Engaging with TFA's thesis: occasionally, it's correct for institutions to insist on law over lore. For one, that lore might be just as artificial or short-lived or "mistaken" (as much as these things can be) as anything seeking to replace it - as some comments have mentioned, the "customary" start of the year was itself imposed by Caesar amid a history of a March start. It might also be in society's best interests that cooler heads determine a particular course. The "lore" of the demihumanity of certain populations takes hold popularly, from time to time, for example. The law prevents, in the worst cases, slaughter (or builds parameters for punishment and future deterrence after the fact).
It's funny you mention ticket stubs, because I also have a similar collection, and I kind of treasure it. Before my Google tracking my every step, before Twitter, as the years go by, I have some record of what I was doing at exceedingly specific times and dates. It helps to structure my memories a bit more than I'd otherwise be able to. I scanned them all at once (in several pages), and it's sort of a map of my adolescence. I can jump across time. I would be sad to lose it. (Along with the photo of the tickets for my make-shift - and first - double feature of Everything Everywhere/Dr. Strange. Multiverse-themed, doncha know?)
There is a direct line between the KKK, American Nazi Party, and Republicans and "moderate" Democrats who are just over the past few years aging (dying) out of office. The ideology of the latter is going strong. But I appreciate the insult; it's the kind of hysterical mischaracterization that tends to come out when one is close to prescribing the proper corrective action to right-wing malfeasance.
It's the kind of blame-ambiguifying ("Can't do anything, law says so," "Can't do anything, courts say so.") that happens when the opposition to a given reform are perfectly happy to beat, bomb, and shoot anyone who dares to try to [integrate schools/secure voting rights/offer reproductive care/marry two people of the same gender/etc.].
What you're actually asking for is for America to finally undertake its own form of denazification, and hoo boy, if you think that things are rough now...
Remember, there was an actual insurrection by these folks 4 years ago. They literally entered the building housing our legislature and threatened the lives of our lawmakers. There is, like, zero question of why there's been a chilling effect on finding legislative remedies to American issues, even if you cut out the massive influence of lobbyists. No one wants to get Abe'd.
It's certainly funny how popular "Defund the" is when it ends with, "[agency with a track record of actually providing service and value to both individual Americans and the country as a whole]" instead of "police". Turns out, conservatism is selective when it comes to preservation of institutions. One guess what the qualifier is.
People need to stop saying this. The internet from 5-10 years ago was already post-social media revolution; it's not substantially different from today's internet, on the consumer side. Google has gotten substantially worse, however.
Indeed, the moon landing wasn't the universally-lauded come-together moment people like to portray it as. MLK had been assassinated the previous year and the Vietnam War was in full swing; there were a lot of things on people's minds (and greatly varying opinions on what the government ought to be spending money on). The common memory of the event can mostly be chalked up to a combination of propaganda and the people who tend to be able to get their writing about it published (white Baby Boomers).
Except Valve, for their Steam service. But that's only because someone realized that you could Zerg rush them with arbitration claims, whose fees they were obliged to pay (since their ToS forced users into it). Their only option that wouldn't be massively disruptive financially, in that case, would be to agree to a settlement with the arb representatives. So, now, you're only allowed to sue Valve, in a specific court of their choosing.
The best thing I ever did for decongestion was to get outside and start wearing a mask during the winter. The air entering my nose is clearer and warmer, which causes less mucus production. The mucus that is produced is more likely to drain, rather than sit around thickening and waiting to be blown out. I wish I'd thought to wear a mask while out when I was younger; could have saved myself much suffering waiting at the bus stop and during the subsequent schoolday.
This reminds me of Lukasa memory boards, analogous to written language as this is to traditional programming (or as a table is to a chart). It's amazing how the way information is encoded and presented can affect its interpretation.
IIRC Material Design actually came before iOS' pivot to Immaterial Aero We Have At Home. Metro was indeed first, though, so kudos for actually mentioning it. Everyone seems to forget that the Zune was what really got things rolling.
I honestly prefer this to the American version, "The governor owns a bunch of real estate that would benefit more from road upgrades than two major rail projects that have been in the works for decades, so he tries to cancel the latter - succeeding with one, delaying the other by 5 years, funneling state funds to Induced DemandLand, and forefeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in free federal grants."
If you're in Maryland, please vote Alsobrooks for Senate.
Older people tend to get up earlier. There is a special place in hell for the Baby Boomers who insisted on a 7:30 start time for our office (though, of course, as the guy who opened every morning, I had to be there earlier). The anxiety that I developed went away when I left and could get up when I wanted to. There are many, many monrings where I lie in bed at 7:30 and think, "I would have had to be a Bukowski quote by now."
They're "integrated" the way Adobe or Autodesk's acquisitions are "integrated," which is to say that they're not, in any meaningful way - but at least you only have to log in/get your credit card out once. And that's sort of fine, because they never needed to be integrated. All of the individual applications work fine on their own, with common media formats if you need to move between them. In fact, the acquisitions should have never taken place at all; they should have been blocked for antitrust violations.
People have been throwing up the, "You're just too technical," canard for years, and it's just not true. Google search does not find what anyone is looking for; it finds what it wants to sell, in a way that makes it more likely that a purchase will be made. Full stop.
This leaves out the perspective of the young black people who would have been the disproportionate target of police interactions.
Unfortunately, moderation within a biased status quo doesn't achieve the goal of eliminating the bias. Those seeking a radical change can't reasonably be faulted for using radical rhetoric, only for wanting to change something that's "working."
The short hair example in particular is remarkably realistic. Immediately familiar to this guy who spent most of his childhood with a skin fade, and a massive improvement over the flat image texture or bump maps that are usually used.
Because many black people (especially African-Americans) have a mixture of hairtypes, I expect the results to be even better once something like this is implemented alongside existing systems.
This isn't even necessarily true. High art is the basic research of culture. You'd be amazed at how many elements from your fave this-or-that are copped (often wholesale) from some obscure piece of media. Often, that reference lifts the latter out of obscurity, and everyone pretends that they knew it was groundbreaking and brilliant all along. "The favorite artist of your favorite artist," is a real concept.
An example : Darren Aronofsky's now-famous cribbing of Satoshi Kon's work, back when anime was mostly thought of as, "Sex and violence, Pokemon, and Miyazaki (if you even knew of Miyazaki)." And even that's kind of the tip of the iceberg. Decades-old expressionist films, little-known performance and video art, paintings, music, fashion; unless you really know the landscape, how can you tell what is and isn't influencing culture down the line? How much of your experience in the world of 2024 was shaped by the proclivities of teenagers on IRC and 4chan in 2004, just trying to make each other laugh?
[Insert that monologue from The Devil Wears Prada]
Reddit where upvotes are weighted by your similarity or difference to the target uploader or commenter. People who have different sentiments, identities, writing styles, etc. will boost your post faster than people who are similar. Downvotes count for less, in the same vein. Discourse approaches a mean of respectability and sentiment. A few years down the road, sell analysis of users' corpus as de facto background checks.
Or
Something something LinkedIn.
I suppose both approaches have their own problems.
My intuition is that art scenes don't cause gentrification so much as they are one of many signals that a neighborhood is "safe" enough for people to begin displacing the incumbent community. It's possible - maybe even likely - that the neighborhood was suitable for investment before that point, but no one noticed until they were forced to visit it while attending a gallery showing or something.
>I don’t think they are owed anything just because they have a lot of skill or are creative.
I do. What's indicated here is an overabundance of pricing power on the film studios' side, which is a direct result of laws and policies that were designed to benefit and advantage businesses over labor (for a variety of reasons, some justifiable and some not). You want to cast this as a natural and organic process when it's anything but; if it were, the skill ceiling involved in the trade and returns from movie sales would likely have topped out at a more appropriate point vis a vis wages. That is, the fact that these CG-heavy films are making more money than ever, and that VFX is incredibly difficult to break into because of the high skill required, and wages are still low, and VFX studios are still going under, suggests that wages are being artificially depressed.
>But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
Nah. It's a case of filthy-rich scammers getting scammed by a filthy rich scammer. Their bad behavior, at the very least, helps to legitimize exploitation (popularly, if not so much legally). But I think it goes further than that. The depressed wages of labor and concentration of capital in the hands of elite executives and business owners has helped to shape the socioeconomic status quo, where so many consumers simply can't afford to purchase film tickets and media the way that they used to be able to, but also where the pressure to participate in pop culture and consume content is stronger than ever. The result is that people are willing to access this content however they can, creating an opportunity for hustlers like Kim.
Obviously, the solution is to dismantle many of the policy benefits that let big businesses exploit workers, and to break up the capital accretion that allowed them to capture policy in the first place. Dismantle the economic distortions that led us here.
This is the argument always used to excuse abuse of labor, and I completely reject it. These are skilled artists and technicians with lives to live - minimum wage is far below the minimum they're owed. Just because powerful interests - who can manipulate the courts as much as they do their contracts - have found a reliable way to exploit workers, doesn't mean that it's how things should work. And it definitely doesn't oblige me to feel sorry for them when they get scammed themselves. Just deserts.
That's the wrong question. Paraphrasing Baldwin, one might expect from one person and not another, and only when that expectation is defeated in the former does a certain bitterness ensue. There's no reason to waste energy and emotion on a person from whom one expects nothing, and subsequently receives nothing.
But if Hollywood execs are scamming the people whose labor makes their whole venture possible in the first place, that's worth expending energy on. Hence, again, the strikes.
The contracts aren't necessarily fair. As with gig work, people will take a bad deal that keeps them solvent in the short term, even if it ruins them long-term, if there isn't really any other way to put their assets to use. VFX crews have to work long hours, often for less than minimum wage, to meet ridiculous contractual requirements; the unfairness of the compensation has lead to several high-profile shutdowns of studios whose work helped secure 9-figure returns and Oscars. And even if the studio survives, workers can end up without a credit in the final product, if they had to leave the project early or there were simply too many people involved.