No, the writing was just bad.

I strongly prefer strong female leads (and my tastes only get more LGBT when it comes to novels), but those movies were terrible. Just horrendous. I still can’t bring myself to watch episode 9, or anything star wars since then

I’m not even that big a star wars fan. I love sci-fi and fantasy, because I love the new ideas they contain - star wars was never special to me, it was just good

I’ll never forget leaving the theater after episode 7, my whole department took off to see it on release. I just remember everyone being relatively satisfied, even the extreme star wars nerds, but I just looked at my team lead who I shared an office with. .

We used to talk about Star wars all the time, especially the extended universe, but we looked at each other and I saw pain in his expression, and I knew I shared the same look. I don’t think we ever spoke about Star wars again

And after episode 8, I now just feel dread when I see a blaster.

It wasn’t that nostalgic for me, it wasn’t that my standards were unreachable - they were just bad movies.

First of all, aviation has vastly more stringent oversight than cars do, in terms of manufacturing regulations, maintenance regulations, and pilot regulations.

This fact is so underrated… They do pre-flight checks and frequent maintenance, let alone requiring extensive testing and redundancy

The second question I struggle to get past… Why is this, in any way, better? In a 747, I doubt a pilots strength could control the aircraft, even if everything linking the steering column was strong enough to handle the forces directly. In a truck, the driver’s strength could still steer… So what advantages are there to steering by wire? I’ve never heard an answer, and I’d love to hear any

In fairness, most computers built after around 2014-2016+ last way longer, performance started to level off not long after that. After all, devs write software for what people have, if everyone had 128 gigs of RAM we’d load everything we could think of into memory and you’d need it to keep up

Macs did have some incredible build quality though, the newer ones aren’t holding up even close to as well. I’m still using a couple 2012 Macs to play videos, it’s slow as hell when you interact, but once the video is playing it still looks and sounds good

I think you’re looking at it the wrong way - triggering the flight or fight response won’t make you able to fight or flight by itself. You have to practice the responses or they’re useless - detrimental even, like a deer in the headlights

Play is a way to exercise those instincts and practice responses, but in a safe way. We even creep into the danger zone a bit sometimes, but most people (and animals) keep the danger measured

Fear isn’t pain - it’s not meant to be an absolute deterrent. It makes us think twice and go into fight or flight mode to handle a challenge - it doesn’t discourage behaviors, it moderates them. Sometimes you do have to face off a rival, or need to take a risk for a reward. It releases endorphins if we come out of it better off

So it’s not weird that we are drawn to it - horror stories/movies/games trigger it artificially, but so does fighting each other or tests of courage

I don’t think it’s weird - we’re animals, mammals and hunters no less, and animals play. If we have unstimulated instincts and free time, we find ways to exercise them

It’s kind of like the zoomies or play fighting, it’s just built into our design, for one reason or another

Now, aliens might come here and be fascinated how Earth vertebrates can even function, assuming this isn’t a common thing. But I’m guessing our social behaviors will be more mind boggling

I don’t know what to tell you, I’m petting a shark right now and it’s like touching silk. In both directions, couldn’t be smoother

Then you can pet it and feel how smooth it is

What about the first month? If you’ve got a buffer in the bank, it doesn’t matter much. But if you were living paycheck to paycheck, those 2-3 weeks might be enough to really set you back

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

Trouble is, their main job is to game public perception

A transparent, honest CEO would win a lot of people over (although they’d also probably be less likely to ignore the horrible decisions that require apologies)

Just remember - generic PR apologies are an attempt at mimickingv leaders actually taking responsibility for a mistake. The transparency will just become as soulless and corporate as the apologies are now

We need to fix the system to remove the incentive to put heartless demons in positions of power

Ideally, we should trust one large company to manage paying them as little as possible for us. Probably through an app, so they can slurp up data on us to decide how much we’d pay for the service

A neighborhood kid showed me a fighting game on it, and I think there was a star fox esque game that should’ve been the launch app (assuming it was any good)

The virtual boy was awesome. I literally thought it was a childhood hallucination for almost 2 decades…

Imagine if they had more games for it, and kept improving the tech. Up through the Wii, Nintendo actually made some of the most amazing tech - the Wii accelerometers are what made quadcopters possible (outside of DARPA projects). The Nintendo back then could’ve made worthwhile VR before the iPad took the “I want to be on the Internet on the couch” niche

Jesus made a speech, they passed around the baskets his group had for the meal, and suddenly they more than enough

Do you think they had grocery stores? That they catered events? That they even had a salary, and carried money instead of food?

I don’t even know where all these numbers and money focus are coming from, but they weren’t in the text

Everyone shared their lunch… That was the whole thing. They shared the food they were initially unwilling to share, and when everyone was full (including those who came with nothing) they had baskets of leftovers

Yes, the magic of an impromptu potluck

Literally the whole point of this “miracle” was to show how if everyone pools resources, there’s more than enough to go around

But that didn’t fit the message the Romans were going for, so they magic’d it up

You don’t understand, deep down she’s a good person. All the shitty things she does day to day are just out of character

When I walk outside, I see a dying world. There’s so much less life than a couple decades ago. Most people are stuck being little gears in a big machine, too stuck in their dull lives to be open to meaningful connection

Things have taken an uptick, but that’s only slowed the rate things are getting worse

Jewish in this context refers to an ethnic group, as does Irish

Sure, break it’s routing. You can give it a fake DNS server (like a pihole that blocks everything), you could set up routing rules that block everything not addressed in the network ip range, there’s a ton of ways I can think to do it off the top of my head. It might require some tinkering though

That’s a better alternative…