Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually delicate, but at times masculine. Well read, even to erudition. Almost an orientalist.

  • 2 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

    One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

    This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.


  • As others have pointed out, Foundation isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of Asimov’s stories, but there good things in it. It might be more accurately titled Foundation and Empire IMO, because it focuses as much on the Empire side of the story as the Foundation. The first season was lopsided. The Empire plotline was compelling, the Foundation ones were… not. Haven’t watched the second season yet, but apparently it’s more consistent.


  • For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.


  • Fedilab is a Fediverse client for (according to the website) Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, GNU Social and Friendica. You can also follow kbin users (and, I assume lemmy ones as well, though I haven’t tried). The app will allow you to manage several accounts on Mastodon, Peertube and Pleroma instances.

    You can block content by keywords or phrases (either hiding them with a warning or hiding them completely) but I don’t know if you can bulk upload keywords. (You can add several keywords/phrases at a time manually.)

    Unfortunately (for you) the app is currently only available on Android.







  • Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

    Doctor Manhattan’s ability to save the human race wasn’t the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn’t feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

    A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?









  • Both Dial of Destiny and Dead Reckoning had similar budgets (around $300M) and similar opening weekends (around $80M). But the reviews and audience reactions have been better for Mission Impossible. This suggests the movie will have longer legs than Indiana Jones. Undoubtedly Paramount is hoping that Dead Reckoning’s trajectory will be more like Top Gun Maverick’s (staggering) 5.66 multiplier and less like (say) Quantumania’s 2.02 multiplier.

    edit: The article also mentions that the global opening weekend box office numbers for Mission Impossible are a lot better than the numbers for Indiana Jones, at $235M (ie $80M domestic + $155M overseas) vs $130M (ie ~$85M domestic + only about $45M overseas). That said, it’s difficult to compare overseas numbers without a detailed breakdown of which markets each movie opened in. Mission Impossible may have played in more countries its first few days than Indiana Jones did.


  • @kingmongoose7877 Of course Scorsese’s mastery, knowledge and love of movies is matched by few and surpassed by none. But I do find it amusing that the he criticises lowbrow superhero genre movies when every third film he makes has a bunch of Irish or Italian guys telling each other to fuhgeddaboudit, then shooting each other in the head. (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by that much.)

    My point? There are bad, mediocre and good superhero movies, just as there are bad, mediocre and good gangster movies. And every so often there are great genre movies, like The Godfather, or - for my money - Logan (which I think deserved Oscar nominations for picture, director, adapted screenplay, actor, supporting actor and supporting actress).

    And, basically, you just need a lot of movies to be made before a masterpiece is produced. For how many decades were westerns a popular genre? Were directors complaining about the guns’n’horses theme parks in the 1950s? Most westerns that were made over that time have been forgotten, but the great ones like Shane or Unforgiven live on. In fifty years most superheroes will have been forgotten, but a handful will live on.

    To address @chickenwing 's post more directly: I remember reading articles a few years ago about how the age of the movie star was dead (Tom Cruise being cited as one of a few exceptions), and that the age of the franchise/brand (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar) had arrived. If the age of the franchise is dying, what will rise to take its place?