Skeletor
1mo ago
I'm far from convinced that TLJ was what actually killed Star Wars.
Leading up to TFA all the nerds at my job sat around and speculated about every little detail for weeks beforehand.
In between movies we all sat around and speculated about what would happen next.
Then TLJ came out and everyone shrugged and we never talked about Star Wars ever again. The third movie came and went without comment since most of us didn't even bother to see it.
TLJ killed Star Wars. It just objectively did. It took a revered pop cultural touchstone and obliterated it overnight. It should be studied as a scientific curiosity, because I wouldn't have believed it possible.
Skeletor
1mo ago
I think that was the point. This is not a story that should be turned into an endless series of blockbuster movies.
If this kind of shit is what the director was actually thinking (and I don't believe that, this all just sounds like cope) then he's worse than a bad director, he's a vandal and a prick. Disney didn't hand him millions of dollars to be a clever little boy and teach fans that Star Wars is stupid or whatever, fans didn't show up and buy movie tickets to see that. If this were intentional, Disney would be morally justified in sending someone to break his legs.
Skeletor
1mo ago
Get over yourself dude. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if the Ukrainians had decided to keep them, and the Russians/Americans invaded, they could have had two dozen hacked up nuclear ICBMs launched in days.
They get wiped from the face of the planet the moment anyone anywhere believes they're even vaguely contemplating such a thing. Fuck off with this stupid fanfic, dog.
Skeletor
1mo ago
So about eleven months longer than it takes American and Russian forces to meet up and shake hands in the ruins of Kiev after they're branded a rogue state, you mean. Get out of here dude, nobody wanted them to keep those weapons.
Skeletor
1mo ago
So the Budapest Memorandum said, in brief, that Ukraine would give up the Soviet nuclear weapons stationed within its borders, and in return the other signatories would agree not to attack them. Also, they would agree to go before the UN and raise a formal stink on Ukraine's behalf in the event that someone else attacked them. It wasn't an especially great deal, but Ukraine didn't have the ability to launch the weapons so their leverage was not that of a proper nuclear power.
However, Ukraine-aligned propagandists shitting up places like /r/worldnews love to refer to it as a "security guarantee" and behave as if it's outrageous that everyone hasn't declared war on Russia already. That and the aforementioned linear model of war where Ukraine loses its last mile of territory in 2060 are the two big tells that you're looking at pro-Ukraine, well, drivel.
In 2025, Russian forces have made significant territorial gains in Ukraine, capturing approximately 165 square miles in the four weeks leading up to November 11, 2025. At these rates, Russia should be able to take all of Ukraine in a few decades.
If it worked like this WW1 would have ended in the 1960s or something. Just stop with this, it's stupid and makes me assume I'm reading assbrained worthless propaganda. The only worse thing you could do is start blurfing about the Budapest Memorandum.
Edit: Whoops I meant to reply to @theSinisterMushroom with this.
Skeletor
1mo ago
Yeah for Monty Hall I had to kind of chew on it until I had a mental model that made sense to me. With Sleeping Beauty I feel like I'm just being asked hey what are the odds of something with 1/3 odds?
I'm reading the Wikipedia article on it linked in the OP, and I like to think I'm a passably intelligent person, but most of the "Solutions" section just reads as complete nonsense to me.
The Monty Hall one clicked pretty easy for me once I realized something like:
There's a 1/3 chance the prize is behind my door, and a 2/3 chance the prize is behind "Not My Door." That knowledge doesn't normally help for obvious reasons, but when Monty comes along and eliminates one of the remaining doors and asks me to reconsider, I'm functionally being given "Not My Door" as a valid choice.
But there was that initial period of assuming that it must be 50/50 and reading an explanation and having it click. By comparison I don't get the point of this one. It's a lot more convoluted yet also more obvious.
Like if every box of Froot Loops contains a free Blue Foozle, and 50% of Froot Loops boxes also contain an additional Red Foozle, then the chance of any given Foozle being blue is two-thirds. Okay done, what's the big deal? It's not even counterintuitive. The guy at the Froot Loops factory probably realized that he needed to order twice as many blues as reds without even thinking about it.
All the shit about drugs and memory erasure is just obfuscation. Why is this problem even a thing?
Skeletor
1mo ago
In what world does what I'm suggesting inconvenience non-trans people in any way? It's literally free money, distributed indiscriminately to all citizens.
How will the market for cosmetic surgery be affected by subsidizing it for literally everyone? How will society and culture be affected by subsidizing cosmetic surgery for literally everyone? You don't know, you haven't given it a second thought. You're a progressive pulling brand new "freedoms" out of your ass that coincidentally boil down to giving other people's money to one of your pet identity groups. Bringing women who want tit jobs or whatever along for the ride is just a sop you're willing to throw in.
After all, it's free money once you take it from other people. What about the overhead, inevitable creep, and probable activist reactions, someone downthread asks? Well golly those would form a fully generalized argument against massive government spending on non-critical issues, and since those can't possibly exist I guess you don't have to answer any of the questions.
Utterly parodical.
I absolutely do not give a single shit about transgender people. I think they should all get psychiatric treatment to stop thinking they're things they're not and get the fuck out of the public sphere. I resent every political force that has behaved as if this bizarre niche sexual practice is entitled to anything but my scorn, and I think the progressive civil rights mantle has been nothing but degraded by trying to extend it to obvious mentally ill fetish bullshit.
In short, I think we're just enemies.
Skeletor
1mo ago
My pitch regarding subsidies for transition is that every citizen should be entitled from birth to a finite "morphological freedom budget", calculated to cover gender reassignment plus detransition. A trans person can cash it in to transition (with just enough left over to detransition if they change their mind); an ordinary person can use the money on whatever other elective plastic surgery they want. But once you're out you're out, and further expenses are on you.
Jesus Christ man, how about these people just go to a goddamn psychiatrist and leave the rest of us the hell alone for once?
Skeletor
1mo ago
Yeah it's all in good fun, half of all fandom consists of making up rationalizations for stuff like this.
Skeletor
1mo ago
Or to be more succinct, their definition of discrimination is just plain invalid because it includes any instance of anyone anywhere admitting to not sharing their beliefs/delusions/whatever.
Skeletor
1mo ago
Acquiring the rights to potentially popular music and gambling on it in the form of promotional dollars will remain a viable business model, but that's really all we're talking about here. The "record company" of X years from now may well be one guy with a squad of AI agents trying to get his hookiest AI songs into the right TikTok cat videos.
Skeletor
1mo ago
I don't claim to know how it's all going to shake out, but Joe Blow on his laptop doesn't really need to create the next Taylor Swift, does he? He just needs to capture a non-zero amount of the Music Dollars that exist in exchange for his investment of literally nothing. Once that's possible, and it seems like we're there already and only getting better, the fact that an endless supply of Joe Blows exist pretty much guarantees serious disruption in the long term.
Or maybe not, who knows, right? But when I see someone post something that sounds a lot like "sure this technology makes (thing) for free but it doesn't really suit how the (thing) industry works" my gut says that's it's the industry that's going to have to cope.
Skeletor
1mo ago
I don't think I fully understand what you're getting at here. I mean I get the idea that record companies always had the option of hiring studio musicians to churn out whatever, but the effective cost to produce and distribute that kind of thing was never zero, the way it is now.
Get some random band together, put them in a studio, let them work for weeks, and if it sucks you're out "only" low five figures? What kind of Stone Age shit is that? Your competition is a guy with a laptop, his product is basically indistinguishably as good as yours at this point, and oh yeah he has no expenses, can never go out of business, and there are endless thousands of him.
Skeletor
1mo ago
If you can't acknowledge that pizza isn't very expensive but still tastes good then you have some kind of mutant snobbery gene that disqualifies you from commenting on the diets of normal human beings.
Skeletor
1mo ago
and the new agent takes on the code name "James Bond"
Yeah giving a bunch of your spies the exact same name over the course of decades is a great way to maintain secrecy. They should just go one better and name him British Spy. He can just go around introducing himself as "Spy, British Spy" while performing all the patented British Spy Mannerisms they carefully instruct every one of these guys to indulge in as publicly as possible.
Skeletor
1mo ago
This is just my own experience talking and probably doesn't generalize, but I've learned to interpret it as womanspeak for "I am letting you know that I am leaving something unsaid but I'm doing it in a plausibly deniable way."
"I'll buy some milk on Monday" means she's going to buy some milk on Monday.
"I'll buy some milk on Monday..." means I'm going to stop and think really hard about whether I forgot to buy milk.
Skeletor
1mo ago
bigoted JAQing off
The fuck are you actually talking about? None of the quotes in the OP are even phrased as questions.
They jerked the corpse around for as long as they could and made some Baby Yoda money along the way, but I knew the deathblow had truly been struck when even a reputedly-good project like Andor got shit for views.
I think bringing Baby Yoda back in 2026 is going to feel like someone trying to bring back fidget spinners. I think their goose is just cooked and this is going to be the part where they really have to face that fact.
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