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5mo ago
I remember reading an askreddit thread of a European or possibly Australian asking why there was so much toilet clogging in their media when it literally never happened to them. Some people who had experience in America and different countries explained that American sewage pipes were an inch or more smaller than European sewage pipes.
I couldn't find that specific reddit thread but there was a thing that had this link: https://pottygirl.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/why-do-american-toilets-clog/
Which suggests the clog factor is mostly about different design.
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5mo ago
Elba as bond I think is an interesting point. Mainly because most of the race swapping doesn't seem to be for any reason other than race swapping.
Remember when Halle Berry was Catwoman? Aside from the movie being garbage I don't remember anyone caring that Catwoman had been race swapped and that was because they chose an A-list (maybe at the time) actor with talent to play the character. Or when Michael Clarke Duncan was Kingpin? How about Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? Will Smith as Jim West? Similar feelings I assume will resonate with an Elba Bond. How about Morgan Freeman as Red in Shawshank Redemption?
It just feels like regardless of acting ability fifteen years ago they'd race swap Bond to Elba, or Doctor Who to someone with the star power of like Chiwetal Ejiofor. But nowadays they'll race swap the doctor to a third lead on a Netflix comedy. I'm sure he's a good actor but it's just an easy trend to spot where the race swapping also ends up making things cheaper production-wise. The Little Mermaid's black, "who's playing her?" someone who's black. The doctor is black, "who's playing the doctor?" someone who's black, and gay, and wasn't born in the UK. I think it's obvious that it feels different now because they really do it different now and it has a lot to do with agenda pushing or the pretense of agenda pushing to get a cheaper actor.
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6mo ago
Okay, Ben's top level response was to his own post that was a day old. I feel I need to clear that up so as not to present it as being somehow more acceptable than yours or frequent_anybody's.
But, to me, top level responses don't just dilute things to being a single topic that other people might not be interested in but generally feel rude or at the very least represent an etiquette faux pas that can cause unnecessary social strife. The implication being something along the lines of "your response was so bad I need to make another topic just to deal with it." or "I'm so right and you're so wrong that I'm taking this to a top level comment to give my argument that much more value."
Whether or not that's right, I see it that way sometimes, and I can imagine others do as well, and there's no way that's not going to ruffle other people who aren't bypassing the usual method of just responding to someone below their comment.
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6mo ago
How well people perceive themselves is also not a direct answer to how they feel about the economy overall. I can be better off financially than I was and spend the exact same amount on groceries but feel like the economy is shit because I'm buying a carton of 4 eggs instead of a dozen. Is the economy how financially secure most people feel personally? Is it inflation? Is it the GDP? Whatever it actually is doesn't really matter if people don't use that as their own definition. Most people feel like the economy is bad if their rent goes up and eggs cost a hell of a lot more.
Also, I think it's quite an extraordinary claim to say that people scoff at "lived experiences". I don't recall that being the case here at all, in fact most people here tend to defer to them when there's no data and when the data is contradictory it's posted and nobody usually mentions or scoffs at the "lived experience." Unless you mean of people that aren't posting here which I think is entirely different but even then I'd say that number is really low. It's really only applies to "racism" where "lived experience" is used as a trump card. You'll notice that most of the people responding didn't say that his numbers were wrong but they disagreed with what they mean or that they're the wrong numbers to measure what they're trying to measure. This is not using a lived experience to trump someone's argument, it's fundamentally saying that they disagree with the foundation of the definition. They may be using anecdotes and not "rebutting" the data provided but that's not the same thing.
OP pretending like he is the master of knowing exactly what the economy means, especially to other people without even defining it, and then throwing shade over nearly anyone who disagrees is not only petty but exceedingly arrogant. He asked people to provide data but then apparently when half the posts do he cites them personally as being unacceptable because it wasn't acceptable data. Food cost apparently does not matter at all to him, and using that as a reason automatically means it's "lived experience" and most of those reasons he cited were culled down to a headline to make them look as bad as possible. This just not the way we should communicate here and reads as someone who has only empathy for people who agree with him.
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6mo ago
Everyone has an anecdote about living in the world and spending money (existing within the economy). I've literally never been the victim of a prosecuted or investigated crime. If you went into a forum that was specifically for people that had been victims of muggings regardless of their obvious bias on the situation they're going to chime in with their anecdotes about crime data because they have anecdotes to share. This just seems like a silly overreaction to an unwanted response.
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6mo ago
There are usually two types of people who make things, those that find great satisfaction in them and those that can't really stand their own creations and just want the reaction of others. I think the only way to find out if you'd be in the former category is to make something yourself as others have said. Apparently, Stephen Spielberg doesn't watch his own movies once they're in the can and Quentin Tarantino watches his own for fun.
Personally, I derive a lot of satisfaction from things I create but I've never gotten anything perfect so I always get a little caught up in the fact that the imperfection could be fixed. I end up liking what I make but if you think that your own work will be perfect because it's what you want it just doesn't work that way in my experience, I enjoy it a lot, yes, but I'm often blind to what I would easily see as imperfections had I been from the outside looking in. So, maybe for a little bit you get that feeling that you've made something purely satisfying all your needs but in my experience that fades whether because the luster fades and you notice your own faults or others tear it down for you.
But it still feels worth it. You might not write your ideal novel, make your ideal game, but it's hard not to make something you enjoy when you know what you want. I mean, you'll know pretty quickly if it's something worth it or not once you have something tangible to reflect on. It's definitely a different kind of satisfaction that's going to hit differently than consuming something from others, and people praising you (sometimes) is just icing on the cake. But if you're going for perfection you're gonna end up making something like TempleOS.
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6mo ago
The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?
I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.
Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.
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8mo ago
What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want? And what compromise could the left offer the right that they'd be willing to give up? The right would probably want stricter voter harvesting laws and some kind of approval system for vote-by-mail, and better oversight for vote counting in exchange for what checking IDs at the voting site? Most reasonable right-aligned people I've seen do not believe that voter fraud in that sense of someone voting twice or without the legal right to vote voting is rampant or affecting the election count to a changeable degree. The left has all the power, is already in the lead for the most part, and gets a political issue that at worst makes them seem naive in that they're defending the poor and downtrodden.
Also, even discussing the compromise will shift the debate landscape and it will suddenly not be about what the unreasonable people are saying. It's easier to come at this saying, well if the problem is just people who shouldn't be voting having a higher barrier of entry to committing voter fraud then why couldn't they come to some compromise? Because the people that seriously want to do something about this topic have serious changes in mind and most of them have nothing to do with how their opponents characterize their position. So, the people that think thousands of people illegally voted to a degree to change the outcome of an election are not going to want this because they're likely unreasonable because they are the caricature their opponent uses as an example of the other side and the people who would make the compromise probably wouldn't see the value in compromising toward something that amounts to giving themselves a worse position because making it easier for people to vote doesn't work in their favor: most people are left, why would they compromise to get more people IDs to vote when they're likely to not vote for their side by two metrics because they're more likely to be left-leaning in general and also specifically more likely to be left-leaning because of the situation they're in. It makes no sense to give your opponent a win like that to get some law about people checking state-IDs which probably from the evidence, I suspect, would not change anything, and even if it would it wouldn't be enforced anyway.
And that state census solution of finding people for 10k and forcing them to register sounds like it would be insanely disapproved by both sides as being authoritarian government overreach that would likely never be fully finished. It sounds like a make-work investigatory bureau would be created for the purpose and they'd likely antagonize many people, accomplish very little, and end up being used for things entirely unrelated to its stated purpose because its purpose would be impossible to accomplish anyway.
I don't know what the solution is but from my perspective it seems like mostly people entrenched in this aren't looking for solutions because the issue is more valuable existing than a resolution of the issue because most people don't care. I'm against voter fraud (so is most everyone), I want to help the poor (so does most everyone). It's probably a political issue of magnitude precisely because it's really hard to politically step in it because the issue is so seemingly contained to itself. Other soundbyte positions like being "for jobs" (but what about free trade?) or wanting to lower taxes (but how will you pay for anything?) require much more complex solutions. The issues without compromise are the easiest to represent yourself with the more compromise that leaks into whatever the issue is then the harder it would be to take a stance or even talk about at all. I think politically wedge issues are too easy to give up because most of them have two positions with no real nuance that you can talk about while appealing to your base, if they start talking about compromise then they're talking to people who won't vote for them so what's the advantage in an election? And what's the advantage of making the compromise when it comes to governing for that matter?
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8mo ago
I suspect most people don't fully understand problems like this and don't follow through with the thought process that everyone lives if they take red. This could be because they're not really giving a lot of thought to the question itself and are just looking at a choice between two answers, one I live, the other I might live but I'm helping other people live. If the text of the choice for red included the part that everyone also lives if they all take red the answers might end up different.
Also, there's too much baggage around red, blue and specifically around a question that involves a red and blue pill. You're just asking for people to pick an ideological side without thinking for many people not wanting to be associated with the red pill when they're not thinking too hard about it and it appears to represent only naked self-interest.
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9mo ago
Well, I know that it's not apples to apples because of inertia and expectations but, right now, top level threads get much less engagement and very little debate compared to top level comments in the cw thread. And I still view being buried as a positive thing for broader engagement. Long endless threads on particular topics become dominated by whoever has the biggest hobby-horse investment in the topic and there's just endless multi-quotes between people arguing about nigh useless minutiae that a casual debater/observer has no interest in. Refreshing the topic constantly allows it to return to a state of wider focus. This is just my experience with forums and "general threads".
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9mo ago
The extra click is crucial for participation and being exposed to ideas you would normally avoid. In threads the title so important and half the time that title seems either like clickbait or something I'm not interested in or indecipherable without clicking to clarify. Going in and out of threads I may be interested in seems just like a worse version of what's done now. As someone else said when this was brought up before you end up reading things you never would before because they're all in one thread as top level comments. And I also think it promotes participation because it ends up taking the heat off of a top-level comment rather than a top level thread there might not be any real distinction but being buried in a 1000 other comments when people tear your ideas apart is a lot more comfortable than that failure existing on its own. I think burying old ideas weekly helps everyone, the deeper comments go the more angry and snipey they get and forcing a new topic is a great cooling method for that, I think the weekend and switching off to the friday fun thread then small scale questions thread helps with that as well.
The idea also segregates all topics. Some people might see that as a good thing but it's just an exercise in people radicalizing themselves. I can see dissenters becoming fewer and fewer as each separate single-interest topic is dominated by those that have a lot of interest in something. People will start avoiding threads started by users they don't like and it'll become even more about people who just agree with each other. And you lose that "there's someone wrong on the internet! this won't stand." drive where you see something that you think or know is wrong and feel compelled to correct them. A top level thread usually presents no facts or real ideas in its title and you lose that possible drive. Every new topic about people's specific bugbears will just be dominated by those people and become a "HBD general" or "AI threat general" or "Immigration general" if people think that the majority opinion dominates and destroys minority opinions now then it would only get worse.
It also creates an idea of staying-on-topic that limits conversation. You can go into a top level comment about the economy and then have people start talking about AI safety two comments deep and it feels normal and fine to switch to that and even if it would be alright otherwise you limit how many people are going to participate in that topic-switch or even know its there.
I do agree that it sucks if you want to post and respond to serious topics on the weekend but that could be fixed by staggering the thread's replacement every few weeks or so but otherwise I think thread level topics will just end up in worse quality probably worse engagement and more personally it would "fuck my shit up" with regard to how I consume what's on this site with all the extra navigation and clicking that it would require.
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10mo ago
Your mod warning might be right, but this post is an example of being a bad mod. You mocked three users to various degrees of uncharitability and antagonism and then warned them when you could have just warned them. And I'm not saying you need to be a robot or in deference to other posters all the time, just you know, mod comment gooder.
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10mo ago
I think Kanye West summed it up pretty well for me, "Money isn't everything, not having it is."
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10mo ago
It's internally cohesive. Everyone in it talks like Shakespeare characters. Nobody actually talked like they do in Deadwood, it's anachronistic in many ways in that regard but it's internally cohesive because everyone talks that way in the show. This kind of nitpicking is like when people call Joss Whedon or Tarantino dialogue bad because it's unrealistic. Maybe it's bad but not because it's unrealistic. You have to allow for style in dialogue at some point or else everything is going to be an Altman/Mumblecore soup.
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10mo ago
Length is sometimes a problem but readability often goes down with length as well and in turn that becomes a bigger problem. More paragraphs, more linebreaks, breaking down lists that might be in paragraph form into a numbered/dots list with a new line for each item: sure we all write too much, except maybe the_nybbler, but sometimes the length is necessary and with that in mind I think things can be long without being unreadably long.
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10mo ago
I have no idea why you've gone into multi-quote argument failure mode. I mostly agree with you and just think it's still not unlikely that they manipulated data because I'm biased that way and I've explained why.
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10mo ago
I feel like it's a lost cause at this point. Review-bombing is probably real, fake, and irrelevant all at the same time. I say irrelevant because once a review-bombing has been deemed to happen all reviews become tainted because let's assume it's all natural both ways, people will still counter-review bomb to say something is great for culture war reasons or pretend to be the enemy and strawman their position. I'm beginning to believe the latter is very likely, if not predestined, to happen in once a review-bomb starts.
This is just a problem for aggregation and numbers. There are still usually reviews by people who have valid criticisms and praise. The review bomb basically just renders the number meaningless and anything with too much negativity or praise becomes much harder to believe as real. So, maybe people just read reviewers whose opinions they already trust to not be contaminated by playing a culture war game with review scores. I'm sure some exist.
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10mo ago
Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you. But I was suggesting that they were secretly weighting the score which may seem conspiracy nutty but that's the entire point of looking at it and thinking "this seems strange, I don't buy it." I'm not going to say nobody believes that the score matches what the website shows but I believe most people who think things might be being manipulated think that a portion of negative reviews are being excluded outside of their own verification system because it's socially/politically in their interest to do so for any number of reasons. There's been so many instances of things being protected from false reviews in the past few years that I find it hard to believe without any hint of doubt that the 95% reflects reality.
Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days. In the same way that allowing people to talk about certain risque things or have certain opinions isn't allowed, saying "I didn't like this product because I don't like its political message" is only allowed in one direction and if it's the wrong direction (right slanted) then that is deemed bad and cracked down on in some way by changing how the reviews work (netflix), limiting reviews affecting scores when a lot of reviews happen at once (steam), verifying reviews in some way (rottentomatoes), all these things only exist because of review-bombing for political/culture war reasons. It's clear that review-bombing does happen by people who haven't consumed the media but even in cases where money is confirmed to have changed hands (steam) they still have protections for review-bombing because there are reasons for reviews that are deemed invalid. It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something even if it's been "verified" (I put a quotes because I don't know how their verification works). It's relatively conspiratorial and I don't necessarily believe it 100% but it doesn't strike me as crazy outlandish to do.
I also would find it easy to believe that a pr company would manufacture bad user reviews for something like metacritic to take a 5.0 down to a 2.0 and flood it with reviews specifically targeting the woke angle of something to completely erase the perceived value of user reviews that are bad or middling. I said in another post that I just don't trust rottentomatoes in the same way I don't trust wikipedia for anything political. Manipulation is just too easy even discounting RT doing it themselves. There are plenty of people that would give a 5/10 a 6/10 purely for culture war reasons and vice versa. But given the critic reviews, genre-fatigue (I guess live action remakes are maybe a genre), the baked-in culture war angle from both sides(I've seen three articles on deadline about how it sets a bad example for women, erases black slavery, and appropriates drag culture) I still find it hard to believe that it sits at 95%. I didn't say impossible, just hard to believe.
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10mo ago
Speaking of apples to oranges comparisons.
Rottentomatoes critic scores before a certain era and for certain products are absolutely not useful because they have so few reviews compared to anything recent and until streaming there were very few serious about making reviews for direct-to-dvd movies. Black Stallion Returns has 5 critic reviews. The Little Mermaid II has 6 critic reviews (and one of them is a duplicate). I don't see how you can take the comparison between thousands of user reviews seriously with that discrepancy.
Not to mention the fact that reviews for older movies are almost never going to draw review-bombing, and almost always going to have people leaving a less critical review of something older because it was older, because their nostalgia, because if they thought it was middling they wouldn't care to make a review for it. Hype, marketing, cultural issues (warring or not) probably skew reviews for modern things in ways that I have a hard time believing are going to reflect accurately back when examining 40 year old movies or direct-to-dvd sequels that came out in 2000.
A better comparison would be to take a movie without controversy, to my knowledge that fits in a similar mold. Look at The Lion King(2019) 52% critic and 85% audience and Aladdin (2019) with a 48% critic and 95% audience which would seem to suggest along with Beauty and the Beast that verified audience percentages make disney movies review proof for audiences. Then again there's Dumbo (2019) 46% critic and 48% audience, Mulan (2020) 78% critic and 46% audience, Lady and the Tramp (2019) 66% critic, 50% audience and finally, Pinnochio (2022) 29% critic and 27% audience. If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe. Not impossible taking into account something like Aladdin, but still hard to believe.
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10mo ago
You're not the first to notice. It seems like IMDB already weighted scores because of review-bombing. On IMDB, even weighted, it's at 7.2. And metacritic's score of 2.2 seems more reflective of what review-bombing might look like, so I'd bet Rottentomatoes put in some extra protections against review-bombing, above and beyond just weighting the score like IMDB. It seems like Rottentomatoes user scores are like Wikipedia articles, if it's political I wouldn't trust it implicitly.
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1yr ago
Ignoring the low-effort rule, we're casual here. "If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." It takes a lot of unnecessary effort to be very succinct sometimes and most people just can't do it naturally, so I'll forgive some bloviating because it's a post on a discussion board that I'm reading for free.
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1yr ago
This hit home for me. The kindle fire volume slider/buttons go like this 0->30%->45%->60%->75%->90%->100%. Apparently you have to root it to get access to changing the volume in steps that don't skip the first 30 and don't go 15 at a time.
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1yr ago
They actually renewed it and then spent 5 million dollars on pre-production of the second season and then cancelled it. I mean it's not HBOmax renewing Minx and filming the entire second season and then cancelling it but it's clearly an executive decision-making problem. I wouldn't call any show that they've ever made an organic "hit" besides The Boys.
If you look at the Nielsen weeklies of time watched and compare A League of Their Own to Reacher it's probable that the entirety of minutes watched up until for for A League of Their Own was probably equal to the first couple weeks of Reacher. And Reacher is a mild hit for Amazon and Amazon in general has a much lower bar for being a hit than Netflix.
For a comparison Reacher had around 1500 million minutes watched in its first week and A League of the Their Own had around 500 million minutes. Reacher stayed on the charts for a couple more weeks but League was gone after its initial appearance.
Another, more sad comparison is that Friends/Seinfield/The Big Bang Theory/Gilmore Girls/Supernatural routinely get around 500 million minutes weekly, they pop in and out of the top ten but they're pretty consistent and usually come back. For whatever reason the show failed spectacularly but nobody noticed because nobody probably knew it existed (a wonder how that works).
Though all of this is moot. A League of Their Own is a clout chasing prestige show made to show off diversity or be artistic and maybe nab awards. It's competition is never going to be Reacher or Jack Ryan but maybe something like the Night Sky which premiered even lower than League and was promptly cancelled. It seems pretty clear that Amazon, like every other network and streamer makes a few clout/award shows and doesn't stick with them if they're not successful.
The fact that they're getting a second season and complaining about it is just a stupid way to bite the hand that feeds. Aside from writing for the Onion, and Movie 43 Will Graham has two episodes on a sitcom for Bravo which I'd never heard of and wasn't aware that Bravo made sitcoms, and his other two shows were both Amazon shows. The guy wrote for the Amazon show Alpha House, executive produced and wrote for Mozart in the Jungle and then created and wrote for A League of Their Own. And then he shits on Amazon, I hope that shield of saying "diversity" can keep them from noticing/remembering this when they want to offer him another show to make. It's funny how it's the white guy complaining about this and the other creator who has a career outside of that show isn't instigating diversity investigations into Amazon because her show was only renewed for a second and final season.
I'm not disagreeing that it is probably not ethnic. But I don't the think the majority of people making claims that Trump was a fascist or a Nazi make any distinction between the two. It works the same way with people who call the other side communists and socialists. They're just bad words for people they disagree with.
Is being a gynecologist not work because a mother would refuse to let their daughter do a pelvic exam on them? Or if you require opposite sex if a father refuses to let their daughter do a physical/prostate exam/colonoscopy?
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