Notices by Thad (thad@brontosin.space)

@MediaActivist Can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to use Mastodon when it's got delightful people like you.

@mekkaokereke One of the things I've noticed about dudes (and it's almost exclusively dudes) who preach the importance of markets — whether that's literal free markets or the marketplace of ideas — is that they really seem to have a lot of trouble understanding that the point of a free market is that nobody has to buy shit they don't want.

@PJ_Evans I don't love Harris's concessions to the right either, and whatever difference they may have made it clearly didn't win the election for her.

But it seems pretty plain from the numbers that the base turned out, and Biden voters staying home weren't Harris's problem, Biden voters switching to Trump were.

I wish Harris had been more progressive too, but nobody chose Trump over Harris because they wanted a progressive. @mekkaokereke @zakatak

@clive Yeah, I'm of much the same mind as Doctorow. I like a lot of what Bluesky's doing, but until you can actually choose from multiple instances it's just one more silo, one more single point of failure. @pluralistic

@StillIRise1963 My county elected Joe Arpaio 6 times. I knew about the cruelty. I just thought most of the country was better.

And I guess *most* of the country is, but by way too slim and majority for comfort.

@thomasfuchs I can understand why some communities have chosen to stay on Twitter, but arguing that companies shouldn't leave Twitter because that's where the people are because of "companies that aren't on anything else" seems like circular reasoning.

@thomasfuchs Is it? I'm not seeing a primary source saying anything about the House vote as yet.

@jacklaridian Okay, but I can't help but notice you saying "another candidate" and not actually naming one.

@jacklaridian
The comics haven't always done him right, but of the original team he was the standard tormented Marvel hero. He's Peter Parker without the wisecracks. While Hank, Warren, and Bobby are fucking around and Jean's barely a character, Slim's the one who's carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He understands the stakes and feels their gravity in a way nobody else does. And also he could kill somebody literally by looking at them the wrong way.

@jacklaridian I do think they've done a really good job threading the needle and keeping him true to the kind-of-terrible version from the original TV series while putting some effort into showing him be competent and badass instead of just whining "But Professor!" all the time. He's still not a fun guy to hang out with, but you get a clearer idea of why he is the way he is.

More than anybody else, this is his life.

@LexPendragon It would be pretty funny if she ended up with "blind lady in a Marvel adaptation" on her resume *twice*. @jacklaridian

@jacklaridian

@thomasfuchs That and these discussions start to feel more like religious debates at a certain point. A lot of folks seem to be taking the inevitability of general AI on faith and working backwards to try to justify it.

@thomasfuchs That's part of it but I've heard it from people who really should know better, people who at least have some technical understanding of how LLMs work.

I've had people tell me with a straight face that all *our* brains do is match patterns, and it kinda baffles me how somebody could fail so badly to understand their own thought processes. (Let alone, y'know, various autonomic processes that are entirely separate from conscious thought.)

@thomasfuchs It's utterly bizarre to me that a person who is actually in possession of a human brain could misunderstand it so badly as to think Spicy Autocomplete is anything like it.

@jacklaridian There's a section in Lewald's book where he cites all of Beast's literary references. It reminded me of that; it's one thing (of many) that '97 has done to keep the same vibe as TOS.

@jacklaridian The reason Beast got a bigger part after the first season was the writers had so much fun with him.

@jacklaridian Tying the two stories together with the theme of colonialism was a nice touch. I particularly liked the dig at Kipling/White Man's Burden.

@jacklaridian Yeah, a glance at Wikipedia confirms my memory of it being slotted in for Robocop is right. Apparently they made it instead of a 13th episode of Robocop.

...man, it's pretty fucking weird that they used to make Saturday morning cartoons out of movies like Robocop and Toxic Avenger, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pryde_of_the_X-Men

@jacklaridian Better animated than X-Men '92, and it's interesting to see the "new girl" throughline from X-Men #1 → Pryde of the X-Men → X-Men '92 → the first X-Men movie.

Its biggest problem was introducing too many villains at once, which was at least partly down to toy company pressure.

Marvel thought the X-Men '92 team was nuts for not introducing Magneto until episode 3. They had a point; that'd be like starting a Batman series with some third-stringer like Man-Bat instead of the Joker.