Notices by JWcph, Radicalized By Decency (jwcph@helvede.net)

So happy when my co-panelist today, herself an experienced #sustainability specialist, pointed out how utterly impossible it is to claim environmental responsibility if you use #AI anywhere in your value chain 🙏☺️ not least because I feel less like an outlier in the business world where people are falling over themselves to praise it in any context... #entrepreneurship #business #tech

@jacklaridian You & I have very different definitions of "fun"...

@jacklaridian I don't mean quality in this context - I mean storyline. It's hard to enjoy pre-Snapture Spiderman when you've seen him die like that in his very immediate future. Not to mention the EXTREMELY downer ending to "Ant Man & Wasp", which - like "Black Widow" - basically ruins the whole movie in its last minute, just because the Snap happened elsewhere in the 'verse. And like I said, it's marketing; it didn't have to end that way - it's only there to get viewers interested 👇

@jacklaridian - in the stupid Ctrl-Z maneuver of reversing the Snap (which, by the way, everybody saw coming ten miles away). An entirely different plot which, by comic book standards, didn't have to be included at all - but it was & now THAT's the mood I come away with, no matter how good the rest of the movie was.

@jacklaridian Oh, it's definitely a story thing. Wild twists & retcons may work in comics because there's a new one every week or so but it just doesn't do any good for movies to keep tangling the plot up more & more, add more & more characters (this alone kept me from that IW sequel, as much as the three+ hour runtime) because the speed of plot is different. Plus, no plotline ever really ends, especially with that multiverse nonsense, so there's no resolution, ever - just more homework.

@jacklaridian Also, though, all the connections & easter eggs are only ignorable if you know nothing; know just a bit & you can't unsee them. This is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that they're not just for fun; they're advertising, to get viewers to watch that other stuff, too - so they're not exactly subtle, even before recognizing that they make up a fair bit of the actual marketing, too.

As for the retroactive thing: It's all one story, so the old stuff is part of the new, bad stuff 🤷

@jacklaridian In that case I'll be happy to try to explain😁in-universe it's The Snapture; it's a moronic plot device making everything after Infinity War suck & even pre-IW films are no fun anymore due to the weight of the impending apocalypse I now know they all face.

IRL it's the unendingness & connectedness of everything; you can't watch anything that doesn't nod at everything else, sets up/is set up by other films/series etc. Feels like being scolded for not doing my homework.

@jacklaridian Understand: Before IW I watched *everything*, including all the series on Netflix back then - but since that film I've not only not felt like watching any of the new ones (and regretted "Black Widow" because of that fucking ending - even "Deadpool & Wolverine" was decidedly meh because of the suspension-of-disbelief-killing multiverse bullshit); I've barely watched any of the ones I loved before, e.g. "Antman", or even "Jessica Jones". The universe just isn't any fun to me anymore.

@jacklaridian I'm pretty sure you're not interested & I don't feel like having an argument about it.

@jacklaridian it doesn't have to - it's just preference 😁

@jacklaridian Glad to hear it. Still probably won't be watching it tho - I have a long way to go before I'll forgive Marvel for retroactively ruining all the MCU movies that I enjoyed... 😝

Sorry - once bitten, twice shy... if we fall for this they'll build another MCU out of it & one of those was more than enough, thank you very much.

https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/114451024501658576 #Thunderbolts #movies #popculture

@baldur This is the capitalist class sawing down the tree because they don't know it's holding up the branch they're sitting on with the rest of us. They will always end up doing that.

@MEActNOW I swear these assholes are like a 4-year-old who picked up a curse word, noticed that the grownups react when they say it, and just says it about everything without knowing what it means.

@benroyce @log @Wendelin That's a f**king Pokemon! 😂🥰

@aral Looks cool 😊also, reminded me: I don't know that I will ever get into E-books but if I do, would something like this come with a left-hand setting? The button placement definitely looks to favor right-handed use - does the image just flip automatically if you turn it over to use it with your other hand?

@aral Exactly. As I mentioned somewhere yesterday, the necessary reckoning of *gestures at everything* is that, particularly in the US, the uncritical embrace of capitalist mechanisms has created an environment which could not be more perfectly tuned to breeding the absolute worst people imaginable & giving them power over everyone else...

@futurebird @gwagner Yeah, plastics are amazing - so much so, in fact, that if they disappeared overnight millions of people would die; we'd be unable to maintain things like food & medicine logistics. This is why "just ge rid of it!" is overly simplistic; we need new materials & processes to replace them.

Also, molecular-recycling plastics is easy, i.e. pyrolysis, but environmentalists hate it for perpetuating plastics & oil & plastic industries hate it because of course they do, so... 🤷

@heleenkuiper - and even leaving out spine, where's your sense of self-preservation? Look at any part of history, distant or recent, including this particular despot's own recent history; there's absolutely no reason at all to think that acquiescing to such people will in any way save you from being exploited and/or thrown under the bus and/or go down with them.

@georgetakei I believe it's the we fucking warned you about this stage...