I (and many other trans folks) didn’t benefit from supportive parents, sisters and friends to provide initial advice, ongoing feedback and moral support. We didn’t have them when we were growing up, and we may not have them now. As an adult, one is expected to have already been through that experience. And, paradoxically, finding new friends and people you can trust often relies on not looking like a total mess to begin with (not to mention the expectations of employers, or the experience of people not yet out to themselves and just want to experiment).

It sucks to have to learn this stuff in a vacuum, but that’s the situation some people are in. “Have you tried not?” is not helpful advice.

54 minutes until they actually start reviewing the show.

Up until then, the video can be boiled down to:

1. fans and pundits focusing on political alignments of sci-fi should STFU and focus on real shit, and
2. sci-fi creators should stop leaning on progressive idealism in lieu of good storytelling when justifying their existence.

Even more concisely: things are good or bad regardless of their political ideology.

I have quibbles with many their arguments, including the Rotten Tomatoes demonstration of progressive-leaning media having high critic ratings and low public ratings vs conservative-leaning media being flipped the other way. You make that case by pointing out examples of modern Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries that don’t completely suck, which they didn’t do.

That said, I’m not arguing that good Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries don’t exist. They absolutely might, and I’d like to see them if they do. But I also absolutely do not trust the ideologues to fairly or accurately measure quality in that way.

And that’s precisely the problem they’re pointing out with modern Star Wars and Trek. The creators seem to be getting high on their own progressive ideology and forgetting to focus on making great media first, which is SUPER annoying for people who don’t share those views.

I’m a lefty type, and I get it. I’d feel the same way if the genre I loved was flooded with hella conservative content and the creators were parading around its conservatism as a reason it’s so great.

DMs containing the identities of spies and assets.

He also managed to wriggle away from multiple rape charges in Sweden by waiting out the statute of limitations.

Heroes and villains alike have complex legacies.

The solution is clear.

You must construct additional pylons.

Whoops – fixed!

Everywhere; it’s a virtual conference.

So it has an MPAA rating, but no published cast list or director yet? WTF?

⭕

Simply sitting in this chair causes your makeup to become fantastic.

Advocacy for a best-stunt-ensemble academy award sounds swell and all, but what’s to prevent that from leading to a stunts arms race that will simultaneously lead to more work and prestige in the field and absolutely lead to more people getting hurt?

A white people taco night no less…

And by “find”, they mean that Indonesian phone bank people are calling every pharmacy near you until they find one who has the drug you’re looking for.

I’m a 404 Media subscriber, but I was a bit disappointed at the misleading nature of that headline.

The last season of Picard managed to turn things around. Yeah it was fan service, but it felt like tasteful fan service (mostly).

I think if he were to get top notch creature effects artists to do practical effects work on the alien world and save the CG stuff for wide shots and space stuff, I think people would respect that.

I started paying attention to this stuff back when Dolby Pro Logic was new, which was a pretty clever way to get surround effects using only left and right audio channels. Left and right channels went directly to the front left and right speakers, but it also compared wave forms coming from the left and right channels. Any wave forms that matched got sent to the center channel (like most on-screen dialog) and any that mismatched got sent to the rear surround speakers (noise, ambience, etc). It wasn’t perfect by any measure, but it was a pretty clever hack.

It was a kids cartoon created to sell toys. The mistake was aging the concept up to appeal to adults in the first place.

I’m actually really excited to see this as a return to form.

The fact that this news follows layoffs may not be a coincidence.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-lay-off-hundreds-azure-cloud-unit-business-insider-reports-2024-06-03/

There’s nothing shameful about enjoying a good genre picture. :D

The best queer film I saw last year was Kokomo City, a documentary about black trans sex workers. It was legit.

This trailer is trash compared to the original one used for film’s initial release in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nW6LLojcUw

As a fellow person with partial Irish ancestry and a nickel allergy, do I have… magic powers?