"Hopefully their future will see a little less gradatim and a little more ferociter."
A few weeks ago, the topics of SpaceX and their competition came up, and although I was "non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed", I might have primed myself to fear disappointment by talking about Boeing's Starliner first. A year and a half ago Boeing were poised to be the ones to break SpaceX's current monopoly on United States crew launch ... and then they launched crew on a vehicle that still hadn't fixed all the Reaction Control System thruster problems from three years earlier, and they needed SpaceX to get them safely back down again.
It's a good thing I didn't quite finish this post yesterday like I'd planned, because today it's been announced that Starliner won't even try to fly humans again until after another cargo flight, and NASA's brought their contract down to 4 missions instead of 6. I don't think either side of that contract wants any part of it anymore; it's all trying to recover a fraction of sunk costs at this point.
Blue Origin, on the other hand, appears to indeed be moving from "gradatim" mode to "ferociter" mode!
After a number of minor delays, the NG-2 mission successfully launched New Glenn's first mission out of Earth orbit: two ESCAPADE spacecraft (buses by Rocket Lab, instruments by NASA and a few University labs) are now on their way to the Earth-Sun L2 point; after an Earth flyby late next year they'll be headed to Mars next. Despite the long-term SpaceX focus on Mars colonization, the Blue Origin + Rocket Lab combination will likely beat them to putting spacecraft in Mars orbit; even the SpaceX launch of Europa Clipper only included a Mars flyby, on the way to Jupiter.
The first New Glenn launch lost its booster due to engine relight failure; in NG-2 a little of the live video was lost, but the booster itself stuck the landing perfectly, as seen more clearly from more distant footage, making Blue Origin the second institution to accomplish a powered landing of an orbital rocket booster, with the second-most powerful rocket to ever be recovered, and the most powerful to be recovered on its own landing gear.
The landing was very inefficient, aiming far from the target initially (as SpaceX does too, to ensure that if engine restart for landing fails the rocket will instead impact at a point where it can't do any damage), but then taking a very slow, almost "hovering" horizontal slide over to the precise center of the landing pad, burning much more landing fuel than SpaceX's "hover slam" landings. Unintuitively, this is probably all a good thing for Blue Origin. First, it's a demonstration of the ability to hover, which although inefficient as a nominal trajectory, adds robustness when things go wrong. SpaceX is well over 500 successful landings now, but this is after burning through a test vehicle and multiple "splashdown" landings before they felt ready to risk a barge, followed by four or five failed landing attempts, all due in great part to the difficulty they had landing a booster whose Merlin engines couldn't throttle down enough to hover if necessary. Second, this is a good bit of context for the rumors (anonymous, but via a trustworthy reporter) that the first New Glenn vehicle capabilities were well under the design's target payload numbers. It's common for a new spacecraft to gain unwanted mass and so lose performance during the design and testing process, but this can sometimes be fixed with subsequent iteration, and that big plume of burning mass ought to be a relatively easy target for them to quickly fix. They've also announced a 15% improvement to each of BE-3 and BE-4 engine thrust, to be deployed on future missions, so they'll be getting performance back from reduced gravity losses on both the way down and the way up.
Adding metaphorical weight to the performance problem rumors was the removal of literal weight from their first launch, whose "Blue Ring Pathfinder" looked like a toy compared to the full "Blue Ring" spacecraft bus+vehicle they'd been working on. There's still no semi-firm launch date for the full Blue Ring, but they've released photos of their first flight vehicle, in production now and at least intended for launch early next year.
We've also now got pictures of a more impressive flight vehicle: the Blue Moon Mk1 cargo lander, to be launched to the lunar surface early next year. It's half the height and only a fraction of the cargo capacity of their planned Mk2 crew-and-cargo lander, which is itself tiny compared to Starship HLS, but until those are launched this will be the largest craft ever to land on the Moon, roughly a third bigger than the Apollo Lunar Module.
We've even been shown a glimpse of test hardware hinting at long term design work: a deployable hypersonic aerobrake, "saving significant mass and cost and enabling heavy cargo delivery from the Moon, to Mars, and point-to-point missions on Earth."
And finally, as part of that thrust improvement announcement, we got a look at their longer-term plans: a scaled up "New Glenn 9x4", with 9 first-stage and 4 second-stage engines (as opposed to the existing newly-renamed "New Glenn 7x2"), stretched to be taller than Saturn V thanks to the additional thrust, expected to give them roughly 50% more capacity to Low Earth Orbit and nearly triple their payload to Trans-Lunar Injection. The 9x4 still won't have as much TLI payload as even the Block 1 version of the Space Launch System, but this is still likely to be a little more beyond-LEO payload than a fully-expended Falcon Heavy, but with a much roomier fairing like Starship, from a rocket in a (partially-) reusable configuration - and unlike with SLS, Blue Origin has been designing with multi-launch mission plans and orbital refueling in mind. That payload to LEO (two thirds of the Starship V3 target, and twice what V2 was reportedly capable of) may end up being more important than the TLI numbers in the long run.
None of these future numbers from either company are guaranteed, of course. The first Starship V3 booster just got wrecked in a failed pressure test, pushing the next Starship flight back from "January" to "Q1". New Glenn was originally supposed to launch those Mars probes a year ago, but juggled their schedule a bit after they lost two New Glenn stages, one also to a test failure and another to worker mishandling, last year.
The obvious thing Blue Origin really still has to work on is cadence. In Fall 2024, Blue Origin was expecting to do 8-10 New Glenn launches in 2025; they ended up managing one in January and a second in November. Rocket Lab likes to brag that their Electron was the only commercial rocket to ramp up faster than Falcon, and that's a fair brag, because cadence is much easier said than done. The Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to fly at least 24 missions per year, ideally more like 50; they ended up at 4-6 with a peak of 9, and cut some tragic corners just trying to reach that. I think Blue Origin has the right design to start with, at least. The difference post-landing between their gleaming methane-powered New Glenn booster and the soot covered kerosene-powered Falcon 9 boosters is like day and night, and hopefully that lack of coking is going to make inspection and maintenance of the rocket internals easier as well. Blue Origin is still talking about doing one or two dozen launches in 2026. I'll be very surprised if they even come near the low end of that, but I'm hoping to be eating crow in a year.
Still, seeing two successful New Glenn flights in a row, including their first successful landing, is heartening. Blue Origin not only managed to land an orbital rocket under the wire of SpaceX's landing 10-year-anniversary, this year they've already managed a couple entries on my checklist of what SpaceX has been up to since:
- Added downrange booster recovery options
- Added booster recovery from and (coming soon, in Blue Origin's case) reflight after missions beyond LEO
- Begun launching national security payloads
And they're working on more, both in the next year:
- Launching payload to the Moon
and in the longer term:
- Adding fairing recovery
- Adding extended fairing options
- Launching a multi-thousand-satellite constellation (hopefully starting with the first launch next year)
They're still behind, but for the first time in decades it feels like they're not falling further behind. Space launch in the USA may soon actually have options other than "keep praying Elon Musk doesn't go full Howard Hughes" or "just go back to paying far more money to Boeing or Lockheed for a fraction of the results".
roystgnr
4d ago
Hasn't enrollment in English programs actually dropped in the last few decades?
Apparently so! From a peak of 55K Bachelors' degrees per year in the late 2000s down to 40K in 2017-2018 (the latest data I could quickly find).
Sadly, that doesn't mean the employment prospects for English majors are actually much better.
This was sadly less surprising to double-check. Among new graduates, they were looking at 4.9% unemployment, 48.6% underemployment in 2023.
roystgnr
4d ago
If you look at the stats, English majors aren't half bad. Their average SAT score of 1143 (in the 2023 data, latest I could find quickly) doesn't beat Engineering majors (1174) or Mathematics-and-statistics majors (1269, which includes beating the English majors' average on the English subtest) ... but it's nearly tied with Philosophy-and-religious-studies, it's consistently ahead of general History, and it's a step above many of the "or something" options. The "you're going to be working with your hands" majors tend to fall below the "you're going to be manipulating symbols" majors on the "how good are you at manipulating symbols" test, unsurprisingly, but among the symbol-manipulation majors there's also some sad showings from: Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies (991, and seemingly dropping fast over the preceding years!?), Family and consumer sciences/human sciences (971), and everyone's (least) favorite ironically low average score, Education (1023).
roystgnr
5d ago
to remove trump
There is a huge gap between the "refuse to obey illegal orders" talk I saw and this. Could you link (and ideally transcribe) what you're paraphrasing here?
roystgnr
5d ago
I wouldn't say I had any sexual attraction pre-puberty, but my first crush/infatuation was in elementary school. There were at least 2 or 3 of those before I hit puberty, all to the opposite sex, which probably wasn't coincidental.
roystgnr
6d ago
Oh, wow, that's a good idea. ～ is actually a better "pay attention, this is not a blurry minus sign, this is approximation" character, at least on my screen.
Obviously, HTML named character references are a lot easier to remember than hexadecimal representations
I'm a big X Compose Key fan, especially with custom sequences. Need the real numbers? Win, m, b, R (mnemonic "math bold R") gives me ℝ. Defining the square function x↦x² with "bar arrow" notation? My "Bar arrow" is Win, |, >, and "squared" is Win, ^, 2. I'm already using Win, for ≈ ... but , Win, b, ~ should work for a "bold" tilde, if I could ever remember to use it.
roystgnr
6d ago
Andor had a somewhat slow start, which for a TV series probably hurt a lot. If you found yourself yawning 45 minutes into Rogue One, you weren't going to walk out of the theater, so you'd end up making it to the good parts. If you found yourself yawning 45 minutes into Andor you'd just never watch the second episode, and I wasn't ready to agree with the good reviews until the third.
But yeah, I think you're right and I'm only getting into the weeds of why you're right. They can't just ask us to trust them for more than an hour anymore. I don't watch anything Star Wars now unless I see a variety of good reviews by trusted reviewers first, so unless they advertise enough to get me or my kids interested enough that I'll seek out the reviews, we don't bother, and that means we'll never be part of any viral hype ourselves. I'm hoping the next movie will be good but I'm definitely not going to see it on opening night.
roystgnr
6d ago
Prune juice always worked well for my kids, and coffee for me, but if you're having a morning espresso every day for weeks and not seeing much effect, I'm not sure how strong you want to go with stimulant laxatives.
Water absorbers like fiber and miralax are good for softening stools and avoiding developing constipation, but if you're already blocked up it's too late to try to soften the culprit with additional solids. Getting yourself very well hydrated and using a chemical stool softener medicine can help even after you're already blocked up.
Are you still blocked up, though? "small and soft", as long as it's still frequent, sounds like a subtle diet change, not a still-unsolved blockage. If you're not bloated then maybe you really do just need more fiber.
If you are still blocked up, for weeks? Lifestyle changes can be subtle (travel can be a trigger for me too, though never nearly this bad), but if you're having awful constipation with no diet/lifestyle changes and you're male and you're paranoid/hypochondriac then it wouldn't be completely crazy to get a PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) self-test kit and then go in for a real exam if it comes up positive. Increasingly bad constipation was the first symptom of my father's cancer, and not getting it looked at until it sent him to the hospital gave the tumor time to metastasize.
roystgnr
6d ago
That one's bitten me too many times before, but these days using Unicode for x·y·z when I want an explicit symbol works well and is almost second nature, when I'm thinking in "math mode". If I'm thinking in "programming mode" then I default to x*y*z but the whole expression is inside backticks and markdown doesn't ruin it.
What markdown still wrecks for me is the use of "~40" to indicate that the number is a loose approximation, which then sometimes turns into a big strikethrough if I use it a second time. Unicode gives us ≈, but that doesn't feel right to me when there's nothing to the left of it.
I like your preferred method of analysis, BTW. It reminds me of the old argument that the US should be expressing vehicle efficiency in gallons per mile (or per 1000 miles, whatever) rather than in miles per gallon, because the latter leads us to overestimate how large the additional savings are when we further improve already-high-efficiency vehicles and to underestimate how important improvements are for the remaining gas guzzlers.
roystgnr
6d ago
That's a good point.
I think one difference just obscures the similarities for me, though: with Anakin, everybody explicitly criticized the execution; with Daenerys there were a lot of fans criticizing the very idea that she would do such evil things as (Googling for some top comments) "character assassination", in addition to those who criticized the execution.
The more I think about it, the more I think that difference is just dramatic irony rather than gender. Even if the execution with Anakin was mostly bungled, at least every bit of proper foreshadowing did hit home, because we saw it in the context of what we knew was going to happen in the end. With Daenerys, limited foreshadowing and inadequate setup might as well have been no setup, because people could always make a few excuses and miss a few more hints, especially in the context of a story where some major plot twists had been given much more setup.
roystgnr
6d ago
Anecdotes aren't data, but all I can really argue with is the hyperbole here: "killed", "obliterated", and "overnight". Data-wise: box office totals went from $2.1B for TFA to $1.3B for TLJ to $1.1 for RoS among the trilogy movies, and from $1.1B for Rogue One (pre-TLJ) to $0.4B for Solo (post-TLJ) side movies. On the one hand, 1.1 billion dollars is still decent money for a zombie, years after TLJ! On the other hand, it sure looks like a ton of people heard the bad reviews and skipped TLJ, a fraction of the ones who wouldn't skip it sight-unseen were like you and didn't bother to see RoS afterward, and most of the ones who did see RoS were probably just looking for some closure and aren't interested in or aren't trusting of Star Wars movies in general anymore.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with "The Mandalorian and Grogu" next year. Box office receipts are just so much cleaner than estimates of streaming viewership. I'd put that in the "side movie" category, naturally, but will it be a $1.1B side movie or a $0.4B side movie? On the one hand, it's coming off of the most popular Star Wars TV show. On the other hand, the show already lost popularity and acclaim in its third season (not to mention with its spinoff show), and the attitude of "Look, Grogu! We still have Grogu! No plot closure for Grogu yet!" is a pretty blatant cash grab attempt, centering a character who was expected to be little more than an amusing MacGuffin until "Baby Yoda" toys started selling by the zillions.
roystgnr
7d ago
LaTeX also doesn't interpret repeated * symbols as a request to hide them both and italicize the text between them. ;-)
roystgnr
7d ago
Ah, I get it - it's that combination of both tropes for that gender you've never seen before? That does get much harder! Two out of three, sure, but...
Personally I wouldn't even count Magneto, since IMHO a key part of the Mary Sue / Marty Stu concept is that they're a viewpoint character that audiences are expected to become invested in, not just a side character. Maybe I'm just ignorant of the comics, but at least in the movies Magneto always seemed to be a deuteragonist foil for Xavier at best. That "can't just be a side character" rule also rules out a couple female examples I've seen in video games, and maybe one from TV.
I think Daenrys Targaryen might be the only example I can come up with! And ... maybe that's the exception that proves the rule? I think the real underlying reason for everyone's disappointment with the Game of Thrones final season was the low quality of the execution once the showrunners no longer had books to work from, but one of the biggest explicit complaints was the way the story turned so many people's favorite Savior character into another villain. Is that a gendered thing, or would people have been equally pissed about Anakin if they hadn't known it was coming?
roystgnr
7d ago
the change sounds... positive to me?
A regional governor isn't a guy you elect locally to represent his home region, it's a guy hand-picked by the central ruler to control his assigned region. Think Lord Cornbury, not George Washington. It's a form of centralization.
Ultimately, the way things shake out in the prequel trilogy, I find myself rooting against the republic. Fighting separatists? Separatists are people who don't WANT to be in your republic, crushing them puts you on the side of meddling interventionist empires, not freedom fighters.
This, on the other hand, is part of my headcanon too. The separatists are clearly assholes, but they're also just the second-to-last of the series of puppets that Palpatine has been using to manufacture crises and accrue power, and at this stage of his plan the way to avoid such a trap would simply be to not walk into it. I'm honestly not sure whether this was a brilliant decision by Lucas (showing that the physical downfall of the Jedi was a consequence of their moral downfall, that they were all as prone to paranoid attachment and jealousy as Anakin, but for power and control and stability rather than for love) or a lucky-but-ignorant decision by Lucas (thoughtlessly internalizing a false lesson of the US Civil War, the idea that because separatism for an evil cause is evil, separatism can simply be assumed to be inherently evil), but it worked.
roystgnr
7d ago
That just means we get to argue about whether it's funnier to call him a "Marty Stu" or a "Gary Stu".
Assuming we argue here, that is. I guessed that TVTropes would have something about how "Mary Sue Tropes are too contentious to provide specific examples", but AllTheTropes was supposed to be the "We're not interested in Censorship", "Debate is Encouraged" fork and even there it's "No examples, please; Mary Sue Tropes are by their nature YMMV Tropes, and we don't need the flamewars."
roystgnr
7d ago
The prequel trilogy had the Jedi becoming reluctant leaders in a massive war, though, and then had that backfiring on them horribly in multiple ways. This was one of the good things about the prequel plot: it retconned Obi Wan's and Yoda's reclusion and pacifism as being a desperate reactionary attempt to return to the old pre-war ways, an overreaction which makes more sense from that psychological point of view than on its own merits, as the original trilogy itself showed their attitudes to be quite lacking. Fortunately the original trilogy also shuffled the last of the old guard Jedi out of the way in the end, clearing the stage for Luke's more tempered, more reluctant, more battle-tested inclinations toward pacifism and forgiveness, ready to try to build something anew.
How do you balance a unwavering love of peace with the varying need for violence? It's an interesting question, and it was all nicely set up for them to add new thematic answers to! They had a formerly main character who'd aged to fit the "old wise mentor whose advice might not be listened to" role himself (and whose wisdom therefore wouldn't necessarily disrupt the narrative tension of protagonists making their own mistakes), who'd seen the consequences of both extremes, and who definitely could come up with advice better than "I should try to murder my nephew in his sleep and then abandon the galaxy". All the sequel trilogy needed to do was complete the last third of the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" dialectic, instead of going with "thesis, antithesis, potato".
I do like the idea of exploring your interpretation of the Force, but I also like interpretations just the opposite of yours, even if they draw as heavily on the prequel as on the original trilogy.
So that's what I'd do: interpretationS, plural.
Much of the genius of early Star Wars was that it hinted at a much larger universe than it had time to show on screen. Lucas started unnecessarily spoiling this pretty quickly ("I am your father", okay, but "sister" too? How small is this "galaxy", anyway?), and after everyone had time to reflect in between trilogies and then continue the spoilage anyway, it just became more clear that those hints of grand scope were only a lucky accident (C3-PO and Chewbacca had to get memberberry parts too? seriously?) ... but we could try to recapture some of that scope, on purpose, by establishing a universe that's at least ideologically large. Show more places where Han's "hokey religion" attitude was just common sense, because there were only ever ten thousand Jedi among millions of planets. Show more of the core Sith point of view that makes it so dangerously tempting. Show the various contradictory lies that the Sith spread until they took on lives and followings of their own. Show which Jedi beliefs might only be true "from a certain point of view" and at least leave room for a little doubt with the rest.
On the other hand, TFA actually loved hinting at mysteries, which was wasted when that prep work just got thrown out by TLJ, leaving little more than a paint-by-numbers rework of ANH behind. The prequel trilogy did more hinting at grand scope (if only by accident, in between the spoilage), but it got buried by wooden dialogue and cartoonish set pieces. It's easy to pick out one thing at a time that we could have done better, but I'm sure I'd have done a dozen different things worse as a director.
Now, as a producer, if the whole sequel trilogy had been mine to make, the major changes would have been easy: insist on having three scripts in advance (even if the second and third might be heavily changed later), insist on either more closure for the first two movies' endings or giving all three movies to the same director or both, and don't let that director be either a "mystery box!" guy or a "subvert expectations!" guy.
Oh, and I would absolutely excise the schtick where they have to practically retcon the rebels' huge victory to try to make them the Loveable Underdog again, but that's another obvious big-picture improvement that could be very easy to screw up entirely when we get down into all the critical little details.
roystgnr
11d ago
Some medicines have different levels of effectiveness and different levels of side effect severity for different people even. I used Flonase on and off for a couple years, and never had any issues with eye pressure as far as my optometrist could measure. Allergists were thrilled by the stuff, because "maybe it'll give you glaucoma if you're susceptible and use it for years on end and don't check for warning signs" from nasal steroid sprays was still a big step up from "you can clear up your congestion for a few days, after which you have to stop or the rebound effect will just give you double-strength congestion for much longer" from nasal decongestant sprays.
Anyway, you don't want to use anything for years for sinus relief, regardless of side effects. If you've got congestion problems that last longer than the few weeks at a time of bad pollen seasons, get yourself taking allergy shots. They're very inconvenient (for me it was three shots a week, tapering down to one a week as they increased in dosage, for months and months) but very effective (I went for about two years unable to breathe through my nose after moving to a new neighborhood with more and different pollen; a decade or more after my shots I get congested maybe a few days a year during a bad year).
roystgnr
13d ago
That's a bit of a motte-and-bailey, though, isn't it? He said "files and folders"; you say "autoexec.bat or config.sys". Even in a perfectly working system there's value to be had in being able to sort your own data (independently of application) and in being able to look through others' sorted data. You're talking about people who can't change spark plugs and he's worrying about people who can't steer. (although that metaphor works both ways, in the world of "car, drive me to my brother's house" and "computer, show all the meme images I edited that have a cat in them")
roystgnr
13d ago
A parent's ability to afford sending their child to such a school is strongly correlated with the intelligence of their child
This is true, but probably not in the sense that you mean it. There may be exceptions in terminology somewhere, but in general charter schools in the United States do not charge tuition. The price you must afford to send your kid to charter school isn't paid in cash, but in the currency of executive function: do you have the foresight to get your kid on an admissions list ASAP (we didn't try until our oldest was moving from a decent-enough elementary school to a weaker selection of middle schools, and so it wasn't until two years later that she got into a charter), and can you reliably shuttle your kid(s) to a more distant school, possibly with a less-standard schedule, without the school bus services that any public school will offer?
You could outdo charter school selection effects in any mid-size public school district by just using an admissions test (most charter schools aren't allowed to use one), but even where this happens it's just hanging on by a thread.
roystgnr
15d ago
The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.
Africa in Black Panther is incredibly heterogeneous, with one super-advanced country so isolationist that its more numerous and much more impoverished neighbors are barely aware it exists.
The homogeneity isn't between Wakanda and the rest of Africa, it's between Wakanda and the woke USA. When Wakanda decides to break its isolation and try to uplift the suffering black people of the world, where does "the first Wakandan International Outreach Center" get built? South Sudan? ($700/year PPP-per-capita GDP, lowest in the world, then mid-civil-war with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees) The DRC? ($1,700/y, infamously one of history's most brutally victimized colonies, a decade or so out from an even larger war, and their fictional neighbor) Rwanda? ($4,000/y, another neighbor, a couple decades out from one of history's most shocking genocides) I could keep going, but naah: it's Oakland. African-American median household income $60,000 (really hard to compare to mean per-capita GDP, but divide by ~4 and you're still way ahead), under 100 African-American homicide victims per year.
There's a strained diegetic reason for this, but the straightforward extradiegetic reason is pretty much as you say: Africans in Africa aren't salient to scriptwriters the way African-Americans in California are.
roystgnr
15d ago
If you look at top 50 (by box office receipts) 2020s movies, and restrict to American movies, Oppenheimer (at #13) is the top entry that isn't a sequel to or a remake of or a movie version of some already-highly-successful narrative IP from an earlier decade ... and then the second-highest entry is Elemental, at #48??? Did I miss a bunch?
We might be through with the very concept in the era of IPs.
I know this isn't a new trend, but I hadn't realized just how bad it's gotten. In the 2010s we've got Zootopia at #38, Bohemian Rhapsody (not counting a song as narrative IP) at #46, The Secret Life of Pets at #50, and that's it, so essentially no better.
But back in the 2000s we see Avatar at #1, the first Pirates of the Caribbean (not counting a theme park ride as narrative IP) at #32 (then up to #3 and #6 in sequels), The Da Vinci Code (based on a successful book, but a 2003 book) at #24, a couple Ice Age movies (sequels to a 2002 movie), 2012 at #27, Up at #29, one of the Twilight sequels (based on a 2005 book), Kung Fu Panda at #34, The Incredibles at #35, Hancock at #36, Ratatouille at #37, The Passion of the Christ at #38, Madagascar at #50 and its sequel at #40, Night at the Museum (based on a 1993 book, but not an already-highly-successful one like Harry Potter) at #46, and The Day After Tomorrow at #50.
Now, note that I didn't say I was looking for good, just successful and original. I can't say I'm proud of the culture that gave us Twilight, Dan Brown, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, or even Dances With Smurfs. But at least it was a noticeable fraction (looks like around 1/4) of a culture! The idea of original culture was clearly on its way out, even then, though - the originality fraction for the 1990s is around 2/3, way more than I want to list out in a comment, and that's despite not including a swath of embarrassing entries like the 2000s did.
Clearly the peak of popular original culture was the late 90s (I'm going to say 1999 - The Matrix was right about that being "the peak of your civilization"), and although it's a priori suspicious that @Iconochasm and I identify this peak as being when we were in high school, it's a fact supported by data, not just nostalgia. Suck it, kids these days.
roystgnr
18d ago
For two hundred years people like you have been trying to squelch English speakers' opportunities to feel like fancy snooty French people once in a while. Well, you see the trajectories at the end of that graph? No more! Our time is now. We're not even saying "OM-idj" now, oh no, you lost that chance at compromise. Our speech will now be a full-throated "oh-MAHZH" to the romance languages!
Technically the FCC rejection of Starlink's rural broadband subsidy application was after Musk made the offer to buy Twitter, but before the transaction took place.
And the Biden grudge against Musk was at least a year older still. Biden holding his "Electric Vehicle Summit" but then not inviting the manufacturer of a supermajority of US EVs because they weren't unionized was ... well, the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" does get overused, but that NY Post article helpfully includes the photos of Biden literally test-driving an electric Rubicon, so who am I to argue with dramatic irony?
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