I would assume any non-mainstream, "legacy" brand that makes you think "huh, they still make TVs?" (Magnavox, RCA, Westinghouse, Phillips) or unknown brand is just some Chinese company's skinsuit at this point, so I would definitely not trust them over any other. At least there is the possibility of a large Japanese or Korean brand getting repercussions from fucking the consumer over. Yes, it rarely happens, but it could, which is probably informing their decisions. But Chinese brands operate outside of the West's ability to punish or regulate. Cheap Chinese electronics (not their prestige brands like Hisense or TCL with a reputation to lose, those are probably just as bad but no worse than the Japanese or Koreans) spying on people rarely makes the news because we rightfully go "well no shit sherlock", not because it doesn't happen.
pigeonburger
6d ago
Imagine a pure-blood Witch reproduces with a male muggle. I do not know the in-universe specific of magical inheritance, but my understanding is that it is then a roll of the dice if the children will have magic.
It's kind of implied by us never seeing an example otherwise, but is there a definitive word that children of two individuals gifted with magic will always result in a gifted kid? Rowling's point would be strengthened if it wasn't the case, though it would be hard to explain magical society as a hidden counterpart to normal society if either the wizarding world or normal society was filled with the ungifted scions of witches and wizards (ie: wouldn't the ungifted seek out the technological tools of muggles to not live like they're handicapped in the wizarding world? and if they were exiled to the muggle world, there would be too many of them walking around, with no particular reason not to reveal what they know).
pigeonburger
6d ago
I watched a movie recently, (spoilering the name because just being mentionned in this conversation kind of spoils the "twist")
That kind of neatly gets around using the known event/period people strongly associate with witches in a horror movie while still acknowledging that it's mostly known for being a moral panic that was used to murder innocents.
The problem with gun control is that it really only reliably disarms people who obey laws. It doesn’t really work on people who break the law. No gang member, spree shooter, or assassin is bothered by the illegality of their weapon or signs prohibiting guns from some venue. In fact, they very likely love seeing those no guns signs because no one else is likely to be armed. So passing more no guns in school laws or whatever other gun control laws aren’t going to work.
I agree with you here, but I have to steelman the gun control argument here so we can have a debate against something worth debating: even if the laws only directly affect lawful owners with non-criminal intentions, guns being so readily available to criminals is downstream of them being readily available for lawful citizens. Be it straw purchases, thefts, etc... A gun loving culture will have a lot of guns around and some of those will be used for crime. The point of gun control laws, while it could not be expressed overtly as such because populations in democraties tend to resist top-down attempts at changing its culture, is not so much in controlling access to guns on technical grounds, but in deliberately attacking and damaging "gun culture", making guns less cool, less attractive, more annoying to get, less popular. In the hope that there will be, as a result, less guns around for criminals to get and use in crime.
Officials pushing for gun controls cannot say it outright, and pro-gun control citizens don't have to say it because they instinctively understand its the point. They just hope that their mental model of the red tribe is accurate and that they are all actual morons who cannot figure out that this is the actual point all along and that they might actually acquiesce to "compromises" that always go in the direction of attacking "gun culture".
They could have just said it's the sweat of Christ and it would have made it work, but by reaching for something that felt more meaningful they basically broke it in a way any Catholic would notice. I wonder if anyone raised the objection during production.
Though I think people who like it don't really care because those movies seem to mostly hit for people who aren't Catholics, but like the demon/witches/exorcisms aesthetics. My wife's like that, she doesn't believe in Christianity but she really wants to believe that stuff like what the Warrens did was real. Because even to atheists, fighting primordial evil is cool, even if wasting time on being lied to in church by hypocritical clergy, being brainwashed to ignore science and hate gays is not (which is what they identify Christianity with).
Some of these religious horror movies try to make it intellectually palatable to believe in the specific Catholic evil, and the power of Catholic rites against it, without believing in the Christian God by making it more of a matter of generic, form changing evil vs a nebulous "force of belief" in general. The last and horrible The Exorcist movie is like that; white voodoo witch doctor rites are powerful against demons too, as long as the person performing it believes. And if it some cases it takes the dramatic form of Catholic demons and Catholic exorcism, then it's just a matter of it being what the character believes.
Anyway, The Nun had nice set designs that made my time watching it not wasted, but otherwise it's not the strongest in that genre by any means.
pigeonburger
9d ago
Not in Catholic teachings: despite keeping the attributes of bread and wine, the Eucharist is transsubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Christ in a litteral, not metaphorical way. Keeping their bread and wine attributes is probably the reason why Catholic run hospitals aren't transfusing communion wine into people, but a Catholic still has to believe that it is The Litteral Blood of Christ.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Ah, okay!
pigeonburger
10d ago
I think Baldur's Gate 3 might be an exception too? I haven't played it personally, but I hear a lot of good sentiment about it despite it sounding like they actually did put activism in there.
pigeonburger
10d ago
Digital Audio Workstations still make those "stripped down versions". I think consumers also feel insulted that they're not getting the "real deal" version. What do you mean this consumer level bundled DAW is limiting me at 8 tracks? My creativity has no bounds, it cannot be held by only 8 tracks!
Never mind the fact that the majority of these consumers probably barely touch the software to begin with, and when they do use it, 8 tracks is likely more than enough. And that some of the greatest, most creative music of the 20th century has been recorded on 4 track analog recorders, let alone 8 tracks with the convenience of digital tools!
pigeonburger
11d ago
Brady is part of a trend of American stars in Canadian markets wanting out. There's a team USA group chat where American stars are supposedly being pressured by their peers to move: Tkachuk, Connor Hellebuyck, Quinn Hughes, and Dylan Larkin are all supposedly examples of this in action. This is basically one step above a conspiracy theory but the trend exists and certainly lots of (bitter) Canadian hockey fans believe it. More plausible is that Tkachuk wanted to play with his brother and was going to refuse to re-sign in Ottawa.
I mean, politics might be one aspect of it, but the more likely reason for most is that in a sport where the teams all have more or less the same payroll amount, southern US states offer advantages that canadian teams cannot match. Most importantly: less taxation, more comfortable climate, less scrutiny/stress, more anonymity. Some of these are not just advantages for the players, but for their family as well. If you enjoy being a city's hero, have always dreamed of playing for your hometown, and don't mind that every little thing about you will be scrutinized by media for whom hockey is the #1 sport to cover, then yeah, canadian players might deliberately chose to go play in Montreal or Toronto. But for anyone who doesn't have that attachment, if you get the choice between you and your family living in Winnipeg, and being taxed harder for the privilege, or living in Florida or Las Vegas...
Eventually the league is going to have to address this problem; maybe salary cap has to be adjusted with a "desirability index". No trade clauses might need to go. Maybe some rules have to be drafted to make free agency blind to which team is making an offer. I don't know. But the current context is a problem if the league is trying to remain competitive.
The latter... mostly offers smug-confirmation for people who project authority onto institutions like the New York Times.
I think it started popping up because these institutions blurred the lines between their editorial and journalistic functions and the result was not the one they had hoped. They had hoped that people would start agreeing with the editorial content as if it was hardcore journalistic truth, but the result is that no one trusts anything in the paper, even journalistic content, unless they are already predisposed to agree with the editorial slant of the institution. With "fact checking" they are double for realsies signaling that it is journalistic work, but of course that does not preclude them from doing their usual manipulations: choice of subject, choice of accepted sources, caracterization of quotes or facts, and of course the subjective value given as a result when something is in the vast gulf between "absolute truth that isn't misleading, controversial or disputable" and "complete and utter fabulation with no supporting evidence of any kind".
pigeonburger
12d ago
In french too: chirurgien.
pigeonburger
12d ago
(I don't want this to be about a left/right thing, I want to talk about ai and fact checking and whatever please)
You might not want this to be a left/right thing, but considering the political slant of most "fact checking" orgs, it will be.
pigeonburger
14d ago
Personally I would explain Silksong's slight decrease in customer score to be entirely explainable by a few people being pushed away by the difficulty starting at a point of "let's keep going from the assumption that you've been able to beat the original Hollow Knight"
pigeonburger
14d ago
Yeah, games back in the NES days were often like that for two reasons. Because arcade games were like that too to steal your quarters, so it was expected of games in general. And because they were seen as children's entertainment for the most part, children who have ample free time compared to adults and little money, so they might get new games once or twice a year for their birthday or Christmas. With cartridges having very limited space for content, companies had to make games hard as fuck so that they wouldn't be beaten in a rental's time.
pigeonburger
14d ago
That's the wokest anti-woke group I've seen. Most woke scolds don't get microaggressed by nearly as many triggers as this group.
pigeonburger
14d ago
Being a free person with rights and independence and agency doesn't give your life purpose, particularly wise and self-motivated people manage to find their own, but plenty just wander through life aimlessly. Some never care, but if suddenly you start to care at 2X, you often latch to the first purposeful looking cause/organisation that comes your way; can be a religion, a cult, a social cause. In some tragic cases, a person that doesn't deserve it.
pigeonburger
17d ago
Nah, they also had the option of, instead of watching it, write pearl-clutching articles grandstanding about Why They Wouldn't Be Watching Trump's Blood Entertainment.
I enjoy salt and balsamic vinegar
*EDIT: If you can tolerate a bit of well-regarded "healthy" fat, olive oil is nice too. The most mindblowing popcorn I make though is not fatless; it's garlic butter + MSG popcorn.
As someone with a white bunny at home, I can confirm that they really are like that. Well, I can't confirm whether medieval bunnies had the acrobatic skills to do the stunts required of The Beast of Caerbannog, but the murderous intent is still here.
*EDIT: But actually, it's really part of the "strangely accurate" stuff that a student of medieval history would appreciate. Killer rabbits are a weirdly recurrent motif in medieval art and decoration.
pigeonburger
19d ago
overwhelming critical praise it was getting
Yeah, and I find it genuinely hard to believe that the critical praise is not in large part due to how it makes critics who agree with the messaging feel smart. I too enjoy watching something that makes me feel smart; that doesn't mean it's artistically worthwhile.
Would today's critics be able to praise something like "Birth of a Nation"? It's been "baked in" by previous generations of critics who could now so they don't really have a choice but to praise that one, but a new movie like it.
pigeonburger
19d ago
At no point was the ride going low enough to hit someone standing under it, but it must be very unnerving to have it swing above your head like that.
pigeonburger
19d ago
I had a similar reaction reading about it yesterday, remaking to myself how bluntly it was stated in the articles. It's not like the articles were dwelling on it, but they were just plainly stating it, no dancing around it, no vague hinting, no euphemism.
But personally, I doubt it's a matter of a media outlet's policy changing, but maybe more up to the wishes of the family or the deceased (as expressed to others in person when alive or in a suicide note).
pigeonburger
19d ago
You are skipping over that he did stop the federal subsidy for EVs, which, I know, subsidies don't actually make EVs cheaper, it just spreads the cost around. But if you believe, as many people do, that the externalities of gas vehicules are not being captured by the cost their users pay (and it's not just the environmental externalities, but the geopolitical ones too) and that those externalities are being paid by society at large anyway, then EV subsidies feel more like evening the playing field than robbing non-EV drivers to pay for EVs.
I think a point that's quite important to the Wizarding World is that the wizards "aren't" exactly overwhelmingly powerful compared to muggles. They seem to have a chronic lack of understanding of muggle technology, it's as if the more you get into wizarding, the less you can even understand about muggles. Arthur Weasley, ostensibly one of Wizarding Britain's foremost experts on muggles, seems almost entirely clueless about them. Sure, it's played for laughs, but we have to take it at face value, especially since on any other topic than the one he's the expert on, he's not a bumbling fool at all. Much of the "woah this is cool" stuff that makes wizarding world work is visually impressive but not any more functional than modern muggle technology. Dishes that do themselves? We have dishwashers. Moving staircases? We have escalators and elevators, what's the point? Computers, even the ones from the 90s where the books are set in, would blow a wizards' mind. Wands with deadly spells that you have to inconveniently take a second to yell an incantation for? Muggles have automatic assault rifles. Dragons? I haven't seen them do anything that would worry a nation that flys fighter jets. There's a few things that wizards do have an advantage on, like ease of travel and, you know, time travel (which has to be ignored if you want to think of that fictional universe in a consistent way as it pretty much breaks all of the stories). But there's things that muggles can do that wizards would likely have no counter to either.
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