Although I’m generally a fairly hardcore superhero movie fan and see them all, i thought I was stuck in the superhero fatigue because very few things have really hit for me the last few years. But then you get Across the Spider-Verse and realize the problem isn’t the genre, the problem is that most of the stuff has just not been very good lately. Passable, sure, but not good, and extremely rare lately to feel like I’m watching anything special.

Can’t speak much for Elemental other than from the little bit of marketing I have seen it didn’t feel like anything particularly new, just a skin on previous Pixar sorts of stories. I saw Flash this weekend because I’m a big fan, and overall it was about what I expected. I don’t trust any hype around DC these days, so I figured I’d get a decent popcorn flick with some solid fan service for old-heads like myself that love Keaton’s Batman. And that’s pretty much what it was.

If you saw the trailer and have a few brain cells that knock into each other, you probably had the movie pegged going in. If you’ve already read or watched previous incarnations of Flashpoint, you pretty much know the story. The things that would be novel/interesting about this movie re: multiverse and using characters from other continuities and such feel entirely derivative coming in after No Way Home, Everything Everywhere All At Once (which is a superhero movie, fight me) and really, really suffers coming out a week after Across the Spider-Verse which has some similar story beats, but just does it waaaaayyyyyy better. I’ve already re-watched AtSV, and it is just jam-packed with what I can only describe as “good-taste.” ItSV was groundbreaking for a lot of reasons, and to your point, it looks anything but bland. Even with that as the measure going in, I didn’t expect AtSV to still be so visually it’s own movie and still groundbreaking in it’s own right.

When you add in the meta for this movie and knowing that it’s unlikely to go anywhere relevant to the new DCEU or even casual fans just hearing about all of the Ezra bullshit (plus tbh I really, really don’t think he’s appealing as Barry or in general for this role) I think they were lucky to end up at 55mil. Really, the marketing team for this movie deserves a raise based on that alone as they managed to get most of the stink off of this and make it feel like an event movie.

This. I have been slowly building my smart home for the last 4-5 years, and I’ve yet to have a dead piece of equipment outside of a failed plug-in outlet. Since i do run everything through home assistant, there isn’t really any worry on my end up about longer term support, and if something does break in 10 years then whatever, I got 10 years of automation and a fun hobby and I’ll just replace it with the switches and shit that I took out to begin with. But because my house is now built around zigbee and home assistant, the only thing I actually have to worry about is HASS going away.

I mean, sure, I’ll probably upgrade to other things over time anyway, but that is the nature of technology. I mean, I’m sure these articles have been written but this thread is the equivalent of “laptops - computers are already fine, isn’t it just going to be a headache to carry one with you?” Ditto for modern mobile phones.

Chefs knife. It’s virtually the only knife I use outside of a bread knife.

This is pretty much what I was going to say. I don’t think that people understand quite how the pseudo libertarian tech bro mentality still permeates this space, and in particular with reddit. The site has always been this way, so if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve been around to this play out many times. Free speech is some absolutely inviolate principle that requires reddit to platform pedophiles (jailbait) and pics of dead kids, until it’s not because it gets bad press and starts to affect financials and some overlord steps in, and then, just like in the real world, when my libertarian ideal starts to negatively impact me, it goes out the window. Repeat ad nauseum.

These people also tend to think that every bit of success they have is only because of them, even though in the case of reddit, most of the success that it’s had has happened in spite of them. One of Reddit’s defining aspects used to be ama’s. Reddit fired the person responsible for making them great. Reddit completely missed mobile even more than Twitter did, and then when they finally got there they did it poorly and can still attribute most of the success to third party developers. Nothing really since the core product stabilized in like 2008 has been meaningful, it’s been about the community the entire time.

I would still be willing to bet that spez and reddit think that their rugged individualist genius is the reason that reddit is as big when that’s all largely happened in spite of them. None of them will admit the truth - they had a good basic idea at the right time, and they’ve succeeded since based on the backs of a bunch of people they’ll never give credit to, and as soon as they stop listening to those people they fade from relevance. And even though they have plenty examples to look to (the juxtaposition of this compared to twitter is really something) they don’t learn from it.