maegul

maegul, 7 hours ago

most struggle to accept minor inconveniences.

This is the really jaw dropping thing whenever I see it. I just have no idea what to say and don’t get how people don’t have an instinct for when there might be a bigger picture.

Some are really cruising through life just trying to maximise convenience and comfort.

maegul, 1 day ago

Anyone have an understanding of how much migration Germany has lately? Is this all still a hang over from the Syrian refugee intake under Merkel? Is Germany a favoured destination generally within Europe? Or are Germans just “sensitive” about darker coloured people (which would be a bit odd given the Turkish migration that occurred after the war, unless that never went well either)?

maegul, 1 day ago

Ah right. Obvious guess I should have made.

maegul, 1 day ago

That’s kinda what I’d heard as a rumour elsewhere, that this is in part being pushed by Amazon doing the rings of power.

Who owns what rights though?

If Warner Bros own rights to the Silmarillion, then this gets interesting and they’ve got my attention.

Sure the hobbit was money grabbing trash, but the Silmarillion is fantasy in the end (so yay) and not something easily stretched out into garbage as it poses the opposite challenge like LotR. Could work out.

maegul, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I was ok with the wizard, just don’t make it Gandalf for nostalgia, stick to the blue wizards as that’s actually canon and interesting and expansive to the lore.

I’m pretty sure the rings of power writers thought they could easily get away with combining the blue wizards with Gandalf, but I think it’s just too confusing for regular fans and too wrong for nerds.

A new wizard though, one mentioned by Gandalf in films? That can work!

maegul, 1 day ago

When they had the “always follow your nose” “reveal” , that was the final nail in the RoP coffin for me.

Oh yea. I loudly groaned when it happened. My partner watching with me isn’t as much of a LoTR nerd as I do I had to explain it to them I was so loud.

I’m actually still hoping that it was a bit of a fun tease and even a way to test the waters with the fan base on whether they should make it Gandalf. It’d be perfectly fine and even a little fun if it’s a “nice” wizard thing to say and think given that bodies and smells might be entirely new to maiar.

maegul, 1 day ago

Some of the shots give a Dune vibe, nice to see this so many years before the first Dune movie.

It’s was only four years before Dune pt 1 and the film Villeneuve did just before Dune. I haven’t seen it since the release either but my memory has always been that there’s a good amount of vibe share between the films. In fact it’s probably reasonable to speculate that Dune wouldn’t be what it is without Villeneuve doing Blade Runner first.

maegul, 1 day ago

Great vid, thanks!

When I saw the film I had some female friends tell me they felt uncomfortable with objectification and portrayal of women in the film. And I can’t disagree. But I always felt that there was an underlying truth to the dystopia of the film that explained that objectification, though perhaps does not justify it.

This vid does a good job at demonstrating that. I’d never thought about how much of a protagonist Joi is, but you certainly remember her and definitely feel the general energy in the film of lost and desperate agency.

Then, tying all of that back to older millennials and capitalism and how their feeling could ever be portrayed in film was great.

maegul, 1 day ago

More than that, Blade Runner’s lack of big commercial success is why Dune was done as a stand alone film at first that ends unfinished. The studios didn’t trust that Vilkeneuve could make a profitable film. So instead of doing it lord of the rings style, they’ve waited to see the success of each film separately.

And I bet this lack of success influenced some of Villeneuve’s directorial decisions too. The differences in the general portrayal of women seems quite stark and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was somewhat conscious. I also feel like you can see Villeneuve trying not to make the Dune films too long and boring, which was a complaint of blade runner 2049.

maegul, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

While I generally agree with all of that, and it is basically what I more or less said at the time, it’s still a film full of women being objectified and in some cases pretty senselessly murdered.

singling out the objectification and portrayal of women just feels a little odd to me.

If patriarchy and violence against women weren’t a problem or if the film were about those issues, then all good. But we’re in a world where male v bear is an actual debate and the above are actual issues.

So I don’t hold anything at all against a woman saying that they think there’s a problem there in the film and that they don’t like it solely for those reasons. And in end, I’m not sure the film’s dystopian or AI-humanity themes really justify or necessitate the portrayal and plot points. It feels like other options were available and, TBH, using female objectification/ownership/subordination/violence as a vehicle and marker for dystopia is perhaps lazy and trope-ish. For instance, the woman who told me they didn’t like the film for these reasons was telling me shortly before the film’s release how tired they were of the sad prostitute and destitute brothel trope for signifying dystopia in sci-fi.

First(/second) season of west world strikes me as a relevant comparison here, where the agency and subjugation and control was less gendered without hiding at all the reality of what a female AI would go through.

In the end I think two things can (edit: both) be true here. 1) the film itself isn’t misogynistic and the portrayal of women in it is part of a bigger dystopian theme, and 2) the use of female characters for that kind of story just doesn’t cut it for some/enough women anymore who, without demanding “girl boss” characters, would prefer either direct stories about female oppression or portrayals the lean into more fruitful or interesting ideas and themes.

For me, as much as I like the film, I don’t think its story and point quite get to the point of making what happens to women in it feel justified in our current era. I think it’s totally fair for women to feel alienated from the film, that it wasn’t made for them. The majority of women aren’t prostitutes or locked down house wives with zero agency (or animals to be slaughtered).

Whatever dystopia resonates with women today is likely more interesting, frankly. Perhaps a bit more like the story of the protagonist in BR 2049 (who’s of course male).

maegul, 1 day ago

AFAICT, many just browse All. If so, the community a post is in doesn’t register much if at all.

maegul, 3 days ago

Yea wow. As a 90s kid I’d never thought of comparing smart phones to consoles. Great point. Gaming together on the couch or a truly fun and social activity and way more wholesome than doom scrolling

maegul, 4 days ago

It’s an interesting question IMO. It’s basically a trope of aging to remember how great things were when you were young that we can’t really trust it (especially in the “OK Boomer” era). But sometimes (often arguably), things are actually lost and mistakes are actually made. So digging out that information can be interesting and helpful IMO, even you’re only starting with impressions and experiences and feelings.

For me, as a 90s kid, it’s the constant internet rage and catastrophe. Not to discount taking serious issues seriously and being informed and active. Not at all. But the whole thing of doom scrolling a feed and getting dopamine from “bad news” then echoing it into the echo chamber you’re part of.

Pretty sure it’s mostly a rubbish phenomenon.

In a similar vein, the whole Daily show comedy news thing is likely ineffectual in actually altering anything about politics as it’s almost always “the other side is dumb” (and sometimes “our side” too LOL).

Also, I was never a Twitter person, but I see a lot of people claim that important political things happened on twitter (and some of those are trying to recreate the same structures on the fediverse and other alt-social). I’m skeptical of all of that. Which isn’t to discount the value of organising communities online, I just don’t trust that much good came out of twitter or that there was a net benefit of the total system.

Interestingly, I wonder if the new tiktok generation is going to do better or more interesting things. I saw a tiktok event nearby recently, it runs regularly and it’s basically a dance jam. Random songs/clips get played over an audio system and the group of people “jamming” all try to remember the accompanying dance moves on the fly. Awards are given out at the end and the whole thing is recorded presumably for twitch or something. I’m no tiktok or dance person but it seemed like a whole lot of fun and, interestingly to me, was happening in real life.

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The other thing is that I think music streaming was/is probably a bad idea. It’s hard for me to be object about this as your relationship to music changes as you age, but I think there’s a demotion of the role music plays in my life by putting it all into a streaming smartphone. Even the basic physical things of having booklets or liner notes and cover art that you could hold and read go pretty far (and also, how fucking dumb is it that streaming doesn’t have digital equivalents for albums??!!)

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Lastly … housing. JFC we/boomers have fucked this up. And like the ozone layer or some other environmental damage it will take a while to clean up.

maegul, 4 days ago

Yea I wonder about this too.

Major problem is that fracturing is in the nature of decentralised federation. So my thinking is that what’s needed is some additional features that enable users to easily stitch together multiple communities in ways that are easily sharable or “upload-able”.

Personalised multi-communities + (better) cross-post surfacing + cross-post comment folding …

… could go fair I suspect. If multi-communities like this could then be easily configured, you could then have downloadable setups (ie config files or something similar) recommended by users or alliances of communities for new users to easily get started.

Interestingly, I’d wonder if such a feature set were to exist and gain widespread traction, whether it would enable easier community migrations when things go south in a community.

maegul, 4 days ago

Seems like people were politely dancing around the fact that he was both an essentially absentee board member and a problematic one in openly criticising bsky and poisoning its well in terms of reputation. Seems that push finally came to shove and that he really needed to go and was happy to leave.

maegul, 4 days ago

Yea generally, AFAICT, it’s a problem with Discovery that the writers tried to be just a bit more “present”. Same with the Stacey Abrams cameo that was just a bit too “front and center” when it would have worked better in the background. I get it, it’s weird for TNG era starfleet to all be into classical music and jazz and Leonardo Da Vinci (Janeway), but you know, it prevents it from aging in the long run.

maegul, 4 days ago

well discovery criticism is well trodden by now and I didn’t want to trigger a dive into it (which I say as a Disco critic). This part though, however minor it might seem, I think goes beyond being a critique of the show and more of a strong lesson that writers should know and shouldn’t fuck around with, especially in sci-fi.

It may also highlight how Disco writers are maybe just not good trek writers and maybe didn’t get the show … where it’s not so much about the “right now” like social media but about the bigger questions of the present.

maegul, 4 days ago

Hmmm I can’t quite pinpoint which episode this was … which was it? It’s interesting because I may have missed the non-binary character!?

maegul, 6 days ago

“I’m sure there’d be a German word for this mood where you’re like, this is exciting, but something is deeply wrong here.”

Ha, nice.

“Unangenehmungsfreude” was my German friend’s best shot. Translates roughly to “discomfort-joy”.

On the fediverse front, platforms as reasonably well defined spaces seems to me something that is both natural and useful but which is kinda missed or ignored by the ideals of the fediverse, in that they are likely to just happen anyway, and are happening, but kinda run counter to the ideal of everything federating everywhere.

maegul, 7 days ago

One potential PoC for a plug-in could be a “conversation listener”?

Something which notifies you whenever a new comment or reply is made to a selected post/comment, so that you can keep track of any new conversation.

Dunno how viable that sort of thing would be though … how could plugins affect the UI? Plus the plug-in would need its own database.

Beyond that, moderation seems like an obvious application?

Perhaps some sort of wiki like application, where posts containing certain tags or other markers get automatically organised someway in a separate post or page?

maegul, 7 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Other random ideas:

• Federation health monitor? Checks if posts are federating well.
• Activity summariser: eg shows how many posts/comments in selected communities since last visited.
  • EDIT: I’m thinking of Phanpy’s catch-up feature here (it’s a web app for microblogging platforms and easily one of the best social media clients there is … if you haven’t seen the catchup feature go check it out).
• link localiser? Probably better in the backend (as suggested already). But it intercepts links to posts/comments and provides links to the local versions.

maegul, 7 days ago

He’s not your guy, friend.

maegul, 5 days ago

Well the one time I interacted from lemmy with comments it worked well: lemmy.ml/post/11677521?scrollToComments=true

So I figured federation was mostly sorted. Unfortunate to hear it’s still pretty rough.