maegul

@maegul@lemmy.ml

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

maegul,

Yea, car congestion isn’t about industrial transport, it’s about personal transport. All of the people commuting to/from work etc in single person occupied tanks.

maegul,

Cheers for the personal review! Awesome.

It’d be cool if there was more of this than just links to the rest of the internet (which is clearly turning to shit anyway).

maegul,

It really is a decent album once you get past the initial knee jerk reaction to it lol

Haha yea … a Kerry King solo album certainly would bring that out in people.

maegul,

Huh!

My impression of Godzilla x Kong, as someone who’s generally enjoyed that franchise, is that it’s basically reached a sort of “strangely calm and abstract animated cartoon vibe”. Which I’m probably down for, but which is also probably just not as entertaining as many would expect.

maegul,

Fantastic framing! Not just of the internet, but the whole economic sector including big tech, various publishers, of course the ads industry and now all of the push for winning the AI platform wars.

It’s a toilet economy! Fueled by the attention, tastes, inclinations and urges of people taking a shit! And now, as AI “learns” from the internet, also fed by and literally made of the writings and thoughts of people … taking a shit.

It’s also a nice litmus test for what kind of internet space somewhere online is based on where people are when they comment or post: “Is this a toilet or desk space”. Depending on what you’re after, you will probably want to know if you’re in the right kind of place.

maegul,

The prestige Coppola carries certainly makes reviews less reliable for this, I’d say. Industry can’t let a good marketing angle slip by.

The Icebergs- Frederic Edwin Church, oil on canvas (1861) (lemmy.world)

Shortly before the first exhibition, the American Civil War began. Church decided to call the painting The North, a title with a double meaning: a picture of the Arctic and a patriotic reference to the northern Union. Advertisements for the exhibition noted that the admission proceeds would be donated to the Patriotic Fund,...

maegul,

And are really eerie against the brown of the sky and water!

maegul,

I’ve found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don’t understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it’s been their main internet experience in life or something.

maegul,

Likely annoying hot take (and certainly a rant)Being picky about bad CGI has run its course now and is likely a toxic urge in film culture ATM. I’m a bit of a broken record on this already (see prior posts here, here and here, all driven by the “No CGI is really just invisible CGI” series on YT. Is this actually helping us enjoy cinema or priming us to be sensitive to something that prevents us from enjoying something we easily could? All I’m going to say here is that some lessened sensitivity over the “quality” of CGI is likely warranted right now. And I know, we all prefer good CGI over bad so why not enjoy what we enjoy. Well because the industry is gaslighting us over how much CGI is actually everywhere and fundamental to modern cinema, likely in part because they enjoy pushing down the CGI industry, but also because they want to control what we think of as “spectacle” so that they control and retain effective marketing. Out of that YT series, there were two really novel things for me. One, was that the studio’s have always underplayed their reliance on effects and lied and not given VFX artists due credit almost since the beginning. Two, was that part of what’s going on right now with CGI and the excitement over “practical effects” is that the glorious epic spectacular shots that got viewers excited in the past have lost their appeal or efficacy due to over saturation over time. But spectacle puts people in seats and makes money. So the studios want to be able to tell us and control what is “good spectacle”.
Sounds conspiracy theorist, I know. But I’m not talking about thought control here, just marketing. Think about how much you or I actually know about VFX and CGI? Do we really know what is “good” or “bad” CGI? Sure somethings will stand out to us as “bad”, but I’ve seen instances now of people mistaking “practical” for “bad CGI” for the simple reason that they don’t actually know what the practical thing really looks like (the Rings of Power trailer with liquid metal is I suspect a good example … people thought it was cheap CGI, but it was apparently practical … the point being that basically no internet nerd actually knows anything about what liquid metal looks like). Add to this how things and tastes have shifted pretty quickly as CGI has gotten way better pretty quickly, and you get a weird scenario where viewers can want the latest/best CGI to the point of being hyper-critical of “bad” CGI that would have been well received 10-20 years ago … while also demanding practical effects that “look real” when there’s a good chance that they’re either being lied to about what is real and isn’t and also don’t really know. But the studios want us hyped. So they’ll keep lying or trying to feed us what they think we want right now. And then viewers’ tastes will be molded by this experience. We’ll think we know what the latest/best CGI is and what “good and real” practical effects look like … which will push the next stage of attempts to hype us with lies and catering to our particular and likely somewhat arbitrary needs. It’s what got us to hyper-CGI driven film making in the 00s-10s and has got us studios lying now about practical effects that actually involve a lot of CGI (Top Gun seems really egregious on this front). And in all of this lack of transparency is a whole industry going unrecognised and being over-worked and underpaid by studios more likely to pretend they don’t exist than actually pay them for the work they do. So … maybe try to enjoy the story, characters and the writing? Maybe don’t be so obsessive about good/bad VFX? Maybe we no longer know what we’re talking about when it comes to convincing VFX, or at least spoilt to the point of being artistically meaningless in our amateur critiques? Maybe just break the hype feedback cycle /rant

maegul,

Bad CGI takes my immersion away from the actors and story and breaks my ability to enjoy the not-CGI shit, so that essay you wrote is wrong.

Well my point was that perhaps your “immersion” (and others’ or the current culture too) is excessively sensitive to the apparent “quality” of the CGI, not that your immersion was never affected. IMO, it’s a mentality and expectations thing, not a “right/wrong” “what is objectively good cinema” thing.

maegul,

Interestingly, this is what I liked about it. Sure, I was expecting more Sci-Fi, but I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy the psychological drama. They dragged it on too long and stumbled mid season, but I was there for it.

As I saw it, it was about grief and loss, and that’s something not everyone is interested in watching all the time. So it was probably hard to market (unfortunately a lot of great things are just niche and hard to market). But the combination of a sci-fi idea and a drama about loss that they pulled off was for me rather wonderful.

The idea of that liminal cabin and how they wander in and intersect there at various times was beautiful to me. Episode 6, personally, was one of the most touching pieces of TV I’d seen in a long time.

maegul,

a mutated form of free TV.

Fantastic description!

Similarly, Casey Newton described it as “Managed decline”, on which I riffed “big tech is moving on from the internet”.

But yea, something relatively drastic is happening here. The big-tech end of the internet is no longer the internet we used to have. As you say: Mutated Broadcast TV.

maegul,

Yea, but to be fair that is a higher boundary to entry. With private communities, someone else can do the hosting while all the users have to do is click buttons in a UI. Obviously we’re not talking about encrypted privacy, but it’s something and a welcoming fusion of closed and open spaces in social media TBH.

maegul,

There are also certain benefits to “all-feeding”, like making communities easier to discover.

You can discover communities just fine without being able to up/down vote.

think disallowing votes (down or both) from non-subscribers would defeat the point of the all feed, which to me is to display the most active/interesting posts on the Fediverse right now. You can’t have that if it is only community subscribers that vote.

You can see what all the subscribers find interesting instead. Like I said, intuitively, the All feed makes sense to me as a view of Lemmy, not a means to participate. And, to the general point of the post, to enable the All-feeders to become a somewhat distinct “voting block” runs the risk of dissolving the ability of communities to be their own places.

Also, as far as I know, it is quite uncommon to follow communities on Mastodon, so you’d exclude voting from there potentially.

That’s not true I don’t think. You can’t follow the “All” feed from mastodon. You either follow a community (or, interestingly, a particular user, which is something you can’t do from lemmy).

Maybe you could somehow have both? I.e. when browsing all, take into account all votes. When browsing a specific comm, have a toggle for including or excluding votes from non-subscribed users in the feed. But not sure how hard that would be to implement.

That’s kinda interesting!

maegul,

so once you block them you basically have a feed of pretty great content to scroll through.

This makes sense!

maegul,

I think it would be nice to be able to make some posts “community members only”

This would make a good amount of sense as part of the local-only and private communities features IMO.

maegul,

Just to be clear, when I said “as part of”, I was thinking of it as a suite of options centered around enabling a community to control how it engages with the external world. I wasn’t suggesting that what you were talking about would pair well with being private or local-only.

maegul,

Thanks!

maegul,

Yea interesting. I don’t know enough reddit lore to be sure of this, but I figured that there would be stories. Any more details?

For me, it seems pretty logical that this would happen (which is why I wrote this post). I realised that intuitively I’d never even thought of voting from the All feed and had to double check whether it was possible.

This doesn’t mean I’m right and that it shouldn’t be allowed, but instead, that there may be some real tension here and reasonable mental models of what a community is that go both ways on this.

maegul,

Yea I realised that after I posted. I wasn’t really thinking about implementation details, and intentionally so, I was just trying to think through it from a UX perspective.

But yea, you’re absolutely right. With an API and federation, there is no such thing as “no upvotes from a certain kind of feed”. It was kinda dumb of me to suggest. Still, I’m personally happy to think out loud.

Limiting votes (and other interactions as mentioned in these threads) by whether a user has subscribed is more viable, but then again federation probably disrupts this again (I don’t know enough to be sure) and likely breaks some promises or conventions.

maegul,

Yea this is me too. All is for exploring for communities or just lazy doom scrolling.

maegul,

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Yep. The idea has been buzzing in my head since I read Casey’s post and thought about it as “Tech moving on from the web”. For those of us who like it, we’ll just be left to (re-)make it ourselves. It’s a weird feeling for me honestly.

It’s almost like the eternal September is actually ending.

maegul,

perfect!

maegul,

Underutilisation seems to me to be a problem common to both DIS and SNW.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • mdbf
  • cubers
  • thenastyranch
  • InstantRegret
  • Youngstown
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • Durango
  • ngwrru68w68
  • khanakhh
  • kavyap
  • everett
  • DreamBathrooms
  • anitta
  • magazineikmin
  • cisconetworking
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • tacticalgear
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • tester
  • Leos
  • normalnudes
  • provamag3
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •