> I don't see how these glasses are legal at all. While filming in public places is allowed in the US, commercial use of that material is not
As a general statement about the law this is not correct. And that’s even before we get to the next paragraph where you just wildly speculate and use that as buttressing the already false premise.
At the risk of sounding very old:in partial response to the nonsense starting around the 2015/2016 era I decided it was a good time to start mining the cultural vault and catch up on classic movies and books (especially) that I’d always been meaning to get around to, and kind of immersed myself in it more and more over time. Lots of older science fiction, fantasy, and just random movies I’d heard of but never got around to experiencing.
Subsequently, trying to return to consuming modern media has been quite the shock to the system. In many ways, but maybe the most startling is the storytelling. Books and movies lauded for being modern classics are so brain-numbing stupid (sorry but there’s no other accurate way to describe them) abound. Just absolute paint by numbers stories, messaging so on the nose you almost need a new phrase to describe it because the standard one didn’t do it justice, small-minded and petty characters being portrayed as heroic or brilliant - it’s incredible. I know there’s already comparisons to Idiocracy in this thread, and yes I’m well aware of the term selection bias so there’s no need to point it out - of course classics are classic for a reason. But I’m talking the most celebrated stories of our modern age here, the supposed next generation of classics, and all I can think is… really? Really? Have you all gone insane?
Exactly my sentiment. Someone else ITT mentioned Everything Everywhere as a thought provoking, good movie. Does anyone actually believe that movie will be discussed in ten years? Because I know The Godfather still will be.
Cultural media output is absolutely in decline, and I think only someone not well-read could think otherwise about literature, and likewise for other media.
It's not now a situation of cream having not yet risen. I don't believe there are myriad hidden gems anymore. Bodies who are meant to discern the cream are coming up empty. The Oscars are full of bad movies now. Pulitzer prizes in literature are awarded to poor works. Hugo and Nebula books are horrendous. We have lost the culture of the literary, and it is very obvious to anyone well read. What's worse is the large majority of people don't even know what well-read is; they have consumed a critical mass of slop sci-fi airport novels and think this is somehow equivalent expertise to absorbing the classics.
The Hugo and Nebula awards in particular are shocking in what they nominate and elevate to winning. There’s no possible way these are the best sci fi/fantasy books being written every year. They’re not just bad, they’re laughably bad in every dimension. It’s incredible to witness.
I recently downloaded a batch torrent of all Hugo and Nebula winners. It didn't take long before I realized I had to delete all of them published after a certain date. Disturbing and sad.
Weren’t they completely undermined by exactly what I am complaining about here, Harold and George not understanding why people grew up and moved on? My memory was the Hugo awards got attacked by some pronoun warriors who did t get their “favorite” genre was smarter than them.
I'd like to reply to myself because I forgot about TV. TV is not one of the things in decline, so that's good. There have been a lot of high dramas in the last decade that are objectively good.
Oh man PAIX brings back memories. Most people have no idea how few true convergence points the Internet had back then or how crucial PAIX was to virtually the entire Internet at that point.
What’s startling to me is how many comments in this thread just take the provided values as gospel without asking questions that methodology answers either in the abstract or barely describes. Also going giving a cost for “United States” is absolutely nonsense - electricity, gas and gasoline prices vary widely across the country. There is no one cost for each, and the average is worthless for this kind of thing (especially since the average of each - gas vs. electric vs. gasoline cost - are independent variables that have no relation to each other on a region by region basis).
While a delightfully funny article it also touches on something I’ve thought about many times before: just how uniform basically 99% of all (American) restaurant breakfast menus are. It’s really quite extraordinary in some ways how these menus are nearly entirely interchangeable from on to another. They might have very small tweaks and of course the ingredient specifics aren’t exact (specific butter brands, slight proportion differences)but by and large you could predict with almost perfect accuracy every single item that a typical breakfast menu in the US might have.
And I feel like that’s really a missed opportunity? Like even recognizing that of all meals breakfast is the most “comforting” and the one most likely for customers to want familiar, at the same time there are so many unexplored variants using the same ingredients (as this article shows!) that almost no restaurants will ever experiment with or offer. Lunch and dinner menus have massive variation in comparison!
I would never have expected that "Shatner and Henry Rollins ranting while Adrian Belew and Matt Chamberlain go absolutely wild on guitar and drums respectively" would be anywhere close to as good as it is.
Incidentally, Rollins talking about the recording[0] of it is freaking hilarious.
Well, thanks for cutting another one and a half hours from my already too short period of sleep at night and making me waste more time tomorrow at looking up more stand up shows from Henry if available.
I highly recommend watching his live show if he's ever in your area. Great experience. Henry is the epitome of intensity for 2 hours. He doesn't stop. He doesn't sit. He doesn't drink. I'm not even sure he breathes.
You wouldn't think someone just orating without singing is entertaining, but it worked. I'm sure Ben Folds did a lot of the heavy lifting to make it great though.
While most people cite Common People as their favorite song on the album, I also like "You'll Have Time" as one of the more philosophically important songs that I've ever heard.
I talked with someone years ago who did networking deep in third world countries in the 90s and early 00’s. Hey said they would not-infrequently use wire fences for wiring up remote locations using X.25 because the protocol was highly tolerant of very noisy lines, and it was the only way to have any confidence the infrastructure wouldn’t just be ripped out the day after they left.
As a general statement about the law this is not correct. And that’s even before we get to the next paragraph where you just wildly speculate and use that as buttressing the already false premise.
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