I mean, I know that this really isn't what people are riled up about over this, but this doesn't feel like something you should be able to patent. Like almost certainly wouldn't hold up in court, right?

The reason AI em-dashes stick out is that AI uses them where most people use a comma or colon (or sometimes brackets). Thing is? The em-dash usually reads cleaner! It's just that most people don't /write/ like that: their work gets EDITED to read like that.

Wonder Man does a great job at showing why the two very different leads might be friends, and also why they also don't have any other friends.

It sucks that clear writing fundamentals—active voice, readable sentence structure, and, yes, appropriate em-dashes—are now flagged as "sounding like AI."

Any typos in my skeets are to prove I'm not AI

Since people DMed me on this: the actual thesis would be about how legitimately they couldn't have shown that exact same nudity if it was MEANT to be titillating. And the gag in the scene is them pushing how far they can go with it in that context. (See also The Chair Company)

Legit, you could write a thesis on the male nudity in the first 30 seconds of tonight's KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: What if a Himbo was so big and dumb and puppy-dog-eyed that even the world of Game of Thrones couldn't bring itself crush him.

After MASK OF THE PHANTASM and BLADE, I think the superhero movie from the 90s that holds up best is bizarrely THE SHADOW, which is much better than it has any right being. Actually, I think it's probably better than BLADE, or at least more watchable.

Every 90s kid who remembers that huge box going on clearance for a year because they couldn't sell the thing.

I know not everyone here follows AI news (understandable), but the last few months of developments imply that OpenAI and ChatGPT are kind of cooked. I don’t mean AI is cooked necessarily (though who knows!), but it feels like it's MySpace in 2007.

A fun thing I liked about Anthem, which isn't a spoiler now that you can't play it: The character who was your handler (+did basically every open-world radio bark) betrays you near the end of the plot. A new character fills in. So they had a full different set of voice lines for basically every bark

So now that Anthem is officially shut down (RIP to a game with much better "bones" than it was given credit for), anyone at BioWare want to confirm it was supposed to be a "several centuries later" sequel to Mass Effect Andromeda, and probably would have been revealed as such had it lasted longer?

Historica Canada has been making new "Heritage Minutes" for youtube about 10 years now, and it's interesting to watch the style evolve for the new minutes.

Man, remember when AppleTV+ did a big, glossy ambitious sci-fi series about the cumulative effects of climate change filled with big-A-list stars and not only did no one watch it, it seems to have been completely memory holed?

It's actually kind of amazing looking at the Canadian stores after they were sold by GameStop last summer and rebranded back to being EB Games. Almost overnight they felt reinvigorated. Really does feel like rot from the top.

The thing I think is funny about people rejecting the Stranger Things ending is I really think the primary thing the Stranger Things ending was designed to was to be as crowd pleasing and and generally palatable to the widest possible audience it could be.

Let’s talk about AI for a second. Most discourse is stuck on "is it good or bad?" (consensus here reasonably settling on "bad"). But that focus causes people to miss the macro shifts actually happening. AI is a huge part of the economy now, and the broad details matter. (thread, I know, sorry) 1/10

FWIW This is why I really try to stay away from political and "current events" posts. Not because the stuff isn't important, but because basically all of bluesky is already that. I'm not adding anything. I feel like I have more to contribute on dumb, irrelevant topics.

I actually liked Stranger Things 5, but it really says something about how much people LIBERALLY skip forward through scenes in the show that I've now seen three different people say they thought Jonathan proposed to Nancy.

I actually liked Stranger Things 5, but it really says something about how much people LIBERALLY skip forward through scenes in the show that I've now seen three different people say they thought Jonathan proposed to Nancy.

Haha, yeah the #StrangerThings finale sure doubled down on this.

It bugs me more than it should that a big plot point/character moment in STRANGER THINGS hinges on the definition of a D&D sorcerer that didn't exist until the early 2000s.

Watched MICHAEL CLAYTON again this holiday. What a slam dunk of a movie. Clooney's best. Wondered why it was never seriously considered for best picture then remembered what year it came out in. What a stacked year for that specific type of Hollywood excellence.

Every week I collect a bunch of new movie trailers to show my friends on movie night. Trying to think what other set I of ads I could ever consider similarly

Spending Christmas with family. @hertzbarry.bsky.social

Avatar Fire & Ash really cements in my mind that Cameron had an idea for a story, realized it would be 4-5 hours long, so then split it in two, then when he split it in two he added a bunch of stuff to both sides to fill them out as complete films, so we got the 7.5 hour combination of Avatar 2 & 3.

In my experience Google drive/docs is still probably the most usable of the online word processing/cloud storage suites. Yet I am still—after more than a decade using it—baffled by what it displays as the default documents in the home and "my drive" tabs. Just a random spray of docs in no hierarchy.

Just got my Steam year in review thing and DAMN the thing to the right is sure a stat, huh? Absolute fight for any new game to get a toehold.

FWIW WAKE UP DEAD MAN was absolutely about about Blanc grappling with his mother's deep Catholicism how it was related to her rejection of him and his homosexuality. It just didn't hit you over the head with it.

I sort of wish Metroid Prime 4 was worse so I'd feel better giving up on it. Intense 7/10 energy.

No

I've enjoyed all of the KNIVES OUT movies, but I appreciate that WAKE UP DEAD MAN actually tries to make a cogent moral argument as opposed to just going "look at these assholes" like the other two did.

Orbitals feels like the kind of game I dreamed might exist some day when I was a kid

I legitimately wonder if the audience for the game awards and the audience for a big glossy mobile game downgrade of a real game overlaps at all.

It's amazing how much "Github being a little bit, not even all the way, borked" basically breaks a bunch of the stuff on the internet

Metroid Prime 4 absolutely feels like the third sequel to a Gamecube game (mostly derogatory) and it's kind of wild that it's the end product of a fraught near decade development and not something they quickly had to iterate out quickly over existing templates to hit the next Christmas.

Metroid Prime 4 absolutely feels like the third sequel to a Gamecube game (mostly derogatory) and it's kind of wild that it's the end product of a fraught near decade development and not something they quickly had to iterate out quickly over existing templates to hit the next Christmas.

Pluribus is a show that on the surface has very few mysteries and that seems to have broken the brains of an entire class of people watching it.

Surprised how much Metroid Prime 4 really does feel like a FOUR. It's in conversation with the other 3 games, and it follows some of the (imo pretty iffy) design directions started in MP3. Very weird for a sequel where there are now college students who weren't born yet when the last one came out.

I like logging in here and seeing someone clearly talking about today's main character and having no idea what they are talking about.

Also: I do wonder if they uploaded that wrong version of the 4K version as a stealth way to advertise the fact that there now is a 4K version.

Going to say something contrary here as someone who just finished a Mad Men rewatch: Mad Men, a show always composed in 16:9 and HD but mastered sloppily in a way filled with compression artifacts (even on bluray) ~absolutely~ needed a new remaster from source.

I just earnestly said "Hbomberguy is the Isaac Chotiner of nerd shit" very earnestly in a conversation.

Just saw a "y'all ever see a take so bad you are forced to immediately go to sleep?" take about Plurbis and it's ruining my day

Not even sure it's a knock on it, but the new Stranger Things has big "storytelling lifted directly from a high production AAA videogame" energy.

Still bugs me that the original plan for the Picard show was "retired Picard solves small stakes Agatha Christie style mysteries in rural France" and the powers that be (either Paramount/Viacom or Patrick Stewart) nixed that.

Man, searching for music on YouTube really is running you into slop these days huh? (No this revelation was not spurred on by searching for "Maybe Tomorrow: Metal Cover" why do you ask?)

Finally finished my Mad Men rewatch. Still amazing to me that the show could do an ending as genuinely hopeful and genuinely cynical as that and not have either aspect really cancel the other out in any way.

I sort of love the angle this book comes at Star Wars history conceptually: It's a history of the Galactic Empire from the perspective of a member of the rebellion/resisitance who tries to keep academic distance, but can't quite keep his dislike of more radical elements of the rebellion fully hidden