mindbleach

Irish unification means get out and push.

Disruption always works this way.

VHS let people watch a movie at home, whenever they wanted, but they had to buy that specific movie and put up with their dinky 20" TV. If you wanted serious sound or scale, you either paid five whole bucks at the local theater, or left your whole wallet at Circuit City. And even the best home experiences were standard-def. Film was not threatened by mere video.

DVDs made buying movies a lot cheaper, largely because they cost a penny to make, so studios could print a million copies just in case and shrug off any losses. If you wanted to see this year's releases, this year, you went to the big theater at the mall. It still beat your enormous 32" plasma in glorious 720p. Theaters got to be fancy and focus on the popular hits.

Streaming was like-- you want me to buy a subscription to watch an old movie? If I'm gonna use the internet, Kazaa is right there. Okay fine, adapting VGA to component video sucks, and this 40" set finally has more pixels than my monitor. Oh wow, that cartoon's on here? I haven't seen this in a decade. And movies wait like three months. I can watch The Office again until that's available. Driving outside town to pay thirty bucks a head at the megagigadodecaplex is only worthwhile for hot new things, like superhero movies. Theaters better step up their game to beat my couch and a stiff drink.

There was a moment.

There was a moment, where they might've turned this around. As Netflix was being cannibalized by assholes splintering off their little fiefdoms, the major competing theater companies could have seen the pattern. Disruption always works this way. Your low end slips away, letting you focus on better quality with higher margins. Then your midrange slips away, and you're a luxury! Then your whole industry dies. What might've saved it was pushing back toward small local theaters. You only have to beat 70" screens and decent stereo. People still don't bother with surround sound, and even a modest projection screen beats the most obscenely large television.

The global respiratory plague put a hard cutoff on how late that might've worked. It was probably screwed, long beforehand. Theaters are over. Move on.

'This person's not allowed to do the right thing, because he was born wrong.'

Uh huh.

Do you understand that elections decide who is in power?

Merely being in office, instead of fascists, is the first line of defense in stopping fascists. This election was about: do you want fascists in power? And y'all said, who cares. Not us. You. We voted against that shit. You could not be arsed.

'Please do the bare minimum to stop fascism.'

'No.'

'Oh for fuck's sake, I'm just gonna get drunk.'

'See, the fascism is your fault.'

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said ”I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy – now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be the Earth – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Nothing that's legal to discuss.

All the pillars of journalism were bought by billionaire assholes.

Half this site was ardent leftists telling people not to vote for Harris.

If you want to get weirder, Tengen released the first version of Tetris on NES. It looks better. It plays worse.

CGP Grey makes him out to be a drama whore in general.

Usability nightmare.