86 inches. $800 dollars.

That's less than ten bucks an inch!!!

I have an 80" tv in my own basement and I sit about 5 feet away from it.

I have seen maybe three movies on it. Countless video games, though.

If you would have told 8-year-old me this, I would have boggled. "Wow! Are the Star Wars sequels out?!?!?"
"Oh, yeah. Six of them. Three sequels, three prequels."
"Do you watch Star Wars movies in your basement?"
"No."

If I had any money, I might invest it in Ubisoft. It broke under the 10-Euros barrier and there is going to be a stockholder revolt. It's fallen to a 12 year low and Tencent is going to push a hardcore back-to-basics gameplan for the company.

Or, of course, it could tailspin and we should panic because we're all going to die.

(The above is not investment advice.)

Eigen's got a good thread.

He talks about a couple of the headlines at the WaPo: "Trump calls tariff plans 'a very beautiful thing'" and "As the markets dropped, the president putted".

He points out that it's easy to imagine the editor thinking "that'll show him" as this was posted.

He also points out that after several decades of this sort of thing, "from an evolutionary game theoretical standpoint it's also selecting for an opposition that is just completely indifferent to ambient social pressure".

And... yeah. That's one thing that seems to be borne out by looking at the demographics of the voters of 2024. This is what happens when people start being sufficiently indifferent to ambient social pressure.

One of the reviews of Nosferatu I read opened with the John Waters quote "I believe if you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, 'The cinematography was beautiful,' it's a bad movie."

Well, during Nosferatu, my bud and I wouldn't shut up about the cinematography. Oooh! Look at that shot! Wow! Look at *THAT* one!

He also did the sound system up with multiple speakers in the basement and the soundbar up front and... wowsers. I'm not sure how much better it would have been to see it in a theater. I know that it's smaller than the difference between a normal screen and IMAX used to be.

Theaters had best figure out *SOMETHING* because, lemme tell ya, watching something (anything) on the basement television has a lot less mental/emotional overhead than what is required to put on shoes and get in the car and drive to the place and talk to at least one stranger.

And that's without getting into the difference in the price of chicken fingers at both places.

When we got tickets to A Working Man, the theater was mostly sold out. The only rows that had two seats next to each other (with a bro seat on either side) were the front rom and the back row.

We got tickets for the back row.

The other night, I watched Nosferatu on my broski's 85" television in his basement that we were sitting about 8-10 feet away from.

The field of vision real estate taken up by the screens was comparable. And, during Nosferatu, we could pause.

Part of the problem is that the Conservative Party is (usually) the Stupid Party.

There's a point at which "moral agency" kicks in and it's above a certain line and sufficiently stupid people are below it... and, in a group, you tend to get even stupider.

From Variety: Texting, Weed and Sing-Alongs: Four Radical Ideas for Bringing New Audiences to Movie Theaters

While I tend to agree that weed would make a movie better (at least it did back in 1992), I'm not sure how the ingestion would work. Edibles, from what I have heard, take a while to kick in and you can't really titrate the experience like you can with a joint. If it is smoking that they're going to be doing, the movie houses will have to get one of their rooms rebranded as a Cigar Bar (or just have a courtyard, I guess).

If my memory is accurate, it's also the case where the most pleasant buzz to watch a movie would be categorized as "comfortable". And, by "comfortable", I mean "shouldn't drive". So you're going to need a DD.

Which, I suppose, the movie theaters could push for... "bring a friend", I guess. But being the guy who isn't stoned with one (or more) stoned dudes is... well, maybe they could set it up and give a free ticket to the DD. Or a free soft drink.

As for cellphone-friendly viewings... ugh. There are a couple dozen reasons that I don't go to the theater that often and cellphones are among them. But if there's a cellphone showing, maybe it can be in a theater next to a non-surfing showing.

Of course, most of the responses to the tweet of this article were of the form "maybe make good movies?" but, as I look at the landscape, I see that Minecraft broke $150 million over the weekend and so that's probably not on the table either.

Saw Nosferatu last night (I'm just seeing movies this year!) and I loved the first 99% of the movie.

Then I realized that I am not the target audience.

The "Can a MV be 3D?" debate has resulted in many broken hearts and broken bones, but I think that it absolutely can be.

That was one of the big eye-openers for me in the first few hours of Arkham Asylum. The fact that they translated it to 3D is one of the (many) reasons I love the game.

Hollow Knight does not hold your hand. I'm not calling it a "soulslike" or anything like that because, so far, I haven't needed twitch skills as much as mere hand-eye coordination and puzzle-solving abilities.

But it dumps you into the world and tells you "go nuts" without explaining what nuts are.

I'm having a blast and have only had to google "what in the heck do I do now?!?" once (the answer involved using a down attack on the purple mushrooms).

Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer for Meta, announces:

By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.

Made about 4 pounds of pepper bacon. 2 pounds to go.

Do you feel that people who try to use rational thought should be policed and shamed?

Dude. That's awesome! Mr. Blue Sky is one of those that strikes me as a cheat code for "awesome". When Guardians of the Galaxy 2 started with it, I remember thinking "that's, like, unfair".

After I watched The Muppets sing it, I googled whether Floyd and Janis were dating and I'm pleased to say that the general consensus is that they were.

This strikes me as a failure that would have been avoidable with skilled people in a handful of important gatekeeping roles.

Above, you give a fairly insightful statement: " All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from “The economy is garbage” to “The economy is great thanks to me” and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with “the genius of Trump” nonsense."

He did *NOT* do that. We agree about that too, right?

So then we're stuck with whether he's stupid and clueless or whether he's actually trying to accomplish something.

Does "stupid and clueless" make more sense to you?

He is indeed assuming that... but I wondered if what he said about China was true.

I mean, if he started stuff off by lying, that'd be a bad start.

So I learned about the Three Red Lines rule.

I learned that China did ban private tutoring (and created a black market).

I learned that China cracked down on luxury influencers as part of a country-wide internet tampdown. (And I'm sure you remember them firewalling off Americans from Chinese folx during the TikTok tempest in the teapot.)

So he has, at least, started from a position of verifiable statements.

Yishan has an interesting take:

Ok, so I am not an administration apologist but I have not heard any intellectually rigorous discussion of the current tariff policy. I'm not sure what I'm about to say is either, but here is a perspective I have not yet seen advanced:

Before we begin, a shift in perspective. To understand where I'm going, you have to first accept that China is succeeding, that they are not backwards, and that in many areas they are already far beyond the US. If you're still in the "China's advantage is low-cost labor" mindset, you're ngmi and might as well leave now.

All right, for everyone still around:

A few years ago, Xi and the CCP made a series of what appeared to be extremely damaging moves for China.

These included:
- popping the real estate bubble, crushing investors and bankrupting more than one investment firm
- wiping out all for-profit student tutoring companies, an entire industry gone overnight
- severely tamping down the entire Chinese social media and e-commerce startup ecosystem

These were widely portrayed as damaging to the Chinese economy and part of an authoritarian reassertion of power and retreat from free markets and capitalism.

Maybe they were.

But, there was rationale behind all of those - and some people even believed them to be true for the US, namely:

- "housing is for living in, not investment" so prices should be low, not high
- for-profit tutoring advantages rich families, corrupting the meritocratic exam system
- social media and e-commerce make money but aren't tech that benefits national security, the way aerospace, robotics, and semiconductors do

A few years later, we see many of the intended results:

- working-class people have been able refinance their homes for less, even while investors took a bath
- the exam system is no longer as corrupted
- China speeds ahead in many hardtech areas

This isn't a post about China supremacy.

(The investment climate in China is still tepid, and China has many other issues)

This is a post about the fact that large-scale decisions that benefit the national interest often look bad according to conventional metrics and will certainly be decried as bad by the people who have been most successful under the current system!

That is likely to be as true in China as in the US, or anywhere.

After all, if they made things look good under the current metrics, we'd already be doing them quite uncontroversially! So anything non-obvious that needs to be done which isn't already being done is probably going to look really bad by those metrics.

I use China to illustrate this because it has leaders who are willing to take such actions, whereas the US generally does not.

Now... I don't personally know if the tariffs are that thing for the US.

But I do know that if they aren't, pointing out that the stock market is tanking is not a useful way to prove it.

US supply chains are global, and I suspect the tariffs are not focused on punishing other countries, but to force US-owned companies to move their supply chains (and thus physical production) into the United States. But it's easier for a President to yell and demonize other countries than to do that about your own country's major industry leaders.

I don't know if there's a better sequence for doing this combined with selected deregulation, but certainly any plan will end up making typical metrics look really bad. I am a fan of detail and finesse myself, and we can't just cold-start new factories in the US tomorrow.

If you just want to know how bad things will be bad, you can probably find a best-case scenario by looking at how long it took for the Chinese economy to recover after they took the drastic actions I listed above.

Dude, it's awesome that you found that. I couldn't get past Google explaining to me that I couldn't vape indoors and those things didn't exist in the early 1900s anyway.

THANK YOU!!!

Here's the Denver Gazette.

Here's where CBS News announced that a judge gave an emergency order to close the apartments due to them being an "immediate threat to public safety."

Now, were they a threat to National Security? Did they have access to the nuclear codes or the machine that keeps the caldera from blowing up? No, they don't.

If you want to say that the threat posed to people who live in the nice part of town was an exaggerated threat, I don't have anything to demonstrate that you or people you know were ever in danger.

Sure, but that's all Engineer Level 3 and up kinda stuff.

I'm talking about AI replacing helpers.

One of the big problems that is going to have to be overcome is the whole "that's not true! That's a conspiracy theory!" thing.

Remember when TDA being in charge of an apartment complex in Aurora was a conspiracy theory? Well, as it turns out, it ended up being true. The authorities (including the 4th Estate, for some reason) was very interested in making sure that we all knew that the rumors of TDA being in Denver were exaggerations.

Oh, so now as part of the cleanup, we find out that TDA was here and all that? And in getting rid of TDA, we're getting rid of people who aren't part of TDA?

You're going to have to get the really good people in charge of asking for empathy. Having them be the same people as the folks who sneered at the conspiracy theorists is going to have results that you're not going to like.

I'm not sure that she has a whole lot in common with the other speakers that have been shut down over the last dozen years or so.

Isn't that a requirement for a blacklist? A common theme?

Well, other than the "potentially harmful" thing?

I'm not sure that it's a blacklist as such. It's just another name on the pile.