fazalmajid

This line is priceless:

Remember Lobo? He disobeyed orders, and now Sador’s wearing his left foot

I’d say the, ahem, borrowings from The Seven Samurai were quite blatant, via the rightfully forgotten Battle Beyond the Stars

Zero interest given that Cixin Liu is an apologist for the CCP’s genocide in Xinjiang.

It’s because the snobbery of English teachers puts Socialist Realusm literary fiction above everything else.

Ursula Le Guin’s “On Serious Literature” springs to mind:

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/on-serious-literature

Why this child abuse must be perpetrated to appease a coterie of critics eludes me.

I’d say The Expanse has revisited many of those themes, better.

Have you tried the Faber-Castell e-motion? Very thick line due to its 1.4mm lead, but very expressive and a joy to hold in the hand.

The Verge’s review is negative:

https://www.theverge.com/23889089/the-creator-movie-review-gareth-edwards

Beastmaster? Although auburn Tanya Robert’s quite fetching.

I’m not sure how valid that criticism is. Reddit’s search is abysmal as well, doesn’t seem to have hurt them.

But 2/3 of the genetic diversity we have is in Africa

That’s a bit harsh. More like “useful idiots” to quote Lenin.

If you look at the crooked Warren of spaghetti that is the London street map, one road stands out for its straightness: Edgware Road (known in my area as Shoot-Up Hill). Wouldn’t you know it, it’s the Roman road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgware_Road

Edgware Road is a major road in London, England. The route originated as part of Roman Watling Street and, unusually in London, it runs for 10 miles in an almost perfectly straight line.

It’s beyond parody at this stage.

Economist George Akerlof explains the role of warranties in establishing customer confidence in his paper The Market for Lemons.

Keep in mind “lifetime warranty” often ends up being “lifetime of the company”, not yours. The Lindy Effect is relevant here.

But iOS is 87% and rising for US teenagers, which explains iMessage being the dominant messaging platform in the US.

I think he is probably bipolar and refusing to take meds for what is nowadays an often treatable condition.

And they never bothered to free his mother Shmi

If he is, then it will be almost as great a service to humanity as killing the internal combustion engine.

Amazon’s core business is AWS, which is worth more than 60% of the market cap. Amazon’s advertising business generates half the profits of AWS and has even faster growth, so should be worth 30% of Amazon’s market cap. The only conclusion is that Wall Street considers Amazon’s e-commerce to be nearly worthless other than as a loss-leader for Ads, and it should thus not be considered their “core business”.

I can imagine all sorts of technical points like how the firehose will be load-balanced so as to not overwhelm any instance, or what metadata they should include in their feeds. Meta also has a lot of AI and moderation expertise that could be of benefit to the Fediverse once it grows into an attractive enough target for the troll farms and spambots.

Quite frankly, the sooner that festering cesspool that is Twitter is killed off, the better off the planet will be. If it takes Meta to wean the talking heads like Oprah from Twitter, so be it. It would be better if Oprah set up her own instance, but that’s unlikely to happen, media businesses still haven’t understood they need to take control over their distribution rather than the easy way of going through big social networks that will stab them in the back when expedient like Facebook deprioritizing media outlets from users’ feeds.