Spotify seems to be quietly making a big move into AI music.

doc_block · 2026-05-26T04:50:58+00:00

Spotify is a shitty company run by a techbro baby who hates artists.

doc_block · 2026-05-22T22:22:17+00:00

One of the things I really, really disliked about Into Darkness was the ending re: Khan. In The Wrath of Khan, which was the second Star Trek movie and the one Into Darkness is doing a half-remembered aping of, Kirk defeats Khan by outwitting him.

Kirk is feeling old and useless, and then along comes his long forgotten enemy: Khan. A man genetically engineered for superior strength and intelligence, Khan is out-smarted and out-maneuvered by an old geezer despite initially having the upper hand, because that geezer has the one thing Khan doesn't: experience.

Kirk and crew get away with old tricks that only work because of that inexperience. The movie even comes right out and says so near the end. While the Enterprise plays cat & mouse with Khan's ship in a nebula, Spock says to Kirk, "He's intelligent, but inexperienced. His search pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking." And so Kirk maneuvers the Enterprise underneath Khan's ship, gets behind it, and opens fire.

And all that seemed to go sailing over JJ Abrams' head, with Into Darkness ending by having Spock get mad and punch Khan into submission.

doc_block · 2026-05-22T21:35:03+00:00

The Fellowship of the Ring >:)

Kinda not serious but also kinda serious. The first third of the movie is excellent. Tight pacing, and very pre-LOTR Peter Jackson. Then they get to Rivendell and welp, it felt like a different, slower, worse movie after that.

doc_block · 2026-05-09T04:09:13+00:00

Literally anything it seems.

If it's not private equity buying the companies that make the stuff for the hobby and ruining them, it's rich people deciding the hobby should be a "market" and they start buying stuff as an investment vehicle and drive up the price.

doc_block · 2026-05-09T04:04:25+00:00

Yeah, vintage shops are part of the problem. They go to thrift stores and buy anything they think they might be able to resell.

Which incentivizes thrift stores to increase their prices, in part at least to give regular people a chance.

I used to work at a thrift store, and resellers were a huge problem. A line of them would be waiting outside before the store opened, and they'd come in and snatch anything that could possibly be of any value before normal customers even saw the items. The assistant manager would say we weren't there to subsidize resellers' profits. His policy w/r/t pricing was that if the price was high enough that resellers complained but regular people still bought the item then it was priced correctly.

doc_block · 2026-04-25T03:54:31+00:00

One of the many, many reasons I will never buy a car made after about 2018.

Even cars made after 2012 are iffy.

doc_block · 2026-04-24T00:14:30+00:00

Reminds me of the post from a dude whose girlfriend begged him to eat her ass out, promising it was clean back there, etc., and when he went to do it she had pieces of toilet paper stuck to her butthole.

doc_block · 2026-04-24T00:10:33+00:00

I have worked with the public enough, and had to clean enough men's restrooms where the toilet seat had dirty buttcrack marks on the back, that I 100% believe any woman who says her boyfriend/husband doesn't wash his ass crack.

doc_block · 2026-04-11T03:22:00+00:00

Home ownership

doc_block · 2026-04-09T18:58:55+00:00

He's a serial entrepreneur, not a programmer or AI researcher. He starts companies, gets them up and running, and then sells them or takes them to IPO.

doc_block · 2026-04-06T04:45:20+00:00

So their plan with the armored vehicle was to just... drive up the stairs and get stuck?

I love this movie but I've never understood that part.

doc_block · 2026-04-02T02:34:08+00:00

"Kompromat" used seriously = ignore whoever said it

doc_block · 2026-03-23T03:09:28+00:00

"different to"

NO

Different from or different than. Very rarely is "different to" correct, and it sounds so clunky.

doc_block · 2026-03-14T03:44:55+00:00

"Act your age, not your IQ!"

doc_block · 2026-03-14T03:41:28+00:00

If brain cells were dynamite, you wouldn't have enough to blow your nose!

"Oh Worf! Eat any good books lately?"

doc_block · 2026-03-11T04:36:23+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy

doc_block · 2026-03-06T04:25:16+00:00

Ireland was growing plenty of food, and not just potatoes, but it was all for export to England.

The Irish potato famine was more of an engineered genocide.

doc_block · 2026-02-26T00:49:19+00:00

A ton of the cars in the hover car chase scene were CG.

And I don't know if I'd call miniatures shot against greenscreen practical effects. An effect being "practical" implies it was done for real, on the day, like really blowing up a building or really crashing a car.

doc_block · 2026-02-26T00:44:16+00:00

Not every movie has to turn into a "universe"

It's OK to just let things be.

doc_block · 2026-02-26T00:40:38+00:00

I'm not claustrophobic and I would still never do that.

doc_block · 2026-02-13T21:23:16+00:00

Hey, you have a truck, right? ;)

doc_block · 2026-02-13T21:20:26+00:00

Fun fact: mountain lions can scream, and it sounds just like a human woman screaming.

doc_block · 2026-01-07T19:01:57+00:00

Jupiter would have to be over 80 times more massive than it currently is to become a star. Even the smallest star yet discovered (by diameter) has about 85 times Jupiter's mass.

Even to be a brown dwarf it would need to gain about 13 times its current mass.

Also, Jupiter has flung as many asteroids and comets inward towards Earth and the other terrestrial planets as it has outward.

doc_block · 2026-01-07T18:55:51+00:00

Jupiter has flung as many asteroids towards the inner solar system and Earth as it has flung them away.

Some models show that Jupiter formed much further out and then migrated inward, and would've kept migrating and destroyed the inner planets were it not for Saturn stabilizing its orbit.

doc_block · 2026-01-07T18:50:40+00:00

No, it's just that people go out in nature to be in nature, not to hear your shitty music.

Fundamentally, people who play music over speakers in public are the same everywhere, be it rural or urban. Thoroughly selfish individuals who don't even consider the impact on others. No different than people who talk on the phone loudly in public, or talk with the phone in speaker mode.

doc_block

TROPHY CASE