https://youtube.com/shorts/UO_whAN302s

I bought Alibre Design, as it was a less oppressive situation license-wise, but these days I find I’m using it less than I might simply because I prefer staying in Linux for literally anything else. It was a bit pricy, but at least it was a perpetual license. I am hearing that while they don’t intend to support Linux, they’re moving away from some of the libraries that have prevented Proton from working.

The rest are varying degrees of oppressive lock-in and feature erosion. PTC/OnShape in particular has a huge “Fuck-You” attitude towards anybody who wants to consider throwing a design up on Etsy or selling a few trinkets without paying out the ass for a professional-grade subscription, and being the only fully mature web-based tool, it’s the only one that works properly in Linux.

Every single major commercial 3D CAD suite is still better than FreeCAD. FreeCAD is not the unusable beast it used to be, in fact it’s very much better, but it has technical debt and structural limitations that just keep it worse.

Dammit Jim! I’m doctor, not an alien reproduction of the mind of a space detective!

Yeah, it felt like a very flat take on the material. Like, Odysseus is an archetypal trickster figure, he’s supposed to be something of a smirking shit (Ulysses Everett McGill?), at least from time to time, and one who creates as many problems for himself as he solves by thinking he’s the smartest guy at the agora. This trailer just looks like The Revenant meets 300. Hope the actual movie is much better.

Theater lobby vs streaming lobby. YAY!

Frankly, as long as they stop memory-holing completed projects like Zaslav did, it will be at least a modest improvement.

There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

YMMV, which I guesses is a huge part of the issue. My company is pushing AI everything, and I can hear the people running them phrasing things specifically for the assistant. Also, my meetings are not particularly technical and are full of corporate bullshit that I’m sure is all through the training set. It works… fine.

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.

There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”

AI does a perfectly fine job summarizing my boring work meetings, but the entire point of those is to be straightforward and unambiguous and in line with previous similar meetings. You cannot trust generative AI to interpret anything with even a modicum of subtlety or novelty. At best it will give you a slop-rack of a framework you can wrestle into something mediocre but basically usable for a specific purpose.

But a twenty-percent efficiency upgrade with a low ceiling on its quality is not what they’re all selling. AI is real, it’s here to stay, but good god I can’t wait for the bubble to pop so LLMs can settle into the limited use cases where they add value.

And both are delicious.

You also know somebody is running on empty when a show or movie franchise set in the future or a fantastic world transports their characters to “the present” for any extended period. Now, whether that’s the writers, the cast, or the accountants, no one can say.

I love that podcast, and particularly when I’m driving, because while Kevin tends to repeat himself and speak slowly, it’s generally pedagogically sound, somehow in the service of his point and ensuring I don’t miss much if I get distracted. He’s also an attorney (probate, IIRC), so when he occasionally drifts into legal stuff, it’s doubly insightful.

Poppycock. It’s mispronounced German and Latin and Greek and French and… well… English, all with a delightful seasoning of mispronounced Dutch and Spanish.

STD will make you all warm and fuzzy.

On the other hand, if they do depart from a joyless slog from one plot point to the next, people scream “filler” like it’s a crime against humanity. I do have some sympathy for people writing shows, but I agree that too many of these shows began life as single-movie pitches that were padded (or at least never edited down) rather than a traditional mini-series, which is what they are, or a season of TV slimmed down to the high-points.

A lot of things are possible when you have a population that is deeply socialized to believe completely in the cause, and/or has few viable economic options, and/or is literally compelled to do the work. We also have a lot of survivorship bias as the we only see the stuff that was done so well as to stand the test of time. In the early days of Egyptology for example, they would sometimes realize (or learn from the locals because the locals knew best) that the big heap of rubble over there in the desert was actually a pyramid where somebody half-assed it with mud bricks instead of the giant limestone slabs from Giza.

Absolutely. Without “uncanceling,” the Acolyte, they need to find a way to get him back for a project. What an utter waste if they don’t. The physicality for the role and choregraphy was perfect, and he “sold” the Dark Side without an appeal to raw coercive power at a political scale, and it worked better than maybe any other approach I can recall. Even the comedic timing and “dude from Jacksonville” vibes (Go Jags!) slotted in perfectly for the (super telegraphed) reveal and the interactions with Osha and Sol. I also liked that Sol brought a lot of humanity and Qui-Gon energy despite Lee Jung-jae’s awkward line readings (the reasons for which I completely understand), and Jecki was good.

I went into that show fully ready to embrace everything about it and almost preemptively give it the grace I knew certain toxic fans wouldn’t, and I still couldn’t love it, though it has its moments and it’s not awful TV. The structure is awkward, the mystery unappealing and self-important, many of the performances unengaging, and frankly despite all the money they blew it often looks cheap. They also killed two out of the three characters I liked the best. Easy targets like the singing and the fire in space and the chubby lightsaber hilts were just people fixating on unimportant shit because they didn’t like the show but lack the ability to say why, or some of them are ashamed to say why. The whole thing needed another couple of passes through the editing process and maybe some hard discussions about why making the entire show look like Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge is not a good use of the budget.

leave things more open or unresolved or ambiguous, which is simultaneously dissatisfying and refreshing

Agreed, and it absolutely depends on the episode. Also agree that they sometimes (often?) bit off more than they could chew, but in general they weren’t so disastrous that I didn’t appreciate the effort. I imagine there was a lot of compromise and horse trading on those scripts, and people were probably relieved to get out something as good as they got. I like to imagine the Ferengi episodes were generally the penance exacted from writers who insisted on too much self-respect.

I enjoyed B5 and would consider it one of the shows that did things well. The production values haven’t held up quite as well (except for the prosthetics and hair, which are easily Star Trek quality I think), and I never fully warmed to either station commander, but for what it was trying to be and within the constraints of its budget, it is a really good show.

I did stop watching after the “original” finale though. I didn’t see where it was likely to get any better and I wasn’t quite invested enough to tolerate a significant downturn.