Little known fact, early warp engines operated on a relativistic turbine system and were powered by “burying” one gram of Bill Watterson’s ashes in engineering and then putting one of these stickers on the ship.
As an aside to an aside, IIRC the real image is Calvin, pants on normally, slyly tying off a water balloon before his plan is inevitably foiled by a handsome and stealthy tiger.
It’s close, though. IIRC, you can’t say the same thing about Miami.
Probably? Maybe? Just thought it was worth rolling out the adjective since it was comparing to the before-times. :-)
Also make it 2005 again so people can’t get a 50" widescreen TV for two hundred bucks.
We brought in massive burritos and drinks from a local Mexican restaurant and enjoyed ourselves. Don’t bring loud, smelly, or messy food and there s literally zero problem.
Pick one, LOL.
I’m not even all that picky. Two or three trailers and a couple of ads, I get it. The butts are in the seat and it’s pollyannaish to assume the suits won’t leverage that. Sometimes I even see a trailer for an interesting-looking movie that I didn’t know was in the pipeline. It’s just such a beatdown the longer it goes, and by that I mean the literal time commitment, yes, but also the sense of the social contract being violated, the tonal whiplash, and the clear diminishing returns on picking their audience demographics.
I saw Project Hail Mary recently, and while I leveraged my assigned seat to show up at the listed time – even though as a kid I developed the instinct that you need to be at a movie early – I couldn’t quite bring myself to trust the conventional wisdom as to how long the previews and ads would go on after that.
I need to get over it. It was something like 28 minutes, and made the entire experience less fun than it should have been. I’m seeing Dune in the theaters, and maybe the Mandolorian movie if the reviews are decent (I’m still a sucker for Star Wars. Is what it is.). If I get to three in a single year, that will actually be a new high for me in the last 10-20 years.
Everything else is fine at home. We have a pretty big TV and a sound bar, and for all but about 1-3 visual and communal experiences per year, that is all I need. I remember when we were living large with a 32" CRT and stereo speakers that faced forward, so I still feel special watching on a “bigscreen,” and the kids these days (LOL… I’m old) all spend most of their time staring at screens from 5-11", so a movie on the big old TV is already a special treat.
My comment history is littered with this idea, but cinemas are settling into their best use case when they can’t benefit from a captive audience. They are there for big events and film devotees, but everyone who went to the theater because it’s the only place where you could see a movie on a half-decent setup will find other options. It’s not entirely unlike live theater before it, and all the grousing from auteurs will not change it. I’m not even saying they’re wrong, just that they benefited from the fact that they the artform they love had built-in technical and economic advantages that gave them a false idea about how invested the broader audience was in the nuances of their work.
“I was in an extraordinary personal crisis because I didn’t want to be vaccinated. At the same time I certainly didn’t want to let my team down at the Olympic Games.”
Barely one layer deep, there’s an almost impressive level of IDGAF energy here: “You see, the thing is, somebody wanted me to do a thing I didn’t want to do, but I had this other thing that I did want to do, so being the type of person that I am, I lied about the first thing and it all worked out for me.”
Generally yes, but what are called mainline Episcopalians are “in communion” with the Church of England, so they’re kinda sorta Anglican. If an observant Anglican were to want to attend church in the US, that’s who they would look up.
Some red-state suburban churches broke off a few years back and are in communion with one of the churches in Africa that also broke off because they didn’t like the ladies and the gays and whatnot. Very classy of them all.
Assuming all is above board, the main concern I have is if it’s worth that much to them, wouldn’t it be worth that much to me?
Yes, and then some. It sounds like you’d do better randomly selecting a realtor to throw it up on MLS “as-is,” and even better if you followed the usual, admittedly annoying, process. These companies are not literal “risking jail” scams, but they’re not your friends either, and they will not be offering you anywhere close to market value. My sister and I looked into a couple of them when our dad passed, and the offers were far below what we pulled with a Realtor, even priced to move and with a kind of costly “turnkey” arrangement where they arranged cleanup and inspections.
I don’t know if it’s really necessary at this point, but I’ll put it behind a spoiler tag…
For me, just the simple fact that there was an interpersonal dynamic at all helped quite a bit. Grace had someone to look after him and to look after in the moment made the emotional connection more real for me. I also appreciated that there was a deeply optimistic take on first contact that Hollywood doesn’t seem to love, so we had some power of friendship vibes.
Now all that said, I also think that the book PHM was a pretty serious course correction for Weir as a writer. The Martian was his first novel, and while enough of it is compelling to make it “good,” it’s very clearly that: a first novel. The plot is meandering and episodic. Watney is a clear author-insert and is literally the only character who gets even nominal treatment as an actual human being. Fortunately he’s wry and and engaging and brilliant and gets to do science adventures that don’t insult an informed audience, and the info dumps are good reading.
Artemis was pretty clearly a failure, I think mostly because Weir and/or his team needed to show that book two was going to be more sophisticated, but unfortunately while Weir kind of knew what he needed to do – full cast of characters, actual plot with antagonists, lead who isn’t the result of Ctrl-H Andy to Mark – he doesn’t pull it off. The result is a lead he can’t sell to the audience, a plot that ends up kind of boring because it has to adhere to his view of what the science will permit with minimal fudging, and while the supporting cast is not the wet tissue of The Martian’s, they’re still paper.
Project Hail Mary dials back the number of characters from Artemis, immediately kills off the annoying “other astronauts” who might compete for mindspace, and also gives us a world in crisis where only the emotionally unencumbered nerds can save us, and so it’s okay that most of the humans are that. Grace, who frankly could have been Mark Watney without messing things up too much (and indeed his reluctance to go on a lonely space mission might even make sense), does get more flaws and internal conflict than Watney and is a more well-rounded author insert. However, Weir succeeds in doubling the number of characters we care about by having Rocky there to be the sounding board that allows Grace to reflect and grow and have someone with whom he can connect, since it didn’t work out with literally any human on Earth, with the device of the limited communication allowing Weir to distill emotions down to their accessible cores. Divorced from the “science fuck yeah!”, it’s just a step in the right direction as a storyteller, while still not nearly as ambitious as Artemis (and therefore snowflake Weir doesn’t get his fee-fees hurt by the queer Star Trek fans).
To circle back to the film, though, because of that, I think they made a slightly less interesting movie, because it’s still Weir, and the main thing he does well is turning science and infodumps into dramatic tales. The hollywood team made Rocky iconic, though. That part wasn’t exactly how it all was in my mind’s eye, but pretty close and also adorable.
I made my semi-annual trip to the theatre and saw Project Hail Mary, despite Weir making an ass of himself. It was very good, and much better emotionally than The Martian, but I think that earlier one nailed the “I’ma science the shit out of this” vibe a little closer to Weir’s writing.
lack of commitment, rather than any law, was the key point.
This is the rub. Can he officially? No. But then, he can’t officially rename the Department of Defense either. What they can do is go in arrears on payments and refuse to cooperate with allies or acknowledge that a given incident involves treaty obligations, and be extremely open about all of it. The only thing the law does is give the next guy cover to walk things back because it was never formal, but by then 99% of the damage will have been done.
Just from a sheer nuts and bolts point of view, the foreign relations damage is going to take literally decades to undo, including at least 8 years of republican administrations that top out at George W Bush levels of fascist exceptionalism. No sane government would trust the US with long-term commitments otherwise.
I have a halfway decent woodworking setup, plus a 3D printer and a cheap laser, but metalworking is just not really an option. The space dedication, plus the oils and the fire hazards and the scraps/shavings/slivers/chaff/god-knows-what-else all being completely incompatible with sharing a space with the rest of it. Sigh, just not likely to happen until and unless I can get in with the makerspace mafia. I am thinking of trying to figure out designing for mills and using metal-bending workbenches in CAD, though, and sending more designs off to be fabbed.
“Gravity plating!” As long as there is floor, you’re good.
Based on the number of anoles, skinks, geckos, and Texas spinys in our yard, I’m guessing that little display was for someone else.
My brother used to catch them and let them bite down on his earlobes.
Weird dude.
And this, folks, is why they were never not going to spoil the main spoilery part. Sounds like it was well done, so I guess maybe I’ll actually see it in the theater.
Experts report the alloy was unmoved by the masterful prologue to Pixar’s 2009 classic Up.
Doors and corners, kid.