Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@social.cleverlibre.org

@lauren (Aside: as appalled as I was at the time by the Rolller-Disco Camp of the 1980-ish Buck Rogers series, I recently realized i'm weirdly nostalgic for it now. )

@lauren Y'know, his "Flash" would probably have been pretty good, if we're to take Raiders as an example of how he treated 1930s pulp serial material.

@lauren I was a teenager, raised on SF&F and when I first saw the Ralph McQuarrie concept art I damn near passed out. SF had almost never been done well visually in film, certainly not far-flung silver age SF as distinct from near-future gems like "2001".

But as the film approached and I learned more about it (I even had a first edition of the novelization, ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster BTW), I realized it wasn't SF, it was a rather childish fantasy movie in SF drag. I did like the first one for what it was, but found them increasingly out-bumming. Still haven't ever seen the third film in either of the latter-made trilogies.

@MikeFairbanks@mastodon.world @lauren Yes. And thankfully they mostly became gatekeepers only for their own services. It is no less possible now -- and in many important respects, far more possible -- to interact freely on the internet than it was in 1996. The fact that most people are attracted to consumer services and spend all their time there being subjected to distinctly commercial conduct doesn't mean you must. The fediverse is just one example of how it never stopped being possible.

@amerika @lauren Can you describe what the internet was like before the government got involved?

@lauren @amerika Of course. But thhis isn't an essayist format. and an essay isn't necessary to respond to something as succinctly backward as "it became commercialized when the government got involved".

@amerika @lauren The government got involved in the internet by creating it in the first place and paying for it. It became commercialized when commercial interests boarded in the second half of the 1990s.

In today's forecast: "patchy fog before 10am, then patchy fog after 11am".

It'd have been just as quick to say "patchy fog, except perhaps 10-11am".

@gregeganSF Perhaps it's to spy work what Star Wars is to physics? Could call the genre Spook Opera.

@transdiffusion@mstdn.social Now I'm putting on that underappreciated seasonal classic, "Have Yourself a Busy, Stressed, Lonely, Drunk and/or Angry Little Christmas"

@DanielSolis @annaleen @Tayhatmaker Yeesh. It would be cheap and lazy of me to say the thing that goes "those who can't ..." but I have to confess I thought it.

@Benji No, I mean it costs _me_ a dollar, as in that's how much heat gets out the door.

How do you explain to a cat that every time he goes to the door and asks to be let out and then changes his mind when he sees that there's an ice storm in progress, it costs like a dollar?

@JulieCohen @JohnShirley2023 There's probably more gold and other precious ores in one or two of the smallest asteroids than has ever been mined on Earth. If I were a member of a group that had a foothold in space I wouldn't be mucking around with lasers because I'd too busy getting rich enough to buy the planet.

@JeniParsons @skiptomyloulou Probably they do, or probably someone knows whether they do?

#GoodPoint

"...Jeremy Clarkson’s grotesque description of his hatred of Meghan Markle—and the actual abuse that he’d like to see her physically subjected to—has actually served a surprising purpose.

"Thanks to him, every person who dismissed Markle and her husband’s claims ... now knows they weren’t exaggerating."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-shocking-revelation-in-harry-and-meghan-netflix-series

@SciFiObsessive @mcc Just being pedantic of course. It was the "in whatever form" that pushed me off the edge. 😛

Cringed good and hard when Nancy Pelosi introduced the president of "The Ukraine" FFS ,half her job is ceremonial, she could at least try to not get the symbolic stuff wrong.