Until he wasn’t.

Lucas was eventually quite against large swaths of the EU.

It doesn’t change how many people enjoyed it.

I think we can both agree things would be vastly different if Tolkien were still alive, but what I sincerely doubt anyone can agree on is what that would look like.

Just look at how many origins there are for orcs.

Not even Tolkien was a Tolkien purist, read some of his letters where he explained the overarching subject matter.

Originally, the Hobbit wasn’t intended to be connected to the Middle Earth stories of involving sauron and the rings at all, he didn’t even think it was set in the same world at first.

I think getting all up-in-arms about stuff that was still evolving and growing until the moment he died is a bit ridiculous.

Rings of Power is definitely MORE THAN ENOUGH into the realm of “in the spirit of” for me to personally find it highly enjoyable.

I’m having a hard time figuring out why so many people seem to have such an abiding need to specifically shit into other people’s bowls of Wheaties the instant they find out they poured them from the box with the Harfoot biathlon team on the cover, though.

Considering the amount of whipped-up outrage I saw years ago when the first picture of a black female dwarf was revealed, I’m finding myself wondering if a bunch of actual fans are getting caught up in a driven sentiment that has nothing to do with fandom for Tolkien’s actual work and more to do with a few overly vocal groups finding every niche, crack, and crevice they can to put a negative spin on representation in any form.

I am. I absolutely love it.

In my mind this is no different than the 90s when we got a BUNCH of “extended universe” Star wars stuff, some of which went in some unusual directions.

My friends and I didn’t care because it was MORE STAR WARS!

This is MORE MIDDLE EARTH! And it’s AWESOME because of it in my mind.

I can’t wrap my brain around how picky and critical so many people are these days.

Like, does anyone remember when it was nigh impossible to get stuff to watch in genres you liked? That was way worse in my mind than “the lightsabers look weird”.

More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

Chips.

No coke, Pepsi.

if the vice president wins in November.Most Read from BloombergWorld’s Second Tallest Tower Spurs Debate About Who Needs ItThe Plan for the World’s Most Ambitious Skyscraper RenovationMadrid to Ban E-Sc

What is this, a bot post with an imperfect scraper behind it?

Pronounced like “hope” without the “h”, it is indeed a local (Midwestern U.S.) "expression.

It is, mostly, a “shorthand apology”.

“Ope, just gonna squeeze right past you and grab the ranch” (dressing) or “Ope, grab the butter while you’re up whydoncha?”, or “Ope, I spose it’s about that time.”

In the context of that sticker, it’s more like a “sorry, not sorry” but less intense and more polite.

I wonder how much of the state of the place upon that inspection was DUE to:

The plant has been shut down since late July

Like, did they say “we’re shutting down” and everyone just fucked off and left the place in a state?

Or was it just that bad ALL the time?

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

Addressing the Overton window issue is the main fix I would hope for.

This is far and away the most frequently mentioned issue in posts I’ve seen. It’s also the one I would like to see addressed.

I don’t know enough to know how accurate this chart actually is, but I’ve seen it tossed around plenty:

https://guides.library.harvard.edu/newsleans/thechart

https://libapps.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/56624/images/Media-Bias-Chart-12.0_Jan-2024-Licensed-scaled.jpg

In the sense of “Simpsons did it!”:

Equifax did it first.

Sure wish the massive corporate incompetence and malfeasance causing huge data leaks multiple times over the years would get mentioned every time one of these stories comes up.

Hackers did blah, this WOULD ALMOST matter, but!

We need to start redirecting some of those board bonuses and CEO dollars back into infrastructure to actually secure this shit as a required responsibility and stop places from being allowed to request personal information they shouldn’t have.

Event happened at raglan road Irish pub, when raglan road staff failed to do their job in regards to food allergens.

Diner dies from anaphylaxis due to ingested dairy and nuts, which they were ASSURED BY THE WAITER WAS NOT IN ANY OF THEIR FOOD.

Disney is calling for the lawsuit to be dismissed because her husband signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service years prior. The company says signing up for the trial requires users to arbitrate all disputes with the company

People in the throes of full blown addiction don’t typically donate to rehab non-profits?

Or not, I dunno. I guess they might when they’re rich and don’t have to worry about how they’re going to afford their next baggie they probably don’t freak out about where their money is going as much. Shrug

I don’t believe so.

As I understand it, he was an actually recovered addict, so it would be “fueled by the damage drugs had already done to his brain before he quit”.

And I think it was crack.

Not to defend the guy, but for a while there pre COVID, while I was doing some volunteer work, I heard from a connected volunteer that Mikey was donating cases upon cases of pillows to rehab locations in his home state, which, speaking as the bleeding heart liberal that I am who wishes we provided more for services like mental health and addiction, is pretty awesome.

A tax write off is possibly just a tax write off, but for a while, at least, it’s possible he might not have been totally reprehensible.

I mean, he also professed to be Christian and there was a stink about him not paying employees like four or five years ago too, so since the Bible has specific things to say about THAT behavior too, it’s pretty easy to draw conclusions but even people who behave like shit bags can perhaps sometimes be nuanced.

Suffering is completely normal and a true necessity if you are striving towards any sort of development of “self”.

Most of what’s commonly referred to as “western” society does not typically see things that way, though. That’s part of why I personally think normalizing therapy by suggesting it regularly to people, even ones who don’t currently have “serious” problems is so important.

Many of us did not get the “tools” necessary to deal with simple normal every day parts of life like suffering (in any degree) from either our parents, from people around us, or from society at large.

That also means stuff like

A therapist, really?

Might deter someone who could otherwise benefit.

Huh.

Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.

I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.

Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.

Yes, but they have to keep associating “person of color” with “poor” and therefore “crime”. If they don’t keep lumping all non-white people in with other “undesirable” things, some of their followers might look around and realize that non-white people can achieve things on their own too, and that makes non-white folks start to resemble actual human beings a bit too much for their liking. If she was single, he wouldn’t be lauding any of her achievements. The unspoken belief is that women are as incapable as non-whites when there’s no husband involved. The dehumanizing and belittling narrative has to be constant with them or some of their followers might start thinking for themselves.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)