The book wasn’t horrible. It was cliche, although that was sortof the point. I think there’s a reason people had issues with representation or something in it too, but I don’t remember. It’s been a while. The movie was aweful.
My take on that was it made pedantry about nostalgia into a superpower and I knew too many people that act like it’s that way IRL to like the characters.
I loved the book and the movie. It’s one of the few times I was glad the movie changed a lot from the book. It wouldn’t have translated well and they were aware of that. They both stand well on their own. I’m looking forward to part 2.
The novel is already fairly modern, and they just totally reworked the story in ways it didn’t need to be while also making the protagonists get into trouble by doing stupid shit instead of making the villains more intelligent or one step ahead, so that’s always a net loss for me.
I love the first one as a proper horror film, and love the second one as a great action film. Alien 3 always seemed to stand well with the other two by returning to the horror genre, and expanding on Ripley.
In the third film, Ripley has lost everything that she fought so hard for in second film, and it’s her against this alien that has taken everything and she knows it’s finally going to take her life in total.
The setting in Alien 3 was very original as a penal colony that’s just hot and dark, and the design of the alien is entirely different since it burst from a dog (or, a bull if you watch the Director’s Cut). The alien moves faster and more haphazardly and the cinematography reflects this as well. The final scene with Ripley’s sacrifice is the fitting end to what was a trilogy at that point.
I don’t know whether people confuse Alien 3 with the 4th one or what, but Alien 3 is a fantastic film that holds up well decades later. I’m always confused by the fact that people slam it so often, and it wasn’t until I saw people crapping on it online that I realized that there was even a consensus that it was bad.
“I’ve had an idea… Lightning has just struck my brain…” “Oh, that must of hurt!”
It’s in that part of my brain that was written before I understood media being ‘good’ and ‘bad’, so my memory of it just is, I’ve never stopped to think about its quality.
I played like 40hours of Cyberpunk 2077 before going on social media. I Thought it was going to get “mid” reviews, but I guess I got really lucky to not hit any serious bugs. Lesson being: If you wanna enjoy a game, don’t look at any marketing materials, and don’t seek out social media about it until you’ve had time to form your own opinions.
Yeah I think the same thing is happening with starfield as well. People expected skyrim x elite dangerous x the good parts of no man’s sky and I think that just isn’t realistic. That said I find starfield pretty meh in it’s current state, I am waiting for the QOL mods to stabilize before I play much as I just ran into way too many issues.
My biggest (not only) complaint so far is that entire planets have maybe 8 or 9 species of plants and animals. Hopefully biodiversity mods will pop up. It seems like a decent platform to build future content into.
It would be one thing if people were just overhyping things, but a lot of the outrage was over how much they just blatantly lied while marketing the game. They promised a lot of specific things and then released something that was aesthetically impressive but ultimately outdone in just about every other category by sometimes decades old games, and lacked all of the groundbreaking features they marketed.
Personally, even coming back to it much later and trying to enjoy it at face value with all of its updates, it still felt like a boring and shallow GTA clone with a neon glaze. That’s not to mention the fact that it’s still frustratingly buggy.
I read reviews before buying on day 2, basically. Sure, I expected some bugs, as the reviewers warned. I barely got any, just some visual glitches during cutscenes. Still, I would give the game a solid 8/10.
Came out of my playthrough to everyone raging about everything about the game. Couldn’t even give an honest opinion about the game without being downvoted to oblivion because people who never even played the game refused to believe the game was playable at all.
Same. I played it on stadia and it was pretty stable. When I went to that other site to see what people were saying I was absolutely shocked at the amount of bugs and hate it was getting.
Yeah I hear that’s bad, I hate all driving in video games so it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for me, I think I drove a car like twice in 150hrs.
To be it was truly bad, but not in a rage-y way, only in a “Wow, this is it?! All this hype, all this wait, and this tepid fart is all we’re getting at the end?”-way.
I finished it - which granted isn’t difficult given how brief the main quest is - then went through some specific side quests. I will give it credit, some of the side quests have really cool characters and are overall really well done. And the graphics can be pretty as hell in some if not most areas. But ~everything else, the main quest, the writing, the story, the city in itself, the software quality, the combat system, the upgrade system, it’s all there, it’s largely functional, but just barely so.
So yeah, just massively disappointing given how much work must have been behind it. I don’t even want to know how often management yanked the team around and made them re-do massive parts of it, the bugginess and tonal disjointedness of the finished game hints at it plenty.
Special shoutout to the driving, which highlights how the game was clearly not meant to have this until relatively late in development.
I borrowed it from a library for a PS4. It was genuinely unplayable if you actually wanted to play it, but for laughing at the bugs and whatnot it was great.
Would’ve been pissed if I had paid anything for it.
I’m not a gamer but I’ve noticed reviews of anything are usually trash. And if you’re thinking about buying a product and looking at reviews, you’ve gotta be careful to avoid reviews where they get a cut on the “buy now” links. In fact, usually if it has a link to buy it I just go back and forget that review.
Here? Bicycles. Super weird how weird people are about bikes and bike lanes here. Spreading the joy of a non-commodified fun-as-fuck method of transportation often provokes some truly reactionary energy here.
Biking is based. The benefits far outweight the cons compared to the other private transport we have today. I thought the hate was almost exclusive to cars from what I’ve seen which is understandable. At least in comparison to bikes.
At the same time you have people driving 30 minutes to the gym to use the stationary bike… I bet if they had less human-hostile designed cities, people would cycle more.
Who doesn’t like bicycles? I mean, cyclists are often very reckless, dangerous people on the road, and bike lanes are sometimes more of a safety hazard.
Bikers get a lot of hate because a lot of them act like pedestrians. (i.e. riding on sidewalks, crosswalks, not stopping at stop signs, not signalling turns or shoulder-checking) But then if you do all of that dumb law-abiding stuff like some kind of responsible citizen, people in cars honk at you, give you their right of way, or worse!
cyclists would not need to do those things if there was proper infrastructure and if car drivers weren’t out to kill them.
making bikes come to a complete stop is less safe because of the acceleration curve of a bike, if the way is clear it’s safer the cyclist and anyone else around for the cyclist to maintain speed
I mean, cyclists are often very reckless, dangerous people on the road
you should try interacting with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist. There are people driving on the roads now that I wouldn’t trust to safely ride in a pram let alone use of heavy machinery at high speed in a public area based on a test they did years ago. If car use was held to the same standard as safely using heavy machinery in an industrial environment a lot of people who drive now wouldn’t be let near a car. It’s like people think they have a god given right to operate heavy machinery despite having no ability (or inclination) to do so safely and doing it around children
also bikes don’t actually have turn signals and when you use your arm to signal it means you have less control of the bike while you do it
That’s why you have to practice signalling so that you can maintain control over the bike while signalling. It’s tricky, though, especially for less experienced cyclists. Have a lovely day and thanks for the insight!
As a cycling instructor, I’ve been honked at, verbally harassed, and flipped off more times than I can count. The reason I know the anti-bicycle talking points is because my job is to discourage people from becoming like that.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear in my comment! Have a lovely day and thank you! Your response made me laugh.
I ride on the sidewalk when I can because I do not want to be run over by some frothingfash in a truck with a 12" lift who’s infuriated by having to see a bicycle
I can understand that. I know that the laws (and road conditions) differ from place to place. Where I’m from, sidewalk riding is restricted to younger people, and so as a cycling instructor, I cannot advise my students to ride on the sidewalk, as it would be dangerous to pedestrians.
Thanks for your perspective, though! I hope you have a lovely day and most importantly, stay safe out there!
Super weird how weird people are about bikes and bike lanes here.
redditors are the worst about it. If you post in your town’s subreddit about bike lanes, all the landlords crawl out of the woodwork to talk shit about bicycles and go on paranoid rants about how drivers are oppressed by bike lanes.
I love riding my bike, but one thing I and everyone else heavily disagree on is riding in the street. You can tell me it’s safer (somehow) than the sidewalk until you’re blue in the face, I’m not doing it and I certainly don’t feel safer doing it, and I’m definitely going to be pissed at anyone doing it in a road I’m trying to drive down.
Edit: I almost forgot the carried over thing from Reddit where anything ambiguous is automatically the worst possible extreme, so I want to clarify that “being pissed” is just complaining to myself in my car, I’m not going to commit vehicular manslaughter because someone’s in the road on their bike.
Riding on the sidewalk endangers pedestrians (especially children and people with disabilities). Crossing an intersection that has cars coming from the right is also unsafer because you enter drivers’ the field of view much later (than if you’re on the street) and at a higher velocity (than a pedestrian). If you are riding a car please accept that in the most places in the industrialized part of the world, bicyclists have exactly the same right to use the street (according to local regulations of course).
A fine? What dystopian hellhole do you live in? Where I live in Indiana, almost no one rides in the street, always on the sidewalk, the only people ever riding in the street are those dorks in full underarmor outfits that revolve their entire life around being a bike owner. No one gets fined for riding in the sidewalk here, and I’m honestly horrified that that’s a thing anywhere.
Large Language Models (such as GPT) and AI image generators.
I follow certain AI related post tags on Tumblr and sometimes I see people expressing pure hatred towards these tools, as they only see the AIs as content thieves.
As an artist I think it’s a more complicated issue than a lot of people are making it out to be, and all the fearmongering some popular artists are promoting really doesn’t help.
You sound like you’ve already closed your mind to the discussion, but in case you’re actually still willing to healthily engage in the discussion here is a really good video about why calling people who utilize AI in their work “hacks and grifters” is a very narrow minded (and often factually incorrect) way of looking at AI utilization.
I think it’s a more complicated issue than a lot of people are making it out to be
Agree.
Also. People are pissed that what they have taken years to master others can now get close to replicate with little effort and time.
I’ve just realized that although they call the AIs “content thieves”, what they really feel is that as AIs are able to replicate their skills quickly, it makes them feel their own merit diminished.
If an artist creates artwork inspired on some other artist eveyone’s cool; if an AI does the same, then it’s stolen work even if the generated image is a unique new one.
I don’t mind the tool itself if you use it as such. I do mind when people use its output as the final product. See: the lawyer who used chatgpt for a legal brief
The person you first replied to asked you to see the legal brief as an example of why they mind using the output as the finished product. You then asked for an explanation. To which I asked you, hey, have you actually looked at that example? You have not.
What exactly do you want here, other than be argumentative for combative reasons?
Letting a language model do the work of thinking is like building a house and using a circular saw to put nails in. It will do it but you should not trust the results.
It is not Google. It can, will, and has made up facts as long as it fits the format expected
Not at the very least proof reading and fact checking the output is beyond lazy and a terrible use of a tool. Using it to create the end product instead of as a tool to use in creation of an end product are two very different things.
The lawyer fuck up is what happens when someone doesn’t know or understand the limitations of a LLM.
If you want a GPT model tailored and specialized for a specific task, you have to train it with custom data, fine tune it and tweak the model’s parameters. You cannot do that from the ChatGPT web/app, you need a custom implementation coded in Python or some other language.
I’m glad you understand my point. Chatgpt is not Google. It’s a language model that will give you something that looks like the thing you asked for it to provide. It can and will pull facts out of its recycle bin if it fits the cadence of what it expects the answer to look like.
ChatGPT is not Google, but sometimes it can work as a glorified search engine or even compete with asking in forums.
I’ve lost count of how many times ChatGPT has produced Bash or Python code for what I needed. Yes, sometimes the code is wrong and/or requires tweaking and sometimes I resorted to look into the documentation, but no one will answer faster and anytime of the day like ChatGPT does, at least not for free.
It’s a tool to aid in creating a product, not a tool that magics out a finished product. That’s my point. Too many people use it as the latter instead of the former.
There are some uis that allow for fine tuning (assuming you have an extremely high end rig designed for ml). For example ChatGPT alternative and DALLE alternative.
Thanks. I have a quite powerful rig, but at the moment I work with OpenAI’s API using GPT 3.5 Turbo using a custom (but shitty) Python script with a simple Gradio web interface. However, I mostly stopped improving or updating it months ago. As long as I don’t use LlamaIndex, the cost is quite low.
I also don’t think that the ChatGPT model is able to do something that requires referencing case law or medical texts or whatever else at all in its current form. The way it works by generating probabilities for certain words is all wrong for doing something where the value of the output isn’t subjective - you need the model to be able to distinguish between facts and opinion, you need it to be able to cite sources for what it says, you need it to be able to produce coherent cause and effect chains and formulate an argument, all things which no currently existing LLM is capable of no matter how much you fine tune it because of how it works.
AI is a method of content theft, it takes other people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works, without any actual coherency.
I don’t like that it churns out slop that displaces actual content.
I also don’t like the way it’s sped up enshitification of google and news sites. I didn’t think it could get worse than pages of listicles written by disinterested journalists paid fuckall to churn out 10 a day, but now you have chatGPT churning out 100 completely useless articles a day.
LLMs just automates and does faster certain things that a person could do on their own if they invested way more effort and time. If a human being takes people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?
I agree with the content enshitification, but I disagree about the coherency.
Usually, implementations like the ChatGPT web/app will generate different outputs for the same prompt/input. You can also ask it to tweak a previous output, make it shorter, more concise, exclude parts, etc. And if you’re making API calls through a script you can tweak parameters like the Temperature, Top P, Presence Penalty or Frequence Penaly, which affect things like the coherence, randomness or repetitiveness of the output.
There’s also fine tunning using embeddings, which can help training a model to fit one’s specific needs and expectations, but I haven’t got to try it yet.
If a human being takes people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?
Yes, obviously. Artists and writers can learn from others and can be inspired by other’s works, but they can’t use parts of those works. That is content theft. Imitating a style is fine, but you have to create something new. LLMs cannot create, only steal.
If, for example, I ask an LLM to produce a short story with a completely unique and random prompt that doesn’t resemble any known existing story in its training data (or in the entire world, if you like), is the generated output of the LLM also stolen?
I think what you’re proposing isn’t something they can do. Are you saying “What if I asked it to create a short story who’s pieces don’t resemble any pieces of known stories?” or are you saying “What if I asked it to create a short story who’s whole doesn’t resemble any known stories?”
The first one can’t happen. The second? Yes, it’s stealing.
Where is it getting this story? LLMs don’t have creativity. They don’t understand story structure. It pulls sentences and paragraphs from work in it’s training data. If the generated output contains work that others have made, that’s called plagiarism. If it doesn’t, then your hypothetical isn’t realistic. LLMs can’t create original works. That’s the whole point. It pulls pieces of the training data and rearranges them. It would be like if I was writing a college paper and instead of writing anything myself I just pulled 100 different sources and copied a sentence or two from each source and structured them as my paper. That’s 100% plagiarism.
The process of generating a story involves recombining and rephrasing the LLM’s training data in unique ways, it’s not a copypaste job. They generate content by predicting and generating text based on patterns, an this implicates a degree of transformation and synthesis.
Where do you draw the line between plagiarism vs inspiration, whether it’s a person or an LLM? How long and similar to something existing does a fragment of text have to be to cross the plagiarism line?
Coherency requires relating symbolic meanings. AI just uses statistical analysis.
Consider if you were locked in the national library of Thailand. You don’t speak Siamese, and any pictures or bilingual dictionaries were removed.
Given a thousand years, you could look at the patterns and produce text similar to what someone who writes Siamese would write, but there’s still no coherency because you cannot connect the meaning behind any of the words.
That doesn’t necessarily mean your outputs are useless though, someone who does read Siamese can have you generate outputs until you print out something they can infer a coherent thought from, but you’re fundamentally unable to be trained to do that yourself.
If a human being takes people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?
We’re getting into ethics territory. IP is a social construct and we live under capitalism, our model for determining what is and isn’t theft should be selected by what supports artists and consumers against capitalists.
Given a thousand years, you could look at the patterns and produce text similar to what someone who writes Siamese would write, but there’s still no coherency because you cannot connect the meaning behind any of the words.
That doesn’t necessarily mean your outputs are useless though, someone who does read Siamese can have you generate outputs until you print out something they can infer a coherent thought from, but you’re fundamentally unable to be trained to do that yourself.
You’re comparing an LLM to something similar to the infinite monkey theorem. In your analogy, you should consider that someone who knows perfect Siamese is giving me feedback to optimize and improve my outputs, even I don’t really know the meaning of anything.
While an LLM may not have a conscience to evaluate if its output is coherent, it can identify patterns and relationships from its training and can generate text that is still appears coherent to human readers.
There was this uber hype around it, then we started using it … and it just makes so many errors, it’s literally just generating more work. Scrapped it after less than a week. It’s modern snakeoil.
Bard is the same, I asked it questions about two of my favourite bands whom I know a lot about. It omitted facts and invented things that were not true!
We used it for code generation. But we ended up spending more time fixen and debugging the generated code than it would have taken us to just write it. Also it introduces the most annoying type of bugs. Like once it misspelled a property name, but only at one point in the code, got it right everywhere else.
That’s why, in the case of a GPT model you would feed it custom training data using something like LlamaIndex. I don’t know if there’s an API available for Bard, tho.
You’re wrong assuming that the free models that we have at our disposal are the only possible and best implementations of these LLMs.
What did you use it for? I helps me a lot with coding, scripting, translations, terminologies… Sometimes it makes mistakes, but other times it produces working code that accomplishes what I asked for.
In any case, ChatGPT is just a demo that uses the GPT-3.5 Turbo model. Many people is being misled assuming that the ChatGPT research preview is all that the model has to offer. You can also try the improved model GPT-4, but it’s not free.
If you really want to get its full potential you need a custom implementation in Python that works against the API and do things like fine tune the model, embeddings, feed it custom data or give it access to tools with LangChain.
Of course that’s not something easy to do, but don’t think that the ChatGPT web/app is GPT models’ full potential.
What! I have the opposite experience.
Im a tabletop roleplaying gamemaster and it has helped me immensely with translations, formatting of text, compiling and keeping track of my players character backgrounds and even coming up with plots and scenes that are suited for each player.
I have a feeling this one’s mostly operator error.
Once we found the issues, it was actually quite easy to tell the AI to fix them. But at this point you’re debugging generated code to imrpove your input for the code generator … and it just was faster to write the code by hand.
And yes, there was a vast overestimation of what it can do, especially by some managers that used to be coders and thought this would compensate for their lack of recent practical expirence. It didn’t … I had to fix it.
Interesting, I’m working as a network engineer and my current job is overhauling an old TV broadcast facility. There are a lot of random solutions like using off brand switches and lack of documentation, etc.
AI has been absolutely critical, it doesn’t do the work for me, but like any good tool it amplifies my ability to do work by cutting out the middle man of sifting through pages of spice works and stack overflow articles trying to figure out what command a ten year old Avaya needs to accomplish whatever task I require of it.
Is it always correct? No. That’s why the engineer behind the screen exists. It does usually get me a workable answer more quickly than just having to look it up myself, though. Between my knowledge of terminal CLI commands and the AI, I’ve been able to get a lot done.
Hell I had it walk me through the process of setting up automated backups, it even suggested the tftp server I used to do it. Shits been working great.
Even our service desk has been able to use it to help with more advanced problems by telling it the issue and describing what has already been done.
Idk why no one else sees the value, I’m over here like Captain Picard solving problems by talking to the LCARS system.
I do see the potential value and I’m happy it worked out for you. But don’t end up like the lawyers that used chatGPT like a search engine and it just made up fictiional cases they cited in an actual court.
I wouldn’t say “hate”, to me it’s more… so what? They’re really bad at what they do, only impressive at first glance. Not bad for some brainstorming, but then you end up with a facsimile of what the actual result would be, and now have to use that as a guideline to create the result.
IMO they’re not bad, but they require a lot of tweaking and trial and error.
I’ve learnt some Python thanks to ChatGPT’s help. When I say “some” I mean that I was able to create a custom implementation that uses a web interface and custom tools. The more lI learnt, the less I needed ChatGPT, but I always require some more coding help.
However, these LLMs are not sentient super smart AIs.
LLM is way overhyped. So if your boss bought into that hype you’re gonna have a certain amount of animosity towards it. I’m a developer and it can be helpful at times, but managers seem to think it can write software on its own.
It’s basically an iterative improvement over a search engine, but unlike a search engine it cuts off the people creating the content it’s scraping from any kind of revenue stream.
And yeah there’s some real problems with it stealing content. Which isn’t being addressed at all. And bringing up these issues tend to get treated like Luddites by those that have bought into the hype.
I like them as non-profit tools for personal use, but the hatred is justified IMO because we’re already seeing people with writing jobs lose that job and get replaced by an LLM and an “editor” who is paid less than the writer was.
Also, for stuff like art competitions and magazines, there is a need to develop a rigorous method of verification of what is and isn’t AI-generated. I’ve been published in a magazine before, but if I were to submit a story now I’d be competing against a massive wave of generated stories.
I like them as non-profit tools for personal use, but the hatred is justified IMO because we’re already seeing people with writing jobs lose that job and get replaced by an LLM and an “editor” who is paid less than the writer was.
That’s capitalism in all of its glory. People never mattered to the ones who want to make money; they just want want to as much profit as possible with the minimal investment. Someone at work created a tool that turns a work day of painstating tasks into a 5 minute wait? Fire the people, keep the tool. You may call LLMs or AIs enablers, but it’s like hating baseball bats because some use them to crack open skulls instead of hitting baseballs.
Regarding the verification of AI-generated content, I just can say I agree, but it’s going to be hard to detect.
I don’t like cilantro. I don’t hate cilantro. Everyone shouts that it’s a genetic thing, so apparently it’s not possible that I can have a distaste for a common food while also not thinking it tastes like soap.
Every time it comes up, somebody wants to feel smug and tell me “well you know…”. It’s the one food where if you don’t like it, it has to be a genetic thing. Maybe I can just not like how it tastes as much as others. Maybe I don’t mind it in salsa but don’t like it in my soup. Just because I don’t mind a finger in my butt doesn’t mean I want a dick in my mouth.
I’m the opposite. My sister and dad hate it, so it’s very possible I have the gene, plus it tastes like soap to me, but only mildly and I kinda like it. I don’t want to eat a tabbouleh made with cilantro instead of parsley, but a sprig or two freshens a dish up nicely.
Mango (only fresh ones and more so near the stem and pit) and rosemary also taste like soap to me, but I also enjoy them 🤷
There’s a generic thing with cilantro that makes some people think it tastes like soap. I don’t have it, but my wife does. I hardly notice cilantro, but even a little ruins a dish for her.
What we taste is a specific chemical that you can’t taste. There are a handful of these chemicals that can be tasteless or not based on your genetics. Drinking alcohols all have a chemical like that. If you ever see anyone hold their nose while taking a shot, it means they’re a taster of that chemical, and trying nor to taste it.
Every little bit I eat them to see if I like them (or can force myself to) but I just haven’t been able to yet. I really wish I could just get over my dislike but I can’t seem to enjoy the taste.
I saw someone commenting how they specifically don’t like “raw tomatoes”. I was wondering why you’d be eating raw tomatoes to begin with but they just meant like regular tomatoes, ones you haven’t cooked since for them the cooked ones were the norm. And it had so many people agreeing with them about how “raw tomatoes” are disgusting.
I’d call “raw” tomatoes, as in regular eatable ones as just regular tomatoes. Raw to me sounds like unripe. While prepared, I guess that is self-explanatory. But I guess that’s more about cultural or language differences.
What do you not like about “raw” (I guess it is now warranted since there’s ambiguity, so fair enough) tomatoes? I think they’re the tits! First time I hear the term “heirloom tomatoes” btw.
Raw means uncooked, not unripe. They taste sharper and have their skins on, and the seeds are with their gel and juice, between the firm fleshy parts. When tomatoes are cooked, often the first step is to drop them in boiling water for a minute, take them out, and slide the skins off. Because the skin gets tough when cooked. The other thing that happens in cooking is that the flesh softens and the seeds migrate so it’s all more or less the same texture. The flavor gets sweeter too.
Personally I like raw tomatoes and cooked equally, but they are different.
Just sounds so weird, people calling regular tomartoes “raw” lmao. Is that a thing somewhere in the world, maybe the US? They like their stuff factory done lol
Raw cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes would go along with raw carrots and raw celery and raw cauliflower and raw bell peppers and other raw vegetables on a crudité platter. Guess what “cru” and “crudités” means in French?
The point being that these are all vegetables that can also be served cooked. (Unlike lettuce which is ruined by cooking. I tried it once, blech.) But when dipping, you want that firmness and fresh taste.
It’s not a US thing, or anything special, you just seem to have an exaggerated idea of what the word raw means. Maybe you’re confused because it can also mean naked (“in Equus, he appeared on stage in the raw”) or chafed/chapped (“his nose was red and raw from the snowstorm”) or unedited/unfiltered (“the raw data suggests Hillary Clinton will win the 2016 election”). But in this case it just means uncooked/unheated. It could be sliced and spiced and still be raw.
Btw, we don’t default to cooked or canned tomatoes, we would specify those as well, for instance in a pasta or chili recipe.
Depends on the context. For instance I have tomatoes growing in a pot on my balcony… I might say, “I put some tomatoes in the salad” or “…in my sandwich” and we’d both know I meant raw. Or I might say “this curry has tomatoes in it” and they’re obviously cooked. Even if I said they were fresh tomatoes from my garden. Unless I was offering chopped tomatoes as a condiment for the hot curry, then they’d be raw.
The people in the comment thread were just trying to make it clear they have an objection to raw tomatoes but not cooked ones, that’s why they specified.
Par for the course. I’m no longer surprised by this because now I know that people are content to simply read about a thing instead of reading that thing itself.
It think it’s nuts, but it doesn’t surprise me any more.
Your point was not about his stuff but about his person. I read up on them and see it is a terrible, uncompassionate and frankly hateful person. That is not for me.
I listened to a couple of his seminars on narcissism and thought, “Hey, this guy knows what he’s talking about!” But the more I listened to him, especially his more recent stuff, the more I realized he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.
I guess he just had a handle on narcissism from his own personal experience as one.
Compassion and empathy for animals. Yeah, they say they like it if you don’t have any follow-up questions, but things go downhill real fuckin’ fast after that.
Watch so-called dog people turn beet red in an instant when you try to point out that they are literally enslaving a sentient creature with feelings, who has been bred over hundreds of generations in inhumane conditions, resulting incountless congenital health problems, in order to produce a docile beast who can simulate affection and is literally miserable for the rest of the day when their human isn’t with them.
But no, they say, Mr. Floof is happy! He’s just shitting the bedroom floor and digging compulsively because that’s what dogs do. Sorry Floof, I can’t walk you today, now go run your ruts in the tiny yard and pretend this plastic toy is an animal you hunted.
It’s peak cognitive dissonance that most people struggle with due to years of social conditioning and lobbying. You can’t even publish the shit in the news any more. Add to the fact a lot of people just don’t think about shit at all, and it is a reality most people don’t want to see when confronted. Frustrating to say the least.
I think they don’t struggle with the cognitive dissonance unless you really rub their nose in it, because there is hundreds of years of culture dedicated to finding the psychological tricks and mythology that allow them to relieve the tension without alleviating the cause.
Yeah part of why I liked Halloween was those bags of black and orange jelly beans. The only jellybean flavors I liked as a kid. I love licorice, anise, fennel. My kids do too. They ask for fennel instead of onion in a lot of foods.
I do understand people not liking it though, it’s a strong and odd flavor. Like cantaloupe.
As a guy who grew up in a conservative household, this is just a lack of understanding of what communism is; most of my family believe it’s a poverty cult, so they hate it.
The ending of How I Met Your Mother. Like, it was certainly no cinematic masterpiece, but I felt like it was a very logical build-up and delivery. I don’t get the impression that they really stretched the story for more seasons either (yes I know they did add more things to stretch it, I just mean I think it doesn’t show story-wise). But even a few days ago I saw people complaining about how bad the ending was, and it’s a rhetoric I see almost every time the show is mentioned. And, again, it is not a cinematic masterpiece by any stretch, but I wouldn’t expect that from a sitcom anyway.
Other people. Individualism is taken to it extreme limit where nobody else matter is the norm in the West. Why should “I” improve the life of any other people?
It was the best of its trilogy and most criticism is complete nonsense, but it still wasn’t a great movie. An anti-war deconstruction of Star Wars got made into an actual Star Wars. And that was probably fantastic at one point, but the edit we got was soured by obvious corporate meddling - like the ‘whoops, nevermind’ ending.
Three simple things would’ve saved it.
One, end the Rey / Kylo story immediately after their fight together. ‘Join me.’ Tense silence. No more Rey until the next movie.
Two, have some shellshocked nobody find the crystal fox things and save the good guys. She doesn’t need lines. She doesn’t need a name. The Force is in all living things. Anyone can be a hero.
Three, don’t hand the finale back to JJ fucking Abrams.
It’s a plot faucet. From an old discussion elsewhere:
Spreading 9 across two movies could not have helped. Sudden introduction was not the problem with a rehash of ROTJ and AOTC - quadrupling down on the Death Star lasers while also pulling a secret army out of thin air. Multiple fake-out deaths would be so much worse if they kept happening in two films. Giving people time to think about the macguffin chase could only make it sillier. They need a map in a thing from a guy who’s dead but has a knife matching ruins so it’s a map to the thing and they don’t even get it. But somehow they manage to fly through a rehash of the clouds from Solo, to where a zillion ships rely on one radio tower, and their brilliant plan for a wild-west shootout atop a spaceship - with horses! - completely fails until two zillion ships fly in to help. They just fly in. Through the secret cloud maze. Which is so un-navigable that it’s the only thing keeping the bad guys in, because spaceships can’t look up.
I heavily disagree, that movie disrespected the entire cast if you ask me. There was not a single story thread in TLJ that I found to be even slightly well thought out. Plenty of good ideas but the executions were horribly botched.
I cannot say anything abput Rise of Skywalker since I haven’t watched it but I don’t think tjat matters for the following. Imo TLJ was not the best movie out of the three, if we look at them in isolation, I could maybe see that being the case. But it isn’t a movie in isolation. It’s a sequel to a movie that already ate up most of the goodwill around. At least personally I was willing to cut TFA a lot of slack since it was the first movie in a good while for the Star Wars Universe. I was not willing to do so for TLJ sonce it was the second movie and they really should have had some idea of what the plan was by then. TFA probably screws over the trilogy harder than TLJ with its plot but TLJ doesn’t get the “Has to restart movie franchise” card that TFA got.
No not really, TLJ on its own sucks. TFA also sucks. Probably even moreso. But when TFA came out it had an advantage that counterweighed a lot of the issues. TLJ did not have that luxury. I think we think of this differently. I have not watched the movies again after their cinematic release so I’m rating them as I experienced them then. If I rewatched these movies now I might agree with you since TFA does not have any “new movie after ages” hype bonus clouding my mind.
The only thing I’m blaming on TLJ is in hindsight making TFA even worse since its failure turned the first movie into a premonition instead of a weak start.
Rian provided answers for JJ’s mystery-box bullshit. They weren’t JJ’s answers, but as the third movie proved, JJ’s answers sucked. Spreading that garbage thinner would not improve the smell.
One answer in particular was fucking incredible writing: Rey’s parents were nobodies. Every aspect of the movie is telling the audience, nobody owes you a destiny, go do cool stuff. Anyone can be a hero. Hey kids, remember how Luke used to be some dirt farmer who saved the universe? Like an identifiable protagonist, and not the secret heir of a prophesied royal messiah? Here you go. Four more of those. Some backwater survivor who can kick ass with a broom handle and three flavors of burned-out space pilot.
JJ going ‘nuh uh!’ wasn’t necessary, clever, or excusable. He dragged the franchise back, kicking and screaming, to being 100.0% about one family of aristocratic space wizards. Slapped that shit right in the title. And yet - people regurgitate that Rian tried to undo everything. You closed out the comment by describing how JJ did that, and at no point do those neurons talk to one another.
Messing up the Sequels was a team effort. JJ’s Setup was shit but Rian’s own writing wasn’t any better. Nothing in JJ’s Setup requires a Bullshit Holdo maneuver, or turning Luke into a character from an alternate Universe. Yes the bag of Mysteries Rian was handed was full of steaming shit but that doesn’t really matter because in the end he decided to add some shit of his own before handing it back to JJ. You claim I say Rian fucked up the Trilogie, he didn’t. He only fucked up 1/3 of it. TLJ however did in retrospect change my view on TFA because, as we agree, JJ’s Mystery boxes turned out to be shit. I don’t claim that Rian fucked that up, he simply tore off the bandaid with his own bad movie. The blame for TFA (and Rise of SkywalkerPalpatine) lays solely with JJ.
As I said in another comment chain: TLJ was bad, but the hate it gets is overblown.
That math doesn’t math. He was directly responsible for 2/3s of it, and the other third he plowed over.
Rian’s script was a genuinely excellent anarchist critique of space opera. Whether or not that belongs in a numbered Star Wars movie is debatable. But the real disconnect with the audience is the edit. The film we got is not excellent. The film we got is not exactly good. And yet - all popular criticism is this same irrelevant fluff.
Luke being a hermit was JJ’s fault. It was immutable, when Rian began. Rian’s explanation was fine. Jesus Christ, his description of the Force is incredible. People keep shitting on his opinion of the Jedi as if the Jedi way didn’t fail the Republic, fail his parents, and fail his mentors, all two of whom kept playing mind games even after death. Some girl shows up expecting How To Hero 101 and of course he says no.
I ask you - as opposed to what?
Sketch it out for me. What does Luke’s motivation look like, when a Force-sensitive rando shows up on his extremely private retreat, offering a tool he built from scratch and obviously abandoned? The man knows smugglers, bounty hunters, militants, and diplomats. He’s attuned to a psychic power that permeates all life and matter. Some glorified barkeep having his backup glowstick in her basement would not stop him from getting it, if he set aside a month and gave half a shit. Tell me what it would look like, if it looked like that Luke Skywalker was well-written, in your eyes.
Me, personally? I’m quite happy with him kicking Rey straight down the only-what-you-take-with-you hole. He doesn’t toy with her except to show her she doesn’t need training and shouldn’t want training. Yoda played some Mister Miyagi shit while he was looking for a level-up before 1v1-ing the scariest motherfucker in the universe. “Ben” was a dutch uncle his whole life and never mentioned he had space-wizard bona fides, nevermind that his dad was alive and well and the scariest motherfucker in the universe. Jedi hermit Luke points out: the fact this trilogy exists means that what Luke did did not work. Of course he tells her not to repeat his mistakes. His ambition did not solve the problem.
That math doesn’t math. He was directly responsible for 2/3s of it, and the other third he plowed over.
Read this again:
You claim I say Rian fucked up the Trilogie, he didn’t. He only fucked up 1/3 of it.
I’m saying Rian only fucked up 1/3, not JJ.
Rian’s explanation was fine.
I sorta disagree. Other possible explanations aside (I dunno, maybe Luke went to undertake a serious ritual and didn’t want to get interrupted unless absolutely necessary) this explanation demands a lot more elaboration. The concept is fine but it would need some more fleshing out (I would prefer a short movie) to pick up the audience. The gaps between Episode 6 Luke, Flashback Luke and Episode 8 Luke are too large to bridge with suspension of disbelief/imagination for some. The trajectory many thought Luke would take does not match what we are shown, which means the audience should be shown a bit more to adjust that trajectory. The audience needs to see Luke drift off first before this transgression, not just told it happened. We do not need to see Luke attack Kylo. We need to see him drift off into intolerance to narrow the gap between Episode 6 and the Flashback. As it stands we see Luke on a trajectory to heroism in Episode 6, then an angry old man in the Flashback and someone who recognized the error of their ways in Episode 8, the difference between Flashback Luke and Episode 8 Luke is fine but the difference between Episode 6 Luke and Flashback Luke is not. His character makes a complete U-Turn in between and we, as the audience, have not a single clue why. It does not match the character we know to such an extreme extent that is completely takes you out of the movie. There was just not enough time in that movie to fit such an Arc for someone who is a Side Character+.
Still no idea what you think was missing from the explanation of how he got there. Him being there was a given. It awkwardly ended the previous movie, with a bizarre helicopter circle shot. Sprinkled throughout two whole acts, we got a Rashomon overview of him doing what we expected and having that blow up in his face. Short of making the movie about him–
And we’re glossing over how Luke in Return Of The Jedi very nearly turned to the dark side. The Emperor was fuckin’ thrilled until he got chucked down that elevator shaft. Luke Skywalker was always a hold-my-beer archetype. Plan A for Darth Vader was murder. There was no Plan B. Even with Jabba and the Emperor, his idea of a diplomatic alternative was to surrender his way in, and then murder his way out.
Luke being grumpy is infinitely more explicable than having the empire ‘return, somehow.’ Especially for an audience that’s spent decades joking about the prequels, and wonders if the whole franchise would’ve gone better if Qui-Gon hadn’t yelled “duck.” Having the prescience to see Kylo ruin everything is the fuzzy precognition we’ve long since known about. Seriously considering murder as a solution is his go-to. He’s not Batman.
why are there suddenly cloaking devices in star wars
why don’t the imperials hyperjump in front of the fleeing rebels?
why can several characters leave a chase in progress visit some planet and come back to the chase still in progress?
the holdo maneuver breaks several in-universe rules about how hyperdrive works.
there’s plenty of problems with the film without being a frothing misogynist. It’s better than rise of skywalker but i’d rather watch the holiday special.
To add to the list of non-chud reasons to dislike it, the plot is driven entirely by characters doing the dumbest thing possible at every turn on all sides for little to no reason.
Someone once pointed out the First Order could have ended the movie in the first ten minutes by having their dreadnaught just shoot the Resistance’s capital ship instead of the planetary (read: entirely stationary) base first, or by having the dreadnaught’s fighter screen/escort ships deployed instead of just chilling and doing nothing the entire fight.
The Resistance should have had all their ships run away in different directions. Sure one of them will get chased down and blown away, but 95% escaping would have been a much better result than what they got. My headcanon is that if Leia hadn’t been unconscious that’s exactly what she would have done, and Holdo was at a “Civil War General” level of incompetence.
But the Rey/Luke/Kylo stuff was great. Rian Johnson actually figured out something to do with the Jedi that hadn’t been done before, and killing off the bad Emperor knockoff was 100% the right call. Every character in that plot was actively making decisions that revealed their character rather than being propelled along by plot contrivance, it was great.
There’s also a ton of potential in the B plot, all you have to do it rewrite it a bit. Maybe they find out that the dreadnought isn’t tracking them with a new piece of technology after all, and since they can’t find a tracking device they suspect there’s a spy. Maybe the reason they go to the rich people planet isn’t to find some macguffin guy, but to find the people funding the FO and shoot them. The Jedi plot ends with Rey deciding not to burn the Jedi’s teachings - you could dramatically pair that with Finn deciding to blow up the arms dealers profiting off of endless galactic war.
the only good thing i think is killing snoke like that. subverting expectations just to subvert them isn’t good, just like tropes aren’t automatically bad but the snoke death added stakes to the events.
Luke’s character “development” happening entirely off-screen (and throwing out better character development from decades of books) makes the flashback scene completely unbelievable. kylo is no jacen
Gosh, you remember more about that movie than I do; I spent a lot of the time in that theater waiting for the plot to develop. Or, you know, character interactions to change. I felt like the movie should have been cut in half. But rather than hate on Rey being a main character, I’ll just get on with my life tyvm.
. But rather than hate on Rey being a main character
i didn’t mention her at all? There are probably problems with Rey but i don’t know what they are because everything about the story is so nonsensical. She’s a soft reboot of luke, i guess, the same way the movies were soft reboot rather than a logical progression of the pretend material conditions at the end of RoTJ. not to mention anything resembling 30 years of books exploring post-endor events.
Oh, I wasn’t referring to your problems with TLJ, I was referring to people who make hating TLJ their whole personality–you know, the ones you can allow to talk for about a minute and three different bigotry colors will shine bright. There’s “TLJ was bad,” then there’s these guys, who usually can’t stop talking about Rey.
I don’t really care about the honor of Rian Johnson, but I don’t think your points are correct.
why are there suddenly cloaking devices in star wars
Cloaking devices were introduced in Episode I
why don’t the imperials hyperjump in front of the fleeing rebels?
The tracking device makes hyperspace jumping a game of hopscotch. There’s not really a point.
why can several characters leave a chase in progress visit some planet and come back to the chase still in progress?
Yeah, this one is kinda dumb, but it’d be possible for a small ship to escape unnoticed and get out of range in order to jump to lightspeed.
the holdo maneuver breaks several in-universe rules about how hyperdrive works.
Those rules are established in the books/supplemental materials, which aren’t canon to the film series. The film-makers have no obligation to respect them. Episode 7 also breaks/rewrites the hyperspace rules.
Luke’s character “development” happening entirely off-screen (and throwing out better character development from decades of books) makes the flashback scene completely unbelievable.
None of the books are canon. It makes sense that people change over long time skips, and they did outline the rationale for his mindset changes in the flashback.
no they were introduced in a TIE Fighter expansion, and if you’re going to say there was a romulan-ass cloaking device in phantom menace i’m gonna need a wookieepedia link beacause i do not remember that shit
The tracking device makes hyperspace jumping a game of hopscotch. There’s not really a point.
instead of a dumbass chase that makes no sense you can microjump some of the ships in front of the rebels, or call in more ships from somewhere else if there’s time for the fucking b-plot.
Those rules are established in the books/supplemental materials, which aren’t canon to the film series. The film-makers have no obligation to respect them. Episode 7 also breaks/rewrites the hyperspace rules.
throwing out the canon was the first bad decision jj and the other execs made, but even without knowing or caring about anything but the movies… all the fucky things disney movies did with hyperjumps means things like the falcon’s escape from mos eisley didn’t need to happen and the blockade of naboo couldn’t have worked because the “can’t go to hyperspace in a gravity well” was thrown out. the big fights against the death stars (hell the death stars themselves) were totally pointless because you could just destroy anything big and slow moving by hyper-ramming it, etc. indefensible on both matters.
It makes sense that people change over long time skips, and they did outline the rationale for his mindset changes in the flashback.
it’s hack writing to have a change like that happen entirely off-screen, and the flashback is just luke about to murder an innocent person who hasn’t done anything wrong yet because of a vision. how the fuck does luke get to that point in 20 years of whatever happened after the battle of endor where it’s heavily implied that the rebels were going to win the war? it’s totally unearned. (Also the state of galactic politics being completely unchanged from the beginning of a new hope is stupid and terrible but that’s not rian’s fault.)
I think the hate Last Jedi receives is overblown BUT it was trash. I was semi hopeful after TFA (in hindsight it set the groundwork for a lot of the bad parts) and forgave it some of its flaws due to being the forst movie in a while and having to restart the franchise when it came to theaters but I walked out of TLJ and wanted my time back.
I think there is a lot of hate for Rey that’s actual misogyny hidden behind the legitimate criticism. But the characters writing doesn’t help that situation. I don’t think any of the other characters are written much better so the fact Rey ends up getting most of the hate boils down to her being a woman and her being the main character (I cannot even guess which of these two weighs more into that equation, which is a shame. Her being female really shouldn’t factor into this). The entire movie just felt very silly to me. It makes for good eye candy but if you think deeper about anything that could be construed as a message in that movie it just falls apart imo.
Tl;dr: I don’t think it should come as a shock that the movoe got hate, it was pretty bad all things considered, but the amount sure was shocking
Every five minutes I had to stop myself from going “What the fuck?!” Out loud in the theaters.
Like the story is nonsensical, characters go full stupid in every possible scene, there are multiple massive issues with time and character location, the plot breaks the previously established rules of the universe, character development on old and new characters is just dumped for plot convenience, Rey becomes even more of a Mary Sue than she already was. I could go on, it’s just a massive shit on the previous films.
Watching it feels like you let a freshman film student direct a plot that was written by a committee of toddlers. I don’t see how it’s a good movie let alone a good entry into the Star wars franchise.