Honestly, the only disadvantage is that you can start to feel your body breaking down.
Everything else just gets better. You're wiser, smarter, more confident, less bothered, and you have fewer fucks to give.
And honestly, I look hotter now than I did in my twenties or thirties.
If only the world didn't keep on getting worse every year.
The issue is that everyone thinks computers operate on magic, so they just ignore the idea that there might be practical limitations on doing the things that they want to do.
In reality there is no means of age verification that isn't also a form of identity verification. And if you asked people "Should everyone have to hand over their government ID to private companies in order to use the internet", you'd see much lower numbers of positive responses.
Interstellar is the sort of movie that would have done a lot better in the hands of a director like Spielberg. Nolan's dry, clinical, super grounded approach is unspeakably jarring in a movie whose ultimate thesis is that love is a kind of fundamental force. It wants to be a magic-realist fantasy, but Nolan tries to treat it like a pseudo-documentary.
See, to me this sounds like calling someone dishonest for claiming they "had their head in the clouds." Oh, what's that, your head wasn't actually a mile in the air? You god damn liar.
It's not dishonesty when everyone understands the meaning. If you present an intentional fantasy, the audience knows it's a fantasy. Everyone is in on it.
I'm expecting exactly the same thing. But we don't assume that reality conforms to our expectations. We assess. We judge. We use fact based examinations of empirical evidence
Dismissing the validity of a piece of reporting because you have a vague feeling about the source is how MAGA got where they are. We can do better than that.
Even a source like Fox News can produce good - or at least useful - reporting from time to time.
What are your specific concerns about the article?
Being aware of bias and potential concerns about accuracy is good, but it's not just some catch-all thing where you dismiss something entirely because it may be biased or because you have this broad notion that it's untrustworthy. That just leads to either a) total hypocrisy or b) being forced to dismiss everything, because everything is biased. And trust is something that you always have to test and reaffirm. Sources are trustworthy because they continue to pass those tests.
Noting the bias of the source is just step one. If you're not willing to do the rest of the steps then you're not actually contributing anything.
So, Luc Besson is, absolutely, a creep, no question about that, but I've never actually seen any believable evidence of this claim about making the film "explicitly pedo."
Yes, I'm aware of the snippet of an "early script draft" going around with a sex scene between Leon and Mathilda. But I've only ever seen that one snippet. I've never been able to find a copy of the full draft it purports to be from and I've never been able to find any evidence that said draft actually exists. None of the actors have ever talked about it, which is weird given that you'd think at least Natalie Portman would right? She's reached peak "Not having to give a fuck." I do know that what Portman has said about her time on the movie has been entirely positive. She never seemed to feel that there was any danger to her from the material, even looking back as an adult.
I'm absolutely willing to be wrong here. If there's evidence that I've missed, I'm willing to see it (almost said 'happy to see it' but obviously 'happy' wouldn't be the right word here), but as far as I can tell it's just a sensational rumour someone invented for clicks because it sounded believable enough after all the other stuff came out about Besson.
As regards what is there in the movie, well, yeah, it's supposed to be really uncomfortable. It's a story about two people who are, each in their own way, deeply vulnerable to exploitation. Exploitation is a common theme in Besson's work, which is horribly ironic really (like Gaiman it sort of feels like he was telling on himself). I'm not sure if I agree with the idea of feeling "ashamed" of liking a movie that explores serious themes in a serious way. The world is full of terrible things and we need art that explores that effectively. For all the creator's flaws, Leon The Professional is a very effective and well crafted story.
Modern routers have a feature that's typically known as "hairpin NAT" or "NAT loopback". This means that if the DNS lookup resolves to the router's public IP, it routes the packet internally instead of passing it out to the internet. So for your subdomains all of the traffic should stay local. Typically this feature is enabled by default, but you may want to check just to be sure.
The thing about Waterworld is that it's a) a lot of fun, and b) absolutely terrible, but it's only terrible in the way that most movies of that time were terrible. It has this outsized reputation for being bad which is mostly down to the fact that it lost a lot of money (because it was extremely expensive to shoot and audiences immediately clocked it as being a Mad Max rip off with no new ideas to bring to the table). It's no more awful than any other summer action blockbuster of its time, and it has plenty of fun moments in amongst all the usual trash.
The subject matter is that war fucking sucks and we shouldn't do it. Are you saying you find that position problematic?
Ashamed? None. I refuse to be ashamed of loving dumb trash. A couple of days ago I introduced my wife to A Knights Tale. She enjoyed it immensely and said it was one of the stupidest movies she's ever seen.
If you love something, there's always a good reason why, even if that good reason is buried under a mountain of flaws.
Yesssssssss. Legion was incredible. One of my favorite shows of all time.
"Love won't save us. Love is what we have to save."
Seconding The Bear. That show is just amazing.
You mean the "AI boom" that's already in the process of becoming an AI crash? That AI boom?
What's one highly extolled piece of media that you absolutely cannot stand in any way shape or form.
OK, so, the most important thing to understand about the Dark Forest hypothesis is that Cixin Liu is not necessarily making a serious argument for it as a realistic model of how the universe works. The novels are works of fiction, and while I will trash Cixin's prose to the ends of the Earth (it is dire, and absolutely none of my complaints have anything to do with translation; the shift from Chinese to English didn't magically replace dialogue and character action with endless tracts of dry narration, that's just how he writes, and it's bad), I think his grasp of themes is actually really, really good. I've often commented that I would love to see Liu take all of his ideas and collaborate with a better writer on putting them into text.
In the case of Remembrance of Earth's Past, the core themes of the series as a whole are all about altruism and cooperation, and the Dark Forest Hypothesis exists as a juxtaposition and foil to those ideas. He's not necessarily advocating for it, it just works for what his story is trying to say about the human condition. The Dark Forest is, in a sense, the ultimate villain of the series.
I also want to note that while earlier versions of the theory existed, there are subtle but important differences in how they're expressed. Hawking et al are/were proponents of the idea that aliens may be hiding, but The Dark Forest specifically presents the argument that no only is everyone hiding from Space Hitler, but that everyone is Space Hitler, as non-genocidal civilizations are inevitably wiped out. That's what I take issue with.
As for why I think the theory is - removed from it's context as a dark backdrop against which to write a story of hope - a crock of shit...
Well, OK, I don't think it's a crock of shit in the sense that it's utterly impossible. But it's presented, especially by fans, as a kind of inevitable logical assertion, a fait-a-complit that cannot be challenged because it's so utterly self-evident. This is nonsense. While the theory is technically possible, all of our available evidence suggests that it's extremely unlikely.
First, at a really basic level, 100% of our observations of intelligent species refute it. Humans constantly and enthusiastically blast our position into space, and the apparently irrefutable logic of the Dark Forest hypothesis hasn't slowed our enthusiasm for doing so by one iota.
"But humans are an outlier!"
Based on what evidence? We have zero empirical observations to base that claim on. And no, I'm not claiming that one (1) species constitutes a statistically significant observation for my argument; rather I'm pointing to the fact that our empirical observations arguing for dark forest are zero (0), and our empirical observations against are > 0, and at some point proponents of the theory kind of have to deal with that fact. It's just as absurd to claim that humans are an outlier as it is to claim that every species in the universe must inherently be like us.
What we do know that is all life on Earth with any degree of intelligence demonstrates curiosity. Curiosity is, as best we can tell, an essential component of applied intelligence. An incurious species will never smash a stick with a rock and learn the concept of a hammer. Curiosity compels us to want to learn about the unknown. Liu presents this idea that inter-species cooperation will always be an unbridgeable gap because truly alien creatures from truly alien environments will never be able to comprehend each other's goals and motivations, and that's frankly ludicrous. The drive to understand the unknown is what made the first ape pick up a burning stick and realise it could keep their tribe warm.
(Am I arguing that Project Hail Mary is basically a sufficient revocation of the Dark Forest Hypothesis entirely on its own? Broadly, yes.)
Further to the lack of evidence is the lack of any observable evidence of the ongoing galactic genocide that we are apparently endlessly surrounded by. We know when stars should die - we're actually pretty good at it - so spotting when stars are being blown up by civilisation destroying weaponry wouldn't be that hard.
Then we get to the fundamental flaws in the game theory. Liu proposes a forest full of hunters with rifles shooting each other from the darkness, but never once contemplates what happens if the hunter you fire at has a friend. Given the nature of the weaponry employed in the story, which is never shown to be capable of destroying more than one star system at a time, that friend doesn't even have to be an allied civilisation, it can just be an extra-solar colony. The entire logic of the "Always strike first" conclusion falls apart at this point. You detect a star system that contains a nascent alien civilisation, you blow it up with a photoid. Turns out you detected one of that species first extra-solar colonies, and their homeworld immediately conceals itself, builds photoids, finds you and kills you. Hard to do, but entirely worth the effort now that you've made it essential to their survival.
The hunters gun reveals him when he fires, and why shouldn't it? There's no reason to believe that methods of interstellar destruction are entirely undetectable to observers. Logically, opening fire is a terrible decision; you have declared to everyone around you that you operate on a first strike principle, making yourself an immediate target for destruction, potentially by a group of altruistic civilisations who will immediately choose to cooperate against you. It's really not hard to formulate the logic of the dark forest in such a way that, rather than only paranoid, genocidal civilisations surviving, it is the exact opposite; that cooperators have an inherent advantage that would lead to only cooperators surviving. The theory as presented just relies on assuming that all of its suppositions are correct while ignoring alternative possibilities.
The argument the theory presents against the likelihood of cooperation is the notion that we exist in a universe of finite resources, but increasingly our observations of the universe show that there is a LOT more matter than there is life, and at a certain level of technology all matter is usable resources. Basically once we can start printing carbon atoms we're close enough to Star Trek replicators as makes no odds. Carbon is literally the fourth most abundant element in the universe. The Trisolarans can turn protons into multidimensional computers but they can't fabricate food from the carbon in asteroids? That is an absolutely demented proposal. In the first Culture novel Ian Banks lays out how the Culture is basically undefeatable in conventional warfare because they've completely transcended the need for territory. Planets don't matter when you can build spaceships the size of continents. The idea that advanced space-faring civilisations would be coming to blows over resources beggars belief. The Trisolarans have already demonstrated the technology required to just become a completely space-faring civilization.
Hell, if the entire driver of a lack of cooperation is scarcity of resources, why the fuck would we be blowing up each other's star systems with all those valuable life-supporting planets? If the existence of advanced life is somehow utterly dependent on life-supporting planets in a way that is fundamentally unsolvable, you'd be insane to go around destroying them.
None of this is fundamentally dispositive to the theory. That's not what I'm trying to claim. If it has a 0.0001% chance of being true then it's still plausible. My point is simply that in order for it to be meaningful there are so many specific assumptions that would first have to be proven, and which, frankly, fly in the face of what available evidence we have. Essentially, we would have to be entirely wrong in many of our current observations of the state of the universe. You might as well assert that the moon is actually made of cheese, it's just buried deep beneath all the bits we've studied. It's a theory that seems entirely logical, as long as you ignore the vast majority of what we know about the universe.
And I do want to reiterate what I said at the top; the Dark Forest Hypothesis is almost certainly a bad theory because it's not meant to stand up as a theory. It's more than likely just meant to be a piece of sufficiently plausible sci-fi technobabble - just like warp drive - that it can support what the story is trying to say, not an actual theory that stands up to scrutiny. I just dislike that a) it really does rely on a LOT of bad assumptions, to the point where I was questioning it throughout the story, and b) people act like it is some kind of irrefutable masterstroke of game theory.
It's aged in all the ways that older shows often do, but I think it's still held up far better than most television of its era.
What's one highly extolled piece of media that you absolutely cannot stand in any way shape or form.
Fair. If we're being pedantic though, come on dude, they had wood in Jerusalem. Like, a lot of it. There are contemporaneous depictions of siege towers being used in the first siege of Jerusalem.
You're already familiar with sci-fi of this era, so you'll know to expect it to find it's stride after season 1. Luckily in Farscape's case this happens pretty quickly, especially when Scorpius shows up and proceeds to absolutely fucking devour every scene they put him in. All time great sci-fi villain.
What's one highly extolled piece of media that you absolutely cannot stand in any way shape or form.
See, those are all really interesting and meaningful criticisms, and for the life of me I cannot understand why you didn't lead with that instead of trying to nitpick how they got access to wood in a region known as the fertile crescent :-P
Take a walk. Even if it's just on a treadmill. Even if it's just up and down the stairs a few times. There are empirical studies on this; the physical act of walking energizes your brain. Doesn't have to be outside, doesn't have to be going anywhere. Just walk. Five to ten minutes, put a podcast on or something. Do that every hour or two.