JD Vance, 40, has invited a considerable amount more media attention and scrutiny than many of his predecessors.

Eh, I don't know about all of that. Seems like he is struggling to not be ignored, with Musk clearly playing a bigger role in this administration than Vance. Granted, when he manages to break through and get some media attention, it is because of things like the Signal leak, or him trying to bully the Ukrainian President... or getting sent to Greenland for one of the stupider things Trump has going on.

I believe that he is lonely. And I'll believe that he is depressed, having hitched his wagon to Trump, someone who encouraged his former VP to be killed by a mob. Turning against Trump is not an option, and not part of his plan anyways. So, he has to run off to Greenland as if he is going to convince them to sell their country to Trump.

But I don't buy that he is being crushed under intense media scrutiny. Trump said before the election that he thought the VP role was mostly pointless. Musk has been more present during press conferences and even international meetings. Vance has basically no expectations of him beyond being a tie-breaking vote, which there is little need for currently.

I hate that there are 2 or 3 pieces of music that get added to every short video these days.

I don't know about that. They needed help, she helped, and they rewarded her with a 100% return on investment.

Then they no longer needed help. It would be odd, once the series became a huge hit, for them to feel obligated 2, 3, 4, 5 movies in to give her a huge cut after already paying her back double.

It’s nice to see that the world’s richest person can be denied something.

I’m about as anti-Trump as they come, but as the last election was approaching, I actually was more interested in seeing Musk fail than seeing Trump lose. Musk had just ripped off the mask and was so blatantly partisan. He put all of his chips on Trump, left no room for any doubt. And he made it happen.

He tried it again here. Walking around in a cheese hat while trying to buy votes by spending millions. Pitching it as an extremely crucial vote for our country’s future… Ironically I somewhat agree on that point. He tried his playbook and it failed. He does not get everything he wants.

Them selling it for $10 million more than what they would have gotten in tax breaks (and $20 million less than it cost to produce) can't possibly be part of some master-mind plan by them. They tried selling it for $80 million previously and it did not work out.

I'll bet that some people over at WB had hoped that how viral this went would boost their sale price, or make it a big enough hit to release in theaters. And I'm sure they did some audience testing after everyone started talking about it, but apparently were still left uneasy about it. Maybe they saw Morbius bomb twice in a row and decided it was just not worth the risk.

Am I a little crazy to think that $50 million for the worldwide distribution rights is a bargain? Just seems like with the amount of attention this one has gotten, it should not be all that hard to make the money back. Even Morbius made $167 million in theaters.

To market it would be expensive, but they've gotten a little of that already for free.

<shrug>

Who knows. Obviously big studios are capable of making mistakes. Although, to be honest, I also assume that they must have a bunch of convincing data telling them that the chance of this making them more at the theaters than the tax write-off is low.

I'll be interested to check back in on this one. Part of me expects it to make 3x that price-tag back in theaters. But another part of me says that WB must have done enough audience testing to have an idea of how well it will be received, and maybe even with this one having gone viral, it making more than $50 million is far from a sure thing.

It is refreshing to see a still functional judicial system. But I still have some PTSD from Trump, so part of me expects her to just ignore the ban and run anyways. Hopefully they have things together well enough over there that that's not a possibility.

The Kremlin slammed the court's ruling, alleging that it was another indication that democracy was under threat in Europe.

Lol. The Kremlin warning about other democracies being under threat. I wonder just how many political threats to Putin have been murdered in the last 10 years.

It’s kind of wild how much of a pushover Trump is proving to be. I thought he’d have pushed back a bit by now.

Ironically, that is one of the few things he HAS been right about.

I think the irony here is that the positions are reversed. Trump is clearly the submissive one. Musk is running around completely unchecked. And when he sees the Tesla image taking a big hit, he instructs Trump to literally become a car salesman, reading ad-copy at the White House. Musk swooped in with his billions, won over the far right with his X changes, and quite possibly won the election for Trump.

Musk sucks, Trump sucks. But I don't think their relationship is Musk down on his knees begging for help. And Musk doing things like wearing that stupid hat are the same tricks that all of Trump's handlers learn over time. Stroke Trump's ego, convince him that you are unwaveringly loyal, and he will reward it.

The article mentions using a thin hydrophobic coating to prevent it from breaking down early. Presumably that hydrophobic coating is better for the ocean than the plastic it is helping to replace. Then when you are done with it, scratching away the coating in one spot is enough to let the salt water in and dissolve the whole container.

Obviously, that would make these semi-disposable. No holding onto your container for 10 years. Maybe these would be cycled out every year or so. Or more often, since you are trying to ditch them before they just dissolve overnight in your fridge.

If they end up being cheap to produce, I could see them still being a good thing. Planned obsolesce is good for business, and maybe your inner layer could e a different color form the outer hydrophobic layer. Once you start seeing some of that inner coloring, you know it is time to replace it, or risk putting something too salty in it.

Yeah. You just need one or two time slips and the rest kind of falls apart.

Although, it does still basically work out. Everyone later in the list is going to try to be ready for their time window, like Fran who has just 5 minutes to get out the door. If they don't get to Fran's until 8:50, she'll probably be standing outside, with her bags, looking at her watch.

It's kind of a lose/lose, to be fair.

Trump is constantly spewing out nonsense to keep people distracted. "Little too much negative press around the war planning leaks on Signal? Let's see if we can get them focused on some ominous comments around Greenland." Ignore that and you are letting Trump get away with talking like a mad king trying to expand his empire. Focus on it and the public forgets a little bit about the last crazy thing that happened.

Fair enough. The name is clearly a reference, as was the spoon-bending thing.

If a multi-billion-dollar company used a clear reference to me in one of the most popular video game series in the world, I can see how it would be really tempting to try and get some money out of them for it. £60 million seems a little high, but I suppose you aim high when the series in question is Pokémon.

Claiming that there were Nazi symbols on the character to try to make a better case for it defaming him is a bit much though.

Little wild that he held onto it for this long. That it took him 20 years to accept that he was not going to get any money out of Nintendo. And now he fully embraced it by calling it his Pokémon and bragging that must be a super rare card due to him blocking it for so long.

I'm not so sure...

Most of the country right now is upset that the app was being used in that capacity. That's not a shining endorsement, that's hundreds of millions of people getting the impression that Signal is not properly secure, was inappropriately used, and apparently does not do the best job at making it clear who is in your current conversation.

I certainly can't imagine Liberals flooding to the platform following this news. And I don't think even MAGA is thrilled about it.

In fact, I'll bet there are a lot of government agencies that are currently reviewing their use of Signal. As a messaging platform, its reputation is currently tarnished. It is associated with leaks, misuse, and incompetence.

And on top of all of that, hackers worldwide now know that top-secret military communications are happening on Signal. It is a ripe target. No doubt there has been a huge uptick in cyber-attacks. Which Signal need to defend against while trying to figure out how to distance themselves from the part of this where every headline is focused on how disgraceful/embarrassing it is that their platform was used.

Sure, a billion people know about it now that did not before, and that might turn into something positive. But all press is not good press.

I clicked through on the link about the reward and looked up Hermes Creative Awards Gold Winners for 2024. The list of "Gold Winners" that year appears to be thousands long. Even the list of Platinum winners that year is far to long for me to scroll through. Once it takes multiple seconds of warp-speed scrolling just to get through the A's, I'm going to just round it up and call it a stupidly long list. Which both of those are.

I have not reviewed the thousands of winners, or even a tiny fraction of the dozens of winning entries from AARP, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that winning this award does not mean very much. They charge $125 per entry for consideration. And they make a point of saying that entries are not compared to each other. One does not beat out other entries, they are all graded by judges and any that get a high enough grade are winners.

Seems like a marketing ploy. That site makes hundreds of thousands off of the entry fees, and the businesses get (I'm guessing) a very high chance of "winning". Then they can write an article about being honored to have won. It's a win/win.

For one short second there I questioned my cynical take on it when I saw that the winners got trophies. The trophies could be cheaply made, but sending out thousands of them does eat into your profits. But then I searched for info about their trophies and a top result clearly stated that "winners have the option to purchase a personalized trophy".

So, yeah. It is just a marketing ploy, not a real thing. Conan bring it up as an achievement would be a huge amount of valuable publicity for the award and for Luxe. Luxe could always write it into their ad copy, but it would really just be a boost for the award company. Presumably other potential advertisers who might be lured in by seeing Conan's ad winning an award, are already plugged in enough to know when an ad read goes viral.

If a member of the Trump administration, or any other ally of Putin, legitimately died from accidently falling out of a window; I'm pretty confident the FSB would go to great lengths to make it look like any other cause of death.

They don't want mixed messages being sent. Defenestration is for those who oppose Putin. A clear message that someone was assassinated at his command. It gets all muddled if people actually start falling out of windows on their own.

The bit in that article about how their phone-line operators were given bonuses based on how many customers they prevented from canceling their service is more interesting to me.

On a first pass, that seems like a somewhat reasonable thing to do, but the outcome of it is predictably bad. People on the phone doing everything they could think of to prevent a cancelation so that they can get their bonus. With it all cumulating in a blogged experience where someone was trying to cancel, and they were being aggressively gaslight to try and get them to back down. "If you really want to cancel our service, then surely you can explain why I still see some usage of it! Obviously, you still need the service, and it would be wrong of me to cancel. I demand to talk to someone who will be easier to manipulate." And then other calls from reporters trying to cancel who just got hung up on immediately.

Because... yeah. If you earn your living through not allowing people to cancel, people are going to start to go off script and take extreme measures.

Well, yeah. Same with movies. Huge, blockbuster games are things you don't want to compete with. If you release around the same time as GTA6, your game gets far less attention from the media and the players. Anyone without unlimited funds and time has to pick one to play. And every gaming news site is going to go with the headlines that attracts the most clicks, which will be articles about the biggest game.

Even other AAA publishers would be hesitant. Like with a main-series Mario game. That is big enough to compete with GTA6 for attention, and the audiences overlap a little, but not a ton. And even then, I'd expect Nintendo to shift things around to release in a month where their game is the uncontested biggest thing happening in gaming. Why fight for attention if you don't have to. And while the Mario series is huge, GTA 6 is a sequel to a game that released over a decade ago. There's a lot more hype built up around it.

And the same goes in both directions. If Valve announced that Half-Life 3 was coming out, I would expect Rockstar to try to avoid it. They have built up so much hype around this game, why let it share the spotlight with a game that has even more hype.

I kind of want to come up with another game in the list that Half-Life 3 would be moved to avoid, but that might be the peak.

The only thing it would not overshadow is Half-Life 3. I would expect Rockstar to start shifting their release schedule around if that was on the horizon. Otherwise, GTA6 has more hype/history behind than pretty much any other new game could.

Edit: Huh... I don't really care about the downvotes, but is what I said controversial? I find it kind of fascinating that several people read that and disagree with it enough to downvote it. GTA6 has been anticipated for over a decade. The only other mainstream, extremely popular series that I can think of that is currently on pause for longer is Half-Life, which has not had a main series release for around 2 decades.

It's on their sub now, at least. So that's something. One of the articles about it even has almost as many comments as their thread about the Snow White movie.

The number of upvotes on the comments says to me that a lot of people came in form other subs to vote, but for now, if it dominating the conversation over there, and all the top comments recognize that it was a big oppsie to chat about war plans in Signals, where a random reporter had been added to the chat.

Tomorrow maybe they will learn how Trump excuses this and get in line behind whatever that is. Maybe it gets pinned to just the guy who added the reporter and they decide they are okay with that. But at least today, we see that their initial reactions are sane.

It might actually be a tough one for Trump to shrug off. I'm guessing we'll see it all pinned on one individual. Probably the guy that added the reporter. Although all of them should be fired. If you talk like that on an insecure messaging app without seeing who it is you are talking to, you are not fit for the job.

Yep. Someone speaking/writing in Russian (basically, just existing in Russia) is half way to committing crime. Could detain anyone to then find out if they are a "foreign agent". And they can certainly get away with calling anyone a suspected foreign agent.

I figured it was that and/or just another crime for someone who you were already going to arrest to be guilty of. Like when someone commits murder with a gun, they are also charged with possession of the gun. Any "foreign agent" you find is guaranteed at this point to be breaking the law, you don't even have to plant evidence. Granted, the article seems to say that they can't engage in "educational activities" in the Russian language. So, in theory, it might not be as simple as placing an order at "Tasty Period" in Russian, but I'm sure that spreading ideas or communicating to groups of people could easily be considered you trying to educate.

If our ability to edit genes, and grow artificial muscles/organs, were to improve dramatically, it is not at all hard to imagine robots with "flesh-like" components having distinct advantages.

Billions (trillions?) are currently being spent all over the world trying to get close to a computer that can learn as well as a human brain can. When a robot shows a fraction of our ability to balance or bend as we can, it is big news. And our bodies can heal themselves by consuming but organic matter and converting it into what is needed. Billions of years of evolution is nothing to scoff at.

Giving robots actual flesh may serve no purpose other than making them more comforting to humans, but fully replicating all of the benefits of being organic would require extremely advanced science. Which, will end up looking organic even if it is not. Swarms of nanobots to repair damage, neural networks for intelligence, the ability to replenish itself by consuming renewable resources in its environment.

If you look through nature and were able to mix and match as you like, some of what you'd get would be pretty wild. Shrimp that can punch with an acceleration of a .22 caliber bullet. Insects that can lift 1,000x their body weight, aquatic animals that can sense (hear/smell/feel) certain things from hundreds of miles away, organisms that are essentially immortal.

Some of those things we can already replicate (others we can not), but it is expensive to do so, and the result is a delicate piece of machinery with a single purpose, that requires a team of experts to maintain it.

So, we'll see. It all depends on how quickly different branches of science progress. Since we are (understandably) a little squeamish on the idea of creating artificial lifeforms and tweaking genes, robots just do their best to mimic what nature has already produced. Maybe we'll get good enough at that for there to no longer be any advantages of being organic.

Even if you set aside your feelings about trans people, good, bad, or neutral. It is still really fucking strange for Musk to be picking this kind of fight with one of his kids.

It gives them a platform that they would not otherwise. Saying “my son is dead” gives her an opportunity for a response that will get millions of views. And it really highlights how Musk has just given up on his own child.

Musk will only attract the most bigoted people with that, ones that would cast out their own children. And even a bunch of them must feel a little off with this kid being called dead who is very clearly alive.

The “compassionate” bigoted approach would be to express love for your child who you think has simply lost their way. What Musk is doing instead is so unhinged.

Im guessing that the Joey character pretty much had to change.

They spent 10 seasons writing for Joey, they ran out of ideas for him. He was already heavily Flanderized by then end.

And if you are going to become the solo lead, you typically have to do things like drive a will they, won’t they sub-plot.

I’ve never seen it, but I’m assuming that’s what happens, because that’s one of the things those types of sitcoms always have. It’s not a very “Joey” thing to do, but Joey as written in Friends never needed to do that… until they ran out of ideas and wrote the  him and Rachel arc.