Almost all of my memory of the original Avatar:

I went to see it with my girlfriend at the time, and she kept reaching into our bag of popcorn, getting engrossed in the movie and just leaving her hand in there, so if I wanted popcorn I’d scritch at her wrist with my fingertips.

There’s a point in the movie where it does this big heavy fade to black. It’s near or beyond the midpoint of the film, and someone in the theater said “Act two.” and half the audience cracked up.

Jake Sooolly.

People talk about the spectacular CG effects, I really only remember one scene, Native Chick takes Jake Sooolly for a walk in the woods at night and everything’s glowing. That scene was striking. Most of the rest of the movie is stored in my brain as visual sludge.

I also remember the news talking about people being upset that they couldn’t be tall sexy blue cat people.

They know they don’t get a piece of the pie.

It’s just a jug of sodium laurel sulfate. Because cleaning a man is mainly a degreasing operation.

Every time I pet my cat, a random stranger somewhere in the world dies. There’s 8 billion people in the world, at least a few hundred are born and die every minute.

Fundamentals of Instruction.

That would require a number of teachers that actually understand or care about FoI which we don’t have.

I have a Ryzen 7700X, a Radeon 7900GRE and 32GB of DDR5. I’m gaming at 1440p in Unreal 5 games at reasonable framerates.

It’s getting to the point that…I think I have enough. I don’t think I’ll ever see another jump in capability like I used to. I remember when the N64 could do things the SNES couldn’t. By the PS3 era, things were basically good enough. What else is there to want out of a gaming PC?

Idiocrat

Look, I’d like to see that little shit do better.

Homestaw Wunnew.

No lemons, on melon.

Too bad I hid a boot.

Lisa Bonet ate no basil.

War sir is raw.

Was it a car, or a cat I saw?

LLMs like Gemini have basically the exact same UI form factor as the Starship Enterprise’s computer. All you need is that little tweedle “I’m listening” prompt and a Text-To-Majel-Barrett library. Thing is, on the Enterprise, it always correctly worked. If you asked it for a statement of fact you’d get a quote out of a database. Gemini will just make shit up that sounds plausible.

The all-new Ikea Cjardboord.

Which is why I was fine with Google’s usual take, there’s a switch in the options you have to turn off to allow installing software from outside the Play store. Keeps the normies on the rails, anyone who pushes the “I’ll take my chances” button is assuming personal responsibility.

Meanwhile: spoofing telephone numbers. We don’t have the same problem with, say, email, do we? We basically need to tear out the telephone system and replace it with something that works in the modern era, quit barely emulating the form factor of a century old system that basically doesn’t exist anymore.

You can’t say the phone companies should block calls from unverified numbers while at the same time saying Google shouldn’t block download of unverified apps.

Sure you can. There’s a difference: Whether or not the owner of the handset requested the traffic.

A random APK from F-Droid isn’t going to suddenly demand my attention while my phone is sitting on my desk with the screen off. An Indian man threatening to jail me if I don’t mail him Amazon gift cards has and will again.

You’re not going to find an Obama Hope edition firearm out there.

What’s Merrell?

I once named the disease “The Disease From Madagascar” and it started in Madagascar.

I also killed the world with a bacteria called Red Ass.

Ugh, my dumbass boomer father.

Okay. 1. My father goes by his middle name. Let’s pretend his name is Christopher James Smith. He introduces himself as Jim. For my entire life, it’s been easy to screen calls for him because “Hello, may I speak to…Christopher Smith please?” That’s spam. “Hey is Jim there?” That’s someone who knows him.

2. The dumbass answer the phone “Hello, this is Jim?”

If I was in charge, all phones would be required to have a built-in taser. The recipient of a call should have a button they can press to tase the caller. This taser must be strong enough to seriously injure a human, like, burn ward you never hear out of that ear again strong enough, or strong enough to set any computer that phone is attached to on fire. Capital offense to remove or disable the taser from a phone.

That would solve the problem I think.