plasma gun

One of the first “aha” design moments I ever got was the Doom plasma gun. There was a kid’s toy version of the American M-60 Light Machine gun that I had. The back half was pretty cool on its own, the typical thumper machanism to make noise, but it also had secondary triggers in the stock and a little gear that would advance a belt of soft plastic ammo. Didn’t do anything except move, but the effect was cool.

The front actually came off, and was a pretty decent quality suction-dart shooter. However, if you turned it around and used the the mating surface as the “muzzle…” BOOM! (or “ZAP” I guess… lol) Doom plasma gun, down to the exact number of ridges.

“I’m telling you Molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem I threw a Molotov cocktail and Boom! Right away, I had a different problem.”

Yup! And honestly, most illegal things you might do accidentally are not spur of the moment situations, and frankly even in an imperfect system you’re unlikely to get the book thrown at you right away. There are abuses, of course, and stamping them out is an absolutely laudable goal, but if you want to set up a business, or think you’ve discovered a novel financial instrument, or (hypothetically of course) wanted to train an LLM algorithm on the totality of an absolutely vast corpus of information without the rights-holders’ consent, then if you can’t be arsed to get legal clarity in advance I have less sympathy for you and you’ve earned your consequences.

I believe it’s a dedicated parking garage, which admittedly only helps a little.

Yup, but it also might be lightly photoshopped. The Street View has a window right where the portajohn is sitting that looks pretty permanent, but this pic or the street view could be old.

Ain’t no torque on a Dremel. Gotta find the hammer drill.

Trump is a resident of Florida, and the BBC does business in Florida via the website, BBCNews, Britbox licensing, etc. The complaint even talks about gray-market VPN viewing of iPlayer. Jurisdiction isn’t really the issue. Establishing any actual harm at all will be the issue, to say nothing of “billions” of dollars worth of it from some splicing that is honestly editorial shading at worst. He is super pissed off in that speech, issues way more shaded threats than calls to peaceful actions, and pardoned the people who killed or injured multiple Capitol Police. Proving that the 10 or twenty people in Florida who actually saw the thing is worth anything to a plaintiff who won the fucking election is going to be an incredibly tall order for any half-way conscientious judge or jury.

It’s typical Trump “lawfare,” complete with breathless nonsense adjectives in the complaint to make the diaper baby anger-happy when he reads it. Only the sheer awfulness and expense of American litigation makes it even conceivable that the BBC will eventually settle, and if they do it will probably be right before discovery after they exhaust any motions to dismiss and other procedural tactics.

There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

YMMV, which I guesses is a huge part of the issue. My company is pushing AI everything, and I can hear the people running them phrasing things specifically for the assistant. Also, my meetings are not particularly technical and are full of corporate bullshit that I’m sure is all through the training set. It works… fine.

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.

There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”

AI does a perfectly fine job summarizing my boring work meetings, but the entire point of those is to be straightforward and unambiguous and in line with previous similar meetings. You cannot trust generative AI to interpret anything with even a modicum of subtlety or novelty. At best it will give you a slop-rack of a framework you can wrestle into something mediocre but basically usable for a specific purpose.

But a twenty-percent efficiency upgrade with a low ceiling on its quality is not what they’re all selling. AI is real, it’s here to stay, but good god I can’t wait for the bubble to pop so LLMs can settle into the limited use cases where they add value.

And both are delicious.

Thank you. That looks plausible and should keep the mental wolves at bay, LOL.

Okay, somebody here has to know of have better image searching skills than I do. What is the Visor prop? It’s clearly not a spray-painted hair clip like (the inspiration for) Geordi’s, but it doesn’t look bespoke, more like some sort of removable support rib from… something. Grrr.

I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.

I think there’s something about the parasitic nature of it, taking over an otherwise healthy ear of corn. We tend to think of our edible fungi as growing out of the dirt like a plant, or a fallen tree, or at worst sort of calmy sitting on top of whatever it is using for its own food. THe fact that this has invaded kernels makes them very bad corn kernels and triggers something instinctive. Corn smut is one of those “the first person to try this was in a bad spot” kind of foods.

Legitimate? Basically none. Illegitimate? First, lazily fixing a fuckup on putting up strings of Christmas lights where you can’t daisy chain them properly, with bonus points for the likeliehood of needing to break off the grounding pin. Second, injecting power from a generator into a single circuit of your house if the power is out.

In one sense, you could argue conductors are conductors and if you think through every eventuality you can mitigate risk, but on the other, if you find you’re in a situation where one of these seems useful, you are not the type of person thinks through every eventuality.

That’s a pretty slimy technicality.

Cue the James Joyce letters in 3… 2… 1… ({}).

I have it on good authority that the Starbucks protein coffee gives you the double-shits.