As I have gotten more and more exhausted with modern social media, I have contemplated building my own simple website (think neocities), but have been hesitant to put much of myself out as I do not want to feed the AI slop machines.
Nepenthes is encouraging since I could see it being able to protect text in a way “glazing” (ie Nightshade) cannot.
Hopefully AI companies cannot sidestep this as easily as ROBOTS.txt…
As disappointed as I am with the name Switch 2 being so plain and ordinary versus their previous sequel consoles (Super NES, Gameboy Advance, Wii U); with the console being so similar to the Switch (1), I think they’d have another Wii U situation on their hands if they did have a more clever name.
If someone told me this was a mid-cycle refresh, I’d probably believe them; but maybe the official launch reveals will change my mind…
I wish I could say I was surprised to see Disney pulling such a transphobic and cowardly move, but it’s certainly not the first time they’ve done it.
I hope negative backlash can effect some change within Disney, but seeing as they didn’t learn their lesson with Moon Girl, I wouldn’t hold my breath…
I’ve seen some interesting takes on this elsewhere as well. If Twitter is making the legal argument that all the accounts belong to them explicitly, would that make them responsible for all the content they host as well?
They basically get away with all the hate speech and copyright infringement because they are considered a “safe harbor,” not the owners of the content themselves; but if they’re the owner of the content, the safe harbor status might not apply…
While the fact that Twitter is run by a flagrant right-wing fascist who would do anything to help other major right-wing fascists is nothing new, I did think this was an interesting look at the state of social media.
The idea that you can never own your own account (and likely, by extension, anything you post on said account) really drives home the point that the Internet as it is now is basically wholly owned by a handful of corporations.
I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to reach the point of everyone making their own silly little sites again. It seems like social media is now required to drive views, so the artists who need views for sales will always need to be on social media.
Luckily, decentralized social media is on the rise. Lemmy, while still comparatively small, has a fairly active user base; and while Mastodon has not (and likely will not) ever be mainstream, even Bluesky is technically decentralized as well (I think).
Having said all that, I would very much like to see people making their own sites just for things they enjoy. It’s surprisingly not that hard to do as long as you don’t need it very polished.
That is really the term. Of course, every time a new wave of users join, they always say they’ll never call them “skeets,” but they usually change their mind in time.
In my personal opinion, I actually really appreciate them being called “skeets.” It kind of serves as a reminder that they are not to be taken seriously. I also appreciate that calling them “skeets” will help deter large corporations from joining for some time. (What company wants to be associated with a social media site where the posts are a tongue-in-cheek reference to ejaculate?)
I think (/hope) trolls are going to have a pretty hard time gaining traction on Bluesky. As you’ve mentioned, the block lists are quite effective; but also the lack of algorithm helps too. No matter how many likes/reskeets an offensive skeet gets, I will never see it unless someone I follow specifically reskeets it themselves.
With this in mind, most people seeing the trolls’ posts will likely only be the trolls themselves. Of course they can hop into the comments of a popular skeet; but once they are blocked by the original poster, their skeet becomes removed for everybody.
From what I can tell, the enhanced moderation tools combined with the followed-only feed should make being a troll on Bluesky much harder…
It seems like Twitter may have passed the thermocline and now seems to be hemorrhaging left leaning users.
What I found interesting about this article was how the right leaning users are likely to follow them because they need the left leaning users for engagement. I suppose on some level it’s common sense. Truth Social and Gab never took off for a reason; but it’s still interesting to think about.
That stuck out to me as well. Disney probably made 50k USD in the time it took me to write this comment. This feels more like sending a message than trying to avoid a costly payout.
I’m sure they want to discourage lawsuits, but I’m worried they did this just to try to set a precedent on EULAs being the end-all-be-all.
I just hope they get enough bad publicity from this move to cost them more than the payout would have.
The fact that Disney is asserting that whether a EULA has been read is irrelevant and that a EULA signed five years prior for an unrelated use is still enforceable feels more than insidious.
I hope Disney’s claim gets thrown out because I worry about the precedent this could set for EULAs going forward.
I’m definitely a little late to the party to comment on this thread, but it blows my mind that any organization would pick a flight with SAG-AFTRA at this point (or the WGA, though that’s not relevant to THIS issue).
SAG has already proven they will hold out pretty much indefinitely and the effects of the joint SAG/WGA strike are still being felt in Hollywood now.
Is the siren song of AI so alluring that companies are willing to die on this hill? At its peak hype, I could see executives salivating at the potential savings; but my understanding is there has been pretty substantial pushback to projects made with AI (or tech with AI in it). I can’t imagine that these large studios think their potential savings would outweigh the potential losses in sales; but I guess that’s why I’ll never be a Fortune 500 CEO…
I wish SAG-AFTRA nothing but the best in their endeavor for protections against AI.
Ever since I watched RedLetterMedia’s “F*ck You, It’s January” (YouTube | Piped) I cannot stop noticing how studios will drop movies they don’t have faith in at the very start of the year.
To date, based off my very detailed research of quickly scrolling through Wikipedia, Marvel has only released two MCU movies in February: Black Panther, and Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania.
With the numerous data-set of two points, it seems like Marvel has two potential reasons for not having faith in a movie:
You could make the case that they dropped Black Panther in February because it is Black History Month, but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was released in November…
With all this said, now, I am curious in their lack of faith in the new Captain America movie. I’ve already mentioned the two reasons, I would expect them to not have faith in it, but there is a third reason as well:
Whatever their reason for releasing Captain America: New World Order in February is, I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.
It feels like a tale as old as time, that a company gets bought by another and immediately selling off assets; and I would very much like to stop hearing it.
While sometimes spending does need to be cut, cutting assets immediately after an acquisition usually does not maintain the company’s health in the long term.
On another note, while I think Paramount/ Skydance is right that the current streaming environment is not amiable to the customer; I find it amusing this is just creating “Cable 2.” I know each studio wants to keep all the money for themselves, but it feels ridiculous they are pretending “Cable 2” would be better for customers than a music streaming model, where any streamer can provide any content
I can’t say I’m surprised to see Gamepass get a price hike; it always seemed like it was in the loss leader stage to try to grow market share.
I wonder what the reasoning was to institute the hike now, though, since I’m not sure how strong their market share actually is on it.
My theory is that either:
My understanding is they are still releasing new Series S models, which are basically just Gamepass machines; so I would expect they are not happy with their current market share (though corporations literally never are), which makes me think it’s the former option, not the latter.
All that being said, I wonder how much the price can increase before the value proposition of Gamepass is moot. Right now 20 USD a month doesn’t sound bad as long as you’re playing at least one new game a month, but I wonder how much more room there is in the price before the number of games you would need to play becomes unreasonable.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the Gamepass model since I like owning my games physically (it’s the main reason I prefer console to PC), so I don’t have much of a horse in this race; but I will be interested to see what becomes of Gamepass in the long term.
While I am tired of comedy sequels coming out decades too late, I am cautiously optimistic about Shrek.
Given its animated nature and fantasy setting, there isn’t a lot of pressure to explain why the characters are all decades older. You can just set it right after the last one, which I think avoids a pitfall a lot of late sequels fall into.
Additionally, in my opinion, Shrek actually has a pretty strong track record. I mostly rewatch the first two, but the fourth and Puss in Boots 2 (if you count that as a Shrek movie) are both really good also. (I can’t comment on the first Puss in Boots movie since I never saw it, and we don’t need to discuss Shrek 3…)
I think it COULD also be fun to see Shrek lampoon more of modern Disney, since a lot has changed for them since the early 2000s; but it feels like Shrek has moved further and further from that style of comedy and have moved more into irreverently twisting broader fairy tales instead, so that doesn’t feel very likely to happen, unfortunately.
Seeing as how the movie is years away, I think it is too soon to be making claims in either direction for the movie’s quality; all I can decisively say is I really hope it doesn’t disappoint.
At this point, I’ve lost count of the number of times Elon should have been let go. I recall him recently saying that dosing himself with cat tranquilizers was cool and a good business decision actually.
That’s not even getting into turning Twitter into a Nazi bar (and throwing out its extremely valuable branding) or pushing for the cybertruck that cuts its passengers, looks like a dumpster, and corrodes if you look at it funny.
The fact any board of directors considers this man employable at all is mind boggling to me.
Honestly, that’s my main hope as well; that all the charging team talent will disperse across the market and help other chargers spread as well. The article mentioned Tesla having 60% of the fast charger market, so hopefully we will see other companies fill the gap.
My concern is that if no companies pick up the ball Tesla just dropped (or more accurately angrily chucked over the fence), that this could set the EV charging network back significantly; which would definitely be a problem for mass adoption of EVs.
When this news dropped a little while ago. I saw a lot of speculation that basically Elon got mad that a woman said he was wrong and laid off possibly Tesla’s biggest asset in a tantrum.
Honestly, at this point, the most surprising part of this situation is how unsurprised I am at that being exactly what happened.
Hopefully, this will not set back a widespread EV charging network (Tesla or otherwise) too much; but it definitely sounds like damage has been done.
I didn’t read the original Spider-Noir run, so I can’t comment in that regard, but I don’t see why live action would be a problem. Noires were really big in the 40s and they were all live-action. As long as the direction leans into that aesthetic, I think it could feel even more noire than the animated version.
I don’t have a full picture idea yet, but I would probably upload art/ projects/ WIPs. I also was considering adding writings, but I’m not sure if there would be enough there to have a section for writings.
I definitely don’t have as much to share as others, but I would like to see the Internet become a less centralized space.
An author I follow on Bluesky has been talking about neocities a lot and it seems pretty silly and fun. You probably need to be signed in to view this, but you can see her talk about the process here.