I love this movie so much it's _unreal_. What an experience, every single time.
And each time I see an article like this, I simply marvel at the immense love for art and life it has. What an incredibly talented crew, what product of mastery and care.
Valerian missed the mark; I'm sure it's got great designs (although I also believe it's mostly CGI), but the story of the movie is disjointed (which is a risk when trying to merge multiple storylines into one) and the actors are lifeless.
I've grown to like Valerian over rewatches, but unfortunately it suffers from Besson being a massive Valerian fanboy and trying to stuff everything he possibly could into it... I think he'd have done far better if he'd gotten a more limited budget, or had to produce three of them for the cost of the one he did...
I know, hence why I think he should have gotten a smaller budget so that he was forced to try to contain himself to one story. Then maybe it'd have done well enough for a sequel as well... It feels like he got into it thinking he had this one shot so he better see how many things he could put in it, and as a result ensured he got only one shot...
The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are widely considered to share a thematic and stylistic universe, with similar aesthetic influences. There are shared elements (ha!) and aesthetics, with Valerian even featuring a shop called "Korbens" as an easter egg to The Fifth Element.
Unfortunately the movie doesn't do it for me, the 90s were a better time.
Once CGI became good storytelling and creativity took a backseat in Hollywood.
It was a fun film, but Chris Tucker broke the pacing too many times for a general audience. Even now on rottentomatoes his role still distracts focus from the character arcs.
I cannot disagree enough. Chris Tucker's Ruby is just what this film needs. With everybody else wearing their "this is serious" face, Ruby being Ruby is a great bit of levity that really adds to this film.
What made the plot unique was Korben and Zorg never actually directly met one another in their on-screen struggles. Most never notice such details as a traditional Bouffon character often blinds viewers to subtly, and thus some lose the story arc in the chaos. It is just a poor production gamble to place Rudy, Jar Jar Binks, or most Jim Carrey characters in a genre outside absurdist slapstick comedy.
I think the film would have been better (though perhaps less successful) if Besson had toned down the occasionally exaggerated tomfoolery, like Chris Tucker's character, or the spaceship Evil (the orb described in the article) which felt almost like a SciFi parody taken out of the movie Spaceballs.
The pacing, the great costumes and set design by Moebius, the actors Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, and the unusual ideas (like the alien opera singer) were all more than enough to carry the movie.
My counterpoint to this is that something that threatened to be a standard space opera had the delightful juxtaposition of Ruby Rhod and the opera singer. The initial appearance of Ruby Rhod really jolted my attention the first time I saw this movie. It’s weird but it works for me
Luc Besson and Patrice Ledoux structured The Fifth Element plot very differently due to their culture. Perhaps one may also find something unique in the classics for your own enjoyment, or continue to choose to be upset with mundane facts. Goodbye =3
Same, I sold at the peak. Don't hold on to your winners for too long, the stock price is not entirely a function of the company's financial success. A lot of it is just on whims and cycles.
> Don't hold on to your winners for too long, the stock price is not entirely a function of the company's financial success
In the long term you don’t think the stock price is a function of a company’s success? Surely while a a company does very well financially and the financial outlook is very good, the stock price would be higher than when the fortunes change?
Sure, but there is no guarantee long term stock price is above what you paid for it. Also, the market can be unreasonable, in both directions, for quite a while. Dividends are what you epupd be looking for in long term stock investments.
> but there is no guarantee long term stock price is above what you paid for it
That’s because there’s no guarantee the company will thrive in the long term, nor that you didn’t overpay to begin with. That does not change the fact that share price is a function of the business’ financial success.
A function? Yes. Realistically linked? No, absolutely not. Added caviat: expected financial success, current and past success are either irrelevant or already priced in.
There are quite a lot of mods (called NewGRFs), ones like FIRS make the game a lot more complex and challenging by making the economy more involved. There are other ways to increase the difficulty with mods, or just with AI players. I agree that the base game can lead to Too Much Money very quickly, which does feel pointless quickly.
I see that he's getting downvoted, but there are minor errors indeed. Problem 31 (https://teachyourselfmath.app/problem?id=31) doesn't list the problem inputs, for example.
People think that the brain is like a micromanager dealing with all parts of the body manually, but it seems like various levels of 'intelligence' in our body is very much decentralised.
Not asking sarcastically, just curious when schools started moving forwards with these things. The decentralised nature of thinking is something that's only been presented to me with a biological basis in the past few years. Would love to know who was agead of the curve, how so, and why!
In my country there is a fairly common expression "det sitter i ryggmärgen" literally "it's in the spinal cord" which means that you have practiced something a whole lot and know it by heart. The implication being that the spinal cord can do the task on its own without involving the brain. It's so common that it wouldn't surprise me if 1st grade teachers used it without even reflecting on the literal meaning.
Now whether the spinal cord actually can learn motor skills seems to be a bit of an open question, but it can perform some instinctive tasks like shying away from painful stimuli.
There’s a book, The Talent Code. One of the central premises is neuroplasticity and more precisely the process of muslin “wrapping” certain neuropathways making them more efficient.
This happens all the time - for connections deemed by the brain as important. While demoting “unimportant” ones.
So yes, the brain undergoes constant change - iterating on continuous improvement.
Intentional practice activates this process.
This, what we call “talent”, more often than not, is the result of intentional practice.
It’s been in some high school US textbooks at least as far back as the 1990’s and I suspect it’s much older. But the implication of such didn’t get much attention. I vaguely recall one of those little blue box blurbs with a mention of headless chickens being able to run and a diagram of a reflex test.
The knee-jerk effect was documented in the 19th century [0]. I was certainly aware of it when I was young (1970s) although I can't remember whether it was explicitly taught at school, either the effect or the underlying cause.
It wasn't named, but it was presented as "if you accidentally touched a hot stove, your reflexes would move your hand before you felt the pain because the round trip to your spine is a shorter path." Which thinking about it now, doesn't quite make sense as an explanation because one is a round trip and the other is not, but oh well. There was an accompanying picture showing a round trip to the base of the skull/top of the spine (not the middle of the spine like the picture in wikipedia).
I did not learn about this in school, but it was apparently accepted enough to put into a children's "encyclopedia".
In the US I learned about CNF in 2006 and a lot of related things such as specialization of different brain areas and the stomach having sort of a brain that affects you emotionally
The humunculean conceptualization of neurology needs to die.
It doesn't add any explanatory power and confuses rather than clarifies. Why not nest humunculae infinitely? No, the brain at all steps, processes information.
Microsoft famously fired their entire QA team. Also… their technical writing team. And then they outsourced both support and the bulk of their development to India.
You get what you pay for, and right now Microsoft is variously paying either zero or very little.
It's double outsourced even. They outsource to Accenture who then outsources it to small companies.
It's really really annoying because these people get penalised for escalating and they don't know much more than what it says in the docs. I read those before contacting them and it's always a hassle to get my case through to real support. They'll stall forever asking for more logs and more tests. I feel like I'm on trial defending that I really have a problem. Not a valued customer.
And mind you, this is already meant to be the "premium" support tier.
At this point I think it's par for the course. There must be some support tiers where you'll get actual Microsoft employees deal with your issues (I don't think Apple's devs get a random contractor reading a script when they report server issues), but short of that I would feel lucky to even get a human to look at the question.
Now that you mention malice, here's a smoking gun, from the linked bug report:
> (it's not an issue with Firefox's implementation. This can be demonstrated by spoofing the useragent as a Chromium-based browser and attempting the same login flow […]).
File an FTC complaint. This is potentially anti competitive behavior with a digital paper trail. Microsoft will ignore randos, so engage a regulator. Include the bugzilla post link in the complaint.
I don't think this is a smoking gun at all, because we don't know the story of why the difference in behavior was implemented. What not-infrequently happens is that Firefox is late to add support for some new web standard, so sites gate their usage on the user agent (which indicates that they actually bothered to test on Firefox!), and then it takes time for them to get around to removing the check after Firefox adds support.
In fact it's not completely unlikely that that is what happened here. Firefox still has incomplete support for the web authentication API [1], and in particular FIDO2 devices did not work if a PIN is set until Firefox 114 - only a few months ago! I'm not sure if this could be related, but Firefox also still does not support passkeys [2], so I'm sure someone will get blamed for anti-competitive behavior for that at some point.
Changing behavior based on user agent is necessarily intentional on the part of Microsoft.
That check lies somewhere along the line between "having the direct goal of breaking authentication flow (pure malice)" and "is a completely legitimate programming error (pure incompetence)."
I am not ready to assume pure incompetence (and here's where I might be wrong).
Ah I see, I thought the parent poster meant malice on the part of Mozilla, got confused by bouncing between comment threads. I could see malice, since it is Microsoft, but what's the "why" of it? I don't really see any motivation that M$ would have to block Mozilla, all it's going to do is piss off users. It's not like people are gonna get fed up and switch to Edge, they'll get fed up and switch to Chrome. If anything, M$ has a great incentive to improve Firefox adoption. The market that uses FF is the same market that is never going to choose Edge. FF and Edge both have a much better position if they can damage Chrome's market share.
Office 365 Calendar broke for me a few weeks back and is still unusable. It forcibly leaps me weeks ahead whenever I try to scroll to today’s date. I literally cannot view my work calendar on my phone anymore.
I often wonder if they’re even capable of knowing there’s an issue.
Despite seeing it work at first I didn't even register my amazement until I saw it on the horse model. I was just thinking, oh a cool knife sharpener..?
Lithium is cheap because the externalities of the environmental damage it causes is not accounted for in the pricing. It's a highly exploitative resource which has destructive impacts on local bacterial ecosystems, human communities, and water availability.
Let's not flatten it. Different materials have different externalities. And are available in different places with different levels of human rights and environmental protections
Seawater contains less than 1ppm of lithium (compared to 300-7k ppm in brine). There are zero commercial facilities to produce lithium from sea salt. It's not even a notable byproduct from other seawater-based processing facilities
It's alright but it's not 'appetizing,' if you know what I mean. I look at the list of posts and it's just a wall of black scribbles. Tagging them and spacing it out a little will make it easier to catch people's attention.
It's 'tagged' enough for my tastes. Actually it looks almost like my terminal emulator. Very calm and not distracting. I can read. I don't need to be spoon-fed.
And each time I see an article like this, I simply marvel at the immense love for art and life it has. What an incredibly talented crew, what product of mastery and care.
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