A mild copyright violation based on a system designed around the constant distribution of copies of things is NOT a parable about sexual violence, people.

I feel like this extremely insensitive rape take is the fediverse’s version of the Godwin Law.

I’m verbose mode.

OP posted to a movies community about Tom Cruise’s narrative troubles, and how he changed them in the eye of the public.

Your comment recommends two movies that don’t have anything to do with Cruise, and a third, from 1988, with Cruise decades prior to his narrative issues.

You didn’t offer an explanation of why we should watch the movies, or even mention that Cruise was in the third, which is odd since you mentioned stars from the others. It came off as you ordering us to watch unrelated movies that don’t have anything to do with the article.

That just makes it feel very out of place. A recommendation list even with Tom in one of the movies feels like a sort of social non-sequitor in this type of thread.

That gives a similar kind of energy that a dad trying to search for celluloid clitorist couplings has when he mistakenly types into Facebook before confidently hitting Post.

Had you said:

“Tom Cruise was excellent in The Color of Money which was a sequel to the wildly successful and excellent The Hustler staring Paul Newman, and despite Cruise’s personal issues later in his career I recommend everyone see both films! Also watch The Sting if you enjoy Newman’s performance in The Hustler since he’s excellent in both.”

Or something like that, we would have all followed your thought train from the article.

I love movie suggestions and I am pretty sure those movies you recommended are great classics, but your comment was giving big “google for lesbian porn” Facebook post energy…

You’re not my real dad!

If I haven’t seen the first 9, will I understand the plot of ROG Ally X?

I have used and worked on/with/owned quite a few VR headsets, yeah. Not a comprehensive reviewer-worthy amount, but I’ve been working on, or playing with, a VR headset since 2015, and I do consider myself to be an enthusiast.

Currently I own a Valve Index and a PSVR 2 along with my Vision Pro. Those two haven’t gotten use in a long while, whereas I use my Vision Pro a lot every day.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Quest 2, 3, or Pro, because Meta’s whole account debacle caused me to give my original quest away to a homeless friend of mine, which he sold for child support money, I think. Not a fan or Meta as a company in general.

I am a slight fan of Apple as a company, and by lemmy standards, I qualify as a rabid lunatic fanboy of Apple, so take it with a grain of salt, but…

The Vision Pro is a lot more of a comprehensive product than any of the other devices I’ve used, in ways that probably don’t matter to most VR enthusiasts. The surprisingly gripping features of it have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever, and everything to do with art, content, media, and productivity.

The main hobby I’ve been using it for daily is learning how to create 3D videos using Stable Diffusion. The huge bonus for this is all of the iPad apps that mostly just work without issue out of the box sprinkled with some Vision Pro specific apps.

Without leaving the headset or relying on an external device, I can use Draw Things to generate a high resolution image, generate up to 25 frames of video with that image as a starting point, save the image sequence out to a directory, where I can use LumaFusion to combine sequences into a video. If I need to I can use waifu2x to uprez, but that takes forever, so I usually don’t.

I can export the video and drag and drop it into Spatial Media Toolkit, futz with the depth setting, and output an AI generated spatial video. I can use Spatialify to output a SBS video if I want to at that point, but usually just keep them as spatial videos.

Aside from that specific workflow, It’s also the best 2D and 3D video watching headset experience. Being able to dial my environment in to drown out a the rest of a cross-country flight and watch Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D while it reflects on a lake in front of me, the size of a cinema screen, is both magical, and something that I hope even Quest users get to experience in some capacity on their platform.

It comes in handy, too, when I want to watch or do something different than the bf is watching on the tv.

I also am benefiting from the Apple ecosystem, since I own an m1 macbook and an iPhone 15 pro.

I love being able to capture spatial videos and panoramas and then experience them in headset later. Airdropping files between devices also lets me offload longer video processing to them, since waifu2x and handbrake on the mac work better for uprezzing and Spatial Media Toolkit has a native-ish Mac release.

For generative AI Draw Things is also on the mac and iPhone, but I’m learning ComfyUI since it seems way more powerful. And I use Screens 5 to vnc from my headset or phone, or I use the native virtual display if I’m by the mac itself.

My only experience using a Quest 2 was recently when a friend came over and we spent an hour trying to get it to work, resetting and rebooting over and over, before finally just giving up on pairing one of the two controllers, and we used the ios app to launch the browser to watch some 180 stereo videos. It wasn’t a good experience, but I’m sure it would be once it’s setup.

But I can’t really knock it too much, since trying to share the Vision Pro is the worst part of the device. The best option is to SharePlay to a mac or Apple TV, since the whole guest mode thing takes too long. And while I won’t fly without my Vision Pro again, I wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing it to a friend’s place. That thing’s expensive as hell, and I don’t want someone to drop it or for it to get stolen.

I do, yeah.

I canceled my Disney+ sub due to the price increase during the great enshitification race to the bottom, but their support for VisionOS and immersive content is making me rethink that.

Which is why the robot voice actors should unionize. It’s a crime that human voice actors have been stealing their jobs for so long!

It still failed to hit projected box office returns with that factored in!

It’s just funny because it’s a good movie and the first one won an academy award but is terrible.

And they won it for writing “damaged” on Joker’s forehead… at least in part.

Fun fact, The Suicide Squad (2021) was a box office flop, whereas Suicide Squad (2016), the only academy award winning DCEU film, was a box office smash hit!

Kids out of college who are grateful that they’re being given a chance to follow their passion don’t think they have collective bargaining power, and the people who stay in the industry tend to do so because they enjoy pain.

The fediverse has a built-in search engine?

I can only comment on my experience searching for communities in lemmy and people to follow on mastadon, but in both cases I am not sure I’d say “works quite well” would describe my experience.

But also that’s not what I think OP was talking about.

They want a search engine for a random fact like google. It’s been long true that you need to add “reddit” to the end of any google search to find the info you needed.

It’d be nice to have a fediverse alternative.

I don’t know what a movie about product placement has to do with Halloween.

The link seemed to work for me from lemmy. I see three posts there when I click it at least.

I hear what you are saying, and while I don’t fully agree that she’s inherently unlikable, I understand why you’re saying that you find her to be so. I mostly was asking you to question your assumptions on it, and I used some charged up language that wasn’t meant as a knock at the show.

To elaborate, what I meant was that the show exaggerates her mannerisms to give Walt motivation rather than to create a fully fleshed out character. She’s not a woman, but a symbol of how men have become emasculated by their wives’ “wearing the pants” in the family. At least early on she’s not much more than a framing device and justification for Walt’s decisions.

She grows as a character, and ends up having more agency, but only in the confines of Walt’s domination of their lives with his selfishly motivated, and traditionally toxic masculine, choices.

And I don’t think you meant it this way, but you can’t really easily separate disliking her from being a woman. I don’t mean to imply that you dislike her because she’s a woman, but that her character’s role is to be a controlling wife. It’s an inherently gendered character that relies heavily on preconceptions of what a woman should and shouldn’t be in a relationship with a man who is a main character in a story.

I think it’s telling that she is considered unlikable enough to even warrant discussing in a show where the main character is a multi-murderer monster who destroyed the lives of everyone he loved, and the main villains include nazis, cartels, lawyers and corporate shills.

That, for anyone, she’s the most hated character on the show is enough for me to take a minute and question my assumptions on her, at least. So I thought it was worth pushing back on your comment asking you, and others reading, to do the same.

Sorry, I should have said that Skyler, the character, did nothing to deserve being disliked. The show was rigged to make you dislike her, in the sense that the storytelling was solely through Walt’s eyes, even in scenes he wasn’t present for.

But I didn’t say that. Vince Gilligan, creator of the show, said it.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/breaking-bad-vince-gilligan-skyler-white-sexist-backlash-1234754425/

I also called it a “power fantasy.” The show’s pitch was to show a man turning himself from “Mr. Chips to Scarface.” It’s not a criticism, I loved the show. It took the power fantasy tropes and subverted them frequently. But at its heart that’s what it is.

If you’re upset that I said that it was about toxic masculinity, then I apologize. That was reductive of me. It explores hegemonic masculinity through the power fantasy trope, and it can be interpreted as either a celebration of or criticism of toxic masculinity depending on how you approach it.

Plenty of more well reasoned people than I could hope to be have written in depth on the subject. Someone even wrote a book in the subject.

If you were reacting to thinking I was putting the show down, which I wasn’t intending to do, then my bad. I could have worded it better. I was trying to make the point that it’s both intentional to not like Skyler, and also the obvious wrong take to not like her.

In the realm of toxic masculinity power fantasies there is no room for a woman who acts kind of like a normal person.

The show was written to make you root for Walt and dislike Skylar because of that, but is she really that unlikeable if you step back and look at her actions and motivations?

Edit: Sorry for being terse and using charged language in this comment.

I’m a fan of Breaking Bad. I wasn’t trying to put it down or to say that people disliker Skyler because she’s a woman.

Upthread I clarified things a bit, hopefully.

I used to be very picky about movies as a teenager, and tended towards more odd, surreal, films that I could find. For a long time Brazil was my favorite movie and Twin Peaks my favorite show.

I was very closed minded and my first boyfriend’s sister referred to me as “the movie nazi” because I did not like Will Farrell, Adam Sandler, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, and lots of other mainstream successful people.

Now I am much more open to movies of all types, and I will watch movies with actors and actresses I have pre-biased towards distaste.

My favorite movie is now Everything Everywhere All At Once, and favorite show is too many to choose from, but probably Adventure Time.