Random thread of randomness
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@TOTALLYNOTANDERS
That’s just as hilarious as it is with context. I can laugh at the same shit twice. For different reasons.
Thanks, Todd!
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Lazlo and Nandor are pretty much the same characters they were in the start (and there’s nothing wrong with that) but I feel like Nadja really has evolved over the seasons. I think a lot of it has to do with Demetriou, I think she’s been experimenting, improvising, I don’t know what the scholars would call it. She’s been taking chances while nailing the landing. Nadja is great and so is Demetriou.
I love all these characters so much. This show is much better than it deserves to be.
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— No Context Brits (@NoContextBrits) August 22, 2022
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I hate the way renewal works with web services. I think they just expect you to be lazy.
I got an email today from Nord VPN, I signed up to them ages ago, it may even have been a 5 year deal, which is expiring in 30 days and they say they will auto-debit me US$105 for 1 more year (it won’t work if they try, my card changed). On the front page of their website they are selling 27 months for $80 and I know from experience with my ISP for sites like this one, they quote me double what their site advertises to new users and to get that rate as a renewal will take a lot of arguing.
So a bit of googling means I will most likely dump them, which I don’t want to do really as the service is very fast and reliable, but one offer by a rival is $85 for 5 years.
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It’s the same with other subscription services. As I’ve probably mentioned, I was a ROLLING STONE magazine subscriber for decades until they changed from a twice-monthly stapled magazine to a monthly higher-paper-quality bound magazine and virtually doubled their subscription price. When they automatically renewed my subscription and sent the bill, I called them up and told them to cancel my subscription, at which point they were suddenly able to offer me a renewal at the “new customer” price, basically 50% of what they were charging. I renewed for one year, and then re-assessed whether or not I’m still getting pleasure from it. In the end, I decided it’s not worth my money, and cancelled for good.
I’ve always felt that companies should reward their existing customers with discounts, but most subscription deals are about getting NEW customers, not making existing customers happy.
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I had to laugh and wonder at the Chart Music podcast today. It’s a podcast that nominally comments on a random episode of the UK Top of the Tops TV chart show but spends at least an hour discussing the world of that time.
This one was an episode from 1977 which wandered into the rather weird fact that it is mandatory to have a period of Christian worship at the start of each school day. There are some caveats to that, nobody polices it to any useful degree (in my school we quite often skipped days and we once did an assembly about Robin Hood which had zero religious relevance just so we could play with bows and arrows) and there are opt-outs if you are in somewhere like Golders Green to change it to Jewish or Bradford to change it to Muslim if the demographics push most pupils into another religion.
However those are very small demographics, well over 90+ will get the Christian worship rule. Yet the UK is a really atheistic country, the amount of people that go to church regularly is tiny and reduces dramatically every census. Far far lower than the US where technically religion is banned from public education.
Their theory is basically it is a day started with very boring people you don’t care about. There’s no concept of escape to the solace of the church as you have to listen to it every day, there’s no escape, it is the status quo. It is a policy that actively drives people in the opposite direction. They may have a point. 😂
US evangelicals demanding prayer in school may really want to think again if it will actually help them in any way.
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I was just thinking about that recently. When I was in primary school in Glasgow in the 90’s we’d recite the Lord’s Prayer, sing hymns and I think a priest or minister would come for the odd school assembly. It’s an odd but funny thing to think back on.
I guess I was too young and never really thought of it as being religious, it was just a thing we did in school.1 user thanked author for this post.
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I’m guessing Clark Gable, though I couldn’t name the other two films.
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The only reason I know Gone With the Wind won best picture on 1939 is because I will never forget nor forgive the total travesty of it beating The Wizard of Oz, the greatest movie of all time.
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Victor Fleming directed both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz
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Victor Fleming directed both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz
That’s a good tactic for winning an Oscar, make all the films.
The Oscars of that period were very much about celebrating the cash and Gone With The Wind remains the most watched movie of all time in cinemas, by fucking miles as well, nothing comes close.
(They wander in and out of celebrating the money makers, the current era is quite far away from that with even one recent winner, Parasite, crossing over with the Palme D’Or which is very rare).
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I was in Edinburgh earlier this week, and couldn’t believe the amount of litter they had there. Every bin was overflowing, and stull was blowing around everywhere. It was probably the worst I can ever remember seeing, in any city centre. Clearly they can’t cope with the number of tourists they get in Fringe season, I thought.
Then yesterday I saw a news item that they have a bin workers’ strike. I remember we had those back in the 70s, and I remember the piled up rubbish on the news, but I was probably sheltered from most of it living in a nice part of a small town. Edinburgh this week made me realise how essential these un-noticed workers are to our lives, and that we should pay them whatever they ask for. I thought the pandemic had taught us this about “key workers” already, but apparently not.
I’m back in Edinburgh tonight. I might take nose plugs
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I posted an article in the Sandman thread that had Neil Gaiman say the following:
“I sent the script to Ain’t It Cool News, which back then was read by people.”
That was a pretty slick burn against AICN. But it got me thinking, it has been a few years since I last visited the site. So I decided to visit it.
It hasn’t changed a bit. That is not a compliment.
It looks exactly the same and there are still a couple recognizable names but it’s the same shithole it has always been. It looks exactly the same. It doesn’t look like it gets many new stories put up as it used to. Many are days and weeks olsd. The comments section on stories is the same dumpster fire it always was.
Just poking around the site, it really does feel like it should have been shut down many years ago. It did have its moment years ago, but now it just feels really sad and pathetic. It feels like a gravely ill dinosaur that just won’t die compared to what you can find the internet today.
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The content moderation or editing, if there is such a thing, is fairly lax. I clicked on two different “articles” and they were walls of text completely devoid of paragraph formatting and it would’ve probably hurt my eyes and head (my eyes are in my head) if I had any interest in reading them.
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I listened to Downlowd recently – a podcast about the rise and fall of Harry Knowles/AICN.
https://anchor.fm/downlowdpod/episodes/Official-Trailer-e1bkscc
It was pretty good. Fairly balanced. Wished it was a bit harder hitting in some places but still worth a listen.
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For the vast majority of crypto-currencies that are not bitcoin, are they better compared to penny stocks, ponzi schemes or Neo-tulipmania?
The recent crypto crash has hurt many first-time investors : NPR
Actually NFTs are more the new tulipmania than anything else, but it’s all the same thing. NFTs primarily are a bait-and-switch tool to sell people into this or that crypto coin.
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Actually NFTs are more the new tulipmania than anything else
Yes they are.
While there is a lot of speculation and hype around crypto currencies they do serve a purpose, even if that is mainly laundering money earned from crime. NFTs resemble tulips more because there is no practical use for them. Maybe even less than tulips because legally all an NFT sells you is a URL to a virtual object (like a picture of a monkey) that they are under no compulsion to retain.
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Actually NFTs are more the new tulipmania than anything else
Yes they are.
While there is a lot of speculation and hype around crypto currencies they do serve a purpose, even if that is mainly laundering money earned from crime. NFTs resemble tulips more because there is no practical use for them. Maybe even less than tulips because legally all an NFT sells you is a URL to a virtual object (like a picture of a monkey) that they are under no compulsion to retain.
Amusingly, the main practical use I’ve seen for cryptocurrency is trans friends using them to buy DIY hormones.
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Amusingly, the main practical use I’ve seen for cryptocurrency is trans friends using them to buy DIY hormones.
The only thing I’ve used them for is buying
illegal drugstotally legal supplementson the dark webonline.5 users thanked author for this post.
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Last night, I watched the Game Center CX (which is a Japanese retro gaming show) Vietnam special from 2015. The stated aim of their foreign specials is to “check out the state of gaming” in those countries, mainly through visits to arcade and retro game shops, plus general larking about. They mentioned in the preamble that some Japanese game studios are setting up Vietnamese branches (which I’d never heard about), making it a future hub for games creation, seemingly their justification for going. As far as I’m aware, 7 years on, that hasn’t really come to pass.
It was interesting though because there’s next to no arcades let alone games shops in Hanoi. Instead there are loads of places on the high street where you can drop in and rent the use of a games console in-store by the hour. This is because pretty much no-one in Vietnam can afford consoles. They said the average annual wage is about $2000 yet consoles still cost about $500 there (as you’d expect really, otherwise everyone would be importing them from Vietnam on the cheap). So it’s (seemingly) created this much more social culture for games where you play in public like an arcade. They, somehow, ended up meeting some random (I think relatively well off) family whose youngest son was having a birthday party, which consisted of going to a larger one of these types of places and renting a Wii for the evening, which the kids were all absolutely loving.
There were similar places for PCs but the family they met had a laptop and ipad for the kids. But in both instances they were shown games that are basically shareware from Russian and Chinese developers, if not homebrews (like an FPS that was full of that troll face meme from web comics and 4chan, used for when you got a headshot or killed etc). The show didn’t outright say it, but I get the feeling the main state of gaming in Vietnam is done through piracy on PC. Which, fair enough really.
It did make me wonder how much research the show put in before commissioning the trip. Especially as they also planned for a casino visit to round it off, only to find out they weren’t allowed to film in the casino.
It was all an interesting counter-point to that Top Gear Vietnam special, where they larked about on bikes and threw money around on suits and gag gifts. Shamefully, that’s probably my main source for the state of modern Vietnam but this GCCX special really drove home the level of poverty there. Not in a “look, isn’t it all awful” way, necessarily. They did a trip to an amusement park in the city too, and it was just depressing. It was like one of those “winter wonderlands” that end up on the front page of a local newspaper every year for being awful. But at the same time, the public parks have lots of exercise equipment and work-out groups (led by park employees, it seems) because I guess barely anyone can afford that kind of stuff or gym memberships.
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There’s a Vietnamese YouTuber I like who talks about this sometimes, her family used to run a shop that had an “arcade” of all bootleg consoles.
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They have PC gaming centres here as well, there’s one just down the road from me. While incomes are higher in Malaysia than Vietnam gaming rigs are pricey things for youngsters.
Piracy was pretty much rife, you couldn’t actually buy original software when I came to Malaysia, there seriously weren’t any shops selling it if you wanted to pay. Even in the posh Petronas Towers shopping mall when I bought a PS2 it came chipped from the shop with 10 free games.
Steam has changed some of that as they use regional pricing, because it runs through their software rather than the web you can’t use VPNs to trick into a cheaper location (or not easily anyway, maybe someone has figured it out). The last game I bought on there was Maid of Sker for £2.93.
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Tangentially, this reminds me of the Soulja Boy scam where he would sell game devices and consoles through his “tech company” but what he was really doing was just taking the money and then buying knock off devices made in some Asian nation to fill the orders.
Soulja Boy Makes A Video Game Console – JonTron – YouTube
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It reminds me of buying a knockoff Gameboy online from China for RM5.99 which is roughly US$1.50. I didn’t want it really but it was so cheap I was curious if it would even work and took the gamble, it did and still does and came with a couple of hundred games loaded. It has kept my son amused on some long car trips so considering I have paid more for a single bag of crisps/chips you can’t really argue.
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Cryptocurrency started out as an alternative to fiat currency. It was meant to be spent. Sure, it became the currency of choice of criminals due to its “untraceable” nature. But at some point, it’s value started increasing to crazy levels. It started becoming an investment. Nowadays, it just seems like it’s an unregulated stock.
Definitely – and it doesn’t seem like anyone considers the obvious question – do the advantages of a decentralized, unregulated alternative currency with publicly viewable wallets (that anyone can put anything into) really outweigh the obvious disadvantages? Even if it worked, I wouldn’t trust it. Not only for the concerns over privacy, sustainability and energy waste for the mining, but also if the US dollar or EU collapsed or if we had some sort of catastrophe, usually the first thing that goes is the electrical grid. How useful will bitcoin be in the aftermath of a financial collapse, hurricane, earthquake or even a blackout?
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Cryptocurrency started out as an alternative to fiat currency. It was meant to be spent. Sure, it became the currency of choice of criminals due to its “untraceable” nature. But at some point, it’s value started increasing to crazy levels. It started becoming an investment. Nowadays, it just seems like it’s an unregulated stock.
Definitely – and it doesn’t seem like anyone considers the obvious question – do the advantages of a decentralized, unregulated alternative currency with publicly viewable wallets (that anyone can put anything into) really outweigh the obvious disadvantages? Even if it worked, I wouldn’t trust it. Not only for the concerns over privacy, sustainability and energy waste for the mining, but also if the US dollar or EU collapsed or if we had some sort of catastrophe, usually the first thing that goes is the electrical grid. How useful will bitcoin be in the aftermath of a financial collapse, hurricane, earthquake or even a blackout?
I remember when I first started learning about cryptocurrency, I could see it was all bullshit. As the values started skyrocketing, it became more and more obvious. Whatever altruism and ideals cryptocurrency had in the very beginning are long dead and been dumped in a gutter somewhere.
As for NFTs, well…
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The fact that they can even build a complex device as cheaply as that makes me think the big brands are scamming us somewhere down the line.
Not really, the actual manufacturing of the components is only a relatively small cost compared to all the costs you need to put in to get there (software and hardware development, design, marketing, distribution etc.).
It’s like that old saw in the 90s about CDs only costing pennies each to produce and so a £10 CD being a ripoff. It doesn’t take into account any of the costs needed to actually produce the content and then also market and distribute the product.
Or to bring it more up to date: I could copy a digital file of your favourite artist’s work and send it on to others for nothing. That doesn’t mean that the artist doesn’t deserve to be paid for it in the first place.
(Certainly firms will build a certain profit margin in on top of all that too, but simple physical production costs are far from the whole story.)
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The fact that they can even build a complex device as cheaply as that makes me think the big brands are scamming us somewhere down the line.
Apart from Dave’s points someone did suggest that sometimes new vendors sell at a loss to get a lot of 5 star reviews which push that vendor onto the front page of searches. I don’t know if that is the case here but I did give him a 5 star review because I got a working Gameboy for $1.50.
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@gareth … fellow… I also remember you being somewhat adamant about those who signed on the dotted line once and as things have it, find out decades later they wound up losing millions. Young comic artists, Ed Brubaker over Winter Soldier, Kirby, and on and on.
We then got to Kelis who signed something at 19 or 20 and now years later Pharrel and Beyonce used some sound snippet she got upset about. True, she did sign. She was too young though and just didn’t know or have foresight.
Now… with this student loan situation that years ago had 18-19 year olds taking huge loans for college that are crippling them now, how do you feel about that? They did sign on the dotted line. I mean targeting teens to all this legal paperwork to sign their lives away to long term loans. Any mercy for them? And why doesn’t that apply to artists starting out like Kelis did?
I just have to say that the music industry contract situation should be restructured as does the comic work for hire situation.
Both seem to exploit the talented young.I’m moving this Al as little I have to say is about music.
I don’t argue all of these systems are unfair and are rigged to boost corporate profits.
I have posted in the politics thread that my issue with ‘loan forgiveness’ is not that it is bad but it solves no fundamental issues. The core problem is why education costs so much and why employers demand silly educational levels that are not needed for the job. Handouts are better than nothing but in truth they just kick the can down the road and in 10 years time you get another round of higher loan rebates.
My issue with Ed Brubaker is not that it is unfair he gets nothing for Winter Soldier, I think he and Steve Epting should be showered with money. It’s that he always knew that, he knew how Kirby got screwed over, he knew Moore and Gibbons were. Kirby had a fair argument as he signed shit on the back of a cheque but Ed Brubaker started at Vertigo with a creator owned book, he took on Captain America in full knowledge nobody working at Marvel owns anything or ever gets paid beyond a page rate and royalties. It’s shit but he never went in blind and as far back as the late 60s Roy Thomas was mining every obscure part of Marvel/Timely stuff to re-use because he knew even back then if you create a character it is never yours and never benefits you.
If it were down to me I would replace it all with the German system where it is illegal for a company to own 100% of your IP. Make 100% work for hire illegal. Even in the UK you always retain copyright, this is why Alan Moore and all his artists had to be consulted for Marvel to reprint Miracleman, they may own the character but they need the permission of the creators to re-use their work. It doesn’t pay them any more but provides a better bargaining chip. When they came to reprint he had the right to say you can’t unless you meet my terms. Brubaker never had that power and he knew that when he signed with Marvel and you need to change the system not moan case by case because a film was a hit.
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A lot of this isn’t really about age but about how circumstances can change unexpectedly.
Siegel and Shuster signed away rights to Superman because they thought they were getting a good deal for what would probably have been a short-lived character. Had they known what kind of a life Superman would have as a property in future, they likely wouldn’t have taken the deal.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took the Watchmen deal in the expectation that the rights would revert to them when the book fell out of print. Had they known what kind of a life the book would have as a perennial top-seller, constantly in print, they likely wouldn’t have taken the deal.
Brubaker and Epting signed up for their Cap run at a time when Marvel was still only just getting over emerging from bankruptcy, and ended up part of a creative peak for the company that also included lots of other creators with great runs in the early 00s. Had those creators known that Marvel would end up using this work as the basis for a multi-billion-dollar media franchise with countless movies and TV shows, earning huge amounts for Disney, they may not have taken the deal (or maybe would have kept their best ideas for creator-owned work, as we’re increasingly seeing happen now).
Even the slightly dodgy Kirby deals with WFH terms on the back of cheques look worse now, in retrospect, than they did then – because of the unexpected success and long life of the characters he (and other creators) worked on.
Ultimately, I don’t think it’s contradictory to believe that people accepted these various contractual terms with their eyes open, while also feeling that they maybe deserve more in terms of compensation for the ideas they created that are earning other people millions (or billions) of dollars. It’s the difference between the legal obligations of the contract and the moral obligations that we might feel are owed by the corporations that end up with the rights to their ideas.
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Brubaker and Epting signed up for their Cap run at a time when Marvel was still only just getting over emerging from bankruptcy, and ended up part of a creative peak for the company that also included lots of other creators with great runs in the early 00s. Had those creators known that Marvel would end up using this work as the basis for a multi-billion-dollar media franchise with countless movies and TV shows, earning huge amounts for Disney, they may not have taken the deal (or maybe would have kept their best ideas for creator-owned work, as we’re increasingly seeing happen now).
Come on, that’s a pretty disingenuous stance. Brubaker and Epting’s Cap run started in 2004. Films based on Marvel properties were pretty big even then. That’s between Spider-Man 2 and 3 and between X-Men 2 and 3. The Thomas Jane Punisher movie was out that year, Ghost Rider was in production with Nic Cage, Daredevil had an Elektra spin-off shooting. Tom Cruise was widely reported to be starring in an Iron Man movie. Hell, Man-Thing had a movie in post-production at that time.
There were also various animated series that had started during the bankruptcy or were going into production then. To say that someone working for Marvel couldn’t have comprehended their work being used as the basis for a big movie or even an animated series is just dumb. Even someone not working there would have expected it. And that’s even before you consider that there was probably office gossip about the Merrill-Lynch self-financing movie loan deal that came the next year. How staggeringly naive would you have to be to work on a comic for Marvel and think “well sure they’ve made movies of Spider-Man, X-Men, Daredevil, Punisher, Ghost Rider, Elektra and Man-Thing, but those are big hitters, no-one is ever going to anything with Captain America.”
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I would say at this point that if you do work-for-hire for the Big Two and don’t understand that your work has the potential to be exploited as the company sees fit and you will not be additionally compensated for it, that is completely on the talent.
And to be fair to the talent, I think they have taken that on board and they now save their best work for creator-owned comics. It’s no coincidence that Big Two comics have slid into such mediocrity over the past decade or so.
It used to be that working for the Big Two (especially Marvel) was considered the apex of your career. Creator-owned and small press work were considered stepping stones to get noticed by Marvel and DC. Nowadays, the Big Two are ways to create and build a following for the eventual creator-owned work. Mark Millar really paved the way doing that.
Unfortuantely, not every “great” idea that was saved for a creator’s wholely owned work will get them fame and fortune. Hollywood is not lining up to buy every magnum opus of a creator. And to be honest, some of those ideas are not that great or may have worked better in a corporate-owned shared universe. While Mark Millar is the ultimate success story for going creator-owned, he was also waaay ahead of the curve. By the time Millar approached the finish line, everyone else just started running.
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Al-x wrote:
Now as more get savvy about trademarking their IP, getting full legal credit and royalties etc. those after the fact “I was exploited stories” should go down.
This is my main problem, I just mentioned high profile cases on song credits that happened nearly 40 years ago and keep happening since. I don’t think they will go down if they haven’t 60 years after the first Beatles records.
Well, I mentioned comics situation because this is mostly a comic forum. Honestly, how many in the past decades had the foresight of their IP meaning billions?
Thing is, in recent years, with all this stealing and taking credit on popular social media sites, it is coming to the fore more now than before.
It just is not fair to push a contract on some teen or very young talent starting out and they don’t know what their legal options are. (This begs the need for proper legal representation ie. having a good lawyer to examine the contract etc.
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True to a degree but it’s an open forum, my aim isn’t necessarily to change Al’s mind but give my two pence on what I think of the subject.
As to the ‘pushing contracts’ I’m not sure Kate Bush was necessarily that savvy, although she had Dave Gilmour as a mentor which would help. The simple answer is apart from a couple of cover versions she always written all her songs, on her own. It was a demo cassette of her own song aged 13 that brought her to Gilmour’s attention. In that case it is very difficult to wrangle ownership in any way without obvious deception that would likely lose in a court.
The tricky area Kelis is involved in is the more modern custom in pop music of producer collaborations. If I read it correctly she’s not claiming she wrote the song but contributed along with the producers and was uncredited (so gets no publishing royalties, only performance ones). This is a really tricky area to prove unless you film the process like The Beatles in Get Back. I can’t even define how much you’d have to do to qualify as a ‘songwriter’. If I’m given a song to record and suggest one better lyric and maybe one note go up rather than down in the chorus is that enough? I don’t know.
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It is also getting harder for even the people that control the property – whether in music, movies or books – to make money off of it. Marvel movies may seem insanely profitable, but the expense to make them is also someone insane and that makes them very risky. If Marvel ever started losing money – or even not meeting expectations – that could quickly snowball into a disaster as there is a mini-industrial infrastructure that is expensive to maintain. A lot of the profit doesn’t really go to the investors in a real sense, but goes into making the next slate of films — and Disney has a lot of films and shows and theme parks which are all in the same situation. No matter how vastly bloated a budget may seem, every separate division of it is working with the bare minimum the producers can squeeze – especially the effects.
It is another part of the argument for protecting the IP ownership even though they are not the original authors. Unless the author actually puts up the money – takes on the risk like George Lucas did with the Star Wars sequels – then their reward for originating the idea is naturally going to be limited. Especially in work-for-hire cases where they were paid to come up with ideas. They didn’t put up the money or take any financial risk when it went to publication or production. So, why should they get 50% of the profits when it hits? They aren’t liable for 50% of the losses if it tanks.
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It is strange. I’m a little less concerned that this encourages assassinations but discourages governments from creating conditions where their activities leave citizens with nothing to lose
currently… see Iraq.
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Three things about this day:
1 Miqque’s birthday. May he continue to RIP
2 The former MW mod. We both share the same birthday, but I have 10 years on him. He said he actually enlisted that very day when he saw what happened.
3 The analogy: Saying “All Lives Matter” is like saying “All Buildings Matter” on this day…
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You know:
This new iOS 16 will take a little getting used to.
Now there is an iPhone 14 with its deluxe model 14 Pro Max
Maybe in late 2023… If it’s really worth it.🤣
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I won one game of chess and lost one tonight playing this semi-professional player tonight in the pub. I still got the chops!
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I won one game of chess and lost one tonight playing this semi-professional player tonight in the pub. I still got the chops!
You should Google about what is going on the chess world. World champ Carlson lost to this young player who was known to have cheated in the past. Now his victory is under scrutiny.
Carlson even resigned from the tournament. Everyone is chiming in.
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Seems difficult to cheat in chess, where everything you do is visible. You can’t exactly hold an extra queen up your sleeve, can you?
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OK, so while cheating using a computer is one way of doing it, the latest scandal is much more exciting:
Huge chess world upset of grandmaster sparks wild claims of cheating — with vibrating sex toy
A cheating scandal is buzzing in the chess world with wild allegations of using technology — including vibrating “anal beads” — to signal winning moves after a teenage newcomer beat a world champion at a high-stakes tournament.
Sounds like a bum rap to me.
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OK, so while cheating using a computer is one way of doing it, the latest scandal is much more exciting:
Huge chess world upset of grandmaster sparks wild claims of cheating — with vibrating sex toy
A cheating scandal is buzzing in the chess world with wild allegations of using technology — including vibrating “anal beads” — to signal winning moves after a teenage newcomer beat a world champion at a high-stakes tournament.
Sounds like a bum rap to me.
You pulled that out of your ass, didn’t you?
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You pulled that out of your ass, didn’t you?
That is the nonsense that Elon Musk is saying how the guy Niemann allegedly did it.
I play on the online chessboards and you can tell by the delay of moves that the other guy is running the
position by some computer program (Stockfish is the strongest engine available, the tournament pros use
the exclusive AlphaZero to prepare for their matches)Anyway, the champion Carlsen was so upset that he resigned from it all. Earlier this year, he said he won’t
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I play on the online chessboards and you can tell by the delay of moves that the other guy is running the position by some computer program
That reminds me of Dave, not our one but the Cockney guy who used to run my local pub quiz. We’d always giggle at his quiz questions for having terrible spelling and his inability to pronounce difficult words. So another friend was playing scrabble with him online and every other answer was some super obscure word. We’d Google it and find out it was some technical term in quantum physics or a Bulgarian nose instrument – when you know the person it’s even more obvious he’s using a word generating website to cheat.
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I think the romance has disappeared from professsional chess a little bit…the games just don’t seem a lot of fun. Everything is extremely safe and calculated.
Maybe that is true. I mean, except for one very specific point in US history, Chess has not been very popular over here. The Queen’s Gambit series was set in that period, actually, and it may account for a spike in recent popularity. But still I imagine it’s real fan base is respectable but probably just a dozen million or so.
A lot may be the competition for people’s times – various videogames and gambling as well as all the other board and card games available. I imagine more Yahtzee game sets are sold each year over here than chess sets (that aren’t also combination checkers and backgammon boards).
From an outsider perspective, it does feel like the backlash against the win is unjust. Essentially, it is like the powers-that-be are claiming they have evidence that they then refuse to share, then people who absolutely do not have any evidence are making wild and honestly insulting accusations and then he’s being punished without any real formal due process and facing demands to prove he didn’t cheat. Exactly how would he prove that?
In some ways, it gives the impression that the Soviet influence on Chess is still there — at least in the political sense. Accuse people that rock the boat of crimes in a way that they can only confess their guilt rather than defend their innocence.
On the other hand, people with intimate knowledge of the game seem to think he cheated, but it is interesting that this may just be based on previous cheats in online games. However, if Carlsen had won, there’d be no story, so this is probably more news chess has gotten than it has in years. Combined with the pandemic and The Queen’s Gambit, now is the time for a push.
On a broader note, I do wonder if cheating is as much a part of the game as it has become in just about every other game and sport. With how common and out in the open scams, corruption and cheating has become, it seems like cheating and getting away with it is more admirable than winning or losing legitimately. It’s all part of “Hustle culture.”
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The UK version kept it, but had the friends on the receiving end backstage and under supervision.
I didn’t know that. That’s pretty funny really. The friend always acts so surprised when the host calls :D
But it explains why no friend ever says, call back later I’m in the bath.
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It looks like it started to drift into cultural use in the US in the early 90s, Wiki cites testimony before a Senate Committee in 1990 as one of the earliest examples of the term being used in public discourse, in this case it was a studio executive talking about how even when there are multiple producers on a show or movie everyone knows who’s in charge of the story and the feel of the production as opposed to the money or logistics – the former is the showrunner.
J. Michael Straczynski was the first person I remember being referred to as a showrunner during his time on Babylon 5 – this started with his online discussion of the show’s production with fans where he often described the day to day activities of a writer and a showrunner/Producer. It migrated to the UK TV industry in the early 2000s
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While the concept of a showrunner has been a thing in television for a few decades, the term seems to have initiated on British television at the start of the 21st Century, according to the Wikipedia page on “Showrunner”:
The first British comedy series to use the term was My Family (2000–11), which had several showrunners in succession.
The first writer appointed the role of showrunner on a British primetime drama was Tony McHale, writer and creator of Holby City, in 2005.[13] Jed Mercurio had carried out a similar role on the less conspicuous medical drama Bodies (2004–2006).[14] But Russell T Davies’ work on the 2005 revival of Doctor Who brought the term to prominence in British television (to the extent that in 2009 a writer for The Guardian wrote that “Over here, the concept of ‘showrunner’ has only made it as far as Doctor Who”).
The Writers Guild of Canada, the union representing screenwriters in Canada, established the Showrunner Award in 2007, at the annual Canadian Screenwriting Awards.
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I would say it’s an American terminology. Russell T Davies cited Buffy as an inspiration as to how he’d approach Doctor Who. Whedon was a ‘showrunner’ before him.
On a practical level UK shows have always been shorter run and more auteur led rather than writers room so effectively always had showrunners, often under a different name.
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At that point in the BBC the script editor would be the equivalent of the modern showrunner. Look at how classic Doctor Who is often divided up into eras by editors like Barry Letts or Andrew Cartmel
Hmm, but Letts was producer, not script editor and the producers were more influential on Who, without necessarily writing any of it (Letts did under a pseudonym, admittedly). Most of the big changes that came in with Tom Baker’s last season were at the behest of producer JNT, not the script editor, Christopher H Bidmead (who did, admittedly make changes to the tone of the scripts, going hard sci-fi). So I don’t think you can call any of them “showrunner” in the true sense rather than just their given job titles. Even Cartmel still had JNT making production decisions that a showrunner like RTD would have been making on modern Who.
I think the first instance I’ve heard of “showrunner” is on the Simpsons. James L Brooks, Sam Simon and to a lesser extent Matt Groening aren’t credited with any scripts in the first season, but worked in a capacity as a showrunner – breaking stories, story editing and running the writers room as well as overseeing production generally.
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I was sure I saw Letts referred to as a script editor, proves I should look stuff up before I open my mouth
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I was in the West 40s below Times Square in Manhattan and took this:
I usually get creeped out by enlarged objects but this sewing needle and button didn’t really phase me. I guess that is progress…
I wonder if the place is still considered The Garment District given all the changes.
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On job applications, they usually stress “ability to multi task”. It really is a fancy term about doing 2-3 things at the same
time. I get the “killing two birds with one stone”thing, if it is efficient and you come out ahead, but if doing 2-3 things at the
same time just gets you to barely break even, then it might be too much for just one person.
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I am very sceptical multi-tasking is good to ask for. I’d rather go with someone who can quickly switch focus as needed, re-stack their to-do list and can work consistently well.
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For a restaurant front of house that’s tasks like taking orders, relaying them, delivering them, scanning what’s going on, with it all changing.
On the way back from the taking the order someone else asks for the bill and another table needs wiping. So you are doing tasks not in order and to some degree at the same time.
I don’t that often you can literally do two tasks simultaneously so I read it more as being able to flip back and forth between them effectively.
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