Until he wasn’t.

Lucas was eventually quite against large swaths of the EU.

It doesn’t change how many people enjoyed it.

I think we can both agree things would be vastly different if Tolkien were still alive, but what I sincerely doubt anyone can agree on is what that would look like.

Just look at how many origins there are for orcs.

Not even Tolkien was a Tolkien purist, read some of his letters where he explained the overarching subject matter.

Originally, the Hobbit wasn’t intended to be connected to the Middle Earth stories of involving sauron and the rings at all, he didn’t even think it was set in the same world at first.

I think getting all up-in-arms about stuff that was still evolving and growing until the moment he died is a bit ridiculous.

Rings of Power is definitely MORE THAN ENOUGH into the realm of “in the spirit of” for me to personally find it highly enjoyable.

I’m having a hard time figuring out why so many people seem to have such an abiding need to specifically shit into other people’s bowls of Wheaties the instant they find out they poured them from the box with the Harfoot biathlon team on the cover, though.

Considering the amount of whipped-up outrage I saw years ago when the first picture of a black female dwarf was revealed, I’m finding myself wondering if a bunch of actual fans are getting caught up in a driven sentiment that has nothing to do with fandom for Tolkien’s actual work and more to do with a few overly vocal groups finding every niche, crack, and crevice they can to put a negative spin on representation in any form.

I am. I absolutely love it.

In my mind this is no different than the 90s when we got a BUNCH of “extended universe” Star wars stuff, some of which went in some unusual directions.

My friends and I didn’t care because it was MORE STAR WARS!

This is MORE MIDDLE EARTH! And it’s AWESOME because of it in my mind.

I can’t wrap my brain around how picky and critical so many people are these days.

Like, does anyone remember when it was nigh impossible to get stuff to watch in genres you liked? That was way worse in my mind than “the lightsabers look weird”.

More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

There was a MOVIE?!?

Based on the In Living Color character?

Chips.

No coke, Pepsi.

if the vice president wins in November.Most Read from BloombergWorld’s Second Tallest Tower Spurs Debate About Who Needs ItThe Plan for the World’s Most Ambitious Skyscraper RenovationMadrid to Ban E-Sc

What is this, a bot post with an imperfect scraper behind it?

What in the actual fuck are you on about?

They genuinely believe some random guy is god incarnate so they tormented him his entire life to try and get him to kill himself,

Nothing in wicca allows any of that, so far as I’m aware.

That’s SO far off base with what I understand of the basic tenets of wicca that it’d be like an humanist atheist vegan suddenly signing on to work as a halal butcher and then deciding animals aren’t enough, it’s time to butcher people instead.

Pronounced like “hope” without the “h”, it is indeed a local (Midwestern U.S.) "expression.

It is, mostly, a “shorthand apology”.

“Ope, just gonna squeeze right past you and grab the ranch” (dressing) or “Ope, grab the butter while you’re up whydoncha?”, or “Ope, I spose it’s about that time.”

In the context of that sticker, it’s more like a “sorry, not sorry” but less intense and more polite.

It is, to a degree.

She’s no billy strings.

I legit wasn’t sure if this was a real thing she did that started as a friendly joke or something.

Actually, I’m still not sure.

The BEHAVIOR of a very small subset of vegans unfortunately causes a small but ridiculously vocal subset of non-vegans to tar all vegans with the same brush.

Since volume equals truth for a not insignificant number of people in the Internet, far too many people don’t stop to separate behavior choices from professed beliefs and that’s how we get where we are now, I unfortunately.

The world would be a better place if people stopped automatically associating and assuming causation and instead treated bad behavior as just that.

I wonder how much of the state of the place upon that inspection was DUE to:

The plant has been shut down since late July

Like, did they say “we’re shutting down” and everyone just fucked off and left the place in a state?

Or was it just that bad ALL the time?

Why do you think a different word is needed?

Because the word has been largely washed of all negative connotations, at least across the minds of the majority of the populace in the U.S.

If you are trying to convey what the word settler means in a dictionary by using it in casual conversation, you are likely to find that it is not carrying the full weight of its intended meaning in the mind(s) of the listener(s).

This makes it a FUNCTIONALLY inadequate word despite being a technically correct one.

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

Addressing the Overton window issue is the main fix I would hope for.

This is far and away the most frequently mentioned issue in posts I’ve seen. It’s also the one I would like to see addressed.

I don’t know enough to know how accurate this chart actually is, but I’ve seen it tossed around plenty:

https://guides.library.harvard.edu/newsleans/thechart

https://libapps.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/56624/images/Media-Bias-Chart-12.0_Jan-2024-Licensed-scaled.jpg

In the sense of “Simpsons did it!”:

Equifax did it first.

Sure wish the massive corporate incompetence and malfeasance causing huge data leaks multiple times over the years would get mentioned every time one of these stories comes up.

Hackers did blah, this WOULD ALMOST matter, but!

We need to start redirecting some of those board bonuses and CEO dollars back into infrastructure to actually secure this shit as a required responsibility and stop places from being allowed to request personal information they shouldn’t have.

Event happened at raglan road Irish pub, when raglan road staff failed to do their job in regards to food allergens.

Diner dies from anaphylaxis due to ingested dairy and nuts, which they were ASSURED BY THE WAITER WAS NOT IN ANY OF THEIR FOOD.

Disney is calling for the lawsuit to be dismissed because her husband signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service years prior. The company says signing up for the trial requires users to arbitrate all disputes with the company

Vertical tabs I could maybe buy someone wanting but MORE AI? Not based on what I’m reading, even in surveys.

If they want to make Firefox more popular, make it so I can close 54 of my 55 open tabs in task manager with “end task” without the whole app crashing (read:fix memory). Add in greater stack trace visibility into what parts of what add-ons are increasing load time at first launch (you can currently kinda see which add-ons, but it’s barely even bare bones info) (read: fix speed issues. Basic stuff like ad block and no script shouldn’t sesquiseptuple load times (that’s two orders of magnitude)

Do stuff the other browsers WON’T do, because their paradigm forbids proper optimization.

People in the throes of full blown addiction don’t typically donate to rehab non-profits?

Or not, I dunno. I guess they might when they’re rich and don’t have to worry about how they’re going to afford their next baggie they probably don’t freak out about where their money is going as much. Shrug