An active box office community. I don’t really watch movies but I enjoy the data and the discussions about why movies are performing that way. @ClarkZuckerberg@lemmy.world tried to singlehandedly keep it afloat for some time, but it didn’t work unfortunately.

I imagine it’s like sports statistics but with a lower barrier of entry, and sometimes you watch a film franchise you enjoyed die in real time.

where the prequels are an elaborate ad to sell more Starwars toys

This is clearly not true, Lucas cared a lot about his story and universe. I say this hoping it helps effectively communicate points later: statements like that detract from your premise because they’re obviously false to an audience that knows and cares. It would be better (from a rhetorical standing) to double down on the poor storytelling allegations by acknowledging it as true instead, then going on to say that they were cinematic incoherence regardless.

I haven’t seen a single one of the prequels in over a decade except RotS (which I thought was an interesting story but a poorly made film), but my dislike of the prequels is because they’re not good movies. My dislike of the sequels is that they were not good and were made to maximize profits.

THe orginals do hold up, because Starwars was about classic adventure story. The character of Luke Skywalker… It’s the sort of timless story, just with a spin on it beeing a sci-fi world… The prequels and sequels completley missed that aspect of basic stoytelling.

This is where I completely disagree. Movies should not be aiming to do only the classic adventure story over and over again, and the prequels weren’t bad because of the story. They actually had a pretty classic story too: an evil being corrupts a well-meaning but slow-to-react institution filled with self serving or incompetent representatives by manufacturing conflict to seize power. All the while the forces of good are distracted and unfocused by the chaos— and too sure that their institutions will not bend to tyranny— until it is too late. With a solid director, the prequels could have been excellent, and also perhaps a prophetic warning about complacent democracies.

Sorry for late response! I think it’s mostly commonly noticeable as a finishing salt but it’s a pretty good salt in general.

So! I’m not an expert and here’s just my thinking. Salts have different flavors and the worldwide distribution of Maldon makes it easy to reach for when you need a flavoring salt for cooking. It has good flavor and will always suffice as a sea salt in recipes.

I have a lot of recipes I personally got from chefs. Super easy, you need only ask and they’re always willing to share the exact recipe. But unless they’re real specific, you get ingredients and not the exact brand of salt. And because it’s basically impossible to track down which [potentially local] salt they use, you’ll have to use what’s on hand and hope for the best— and that’s unlikely to go wrong with Maldon or diamond crystal.

They’re the standards for a reason, and I’m pretty that reason is consistency and availability. I’ve seen online that people will use a random granulated salt and it will either be too salty or taste off. I’ve also had chefs specifically note that they use Maldon for said recipe, so it’s a safe bet. Even when I know they used some difficult to acquire local salt, Maldon is good enough.

Yeah, I monologue sometimes, it’s my habit with forums. I’m glad you liked it, I often worry it’ll be more annoying to read than useful or enjoyable

Interesting, I’ll see if I can find Arabian Sea salt here. Sometimes I think I can tell the difference between regional sea salts but it might also just be placebo. The Himalayan one too because it’s pink.

I’m pretty sure color why they use the Hawaiian black salt but it does taste different. I’m quite fond of it. Looks like ours are similar in that they (probably?) derive their color from charcoal. Wikipedia says Indian black salt has a sulfurous taste and smell— that’s definitely new to me and explains the egg flavor. Sulfur isn’t hugely loved here but some traditionally “unwanted” flavors can make for great dishes, and some people online indicated they like it for acidic or Indian foods. Can’t lie, this is extremely interesting, I hope a store nearby has some. If not I’ll order online.

This will probably be the neatest thing I learn about today. Damn I love salt, now I do want to get into recreational salt tasting

Potentially unpopular but I don’t think it matters for pasta water.

I’m not that deep into salts but I keep a few on hand. The standard diamond crystal/maldon for cooking, as well as an unrefined sea salt for the same purpose. The standards are standard for a reason and they’re more than enough for my non-chef preferences, these and a random sea salt for the grinder are what I use 90% of the time.

I like fleur de sel or flor de sal for finishing, though I can’t tell the difference between the two (I believe it is region, but my palate is far from capable of differentiating much). I have a sel gris that came with a salt set that is meant to be used as a finisher, but fleur de sel is more popular and thus easier to restock. I use black Hawaiian salt as a finisher for Hawaiian dishes. The black salt, unrefined, and fleur de sel are good for eating the salt alone which is a guilty pleasure.

I’m actually pretty surprised to hear that some prefer saltier salt. The chefs I have asked like lower sodium and higher mineral contents because they have more flavor. That said both tabelog gold/*** sushi chefs I’ve asked heat the salt to remove moisture, which then increases saltiness by volume, so I guess I’m not that surprised. I do this for sushi rice for authenticity but like I said, my palate is solidly mid and I can’t tell.

What do you like those salts for? I’m not really a salt enthusiast and just use what has been suggested by the chefs I like. Don’t think I’ve heard of Arabian Sea salt and I’ve never used Himalayan myself, but I’m very much interested!

I’ve used this for years but I have a pretty high rate of asymmetry. It’s still a lot quicker to just quickly fix that than do it the way I was taught so I keep doing it.

Maybe I should practice doing it symmetrically instead of assuming I will always lopside it though

I’m not cool like everyone else here who got bargains or things that went up in value but for things that are more expensive than they seem to rational people, I have $6k headphones and up to $9k pens. Got them for a little under msrp (for the headphones, the cost of the pens went up).

Rational people don’t generally expect the prices of things like that to get so high, but they actually get a lot higher, I’m also not cool like the people who have those. There’s likely other things like this I can’t think of rn, but pens and headphones easily get the biggest “what’s wrong with you?” probably because they’re handheld non-jewelry

Seething with jealousy I am. I love the HP 33s but it’s currently priced more than I’d like. I don’t know if I’d actually use it, not a ton to use it on anymore, but wish I had one nonetheless.

Well shit, thanks. I used to do this (being long comments) on Reddit but long comments naturally filter out some readers. Which I get, cause sometimes I’m not looking to read a whole thing too, so it never offended me.

People on Lemmy seem to have longer attention spans though, shouldn’t be too surprised. This site has me returning to older habits of thinking through comments and spending almost 20 minutes typing haha, back on the other site I just stopped commenting in the years before the API changes since I’ve never been the type for quippy one liners. So yeah weirdly thanks, odd how it kind of feels nice to have these read again. I obv can’t text monologue irl (cause it’s not text) and I’m one for brevity with text messages

Not really. You’re making an allegation with no evidence, then incorrectly comparing it to you proving something you yourself may have done. That wouldn’t work if you were merely claiming someone else ate a sandwich, much less something like this.

An exercise— some taxi company made the app with publicly available software. A lot of Lemmy users seem to be developers and know how the notification system works for iOS. Is it then:

• Apple tracks all sentences typed and lets every single app know when something related to its purpose is typed so a notification can be served? And every single app developer in existence has hidden this knowledge?

• Apple tracks all sentences typed and lets specific apps know when something related to its purpose is typed? Why would they give this data to a taxi company and not larger companies that drive more profit? If they did give it to taxi companies and up, how do they prevent whistleblowers? Privacy intrusion on this level would be massive. People will leak military secrets to prove a point in video games, but not this?

• Apple tracks all sentences typed and only lets this taxi company know when “I need a taxi” is typed? This would be safest because it reduces the chance of a leak. And yet also tremendously risky to give this data to a taxi company, which probably isn’t overly secure, when this information leaking would cost them shareholder-angering amounts of money and poor press.

This conspiracy is moon-landing-is-fake levels of implausible. It would require airtight security and a level of secret keeping that humans are simply not capable of. No disgruntled employee of any company would have leaked this? Apple would risk meteoric reputation damage to slightly drive in app purchases that they’d then get a 30% cut of? Be serious.

I hate defending any corporation but the flat earth level conspiracies I see upvoted on Lemmy— with zero proof, or even waving away the thought of proof!— would be laughed at anywhere else. These takes also delegitimize real criticism because there may yet be something relatively implausible that they are doing, and noise like this muddies the water. Why not discuss the actual unethical things Apple does, of which there are many, instead of making stuff up?

Edit: oops, you did not make the allegation, merely defended it. I’d split this up into two separate criticisms for maximum effectiveness (the other one for the confidently-said zero-proof conspiracy, and this one for the implication that evidence for conspiracies is unnecessary) but no one’s gonna read it anyway so whatever.

Well, I did ignore him. I don’t keep up with conservative media and did not know who he was. I heard about this initially because I’m alum of a related university and didn’t know until your article who began the agenda against Dr. Gay. Problem is, when the broken clock is correct, it’s correct, and that led to normal people talking about it.

That said, would you really ignore literally everything he or his ilk say even if it was true? I feel like all we’ve done is talk about this one guy that 99% of people probably don’t know, and not the merits of the actual events. I genuinely feel it is bad for one to ignore even truthful things just because it came from a piece of shit. That could easily be weaponized— he could champion a good cause just to throw it under the bus.

Why not? Thought is free, I don’t read internet discussions to think little. Lemmy was heralded as a place for thoughtful discussions, and shouldn’t strive for less substance than Reddit had.

I understand that the agenda against Dr. Gay was started by a piece of shit, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. Broken clock and all. I’m not pleased about it either, but if I discounted literally everything said by pieces of shit, I’d be giving up my own integrity for the sake of owning the cons.

Serious, in the case of academic dishonesty, is narrower than the actual actions indicate. In that article, her advisor indicates that his book “encourages scholars that use the method to describe things in those ways”. He can say that, but by describing things in exactly those ways without quotes, it muddies the water on whose thoughts you’re reading (as it would if I hadn’t quoted the above, which would have read as my words). I recall an independent review indicating she improperly cited but it wasn’t misconduct— respectfully, students doing the same thing before this would probably not be allowed that much leeway. Imagine being back in school days, would you paste paragraphs worth of words without quotes and expect to survive a dishonesty board?

Therein lies the issue: allowing that behavior is genuinely very serious, though it can look less so if you’re not literally thinking back to your own university experience. Moreover research isn’t done for the sake of writing stuff down for a grade, it’s done to progress society. Properly noting which thoughts are yours, and which are being quoted as supporting evidence or if your theories were built on others’, is important if merely for clarity’s sake. It could get worse than that though. Allowing this would allow researchers to ape words without sufficiently crediting them, and that could be taken to more sinister degrees.

Dr. Gay is an excellent academic, this aside, and she understands the danger in allowing her own behavior to go unaddressed. She corrected several of her own works and will probably correct more of them as issues continue to be found.

I kept this comment limited to analysis of the situation, but I’m gonna inject a little bit of personal opinion. I do genuinely think this sucks because, while I believe it was plagiarism, I hate when the conservatives win. But I also don’t see this as a real loss for Harvard or academia as a whole— Harvard will find another President and academic standards only improve. I also don’t want to make the conservative mistake of standing by someone whose conduct is detrimental to their own cause, simply because they are the enemy or target of a group I consider to be abhorrent.

And I think that’s ultimately the thing here. We don’t want the conservatives to take this one, especially because they themselves would likely throw academic standards into the wind if it weren’t personally advantageous in this moment. But if we remove the view of “the enemy,” this is just a President resigning because her academic history is less than flawless, and a President should always have a record capable of withstanding even the sharpest scrutiny. Any less and they are actively at risk of eroding standards which exist for a reason.

The plagiarism allegations were serious and, once entire paragraphs were found to be copied, it was always going to end like this. Everyone remembers how strict their university was about academic dishonesty. While the claims of antisemitism sped it up, it’s very likely someone would eventually discover it and when that happened, she would still have resigned.

How was an academic dishonesty board supposed to deal with students accused of plagiarizing if the President did it too? Terrible situation in academia. Unlike money, unethical behavior does trickle down, if just because it hinders the tools of enforcement (see America since 2017).

There are commercial medical/dental lasers but they’re decently more expensive. Still worth it but as a laser hobbyist I’m comfortable with the things. You can find them by searching for an 808nm dental laser.

Oh, they’re kind of big, which is the other downside. Make sure to still use the appropriate glasses

There’s also a device that uses red light instead, I think called luminance red. Not as effective but way cheaper than everything but a DIY with your own diode, and still reduces sore length for most people

I had one custom made to avoid the cost of medical grade/dental lasers. You can make your own pretty easily with a diode and some other parts but I wanted a good shape for reaching the affected areas and my metalwork skills are nonexistent. I had it specced at 810nm, 600mW.

Be sure not to do this without knowledge of high powered lasers! At that wavelength and wattage it’s pretty weak for lasers, but still >100x the wattage of a typical laser pointer. It won’t burn through things like other similar lasers, but it will blind you with no warning and no room for error if you’re not careful and using the right glasses. Lasers are not actually very fun at all since you have to be very cautious.

I hate these sores with a passion. You can fix them instantly with Oralmedic from the internet (possibly currently undergoing supply chain issues but that is temporary). It is agonizing— you are cauterizing the sore— but provides immediate and permanent relief. You can also get a laser for it, which does not hurt but is way higher effort and costs a ton more. I am passionate about my sore hatred so I have done this.

If you don’t want to do either, Canker Shield is available on Amazon and reduces sore lifespan to around 24-48hr. Also painful to use but nothing is as bad as Oralmedic or debacterol. Combine that with supplements (not one size fits all, lysine seems to have high success rate though) and you can deal with these while away from home.

Anyway this tip actually reminded me to check my travel toothpastes which naturally do have SLS. So thank you. I had noticed an uptick to a sore every couple months since Covid “ended” but that cause slipped my mind

Lysine helps too for prevention and healing

HFY (humanity, fuck yeah) was a sub for short stories about humans being cooler than aliens. Not in a self congratulatory way, but like how humans could feasibly have good or useful traits that alien species might not. Such as creativity or physical prowess due to being top of the food chain in a competitive ecosystem.

There’s a Lemmy alternative but not a lot of traction.