GreyShuck

At the point where you and the AI can see someone straightening their tie in a certain way and you and the AI can exchange a single wordless glance and you both burst out laughing 'cos it was just like that thing that you both saw 6 months ago and found hilarious then - then maybe.

Not before.

Oh yes, very much - and not just with movies, but TV, novels, stage performance and the like.

As a kid, it was just the overall visuals and spectacle as much as anything - details of the plot were secondary. Into my teens and early twenties and think that plot details came to dominate and after that exploring interesting concepts began to take priority. Then I guess that I began to appreciate the production side of things more: writing quality and cinematography etc maybe into my 30s and 40s. And these days (in my 50s) I am much more focused on character-driven things.

My first computer was a ZX81 - in 1982 - which, with my brother, I built from a kit and was astonished when it actually worked. We eventually added the 16k ram pack too: how could anyone possibly use all that?!

First phone. I think it was a Nokia 5110 or similar in 2000.

Biggest one for me was swapping from setting the alarm as late as possible and then rushing to get out of the house, to setting it an hour earlier and using that to read, do a little qi gong and have a leisurely breakfast.

My main requirement is that it has to be available on my heavily locked down work phone and work laptop as well as my home ones. If it isnt in my face whenever I look at a screen, it isnt going to work. So it ends up being Google tasks.

Without looking for sources - so I could be totally wrong - I believe that it did darken proportionately and that light meters would register that. However, human eyes are not light meters and adjust to the dimmer light without you knowing.

Difficult to say. I’ve never been one to fixate on a single film for long. The ones below are likely candidates for various reasons though. I must have seen each at least 6 times. Probably none of them more than a dozen though.

• The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
• Star Wars/A New Hope (1977)
• Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
• Mon Oncle (1958)
• The Ladykillers (1955)
• The Third Man (1949)

Film

• Uproar (2023) - a New Zealand coming of age tale. There are no surprises here. You know exactly what you are getting right from the start, but it is solidly and engagingly done, with some some good performances from Josh Waaka and Rhys Darby particularly.

• House of Flying Daggers (2004) - continuing my SO’s wuxia fad at the moment. This one looks wonderful and has some great set pieces early on but then runs out of ideas and drifts to a stop in a morass of repetitive melodrama and loose ends. Very pretty but frustratingly unsatisfying.

TV

• A Gentleman in Moscow - the pick of the crop at the moment with Ewan McGregor and Alexa Goodall both both proving charming in their respective roles. The tale balences the pre-revolutionry culture, the bolshevic ideals and the grim reality well - although glamourising the former quite a bit, at least initially.

• Renegade Nell - this has a lot of positive reviews, and i certainly enjoyed the writer’s Gentleman Jack, but on the basis of the first episode it seemed to be tonally all over the place, as though the writer had one thing in mind but the director, or studio bosses or someone were trying for something totally different. I found it pretty off-putting and am not sure whether I’ll continue.

• Extraordinary - I thoroughly enjoyed season 1 and am glad to see that season 2 is keeping it up. Some of the novelty value of the superpowers in season 1 has been replaced by more emphasis on the individual characters this time round, but the comedy is definitely still on point.

Not a developer, but I will always use 2 monitors when I can - using the secondary for Outlook: inbox on one side, calendar on the other. I will also swivel this for showing presentations/plans/documents to members of my team in face to face meetings, and will move Zoom windows to in webinars etc it whilst I get on with some actual work on the main monitor.

I am - in the UK - and I think that it should be opt out rather than opt in.

I use Rainy Days for the radar, and - since I’m in the UK - the Met Office weather app, which has a Next Rain widget.

I don’t know whether it was you, but I have responded to this same question on Lemmy before.

Yes. We had a coal fire when I was growing up - in the 60s and 70s -, so it was an everyday thing during the winters.

We have used ALS Testing in the past. More recently Latis Scientific. Both have been good, we swapped just because of some internal admin thing at one point.

In my case, I approached our usual plumbing contractor who have a couple of labs that they usually used. I now go directly to those labs.

I manage utility services - among other things - for a group of properties - and have had the mains water analysed for chemical and biological contamination at various times. The results have always been absolutely fine. Not just with EU limits, but far, far, far within them for almost everything and definitely well within them for all measures.

I’ve got no issues at all with drinking tap water in the UK, even given the state of the rivers etc.

The first I thought of was Dead Horse, Alaska. Permanent population 25 - 50, I understand.

I really can’t recall where I first heard of it though.

I have probably heard of a few other odd ones like this.

Never touched Instagram. Deleted Facebook a decade or more back.

It’s difficult to tell how many there are around here overall. There are a scattering of pagan, witchcraft and occult communities, but pretty much no activity on any of them: I have made a few attempts.

But then every so often someone does post something on one of them and at least some of those posts get a significant number of up votes - but then no follow-up activity at all… so I don’t know who is up voting or what their background is.

Anyway, howdy back at ya.

• All Of Us Strangers (2023) - another in a run of really great recent films that I have seen lately (this, Killers of the Flower Moon, The End We Start From, Anatomy of a Fall). This one took a while to engage me and once it did I very soon saw what the final ‘revelation’ was going to be but - as with the others that I have mentioned above - that really didn’t matter at all. This is not about plot, twists or surprises, this is about character and loneliness and grief, and the character study was wonderfully played out by the ever-intense Andrew Scott. The final scene stuck with me all night and the track has been an ear-worm since.

• Hero (2002) - I had seen it before, at the time of release but could recall little other than the visual style, which was as strong this time as back then. My SO was in search of a bit of Wuxia along the lines of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is a long-time favourite of hers. Hero is a much starker, more focussed film than that and stylish rather than beautiful, but does what it does extremely well and scratched the itch very well.

I will be going to see Dune, as well as Poor Things, Out of Darkness, and Zone of Interest soon, but haven’t just yet.

I am a pagan. There are pretty much no widely accepted texts within paganism that make any statements about subject. In my experience most pagans are quite happy to coexist with other religions in general - and given that in almost all circumstances pagans will be in a small minority that makes perfect sense. On the other hand, most pagans that I know are far less happy to coexist with the more bigoted and hateful varieties of religion.

There is a strong feminist trend within paganism and this - particularly linked with the ahistorial but often assumed heritage of witchcraft, and the associated history of hanging and burning of witches - does not lead the more patriarchal end of the Abrahamic religions to sit well with a lot of pagans - and I know a lot who are far happier about visiting the roofless moss-covered shell of an abandoned church, with a hawthorn growing in the apse than they are visiting an occupied one (unless it is in search of a sheel-na-gig etc).

On the other hand, there is a strand of Norse paganism that crosses into white supremacy and neo-nazism, so that brings its own hate, bigotry and patriarchy. I do not know what their stance on other religions is.