Agreed. The difference is that the prequels were a failure in execution, whereas the sequels failed on a conceptual level.

Kind of late, since i just came around to seeing it. Some thoughts:

• I really liked the visuals and i’m glad i got to see it in the cinema on a really good screen, so more or less the best possible experience. But i agree that the Rook animatronic looked a bit off (i’d have to rewatch it again).

• As someone else already mentioned i also liked the dystopian setting of the first act.

• I liked that they were leaning more into the horror, rather than action genre. But imo unlike the first Alien movie it had a few too many jump scares and overused the xenomorphs. Where the original was able to build tension with what you can’t see, here you had a whole pack of them. And somehow they get mowed down way too easily.

• Agreed that there were too many callbacks and easter eggs, rather than letting the movie stand on its own. Especially the Ripley line was just too obvious and imo breaks the immersion into the movie.

• Not a huge fan of the third act

I think in reality I would milk it for personal gain, but in this hypothetical thought experiment I’d also like to imagine putting it into public domain.

Yes we would certainly see a lot of trash, but I’d imagine that it would also lead to a lot of creativity. We really are hampered by the insanely long copyright durations.

Sherlock Holmes for example has been part of general culture for a long time, and yet the last novel only became public domain 2023. Considering how much the world changed between now and 1927 (when it was published) it really doesn’t make sense. And the argument for copyright that invention needs to pay also falls flat, when it extends so long even after the authors death.

Definitely not an obvious choice and it might fail spectacularly. But imo this seems like the right choice in some ways.

Instead of trying to will a fomularic cinematic universe into existence, make a variety of unique movies (hopefully good), and then slowly tie them together.

I’ll go based on letterboxd release year. Often times it’s hard for me to judge towards which year I should count a film that might have had a limited release in the previous year, but then a wider cinema run later.

So far I’ve enjoyed:

• Dune part 2: epic sci-fi and that is exactly my jam, so thus far my favorite movie of the year.

• Civil war: Imo flawed in some ways and not quite what I expected (expected it to be more social commentary and less about war photograpy), but overall still very much a recommendation and good movie. Alex Garland has made some of my favorite films of all times (ex machina and Dredd, also enjoyed annihilation), but it didn’t reach those heights, so I’d rank it below those.

• Exhuma: usually not a horror fan, but I guess I very much enjoy the Korean ones. More direct compared to “The wailing”, which it somewhat reminded me of, but that had more of a mystery aspect.

Movies that don’t yet have a wide release, but that I already saw at a film festival:

• Black box diaries: Documentary by the journalist Shiori Itō about her own sexual assault case and her battle against the outdated judicial system and social views in Japan. Sadly I missed the screening with q&a afterwards. I found it interesting and overall well made, definitely gets a recommendation for whenever it gets a wider release later this year.

• All we imagine as light: Drama set in india. Feels like comparatively I’ve seen less movies set in India, so it’s always nice to get a view into other cultures. Overall I enjoyed it and can also recommend it to people that like this type of movie.

Also watched “the substance” (body horror) during the festival, but while decent that just isn’t quite my cup of tea.

Some movies that I found “meh” so far include Furiosa and monkey man, but there is also a lot that I haven’t seen so far.

To be fair: from a financial perspective that sounds like the right call, even if the movie would have been interesting.

R rated horror movies just don’t bring in the amount of money to sustain high budgets like that. The exception being “It” (and the sequel), but that had more mainstream appeal and also only came out years later.

Although isn’t the break even number usually closer to double the budget?

I would change this slightly to:

the idea of future carbon capture is just social permission to keep using fossil fuels right now’

Because of this it is in my opinion actually harmful. And don’t even start thinking about who gets to shoulder potential future costs vs todays profits.

Is it actually that little that gets used by the CPU? I assume there’d also be some overhead that gets claimed by the OS and not the game. Maybe 1-3gb?

The PS5 has shared RAM between CPU and GPU. Not sure what the average split between the two is in games, but it would certainly be wrong to say it has use of the full 16gb like desktop cards have.

Yeah i guess a good case makes a phone durable enough for most people and if you want an iPhone that is your only option anyways.

I’d have imagined that a purpose build phone would still offer some benefits. Like operable with gloves, maybe being the ports better protected against things like dust, or they have removeable batteries. Suprisingly i had to learn (after a quick search) that they don’t seem to offer much brighter displays for better visibility outdoors. I’d have thought that could be another feature.

I’d have thought that the niche for rugged smartphones might be small, but offer a relatively stable profit. What are the other competitors in that market? I know samsung offers some rugged phone, any other major brands?

Google struggles with presenting a unified interface, design language, and overall experience across their scattered hardware platforms

Agreed, but that to me seems more of a conceptual and software issue, rather than the hardware side. Although the article makes it seem like the teams getting merged are also (at least partially) responsible for that:

Currently, all three teams operate separately, making standalone decisions on things like design, software, hardware engineering, etc.

However they also need to be more reliable to build an ecosystem that people buy into. It’s kind of a meme that in every google thread killedbygoogle.com gets mentioned, but there is truth behind it. Especially in the smart home space you really need to project long term support for people to buy into your product suite.

One aspect through which one could argue that they might stifle competition is their price parity rule, for which it seems they are being sued. See here (not sure if there is any new development.

Hard to compete with steam if you cant at least do it through lower pricing. Although this article suggests that at least for epic exclusives publisher seem to prefer to just pocket the difference, rather than pass on those savings.