I can’t agree more strongly. The ad for the Neo felt like a cult recruitment video. It’s targeting people in their feels, not appealing to sensibility. Huge red flag. 99% of footage of a Neo in motion has been with in remote controlled by a person in a VR headset.

I double checked myself on some Chauchat machinegun facts, and then kind of went into a rabbit hole of inter-war French armament.

In 2026 the Neo robot, the figure 3 and the Tesla bot are going mainstream in countries like America and I’m pretty sure other western countries.

I am skeptical. The Neo robot is basically a Mechanical Turk with extra steps.

I can’t prove it but the Figure 3 gives me even more vaporware flags.

As for the Tesla bot, it’s the least scammy of the bunch, but this is on the “we promise to put robots in your house in 2026” scale. It wouldn’t be the first time Tesla overset expectations.

None of these companies are straightforwardly showing extended, unedited footage of these robots operating in full AI mode in an uncontrolled realworld environment for a reason.

Humanoid household robots are the new (edit: I suppose not new, but resurging) fascination, but they are dumb. If someone wants to automate away chores it’s going to be by increasing smarthome capabilities and integration, and/or by having improved standalone robots and automation, like roombas, if they aren’t going all in on integrated smarthome tech. Success in automation will be with specific use robots and pieces of automation, ideally working together, not a Cylon lumbering around.

Ziggy’s done messing around.

I grew up eating what most people consider very spicy food. I don’t care what level of spicy other people are comfortable with, but I’ve found that amongst certain types of people I have to be discreet about my preference for spicy food. Some people find it a novelty to gawk at which is just awkward.

If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?

In this earlier definition looking for objective merit, it leans heavily on professional opinion. If a small number of individuals not thinking a work that is “objectively good” is good doesn’t change that, then the opposite must also be true. Therefore, if we have a situation where the critical consensus is that a work is bad, and only a small number of people think it is good, then we have a piece of art that is “objectively bad” by using the critical standards, but which is held onto by a small number of people who disagree.

At the top of this discussion I didn’t define “art” merely as visual pieces (I actually used examples of movie and games). So that art could be anything expressive- music, books, plays, movies, games, and beyond. I can think of art and artists not appreciated in their time, and then over time critical perception turned around.

This is all a long way of saying critical opinions are at the end of the day still opinions. That’s why even critics disagree with each other.

saying that something is objectively good does actually mean “for the majority”, because there is no singular point of absolute goodness to compare it to.

I agree completely that people use it like this.

If a piece of art was created 100 years ago and every professional critic of the time thought it was trash without any merit, and then 100 years later the critical reception of that same piece had changed and it was considered a piece of high art, is that piece of art objectively good? Objectively bad? Was it objectively bad 100 years ago and then somehow became good?

If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?

If I don’t like that piece of art, am I wrong? Am I objectively incorrect of the opinions inside my own head?

Lots of people dislike award winning movies, songs, and games. Are those people measurably wrong? No. The plural of subjective opinions is not an objective one.

My personal gripe in this area is people misusing “objectively”.

Such as declaring that a certain movie or game is objectively good.

Probably stereotypical, but I find well done steaks to be a total waste.

I rarely cook steak, but when I do I go to a butcher and get something quality and fresh. Normally I don’t care how other people enjoy their food, but when I take the effort to get quality steak and someone at a family get together asks me to cook until the steak is grey in the center it just deflates me. Logically I know that if everyone is happy with their food it doesn’t matter, but personally having to mangle a steak so it has the taste of ground beef just goes against every cooking instinct I have.

I’ve learned that when certain people are coming to a holiday cookout to just cook burgers or BBQ instead. Everyone is just as happy with what they get.

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Respeccing. It shouldn’t be infinitely free, but I like games that allow you to pay (usually increasing amounts) to respec.

Related to this, in older games without this it was common practice to save up your skillpoints and just sit on them until you’d gotten a little further into the game and hopefully had a better idea how to spend them. What was massively frustrating in older games were when leveling up forced you to immediately spend the points instead of sitting on them.

I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don’t like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.

What I can’t stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.

It’s very obnoxious. What’s worse is when the secret areas provide armor or weapons that feel mandatory to beat the level with. If the secrets are just for a score I can at least ignore them.

Level scaling. It’s a mechanic designers put in because they think the game needs to stay challenging, which is true but I’ve never agreed with level scaling as the answer.

The least bad implementations (but still not good) at least replace low level enemies with different kinds of enemies entirely. The worst, most lazy implementations just increase existing enemy HP and damage.

I think it is much better to have different locations or zones where different ranges of enemies spawn, with more powerful enemies tuned to the expected level of a player character for the quests in the zone.

You’re not getting your deposit back if those creative juices soak in.

Foundation was so strange because it felt like the writers split into two isolated groups.

The team that was trying and failing to “reimagine” the original story, and the team the totally abandoned the original story and was doing their own thing with the clone emperors story.

Unlike other examples where the show felt like an existing story twisted into the framework of an unrelated franchise, Foundation felt like the clone emperors story came out of the talented writers getting frustrated by the quality of the adaption.

I don’t consider anything I watch a guilty pleasure, since I’m pretty open about watching B and bad movies.

I enjoy movies where a director has made a surprisingly successful cult movie and on the back of that got creative freedom and a big budget from a studio, which they then used to create something beautiful and terrifying. My exemplar movie for this is Southland Tales, which I absolutely love on all possible levels.

I really like movies that commit to a sharp genre turn. The Guest (2014) is a great example.

Lastly, spaghetti westerns. This seems like a maybe more mainstream choice, but had a conversation in real life not too long ago with somebody who had no interest in any kind of western and didn’t know about the distinction between classic and spaghetti. When I was articulating the difference I was able to boil it down to classic westerns being nostalgia and romanticization of the American west, while spaghetti westerns were made by people with no nostalgia for it. It creates a subgenre which is grittier and more morally grey than the John Wayne era movies. My favorite is Once Upon A Time In The West, though I’d recommend people work up to that by watching other genre movies first.

What’s your favorite movie that uses lots of practical effects?

The Thing has to be up there if the criteria is just an overall great movie heavy on practical effects.

Do you have a favorite practical effect of all time?

The “digital” wireframe view of the city from Snake’s glider in ‘Escape From New York’.

It was accomplished with miniature buildings which is rad.