Blackbeard

The shows, however, have mostly skewed to the worse side of things. Not quite so stilted as the PT, but there is a serious lack of charisma and humanity emanating from them, and it just makes things less fun, and when your dialogue mostly exists to deliver exposition, it leaves us more willing to nitpick details. Andor has a grimmer tone, but there is charisma there. The performances were compelling and I had to watch. You cannot and should not make all Star Wars like Andor, but you could make it all as well-conceived as Andor.

I recently watched a video that went deeply into exactly that criticism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL4IfoQzSSE

The gist is that most of the current content forgets to focus on making characters feel human, and that’s because they’re so relentlessly focused on forcing exposition that needs to get the plot from point A to point B that they forget to focus on the organic way that a character might interact with and react to a situation. Every character turns into a cardboard cutout because they’re archetypes designed to fill a role in a plotline, as opposed to living, breathing individuals with their own priorities, intentions, and often times inner turmoil. Andor and Rogue One are the only two projects that allowed characters to be flawed and emotional, and therefore authentic and relatable. And that’s why we care so much more about those stories, because we can feel what the character is going through. The rest is just hitting us on the head with exposition so that we can follow along, as if we’re all thumb-sucking idiots who can’t think for ourselves.

I hear you. Didn’t mean for that to come across as an attack on you.

Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won’t go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.

Second, sure, it’s a low risk bill because they know it won’t go anywhere, but damn isn’t it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?

https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/

Boil it down even further than OP and everything, ultimately, is just binary impulses between differently oriented clusters of atoms.

Time and time again I find myself coming back to a deterministic interpretation of the physical world. We’re now at the point where a simple scrape-predict-regurgitate AI language model (ChatGPT) can convincingly imitate the communication pattern of a human being with good factual recall but low social acumen, almost like what we generally associate with the autism spectrum. It’s harder and harder to argue that we aren’t just walking flesh bags with simple electrical impulses that carry us from decision to decision based on a finite dataset. It’s amazingly complex and sometimes can seem unpredictable, but it’s still finite. Were we ever able to build a sufficiently complex computer, I believe it could predict every decision we ever make with remarkable accuracy. The concept of “free will”, at least to me, seems a comfortable agreed-upon illusion that keeps us from killing and eating one another.