memfree

They’d be welcome on !creative@beehaw.org

I saw your earlier plug for Penny Dreadful, but I kinda want to boycott Paramount/Showtime after the 60 minutes & Colbert fiascos (After you asked about Legion, I commented about it in this thread).

Kinda liking Revival. Started Sandman S2, but only watching 1 per week with friend.

Finished Dying for Sex. It was ok, but I kept getting distracted by thoughts like, “I bet this was uglier in real life.” Of course, we probably want our media to be more fun and exciting than real life, but it is rare that I’m disrtacted by the … ‘cleanliness?’ of a show.

side note: I did NOT like Interior Chinatown. I enjoyed the first couple episodes, but then it dragged, and I found the ending completely unsatisfying, with big holes left unfilled.

Debating if I should rewatch S1 of Peasemaker before starting S2.

Heads up: It is a Paramount/Showtime product (for anyone boycotting after the 60 minutes & Colbert incidents).

Hulu has it (they hold FX/Fox and ABC catalogs). If you have the Disney bundle, you probably already have it (I hate ads so I have the ad-free version but no live TV with it).

Per that definition:

Vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) were the first active electronic components… and by the 1920s, commercial radio broadcasting and telecommunications were becoming widespread and electronic amplifiers were being used in such diverse applications as long-distance telephony and the music recording industry.

So tubes are in! Old lamps are OUT!

Are thermionic diodes allowed or just semiconductor diodes? What about the early crystal diodes (subset of semiconductor). Did the Colossus computer count? Eniac? I guess particular items don’t matter because no individual owns either and I doubt individual built replicas.

What counts as electronics? Guitar speaker with vacuum tubes? Old rotary phone? Lamps so old the electric cords are covered in a hard fabric? If you require solid state / chips and boards rather than things that did the same function without them, you’re excluding the stuff predating that tech.

Subscription cancelled. Paramount+ never had much content I liked and this was just what I needed to get rid of them. Yes, they prompt you for why you want to cancel, and if you choose ‘Other’, you can explain that your reason is that with 60 minutes and now Colbert, they are acceding to a fascist bent on stripping the U.S. of everything that made it good: education, research, rule of law, and so on – and why? For the love of money rather than any interest in their customers’ welfare.

After reading the piece and seeing no explanation for why Farrell would be so angry, I found this quote from his wife about what happened:

“He felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band,” Etty wrote in her post. “Perry had been suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat every night. But when the audience in the first row, started complaining up to Perry cussing at him that the band was planning too loud and that they couldn’t hear him, Perry lost it.”

DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to mothers who carry genes for mitochondrial diseases and risked passing on severe disorders. The eight babies are healthy, say the researchers behind the trial.

That’s gonna mess up how we trace ancestry.

When we mean the bad ones, it’d be, “My nightmare has come true.”

… seems like every news story evokes that thought these days.

Wait. Yesterday the OP, @Skavau@piefed.social, posted this that says Bluey topped Nielson with 25 billion minutes:

Six out of the top 20 most-streamed titles from January through June fell into the animation category (No. 1 “Bluey,” No. 4 “Family Guy,” No. 5 “Bob’s Burgers,” No. 6 “SpongeBob SquarePants,” No. 12 “American Dad!” and No. 20 “South Park”).

“Grey’s Anatomy” came in at No. 2 overall with more than 22 billion minutes streamed across 449 episodes on Hulu and Netflix, while “NCIS” topped 19 billion minutes across 488 episodes on Paramount+, Hulu and Netflix and charted at No. 3 overall.

A number of series with smaller libraries of episodes punched above their weight on the overall list.

“Squid Game” on Netflix accrued more than 15 billion viewing minutes across just 22 total episodes, securing the No. 9 spot overall and No. 1 among original series.

… so even though the Forbes article doesn’t SAY it, perhaps Forbes is only counting streaming-only original series rather than streaming-and-broadcast?

Yes. Looking at Hollywood Reporter, we have more lists that explain the breakdown of Original Series versus Overall. They also list Acquired Series and Movies. Overall:

Bonus! Here’s the most recent 35 day I found – from Variety:

• 1. Squid Game (Netflix) 27.1 million
• 2. Adolescence (Netflix) 19.0 million
• 3. Reacher (Amazon Prime) 18.1 million
• 4. Tracker (CBS) 17.5 million
• 5. Matlock (CBS) 16.1 million
• tie High Potential (ABC) 16.1 million
• 7. Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Story (Netflix) 15.7 million
• tie Zero Day (Netflix) 15.7 million
• 9. Nobody Wants This (Netflix) 15.2 million
• 10. Landman (Paramount+) 15.0 million
• 11. The Night Agent (Netflix) 14.8 million
• 12. American Primeval (Netflix) 13.8 million
• 13. Running Point (Netflix) 13.1 million
• 14. A Man on the Inside (Netflix) 12.4 million
• 15. Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage (CBS) 12.1 million
• tie Ghosts (CBS) 12.1 million
• 17. Will Trent (ABC) 11.6 million
• 18. Elsbeth (CBS) 11.5 million
• tie Watson (CBS) 11.5 million
• tie 1923 (Paramount+) 11.5 million
• tie Ms. Rachel (Netflix/YouTube) 11.5 million

Source: Nielsen panel-only P2+ prime AA, Live+35, 9/15/24-3/15/25 +Nielsen SCR, 35 Day Total Flight for streaming. Excludes sports, specials and repeat programs Note: Regularly scheduled programs with fewer than four episodes in a completed season are not included in this program ranking.

I guess I just can’t hear “literacy gains” as anything but a postivie regardless of source; even (if not especially) if it is an ‘enemy’ population.

I am not confident I or most other Americans can always tell what is misinformation. A recent bout of AI generated ‘Am I the A-hole?’ post on reddit recently got a bunch of people angry (Meta would say, ‘highly engaged’) because enough of them though the stories might be true.

When the Fukishima power plant got hit by a tidal wave, I foolishly believed an ‘expert’ on TV that day who said the plant was designed so that lead shielding hoods would automatically cover the rods in the event of power loss. Well THAT didn’t happen. I no longer remember who the ‘expert’ was, so he could fool me again. Maybe he has.

I, too, know the trend of criminal U.S. administrations to tell the other side to tone it down and just go with the President. The current administration makes me more outraged than post-9/11 when we knew the hijackers were Saudis, we knew bin Laden was around Afghanistan/Pakistan, and we had a team of Nuclear inspectors WITHIN Iraq saying they’d found no evidence of such weapons, yet a few days before their official report was finished, Bush declares war on Iraq? With no exit strategy? When Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11?

Rather than suggesting we all calm down, or that true patriots back the President, I’m simply seeing the article’s point in asking people to stop following the top, say, 2% most divisive voices. It is a sad truth that the worst liars will get their followers to disbelieve Dr. Fauci such that he becomes divisive through no fault of his own, but he won’t hit the critical ‘worst’ list because he’s not spouting vitriol of his own.

As far as Bernie goes, there were a good number of Bernie backers at Trump rallies, so I honestly doubt that anyone but moneyed think tanks have much bad to say about him.

I agree that as categories, the are different things, just as ‘tools’ are not the same as ‘weapons’, but ignoring the perncious overlap borders on criminal. If you follow actual news sites and reporters but omit the likes of Musk, you will still see Musk quoted, but it is more likely to be properly discredited where needed. At no point does the article suggest you avoid all partisan content, it simply says the most divisive is likely to hurt us all. You know the platforms profit from engagement, so they’ll promote the worst offenders’ content upward, but we don’t have to take that bait.

The accounts with the MOST divisive political content are unlikely to be your best source of information. You might hate Rachel Maddow or Charlie Kirk, but you’'ll be better off getting news from a generic MSNBC or FOX feed than either personality. Better still, pick BBC, Reuters, and AlJazeera to see a variety of views.

A reverse example of context: Project 2025 never explicitly says anything about IVF, but it repeatedly talks about human life “from conception to natural death”, which would mean IVF would be problematic. If you try quoting just the last sentence in this chunk, ‘day one’ might be interpreted as birth, but in context, ‘day one’ is obviously conception:

From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.

P.S. Do we agree that Bernie Sanders is NOT divisive? That the majority of actual people agree with most of what Bernie says, and it is only a few rich interests that object?

No, not in context. They are talking about disimformation like, “using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19” from Musk. They say:

A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So if you cut out the the most divisive political accounts, you will not miss ANY actual news, but are likely to miss a huge pile of disinformation.

If Kristi Noem had any morals or sense of remorse, she’d just curl up and die.

On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.

That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter

The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.

Research suggests that how a body reacts to a vaccine is altered by the type of microbiome a person has. Studies on the Covid-19 vaccine, for example, suggest it affected the snot’s microbiome, and in turn, the microbiome affected how efficient the vaccine was.

I hope those researchers get paid extra.

The researchers asked 22 adults to shoot themselves up the nose with a syringe full of snot from healthy friends and partners each day for five days. They discovered that symptoms like cough and facial pain, for instance, dropped by almost 40% for up to three months in at least 16 of the patients.

<shudder> There’s no way those 22 could have been paid enough.