As I said, practical first, digital secondary or to enhance seems to be the secret sauce of creating something stunning. Most of the intimate shots with Rexy and the kids are practical. When she busts through the sunroof and tries to eat them… terrifyingly real because there’s a “real” thing attacking them. LOTR is real for a different reason- physical armor, cast of thousands. Compare the Rohirrim and armies of Mordor in that movie to the unified CGI mess that is the Battle of Five Armies in the Hobbit. Even using physical miniature sets for the big locations like Minas Tirith gives them weight.

My critique of China’s environmental policies will always be that it’s rooted in lessening the impact on the environment for human reasons first, never for the sake of the environment and the other life we share this planet with. It’s also one of my fundamental criticisms of ML theory itself; it still puts humans first. I get that we’re going to tend to default to that, but the amount of Western “leftists” willing to ignore the rape of the planet for human’s sake just to spite western methods disgusts me. Strip-mining for rare earth elements to make better batteries for solar power isn’t exactly a better trade off than burning coal, it just makes you feel better cus it sounds better. And let’s talk about the factory farms it takes to feed a billion people who’ve been moved out of subsistence farming and into a “middle class”.

Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, TMNT ‘89, Lord of the Rings.

Whatever the JP franchise is now, it will never go back to full scale animatronics, and without Stan Winston’s magic, it’ll never be quite what the first (and a bit of the second) were.

Cameron himself can’t recreate the magic of T2 even if his films make billions. He never risks having to “nail this in one shot” stunts.

As for TMNT. Nobody gives a shit they’re suits, we could suspend our disbelief and watched mindblowing performances by great stuntmen in some of the most advanced animatronics ever. Michael Bay can’t even fathom how much better that is.

The Hobbit was plagued by a lot of problems, but I don’t know if even Jackson could pull off the practical effects with digital overlay magic that was the first trilogy if he tried.

That era of Hollywood, practical first, digital to enhance (sparingly) is gone it seems. It’s sad Hollywood has forgotten that that boundary pushing era was what made those films iconic. Rexy had weight, she literally tore a car apart. You can see the chaos of the semi landing in the canal. The turtles hit. The Riders of Théoden truly rode for ruin. Tell me you don’t get giddy when you know that scene is about to hit.

I’m jealous you’ve got a pecan tree in your yard. Wrong zone for me but there’s a couple of untended black walnuts near by that I harvest from and there’s always some garlic to be found.

I’m up in that area as well. Yeah, it does a little too well in the region. Despite having some benefits it can become a problem so probably worth letting them know. It’s not devastatingly invasive like some plants but it’s also not native North America.

“Found an old human in the parking lot and conned it into feeding and housing me. Suck it tree dwellers.”

That’s exactly what I use mine for!

Hi Eel!

Also, that looks like purple dead nettle. If it is, it’s good for pollinators and edible, but also will spread like wildfire if left unchecked and choke out what you might otherwise want to grow there. I keep a patch contained but it’s a constant battle to keep it in.

I would guess the case could be made that any motorized vehicle doesn’t operate without a human actively making the choices about what the vehicle does, whereas a horse can take direction but will still “operate” even if the rider is blackout drunk. If you’re not on the road and not “operating” the horse, I think you could attempt to argue down to public intoxication or some other nuisance charge, especially if the horse was out of traffic and could be shown to reliably get you home without causing a disturbance. I’ll be interested to see how the courts deal with DUIs when a self-driving car is involved.

Technically one could in my state, but there was a case (granted, 20+ yrs ago) where an old timer got it tossed out because despite being drunk af, he wasn’t on the road but off on the shoulder and there were enough witnesses and history to testify the horse consistently took him home without posing a danger to road safety. A lot of factors went in to that win, old timer, small town, everybody knew him, judge didn’t see him as an issue, so I wouldn’t suggest it for everybody in every situation.

The US does. Even if not fixed life it’ll happily pay for egregiously long sentences that surpass the threat of the crime, stack and “enhance” charges to create longer sentences, and uses probation & parole like a revolving door to find new ways to send people back for violations often over personal vice rather than violence in their community. The part of the population that screams loudest against funding food/healthcare/living programs for their non-criminal neighbors are also the ones who love this system, but they won’t fund any part of it that would teach skills or provide education. They lost their shit when Biden allowed inmates to get Pell grants and colleges sought to offer degrees to inmates. Can’t have your constitutionally allowed slave force enlighten their way out of the cycle.

Every device you run today has an Operating System of some kind, so this bill could impact all devices.

Not all devices.

God bless these chucklefucks for targeting the tools of the 1st instead of the tools of the 2nd. Why use words when you can use lead?

Yeah. But I was a kid in the 80s so I’m also partial to this scenario:

The Flys - Got You Where I Want You, Rob Zombie -Dragula, Real McCoy - Runaway

Hahaha. Fuck. I went to a record swap once where some dude we’d always thought was a fencewalker showed up with that album and tried to convince us “it’s actually really good”. The greatest hit Ian had was a tree.

LC never quite scratched that itch for me but Choking Victim is absolutely a guilty pleasure I haven’t abandoned despite Scott’s bs.

So many exciting possibilities!!! NGL, I was hoping they’d bring dinosaurs back before the machines killed us. Maybe the Matrix will decide to incorporate them. I can live with that.

Good intentions and human skulls.

Western US here. I’m in an urban area where a lot of the farmland that turned into housing in the mid-1900s didn’t become modern subdivisions, so we still have sections of the city where people have enough land to keep their own horse, plus stables on the outskirts. Haven’t seen a horse in downtown in a while, but still see them on side roads, on the walking path along the river, and a lot in the hiking trails that run north of the city, which are basically an extension of the town at this point. When I was a kid in the 80s/90s there was a bar in the farm town about 6mi outside the city that had a hitching post out front and the cowboys still rode there to drink.