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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Let’s see.

    • We’ll probably be up to the iPhone 22 but I doubt that’s what they’ll call it.
    • We will have missed the majority of the global warming deadlines to transition to greener energy by 2030 with most companies pushing out their timeliness to 2050.
    • The buzz around AI will have died down a bit but the technology will have found its niche and been adopted both as a useful tool and the next step of enshittification against users.
    • The SpaceX Mars mission will still be nowhere to be found
    • The first $10 trillion+ market cap company will exist by then
    • There will be some other, different conflict in the middle-east
    • The invasion of Taiwan will have either already been attempted or China gives up on it and decides to focus on building their own fabs
    • Putin is still in control of Russia but extremely rarely seen outside of his bunker. Thee are many conspiracies that he is dead and has been replaced by a double
    • The war in Ukraine has stalled with neither party being able to achieve complete victory. There is an armistice in place but not a proper peace accord
    • The price of food has almost doubled again compared to today but wages only increased by 60%
    • There is an even higher social tension between the left and right but people are unwilling to try to break out of the two party system
    • Lemmy has 2-3 x users compared to today but is still a niche platform








  • Many dumb takes here, but also some good ones. Here are mine roughly sorted by importance:

    • (Don’t be a dick - obviously)
    • Choose a direct flight whenever possible. I usually would pick a shitty, more expensive airline over having a connecting flight.
    • If you are planning a connecting flight, try to allocate at least 1-1.5 hours for the connection. Planes are delayed all the time and the shorter the connection time, the higher chance you’ll miss your flight. Your checked luggage can also miss your connection, pack some necessities in your carry-on. (anything more than 3 hrs is overkill though)
    • Noise cancelling headphones/earphones: this is where they work best, blocking out the fatiguing drone of the plane. Highly recommended. Headphones are more comfortable over longer periods than earbuds.
    • Window seats are better for sleeping asile is better if you tend to move around (but people passing by will disturb you by brushing up against you and you feel the floor flexing more as they walk)
    • Cheap airlines: you get what you pay for. You will be treated like cattle but they do get you from point A to B for less money. Be aware they will nickle and dime you every step of the way, bring water (bottle you can fill after security) and some snacks.
    • Luggage: carry-on is better than checked if you can avoid it but sometimes you can’t. For cheap airlines double check the size limits for carry on. The sizes are not standard and cheap airlines try to trick you into paying fees. Sometimes they’ll also take your carryon during boarding to check it in the hold when the plane is very full. You can try to avoid this by queueing and boarding sooner than others, or by bringing a smaller bag that fits under the seat.
    • If you do end up checking a bag you’ll have to show up a bit sooner and usually wait a bit longer after the plane has landed. Place anything fragile in your carry-on! The luggage handlers throw your bag around like they are trying to break something on purpose. If you can’t avaid checking fragile things, surround them with clothes and other soft materials. Also put a luggage tag on your bag, sometimes multiple people have the same bag.
    • Flights during the evening and afternoon tend to have a higher chance of being late/geting cancelled. The effect is slight and there isn’t much you can do about it though. Just keep it in mind if you have a critical time/place to be somewhere.
    • On a long flight wearing your seat belt (even loosely) while sleeping means the flight attendant doesn’t have to wake you if there is turbulance.
    • Wearing a mask is not a bad idea

  • Quality fluctuates, there are good and bad years. During the pandemic there were very few actually good releases but this last year has been pretty great. Of course when I talk about a ‘good year’ I mean there were a handful of great releases, not that everything released was good. Most of new releases are trash (always have been) but you can happily ignore those if there are enough of the quality shows/movies.

    The thing is both audiences and TV shows/movies evolve. Once you see something revolutionary it’s hard to go back to some of the old stuff that now feels stale or lacking. So in order to release quality content, I would argue, you actually have to do better every year.

    Also, studios love repeating what works already. This grants them safe, repeatable profits, but reduces experimentation and means they release similar movies repeatedly year after year. Take a look at the Marvel movies since Endgame. I would actually say that quality hasn’t actually been dropping necessarily, (at least not on average) as many say. It’s just that the premise of a Marvel movie in 2023 is so boring and played out, everyone already knows how the movie will flow. But I think a 2017 audience would enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy 3 just as much as they did the previous movies.

    Finally, Hollywood seems to love tropes. In the 80s and 90s it was macho action man, the 2010s we had a superhero craze, and this last decade it seems to be female empowerment. As with anything after a few years it starts to become stale and the best movies are usually the ones defying the industry because, as you said, fatigue sets in. (the 2000s seemed great in this regard I can’t really pin an overarching trope on them)

    So I think the quality of cinema is increasing but so are our expectations. And we can get bored by seeing the same movie over and over again.