Endgame vs Infinity War which was a better movie?

 

In my opinion Endgame consisted purely of fan service, and the writing was sloppy. The movie was pretty linear and had a boring story line. The final fight scene was fun, but cheesy. I liked the movie simply because it was the last avengers movie, and that’s it.

It doesn’t deserve to be called on if the best movies of all time, because it wasn’t. Infinity War was much more interesting and was much more enjoyable to watch. All of Endgame just felt forced, whereas Infinity War is just fun to watch.

I rated Infinity War an 8/10 and I gave Endgame a 6.5/10 (where 5 is average). When I told my friends what they thought, about 8 of them yelled at me all in a group chat about how I “wasn’t a real marvel fan” even though I’ve seen all of the movies, most of them in theaters.

People glorify Endgame just because it’s the last avengers movie.

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Emoji's are an abomination and should be removed

Unicode is an international standard for encoding written languages. It supports a very large, but finite number of characters. Not all writing systems have been incorporated into Unicode yet, and work continues to make a truly universal system for encoding all written language in computers.

Unicode is one of the great legacies of our time. It is built to last as long as human civilization itself. If humans still exist and use computers in ten million years, they'll encode their writing in Unicode.

Some years ago, a bunch of Japanese guys decided that what it really needed was a pictographic representation of poop.  Since then, there's been a proliferation of extremely culturally-specific iconography added to (I would say, polluting) the Unicode space. This is unsustainable. We have languages for a reason--we combine words to shade our meaning. The meanings of emojis are both too specific to deserve their own Unicode characters, and too broad for Unicode to support all of the possible things you could want in an pictogram.

Maybe in 1000 years nobody eats hamburgers. Why the f**k do we need a hamburger emoji? Why does it look like a hamburger from Japan instead of the US? Because if you add all the things that you could possibly want, Unicode will run out of space.

So screw emojis.

(Note, I'm not against pictograms in general. If you come on here saying that "yes there are emojis for those things, I downloaded them on my iPhone" that's because you don't know what an emoji is.)

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Short Film Inspired by 13 Reasons Why

The story of a depressed teenager working at a movie theater, as well as juggling some heavy relationship issues!

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Amazon updates Fire 7 tablet with faster processor, more storage

The new version of the company's entry-level tablet is getting a much-needed speed boost along with support for hands-free Alexa voice recognition. Now Amazon is updating it with a faster processor and bumping the base storage from 8GB to 16GB.

The "all-new" Fire 7 is available for preorder now and will ship June 7. Like other Amazon tablets, the Fire 7 gives you access to the company's exclusive features, which include Alexa, ASAP, X-Ray, Second Screen, Amazon FreeTime, Family Library, Blue Shade, On Deck and Prime Video downloads. Prime members also have access to millions of movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, apps and games with free, unlimited cloud storage for all Amazon content.

Key Features

• 1,024x600-pixel display
• 10.4 oz (295 grams)
• 7.6x4.5x0.4 inches (192x115x9.6 mm)
• Quad-core 1.3GHz processor
• Front- and rear-facing cameras
• Free, unlimited cloud storage for all photos taken on Fire devices
• Up to 512GB of expandable storage via microSD card (up from 256GB on previous model)
• Dual-band Wi-Fi support
• Battery life: Up to 7 hours of reading, listening to music, streaming video and web browsing
• Screen sharing: Let an Amazon expert guide you remotely through any feature on your screen for free
• Access to exclusive Amazon features, services and media libraries
• New color options: Black, Sage, Plum, and Twilight Blue

Source

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Running thoughts in my Mind

Its 6 AM in the morning I'm awake and unable to sleep... while I wallow in pain from the stiff neck that I caught yesterday, i started thinking... go ahead grab some food and a coke and prepare a response. Think. Think about it. Think about this very hard.

Have you ever been driving down the road and think about where you’re going? What about where each other person is going? Have you thought about how each and every person has lived their life until that very point just like you have. Think about it.

During this very second of time, how many actions are taking place across the world or even universe? Every creature, plant and being is performing some type of action whether it is sleeping or making coffee. Some action is being made in that split second of time. The magnitude of life quickly becomes apparent if you give this some thought and it makes you appreciate the moments you live.

You realize the stress you may have, the feelings you might be feeling are universal and someone is feeling the same way somewhere.

To me, thinking about this is just as mind boggling as trying to wrap my head around our boundless, infinite space. And it makes you feel small, but it also makes you appreciate everything.

Think about it and tell me what you think.

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The growing emotional toll on Climate Change

I'm a very optimistic person, but I'd be lying if I said I don't worry about this on a regular basis.

Climate change is real, is happening and will have a profoundly negative impact on the planet and its inhabitants, which does include human beings. Denying the science, pretending it's not happening or suggesting we can't do anything about it won't do anything other than make the situation worse. 

Start here to see what you can do: https://cotap.org/reduce-carbon-footprint/

If you're treating someone for a burn, the first thing that you should do is stop the burning process. If you can't stop the source of the burn, then the treatments applied will be mostly ineffective. It's the same logic with climate change. If we can't stop the source of the problem, then our treatments will be ineffective. We will build sea walls that will still eventually be over run by rising water. We spend ever more resources fighting worse, and worse forest fires. We will have to build larger and large irrigation and water projects to keep farms irrigated. We will have to abandon populous sections of the planet.

None of those options are stable solutions. They are also incredibly expensive prospects. The simple economics of it is that slowing the rate of damage will have the best return on investment. And the fear is that the worst case scenario, if we choose to do absolutely nothing, could collapse incredibly vital ecological functions (the collapse of currents, total loss of sea ice, large scale drought) from which there is no mitigation technically possible.

I agree that this far in, we definitely have to think about mitigation and control of the problem. But we haven't hit the worst of it yet. Our best investment is in slowing the release of GHG emissions and we have quite a few promising leads to do that. A small investment today, is a huge investment in the future.

My grief is not that the climate is going downhill. I'm sad because the people that are in a position of power enough to make any real meaningful changes towards making the environment better don't seem to care at all.

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macOS Mojave 10.14.5 (18F132) is out!

Overview

The macOS 10.14.4 SDK provides support for developing apps for Macs running macOS Mojave 10.14.5. The SDK comes bundled with Xcode 10.2.1 available from the Mac App Store. For information on the compatibility requirements for Xcode 10.2.1, see Xcode 10.2.1 Release Notes.

Accessibility

Resolved Issues
The Accessibility Events switch was removed, because related aspects of the W3C AOM effort are no longer applicable. (49784417)

Date and Time

New Features

Support for the Reiwa (令和) era of the Japanese calendar, which began on May 1, 2019, is now available. The first year of Japanese-calendar era is represented as “元年” (“Gannen”) instead of “1年”, except in the shorter numeric-style formats which typically also use the narrow era name; for example: “R1/05/01”. (27323929)

Security

New Features

Kernel extensions signed after April 7, 2019 must be notarized in order to load on macOS 10.14.5. (50016570)
Known Issues

The system fails to register tickets stapled to installer packages not scanned by Gatekeeper, which causes newly installed kernel extensions to fail to load if Internet access isn’t available. This can occur if a user launches installation from a local folder or an enterprise uses automated tools to deploy an installer. This issue doesn’t affect stapled disk images, apps, or kext bundles. (50205533)

Workaround: In a new folder, create a shell script named preinstall to register the stapled ticket during install: ‘#!/bin/sh’ if [[ /usr/bin/sw_vers -productVersion == 10.14.5 ]]; then /usr/sbin/spctl -a -vvv -t install "$PACKAGE_PATH"; fi Then, when creating the flat package installer using either the pkgbuild or productbuild tool, pass the --scripts <path to folder containing preinstall> option to embed the preinstall script into the finalized installer.

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Movie Reviews: Avengers Endgame

This moment right here is when the experiment of the MCU came in full force to me. There was a lot of great moments in this film.

The way the film just started had me hooked. That opener was chilling and superb. Overall, what a movie. The scale of it alone is one of the most impressive things I've seen in a movie, and it's not just that scale but also how this movie is not a total mess. I am so happy for Marvel fans because this must really hit their g-spot. So many great surprises for fans and just general fun.

The more I watch it the more I have questions but that probably just comes with the territory of a movie this big that messes with time. 

"What really works here is the emotion and the hype builds."

Still, overall this is an easy 9/10. Theaters were absolutely insane last weekend, we will likely not see a movie this big again in the next decade or two. And if someone wants to top it then they have to start right now. 

In the sense that movies and money will always be intertwined, when a movie comes along and smashes every record there is, that is what makes cinematic history. Props to everyone who worked on it and any Marvel movie.

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Android should move to Single Image OS with continuous Updates

Android needs to move to a software model more like how Windows or linux distributions are released where a single disk image can work on just about any device, and after installed, you simply install the drivers for your specific hardware. Though with most smartphones using the same board level specs, driver packages should be easy to maintain.

If android could move to that model, then it will be easier to keep smartphones up to date. While I use android, I find that these devices have the worst support out of any other device.

Think about this, when you buy a video card, a low end Nvidia GPU from 200, got updates until late 2018. 

Windows will typically offer security updates for 10+ years.

My Samsung Galaxy S5 still gets security updates to fix bugs when some OS updates cause issues with the phone. 

With a smartphone, we typically get 18-24 months of support and most smartphones will at best offer 1 major OS update and a security update every 4-6 months or so. Low end models may at best get one update over their life.

Most laptops priced similarly to the higher end smartphones, will typically get bios and major driver updates for 5+ years.

With all of this in mind, if we look at laptops and smartphones we see that the smartphones will typically have a 350%-600% profit margin over BOM + manufacturing while a laptop may have a 20-50% margin.

Why can a laptop maker release a device at a 20-50% margin and support it for 5 years while a smartphone maker can get a 600% margin and only support it for 18-24 months?

PS, by support for laptops (and even desktop PC motherboards), I am talking about things like driver and bios updates. Overall, many other companies are shipping devices at a lot lower profit margins than smartphones while supporting their devices for a longer time.

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Tumblr's NSFW Content and bid for Freedom

Tumblr used to have a large amount of NSFW content on there, ranging from art to photos and even clips from porn if you knew where to look.

Among other things, it was a great place for artists to post and share their art, especially as other popular sites like deviantArt wouldn't allow it.

Tumblr hosted many blogs that focused on extremely specific fetish content too. Blogs were as broad as "just anal" all the way to as specific as "just Asian girl's left feet wearing toe rings." For people with less common fetishes these curated streams of content were highly appreciated, it wasn't just what you were interested in but a steady stream of it instead of having to comb through many different sites. Beyond that, content creators would be able to share their own OC in their curated stream, and individuals producing content could network and interact with others who shared their tastes. 

This mix of your own work as well as others was important because individuals are not able to be as prolific in making content when it is just a hobby or side gig. It was both the content being specific as well as the communities that were built that made Tumblr unique.

Late last year, Tumblr decided to remove all of the NSFW content, leading to a large number of creators leaving the site. The purge was done because the Apple store remove it as an option due to there being child porn on there. Additionally, the people who own Tumblr also wanted to make the site more ad friendly; something you can't do if there are lewd pinups of a woman, regardless of her age.

A few days ago, news broke that Verizon is looking to sell Tumblr, likely due to the loss it took once the NSFW content was removed. Thus PornHub offering to buy it and restore it to how it once was.

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