I watched this yesterday in the cinema and lost at least 30 brain cells. All of the world’s natural disasters happen at once and they seem to be exclusively hunting Gerard Butler. It was so stupid it was funny again.

Cut - tectonic plate shift - cut - tsunami - cut - radioactive cyclone - cut - meteor blasts out of orbit :D

What a load of crap! A true trash gem. But the last 20 minutes were just painful, to be honest.

At least we still have very powerful netbooks. GPD makes some.

I am really grateful that Microsoft removed Windows Mixed Reality from Windows 11 and turned a lot of good headsets into trash for a while. Got an HP Reverb G2 for 120 bucks and now that works better than ever thanks to the Oasis driver that came out a few months ago.

It’s 2160p per eye and I played Half-Life: Alyx on it, which is an absolute masterpiece. And I got Virtual Home Theater and watched all of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies in full 3D SBS. Better quality than my local cinema.

The Steam frame is supposed to have the same resolution and might be 600+. I’m not paying that much for VR.

And the Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick. Came out in 1998 and people still build USB adapters today to make it work in modern racing games and flight simulators.

Using light sensors was wild back then, the successor didn’t use them anymore because they cheaped out.

I wish we’d still use them. Typing this on a Unihertz Titan 2.

Common within a very small niche.

I’d wager a lot of people from that small niche are registered on the Fediverse, though.

I do admit that I run Win10 IOT in VirtualBox for a few small programs that won’t run under Wine.

I work in an ad agency and I have to use it, too, sometimes. Mainly for Adobe XD and Illustrator. I export their shitty proprietary formats to PDF and SVG, shut down the VM and continue working with native Linux tools.

This guy assassinates.

I like having to put “site:reddit.com” at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.

kagi.com solved this problem for me.

Ungrouped buttons with titles is very efficient for me, too. I grew up with Windows 95 (that was the default behaviour back then) and my brain can handle this really well. I despise grouped buttons I have to hover over to see the actual windows and the icons only mode makes the clickable area too small and annoying to navigate to.

the future of cinema is community

I’m from Germany and I took a trip to Nuremberg this year. They have a very popular and massive cinema, because they understand the culture. You can find dancefloors in there, a big cafe area to hang out, an underground cinema where they carved the screen out of the wall (it’s like the batcave with a screen). They livestream soccer matches and you can even listen to audiodramas in a dark room or watch movies on the roof at night with drinks served.

It’s really amazing and I wish more cinemas would understand that surviving on endless Marvel movies will not work out for them in the future. Cinemas need to do more activities to draw people in.

The picture quality on that enormous screen was absolute shit.

At my local cinema, they have a system that opens a curtain automatically before the movie starts. Except it often doesn’t work right and only opens up halfway, so someone from the audience (usually me) has to get up and look for an employee to manually open it all the way. I missed quite a few movie intros because of that. 😑

When I watched Robot Dreams at another cinema, there was a small tear right in the middle of the screen. The state of cinema in this day and age is very sad.

It used to be a great picture

I have a 300$ projector at home and the image is better than at the local cinema. People don’t go to the cinemas anymore, so they don’t have money to keep up their technology and fall behind. It makes me sad, because my local cinema is from the 1950s and it could be an amazing place with a really unique architecture, but the technology to really enjoy the movies isn’t there.

Heck, they show 3D movies in half framerate, but you still have to pay the full additional charge. I can get better quality with 140$ VR glasses at home. :(

The attention span from social media like TikTok has ruined people, too. It’s annoying when a movie takes its time and people start getting their phones and smartwatches lit up to distract themselves.

In 2024, I’ve been at the cinema almost every week, but this year I just didn’t feel like it. I watched a few movies, for sure, but the excitement wasn’t there.

I don’t know if that’s just me, but I also think movies have gotten too long. I don’t want to sit at the cinema for 3.5 hours and watch a movie that doesn’t even have an ending (looking at you, Killers of the Flower Moon). I get my popcorn and my drink and after 2.5 hours I need to pee and having to get up is just annoying, having to endure my full bladder for another hour even more so.

It’s really weird why filmmakers have decided to make such long movies in this day and age. The Whale was under two hours and the room was flooded with tears afterwards, you don’t need to put a whole series worth of story into one single movie.

I am also tired of the endless remakes and re-remakes. Jurassic World Rebirth was terrible, just let it die already - and what the hell was that “I Know What You Did Last Summer” movie? The first one was bad already, it didn’t need a sequel.

Maybe 2026 will be better, but I don’t have a lot of hope.

At my local cinema they usually play around 5 to 10 minutes of ads before a movie. But I still remember one particular movie where it just didn’t stop and they blasted jewelry ads left and right for a whole 22 minutes. It was “Wish” from Disney.

That whole ordeal made the movie even worse. I do like seeing trailers, because I get excited for new movies, but fucking jewelry ads? Those are the lowest of the low. I’m sure they would’ve played gambling ads next, if that was allowed in Germany.

digikam, it’s a really great alternative to Adobe Lightroom.

I’m currently running Fedora Linux with Firefox and YouTube opened up. The whole system uses ~4GB of memory. That’s totally fine and I couldn’t care less about what Microsoft is doing with their OS.

With that said, I don’t think we’ll see a lot of optimizations in commercial software. Maybe a few here and there, but a lot of developers nowadays don’t even know how to optimize their code. Especially people working in web development or adjacent frameworks. Let’s just throw hundreds of npm packages into one project and bundle them up with webpack, here’s your 12MB JavaScript - take it or leave it. Projects like this aren’t the exception, they are the norm.

Even if the devices that can run that code without running out of memory get more expensive, companies will just pay for those and write them off on the taxes. And if not, more apps will just get pushed into the cloud.

I’m the IT admin, so I can run whatever I want. As long as the work gets done, I could even run TempleOS on my machine. 😀

I stay off the internet more and only try to read terrible news about the world once a week. There’s always a war somewhere on the world that I can’t do anything about, so I don’t have to read about it every day.

I also bought an eBook-Reader without WiFi and I started reading books again.

It’s good.

struthless’ video about suicide was absolutely amazing.