@stevesplace I assume some people do like all the drama too, otherwise in a profit oriented environment, they wouldn’t be going for that approach, right?

But personally, I don’t like loading up a show with all the personal drama instead of the original subject matter that got me hooked in the first place.

Take shows like “Midsomer Murders” which has run for over 20 seasons in the UK — the show has stuck to its core premise all those seasons. The personal stuff is incidental and is not the main focus of the show. I like that approach much better 🙂

Something I've noticed about a lot of American TV shows — the first season starts off with a great idea but by season two or three it has become all about the personal lives of the characters and their relationships and the core idea gets relegated to the background and gets lost.

“House” was a great medical drama at first and I loved it for the medicine but eventually it became all drama and not much medicine. The same with “The Good Doctor”.

(I can contrast this to UK TV but I guess that’ll have to be a post for another time 😛)

“Warrior” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5743796) is a show which doesn’t do this as much and which manages to maintain a balance between the core story and the character development. Or maybe, it’s because the story is all about the characters 🙂

But what I do like about the show a lot is the fact that the characters learn, grow, and change. Characters who started out looking as if they are pure evil start getting shades of grey as you learn about them and their motivations. Others change their attitudes and stance as time goes on.

The show is constantly changing and alliances constantly shift. And it’s marvellous to see these happening and to see a story being told so deftly 🙂

As the end of season 3 approaches, I can see a lot of changes and a bunch of new alliances happening. I hope there’s a season 4 since I want to keep on watching!

#TV #US #English #Warrior #BruceLee

@davemark I believe the display name on device is “X” while the app name on the App Store is still “Twitter” 🙂 @mcelhearn

Back in the day, Tamil movie songs used to have meaning — some of them espoused deep philosophies in song. Then things changed. It seemed to become all about the rhythm and the beat and less about meaning.

"Maamannan" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20242416) made me acutely aware of this because one character in the movie sings some of the old songs and I realized how much I'd missed these meaningful songs.

But that wasn't all of it. The movie has a very melancholic vibe and I keep expecting bad things to happen. And they do.

One of the characters sings "the only thing that humanity hasn't learned is how to be human" (or words to that effect) and the movie is all about that — how humans endlessly oppress and kill other humans in the name of constructs that they've created such as caste, status, authority etc. to keep humans separated from other humans.

A couple of characters buck this trend and stand for equality and not bowing down to "authority"/bullies, but it's a telling sign that even one of these characters has to tell others what to do in several situations. This is a characteristic of almost every Indian movie — the "hero"/protagonist has to tell others what to do, even when the actions are fairly self-evident (as in taking an injured person to the hospital). It's almost as if people are being told, you shouldn't act/think for yourself — let somebody who's "the one" tell you what to do ...

And that probably is the most harmful thing that a movie which preaches the opposite message can do? If more people would think for themselves, perhaps they might not fall prey to those who try to control them by sowing division amongst them?

#Movies #Tamil #MiniReview #Reflections

I’ve generally not been keen on Varun Dhawan movies — maybe it’s my general dislike of the kind of movies his Dad used to make seeping through, or maybe it’s because most Varun Dhawan movies I’ve seen have had him playing comedic roles without much weight.

But “Bawaal” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19755170/) is a movie which changed my opinion of him. It’s an interesting and impactful movie in many levels.

Based on the description, I expected a war movie and half didn’t watch it since I dislike war movies intensely. But this was good, it talks about war, the impact I has on people, but it’s also about society, how we want to portray ourselves, relationships, and a lot more.

While this part gets a little lost in the rest of the story, it’s also about teaching and teachers. That’s something I’ve loved since “To Sir, With Love” and while this is not on the same level, it does have some of the same impact, in a way.

#Movies #MiniReview #Bollywood #Hindi

@giuseppe Maybe we should form a club? Or a support group? 😛 @christianselig

@christianselig Thank you 🙂 Hope you had a great birthday as well?

The thing about my birthday is that I was born on the other side of the world when they landed on the moon, so my birthday is on the 21st — so you and I have a sort of a Schroedinger’s birthday where we share the birthday and don’t 😛

@christianselig And I’m 54 today — I came here when they landed on the moon 😛

@alexito4 Yeah, I discovered that I’m not that big of a science geek anymore 😛 I got bored trying to make my one-cell organism advance and gave up 😀

@karim Didn’t think anybody would actually want another fork, to be honest. I just wanted the features for myself because I couldn’t find them anywhere else.

Would have contributed to the original repo but my changes are rather drastic and (possibly) go against the original project’s philosophy 🙂

But if there’s enough interest, I suppose I can put it up on GitHub or something …

I’ve been following the discussion by @alexito4 about adding extra tags to a followed hashtag on Fedi clients generally (and @IceCubesApp specifically) with interest …

Since this is a feature that I’d wanted myself, I decided to go ahead and add it to my custom IceCubes fork with an additional change — the ability to specify how the extra tags are used for selecting posts …

This should reduce my main timeline clutter quite a bit — with an additional change, of course. Currently, followed tags appear in the main timeline and I’ve added filtering to remove them.

But I realized with this change that I don’t have to follow hashtags at all — I was simply doing that as a backup mechanism so that I can have all followed hashtags saved on the server so that when I switch clients, I don’t have to set up hashtags all over again.

However, if I add saving my local client config to iCloud, I might have a much better system here … Hmm ….

#FediClients #Swift #SwiftUI #Coding #Hashtags

@joshdholtz If it’s something I’d be interested in, then I’m likely to provide a lot more feedback 🙂 Would certainly be interested in the beta access, but knowing a bit more about the “thing” might help me let you know if I’m likely to be a good test subject? 😛

Reminds me a bit of Will Wright’s “Spore” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game) …

Guess I’ll have to give it a go and see how well it works on macOS? 🙂

From: @alexito4
https://mastodon.social/@alexito4/110741928929528729

@icanzilb I have the opposite problem — I have 6 names and most systems can’t handle that number of characters. So I end up having to abbreviate etc. 🙂

Didn’t have any problems in Spain but then again, we only lived there a few months and I don’t think we had to go to doctors or sign up anywhere except online …

So ... I've heard of shadow banning on Twitter, but is there also shadow blocking of being able to post? Or is it just that the Twitter macOS app is now broken?

I used to post a protest message to Twitter everyday via their API. But the free API access kept getting blocked/banned etc.

So I switched over to using a macOS shortcut to post via the Twitter app. That too stopped working about a week ago. Every single time I try to post, it says “posting failed” or something similar.

However, if I go to the web interface, I can post the same thing fine.

So not sure if this is shadow blocking or the Twitter edifice crumbling slowly into the oceans of time 😛

#Twitter #Posting #Blocking #ShadowBans

@cwagdev Thanks 🙂 These days my client has a lot of hidden rows, but on the other hand, I don’t stress out about catching up as much because I can tell at a glance what is important for me at the moment vs. what I can safely skip …

@cwagdev I designed my custom client around this exact thing ... OK, maybe not “designed”, it was more of an organic development 😛

Basically, I added a feature where people from posts can be filtered out of the main timeline. So, I add people who are prolific to lists, colour-code the lists, and then filter them out of the main timeline.

Well, not quite filter them out since that breaks timeline handling in a lot of ways, but I hide the content and put a tiny colour-coded strip which indicates which list the item came from.

That way, I can scroll through the main timeline easily and see the posts from the people I’m interested in and if I’m not busy, I can also expand the hidden list items I’m more interested in …

Works pretty well for me without getting too stressed out about how far behind I am …🙂

@vegetarianzombie Agreed 🙂 I don’t like the zealotry when it rears its head, but on the other hand, even that is more low key than the strident argumentativeness on most other places …

I tried out Threads in the hope of finding more people for the subjects that I was interested in (since they have a lot more users) but it was a wasteland of people just shouting out stuff and nobody responding … unless you’re a celeb of course. Then, a lot of “Me too” responses but nothing really useful 😛

@dimsumthinking Now you’ve got me curious 🙂 What did you learn about Observable? And is it something which can be explained in a few words or something that requires a blog post?