Obviously nothing is to their credit. But the talk about tariffs is forcing the UK to look towards Europe more than they maybe would have, and a majority of Brexit voters are now in favour of joining the EU's internal market.

It was just a tongue in cheek way of saying that the US' only ally in the world is going to be the soaring Russian economy - even the Brits, who forcefully tied themself to the Mayflower mast, are now looking back to Europe.

In good personal news, a good friend of mine in the UK has landed a really good job in the UK working on the tariffs. I'm very happy for her. Silver linings. :)

Fuck Trump and the horse he rode in on (Musk), but he is doing wonders for UK/EU relations.

As much as I think AI will make everything worse, I think it's just a symptom of the real problem in the industry.

I think it boils down to two things:

1. Major studios are pure capitalists with no artistic interest, with newcomers like Apple and Amazon not even having a culture for authenticity in any part of their operation
2. Marvel made too much money

So what they've learned is that there's no point in making movies - if they want to make money they need to make a franchise. So they keep investing in anything they can possibly milk into a soulless franchise that sucks in consumers and leaves them hooked.

There's no room for artistic authenticity in this process. It will produce worthless garbage by design. It's consumerism turned into cinematography.

Thank god some are rebelling against it.

Well, yeah, there are political or ideological aims, which are believed to be achievable through fear. The violence itself is not meant to achieve much directly, but it spreads fear in the population that works towards some goal or another.

Violence + politics is just war.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and vice versa.

Terrorism is violence in order to spread fear. The poor CEOs are shitting themselves right now.

Problem is, generally it's defined as violence against civilians. I'm not sure billionaires fit that category.

Not to mention handling media requests, as it's constantly in the news.

There's no length they wouldn't go to to prevent people from enjoying things. Next they'll probably find the culprit and press terrorism charges on him.

I cannot wrap my head around the fact that apparently, except that god-awful character design, everything else in the movie was apparently fine.

Like, how can anyone with any sense of producing anything good accept anything that awful?

If it wasn't for the stories going around about the team hired to do the new graphics I would have thought it was just a publicity stunt.

I find microblogging is a really hard format to work with. Being short is super important - the default for Mastodon is 500 characters, on Bluesky it's 300. On Twitter it might be even less, who cares.

So you need to try to get your message across super efficiently. Even if you can write longer in mbin, people might not have the attention span to read long texts. So watch the character counter.

Some other things:

Getting attention

On Mastodon there are two ways of getting attention to your post. The first is by getting followers; the second is by getting boosts. Until you have your own following, the best you can hope for is that people reading your post thinks it's worth promoting and then boost it. Hashtags can also be moderately effective - it's certainly good for discovering content - but you're probably not going to reach very far by shooting things into the void with an hashtag attached if you have no followers.

What helps is to interact with other users. Follow them, boost interesting content you see from them, favourite/upvote their content as a "compliments to the chef", and leave a comment when you have anything to say. Doing this, they might follow you back, which will dramatically increase your reach on the fediverse.

Hashtags

There are two general ways of using hashtags. First, you can add it to some word in your post that nicely summarizes what you're talking about. This is not too distracting, and common practice in most parts of the #fediverse. We don't expect it in forum-style content of course, so for some users it'll look a bit out of place.

The second way of doing it is by listing hashtags at the bottom of your post. Mastodon has a way of hiding these a little, so that they don't get in the way.

As for which hashtags to use, you can of course get creative. But some hashtags are more common than others. When drafting in Mastodon the interface tells you how many people visible from your instance are using the hashtag, which is useful. We sadly lack that on Mbin. In general, maybe include some general and some more specific ones, but don't over-do it.

Mentions / @s

Mentions play a very specific role in the Fediverse. Inherently they're of course simple enough - @user@example.com - but they play a fundamental role in how different Mastodon instances are stitched together.

Of course, they can be used to notify someone - if I tag you (@unknown1234_5@kbin.earth), you'll probably be notified that I did so. But more importantly, it serves the same purpose as an address on an envelope. If you respond to someone on a different instance without @ing them, your post might never reach them, as your post wasn't told it needed to travel to their instance. This is a bit weird and not very intuitive, but that's the reason why Mastodon users always tag each other like crazy in the comments.

@s are also useful to point people towards a specific account, or to include someone in a conversation that might not have been aware of it.

Not sure if that's helpful, but at least it's something!

A couple of fun things as a bonus:

• If you follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy, your microblog posts will all be sent to Bluesky as well. I have been testing this a little, and it works: if you search for Aasatru on Bluesky, you'll find my Mbin account. I don't really microblog much from here though.
• If you get followers on Mastodon, everything you boost will pop up in their feed. So if you see a comment you find to be particularly fun or insightful, and that ideally also works well as a free-standing text, you can boost it to give it attention on Mastodon and similar sites. Sometimes random comments can "escape" this way and get much more attention than the post they are responding to.

As long as he doesn't end up subscribing to the Chicago school of economics, but I have the impression that the University of Chicago has moved on and that even there it's only subscribed to by the loonies these days.

But whenever someone says they studied economy in Chicago I still get suspicious.

Ironically, the influence of the Chicago school is probably why tuition is so expensive. Supply and demand, baby.

As far as I know there's no option to boost posts from Lemmy, it's an exclusive little function for Mbin and the microblogs.

I quite like it, as it makes it easier for good comments to "escape" from here and into the microblogging platforms. Assuming of course you are followed by users over there. But it is not a function on Lemmy.

So I'm not sure what OP refers to, or how posts appear as boosted in the dadjokes community. But it is indeed possible for Mbin or Mastodon users (among others) to boost any content seen on there.

Huh. Seems pretty expansive - @dansup@mastodon.social, any comment?

Get them on Signal, I'd say. :)

I don't think there's any need to be rude. Just tell him you appreciate that he wants to make sure you're alright, but that you're just not a very talkative person and you quite enjoy silence. You can say it's nothing personal, but that's just who you are and you'll let him know if one day for whatever reason you are not fine. If you're feeling generous you can ask him to do the same, but that is a potential commitment.

She's not interested in using any social media at all, she just wants a place to toot about her publications because it's part of the job. So some Mastodon instance specific to her field is pretty much as good as it gets for her usecase. As an academic the domain-specific Mastodon instances are pretty great.

I like Mbin a lot though! :)

As an academic, there are several users on Bluesky I would like to follow. Sadly very few are bridged for now. Hopefully all Bluesky accounts will be open for bridging at some point.

Another advantage is that thanks to Bridgy I can convince my partner to join Mastodon instead of Bluesky to promote her work, as the reach is the same on either platform.

I don't think independent forums exist in the eyes of many legislators. The internet equals big tech.

If they accidentally kill off the independent web they won't even notice. They're probably still on X, thinking it's still hip and unaware alternatives even exist. Never mind trying to explain them about independent forums.

Of all the nerdy things I'm excited about, the prospekt of making bug reports to FOSS git projects through my Mbin or Mastodon accounts is certainly on the list. I have so many accounts I made just for a single bug report. This will be great if/when it takes off.

I don't know the franchise, I don't care all that much for horror films, and I don't follow the movie industry all that much.

Still watched the trailer for this when I saw it was well received here, and I'm happy I did. It's a nice little piece of cinema in its own right.

This comment was brought to my attention as it was reported for being too dumb to exist.

As I'm not a moderator of this community, I'll leave that judgment to others.

However, I will point out that the Online Safety Act was passed in 2023, towards the end of well over a decade of British politics being dominated by the Tories. Labour only won the election in 2024.

So, despite popular belief, the liberals are not the ones taking your rights away. Unless you consider Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak to be liberals, of course. Which you might, as nobody using the word "liberal" seems to have even the faintest idea what it means any more.

The Online Safety Act is not about regulating TikTok, it's about surveillance underneath a thin veil of protecting children. And it is very much a Tory piece of work.

Sounds like it might be ideal for some take on Korean pancakes, which are absolutely delicious (but challenging to make, I've heard). Thanks for the link!