Embracer and Amazon just announced they were going to jointly make a Lord of the Rings MMO just last week.  Does anyone know the status of this now?  It does also seem to point to Amazon as the potential partner.

I have one friend who is a writer and I think the writing residuals are now basically non-existent. And I’ve heard that it is also true for most of the actors too (Even the big names now just get a huge upfront). One of the reasons is that the streaming services don’t want anyone to know their actual viewership…

Totally agree, I posted a reply just above that.

I mean this is Chekhov’s gun right here. The very end of the last episode of season one. In 25 seconds it lays out Season 2 and 3, right there. And what’s brilliant and REALLY important about it, is for a second, it shows the Ted actually gives a shit about winning. Look at Rebecca’s reaction. That is not a mistake!…

If they did one heartfelt episode like this I think it would be good and have a lot of impact. But nearly every episode this season has been like this. It’s been such a let down. Particularly because they set themselves up to have such a strong narrative throughline for the season:

“In this economy?”

Yes, you’re right. But it is extremally well made and the story is very interesting. Which, for me, makes it enjoyable to watch, but every character is despicable and none of them are going to be punished in the end. You need to go into this realizing that. It is even one step further down the line of a story about a…

I think it’s more complicated than that, my understanding is that with streaming shows residuals really aren’t part of the equation anymore for a vast majority of the talent.

This was my biggest complaint about the show: “You’re giving people some very actionable ideas here! Stop!”

Has the whole final Hulu ownership thing been resolved yet? Given what is going on with the streaming companies it seems like they are just going to abandon it now. I’m wondering why they are even bothering to deal with what shows will be on it going forward.

Yeah, but in it’s defense, Y The Last Man was Awful.

Quitting en masse AND on the day of a huge release points to not just dissatisfaction with a job, but an abusive workplace. It reflects poorly on GameStop, not on these employees.

I know is sucks that people can’t afford things like this, but some of Disney’s most profitable park ventures are for the ultra-high-end guests.

This stuff is going to really start killing companies in Florida and Texas over the next decades. They are becoming no-go zones for many high-tech workers and academics that have plenty of other places to work.  It’s going to take a while to see the effects, but it is also going to be incredibly hard to recover.

There were also a lot of complaints about the quality of the food and rooms for the price. Ironically, maybe going even HIGHER end might have been the right solution.

I wonder if they could compress the whole experience into a one day or several hour experience. I still believe something like this can be a money maker, they just didn’t get the formula quite right. I just hope Disney has the vision to pat themselves on the back for trying something really new and treat it as a…

Hard pass.

I thought the game was absolutely wonderful and I’d highly recommend that anyone that likes “stressful sims” play it. I will say there were a few bugs and I think that I would have actually spent the time doing some bug fixing and working on the tutorials a bit more rather than add a bunch of customizable difficulty.

You have Past Lives in the header, but it’s not part of the list?

This article references a lot more rigorous work, but is good starting point: https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/ and I would emphasize that I think that the situation is just as bad for women, they just express in a far less obnoxious way (which might be worse, because it is easier to ignore).