Max @max@smeap.com

Days later still thinking about how Legendary/WB “Monsterverse” Godzilla has just like the most boopable looking snout. By the end of the film I kind of wanted Kong to just gently boop that snout. I hope some animator did this for the world anyway and it’s a delightful extra on YouTube someday

Recommended for you: Marvel Funko Pop Shorts

Hulu recommended “Supervized” about a nursing home of retired superheroes. (Including Beau Bridges as a retired super sidekick.) It was amusing.

I had been happy with DoorDash a year back but then Xbox gave me a couple months free Postmates Unlimited which I just sort of let roll into a membership. Then I got this fun sequence of emails:

Uber: Your account has been terminated due to inactivity

Postmates: Good news, soon you’ll need to login with your Uber account

Me: Guess it’s back to DoorDash, huh?

😹

“We got your email from KickStarter”

Wacky lies, the email you just sent to isn’t known at all to Kickstarter. You found it in a spam dump that only grows worse. Morons

Last night I made it almost exactly an hour and a half into the four hours. That wasn’t entirely the film’s fault, I was kind of sick and had no sleep the night before, but yeah the excessive slow mo didn’t entirely help. (Kept thinking HBO Max should give me a 1.5x/2x playback button).

➕Big improvements to the Amazons, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, and Flash scenes as I’d been told to expect. Far more Joe Morton, a criminally underrated character actor.

➖Slow mo, desaturated colors,...

Ban cars, reforest parking lots

That feeling of getting a tracking number but having no idea what order it could possibly refer to. The excitement of surprise packages from probably past versions of yourself.

(Really was quite proud of that LINQ rules engine monstrosity at the time, despite its ethically problematic reasons for existence. Sometimes I’m curious to see the code again, but it is probably best it stays locked away in the proprietary dungeon of the company I built that for.)

Though presumably my worst abuses of LINQ syntax are behind me*, it remains a tool that I love.

I was also proud that I proved I could do in LINQ what others could in hand tuned SQL.

*I don’t expect to have another job with quite the same insane amounts of cross-database queries and hopefully never have reason to build a “business rules” engine built on Expression<T> and an abuse of LINQ syntax as a way for Access users to write much more performant code in a “familiar way”.

Feared: Colleagues at multiple jobs found out quickly that if I break out the LINQ syntax, something amazing and horrible is happening and its surface level readability defies the frightening nature of it.

Tired: LINQ syntax is for baby devs that need SQL coddling syntax sugar, real devs use Fluent syntax

Wired: LINQ scope rules and let binding allow you to easily create monadic closures that are far harder to replicate in Fluent syntax. More than just sugar

Inspired: LINQ syntax is for queries with hair on their chest, Fluent syntax is for baby queries

I finally remembered the one thing I was actually using the Prime Membership for in the last year: the Twitch Rewards.

I know they rebranded it Amazon Prime Gaming, but I still think of it as a Twitch thing more than an Amazon thing, lol. Wasn't even mentioned in their dark UX reminders of reasons to keep Prime. Wow.

For anyone who wants the daily newspaper summary of the wrestling match rather than watch the whole silly event:

Godzilla vs. Kong: 2-1 (Titan Axe blow gets Kong’s lone round win)

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla: 0-1

Kong vs. Mechagodzilla: 1-0 (Godzilla Recharged Titan Axe)

To be fair, there’s sort of reason: it’s an office in Hong Kong and yeah HK does look pretty Tron in exterior B-Roll and the CGI version they get to destroy. So I guess it helps you know that you are in HK if the interior matches?

Also, to be fair, (SPOILERS) they did build Mechagodzilla there, and Tron ALL The Things is prime Mechagodzilla Aesthetic

So I decided to watch Godzilla: King of Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong back to back. Mostly just a lot of dumb fun

I did need to pause to celebrate all these colors!

G:KOM had a huge color grading problem and nearly every scene was predominantly blue with a couple scenes orange and one one red (wow!). Like just single color scenes throughout. “All we can afford is one color at a time, sorry!”

GvK: “We can use ALL the colors! Let’s go! More neons! Tron this set for no reason!”

I’ve had Prime since college. I was one of the earliest Prime subscribers.

It’s an end of a more innocent era. Goodbye Amazon Prime, I probably won’t miss you. Good riddance horrible Amazon dark pattern UX. I definitely won’t miss you.

Not to mention the general ethical concerns of an “everything store” with bad labor relations and horrible job conditions.

So I went to cancel Prime again. Same dark patterns! This time I think I brought enough breadcrumbs to Theseus my way through that awful maze. I was left with an impression that it is canceled now and I should expect a refund for most of the year left!

We’ll see if the refund actually hits my CC, though.

Was I using anything else from Prime? I watched The Expanse and a couple okay-not-great movies. I hated The Boys and they burnt me canceling The Tick for it. Other than that, I can’t think of anything. They burnt me on Amazon Music. They burnt me on Amazon storage/photos. I have a hard time going through the books I buy at full price to consider renting books with Kindle Unlimited’s Weird Prime Selection. The Prime Free Reading rarely included genres I like.