Still Burning, Kevin Cooley (because)

I too took this at face value. Then I looked up Byzantium Security. It’s a fake company. This is likely a promotional shot for a tvshow/movie.

Youre unwittingly a shill for some corporate bullshit, fyi.

WIRED

Cinemax Blankets Wall Street With Fake Ads Aimed at the 1%

To promote the upcoming premiere of the television drama Hunted, Cinemax took out advertisements on Wall Street promoting the show's fiction

This is what you see weenis you look out of the Overton window

Hey y'all want to see one of the worst left-right political charts I've seen in a while?

ok given that there are no non-evil options for the pope i guess i begrudgingly appreciate in an abstract sense that they chose someone who recently tweeted "jd vance is wrong" lmao. it doesn't make anything better but it makes jd vance's life a little worse and i do think that's funny

Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.

Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship's sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic's wreak. And Titanic's plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I'm not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn't know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don't walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.

However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn't make them plot twists was because they couldn't have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you'd have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.

I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren't forced to do it. We've clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.

Ophthalmology is pretty stoked about “AI”. Host of applications. Here’s one of the first:

CRSToday

Digital Twins in Laser Vision Correction

Digital Twins in Laser Vision Correction

Mail Online

Laser eye op that can give patients 'super-vision': better than 20/20

The groundbreaking technology, performed for the first time in the UK today, creates a 3D digital clone of a patient's eyes.

The peach cobbler in question

A man needs a car like a wizard needs a bicycle

The structure of our society is to blame. Not you. Not your friends.

friends

you can literally put this stuff on anything & its good