sblfilms

Thanks, I hate it

Finally went out to Minute Maid to watch the Astros play and got to watch a great pitching matchup between Verlander and McKenzie. Both controlled the game and had few moments where they were really in trouble. Ended up going to extra innings again, and Steven Kwan won the game with an RBI double in the top of the 10th followed by a diving catch to prevent a run from scoring + ultimately a double play. That guy is so good. I’m glad he is finally on a squad that could really do damage in October. Shame that Bieber is out for the season though. I need Bregman, Verlander, and Framber to be good so when the Astros are selling at the deadline the club can get a good haul. Nothing in this first month makes me think they’ve got the stuff to turn it around and even make it as WC3 😭

The need for such legislation speaks to the reality that a bachelors degree is viewed like a high school diploma was 30-40 years ago, the bare minimum hiring managers expect. The problem is that the requirement began being applied to nearly every type of job you can imagine. There are amusing anecdotes about firms/government agencies making the requirement essentially across the board such that you could find basic janitorial positions being listed online with bachelors degree required. There are similar issues with work experience requirements for absolutely every level office jobs. Like…bruh, that’s the job where you GET the experience needed for your next job! So again, lie to these jokers and say you have relevant experience because these firms aren’t your friend and being employed is better than not.

It is the exact opposite. The move to largely automated pre-screening of job applicants has meant upward pressure on having a baseline of a bachelors degree for large swaths of even entry level jobs that previously would have required only a high school diploma. If you don’t have a degree, lie and say you do on your resume and hope the company doesn’t use any verification services in their HR department 😂

It is time for the feds to treat gambling like cigarettes and ban nearly all advertising of it. It should be legal to participate in, but the constant stream of marketing is truly gross stuff.

Working with so many young people fresh out of high school as they attempt to navigate life as an adult, including making education decisions, I now have a much better understanding of how kids get lured into the debt trap of education. I didn't get any assistance from my parents with college, they themselves never went and were just generally in favor of their children getting a degree. So I, as I do with just about anything that grabs my interest, spent a ton of time studying the process and expected value of different routes. The thing that made most sense for what I wanted to do was the local community college for as many hours as I could, and then a state University for the rest. I ended up staying in Houston and took classes as I had the money to afford them, while working full time. At the end of my undergrad, I had a degree and no debt. The second part is a major reason why I was in a place to take the plunge and start our first theater. School debt has negative impact on the people who carry it for many reasons, and a huge one is that it makes people feel trapped in jobs they otherwise would have no taken, or bailed on months or years prior. I have a suspicion that is part of the reason big business is at best neutral on debt forgiveness and college affordability pushes. They greatly benefit from a labor force that is under the yoke of school debt. I am especially happy that people who went to honest-to-god scam schools are getting out from under this. It is a double whammy to get a useless education and be 10s of thousands of dollars in debt to secure it.

A great candidate for regular season GOTY, that Ms/Braves game. Pitching porn.

It is a good thing, but it is even better to learn from somebody else's mistakes!

Obviously, the current pace won't hold up, but I've felt the Ms starting rotation is tops in the league since around the ASB last season. And they all got BETTER over the off season! If only Dipoto would have put together a lineup that can match, this would be a 100 win team with that firepower on the mound.

I am sure being a fan of a team that is always disappointing desensitizes you to the struggle. After enduring the dark days post-Bagewell/Biggio retirement, and through the absolute pit that was 3 consecutive 100+ loss seasons, I have grown accustomed to the glory of the golden era for the Stros. It hurts to see such bad baseball. And holy moly, Jose Abreu is legitimately the worst player in baseball and the owner of the Astros signed him for 20 million a year when he was cosplaying GM after firing the two GMs who actually built the juggernaut of 2017-2022. I think he is turning into the baseball version of Jerry Jones, believing he was the actual reason for the success of the club and making himself the focal point. I am concerned that I may be in for an extended stretch of trainwreck roster management because of his meddling. Now, of course, the early part of the season has included all except the #3 guy in the rotation being on the IL at some point already, so plenty of season left to turn things around. But maaaan does it make you feel sick to see the 100 million dollar closer blow 4 of his first 5 save opportunities. It is brutal to see a team lead the MLB in hits, but be near dead last hitting with RISP. Just bad bad baseball, and I'm a glutton for punishment that still watches every inning.

That would be another good notion. You can't have a structure where teams are incentivized to run these guys 100% max effort every pitch because you only expect them to get 15 or 16 outs. Maybe decrease the number of minor league options so teams can't swap out tired arms so often? I don't know, but they have to do something soon!

Barco HDR Projector Pilot Program Launches at CinemaCon (EXCLUSIVE) VARIETY.COM Jerry Bruckheimer, Joe Kosinski are testing Barco's new HDR projector. Barco announced its pilot program at CinemaCon. I went to the HDR by Barco demo at CinemaCon, and I want to be fair to Barco because the demo was in a ballroom that had nothing more than black curtains as the walls. The ceilings were close to white in color, so really reflecting a lot of light back on the screen. That being said, the colors on the material shown were stellar, as were the peak whites. A massive upgrade from Barco's SDR projectors. The area that I still was not super impressed with was the black levels, not really close to what I see in a Dolby Cinema install. But I will allow for the possibility that the apparent elevated black level is largely the result of the poor viewing environment. I really think Barco would have been better off building a blackout box and setting up the theater inside of that, but that might have been hard to get fire marshal approval from in a short week convention time frame. But overall, a great move forward and they aren't quite done with the tech. The first test units will hit theaters later this year and then retail installs Q1 of 2025. The other BIG news is that Barco developed their own box to connect to various color timing software, like Davinci Resolve, that helps colorists create SMPTE standard REC 2020 HDR outputs that are initially automatically rendered shot by shot by the Barco box and then can be manually tweaked by the colorist. This will be huge as getting Dolby Vision certification is a long and costly process, whereas this will be relatively inexpensive and should lead to substantially more films being finished in HDR. The REC 2020 HDR standard is also...standard, so any company that makes an HDR-capable projector in the future will be able to utilize these same DCP files. A big win for consumers, much like the ending of Dolby's grip on object-based audio with the standardization of IAB tracks over the proprietary Atmos format.

Spencer Strider officially out for the season with a UCL bracing procedure. I don’t know how you fix the issue of pitchers throwing harder and at max effort all the time. Only sorts of things I could imagine would be requiring starters to throw a minimum 100 pitches every game. You would necessarily have to pace yourself more, but that seems like something everybody would hate…

These are all articles penned by people who think understanding the dominant technological paradigm of their youth is what makes one tech savvy. This is what every generation thinks about subsequent ones. What ends up happening is the tech doofus kids eventually become the managerial class and replace technology with what makes them comfortable, then the next generation comes along that grew up with a new paradigm and now they are the tech doofus kids who don’t have the right skills. Rinse and repeat. Like, I guarantee some boomer manager threw their hands up in frustration when dealing with a young whippersnapper who did know how to use a word processor but didn’t know how to change the ribbon on a typewriter. Those who grew up during the PC revolution needed to know more about the basic functionality mostly because the tech was kinda trash and didn’t work particularly well. Improvements in reliability and stability of both hardware and software has rendered many of the skills we learned less important today than even a decade ago. But people are slow to recognize the declining value of their own skillset and instead poo poo the kids for developing a different skill set relevant to the world they actually live in. That being said, it is still highly frustrating working with gen z kids when something on a windows device isn’t working right and nothing makes me feel more like a grumpy old man.

There is certainly a fair emotional response to a situation that is unfair in a vacuum, that one group gets something while another group doesn’t. But in this particular instance it misses a larger issue that the system of higher education finance is itself unfair on a fundamental level. Spending more time with kids who are trying their hardest to improve their lives through education as I walk with my own children through their college career, I have an even better sense of just how little the average person understands how to pay for college, or what the expected value of a particular degree will be. How do you make rational economic decisions when so much is obfuscated, even more so when you are largely talking about 18-22 year olds who barely understand the basics of personal finance? Getting a college education does not have to be prohibitively expensive, but it has been for many people through a combination of ignorance and predatory behavior. The federal government played a large part in making this system, they ought to do more to fix what they broke. Debt forgiveness shouldn’t be the end of the process, but it is one proper step to take.

Ippei is @Brian if he had a rich guy bankrolling him

Todd Phillips was on hand this week at CinemaCon to introduce the trailer and said he thought it was odd that people were calling it a musical as he wouldn’t describe it that way. He said he didn’t think it was terribly different from how the first film was built around a lot of music, though they leaned a little more into it after they signed Gaga up.

For good reason. There will always be somebody else coming along who can do what you currently do better, or the same but cheaper. The longer you stay the same the more likely it is that a competitor will surpass what you are offering. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel all of the time, but you do need to provide compelling reasons to choose you over the next firm. This is why large firms love to create roadblocks to competition entering the market. It gives a longer timeline before they need to elevate their game. Certainly does not preclude management from pursuing poor strategies to improve, but they absolutely should be trying to do so.

Trevor Story is a shortstop

Chamber Valdez was scratched from his start yesterday with elbow soreness (siiiiiiggggghhhhhhhh), so the Astros call up an absolute nobody despite having some good AAA arms. The kid gets one out, gives up 5 runs, and it pulled with the bases loaded and the score 5-2 in favor of the Rangers. The Astros then proceed to throw 8.2 IP if scoreless ball by the bullpen, who have to this point cost the Astros 5 wins, and the offense explodes for 8 unanswered runs. The AAA call up, Henley, will likely never pitch in the MLB again, but can forever say he was a big leaguer. He will probably leave out his 135 career ERA out of the story 😂

Sorry @Nokra there is no such thing as NSFW when you’re the boss. Well, not until the lawyers come to depose you in a workplace harassment suit, I guess

The Astros are averaging a staggering 1 hit given up per game in their wins this season. Unfortunately, that is because they only have three wins, lol. They have had a lead or been tied in all but two games in the 7th inning, but have been very uneven offensively and the bullpen has been a trainwreck. But Ronel Blanco followed his no-hitter with 5.2 IP of no-hit ball tonight, ending the day with 6IP, 1 hit, and 0 runs. What a GREAT call by Astros GM, Dana Brown, who round the third day of his first spring training with the club told the coaching staff to begin stretching him out because he has starter stuff. One of Brown's real strong suits in Atlanta was minor league player development, and I'm happy to see that it has translated to his time so far in the Astros org.

Hope you are having a good time. Had some flight credits that were about to expire so the wife and I ran down to Cancun for a couple of days last week. I love being less than two hours away from the Caribbean part of the Mexican coast. Lots of nice places to spend time in the country, but this is my favorite ❤️ NSFW Please mark your NSFW content as such. - Nokra