I'm a Markiplier fanboy, but being shocked that a guy who has "an audience of more than 38 million subscribers" (REALLY??) can make his money back is comical. Of course he has. He'd have made even more money if even just 1/4 of his fans saw his movie and they haven't, it's far less than that.

"This is how you change the system." ... I work in VFX and I tell every aspiring student and hobbyist this: use your iPhone. Everyone who wants to change the system or break down walls... yeah yeah, you have everything you need in your pocket today. Publishing to YouTube will get your the feedback you need to progress. You don't need AI to get rid of gatekeepers or whatever, you just need to try. 99% of the people use the camera, the location, or something to else difficult to attain to justify how lazy they are.

Laziness is the biggest gatekeeper of them all. Markiplier has never been lazy. The guy gave himself a heart attack at 20 or something from working too hard, yeeesh.

The problem is in the definition they cited, "industrial". Fish, plant, beef, whatever... we do it in a way to simulate abundance in stores and restaurants. Something like more than 50% of seafood is mislabeled as something else. We design vegetables for visual appeal and chemical resistance, not nutrition to us or the soil. Cows are pumped with antibiotics because of the insane, compact mass they're raised in. We have to diversify what we grow and not simply direct farmers to produce according to what some commodity broker thinks is most profitable. It does still have to be relatively industrialized, but not in the way we're currently doing it. We've lost any sense of nuance to it all.

Yup, everyone interviewed gets it, it's all of those things.

With the photography in particular there's a joy in waiting for film to return, to the hope that you got a good picture and the happy accidents you didn't plan for. If you do it with your phone you look, you verify it's good and you're more or less done with it. Waiting for film though, it could be weeks or months till you develop that roll. You've probably really forgotten what exactly you took photos of. Suddenly you have a little unwrapping, a little gift to look inside. There's the spark of remembering the event over again and the happiness when a few of your attempts actually came out great. It's a little loot box you give to yourself.

Wow, the video of McNally doing it all on the fly at the Amazon locker was mega.

1000% what you said.

There's been so many protests in 2024 and 2025 in China over labor and banking problems. Now, if you want to talk about how the Chinese economy is failing the working class Chinese... that's a jailing!

I feel this. When I'm at work, in office, I get so much more done. There's no distractions, I'm just here to work. From what I'm reading is a lot of people just sit in meetings all day, but that's not my job. I do VFX and collaboration makes amazing things happen, in that regard I also like working in office with people. I really enjoy shooting the shit with people at lunch be it common work gripes or talking movies, but then going back to work together.

Most of my last few years have been remote until recently. I hated working at home. All of my hobbies, passions, sometimes my g/f, my pets, etc. are at home. There are SO many things I would love to give my attention to at home versus the office. The office facilitates focus for me while conveniently book ending time at lunch fo socializing. Returning home seems refreshing too. When I WFH and log out for the evening nothing really changes?? Days blur together and feel less eventful with WFH, for me.

Definitely YMMV as I'm reading these comments.

Ah I disagree. I work in VFX and I've done remote for 4 years and just returned back to the office this year. Already my job prospects for when this gig ends are far beyond anything I had while working remote. Remote absolutely got the job done, but when it comes to diagnosing a creative solution for something it's been fun to be back in person. When we have lunch breaks I get to hear about projects in the works that are both personal and professional. That's allowing me to set things in motion professionally (also know I want to pass on something I thought I wanted before). I'm hanging out with people who aren't in my direct team. That literally never happened doing remote. If you weren't in a ZOOM/Meet with me, you might as well not exist. The gigs I was getting remote were more or less reliant on the closest of friends for word of mouth and then whatever the job boards provided, which is frankly more miss than hit. I think in the last 5 months I've made more genuine connections versus a few years remote. I'm younger and without a family to provide for so it's a different situation. I get people who are a mom or dad being ambivalent towards returning to an office since their time outside of work is almost entirely for parenting. I've also meet some people here that can't wait to return to just remote work.

I just hear people talking about productivity but maybe there's more to it. I'm really liking returning to the office so far.

For every win Trump has there's 5 L's that drag the country down farther. I had no idea winning looked so much like punching ourselves in the dick.

Solar being anti-farmer is wild. Mr. Let's Inject Bleach thinks deserts and all dry land would be farmed if not for solar, gotcha.

As the spouse of a designer who has been on numerous re-brand, better brand, update the brand etc. campaigns I can tell you that the decision doesn't come from designers. The design team will literally be swamped with managing every existing product launch, update, news cycle, etc. Their design team doesn't need to find work, I bet money on that, but someone else thought this was an important move and thus a re-design happens.

NVIDIA cards dropping like Pokemon boxes at Costco

You can just as easily never eat at a place with QR codes or tablets for ordering in Japan too. I'm just not that interested in that experience so when we eat out, we don't go to those places. You don't have to eat fancy to avoid them. There's barely any difference in cost either and since tipping isn't a thing.

In fact, the places we go where it's "vending style" is usually ramen and THAT spits out a small slip of paper anyway so in the end it's kind of lofi, lol

Nope, there's a thing called "sub minimum" wage. Last Week Tonight just recently covered how this works. Minimum wage is definitely NOT the minimum, which is crazy.

Incorrect, the final paycheck does not have to meet minimum wage. If you are working 'sub minimum' because you work for tips there is no employer requirement to fill the gap. This was exhaustively covered just recently on Last Week Tonight's most recent episode I believe.

I hate the "pass the phone around of the person who got the menu to load" game. For something so simple, they fail too often.