Aesthetics, plus the seductive appeal that pre-modern, pre-liberal-democratic societies (when the governments were authoritarian, the women were submissive, and the men “were men”) have for reactionaries, incels, and cryptofacists.

While I’d personally argue that the quality of the character development, writing, and storytelling in the show doesn’t even achieve the level of “fine”, you’re right in that 1) people should be allowed to enjoy things in peace and 2) RoP in particular attracts criticism which is often hyperbolic. At the same time, however, there should also be the freedom to honestly critique a piece of media without being labeled as a hater, obsessive fanboy, or a neckbeard, etc. Especially when dealing with an IP as treasured as Tolkien’s.

Whether you find this article excessive in its criticism or not, the writer makes the very valid point that the media landscape today is becoming increasingly saturated with this 'memberberries/nostalgia/callback type of storytelling, along with the constant stream of prequels and sequels based on this formula. People are growing tired of it, and Rings of Power has it deep in its bones.

For a good examination of the showrunners’ over-reliance on referencing the Jackson movie trilogy in lieu of interesting, original storytelling, I highly recommend this YouTube video. I think it really gets to the core of why so many people find RoP frustrating or disappointing as a show in its own right, let alone as a Tolkien adaptation.

Hard to argue with him about the JJ-Abramsification of all things, or the perplexing fact that modern audiences appear to lap it up.

Watching season one of RoP felt undeniably reminiscent of watching The Force Awakens and almost hearing the audible *ding as yet another callback got checked off the list. It’s not art any more; it’s just content to be consumed.

I’d say it’s more like a cousin/sibling of Exynos rather than being a straight rebrand. They share very similar clock management and power management architecture, although there are enough differences to set them apart.

It could well be that certain apps are optimized more towards Qualcomm’s Snapdragon architecture over Tensor, which would account for why the Nothing Phone appears to perform better in certain apps than Pixels do, or it could be that the SoC’s thermal management or clock profiling is leading to inefficiencies in performance.

Could be a little from column A and a little from column B, so to speak.

Ah, shame - I’d heard mixed reports over whether Graphene manages to fix some of the performance issues of the stock ROM, but that’s one more data point in the Nope column.

I guess Tensor still has some fundamental issues that have yet to be ironed out.

For your use case, I’d go with Lossless Cut as opposed Shotcut, Openshot, etc.

The reason being that it is much simpler and faster to use, and generally results in smaller filesizes because you aren’t having to re-encode and export the project from scratch.

Man that side-by-side of the scrolling lag was super obvious. That would drive me up the wall.

It’s such a shame that Google still can’t get their act together and offer as smooth and consistent an experience as their rivals because otherwise they do have a lot going for them

Going from 192kbps to 320kbps would be audibly negligible unless you used a really bad codec to begin with, in which case adding AI into the mix would likely just compound the problem.

Probably not even worth it, tbh.

I think it would be fairer to say that homeschooling in the US offers a wider distribution about the mean, with comprehensive, school-board curriculums on the one hand and whatever backward, ahistorical, pseudoscientific garbage the parents want to fill their kids’ heads with on the other. It really depends on the state and the family.

Here in California, we do the same as you for our daughter’s schooling and it works great for us.