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I highly don’t recommend the 2020 film by Pixar: Soul.

Are you excited to get to know all about an aspiring jazz pianist who is trying to make it in nyc?! Well tough luck, that’s not what this film is about. Instead, after getting hooked on a character and his goals, you are instead treated to a 30m-1h sequence of “lessons” (similar to a video game tutorial that’s overstayed its welcome) about how this meta afterlife world works. Everything is explained. But the explanations suck. But I’m not even here to start taking notes on the mechanisms of this after life world (which end up being broken anyway). It’s very… boring.

The best parts of the movie are in the real world. Who is this guy? What’s his life like? What are his dreams, how does he fall short? Those are also the shortest parts of the movie.

The movie is mainly the main guy running and bouncing around trying to get back to the actual interesting part of the film.

The after life world characters are bland. They are mechanical (on purpose), which makes them difficult to connect to. I had no sympathy for their goals and struggles.

Overall Soul is a big miss for Pixar. And I love Pixar. I can see what they were going for, they wanted to make a movie about life, death, purpose, etc. This movie is not that. It’s a weird adaptation of intangible concepts personified but not done well. It’s also way too much like Inside Out, which was better (but also not anything amazing).

If you need your Pixar fix, I recommend: - Ratatouille - Coco - WallE

This reminds me… what ever happened to Microsoft’s Surface Neo? This is a very similar idea, especially with the external keyboard

He never fully predicts or promises, but we all know the infamous Musk time, where he says one of his inventions will be ready “next year”.

for the last 8 years Musk has been promising FSD and that it will be ready next year.

Yeah, there are faint mentions of moon colonization from Musk, but more often than not he talks about Mars.

I do agree more and more that Musk is a grifter (look no further than Twitter), but SpaceX seems to be one of his ventures that’s not a grift. The technology actually works (falcon 9 works, dragon works, Starlink works), and I don’t see what kind of financial gain he has in going to Mars. Possibly hoping the government subsidizes his Starship rockets that he then will use for contracts?

I’ll give that video a watch, thanks for the rec. Yeah, getting to Mars as a human presents a whole load of problems, let alone living on Mars. Elon loves the self deprecating talking point of saying how terrible the journey will be, but I get the feeling it may be more than terrible, if may be simply infeasible. A Starship will have to be like a mini space station during the ~7 months it takes to get to Mars. From the Elon interviews I’ve listened to he describes it like packing many people into a single starship, but it may be only possible to house 5-10 given the amount of support they’ll need to and on Mars.

Edit: I actually watched parts of those videos months ago and just watched some more. Good stuff, though sorry to say but fairly biased reporting with a lot of opinions and theories thrown in there. Nonetheless informative and entertaining, just… the YouTuber clearly has it out for Musk.

The one time I used booking.com I got screwed over. Their website is riddled with dark patterns and has probably been A/B tested into oblivion. The tactic they used that screwed me over was that they advertised 100% refunds on last minute cancellations. I used booking.com for this exact reason as I didn’t know if I’d be staying the night in the city I was driving past. Well turns out I didn’t need the booking but when I went to cancel I didn’t get a refund. When I went to go back to booking.com to see what their policy was, it was clear they carefully worded the last minute cancellation policy to really mean something completely different from what they knew they were advertising.

Lesson learned: never use any third party service when you can book the place directly. Also last minute cancellations probably just don’t exist

Yeah this is kind of where I’m at. I can afford SF, it’s just whether or not it’s worth the price tag. If I can have a similar or slightly “worse” experience elsewhere for half the price then I’ll I’d like to save the money.

Life is short: do what you love and lead an exciting life

Life is long: invest for the long term and don’t blow your paycheck

I’m in my late 20’s, though that does sound like a nice situation to be in if you’re a single 30-40 something year old. Being in my mid/late thirties and single kind of scares me (mainly because most of my friends/peers will likely be married and have kids); it’s nice to hear there’s a place where you can live a single lifestyle and not feel left out

Thanks for the input. I definitely understand your first point, sometimes the city seems “impossible” to me - a lot of wealth and demand packed into a small area; I wonder if there’s space for me there.

I’ve also seen my fair share of naked homeless people in SF. In all honestly it doesn’t bother me, but I’m sure that would change if I lived there for a couple of years.

Can you explain more about Chicago lacking “a certain reach to the higher levels”?

Can you elaborate on why you left? I always hear about crime and poop on the street but I feel like if I avoid the tenderloin and soma I should be fine, no?

Yes agreed. Sometimes doing what I love is hard for me to do… I don’t know why.

At this stage in my life I would live alone; it’s true that roommates would make the rent more palatable

Any more input here would be appreciated. Have you dated in both places?