JΛCΞ

@anishmoonka The person in May can't feel February either. That's the cruelty of it. Neither of you can reach each other.

Stanford scientists put people in brain scanners and asked them to picture themselves 10 years from now. The same brain regions fired as when they thought about a stranger walking past on the street. Hal Hershfield ran this study in 2009. When you picture future-you, the part of your brain that says "this is me" stays much dimmer. This is why, in deep winter, you cannot picture the version of you who will be sitting in green grass in May. The two of you feel like different people because, to your brain, you are. Two psychologists, Daniel Gilbert at Harvard and Tim Wilson at the University of Virginia, spent more than two decades showing how badly we predict our own feelings. In a 1998 paper, they tracked people through six painful events: a breakup, getting denied tenure as a professor, losing an election, being turned down for a job, reading about a child's death, and brutal personality feedback. In every single case, people predicted the misery would last way longer than it actually did. Our minds have something called a "psychological immune system," a quiet little process that softens hard feelings before you even notice it kicking in. In 2013, Jordi Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson surveyed more than 19,000 people ages 18 to 68. They asked everyone the same thing: how much had you changed in the past 10 years, and how much would you change in the next 10. Every age group said "a lot" to the first one and "barely" to the second. They called it the End of History Illusion. An eighteen-year-old believes they've finally figured themselves out. A sixty-eight-year-old will tell you the exact same thing, just as confidently. We keep landing at what feels like our final self, decade after decade, and we keep being wrong. George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon, found that your current emotional state blinds you to how a different one would feel. When you're freezing cold, you can't picture being hot. Anyone who's gone to the supermarket hungry has overbought. Their current stomach is making promises their future stomach won't keep. Your brain treats the future version of you as a stranger, even though that person will eventually be you. It expects any bad feeling to last forever. Whoever you are right now, your brain assumes, is who you'll still be a decade from today. And mentally, it has no way to cross over from one feeling to another, even briefly. The person standing in May knew this in February. The person in February could not get there.

@TWOTIMESABITCH Genuinely

they should invent a kind of sleep that leaves you refreshed in the morning

But hey, effective parenting is effective parenting.

the scariest thing is wanting to be loved so badly you accept crumbs and call it a meal.

@leftunsents @Gottalovechaze Exactly 🥲

all roads lead back to the loneliness i felt as a child.

@uhtriad 😂

Your 3rd emoji just exposed your response 😭

you can miss someone and still know they were the worst thing that ever happened to your peace.

being soft in a world that punishes softness is slowly killing me.

at what point do you accept that you’re the only one fighting for the relationship?

how do you stop caring about someone who never really cared about you?

@anishmoonka Ed Harris drowning. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio drowning. One suit. The camera weeps, gets wiped like a kitchen counter mid-weep, and nobody blinked for 35 years. Cameron knew exactly where your eyes were. They were on the dying.

In the climax of The Abyss, Ed Harris and his wife are trapped in a flooding chamber. They have one diving suit. One of them has to die. Right in the middle of that scene, a crew member's hand reaches into the frame and wipes water off the camera lens. Twice. James Cameron knew. He kept it. The cinematographer on The Abyss spent the entire editing process begging Cameron to cut this take from the final movie. Cameron refused. His name is Mikael Salomon. He's a Danish cinematographer with two Oscar nominations, one of them for The Abyss itself. In a 2019 interview with SYFY Wire, he said the shot is also badly out of focus, on top of the lens wipe. Cameron's response when Salomon begged him to cut it: "Nobody is going to notice it." For 35 years, Cameron was right. The film opened in theaters in 1989, came out on home video and DVD over the next two decades, and hit streaming in 2023. Not a single viewer flagged the lens wipe. Salomon went to a screening of the film himself and nudged his wife at the exact second the wipe happens. He says she still missed it. Then in April 2024, a visual effects artist at Industrial Light and Magic named Todd Vaziri saw someone point it out online. He wrote about it on his blog, and the discovery went viral. Reshoots on The Abyss were not happening. The crew worked six days a week, seventy hours a week, for six months. The set was a giant water tank built inside an abandoned nuclear power plant in South Carolina. There are scenes where Ed Harris is shown breathing a special liquid instead of air. To shoot them, he held his breath as long as he could while the liquid sloshed into his eyes and nose. Cameron kept the lens wipe because the alternative was going back to that hellscape. And no, Cameron does not "still incorporate it into his movies today." This was a one-time bet on what audiences look at during a tense scene, and it paid off for three and a half decades.

i keep choosing people who make me feel like an inconvenience for having feelings.

@anishmoonka Frank Oz said make him 'sore and frigid.' They made him fly. Sometimes the best creative brief is the one you ignore.

For 22 years, Yoda was a foam puppet. He sat down a lot. Then in 2002, this scene played in cinemas and audiences cheered hard enough to shake old buildings. Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. For two decades, every kid who grew up on Star Wars knew Yoda was supposed to be the most powerful Jedi alive, but no one had ever seen him pick up a weapon. George Lucas couldn't show it. The tech to make a small, fast-moving computer-animated character look real didn't exist yet. When his effects team finally figured it out, the guy running the project was sure it would end his career. His name was Rob Coleman. He'd watched Star Wars fans tear apart Jar Jar Binks three years earlier, and figured a tiny green Jedi flipping around with a lightsaber would get the same treatment. Lucas's instructions were no help either. He told Coleman the duel should "defy description." When Coleman asked what that meant, Lucas said, "think of him as the Tasmanian Devil." Later he added that Yoda should be like "the illegitimate child of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy." That was the whole brief. The fight scene alone took 9 animators three months to make. They studied samurai films, Jackie Chan movies, circus acrobatics, and tennis matches. Ahmed Best, the actor who played Jar Jar Binks, invited Coleman to his house to watch a Jet Li movie called Swordsman II. The flying ninjas in that film inspired Yoda's spinning leaps. Christopher Lee, who played the villain Count Dooku, was 78 years old, so his face was edited onto a stunt double for most of the duel. Frank Oz, the man who had played Yoda since 1980, gave the team one piece of advice: Yoda should look "extremely old, sore, and frigid." When Yoda dropped his cane and used the Force to pull the lightsaber into his hand, fans recall their theaters rumbling and shaking from the cheering. One man said his dad, who never showed emotion, walked out of the cinema "acting like a 9-year-old." The tweet calls it the coldest thing ever. It was the payoff of 22 years of waiting, three months of animation work, and one of the strangest creative briefs in movie history.

@anishmoonka Jensen Huang: the only CEO who'll sign your GPU and then make you cry in a 200-person standup. $5.48 trillion and still practicing his pitch in the backyard someone give that man a hug before he gives himself another ulcer.

Jensen Huang runs the biggest company in the world. He hugs his employees, signs autographs in Taiwan like a pop star, and once left a $1,000 tip at a Denny's. He also screams at his executives for 20 minutes at a time, while his PR team stands frozen in the corner, trained never to step in. The company is Nvidia. Its chips are inside almost every AI system in the world. This week Nvidia hit $5.48 trillion. That makes it bigger than Apple, bigger than Microsoft, bigger than any company that has ever existed. The friendly Jensen is the one you see in interviews. Fans crowd him for selfies in Taiwan. He still goes to Denny's for breakfast, the same chain where he started Nvidia in 1993 with two engineering friends and forty thousand dollars. The $1,000 tip story comes from his biographer Stephen Witt, who tagged along to breakfast one morning. Inside Nvidia, his executives see a different man. Sixty of them report straight to him, and he refuses to meet any of them one-on-one. Every conversation, every decision, every mistake happens in front of the whole group. He calls this "extreme co-design." When someone slips up, Witt says Jensen makes them stand in front of the whole room of 100 or 200 people and tears them apart. One former executive told AFP that he "rips people to shreds" over major mistakes. His own way of putting it: "I'd rather torture you into greatness because I believe in you." Bloomberg interviewed ten current and former Nvidia employees. They described seven-day workweeks, with days ending at 1 or 2 in the morning. Ten meetings every day with more than thirty people in each room. Shouting matches were routine. Witt's portrait goes darker. He says Jensen lives inside "a mental torture chamber," beating himself up over his own mistakes. Asked to throw the first pitch at a baseball game in Taiwan, Jensen warned the crowd to look away, then spent six months practicing in his backyard with his wife every day until he could throw properly. The warmth and the fury sit inside the same person and run at the same time. A nine-year-old sent by mistake to a Kentucky reform school in 1973, sharing a room with a 17-year-old wrapped in tape from a recent knife fight, cleaning toilets every day for two years, does not grow up to build a $5.48 trillion company by being only one thing. War general who loves to giggle is exactly right.

@tufdave She paid for it so u gotta reply fast🤣🫠

My mom gotta relax

i cry in the shower so nobody hears. then i get out and act like i’m fine like nothing’s wrong with me.

@fwjenifa He said he was different. He was right. Just not in the way you hoped.

Men be like "I’m different" then be a different type of disappointment

Stuart broke a device and now the multiverse is leaking. That's the whole pitch. Alternate-universe cameos so the millionaires don't have to commit, while the side characters who never got the big contracts carry the actual show. HBO Max paid $600 million for reruns and got 29 billion minutes in return. The math is brutal and the math works.

The average HBO Max viewer watched 265 episodes of Big Bang Theory last year, almost four full days of reruns from a show that ended seven years ago. The new Stuart spinoff exists because of that number. Add everyone up, and you get 29.1 billion minutes for 2024, making it the most-binged show on streaming according to Nielsen. In 2019, HBO Max's parent company spent about $600 million to lock down the show for five years. Looked expensive then. Looks like a steal now. About 58% of all that watch time came from viewers between 18 and 49, the age group advertisers pay the most to reach. HBO Max's cheaper plan with ads is built around shows like this. The math also decides who's in the new show. Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, and Kaley Cuoco were making about $1 million per episode by the end of the original run. They own a piece of the franchise, which means they get paid every time someone hits play. None of them need the money. Parsons said in 2019 he was done. So the spinoff goes to the side characters, the ones who never had those kinds of contracts. Kevin Sussman is back as Stuart, who runs the comic book shop where the main characters used to hang out. Lauren Lapkus plays his girlfriend Denise, and Brian Posehn returns as Bert the geologist. John Ross Bowie comes back as Barry Kripke. Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady wrote it with screenwriter Zak Penn, and Danny Elfman did the theme music. The plot is built for cheapness too. Stuart breaks a device Sheldon and Leonard built and accidentally wrecks the multiverse. Alternate-universe versions of the original cast can pop in for one scene without signing long-term contracts, while the new cast carries the actual workload. This is the fourth show set in the Big Bang world. Young Sheldon ran seven seasons on CBS. Georgie and Mandy followed on CBS in 2024. Stuart is the first one to live only on HBO Max, the home that now holds all the streaming rights. HBO Max ended March with 140 million paying customers and has told investors it expects 150 million by the end of the year. The cheapest way to keep them paying is to make more shows around the title they already watch the most.

i wish i could unlove people the same way they unlove me. quick. clean. without dying inside.

i hope one day i become someone’s peace and not just their “maybe later.”