Wow, what a terrible design. My experience with QMK- powered keyboards didn’t let my mind entertain the thought of that being controlled externally from the board. I knew people shit on Razer and other “gamer” products but I always chalked it up to aesthetics and advertising gimmicks.
True, but I’d take a bluish/purplish white over ever having to desolder a through-switch led ever again.
Even a RGB board should have controls for color, brightness, and pattern. Shouldn’t be too difficult to turn it off or adjust the color to something more natural.
That said, none of the keyboards I currently own and use have anything more than an indicator LED.
The movie juxtaposes the ideal against the dysfunctional and highlights pressures of playing a social and familial role through comedy.
The main character is inherently flawed and is trying to give his family an ideal Christmas. He’s caught up in petty neighborly disputes, things go awry, and he’s an asshole. He wants to provide and be a good father and husband but his expectations are set too high and naturally he fails. He is morally weak and is easily distracted by lust or rivalry.
He just wants things to go as planned for once and not to be burdened by unwanted and embarrassing family members. He just wants things to be “normal” and for people to recognize his hard work and dedication.
People in this thread have pointed out that it’s difficult to empathize with the character because of his perceived wealth and the plot point of needing the Christmas bonus to cover money he over spent on a down payment for a pool.
However, for all of his toxic behaviors, his disproportionate reactions, his un-relatable lifestyle, his pettiness, his stress, his inability to let things go, he is familiar; he’s us. He wants to be happy but has no idea how to make that happen for himself. His heart is in the right place but that’s not enough.
There’s catharsis in watching him experience exaggerated depictions of what a lot of people experience around the holidays: you can’t choose your family and the world is typically against you. His final stress-fueled blowup and monologue at the end is a summary of the dumb shit the audience has always wanted to say but never been able to.
At least, that’s what I think the post is about.
Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality comes to mind.
However, after thinking up some doom and gloom shit about the future, I reversed course: Why speculate about future kids when most of us grew up with a manipulative media diet? Saturday morning cartoons were wildly manipulative, the emergence of social media damaged a lot of people’s expectation of reality, and the last three election cycles in the US were heavily impacted by the ability of certain populists to generate memes.
AI will speed up the content generation process and introduce some absurd elements like six-fingered watch models, but I don’t think it will be more manipulative than media already is, just weirder and faster.
My ultimately positive forecast: the kids of the future will create their own networked spaces outside of the mainstream internet and just continue on with their lives ignoring what doesn’t interest them and seeking out what does. Regardless, we’ll never understand it anyway.