I really disagree. The aliens being insects is perfect because it provides a justaposition with the human characters. The idea is that the insects are a swarm of mindless drones. Meanwhile, the humans are…well, also a swarm of mindless drones. Which is sort of the point of the movie. The fascist society they inhabit actively dehumanizes them and robs them of their ability to think for themselves. The visuals of the film reinforce this in the larger fight scenes: the mass of gray bodies that constitute the human forces all blend together into a single swarm, much like that of the insects. And by the end of the movie Rico is completely hollowed out as a character: literally just inhabiting the same role as Rasczak, and even parroting all of his phrases from earlier in the film.

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

I’m actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here’s why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class “free market” bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it’s an appreciable asset. I’ve seen these people my entire life. They’ll decry socialism and make the age old joke that “socialism is when no potato.” But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking “Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit” memes. They’ll say things like “scalping should be illegal” or “the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever.” Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn’t directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they’d ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.

Because :wq to me means “Issue command write, followed by command quit.” “Issue command x” to me means nothing in the context of vim, and ctrl + x on most systems is reserved for cutting, so it just “feels” wrong.

spez and Musk burning their services to the ground

Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.