That would make Dot Warner a Disney princess.

Finally, someone to give the Alien queen a run for her money.

Whatever happened with the Unicorn series? I never was able to catch it.

The director, Bernardo Britto, is a director of multiple thoughtful, expressive animated short films...

• Time Machines (2010)
• The Places Where We Lived (2013)
• Yearbook (2014)
• Glove (2016)
• The Places Where We Live: All The Seconds Before You Swipe (2019)
• Hudson Geese (2020)

...and worked on the under-seen and under-appreciated series Fired On Mars.

All these comparisons to previous works illustrate how Wish may have reached but fell short of those high bars. I think the Spiderverse films are the closest I've seen to the playful microexpressions in Paperman popping up anywhere else, and there's no question on which of those two water reflection wide shots are more dramatic: the Sleeping Beauty shot is better stylized, better refined, with unnecessary elements completely removed to smack you in the face with an epic shot focused on two animated characters dancing. The Wish shot, by comparison, is a throw-away joke about King Magnifico's cult of personality, with extra elements for no apparent reason. "Ehh, this shot looks empty... throw a couple of merchant carts in there. Not enough to make it seem like an actual bustling outdoor market, just two so the space still seems weirdly vacant."

I think it technically counts as Spring, but Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction has me enraptured.

But if we're talking about Summer alone, hands down, Dungeon People.

Same (using element.io). I’m in several other matrix rooms, but it seems like the JS or form action on the join button is harfed.

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/client/v3/directory/room/%23gv-apply%3Ablahaj.zone. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 502.

The angle I'd heard elsewhere was that this seemed like Star Wars: Goonies, which I think would make a pretty entertaining story. So long as the writing can figure out how to not make the kid characters so darn precious. For a Goonies angle to work, they kinda need to be some degree of little shits, but still endearing.

Asking the person you’re debating to look up your own citations is certainly one way to converse. But ok, let’s go for it.

In Aug 2023, Forbes published an article describing the proposal of “unfettered access” you referred to:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/21/draft-tiktok-cfius-agreement/

In June 2024, the Washington Post reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) turned down the proposal and includes some broad reporting as to why:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tiktok-offered-an-extraordinary-deal-the-u-s-government-took-a-pass/ar-BB1nfAcE

The article isn’t very technical, but it mentions some interesting responsibility angles that the US wouldn’t want to back themselves into:

• throwing open some, but not all, doors to server operations and source code creates a mountain of work for the government to inspect, which would be a workload nightmare
• the US government’s deepest concerns seem to be about what data is going out (usage insights on the virtuous side and clipboard/mic/camera monitoring on the ultra shady side) and data coming in (bespoke content intended to influence US residents of China-aligned goals). Usage insights are relatively benign from national security perspective (especially when you can just mandate that people in important roles aren’t permitted to use it). Shady monitoring should be discoverable through app source code monitoring, which you can put the app platforms (Apple, Google, whoever else) on the hook for if they continue to insist on having walled app gardens (and if you trust them at all). The content shaping is harder to put your finger on though, since it’s super easy to abstract logic as far out as you need to avoid detection. “Here, look at these 50M lines of code that run stateside, and yeah, there are some API calls to stuff outside the sandbox. Is that such a big deal?” Spoiler: it is a big deal.
• the US can’t hold Byte Dance accountable so long as it remains in China. Let’s say the US agreed to all this, spent all the effort to uncover some hidden shady activity that they don’t like (after an untold amount of time has passed). What then? They can’t legally go after Byte Dance’s foreign entity. The US can prosecute the US employees, but it’s totally possible to organize in such a way that leaves those domestic employees free from misdeeds, leaving prosecutors unable to enforce misdeeds fairly. It’d be a mess.

The second article explains this somewhat, but I’m admittedly painting some conjecture on top regarding how a malicious actor could behave. I’ve got no evidence that Byte Dance is actually doing any of that.

But going back to the “influence the public” angle, I’m struggling to see how different TikTok is versus NHK America (Japan’s American broadcasts) or RT (American media from the Russian standpoint) aside from being wildly more successful and popular. But I guess that’s all there is to it.

I’d prefer our leaders also be transparent with us regarding their concerns about TikTok. The reductive “because China!!1!” argument is not compelling on its own.

Do you have any citation for that?

Does ByteDance publish TikTok’s transmission protocol to demonstrate transparency?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol

A high quality version of the map can be found at the bottom of this PDF: https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/2023-12/FY22%20CID%20Project%20Summaries-Map.pdf

And here's a screenshot of the high-res map: https://imgur.com/dHbLmXL

But the slaves' emancipation was right around the corner in 1865, approximately 124 years prior to the release of Belgian techno anthem Pump Up the Jam.