Matt Bryant

Matt Bryant

@badrobotbrain.bsky.social

Nebraska based Artist, Illustrator, Designer, Developer, and Tacotarian. https://badrobotbrain.com

88 followers62 following216 posts

I finally got around to watching Tron: Ares 1. It's not as bad as people make it out to be 2. It is by no means high-art 3. Nine Inch Nail's score definitely pulled most of the weight 4. An anthropomorphized AI with a flat affect and no emotional range is actually the perfect role for Jared Leto

I often wonder if young folk these days feel weighed down by the nostalgia of generations past. The past seems to be in sharper focus these than it used to be due to internet culture and streaming all-the-things. eh... Maybe I'm just tired of watching the snake eating its own tail.

Spoiler free Spider-Man Brand Ne Day review… It was delightful. Great action and way more heart than the previous MCU Spidey films. And the Punisher’s van is in it quite a which makes my 90s kid heart happy.

Since when did movie theaters become Ticket Master? I just paid an 18% service charge to buy movie tickets through the Marcus Theaters app! FFS, for all their pissing and moaning about declining audiences, theaters are sure encouraging people to just stay home.

Turns out I'm being charged a this fee because I've had fewer than 4 visits to the theater in the past 12 months. I don't go to the theater much because it's expensive and between the shoddy sound and blurry screens the experience can be middling. So, the solution is to make it more expensive?

I'm seeing new businesses crop up to help "service" the Federal Education Freedom Tax Credits... 🤔 Because there's nothing like a few middlemen to prevent all that waste, fraud, and abuse 🤦‍♂️

It didn't occur to me until after booking our tickets that The Mandalorian & Grogu will be the first Star Wars film my kiddo will watch in the theater. He's obsessed with the franchise, and I'm excited for him to experience the spectacle on the big screen.

Follow-up: We saw Mandalorian & Grogu last night. It was a delightful popcorn flick. Full of action, humor, heart, and a heap of excellent puppet work. Could it have been Season 4? Sure. Would it have been better spread across an entire season? No It felt like a classic Lucas+Henson film.

I am stoked to have two of my illustrations in the Mars Attacks art book published by Printed in Blood and Atomic Toybox. All of the art in this book is incredible and it is rad as hell to have been included with such fine creatives. You can pick up a copy for yourself at marsattacksbook.com

100% From local to federal, I have yet to see a public service improved by privatization.

Robert Reich@rbreich.bsky.social

This has been the GOP's "starve-the-beast" scheme for nearly 50 years. Meanwhile, millions suffer and struggle to get ahead as the rich get richer. See the problem here?

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This may be the natural progression towards automation that many professions have experienced. Development as a career might simply be a blip on the radar, much like the typesetters of yore.

Commercial artists, being oh so familiar with exploitation, theft, and low wages from the business side, tend to vehemently oppose the technology. While developers, who’ve enjoyed decades of increasing importance and wage growth in the business sector, appear to be embracing AI with open arms.

I understand the pressure to keep up or get left behind. But I have this pit-of-my-stomach feeling that when folks boast about not writing any code for months, or orchestrating agents to do the work of junior developers, we’re enthusiastically giving up something that will be impossible regain.

Minecraft is a whole level of parental Hell unto itself. I cannot count the number of hours I've lost figuring out login issues. This is compounded by playing on non-Microsoft devices that have their own login and permission layers on top of it all.

One of the fun challenges of being a solo web designer + front end dev is that I have the opportunity to work out complex communication challenges through rapid iteration.

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I don't always work this way, but when deadlines are tight and you're understaffed, you just have to get the shit done and make sure it'll work right for the next couple years.

I fully acknowledge that this would be a real nightmare on a larger team where each step (copy+layout+code) was handled by a different person. But 20 years of experience has to amount to something and I suppose this is it.

One of the fun challenges of being a solo web designer + front end dev is that I have the opportunity to work out complex communication challenges through rapid iteration.

Which is really a puffed up way of saying that sometimes I start designing in code when I have a vague notion of what the solution could be. Then circle around and around the problem until what I've put together finally makes sense.

I'd much rather have music recommendation engines based on "a person in this band was also in that other band you like" and "these folk opened for that band once" than whatever fuckery goes into current music app algorithms.

As a parent who's spent bajillions on Lego for my obsessed kid, I'd bristle at having to pay more for a set because it comes with fancy sound effect bricks when I know he won't give a flip about them.

We've been reading this as a family this holiday season. It is a delight. but the kerning between the 'n' and the 'd' is driving me a little nuts.

The Public Domain Review@publicdomainrev.bsky.social

Santa as we know him today — sleigh riding, gift-giving, rotund and white bearded with his distinctive red suit — only began to properly take shape early 20th century. What did he look like before this? Find out in our "Pictorial History of Santa Claus" publicdomainreview.org/collection/a...