Texas and Florida aren't blue states.

Because having to verify your age with multiple different companies is clearly superior to just doing it once and being done with it?

Look, I get it when some people say they don't want any age checks. That's how the internet used to work, and it's not entirely unreasonable to place the burden of parenting (ie keeping kids away from age inappropriate content by enabling the appropriate parental controls) on parents. But a few states already have age gate laws that work the way you're describing (at the site level) and:

It's annoying for adults.
It doesn't work to keep kids away from inappropriate content.
There's no way to implement the age checks without massive privacy concerns.

Given the choice, I'd prefer no age checks at all - but my preference for a lesser evil would be to just verify once with Microsoft/Apple/Google (in all likelihood, they already have the information needed to determine I'm an adult anyway) and be done with it forever.

You pretty much have to produce content that follows an established formula or audiences won't like it. One of my favorite examples of this was the Little Shop of Horrors film from the 80s. It was based on a stage musical (which itself was loosely based on a 1960s B-movie). The original ending from the play has the main character killed and the alien plants taking over the world. Test audiences hated it. A new ending was re-shot and what was supposed to be a tragedy became a heroic redemption arc story.

Not too long ago, Disney actually did release an animated film that wasn't tied to some established franchise: Elio. It flopped.

Disney's studios produce content that gets people to visit their theme parks. The theme parks are still packed, at least from what I've seen. So, mission accomplished.

That's pretty much where all the eyeballs are these days, and anyone with the most minimal amount of respect for their sanity opts for ad-free tier of paid streaming services (or just gets their content from the high seas, which also doesn't have ads), so you're not getting movie trailers on TV unless you specifically go searching for them.

Whichever studio is behind the upcoming He-Man film sure has been promoting the fuck out of that on Facebook. It still looks absolutely awful, not that I'm surprised - it's based on an IP that was originally created as a glorified toy commercial. Besides, all it takes for the money you spent promoting a bad film to be wasted, is a handful of influencers on the social media site formerly known as Twitter saying "It's trash, wait until it hits streaming." I guess we'll see how it does at the box office in a few days.

If "free" Plex can't transcode and can't stream externally, you may as well skip it entirely and just run something like FileZilla on your media server and use Kodi on the client(s). In fact, I lived with this exact setup until I got around to finally setting up JellyFin.

There hasn't been anything on OTA TV that I've cared to watch ever since all the major networks moved anything halfway decent behind the paywalls of their respective branded streaming services.

Well, we can't have them using the same Dell laptops as the worker drones, now can we? Do you have any idea how much RAM it takes to send a Teams chat message to remind everyone that you'll be unavailable after 1PM because you've got golf today?

Think of the golf, man.

Apple doesn't actually have a product that directly competes against the Surface Pro tablets. Despite some of the recent improvements, iPad OS is still quite limiting. That being said, some people do manage to perform "real" work on iPads, if everything you're trying to do is compatible with Apple's ecosystem.

Pretty sure Ticketmaster has some prior art in that department.

Musk won at capitalism, so the current system of rules that American businesses have to operate under seems to be working very much in his favor. You'd think he'd just sit the fuck down and enjoy his riches, but nope, he just can't stand the fact that some other sleazy businessman also was able to have their own 5 minutes in the limelight. Musk is like the business world's version of Madonna.

I'm pretty sure the concept of capturing and taming wild animals came from the real-world concept of domestication, which (and I shouldn't have to say this) predates the invention of television.

And fanciful monsters that don't actually exist? Yeah, that literary trope is as old as the written word.

Nope. But digging through a massive pile of rubbish in search of money seems like a rather apt metaphor for the job market after AI gets through with it.

I hope they both lose.

If you're an adult who understands the risks and still wants a cigar, why not? I've never understood this obsession some people have with forcing others to be virtuous in spite of themselves. If your religion and/or personal code of beliefs says you can't partake in $VICE, that's entirely on you.