Is it? I’ve never seen my VPN serving me any ads, and it’s pretty cheap.

Any 5th any movie is going to be a rehash.

Have you seen it, or do you even know anything about it? This one’s getting solid reviews from critics and audiences. And I say this as someone who’s never gotten into the franchise and didn’t even watch 4 or 5; I have nothing to personally defend here. The Schafrillas review (also on Nebula) was quite positive, and he went in with the same expectations you’re talking about here.

If you’re going to be a pretentious, overgeneralizing jackass, maybe don’t pick on the movie with a 93%/7.8 on Rotten Tomatoes.

If you actually look at the evidence presented, they cite this 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management: “Making CEO Narcissism Research Great [ew]: A Review and Meta-Analysis of CEO Narcissism”. On signature size, for which it found only two studies by nearly the exact same team, it remarked:

Ham[, Seybert, and Wang] (2018) and Ham, Lang, Seybert, and Wang (2017) employed an alternative unobtrusive measure of CEO narcissism by measuring the size and contents of a CEO’s signature in SEC filings (2 of 42 articles). Their rationale posits that a larger signature represents the grandiose nature of a narcissist. To validate the measure, Ham et al. used student samples in a laboratory setting. While the main advantage of the measure is that it captures a behavior under the direct control of the CEO (i.e., his or her signature), the measure may not fully capture narcissism’s multifaceted nature. Ham et al. also provided external validation by correlating the measure with employee ratings of CEO narcissism, as obtained by O’Reilly et al. (2014). As this is a newer measure, it has seen limited use to date.

I still see this as some absolute TikTok narcissist-whisperer shit and emblematic of the worst of the reproducibility crisis and conclusion-chasing in the social sciences – sincere respect for the social sciences though I may have.

Edit: I will add that not Charles Ham, not Mark Lang, not Nicholas Seybert, and not Sean Wang are psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or frankly fucking anything; they’re in business studies.

unobtrusive measures of narcissism via photo size, signature size, and relative compensation predicted greater resistance to remote work in public statements early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dude, come the fuck on. I take psychology as a serious science, so this methodology legitimately offends me: signature size as a metric for narcissism? Get the actual fuck out of here. This reeks of a paper in search of a conclusion.

“Imagine calling yourselves the ‘master race’ but forgetting to secure your own website — maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination,” Root wrote.

Fucking gold.