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Post by Lee Traxin on May 1, 2019 13:22:28 GMT -5
I love the Sonic trailer, Gangsta's Paradise is most certainly my main thought when it comes to Sonic. And Jim Carrey is most certainly a great Robotnik, not a complete miscast at all.
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on May 1, 2019 14:27:54 GMT -5
Can't wait for the youtube genesis-soundfont wizards to give us the authentic cover of Gangsta's Paradise we can mod into our games for ultimate sonic experience.
EDIT: On the authors owing the ending to readers: if the author is dumb enough to lie to their fans about the progress they've made writing, and keeps promising the ending even if nothing is being shown, then the fan outrage is on them. You've given an expectation that you are consistently not delivering on, and the fans are getting tired of it. As a writer you owe to the fans to be honest at least, and if you are struggling and are not sure if you can deliver, then you shouldn't be saying "everything is going fine". However, if author decides to just say "f**k it, I'll quit", then I won't be too mad. I'll be bummed that I won't be getting the rest of it, but I won't hold it against the writers if they just don't feel like writing it anymore, because what's the point if the writer doesn't care about the story anymore. It's all about how you communicate it to the reader, and I think Martin hasn't done a very good job.
It goes into a weird territory when another writer decides to pick up where the previous one left it. I've tried reading Eoin Colfer's sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and back then I liked both of the writers individually. It just didn't feel the same, and I ended up dropping it halfway through. There are some cases where another writer has successfully continued a story, but haven't read any myself (at least can't think of any right now).
Also, did the language filter really censor the word "thingy" from thingyens on Grain's post?
EDIT2: yes it did... "D1ck" to "thingy"
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Post by Friendly Person :) on May 2, 2019 15:36:58 GMT -5
Started a new game of Civ 6. In an effort to try something new, I went with Eleanor as the Brits. I started just trying to flip cities non-aggresively, but now I think I'm gonna add on to that a diplomatic victory win. In other words, no Giant Death Robots, no Space Race: just good ol' fashioned diplomacy... assuming the gits don't try launching rockets...
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Post by Friendly Person :) on May 3, 2019 17:11:20 GMT -5
Okay, so having just 40 pages left to go on Turtles All the Way Down (and having no further access to it until Tuesday), I think it’s safe to say I have a firm stance on John Green. Surprise: he’s every bit as cringe-inducing as I expected. The thing with the Green Meme though is that, while there are various elements of the book itself that inspires cringe, it’s really the context around it that gives the cringe such force.
If we dive right into things, let’s take dialogue as an example. Probably the first (or maybe second) thing you’ll note about Green is that his voice and dialogue sound like a mixture of “things those kids say” and “teenagers are really deep thinkers”. To use some of the richer examples (thanks Goodreads reviews):
“Last night I lay on the frozen ground, staring up at a clear sky only somewhat ruined by light pollution and the fog produced by my own breath - no telescope or anything, just me and the wide-open sky - and I kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it’s one thing. But the sky isn’t one thing. The sky is everything. And last night, it was enough.”
or during a texting conversation:
“Him: Then what am I? What is anyone? Me: I is the hardest word to define. Him: Maybe you are what you can’t not be.”
What the flying f**k are you on about Green? No teenager thinks that way. I’m gonna wager very few humans think that way. This isn’t just “adults writing kids”, it’s also mixed with tween fantasies about what high school is like. Life is Strange is ‘adults writing kids’ – Green is something else entirely.
But okay, he can’t capture the teen voice: it’s not so bad, since almost nobody can. Yet, the thing you’ll notice next (or maybe first) is that every single character has to have some kind of quirk. Our main character has anxiety about germs to the extent that at one point she starts drinking hand sanitizer. Her best friend writes Star Wars fan-fiction with wookies. Her love interest is rich. It’s the novel equivalent of having a character with blue/purple/green hair in an anime: just a flamboyant way of trying to make a character memorable because you're insecure that without it nobody will remember they exist.
One or two oddballs I can deal with. If you want your main character to have anxiety, that’s fine. But if you want to keep things relatable, you should probably limit your quirkiness after that, because the more quirk, the less relatable it becomes. I don’t have friends who are rich or write fan fiction or who studied architecture in effing high school. By making everybody special, not only does nobody become special, but you also lose any semblance of realism. Again, it doesn’t feel like a real high school, it feels like a tween’s fantasy of what high school is like.
Hopefully you’re starting to see the underlying problem: the push and pull between fantasy and reality. The book wants you to take its character’s drama seriously, but places them in a world that feels completely fake. When every character has a name for their car, you are not writing endearing teenaged characters, you are writing caricatures of teenagers. When you want the focal point of your story to be the challenges of living with anxiety, maybe cut the part about the rich boyfriend who understands all of your feelings and is patient with everything and gives you 100 grand just to prove that you love him. I’m not kidding, that happened.
But at the end of the day none of this is enough to make John Green notable. The plot – i.e. the things that happen in the story – is fine by YA standards. The book, divorced of any context, would be gag inducing, but probably just forgettable. What makes it so difficult is John Green himself. See, John Green actually struggled with anxiety as a child, and was bullied a lot in high school. So when you have a female main character who doesn’t fit in, has anxiety, and falls for a geeky boy with brown hair who wears glasses and understands her perfectly because he also doesn’t fit in... it’s kinda f**king weird.
And this is what makes it so uncomfortable. Given the tween glorification of high school, the misfit characters, and the descriptions, I cannot shake the sense that John Green is trying to live out some fantasy version of high school. In THIS high school he has friends – awesome, quirky friends. In THIS high school he has a deep profoundness that nobody can see. In THIS high school somebody can see past his issues and love him for who he really is!
...and he’s also a girl in love with a self-insert rich version of himself.
That’s pretty much my experience with John Green. The part I left off at had the MC literally attempting to OD on hand sanitizer. It sounds hilarious, and I confess that I laughed out loud, but it came right after an entire two page anxiety rant. For every funny-stupid moment, you’ll get a dozen eye-rolling ones (we literally get the ‘I hurt myself to feel alive’ line), and eventually you start questioning if reading any further starts saying more about you than the book. If I finish it, it’s because there’s only 40 pages left. Otherwise, I’ve lost enough of my brain cells to Mr. Green’s fantasies.
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Post by Youngster Joey on May 3, 2019 22:18:52 GMT -5
Derman - I legitimately thought that was me for a split sec and was wondering when the heck I had written about "youtube genesis-soundfront wizards." Had I just written that when I was tired and forogt? @grain - Yeah, I dunno, I... I don't think that's the way teenagers talk. Or adults. I suppose he's right in that some teenagers often deem themselves profound. I find those teenagers obnoxious. The samples you quoted also sound obnoxious. Certainly isn't ubiquitous, though... I think the quirk thing is a common characteristic of bad YA writing. Or just writing in general, but I've noticed it especially in YA. Characters should be interesting on their own, and if they have a quirk, it shouldn't be front-and-center piece. Most people should resemble the people you meet in real life--nice enough, but nothing particularly unique. If I feel like the characters don't feel real or come off as overly contrived, I stop reading. Incidentally, your description of everyone needing a quirk brought forth a long-forgotten memory of reading All Souls in my senior year of high school. Good God, I hated that book. That book had a lot of issues--which I am now compelled to expand upon, having not thought of this book for 9 years and yet immediately once again livid--but it suffered from a similar problem, in that everyone was a special snowflake of sorts. It was not realistic and did not make the characters more relatable. In fact, it made them feel fake. For a bit of background about the book and why I hated reading it, it's about a posh all-girls school in Manhattan. One of the girls gets sick with cancer, and the book is about that girl, Astrid, and a bunch of other girls at the school. I think the book was supposed to be a dual look at upperclass girls in posh private schools and also how the sickness of Astrid affected everyone else. I thought it failed in both respects. Firstly, all-girls private school. At the time I was reading the book, I was attending one, so I think I'm pretty well-equipped to have a legitimate bone to pick. Everyone probably has a general stereotype of what a posh all-girls schools might be like--catty, boys-obsessed, casually flippant with money and fashion, etc. Some of those stereotypes are kinda true to an extent (high school girls are often petty), but people are still people? They're much more normal than you might think. I get that authors write about tons of things they've never experienced themselves, and they can do so quite capably. But her all-girls school was like a caricature--like if she took the extreme of a stereotype and just wrote about that. No one is actually that flippant about money or spoiled, even if they're really f**king rich. I don't think you'd have even needed to attend an all-girls school to feel that way. The characters were simply absurd and unbelievable. Secondly, this book had like 390452895823 characters. And each chapter was from a different POV. Now, I think books that shift POV can work, but there needs to be a common plot theme. When you're following completely different storylines with each character and the last time you saw them was 5 storylines and 10 chapters ago... I dunno, the book starts to feel like a confusing clusterf**k? Who is this person, and why should I care about them again? Especially on the why piece? The book is spread so thin across these characters that none of them are able to develop in a meaningful way. All of these characters have their own special quirks (see for reference also their absurdly exaggerated rich prep school girl traits), but this doesn't make them memorable. If anything, it makes them unbelievable. It feels like the author is trying too hard to make them interesting. Maybe have a less schizophrenic plot and they'd be interesting on their own? Just a thought... Thirdly, and relatedly, this book was supposed to be about a girl sick with cancer, right? Yeah, so Astrid is barely ever talked about. Hell, the book doesn't even really cover her illness that much or its impact on others. She eventually recovers at the end, and as a reader, I gave no sh*ts. Astrid was not developed at all and I've spent the entire book reading about the totally inane plot lines of all of her sh*tty classmates instead. None of the sh*tty classmates' plot lines had anything to do with one another and basically the book ended and I guess there was a resolution or something but I didn't know what it was and I didn't give a shit. No idea what the point of the book was. It was basically word vomit, frankly. I hated my AP English class. I think literally the only thing that teacher assigned that I liked was Gulliver's Travels and A Streetcar Named Desire. Everything else my teacher assigned was terrible.
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on May 4, 2019 17:01:49 GMT -5
Derman - I legitimately thought that was me for a split sec and was wondering when the heck I had written about "youtube genesis-soundfront wizards." Had I just written that when I was tired and forogt? It's a charming picture, isn't it. Grain mentioned finnish Snufkin sounds like a spanish bard, so I went with it. And I like it. I call it "Spankin". John Green sounds as bad as I was expecting. I had a feeling that there's some heavy self-inserting going on in his books, because they sound like someone's high-school fantasy. Honestly if I only saw those two parts, I wouldn't find it hard to believe that the whole thing is just satire about how teenagers are such deep thinkers, and how you can make any thought sound smart if you just present it in the right way. The whole "everyone has a quirk" doesn't sound that bad, because I think everyone has their quirks, some just harder to see than others (I have 12 siblings, and all of them have something weird going on. Except maybe one). Although judging from how you described it, in the novel they are all over the top and unrealistic. It sounds like Juan Green is on that "everyone is a special" juice that we were fed in high school. For the past few days I haven't gotten anything done, and I've been mostly lying in bed. I've been wondering why I just can't push myself to do anything and why I'm feeling so tired all the time. So I finally decided to check if I were sick or something, and surprise, a nice little fever. I was so sure I was just being lazy and I need to get off my arse. Now that I've got an excuse, I don't have to feel bad about not working anymore.
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Post by Youngster Joey on May 4, 2019 17:19:04 GMT -5
So I've been having a friendly debate with this guy at work about Slack after someone else posted an article pointing out that Slack has replaced email in many respects and is distracting/too many messages/encroaches on work/life balance/drains productivity/etc.
I don't really think this is a Slack issue. That's really more of a "communication system" issue. If I have 20 issues in one day and need to talk to you about them in writing, the platform doesn't really matter at that point? You're either getting 20 messages on Slack or 20 emails. The complaints leveraged at Slack are the exact same ones people leverage at email, which is a pretty good indication that it's neither email nor Slack that's the problem. It's an issue inherent to communication platforms in general. There's a lot of information being sent and read, demands are placed on your time, you'll be distracted reading some of them, etc. After a certain point, the user has to curate the experience for themselves. For instance, I have filters set up to automatically route emails to my trash bin if they meet certain criteria. Other people might (and do) want the same emails I trash.
If the communication system is really untenable, like people contacting you after hours and expecting a response, then the problem isn't really Slack or email, is it? That's a culture problem. So lay down the law about communication rules with the people involved.
Then it came to light what he actually takes issue with is the fact that Slack has no incentive to make you not use Slack all the time, that it's designed to be addictive with notifications on by default and highlights things in color to grab your attention. Well... I dunno. What good is a communication app if I have to tell it to notify me when I get stuff I might care about? And yes, I want new messages highlighted for me--I'm no fan of searching through stuff I've already read to find the important bit. I guess that's "gamifying" and addictive and such, but people use the app for a reason--it's useful. If those notifications are too addictive, then you certainly have the option to turn them off or just not use the service at all. Slack has no shortage of options to curate your experience, which goes back to my above point.
Ultimately, it's kind of like saying, "Slack is bad because it does things that make users want to use it!", which is sort of silly.
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on May 4, 2019 17:35:04 GMT -5
I can understand where he's coming from with his complaints, but literally all he has to do is spend few minutes setting it up so that he won't get the stuff all the time. When I want to focus on something, I mute everything and check them messages every hour or something. I haven't used slack much, but I'd assume it's possible to mute individual channels so the general chatter doesn't go through. Some people might get annoyed if you don't respond immediately, but that's on them, IMO.
I weird story about emails. When I was looking for a job earlier this year, the first interview I was in went really well. They basically offered me a job at the door as I was walking out, said they'd contact me later. Didn't hear anything from them, so I ended up taking another job (which, to be completely honest, I didn't expect to be getting and I'm really happy that I got it). A couple of weeks ago they called me, wanted to talk about the job. Apparently they had lost my contact info somewhere in the flood of emails, and it took them this long to be able to contact me. I felt really bad for them, because apparently they didn't have anyone to replace me.
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Post by Youngster Joey on May 4, 2019 19:52:13 GMT -5
Yeah, Slack allows you to customize things a lot. You can mute entire channels, or have it only contact you if certain keywords are mentioned, or only within a certain time window, etc. Or, you know, you could just not check. That works best of all, if you feel like there's too much. On the people getting mad if you don't respond, that is on them. I was thinking about it more, and I actually think defaulting to not having flashy notifications actually makes the product bad, because most people don't read the documentation and just use the thing. Which means they'd end up missing quite a few important messages before googling how to turn notifications on properly. From a usability and user experience perspective, I think that's a far worse offense than "I'm getting so many messages that it's annoying me, how can I turn it down?" I kinda find it a little unimpressive that they lost your contact info. It's not like they had it written down on a piece of paper that got thrown away... they might be totally fine, but I'd have to wonder how organized the company or hiring manager was. On a note of trepidation, I thinkI've gotten the worst of things ironed out with jonsnowisdumb.com. It routes to the right address now? It also looks like total a** on mobile... also, I need to actually get it to work properly with the www and https and all that jazz, but Amazon's slow.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on May 4, 2019 20:02:38 GMT -5
I don't even know what Slacker is. Seems to me though that certain people in general have a harder time transitioning between 'free' mode and 'work' mode. I'm one of them. It sucks, but at the same time I don't think I could write without the overhanging sense that 'I should be doing something more productive'. As to the book, it's funny because on Goodreads it has a relatively low rating despite being a Pulitzer Prize nominee? Also I love the review that says 'this captured my experience perfectly!'. Given your comments, and the people I see say the same about John Green, I get the sense that people romanticise their pasts way more than I gave them credit for...
I deleted the rest of this post. Maybe I'll come back to it later.
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Post by Youngster Joey on May 5, 2019 10:19:58 GMT -5
Yeah, it's sort of a love-it-or-hate-it book, I think. The book has a very unique style. I think it's sort of like abstract art, really. Most people will look at it and go WTF, and a few people will think it's incredibly profound.
I don't really like "profound" books, the sort that meander and don't really go anywhere or explicitly state their point and just are and leave you scratching for some kind of meaning. I went onto Goodreads to read the comments as well after you mentioned it, and one (critical) commenter noted it seemed the author's background was in short stories, and the book showed--it was more like a loose collection of character vignettes than a cohesive thread. Her countless characters' stories have no arcs, no point, no thread connecting the characters' chapters within or with one another. Just random, pointless snapshots throughout the year.
Maybe that was the point, that most people don't have any particular arc in their senior year of high school and are in fact just living their day-to-day lives. Maybe there's a point to that, but I think it must be like how some people feel about playing The Sims--what's interesting about watching someone eat breakfast and go to the bathroom before heading to work? At least I like my Sims (most of them :-) ), but I couldn't bring myself to have a drop of sympathy for her obnoxious, self-absorbed Gossip Girl caricatures.
I dunno. If I have to really think hard about what a book's point was, I don't think that's a good sign. A book can be slow and meandering and accomplish very little page to page, but still accomplish a lot when you step back. Or it can not, and just be boring flowery word vomit. Without sounding pretentious (I'm sure this sounds pretentious), I can read between the lines on books fairly well. I can usually recognize what a book was trying to accomplish and appreciate it for that, even if I genuinely did not enjoy reading it. (See for reference Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, who deftly lampooned the shallowness of elite society at an agonizingly plodding pace with a cast of characters I loathed.) I think All Souls won a Pulitzer because her writing style is unconventional and skilled at the sentence or paragraph level. But writing poetic sentences that don't add up to a meaningful whole is pointless? A reader might need to take time to reflect and think back on a book to fully appreciate it, but if after doing so, they still struggle to find the point, the author has failed.
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on May 5, 2019 14:00:42 GMT -5
The position was at my university's robotic research group. "Professional" would be the last work I'd use to describe the way they operate. I had a meeting once a week in the room next to the guy who interviewed me, and I ran into him a few times in the hallway. Apparently he didn't remember my face either, because he didn't seem to even register me passing him. I had the other job at that point, so I didn't bother bringing it up.
jonsnowisdumb looks great, and seems to be working fine. For some reason, when I access the website with my android phone, the title and banner fonts are fancy, but when I use my PC or other phone, it's the same font as the rest of the text.
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Post by Youngster Joey on May 5, 2019 16:15:49 GMT -5
That's weird. Maybe your PC is automatically routing to http://www. version? jonsnowisdumb.com displays appropriately, although www.jonsnowisdumb.com doesn't. I gave up on it for today. I'm sure it's some stupid configuration I didn't do right, but I've cleared through enough problems this weekend that I'm just going to figure it out later. If for any reason people tell you, as they did me, that you could just "throw a site up on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk," this is a lie. You will throw things on EB and it will get stuck on every single freakin' branch. Incremental progress... Anyway, I've been going through and looking through longer rants I've written about things to clean up and put into blog post format. I edited one just now about Stardew Valley. I really haven't been compelled to play Harvest Moon since; why would I when it's obvious it could be done so much better? Writing about it does make me want to play Stardew Valley again, though...
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on May 5, 2019 17:17:28 GMT -5
So the fancy font is the intended behaviour? No matter which browser or machine I use, I get the normal font, except on one android phone using Chrome. Doesn't matter if I go through jonsnow- or www.jonsnow-I'll try a few more things later to see if I can figure anything out.
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Post by Youngster Joey on May 5, 2019 19:49:46 GMT -5
What kind of fancy font do you mean? That's how it's supposed to look. It defaults to another font elsewhere...
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