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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 24, 2019 13:29:23 GMT -5
Confession: I literally just don't read about politics. I kind of half-avoid it, kind half-tune it out. I have a general sense of what's going on, but I don't go out of my way to stay abreast. I can't do anything about politicians currently in office or what they do, and I don't agree with most of it anyway. So I'd rather just have a surface awareness and read about other things. It's useless energy spent. I just finished up a week in Pittsburgh attending a tech conference. It was my first time meeting my team, as well as meeting a coworker who worked with me on a previous team. Truncated thoughts: - Pittsburgh is a pretty cool city, with a small town feel
- People who present at conferences should be required to submit a clip of them speaking as part of their application; one person read (droned) from their notes the entire time (!!!), and one person had such a thick Spanish accent, no one could understand half the stuff he said.
- When attending a tech conference, go to the sessions that sound interesting, not educational. If you actually want to learn about, say, Terraform, the most effective way to learn it isn't by attending a half-hour session, but by reading the documentation. Conversely, I really enjoyed the session I attended about time, which had no immediate practical aha! application, but was really interesting (who knew Russia has changed the number of timezones it has multiple times in the past decade?) and validated all of the time I have wasted correcting bugs with daylight savings time (DST is the WORST).
- On that note, do attend sessions hosted by a company. They want to represent themselves well, so they send good speakers. If not hosted by a company, sit in the back. Usually, you can tell as soon as somebody opens their mouth whether the presentation is going to be terrible. Sitting in the front means you are trapped there for the remainder of the presentation in agony. No one notices if you immediately leave if you're in the back.
- Sitting the back, you reason, means that you won't be able to see the code they put up on the screen! Who cares! The guys who want to present code are the bad speakers. Good presentations talk about the concepts, not implementation details no one will remember. Nobody will remember random lines of code from your presentation... just Google it.
- I don't know sh*t in the tech industry. Not a new revelation, but I really don't know shit.
- I wish I had met the team based in Pittsburgh like 4 months ago. I'm kind of upset that so much time elapsed before I was able to, especially now that I have a sense of what I was missing. Being the only remote worker as a junior developer is not a job I would recommend anyone take. Don't do it, Derman!!!
- My coworker, who I had never met in person before, is awesome, and I wish he lived near me.
- I should move out of New York. I've been there for 8 years. I've been thinking this for months now, so it's not really a new revelation. But I'm thinking about it more. I think I would move now if I didn't have a lease until February...
I was also really kind of impressed by how social my coworker is. He says he's an ambivert, but, either way, he has no problem talking to people randomly. I never do that. Hanging out with him was fascinating because he elicited friendly, interesting conversation with everyone. (I should note that Pittsburghers are also infinitely friendlier than New Yorkers, even at stores and in Ubers and such. It's a bit jarring, although in a pleasant way.) I never talk to anyone I don't know. I always say I hate small talk, but I think I mostly hate it because talking to people I don't know makes me nervous. I just assume I'd be bothering them as they do whatever, and sustaining the conversation can be work. Of course, people like talking about themselves, and he asks lots of questions about other people... I should try that.
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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 Aug 26, 2019 10:43:37 GMT -5
Working in the same space as the rest of the coworkers makes it a lot easier to just ask when you have problems. We have a few people who work remote 99% of the time and if occasionally run into stuff I need to ask them about, it has to really be something I couldn't figure out on my own. There's certain distance to the relationship with those people (other than the physical, of course) that makes it harder to just ask. Also, I've even had a some of my coworkers come and volunteer to be my rubber duck, since I sometimes figure out a solution to my problems by explaining it to someone else. And just being able to mess around with your coworkers outside of slack is nice enough for me to never want to work from home.
Which might change in about half a year. My contract was extended until May next year, I'll be working a couple of days a week until then. Our office is moving to the other side of the city (which isn't that much honestly, but it means I can no longer walk to work every day) early next year, so I might work from home a bit more often after that happens. Or I'll move, I guess that's an option too. The new offices are also all in one open space (compared to separate rooms with 2-3 people that we have here), so it might be harder to have casual conversations with your coworkers without bothering anybody.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Aug 29, 2019 20:10:01 GMT -5
Yup. You really think twice before you bother someone with a question. I do sit next to my manager (who is not on my scrum team/I don't work with, just simply report to for HR purposes), and it is much easier to simply ask him random questions if I do have any he could answer.
We have an open office. I like it; it encourages socializing, and it's easy enough for me to block out noise by listening to music. Of course, I have unusually deep concentration (my intense the-rest-of-the-world-doesn't-exist concentration is a bit of a running joke), so maybe I'm just not sensitive to the noise.
Is it common to be on contract in Finland? I knew contracts were quite common, especially for younger workers, in France/Italy/Spain, etc, but hadn't really heard much on the matter about Scandinavia. Contract work isn't super common in tech here, unless you're working as a freelancer in web development.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Aug 31, 2019 23:10:20 GMT -5
I was going to post something about Air: the anime adaptation of the Visual Novel by Key, and how hilariously sh*t it is. But I just never got around to it, because I'll probably just mock it for a few minutes in Steam chat and move on. What I'm struggling to figure out, right now, is how I feel about Alec Holowka.
Alec Holowka is a co-creator of the game Night in the Woods: a game developed by three people. He was recently accused of sexual misconduct by Zoe Quinn, and subsequently his two friends booted him from their team. Two days later he killed himself. On the surface, it seems a relatively simple situation. However, it's muddied by several factors. Zoe Quinn has a reputation for dishonesty. Alec Holowka has a history of mental illness. No proof was ever offered: just an accusation.
Suffice to say, two days ago Alec Holowka was, in the eyes of the public, the kind of trash you wouldn't want to step in. His co-workers were brave, and people were posting online giving sympathy and love, even going so-far as to request that future sales not contribute any funds to Alec. Now, post-suicide, he's a victim of twitter and the outrage culture. His two companions are bastards who turned their back on their friend and drove him to suicide. Zoe Quinn is more-or-less a serial killer waiting for her next target.
Here's the thing: as a straight, white male, I'm obviously biased when it comes to outrage culture, because it's straight, white males who are its primary victims. A person can have their entire life ruined because of an accusation on twitter, and there are people who genuinely believe that's a positive thing. Therefor whenever anti-outrage culture events happen, I privately spur them on. I admit, when I found out about Alec Holowka's death, I went to the dev's twitter feeds hoping to find some scathing commentary. Sure enough, there are plenty of posts accusing his fellow developers of pushing him to suicide. Fun fact: the accounts of his two co-developers, as well as Zoe Quinn, have all been deleted. Even on Steam, the game is on the verge of a massive review bomb. However, in the forums, there's a part of a post from one of the co-developers (made pre-suicide) that reads:
"We don't need reminders to assume innocence. We don't need horror stories of Twitter mobs. For us this is a real life thing with complicated real life history, most of which happened offline. Twitter is just how you heard about it."
Whatever else might be said about the nature of the post, this part in particular stood out to me, because right or wrong, it's absolutely true. In essence, calling the co-developers 'traitors' or 'murderers' is doing the exact same thing as the people who accused Alec in the first place. The problem with outrage/call-out/cancel culture is not its rampant inaccuracy, or the people it targets: it's that people are tried and judged entirely based on twitter.
The general public will never know what truly happened. Whether or not Alec is innocent of sexual harassment is not really the problem: the problem is that he suffered for a crime without due process. However, because we will never know what truly happened, it is therefor true that any accusations made against his co-developers are equally lacking in due process. Zoe Quinn has done some questionable things (it seems that 85k was raised for a kickstarter project that hasn't budged in years), but that does not render her allegation false (which itself does not make it true either).
The point is, trial by public is insanely idiotic, ineffective, and accomplishes nothing other than to further my argument that social media has been the single worst thing to happen to civilization since the Cold War. In fact, it's very simple to draw comparisons between modern-day outrage culture and McCarthyism; or any other witch hunt, for that matter. But recognising this (on an individual level) does little good, because what I'm struggling so hard to wrap my head around is, how do we stop it?
I'd like to think that the current slew of demonstrably false accusations have generated enough outrage against outrage culture that we will start to see things trend back towards neutral. However, what I'm seeing from the suicide of Alec Holowka is nothing of the sort. Instead it's just the same tactic being used by the other side. I'm worried that it will become like the current political situation in Washington: both sides screaming at the top of their lungs, neither giving a single inch.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Sept 1, 2019 7:36:24 GMT -5
Well, that sounds like a sh*t situation all around. Sh*t for Zoe if she was in fact assaulted, sh*t for Alec because he got attacked by the Twitter hate mob and felt compelled to kill himself, and sh*t for Zoe because the dude she accused killed himself. I'd feel awful about that last one irrespective of whether anything happened or not.
I don't think people really understand the impact of Twitter hate mobs. It's too much and too hateful. People get revved up over some cause that they really don't know much about, and--even if the thing in question is completely reprehensible--they take it too far. Threatening to kill people, dox them, flood their DMs, etc.--at some point, one has to ask, what is wrong with you, the people doing that? Doesn't it seem over the top? At what point did your target stop being human?
I think the underlying cause/impetus isn't really outrage, as it is people liking to be part of a group. It feels good to be on the "inside" with others, galvanized by a common emotion. You're part of something, part of something bigger. You're in the in-group, aligned against an out-group. There's community. How many of these people would do any of this in person, alone? Not many.
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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 Sept 1, 2019 15:27:15 GMT -5
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "contract work" (I might be misusing the word contract here). If you mean someone hired for specific purpose for a specific time frame then that's not very common here. We have a couple of those in the office, but I'm not sure what what exactly their thing is because they are not in my tea. But a few-month internships are very common here. Usually people only stay for the summer. If you are lucky or do well, you can work part-time while you are studying, which is what I'm doing now.
Goddammit, I didn't read much internet this week and it seems things are not any better... It seems that the one who shoots the first shot is right by default (unless they are notoriously huge d**s, although judging from Zoe's case it seems you can still get away with it). Getting targeted by an internet mob must be the worst. Even though it is a loud minority that's spouting shit, they are still people that are targeting you and that's impossible to ignore. When your whole life depends on online presence (like in the case of Night in the Woods guy, you have to have be online to sell a small game) that's got to be even worse.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Sept 1, 2019 18:38:07 GMT -5
I agree that it's group mentality, but that's what I mean by 'outrage': everyone wants to be part of the 'outrage' because outrage/being offended/being a victim is the "in" thing right now. Thing is, a lot of this sh*t just shouldn't be on social media in the first place. If something is so important to you that you need to take action, do it through the proper channels (HR, Police, etc.). If that yields no results, and you have proof, then maybe I understand making a post online describing your hardships, but even then I'd be very careful how I do it. Going straight to Twitter with accusations of sexual assault is just straight asinine.
But that's social media in a nutshell: everyone thinks they are an expert on everyone else's lives because they allow others into their lives way more than they should. Never mind that most of this stuff falls strictly under the category of none of our damn business.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Sept 2, 2019 17:10:18 GMT -5
Hmm.
I bought Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. It sounded like what I wanted Spore to be. I've played a lot of not-so-great games, but most I forget and move on from; Spore has lingered in my memory with the dubious honor being a complete disappointment. I was so excited for that game to come out, and... it was a boring, watered-down slog. I wanted to like it. I couldn't. The premise sounded great; the reality was dull.
Anyway, I happened upon an early review of Ancestors a week before release, and it sounded exactly like what I had wanted from Spore. Hype. Couldn't find any other reviews on it, though.
When I checked to see when the release date was a few days later, I saw it had since gotten reviews. 67%, Google told me. Say what you will about game reviews, but reviews are definitely not normally distributed. A 67% generally isn't "okay," it's "this game was shit." Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. I read some of the reviews to see where the game had fallen short. Apparently, everyone said it was too hard, too little-hand-holding, not clear what you were supposed to do, frustrating, no tutorial.
Meh, not the worst review I've ever seen. I'd hesitate to buy the game if people said it was boring, or shallow, or repetitive. No, people just didn't like it because the game didn't tell you what to do. I can see that being a design flaw in other games, but it is supposed to be a survival game, and supposed to mimic evolution. I bought it anyway.
I'm too early in to see if the reviewers' criticism is spot on. They are correct that the game gives no hand-holding, at least. However, right now, I consider that more of a challenge I want to overcome, rather than something that puts me off from the game.
So far, I think, if anything, the controls are poorly explained. For instance, I didn't understand the instructions for evading a wild boar that attacked me (also, the Xbox controller's A button location != Switch A button location... that, um, did not help). Needless to say, things did not end well for me. I narrowly escaped and scampered up the wall away from the boar, but oddly limped and panted. Alas, I suddenly realized--I had a broken bone. The game gave no indication of how to heal the bone; unsure of where I was, I ended up just sleeping for the night and healing my leg that way. Cool, will remember that. Works for me. Unfortunately, a minute or so later, I got attacked by a cougar and failed again to figure out how to dodge. I promptly became dinner--the game spared no cinematic details--and that was that.
The game's actually not so cruel, though. You respawn as another chimp in your clan, so in theory, being eaten by a cougar or meeting some other gruesome end isn't the end of the world. Wasn't my first death; I tried to climb straight up a waterfall, losing my grip on the slippery rocks, and fatally slamming to the hard stone below. I just wanted to see what was on top of the waterfall, but meh, kinda deserved that natural selection...
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Sept 2, 2019 17:32:24 GMT -5
Average reviews (ironically) highlight the problem with averages. Say, for instance, something on Amazon has a 3 star rating. As you said, under ordinary circumstances 3 stars does not mean "average", it means "avoid on sight". However, what's more important isn't the average rating, it's the distribution of score. If it's fairly even, or if most people truly do rate it 3 stars, then it's safe to say that you're looking at something pretty mediocre. On the other hand, something like Under the Silver Lake has 38% 5 stars and 37% 1 stars, so it's really more of a "you will either love it or hate it, with little in-between".
That said, I certainly appreciate the conflicting feeling reviews can give: if something sounds up your alley, you want to know if it's worth your time/money. However when all the reviews emphasise elements which aren't of particular interest, it can be difficult to get a grasp on whether or not it's worthy. Sometimes things which sound tailor-made for you (Hollow Knight is the best metroid-vania in years with a huge map? Sign me up!) end up being disappointing for reasons that seem specific to you (Zelda-esque health upgrades mean that 3/4ths of the time you find something, you gain nothing/huge map with a lot of space that feels just empty). In general I've found that my tastes are so specific that they don't really sync up too well with either critics or user reviews. Critics will always favour shiny things over mechanically deep things. User reviews are rarely able to put aside their own bias to give an objective look at the game.
To give an example, a friend and I finished a playthrough of all the numbered Metal Gear Solid games just last night. It took ~2 months, trading off games (I played 1 and 3, he played 2 and 4). The games have garnered praise from critics and fans alike, yet in every respect you'll find the praise overblown. The cinematic presentation which draws in the critics grinds the pace to a halt in later games, culminating with 4: a game where you genuinely spend more time watching cutscenes than playing the game. The story which fans often praise is a mess of twists and retcons that make everything feel like it was written off the top of Kojima's head. The themes are executed so badly that it's outright laughable. The gameplay is functional, but it's not until 3 that it becomes fun, and 4 that it manages to become good.
In short, it's a series of 5-7/10 games (mostly based on gameplay) that for some reason are hailed as 9-10s. If you're a teenager, or emotionally a teenager, you'll probably love it. For everyone else, just play 3 and decide from there if it's worth your time to care about the others (3, by being so far removed from the others, ends up being the runaway best in the franchise).
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Post by Youngster Joey on Sept 2, 2019 19:02:35 GMT -5
Yeah, I definitely got that sense reading the reviews of users, vs. paid reviewers. Quite a lot of people 5-starred it, admitting it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and that they liked the difficulty and lack of direction. That's fine in my book. If it's my cup of tea and not most other people's, still works for me, right? It'd be more disconcerting if most of the user reviewers said it was poorly designed.
I also think you'll probably have a better time if you go in knowing that the game doesn't handhold. I'm not sure to what degree paid reviewers had that knowledge going in. It's very different to know a game explicitly wants you to struggle, vs. unexpectedly struggling due to poor game design. In the game's defense, the opening cutscene ends with "We won't help you much," but given how much games do typically provide in tutorials, I don't think the average person would interpret that as "you're totally on your own, sucker!" I've quit games early in before because I had no idea what I was doing. Knowing I'm not supposed to know anything makes the experience very different.
In any case, ratings are a bit of a double-edged sword. You can either have the absolute average rating, which is like the 3-star situation you described. Or you can implement Netflix's version of a rating, where they try to predict how you would like it. I don't use Netflix, but I think this is an interesting approach, especially if you have niche interests. I know I definitely get frustrated by the blanket "oh, you like X in Y genre? You must like all of Y genre!", when in fact I liked Z elements within Y genre and care very little for the rest of Y genre. (Spotify, I'm looking at you.)
Interestingly, though, a friend of mine doesn't like the Netflix approach, because he feels like it becomes harder for him to discover new content if everything's catered to him. Go figure. Can't have it both ways, I guess.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Sept 2, 2019 23:17:55 GMT -5
Netflix's approach is so awful that I literally have no clue how it works. It generates a percentage, but what that percentage is supposed to mean is a complete mystery. I think it's supposed to be how much the thing in question matches what you've previously watched, but why the hell would I use that as a metric for anything? "Oh, you'll like this book: it's 82% Haruki Murakami" -- lolwut?
The cynical side of me thinks that Netflix removed user reviews so that you wouldn't have any bias against watching the original content they shove in your face, ESPECIALLY the ones that would clearly earn a low score (like, say, anything with Adam Sandler, who they signed a 6 movie deal with).
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Post by Youngster Joey on Sept 4, 2019 0:36:04 GMT -5
I suppose at least they're trying? I can't speak much to it since, again, I don't use Netflix... TV is boring.
Adam Sandler... clearly, a significant number of people must like him and are just not coming out and saying so, or he simply appeals to a demographic I don't interact with. I don't know anyone who likes Adam Sandler. There are a few actors where, if I know they're involved, is an automatic kiss of death to whatever interest I may have had in the movie. I've never, ever, ever seen him in anything that did not make me feel like my IQ dropped by several standard deviations.
I went to boarding school as a teen for a bit. We were required to do activities during the week, one of which was going to the movies every Thursday. This sounds OK, until you realize you can't actually go and see movies every week and not, well, run out of things to see. Obviously we saw the good movies... and the OK ones... and, well, the really awful ones, too. I had to sit through the entirety of This is Sparta, which was... awful. But the worst of all was Don't Mess with the Zohan, starring our friend Adam Sandler. No, I don't know what adult thought it was appropriate to take us to see that movie. I do know that said adults regretted their decision as their own brains atrophied in the theatre, and for once, just once out of all of the god awful movies we were forced to see in full, they decided we would leave the movie early. No one complained.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Sept 4, 2019 3:27:26 GMT -5
My Dad likes some of Adam Sandler's stuff. Then again, my Dad has very odd taste in movies. He can enjoy absolute garbage, but also occasionally thinks more deeply on more serious movies. It's all rather enigmatic, but at least I can get him to watch just about anything, even if his end response sometimes baffles me. Spirited Away was 'too weird', and his conclusion of Penguin Highway was, "Well, that was bizarre". I'd say his tolerance for things that have that Japanese brand of oddity aren't to his taste? Anyway, back to Adam Sandler, his movies are liked by a certain crowd: the crowd that will never read or write a review anyway, which makes the removal of the ratings system more of a mystery. But I agree: anything to do with Happy Madison (Adam Sandler, Kevin James, and a few others) are just an instant no-go. Then again, if a movie is billed primarily as a 'comedy', that's about the biggest red flag you can get. I can't think of a single 'comedy' movie I enjoy outside of South Park and Team America (both by Stone and Parker). I'm assuming it's such a cesspool because most people above a certain IQ know how to be funny while also making a point, or tell a compelling story, or have interesting characters, and therefor write stories "with comedic elements" rather than straight comedies. But I might just be being an over-generalising pr*ck.
The Boarding School thing sounds interesting. It took me a while before I recognised that you went as a class. I thought you were simply required to see a movie on your time (and write about it?), but I'm guessing it was instead viewed as a group activity? For what purpose? The cost of taking an entire class to a cinema must have been enormous, much less to do so each week. Why not simply show screenings within the school? Surely a projector would be cheaper than that?
I find it funny how terrible I'm getting about buying new books before reading the ones I already have. 5 months ago I would have been able to say, in complete honesty, that I read through my purchases so quickly that I wanted to have a comfy backlog. Nowadays I buy 2 books, read 1 right away, then read something else on the shelf, and by then something completely different is demanding my attention, and before long that second book is completely lost. For example, I mentioned how much I enjoyed The Secret History (~520 pages), and I have The Goldfinch (778) to read as well. And I really want to read it, but I also really wanted to read Killing Commendatore (681) again, and so I went ahead and did that. Only, KC and Wind-Up Bird (607, small print/added lines per page) feel so connected now that reading one puts me in mind to read the other, so now once I finish Moshi Moshi (200), I know I'm going to read Wind-Up Bird, after which I will certain get to Goldfinch, because I absolutely want to read it! (And none of this is to mention Coin Locker Babies (507) or From the Fatherland With Love (666 -- hue hue), both by Ryu Murakami and purchased knowing it would be some time before they got some attention, but which I do wish to get to in relative shortness) Buuuuuuuut you know, after watching Penguin Highway again, I also really want to read the novel and see how it compares................................................... God help me. *page numbers included to emphasise that these are long books that typically take a minimum of 10 days to read through.
-edit- It occurs to me that my next two books will feature birds in the title, but neither will be avian in the slightest.
While I'm on the topic, there are some 'classics' that I've wanted to look in to, but I've found my experiences very mixed. Kokoro and The Sun Also Rises were both surprisingly great reads. On the other hand, I've tried to read Crime and Punishment multiple times, but find that it's meandering, repetitious prose makes it impossible to enjoy. I feel compelled to read something written by D*ckens* at some point in my life, but fear encountering the same issue. Similarly, I've found frequent references to Proust in several other novels, but quite aside from being SEVEN F*CKING VOLUMES, I fear the same might hold true for In Search of Lost Time. Tolstoy... well... more f*ck huge books...
Maybe pre-1900 is just the cut-off point where the structure/prose becomes so archaic that I can't tolerate it. A pity, because there are many highly-praised works which are rendered unreadable (for me, obviously).
*Sweet zombie f*ck it's pathetic that I have to star that, or else it gets censored.
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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 Sept 4, 2019 6:12:34 GMT -5
(why do I keep doing this... I keep reloading the page accidentally and losing everything I've written. I did it twice this time...)
I've never watched anything based on Netflix's recommendations. I may notice that they've added a thing I've wanted to watch when I'm browsing the front page, but I've never picked up anything just because Netflix recommended it to me. The system is pretty s**t, but I don't mind the lack of user reviews. I'd rather have my recommendations filtered by netflix based on what I've watched than have my recommendations be based on what most people have liked. If most people like/dislike something it doesn't really mean I will/won't like it.
The last few books I've read have been disappointments. Chi-fi was boring and aside from a handful of clever ideas they didn't really have much going for them, and I stopped before finishing the second book. Neuromancer was alright, I enjoyed it as an insight into early cyberpunk, despite being a little uninspired by modern standards, and it wasn't a bad book overall. However, I was still a bit disappointed by it. Maybe it was the fact that when it comes to modern cyberpunk, they are mostly a 1-for-1 copy of the concepts of the Neuromancer, or the fact that despite being sci-fi with heavy emphasis on near-future technology, the writer had no idea how technology worked even in his own time. It was ok, but it wasn't the masterpiece some people make it out to be. I have a short list of other sci-fi stuff I intend to read, but I think I'll try moving on to something else for now, maybe Wind-Up bird.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Sept 4, 2019 19:09:55 GMT -5
Yeah, I can't confess to having seen many comedies I thought were funny. I've enjoyed episodes of the Simpsons and South Park, and I remember finding Rat Race clever, but... meh. There's nothing more awkward than when people force you to watch XYZ thing together because it's so funny, and the entire time, you know they're watching your reaction... but the thing just isn't funny. Usually, it's something I think isn't just not funny, but flat-out dumb...
As for boarding school, yes, it was an evening activity. We were required to do activities in the evening most days a week, I think most school nights, really. The idea was specifically to be out in the community. The place was boring as hell--you weren't allowed internet, and you lived in a house with 10ish other students with one TV--so going to mediocre movies wasn't all that bad, relatively speaking... It was an unusual place. Definitely not your typical Harry Potter boarding school. No hyperbole or hubris in saying I could write a memoir on my weird adolescence and its wacky supporting characters.
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