SkoomaDentist
No bio...
User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
7d ago
when the reality is that Asian and white Americans are doing great relative to comparable nations
Are they? If that is the case, why do people even in this forum always claim that high school cannot be expected to teach people anything and that's why it is absolutely necessary for colleges / universities to teach liberal arts to vast amount of people?
SkoomaDentist
12d ago
try and
You were doing so well and then you write something like that... Shame!
SkoomaDentist
12d ago
Case in point, my old car had lane guard that couldn't be permanently disabled. There were certain spots where it would try to guide me off the road / towards the incoming traffic every single time I drove through them. The road wasn't even in particularly bad shape at those spots.
SkoomaDentist
12d ago
Very very loud leftist politicians.
SkoomaDentist
13d ago
Sunshine punctuated by light showers of rain genocide.
SkoomaDentist
13d ago
The current fashion of grey morality and grim dark gets a bit tiresome simply because you have so much of it made.
I don't think it's quite that, at least to me. It's more that there seems to be this strange idea that every work absolutely must have the protagonists - and by extension the reader - suffer losses by having characters the reader cares about suffer or be outright killed. This ends up killing any real optimism and the best you get is "Yay, they mostly won in the end... I guess?" This would be fine if they were skillfully written into the story from the beginning to drive the plot but that of course is rarely the case and instead they end up feeling as if the editor told the author "This is otherwise good, but you need to kill characters A and B near the end". An example that comes to mind is Harry Potter where Fred Weasley's deathin the final battle adds absolutely nothing to the story - besides of course driving home that you, the reader, must be made to lose characters you liked.
Martin's writing doesn't have this problem as it's established already in the first book that anyone can die, most protagonists are more or less villainy and the reader really shouldn't hang onto any of them. It does however need balance from more optimistic stories, only that balance has been lost due to this trend.
Or to put it another way, those writers weren't all that entertaining. For all Martin's faults, the first few books in the series were certainly entertaining.
SkoomaDentist
13d ago
You aren’t entirely wrong. IMO having Jon Snow be safe and Tyrion probably but not quite guaranteed safe was fine, but the rest should have been as disposable as everyone else. Also agreed about the extra plots.
neither the red wedding nor twincest actually work out for the perpetrators
A major attraction of the book series was seeing how the situation would get even more and more fucked for pretty much everyone. I consider it less nihilistic and more a semi-gleeful entertainment to be enjoyed with virtual popcorn, but maybe that's just me. Ned Stark's fate was a brilliant way to drive home the point that anyone could die at any time, even people who would in other works be protected by being considered protagonists. "Truly anyone can die and almost nobody has plot armor" may not be a big deal nowadays (because so many people have been influenced by Martin), but it was very much different from the norm when the first book was published in 1996.
SkoomaDentist
18d ago
Goes for other countries around there, too. I regularly read complaints from Brasilians that buying tech there is insanely expensive due to tariffs.
Aren't those two contradictory? If it's easy to find (and, I assume, participate, otherwise what's the point in finding them?) then "unwanted people" could easily pretend to be wanted people and find and participate too?
Not at all. It's enough that the contents of the group not be shown to people who aren't members even if the name of the group is obvious to people who are aware of the terminology / slang.
This is unlikely to work in English but can work much better in other languages when the censor-happy employees (usually not speakers of said language) don't even know what to look for (and having the group be "closed" prevents them from accidentally seeing the messages that use more straightforward language / imagery).
The thing about web forums is that nobody uses those outside nerds / people with some specialty interest while, well, pretty much everyone is on social media. This makes it super easy to both join such group as well as recommend it to people you know (and thus gather critical mass).
SkoomaDentist
21d ago
Wouldn't any communication platform work the same way?
Any communication platform that's already widely used, has easy to find groups, allows groups of massive size and keeps those groups mostly out of the sight of unwanted people. The list of suitable platforms isn't huge once you account for those.
SkoomaDentist
22d ago
and Last Christmas by Wham endlessly.
Finally a man of culture around here!
SkoomaDentist
22d ago
it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons.
Why on earth would it? They've already taken those in high school.
SkoomaDentist
23d ago
because some people won't bother to actually create themed playlists
This isn't exactly helped by having no way to tell Spotify to never ever suggest this artist / album / song for this playlist.
In general Spotify is a classic example of a company where the majority of developers exist only to make themselves look useful. The Spotify client hasn't improved (and has actually declined) in a meaningful way in a decade and would realistically only need a small team of handful of people per platform to keep it up to date. Instead the company has more than doubled its employee count in five years while losing money throughout its entire history of operation.
SkoomaDentist
23d ago
I disagree that the general undergraduate population doesn’t benefit from exposure if not from gen-ed courses
That's literally why there's high school.
The fact that US high schools aren't up to that is no reason to waste a university education on that stuff (except for the small minority who're rich enough to study just for leisure).
SkoomaDentist
23d ago
Does China have any friends?
North Korea kinda sorta?
SkoomaDentist
24d ago
Its major products are still Search and AdSense, which are barely better than they were in 2008
I could swear Search is outright worse than it was in 2008...
SkoomaDentist
25d ago
Also true of music
There's been very very little of worthwhile music made since the mid to late 90s outside metal, some niche genres (which don't include so-called "indie", anything related to EDM or what most people call "electronic music") and legacy artists who are now at or beyond retirement age.
This is a hill I'm willing to die on.
SkoomaDentist
29d ago
You can use it via the mobile website, too.
SkoomaDentist
29d ago
Known better as just the messages tab om facebook. Which a lot of people my age use. Also works seamlessly on laptop & tablets unlike sms or whatsapp.
But really the #1 killer feature of FB messages is that they’re tied to your name, not to your arbitrary phone number. Want to send someone a message? Just send one. No need to try to hunt their phone number.
SkoomaDentist
29d ago
Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging?
Conversely, I've never understood people who ragequit Facebook completely and then try to demand others to use some niche service to contact them. Just stop reading the feed (install a browser extension if you have to) but keep the messenger.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
One of the reasons given is that X's new terms of service kick in today.
What's the difference to old? What do they mean in practise?
A while ago I came to the conclusion that any intellectual (or ”intellectual”) commonly being discussed here is a sign that their main skill is filling pages and pages with nonsense and that I should simply completely ignore anything that intellectual says. It works remarkably well.
Is that actually a thing?
I don't think I've ever seen a piece of finished wooden furniture which hadn't been sanded and usually lacquered such that splinters just weren't a thing unless you literally broke it.
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