buffy_bot
1yr ago
I’ve read two of her three books (Expecting Better and Cribsheet) and in general trust her. She digs into the veracity of studies backing certain claims and also understands that there’s only so much bandwidth a parent has when trying to follow strict guidelines that feel overly high stakes.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
Matthew Dennison, Dahl’s biographer, said that the author - who died in 1990 - chose his vocabulary with care. “I’m almost certain that he would have recognised that alterations to his novels prompted by the political climate were driven by adults rather than children," he said.
Flow and tone matters. Some of these changes sound like adults “talking to kids” rather than “talking with kids”. It’s against the spirit of the stories.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
The OP of a post in this over on /r/books listed out all the changes in table format. It’s crazy. One missing detail in your post is that the rights to the works are owned by Netflix. I wonder if they were the ones employing the sensitivity readers. Thank goodness I impulse bought his whole collection for my baby back in the fall. Not a moment too late.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
It's likely that the Hurts QB Push is going to be made illegal next year, for example, because it's such a wild cheat code for the Eagles all season.
CFB pleb here. What’s wrong with the QB push? Is this different from a sneak? Getting rid of that in cfb would seem wild to me. So many 4th and goals would turn into kicks without it.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
As someone who watches a lot of cfb and almost no nfl, kneeling to run down the clock before a field goal instead of running the ball for more yards, better position, slow plays, and low fumble odds isn’t very common at all. I want to say it doesn’t even happen except once to stop the clock, and that’s usually a spike. Maybe it’s a difference in the rules and how nfl’s late game clock works.
Overall, game clock management is a huge part of the sport. I’d rather my team run the clock down before attempting a pat-level field goal than go for a td with too much time left ala Georgia in the championship this year. I will admit, that did make for a more exciting ending. Doesn’t mean Stenson Bennett didn’t know he goofed up.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
I don’t know if I’d go with less intelligent so much as less experienced and mature. And in a sub like cscareerquestions, also non intellectual.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
True, of the three Buffy is the one that's most overtly feminist. But they're all of the 90's/early 00's egalitarian brand of feminism that uplifted good strong female characters without tearing down the male characters.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
Another kernel to think about: by not buying a ticket to the sequel, you’re not only avoiding giving money to someone who hates you but not financially supporting a form of entertainment you enjoy. Which is more important to you, signaling to the movie industry to make more films like Into the Spiderverse or keeping your money away from a pro-antifa type? My choice would be towards the former. There’s not much quality bigger-budget films these days thanks to Disney-Marvel. I avoid seeing their stuff in theaters now unless I feel like a dose of visual popcorn. The first movie was a solid story with interesting, experimental visuals, with no pro-antifa or other wokish messaging. If the sequel follows suit, then that’s not a problem for me. If there’s evidence that the director-now-producer’s views have seeped into it, then skip it.
Something to compliment /u/haroldbkny‘s take: consider “death of the author”. Once a work is created, it stands on its own separate from whatever the author intended. Into the Spiderverse is not pro-antifa work just because the director is so. My personal experience with this is Joss Whedon. Buffy, Angel, and, to a smaller extent, Firefly were all huge influences on my late childhood. I still rewatch them with some regularity. However, it turns out Whedon the man is not quite the feminist crusader Whedon the writer/director is. He might be an egomaniac jerk who verbally abused some of the actresses on his shows. I’m not going to let that ruin them for me.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
The Three Musketeers in spurts. Right now I’m reading as much as I can to my baby at bedtime before they get fussy. I don’t read it every day, and the average is less than a chapter at once, so it’s slow going. On good nights my baby is cooing and laughing at me the whole time, and I get to teach them that French is a nonsense language I have no idea how to pronounce. On bad nights I get a couple of paragraphs in before I have to put the baby to sleep. It’s a fun read. I was worried it might be one of those older books that feels old, but once it got going it’s been pretty easy. Many chuckles to be had.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
A couple of Fridays ago there was a comment thread on what the best series you watched in 2022 was/were. In honor of @EdenicFaithful's weekly Sunday reading question, what were your best reads of 2022? What did you enjoy or find interesting? Anything of note you didn't finish?
For me:
God Emperor of Dune. Such a good book. Well, Idk how to qualify it in terms of goodness. Such a unique book. How many have a near-omnipotent, centuries old, giant worm-man with voices in his head as the main character? My favorite bit: Leto is so wrapped up in his own ancient internal monologue about the voices of his ancestors inside him and the future he can see that he almost misses getting a gun that he knows is going to be pulled on him pulled on him.
I read a bit of horror later in the year. Ghost Story by Peter Straub would probably be my favorite of the bunch. It loses some steam near the end, but I think that's a flaw intrinsic to the horror genre. Or maybe that's all the Stephen King I've read talking. Speaking of, Revival would be my runner-up. It's the only post-car accident King I've read that's not The Dark Tower, and I wasn't disappointed. He maybe could have used a little trimming in the second quarter of the book to shorten the gap between the inciting incident and the next big plot movement, but other than that I think he even stuck the landing.
Books I did not finish:
I didn't read a lot of books this year. Sometime around March I attempted to do what I thought of as a "liberal arts" read: reading world history, art history, music history, philosophy history, and literature concurrently, going through sections that aligned with the same time period. A bit ambitious. Couple of problems with it, besides coming up with the "curriculum" on my own based on what we already had in our home library: I started with human pre-history, which kept me hopping between just a couple of books at first; a couple, particularly the philosophy book, were Western focus, whereas I wanted to be more comprehensive; the literature portion (the first volume of Norton's world lit anthology) covered a lot I had already read; for world history, I picked a book that's like the notes to a world history encyclopedia - very dense and dry, and I wasn't trying to skip any of it; finally, the sections just didn't line up that well for jumping between things and keeping it "fresh". My goal was to get to 0 AD. I barely got to the Greeks. After a couple months or so of spending my bedtime reading time on this, I was worn out and needed a narrative I could start and finish without interruption and moved on to a fiction splurge. I'd like to go back and read some more of the individual books on their own. Except that encyclopedic notes one. It's literally organized in a ABC, 123 subnote style. Very dense and dry. Overall, and interesting experiment.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." -- Mark Twain
It took me until 31, but he's right.
And then you have kids and find out your parents were parents and you were a child all along. My husband and I have gained a newfound awe towards our mothers now that we have a baby. Kinda-sorta towards the fathers. It’s like a circle. As a baby, your parents are everything, especially moms. They can make themselves disappear and reappear with a wave of their hands! Fricking magic right there. Then you grow to look at them as idiots who keep getting in the way of your genius, and then you have children and realize your mom’s a saint all along. Dad’s always been a cad, but a lovable one who’s better than your thought.
On the deadlift-backpain note, having a child in our early 30’s made us realize we should have started in our 20’s. Little poopface was kicking our butts physically before he hit 10 pounds. Both our backs are sore despite efforts towards proper posture and bending, one of my wrists is always tender from carrying the baby, my husband’s feet hurt from walking the baby around. I still think early 30’s is on the young side of adult, but it turns out to also be close to middle age.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
The Last Wish introduces Yennifer, Dandelion, Cintra and Ciri's origins as Geralt's child of surprise. The next short story collection, Sword of Destiny, introduces Ciri proper and builds her and Yenn's relationship with Geralt, something Blood of Elves dives into already established. Some of the stories are building the groundwork to the main series like that. I recommend them first not just so you get the important world building, but because they are pretty good on their own. The ending of Sword of Destiny made me tear up, but it should be known that I am a sap. The video games take some of the characters from the stories. Villentretenmerth, for instance, is only in "The Bounds of Reason".
buffy_bot
1yr ago
Yes! That was the worst for me. Borderline offensive on a personal level, since I can most identify with that character
The second worst was
To even this out, I did love the monologue for Monsignor Pruitt's story.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
After not watching much tv with my husband for a while for one reason or another, we started putting more on after the birth of our baby. It made the late nights surprisingly cozy.
Yellowjackets - rides a mystery box line where I think the writers might know what’s inside their box, but I’m not terribly sure. Most mystery box shows kinda turn me off. I saw the OG Lost. Please don’t put a polar bear on your island just for the mystery when it doesn’t relate to any other mystery. I didn’t feel like Yellowjackets made that mistake. Good, creepy fun. I’m down for the next season.
Midnight Mass - gets a little monologue-y, but I can only think of two that were just egregious. Thankfully, watching with subtitles on while trying to put a newborn to sleep got me through those bad moments. The rest of the show is quite good.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities - some of the episodes are pretty fun. Others are fine to catch while wrangling said newborn at 2am.
X-Files, Angel, Supernatural, and Star Trek: TNG rewatches. TNG was great hospital bed fodder as one of the only things on tv at 3am.
Marvel’s Moon Knight wasn’t too bad. I think it might fall under “guilty pleasure” since it has a lot of things I like but is clearly flawed like a typical middling Marvel entry.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
You can sub buttermilk with 1 cup milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice that’s sat for 30 minutes. I do this for baking. There’s also powdered buttermilk you can buy to avoid having extra buttermilk taking up space in the fridge until you decide to make pancakes.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
My now-husband let me lead the ring shopping in a way. We discussed prices, band material, and stones and went to jewelry stores together to figure out what I like when it comes to size, style, and material (read - color). I didn’t point to a ring and say, “this one,” but I did pick a few as at least examples for him. He ended up choosing one of those we both really liked. I was still surprised by his choice (though it was my #1) and his proposal. Proposals are memorable, special moments even without being a surprise.
I recommend this method if your future fiancé is amenable to it. Don’t go fiddling in the dark about something she may be wearing for the rest of her life.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
College baseball fan who dabbles in the pros (usually through Jomboy or Baseball Doesn't Exist videos) - the base size and pitch timer rules seem to be a net "good". If I read the timer rule right, the pitcher's ability to check a base runner looking to steal is limited to two tries? That's interesting. As a spectator, I do get pretty annoyed when the pitcher is throwing to first for the fifth time this at bat instead of working at getting the batter out. That's probably my least favorite moment of the sport, so limiting it would be nice. The infielder rule I'm really not sure about. I barely understand defensive baseball schemes, but this seems to really limit the defensive capabilities of the pitching team.
Idk, I'm not likely to become enough of a fan of the pros anytime soon for these rule changes to effect me. If they're successful enough to make their way down to the college level, then that'll a different story.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
You'll make spaghetti code and code debt just rubber stamping or giving minimal input on the reviews. My philosophy is to try to make it as easy on my future self or future coders as possible, because in my experience teams never have time to do refactoring or clean up work. There's always something else to make a priority.
To be less nitpicky sounding, I focus on the why of my comments. I try to explain what good it would do, with the level of detail I include based on the coder's level of experience. With a more senior dev, I may also ask why they chose to do it that way to see if there's something I'm missing. Basically, make it a conversation with learning opportunities. Mileage may vary with the results.
Give that a try, and if nothing improves then, yeah, slip in the rubber stamp and maybe start looking for another team. My current team lead talks a lot about good, clean, reusable, readable code and then in practice barely reviews code on my project and will add subpar code as a quick fix to a bug. I've lowered some of my expectations to cut back my frustration and sneak in a code cleanup here and there.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
Yoga is physical activity though, this doesn't distinguish between "more physical activity / stronger core / better integrated muscles / stretching muscles" helping the pain and it being mental
This may depend on the instructor, but I find yoga to also be a bit mental as well. There's a bit of meditation going on. Your breathing is regulated, you may be encouraged to clear your mind and focus solely on the pose you're holding. As TheDag describes, the instructor may tell you not just how to engage the appropriate muscles but disengage others, helping you "get in touch" with how your body works beyond mechanical movement. This meditation and bodily focus is why yoga attracts or creates the "woo" energy/spiritual types.
buffy_bot
1yr ago
Clinton was a very strong candidate, with access to immense funds, a social network of insiders at every level of politics and business, Clinton name recognition, and the full force of Girl Power and the media behind her.
But was her message strong? I remember listening to Trump and Clinton give speeches a few days apart to the Midwestern/Rust Belt crowd (maybe Michigan in both cases?). Clinton came off as fake, speaking platitudes to an audience she's supposed to go through the motions with in between stops with the base she really cares about. Trump was more genuine, putting more work into sounding like he really was going to do something for those people. This was probably fed by my biases of having broken with the liberal side of the isle for the more libertarian no-man's-land a couple of years before. But, part of Clinton's campaign was to focus really hard on the areas she was going to win anyway - like the big cities in California - in order to drum up the popular vote, because they feared that Trump would get the popular vote otherwise while Clinton would win the electoral college. Clinton needed to win the popular vote, too, to avoid any electoral drama with Trump. She didn't put the effort into swing states or red states that she maybe should have, and who knows how that cost her.
Speaking of 2016, biases, and post hoc narratives to explain Clinton's loss and Trump's win, one of my favorite postmortems for the 2016 election was an experiment NYU did to see if sexism played a role in the outcome. Some professors got together, hired a couple of actors, and put on a gender swapped presidential debate reenactment to see if the audience - including several other NYU professors, all most likely Clinton supporters - had a different reaction. Many were surprised to find that she-Trump's message and delivery resonated more with them, while he-Clinton came off as cold and unlikable. I don't have time right now to do more than a hard skim, but I'm pretty sure this is the article detailing the whole thing.
Kiera Metz is best girl.
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