wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social

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514

Joined

2 yr. ago

If something aims for GoT it could still be pretty watchable as long as it lands in "The Last Kingdom" territory.

For kid lit, absolutely. Maintain "scholarly editions" for academics and curious adults, and maybe even indicate somewhere on the copyright or title page that the edition people are reading differs from the original, but if a book is both important and problematic, then yeah, there's no reason to take the hurtful, insensitive themes and images in them and say, "here, junior, this is what the adults in your life think you need to internalize."

In general, I'm more for retiring dated children's literature than revising it, authorial intent and all, but some of the great touchstones would have more value in revised form than as relics. As a parent, discussions about problematic media eventually become unavoidable if you want to responsibly engage with the world, but I don't want to give a younger kid of bunch of mixed messages.

They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn't really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don't really apply today also don't get through anyways.

As an old English major, I agree that the "canon" is probably larger than it needs to be, and educators generally do a piss poor job of accepting that excellent works of literature continue to be written while the length of a school year does not change. I'll stick up for a heavy dose of the classics though. Even more than the techniques, which absolutely are present in modern literature, Shakespeare and Dickens and Melville provide a shared set of norms and expectations and feed into references and provide a vocabulary for conversation and even subconscious engagement with newer works of lit and drama.

In a lot of ways they ARE the historical context of English literature, and to that extent, yes, you should cram some of them into the brains of teenagers. Not so many as we do now, and the point is well taken that newer works can engage more readily, but school is the right time to have people read these works and to discuss why some parts are relevant, and to take a moment to explain why other parts were relevant. I'd love to see a curriculum that includes some "family tree" type stuff for themes and techniques and shows how writers have more- or less-consciously adapted and built on the DNA of previous works. Kind of a "Huck Finn begets Holden Caulfield begets Harry Potter" kind of thing. Nothing could be worse for engagement than a pure chronological lesson plan for the year.

Part of the reason there's less pressure to change it than you might imagine is that we now have a hundred years of cultural inertia working on, yes, the customers and restaurants, but also on the waitstaff labor pool. At this point, the Americans who seek work as waiters are generally the ones who feel they work with the system and even turn it to their advantage. It's far from all, of course, but the "best" servers at most restaurants probably feel like they're going to make more working the customers than negotiating with their bosses.

So, you've got restaurants keeping their list-prices low and a built-in workforce motivator, customers who expect friendly service and accept that they're culturally responsible for the staff's pay, and servers who stay at the job because they feel like they'll make more than the restaurant would be willing to pay as a "fair" wage (and they're probably right). Now, it's full-on bizarre that we have taken an entry level service job and made it an exercise in theatrical entrepreneurship, and it says some unsettling things about the underlying social order in the US, but I'm not sure that at the nuts-and-bolts level, it's as broken as the people like to imagine.

Indeed. Pour out a little pocket sand, everybody.

::sad sha-sha noises::

Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true, but save few for Billy too. He only did what he had to do, and now he’s growing old.

All the green Gorn captains say, they could have had him any day…

Be careful. The word only took on its perjorative meaning because of the connection to various groups of special needs people. Before then, the noun form was pretty much nonexistent, and the adjective and verb forms were boring latinate terms meaning "slow(ed) down."

I was on Squabbles for a bit when the API changes were looming. It was fine, I ran into nice folks, but more than the performance or the community, I was concerned that a single centralized site, run by one dude, who seemed determined to set it up to quickly monetize, was not going to be sustainable.

I admit that federation was not why I came to Kbin, but if federated sites are where open-internet folks are sharing links and pics and discussing them, then that's where I was headed. I suppose the good thing is that anyone who is deeply invested in federation working exactly how it was originally envisioned can continue to pursue that goal with their own instances, up to the point where they consider defederation with the (relative) normies.

Yeah, I mean once it became clear the the Threadiverse would be populated by tens of thousands of self-exiles from Reddit who left for a bunch of issues, relatively few of them directly related to how federation should work (i.e. people like me), it was sort of bound to happen to any general interest instance.

The Star Trek and the security instances (and even lemmygrad) are probably more how the model was envisioned. I'm not entirely sure it's "better," but it is better suited to the infrastructure that was in place.

I think that's more what the devs had in mind when they decided to make Lemmy federated. Each instance would be a little more distinct in the users it would attract (ideology, hobby, etc.), and federation would be more about exploring the local neighborhoods; maybe instances would even limit or ban user-created communities.

In reality, most instances seem to be attracting similar users and making mini-reddits that can talk to each other. It's ended up more about simple load balancing and having backup communities accessible should you get cut off from your preferred one. You can still get out and explore the nearby neighborhoods, but they have the same Starbucks and MicroCenter that yours does. This still is useful in its own way, but it comes with different set of challenges, particularly for the front-end UI's.

This is my preferred option. Requires no underlying change to ActivityPub or federation, just makes the end user experience more pleasant until/unless communities gain more distinct personalities that would result in fewer reposts.

If you're in the US, Ryobi has changed chemistries once or twice, but they haven't changed the voltage or physical format of their batteries for 20+ years.

I'm going to go deep cut here with Outlaws (Lucasarts, 1997). If you don't have time to listen, imagine an Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western score, but with John Williams-like melodic leitmotifs. It was done really well, and lived on my various MP3 players for many years.

Put me in the "like it don't love it" camp. It is very clearly Seth MacFarlane's love letter to 90s trek, pulled some good ideas from that era's writers, and has more heart than it seems in the first couple of episodes. Some of the character work is actually quite touching, and it seems like they're having fun with the show, so it's rarely a slog. Overall though, it is way too uneven to be great or even really good.

Seth is not a great actor, and several members of the cast are MUCH worse than him, like "low-end dinner theater" bad. The set design, costume, and prosthetics are pretty weak, and Seth's sense of humor just doesn't work for me, so in a context where he's trying to find the right balance with a Star Trek show, it hits even more awkwardly. It's also very specifically SETH MACFARLANE'S love letter to Star Trek, so there's way too much emphasis on 1980-2000 American pop culture, and I say that as someone who's only a few years younger than him. It's distracting how narrow the set of references are in a show that traffics in them so liberally.

There's also something just a bit off about the messaging of many of the more serious episodes, like Seth feels a need to come down on a definitive answer to the moral questions that come up. I dunno, I am having trouble recollecting specific scenes, but it's a lingering feeling I have. I almost imagine 20-something Seth in a dorm room at RISD screaming at Picard that he should have just shot that Romulan!

I dunno, Max P. You may have a falling out with the admin at max-p.me. Better be careful.

Fair enough. Personally I'd probably just lurk until my instance was back up, but I could see it being worth having a backup.

One. Isn't that kind of the point?

Walked right into that one, didn't I? 🤣 Brief but very real LOL.

I defend soccer to American football fans. I defend American football to soccer fans. I defend baseball to cricket fans, and vice versa. I defend NASCAR to ball-sport fans. I defend golf to fans of more strenuous sports. I defend esports to fans of traditional sports. I don't even like all those things myself, but I get them. The fact that the specific activities and their nuances and rhythms didn't connect with me personally doesn't mean I can't wrap my head around the appeal.

But a man's got to have limits. I draw the line at fuckin' Excel. You're on your own, mofos.