Slow, unresponsive, shittastic. An utter embarrassment. A wank-stain on the face of technology. Windows Mobile products make the users want to kill themselves as opposed to iPhones which only make the people who build them suicidal; in use the iPhone is actually quite enjoyable.
CSI shows chest cavaties that have been ripped open. Law and Order discussed horrible sex crimes. But heaven forbid you say a naughty word!
I like how on Heroes we could see the cheerleader's chest cavity opened up for autopsy with her dead as a doornail but the moment the spike was removed from the back of her head and the bit of skin with the tits was flapped back up over the hole, THAT was considered obscene and had to be tastefully censored. You can look at the woman's chest but only if there's no skin visible, and by visible either covered with clothing or ripped the fuck off!!!
The doctors, will they be hot and have lots of sex? That's so crazy it might just work!
Re:As someone who has not watched and is proud of
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
(A friend of mine was talked into finally watching Big Bang Theory, and the first episode he watched was basically a flashback episode that filled in gaps in the backstory. Every joke required you to know everything that came before it. Because of that, he was decided to never watch the show again. And before the internet, DVRs, etc. you could never do that sort of thing).
That's insane. If you're starting a new show you start at the beginning. You don't see what you think of a novel by starting at page 200. Only crazy people do that.
But this is instructive. Some things are objectively awful but other things are subjective; they might be well-done for that sort of thing but that's the sort of thing you don't like. Someone dislikes the same things you dislike, likes the things you like, their subjective opinion might be very valid; if there's little overlap, they can't probably tell you anything of value and neither you them.
I think Big Bang Theory is great. Anyone who disagrees with me on that probably shouldn't bother following my advice on comedies. If you like BBT, too, then let's sit down and chat.
Re:As someone who has not watched and is proud of
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 2, Funny
So you're an expert on a show that you never watched?
You're offended by people acting smug? Look in the mirror.
This was not X-Files or BSG. This really was the exact opposite. This was amazingly enough a well thought out show that didn't drag on too long. They had a specific arc for X number of episodes and told the story they wanted to tell in that time. They had the end planned from the beginning, and it really shows. It is amazing how consistent the show is, and how well everything paid off that they set up earlier.
Don't try and judge something you know nothing about.
Most TV? Certainly. But there are the occasional gems that make it worthwhile. A few examples of current, excellent shows include Better Off Ted (sadly canceled), Dexter, and Gravity (weird show on Starz about a suicide group).
Ted is gone? Shit! I knew it was inexplicably too good for network TV. I know! Let's bring on another police procedural!
Re:Babylon 5 / Firefly / Star Blazers
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It seems to me that a series is *so* much better when the writers KNOW what the ending will be BEFORE the series airs. This way, the entire series can work towards the ending, with the result being much more satisfying.
The best part about B5 is how JMS could set up things that would pay off years later. One of my favorite bits was Vir's answer to Morden about what he wanted. Then years later, looking up at that head on the pike and waving. Classic!
A good example of crappy syndication writing that I don't really blame on JMS was what happened with Garibaldi and Bester. We had a perfect ending in season 4 with Bester talking to Sheridan and realizing he was up shit creek. Of course, with Season 5 greenlit, JMS had to retract that resolution and make it all according to Bester's plan. Understandable, JMS didn't know he'd get a 5th season. But that's a rare, rare shortcoming in B5 and utterly common in every other form of long-running fiction.
In a mystery it is absolutely essential for the writer to know who did it, how, and why. The trick is laying out the clues in such a way that the reader could have worked it out on his own the whole time, doesn't figure it out until the revelation, and then kicks himself in retrospect because he realizes he had every clue he needed in those earlier chapters. And you're exactly right, you have to work backwards from that conclusion to lay the groundwork. There's always room for new ideas and improvisation but there's absolutely no room for crap like the BSG Final Five wankery.
As someone who has not watched and is proud of it
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
Let me weigh in with my two cents. I feel justified in commenting because this is the kind of show I would have watched and enjoyed and ultimately been annoyed by had I not been warned off.
Make-it-up-as-you-go storytelling with the writers acting smug that you never figured it out as it went along. Lax, lazy, ignorant work that was not immediately apparent because of likable characters, superficially interesting storytelling, and an intriguing premise.
X-Files really set the gold standard for this kind of thing. Chris Carter intended for the show to be episodic and tossed in the hints of a larger conspiracy as a bit of fluff. The fans latched onto that and thought these were breadcrumbs leading to a larger mystery, a great big crusty loaf of bread. And by the time we finally got to the end of the series, all we had was a large pile of stale bread crumbs and no bread! No cake, either.
BSG was the biggest disappointment since X-Files and for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Fortunately I gave up on it early on and so didn't experience the wall-banging frustration of Space Hendrix and All Along the Watchtower, of that final episode with Mitochondrial Eve and the smug inconclusion. I mean I read about it and saw people raging, obviously, but it wasn't personal for me at this point.
All of the Lost followers I know are looking exactly like me back when Phantom Menace came out, going through the five stages of fan grief when they realize it's all been a big waste of time.
First there's denial, insisting there was nothing wrong with the movie/show and that how it resolved was how the creator(s) intended from the beginning.
Second comes cognitive dissonance as the fan realizes what they were handed was a pile of shit and that does not square with their expectations.
Third is rationalization, trying to explain that while some parts might have sucked, taken as a whole the work still has merit.
Fourth is realization where the fan admits to himself that it looks like shit, smells like shit, and tastes like shit because it is, indeed, shit. Even if the work started out well like a large multi-volume fantasy series, early seasons of a television show, the original movie before the purposeless sequels, all merit is gone at this point, leeched out the moment the word "franchise" was used. Some say the work will end in fire, Some say in ice, but now we've seen the end of it and it's naught but shit. This is about the stage where one's childhood feels anally violated, usually by a man with a beard and no neck.
The fifth stage is anger and that's where any fan's sentiments will remain. Some will remain seething for the rest of their days but most of us will cool to a feeling of loss and regret for what might have been.
So, Lost fans, while I don't share your loss, I feel your pain.
There's certainly room for community television -- shows about the community produced by people in the community to satisfy local interests -- but the old model of doing things just isn't sustainable. Local news is *awful*. If anything, that song "Dirty Laundry" is too optimistic. We get a half hour of local rape and murder with half the stories being ads for what's coming on at 11, a half hour of national news watered down and leeched of any real content, and then a half hour of infotainment celebrity shit. And half of all that time is spent on commercials.
Local television is dying? Good. Let me know when they finally bury it, I want to piss on the grave.
Say what ? Price fixing is *absolutely* "free market". Huge cartels (if not just one big monopoly) is exactly where the "free market" would end up without this sort of regulation.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Adam Smith quotes (Scottish philosopher and economist, 1723-1790)
What I think should happen is that all the products that were price fixed should be entered into the public domain in the country where the price fixing was conducted and the company was found guilty. Meaning all patents and designs of those products are now owned by the public. The public overpaid for them so force the companies to give something back to the public. The manufacturing processes and techniques can be kept secret but all the chip design and patents should be open for competitors to step in and make a better cheaper product. I know a lot of people will think that's overly harsh but frankly the DRAM manufacturers should have thought of that before they started price fixing. You think times were tough when you tried to turn some illegal profit? Try now when everyone knows everything about your product. Really, that's the only way to 1) make them think twice about price fixing and 2) actually give something valuable to the victim that has a positive result instead of a negative result./quote.
THIS. THIS. Punishments that don't hurt are ineffective. This doesn't just hurt, it slays.
However, CCP never took the CSM seriously, resulting in the current lack of trust in CCP's willingness to take its customers seriously (CCP actually told the last CSM that they were not actually interested in the majority of the players but only in a subsection that lived in a specific "elite" part of Eve space). The resulting lack of belief in CCP and the CSM has led to widespread protests against voting for the CSM and CCP has once again relented by now making the CSM a "stakeholder" in the game.
And this is why I love stand-alone games. I don't like where the developers took the later Soul Caliber games but no worries, I'll always have the first one. But if it were an online game, once the changes are made I'm never getting my old game back. And dick moves by management continue to make the experience suck. Hell, when Lucas tried to change the original trilogy I could still go back to the original version of the originals. I don't have to buy the prequels. In an online game, you just have to suck it up and take your lumps. I hate that.
Maybe if we ask people what they want and then give it to them, they will tell their friends, blog positively, continue to subscribe to our subscription-based service instead of wandering off in boredom.
The Internet makes a lot of things possible when it comes to unprecedented communication between suppliers and consumers. Of course, this only works if you believe your users know what they want.
Proud to say I kicked the EVE habit long ago. You could get places it that game but it felt like a full-time job.
What finally did it for me is that the missions became too difficult for too little reward. I had my spiffy new battleship and lost it in a mission because the enemy bots were using jammer ships, i.e. you can't warp out when you notice you're in trouble. This was the final straw on top of the nerfing of the loot tables, the addition of extraneous content like rigs that just made missions take longer, and the ultimate sense I wasn't going anywhere. And let's not even get started about the developers interceding in high-level wars, the long-standing bugs that don't get fixed, and developer focus on silly new features rather than fixing those holes. Did they ever get station perambulation working?
You get out of things what you put into it and maybe there are people who are getting a great deal out of EVE. I figure my time there would be better spent on other things, things with payoff (I say while reading slashdot.)
I don't think that offenders with a high chance of recidivism should be released but that should be taken care of during the sentencing phase of the original trial. If a guy is a habitual rapist, give him a life sentence, don't do this legal jujitsu nonsense after he's served a sentence. Too many possibilities for abuse.
Seriously, there is one fantastic quote here from Steve Jobs that he replied to someone who *dared* to criticize him:
what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
What a complete asshole who thinks he's so much better than everyone else.
That's a valid response for useless criticism, people who are hating without real cause. Not so valid when real critiques are being offered along with suggestions for improvement. I don't have to be able to brew my own beer to tell you whether or not I like your beer. I don't have to be able to write software to be able to tell you whether or not your software is user-friendly. But if I'm just being a random hater and offering no specific arguments other than your software is gay and lame, "what have you ever done?" is a pretty good response.
There are people who hate on Apple because it's Apple. The biggest mistake is confusing genuine, helpful critics for the haters and ignoring what they have to say.
Because with ripped movies you don't have to deal with those annoying previews that on some dvds, you can't skip.
Those stupid FBI warnings. I could always FF through them on tape, no big deal. Can't skip through them on DVD? Fuck that.
What incenses me so much is that they waste my goddamn time. Or rentals that INSIST on playing the previews. I happen to enjoy previews most of the time, I usually watch them. But if I don't feel like it and try to go to the menu but can't, that makes me see red. Usually they don't disable FF and I can skip through them that way but seriously, disabling menu functions to force me to watch content? FUCK YOU.
The only DVD's I own that I would buy again in a heartbeat if they were lost or damaged are the Lord of the Rings. They're freaking amazing. Everything about them says "This is why you should own 'em. Just downloading the movies won't cut it." And strangely enough, I hear legal bullshit is preventing the release of blueray versions. They'd probably be the only bluerays I'd ever be tempted to buy, assuming the quality was maintained.
This is *really bad* from a freedom perspective. As soon as computers can reliably and safely drive cars, anyone who *dares* drive the car themselves will be considered negligent; they'll probably pass a law against it.
Yeah. The only guys who would insist on driving their own cars are paranoid cops who have a pathological hatred of mechanoids and AI, constantly spinning theories about how the robots are taking over.
Srs face now: This is something that annoys me no end. Just like you'll never meet someone on the internet who doesn't have at least a 9 inch cock
It's scary to think that for many people, everything they know about sex was learned from watching porn. They're going to get some very, very funny ideas about what women are really into. "Honey, I wanted to have sex but there just weren't enough people!"
Back when Babylon 5 was still being produced, some licensing issue had held up making any models of the ships being produced as toys, which prompted some outfits to start making their own models and selling them illegally.
Here's an even better story. The original digital models for all the CGI assets in the show were lost between production shutting down and the new direct-to-video episodes being produced. The production team went to those fans for the models for use in the new footage -- models that were even more detailed than what was used in the original show! Ain't technology grand?
Back in the late eighties, when the world was turned upside down by the fall of the iron curtain. my friends and I speculated that the fact that Reagan had survived assassination* had torn a hole in reality, thrusting us into a Bizarro Universe.
Now we have Russians suggesting something that only would make sense in a really bad TV movie or potboiler eco-disaster novel.
Like the man uptopic says, what could possibly go wrong?
And just like every recent action/disaster movie, we've got a black president.
Friends aren't about sex, or cool parties. Friends are those people who, when your father-in-law dies unexpectedly, walk out on the preps for their own Christmas party to come help you. Friends are those who read the note on the door the first couple left and call you to see if you need help. Friends are those who'll drive and hour and a half to the airport at three o'clock in the morning to pick up your wife (who was out of town on business when her father died). I'd have needed a bus just to haul those who volunteered to go pick her up!
Finding those people is the hard part. Friends have to be cultivated. Your parent post was cultivating the wrong kind of friends, the superficial, but the same care needs to be applied to the good ones. But it shouldn't feel like a chore. Friendship is about reciprocity and you should be getting as much out of it as you're putting into it, otherwise it's called codependency. But it sounds like you've got some great friends. Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Slow, unresponsive, shittastic. An utter embarrassment. A wank-stain on the face of technology. Windows Mobile products make the users want to kill themselves as opposed to iPhones which only make the people who build them suicidal; in use the iPhone is actually quite enjoyable.
What, girls can never be devious or sexually adventurous without the prodding of a boy? Are you living in 1955?
No, but the prodding certainly helps.
CSI shows chest cavaties that have been ripped open. Law and Order discussed horrible sex crimes. But heaven forbid you say a naughty word!
I like how on Heroes we could see the cheerleader's chest cavity opened up for autopsy with her dead as a doornail but the moment the spike was removed from the back of her head and the bit of skin with the tits was flapped back up over the hole, THAT was considered obscene and had to be tastefully censored. You can look at the woman's chest but only if there's no skin visible, and by visible either covered with clothing or ripped the fuck off!!!
No, we need to make room for a medical drama!
The doctors, will they be hot and have lots of sex? That's so crazy it might just work!
(A friend of mine was talked into finally watching Big Bang Theory, and the first episode he watched was basically a flashback episode that filled in gaps in the backstory. Every joke required you to know everything that came before it. Because of that, he was decided to never watch the show again. And before the internet, DVRs, etc. you could never do that sort of thing).
That's insane. If you're starting a new show you start at the beginning. You don't see what you think of a novel by starting at page 200. Only crazy people do that.
But this is instructive. Some things are objectively awful but other things are subjective; they might be well-done for that sort of thing but that's the sort of thing you don't like. Someone dislikes the same things you dislike, likes the things you like, their subjective opinion might be very valid; if there's little overlap, they can't probably tell you anything of value and neither you them.
I think Big Bang Theory is great. Anyone who disagrees with me on that probably shouldn't bother following my advice on comedies. If you like BBT, too, then let's sit down and chat.
So you're an expert on a show that you never watched?
You're offended by people acting smug? Look in the mirror.
This was not X-Files or BSG. This really was the exact opposite. This was amazingly enough a well thought out show that didn't drag on too long. They had a specific arc for X number of episodes and told the story they wanted to tell in that time. They had the end planned from the beginning, and it really shows. It is amazing how consistent the show is, and how well everything paid off that they set up earlier.
Don't try and judge something you know nothing about.
Third stage, rationalization.
Most TV? Certainly. But there are the occasional gems that make it worthwhile. A few examples of current, excellent shows include Better Off Ted (sadly canceled), Dexter, and Gravity (weird show on Starz about a suicide group).
Ted is gone? Shit! I knew it was inexplicably too good for network TV. I know! Let's bring on another police procedural!
It seems to me that a series is *so* much better when the writers KNOW what the ending will be BEFORE the series airs. This way, the entire series can work towards the ending, with the result being much more satisfying.
The best part about B5 is how JMS could set up things that would pay off years later. One of my favorite bits was Vir's answer to Morden about what he wanted. Then years later, looking up at that head on the pike and waving. Classic!
A good example of crappy syndication writing that I don't really blame on JMS was what happened with Garibaldi and Bester. We had a perfect ending in season 4 with Bester talking to Sheridan and realizing he was up shit creek. Of course, with Season 5 greenlit, JMS had to retract that resolution and make it all according to Bester's plan. Understandable, JMS didn't know he'd get a 5th season. But that's a rare, rare shortcoming in B5 and utterly common in every other form of long-running fiction.
In a mystery it is absolutely essential for the writer to know who did it, how, and why. The trick is laying out the clues in such a way that the reader could have worked it out on his own the whole time, doesn't figure it out until the revelation, and then kicks himself in retrospect because he realizes he had every clue he needed in those earlier chapters. And you're exactly right, you have to work backwards from that conclusion to lay the groundwork. There's always room for new ideas and improvisation but there's absolutely no room for crap like the BSG Final Five wankery.
Let me weigh in with my two cents. I feel justified in commenting because this is the kind of show I would have watched and enjoyed and ultimately been annoyed by had I not been warned off.
Make-it-up-as-you-go storytelling with the writers acting smug that you never figured it out as it went along. Lax, lazy, ignorant work that was not immediately apparent because of likable characters, superficially interesting storytelling, and an intriguing premise.
X-Files really set the gold standard for this kind of thing. Chris Carter intended for the show to be episodic and tossed in the hints of a larger conspiracy as a bit of fluff. The fans latched onto that and thought these were breadcrumbs leading to a larger mystery, a great big crusty loaf of bread. And by the time we finally got to the end of the series, all we had was a large pile of stale bread crumbs and no bread! No cake, either.
BSG was the biggest disappointment since X-Files and for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Fortunately I gave up on it early on and so didn't experience the wall-banging frustration of Space Hendrix and All Along the Watchtower, of that final episode with Mitochondrial Eve and the smug inconclusion. I mean I read about it and saw people raging, obviously, but it wasn't personal for me at this point.
All of the Lost followers I know are looking exactly like me back when Phantom Menace came out, going through the five stages of fan grief when they realize it's all been a big waste of time.
First there's denial, insisting there was nothing wrong with the movie/show and that how it resolved was how the creator(s) intended from the beginning.
Second comes cognitive dissonance as the fan realizes what they were handed was a pile of shit and that does not square with their expectations.
Third is rationalization, trying to explain that while some parts might have sucked, taken as a whole the work still has merit.
Fourth is realization where the fan admits to himself that it looks like shit, smells like shit, and tastes like shit because it is, indeed, shit. Even if the work started out well like a large multi-volume fantasy series, early seasons of a television show, the original movie before the purposeless sequels, all merit is gone at this point, leeched out the moment the word "franchise" was used. Some say the work will end in fire, Some say in ice, but now we've seen the end of it and it's naught but shit. This is about the stage where one's childhood feels anally violated, usually by a man with a beard and no neck.
The fifth stage is anger and that's where any fan's sentiments will remain. Some will remain seething for the rest of their days but most of us will cool to a feeling of loss and regret for what might have been.
So, Lost fans, while I don't share your loss, I feel your pain.
There's certainly room for community television -- shows about the community produced by people in the community to satisfy local interests -- but the old model of doing things just isn't sustainable. Local news is *awful*. If anything, that song "Dirty Laundry" is too optimistic. We get a half hour of local rape and murder with half the stories being ads for what's coming on at 11, a half hour of national news watered down and leeched of any real content, and then a half hour of infotainment celebrity shit. And half of all that time is spent on commercials.
Local television is dying? Good. Let me know when they finally bury it, I want to piss on the grave.
price fixing is not free market, nub.
Say what ? Price fixing is *absolutely* "free market". Huge cartels (if not just one big monopoly) is exactly where the "free market" would end up without this sort of regulation.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Adam Smith quotes (Scottish philosopher and economist, 1723-1790)
What I think should happen is that all the products that were price fixed should be entered into the public domain in the country where the price fixing was conducted and the company was found guilty. Meaning all patents and designs of those products are now owned by the public. The public overpaid for them so force the companies to give something back to the public. The manufacturing processes and techniques can be kept secret but all the chip design and patents should be open for competitors to step in and make a better cheaper product. I know a lot of people will think that's overly harsh but frankly the DRAM manufacturers should have thought of that before they started price fixing. You think times were tough when you tried to turn some illegal profit? Try now when everyone knows everything about your product. Really, that's the only way to 1) make them think twice about price fixing and 2) actually give something valuable to the victim that has a positive result instead of a negative result. /quote.
THIS. THIS. Punishments that don't hurt are ineffective. This doesn't just hurt, it slays.
However, CCP never took the CSM seriously, resulting in the current lack of trust in CCP's willingness to take its customers seriously (CCP actually told the last CSM that they were not actually interested in the majority of the players but only in a subsection that lived in a specific "elite" part of Eve space). The resulting lack of belief in CCP and the CSM has led to widespread protests against voting for the CSM and CCP has once again relented by now making the CSM a "stakeholder" in the game.
And this is why I love stand-alone games. I don't like where the developers took the later Soul Caliber games but no worries, I'll always have the first one. But if it were an online game, once the changes are made I'm never getting my old game back. And dick moves by management continue to make the experience suck. Hell, when Lucas tried to change the original trilogy I could still go back to the original version of the originals. I don't have to buy the prequels. In an online game, you just have to suck it up and take your lumps. I hate that.
Maybe if we ask people what they want and then give it to them, they will tell their friends, blog positively, continue to subscribe to our subscription-based service instead of wandering off in boredom.
The Internet makes a lot of things possible when it comes to unprecedented communication between suppliers and consumers. Of course, this only works if you believe your users know what they want.
Proud to say I kicked the EVE habit long ago. You could get places it that game but it felt like a full-time job.
What finally did it for me is that the missions became too difficult for too little reward. I had my spiffy new battleship and lost it in a mission because the enemy bots were using jammer ships, i.e. you can't warp out when you notice you're in trouble. This was the final straw on top of the nerfing of the loot tables, the addition of extraneous content like rigs that just made missions take longer, and the ultimate sense I wasn't going anywhere. And let's not even get started about the developers interceding in high-level wars, the long-standing bugs that don't get fixed, and developer focus on silly new features rather than fixing those holes. Did they ever get station perambulation working?
You get out of things what you put into it and maybe there are people who are getting a great deal out of EVE. I figure my time there would be better spent on other things, things with payoff (I say while reading slashdot.)
I don't think that offenders with a high chance of recidivism should be released but that should be taken care of during the sentencing phase of the original trial. If a guy is a habitual rapist, give him a life sentence, don't do this legal jujitsu nonsense after he's served a sentence. Too many possibilities for abuse.
Seriously, there is one fantastic quote here from Steve Jobs that he replied to someone who *dared* to criticize him:
what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
What a complete asshole who thinks he's so much better than everyone else.
That's a valid response for useless criticism, people who are hating without real cause. Not so valid when real critiques are being offered along with suggestions for improvement. I don't have to be able to brew my own beer to tell you whether or not I like your beer. I don't have to be able to write software to be able to tell you whether or not your software is user-friendly. But if I'm just being a random hater and offering no specific arguments other than your software is gay and lame, "what have you ever done?" is a pretty good response.
There are people who hate on Apple because it's Apple. The biggest mistake is confusing genuine, helpful critics for the haters and ignoring what they have to say.
Because with ripped movies you don't have to deal with those annoying previews that on some dvds, you can't skip.
Those stupid FBI warnings. I could always FF through them on tape, no big deal. Can't skip through them on DVD? Fuck that.
What incenses me so much is that they waste my goddamn time. Or rentals that INSIST on playing the previews. I happen to enjoy previews most of the time, I usually watch them. But if I don't feel like it and try to go to the menu but can't, that makes me see red. Usually they don't disable FF and I can skip through them that way but seriously, disabling menu functions to force me to watch content? FUCK YOU.
The only DVD's I own that I would buy again in a heartbeat if they were lost or damaged are the Lord of the Rings. They're freaking amazing. Everything about them says "This is why you should own 'em. Just downloading the movies won't cut it." And strangely enough, I hear legal bullshit is preventing the release of blueray versions. They'd probably be the only bluerays I'd ever be tempted to buy, assuming the quality was maintained.
This is also why Wikipedia should never be considered a good source of information. It's like two birds with one stone, a biavianlith if you will.
I know what two girls can do with a cup, don't know if a stone can make it much worse.
This is *really bad* from a freedom perspective. As soon as computers can reliably and safely drive cars, anyone who *dares* drive the car themselves will be considered negligent; they'll probably pass a law against it.
Yeah. The only guys who would insist on driving their own cars are paranoid cops who have a pathological hatred of mechanoids and AI, constantly spinning theories about how the robots are taking over.
Srs face now: This is something that annoys me no end. Just like you'll never meet someone on the internet who doesn't have at least a 9 inch cock
It's scary to think that for many people, everything they know about sex was learned from watching porn. They're going to get some very, very funny ideas about what women are really into. "Honey, I wanted to have sex but there just weren't enough people!"
Back when Babylon 5 was still being produced, some licensing issue had held up making any models of the ships being produced as toys, which prompted some outfits to start making their own models and selling them illegally.
Here's an even better story. The original digital models for all the CGI assets in the show were lost between production shutting down and the new direct-to-video episodes being produced. The production team went to those fans for the models for use in the new footage -- models that were even more detailed than what was used in the original show! Ain't technology grand?
What's next, needles full of AIDS-infected blood?
Back in the late eighties, when the world was turned upside down by the fall of the iron curtain. my friends and I speculated that the fact that Reagan had survived assassination* had torn a hole in reality, thrusting us into a Bizarro Universe.
Now we have Russians suggesting something that only would make sense in a really bad TV movie or potboiler eco-disaster novel.
Like the man uptopic says, what could possibly go wrong?
And just like every recent action/disaster movie, we've got a black president.
Friends aren't about sex, or cool parties. Friends are those people who, when your father-in-law dies unexpectedly, walk out on the preps for their own Christmas party to come help you. Friends are those who read the note on the door the first couple left and call you to see if you need help. Friends are those who'll drive and hour and a half to the airport at three o'clock in the morning to pick up your wife (who was out of town on business when her father died). I'd have needed a bus just to haul those who volunteered to go pick her up!
Finding those people is the hard part. Friends have to be cultivated. Your parent post was cultivating the wrong kind of friends, the superficial, but the same care needs to be applied to the good ones. But it shouldn't feel like a chore. Friendship is about reciprocity and you should be getting as much out of it as you're putting into it, otherwise it's called codependency. But it sounds like you've got some great friends. Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right.
If you just shrugged it off then only your coworkers would know you have a small dick. Now the whole world knows.