If we’re going fictional characters, then Havelock Vetinari from the Discworld novels.

As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I’ve found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than “gaming specific” linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of “gaming adjacent” software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don’t want or need in the first place.

And if they are…well, first of all, yikes, and second of all his career as a content creator is going to go from “damaged” to “gone” as no platform would let him stream after that.

“My daughter Murph. I keep gettin’ older. She stays the same age.”

Also, I love how he had a son who just wanted to be a farmer and that meant that Matthew McConaughey’s character was justified in being totally emotionally disinterested in him, compared to his genius daughter. Seriously, at a certain point I think Nolan forgot he wrote this guy with two kids. His entire character was defined by his relationship with his daughter. Why even give him a son in the first place?

I respect the sentiment, but I recently read “Exiting the Vampire Castle” by Mark Fisher and he makes some good points for why callout culture is, shall we say, “less than productive” in some situations.

I mean, this entire discussion hinges on the definition of “trivial,” so…cool.

Not the person you initially asked, but a good one is Eli Whitney’s cotton gin that made separating the cotton fiber from the seeds much easier. It had traditionally been done by hand, which is very time consuming. Whitney’s invention greatly simplified the process and made cotton farming much more economically viable as an industry, ultimately leading to an extreme expansion in chattel slavery in the Southern United States and serving to solidify a planter aristocracy that would eventually seek to split with the United States in order to create its own slaveholding empire, triggering a Civil War that would decimate a large chunk of the country and kill three quarters of a million people.

Don’t Bother Reading

It’s an interesting idea, though, that one’s preference for a particular design or aesthetic, especially when that design or aesthetic is emblematic of a particular historical or cultural moment, is never wholly isolated to its visual or material components, but also innately tied to our memory and understanding of that moment. I personally don’t think you can extricate a particular aesthetic from the psychic background noise surrounding it. Our minds don’t work that way. It’s always forming these subconscious or unconscious connections, binding events and memory to abstract signifiers.

We don’t like the 90s aesthetic because it’s “better” or even attractive. I mean, nobody has wallpaper in their home with those pastel and neon triangles. Many of us like it because it reminds us of childhood, of not having responsibilities other than waking up early enough on Saturday to catch all your cartoons and of not complaining too much when you have to go visit your grandparents who can never remember your birthday and who always ask you how old you are this year, of finishing Super Mario on the SNES before your friend does so you can brag about being better at video games than him. It’s of a simpler time and place, because we were simpler. And it was, in retrospect, of an America briefly sandwiched between the end of the original “Forever War” that was the Cold War, and the beginning of the 20th Century’s new “Forever War,” that is the War on Terror.

Great thing is that since it’s open source someone can just fork the project and continue development in a different direction.

On reddit, there’s a subreddit called r/lrcast, which is the dedicated subreddit for the Limited Resources podcast. The primary purpose of the subreddit, however, is not to discuss the podcast, but to discuss the “limited” format of Magic: the Gathering, which constitutes draft and sealed. It’s a very difficult, very expensive format of Magic to play and is a niche subsection of an already fairly niche hobby.

Extrapolating from this, we can say that Youtube hosts around 2.5 to 3 exabytes (2.5 to 3 million terabytes) of data. Interestingly, the total volume of data on the internet is, as of the end of 2023, around 120 zettabytes, so Youtube only makes up around 0.0025% of the total volume of all that data.

XBox has always been a weird console. It never really competes with Nintendo because NIntendo always does its own general thing and also slides neatly into the kids and family market. So it competes with Playstation by default. Except Playstation actually has contracts with good studios to make exclusive games. What’s a non-Halo exclusive for the XBox? Back in the day, you’d play games like Gears of War, Halo (obviously), Fallout 3, Psychonauts, KOTOR, COD, etc. I can’t think of a single meaningful game on the most recent generation for the XBox.

Edith Finch is more of an interactive short-story collection thematically and narrative centralized around a single family and their almost comical level of intergenerational neglect.

Sounds like a hell of your own making. Always change the background to something generic. Like a nice tree. Always. Nobody gives a shit about trees.

forgiving your younger self and understanding that books can be good in different ways

You can imply whatever you want about me, if it makes you feel better about losing an argument, but I read a lot of stuff that I don’t think is particularly good. That’s the present tense of read, by the way. As you get older, one thing you’ll realize is that you can acknowledge that something being entertaining and something meeting some set criteria of artistic merit are different things. I like a lot of things that I don’t think are executed with a great degree of skill or which have a great degree of literary merit. I acknowledge those things as enjoyable (which I’ve already done for Harry Potter), but I also acknowledge them as flawed in specific ways.

You’re nearly there yourself in your original comment. No one is comparing Harry Potter to Gravity’s Rainbow or Wuthering Heights here.

No, but you can compare it to other, superior works of fiction for that targeted age range. Many of the works of Ursula K. Leguin and Terry Pratchett that were intended for people in the similar age range as Harry Potter put Rowling’s work to shame.

I’m surprised you didn’t link to Wikipedia…but that’s not really the argument here.

I would say I’m surprised you’re complaining about things I haven’t done and arguments I haven’t made, but as I’ve been on the internet for more than five minutes and have engaged in arguments with people like you more than I would ever realistically care to, I can’t say that I am. But that’s not really the argument here, either.

And if you had been more reasonable - not called them “shit” perhaps - it would have been a different story. And I see you skirt the issue, but the reason people go on and on about the failings of Harry Potter these days is very obvious, and it has little to do with literary value.

I think they are shit, though. From the perspective of the entire thing, if you want a more nuanced analysis, the first novel is a masterpiece of world building. The second and third do good jobs of expanding the internal mythology of Harry Potter and his relationship to Voldemort. But that’s all they do. The last four novels become overburderend with meandering, often pointless content and are just hilariously overindulgent.

I think the core issue I have with the novels is that the main characters of the series experience comparatively little in the way of real character development and growth over the course of the series. They are essentially the same people at the end of the seventh novel as they are at the beginning of the first. Hermione is a little bit less insufferable, Ron is a little bit less of a walking inferiority complex. And Harry is a little…angrier? It’s hard to say. They have such little character development because the novels aren’t really focused on the complexities of growing up or the way in which your understanding of the world radically shifts from childhood to adulthood. These things, if they exist in the novels at all, are even less than tertiary to the core focus. The novels themselves are more concerned with action and worldbuilding, which…I get it. It’s accessible. It’s engaging for children. Things like difficult feelings and interpersonal drama are stereotypically boring for kids. Having a lot of stuff going on, a lot of fantasy and mythology and all the other bullshit Harry Potter is known for is part of its core appeal. But it’s also shallow. You don’t like the fact that I think those qualities makes the series “shit,” but I do. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with my criteria. And if you have a problem with my criteria, then I guess…too bad? There’s not really any point in trying to have any more of a discussion after that, because in order to talk about “good” and “bad” art you have to have some semblance of a shared definition, and the simple reality is that we probably don’t. You have your criteria for what you think makes a work of fiction good, and Harry Potter meets it enough for you to think it’s good, and I have my criteria and it simply doesn’t.

“accessible” is a weird thing to criticize in a work geared towards children, btw

It’s not a criticism. It’s an, at worst, neutral observation. It’s not like a children’s novel written from the perspective of a child in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and it’s not a children’s novel about a person growing up transgender. These things are comparatively less accessible because they require a degree of abstraction and empathy of which your average child, who likely doesn’t have similar experiences, is almost certainly psychologically incapable. That’s not a knock against kids. It’s just the psychological nature of being a child. Accessibility makes sense and is important for works looking to act as mainstream entertainment. And that’s what Harry Potter succeeds at being: entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but entertaining and artistically rich are different things.

And I guess the reason you read the whole thing is…that it was so awful? Be honest with yourself.

I guess the reason I read it is because I was a child and enjoyed detective fiction, which is all Harry Potter effectively is: detective stories with wizards. I read a lot of stuff as a kid that wasn’t very good in retrospect. I also read a shitload of Hardy Boys, and most Hardy Boys novels are fucking awful. Something being entertaining to you when you’re a kid that you can acknowledge was shit when you’re an adult is a normal part of growing up. I’m sure you’ll get there yourself, someday. Or maybe your ability to parse literature will suffer from arrested development. Who can say?

It is, however, a book written for children and teenagers. And for what it is, the plots and themes ask more of, and give more back to, young readers than so much of the other drivel that is readily available to them.

The argument that something should be considered good because there exists other things which can be considered significantly worse is not a very good framework for arguing for the quality of a work of fiction. This is classic “damning by faint praise.”

I know this, since I read to my own children and teenagers every day, and buy them books to read for themselves

The foundational premise of this argument is that you know something to be true because you perceive it to be so. This is like me saying that I know I’m a good cook because I cook every day and enjoy the food that I make for myself. It ignores the obvious possibility that your personal standards for what you are doing are simply garbage.

If we’re being honest, the real issue is that Rowling is now le diable du jour, which means everything she ever did is now material for our daily two minutes of hate. The books have to be completely without merit as well because it’s just not possible to hold even mildly conflicting views simultaneously.

If we’re being honest, her books are simple, accessible, designed for mass appeal, relatively thematically shallow, and were at the time of their initial publication outrageously overhyped because she did what J. J. Abrams does with every single t.v. show he’s ever made and allude to an elaborate set of mysteries that actively drove fan engagement via wild speculation about the future of the series between novels. To add to this, the average American reads so little that for many of them, the novels were the only major series of fiction they’d ever voluntarily read, so there was a period of time on the internet where every piece of fantasy fiction in any medium got immediately compared to Harry Potter. This is admittedly not Harry Potter’s or Rowling’s fault, but it was fucking annoying and served to drive negative sentiment for the series.

If anything, it’s an overly generous reading of a work whose themes and characterization come across as remarkably shallow when examined by anyone with even a hint of genuine critical literacy. I guess the main takeaway is “read another book.”

Context obviously matters. It’s essentially what I said in my comment. But if you’re in a public forum like Lemmy or Reddit and you have a thread about, say, a popular t.v. show, and someone expresses a negative sentiment towards it, while you genuinely enjoyed it and thought it was good, then if you try to silence that person’s perspective, which they have as much right to share as you do, then you are effectively saying that the only perspective that is valid is one that agrees with yours. There’s a reason that circlejerk subreddits like r/gamingcirclejerk and r/moviescirclejerk were so popular. It’s because monolithic sentiment is the bane of places like reddit and lemmy.

This basically puts the onus for another’s enjoyment on everyone except for the individual enjoying the thing, though. Which I’m not saying is categorically wrong in all cases. If you have a child/niece/nephew/etc. who really enjoys, say, Harry Potter, and you go “well, J.K. Rowling is a transphobic neoliberal and Harry Potter is a story about only fighting against fascism and bigotry when it actively threatens dominant, existing modes of power.” In that case, you are actively robbing enjoyment of something from someone who should be engaging with things uncritically. If you say it to an adult, who should have already developed that degree of literacy, and they complain about having their fun ruined, then they’re basically asking to be infantilized.