A new hope had lots of effect that are basically cgi in impact. Muppets, painted backgrounds, lightsabres, the death star wireframe plans was cgi. The method of making fake pixels isn't the issue, good taste is, and modern cgi is just easy to make slop effects with.
Also compare lotr gollum (cgi but with a good actor and good script, with the actor in a motion suit on stage for actors to interact with) to Jar Jar (a tennis ball who actors couldn't interact with). Gollum is arguavly more cgi (both removing the actor and replacing them) but better.
Everything is political. If you think it's not, you're just benefiting from the status quo and blind to it.
Even ignoring that history loves to repeat itself, plenty of politics in all forms of media has aged excellently, and plenty of politics that haven't aged well are still insightful into the period of the piece.
"Everything is political" is the classic motte-and-bailey fallacy beloved by the most obnoxious politics pushers. The fact that it's impossible to remove all traces of politics from fiction does not excuse subjugating art to ideology. When people complain about "political" works they're complaining about works where the author appears to care more about how you vote than the story.
I’ve found when people complain about something being “political” 9 out of 10 times they’re complaining that they dislike the author’s politics.
The dictionary definition of “politics” (as in, what the word actually means) would support the statement that “everything is political” to be at worst a smidge hyperbolic. No motte, no bailey, no rhetorical fallacy.
Thing is, most art has ideology, it’s the weirdo reactionaries that try to pretend otherwise.
So is Casablanca art or propaganda? IMO 'art' and 'propaganda' are largely orthogonal concepts. Something can be art but not propaganda, propaganda but not art, neither, or both.
That's why old political writing is good - because the politics has been settled by now, most people won't argue 1984 was unfairly criticizing totalitarianism or Starship Troopers are too hard on fascism.
But new political writing is outrageous for half the people, because they disagree with it.
There's a striking difference between telling and tone deaf preaching and when people complain about politics they always, without fail, mean the latter.
The stance of "everything is political" itself is extremely tone deaf.
> “You should have failed this class. I’m going to make accommodations so that no student can pass next semester the same way you did.”
> This is what my Ancient History II professor told me when my group and I got our final group project essay handed out.
What a terrible, hack of a teacher.
If you've ever said something like that to a student, quit your job.
Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.
Yep. The main reason I didn't further pursue History academia was that it was too much of a monoculture with a bit of nepotism sparkled all over it. Not to discard everyone there of course; there were some awesome courses and faculty. But there's no way I was going to dedicate my life to such environment with so little in return for it.
Nah, the teacher was just wrong about the facts. If they had been right about the facts, there's nothing wrong with saying that imo. The reality was that it was the partner who should have gotten that lecture rather than the author.
So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong. They may even be racist or sexist (i.e. something that the person you're maligning has to deal with constantly), instead of in this case when it was just a weakness for ass-kissers.
Too many times somebody else got a good grade from my work. I don't begrudge them the grade because I don't care when other people get nice things for free (I love it when me or my friends get nice things for free), but they certainly had no knowledge in what had been taught in the class they just got a B in.
> Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.
School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.
That's a big if. I've learned far more from settings and courses I enjoyed than from ones I hated. I expect the causation flowed in both directions, and there's no way I'm unique in that regard.
> So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong.
That's exactly my point.
That teacher didn't have any facts, they just decided someone was a slacker based on vibes and used that bias to single them out.
And presumably would go on to add systems to allow them to persecute others they deem to be slackers.
> School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.
As someone who gets told he's smart somewhat regularly by his peers, and had a school mandated therapist because they thought he was a suicide risk, I believe that's a statement that needs a citation.
In any case they're not mutually exclusive, you can have an education system that works without grinding people down into lifelong anxiety disorders.
> The structure of this post is a bit of a miss for me. Sorry about that. I wanted to write a short post about writing non-fiction but it turned out to be a bit longer than expected and I need to get to work now. I hope you enjoyed it.
It almost reads like the author climbed the tree to shake its branches and content himself with whatever dropped. Which in this case is fine by me.
To be honest what happened was that I tried to write a short introduction with both stories from university, they got way too long, then wrote the writing advice, and then tried to mix them both into a coherent post, then noticed the analogy of the trunk was a good anchor and remixed the article even more around that, and this is what we got. Still I enjoyed writing it.
There's always hope for a Part II. Maybe on rhetoric; which is what I interpreted "The second most important thing" to be about. But the concepts introduced there are entirely new to me so I may be off.
If university is truly miserable then multiple years of it are going to give you lifelong issues with learning and set you up for failure later in life.
I'm not saying it has to be sunshine and rainbows all the time, but if you actually genuinely hate it then that's a worse outcome than being a blank slate. A blank slate can pick up a book at 25 and go follow their interest down the rabbit hole, maybe even go to uni. If you had a bad first experience then good luck unlearning all of it and getting back to the point where you're excited about art history or whatever. I also don't believe you can find something miserable the entire time and come out smarter for it.
> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Sure.
And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.
> There is a compounding effect
That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.
> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services.
I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like.
And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.
A library of 300 songs is tiny.
I guess you don't listen to much music?
Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.
I'd say it's similar but not the same.
One thing I can see from a quick skim is that cloud in a bottle can be set up on local infrastructure, this requires a cloud hosted VPS.
> One needs to make their server machine accessible to everyone
No not really, what gave you that idea?
> which isn't generally possible due to how networks work
Complete nonsense.
Lots of people do it, many more have the capability even if they choose not to use it.
> Also one needs a domain
Nice to have, but completely optional.
> These barriers are high enough, so that common people can't create/host their own sites.
Are you talking about a website?
Like a blog?
If so you can have a Neocities site for free, with an optional 5 USD monthly subscription.
That's the accessible, affordable option you're looking for.
> Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up.
It's also not accessible to people in comas, what's your point?
The instructions are "import the file into VM software" and that's enough to get you something you can connect to over a web browser.
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