Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

  • 1 Post
  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle




  • Trying to put the thought in my head into words…Let’s try this: Beetlejuice has an excuse plot like a lot of video games do. The plot is a framework to attach fun and amusing scenes together. It’s an excuse to go to the ghost DMV and to have the dinner and seance and wedding scenes.

    At one point they do have a stated goal of scaring away the Deetzes, but they don’t achieve this goal. They scare off Otho, by making his…suit less trendy? Am I remembering that right? But the Maitlands and Deetzes end up living in harmony, Lydia gets the movie’s victory lap. Beetlejuice is the title character, but he’s really the closest thing the film has to an antagonist.

    Really, the characters and plot don’t matter as much as the series of fun and interesting scenes. That’s why I enjoyed the movie; it’s built more like a haunted house than a feature film. It’s a series of loosely related vignettes. And if those are fun, then mission achieved.









  • I had typing tutor software on the family PC. It made the mistake of trying to teach typing by starting with only home row keys, then expanding outward from there. So for a very long time, you would type things like adj daf jal ls; dal fka and so forth. It was a very long time until you really started to get it.

    And then MSN chat rooms and messenger happened to me, and suddenly touch typing was the main way I had to hit on chicks. I knew what the home row was, so I knew what touch typing looked like, so I started actually doing it, but typing things I wanted to type. I’m now the third fastest typist I know. On a good keyboard with a passage I’m familiar with I can key 106WPM, right now typing conversationally out of my brain I’m probably hitting about 65 or 70.



  • Humans are indeed creative by nature, we like making things. What we don’t naturally do is publish, broadcast and preserve our work.

    Society is iterative. What we build today, we build mostly out of what those who came before us built. We tell our versions of our forefathers’ stories, we build new and improved versions of our forefather’s machines.

    A purely capitalistic society would have infinite copyright and patent durations, this idea is mine, it belongs to me, no one can ever have it, my family and only my family will profit from it forever. Nothing ever improves because improving on an old idea devalues the old idea, and the landed gentry can’t allow that.

    A purely communist society immediately enters whatever anyone creates into the public domain. The guy who revolutionizes energy production making everyone’s lives better is paid the same as a janitor. So why go through all the effort? Just sweep the floors.

    At least as designed, our idea of copyright is a compromise. If you have an idea, we will grant you a limited time to exclusively profit from your idea. You may allow others to also profit at your discretion; you can grant licenses, but that’s up to you. After the time is up, your idea enters the public domain, and becomes the property and heritage of humanity, just like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Others are free to reproduce and iterate upon your ideas.





  • Of the four levels of learning, rote memorization is the lowest, easiest to achieve, easiest to test, and least useful. The student can demonstrate the ability to repeat a memorized phrase verbatim, or given a couple seconds to think about it they can rephrase it in their own words using their mental thesaurus. Multiple choice and short answer questions test rote memorization, which happen to be easy to grade, machines can do it. Rote memorization will have little effect on the student’s overall behavior, if it’s all you teach and test for you’re not a teacher you’re just cosplaying as one.