I rather feared things that actually existed (though in other places), like spiders and burglars.
> My daughter said to me that there is a woman who watches her watch movies in her room and sleeps on the ceiling above her bed when she sleeps. she also says it dose not like me and wants to eat my heart. my kid watches elmo and fucking dinosaur train. where in the hell did she get this from?
Who ever came up with this shit? I have what appears to be near identical blinds at work, except the mechanism is such it works like a charm, with just one string.
@Rob What do you think of this nocturne? I'm interested in your impression after listening to the first 30 seconds or so. Don't read the description, and don't look up Emily Howell if you don't already know the composer.
Mine also have a separate stick that you can turn to control the angle of attack of the blades, i.e. how much light gets through and from which direction.
And yeah, that's nothing like Chopin. Chopin would have modulated the crap out of that thing. It does start to get more interesting at about 1:20, but the main theme is as cheap as it gets.
@Cerberus Who cares? In this case the computer has become the proverbial "million monkeys typing in a roomi" who might eventually produce Shakespeare just by chance.
@Robusto Yeah, I don't really understand why people want music in a café with people in it. They're not listening—not that they could really hear it anyway. The only real reason I understand is that it fills up the silence when it's still empty.
@Robusto Or perhaps rather a pair of advanced scissors that save you some time if you want to create a variation on an existing piece or combine several pieces?
With the posh restaurant, people come there to have vapid smalltalk, so have vapid smalltalk they do. They didn't come for the music, so they couldn't care less if it's interesting even if, and that's a big if already, even if they do acknowledge it's interesting.
@Cerberus the financial part is what I mean, though. If you sell something that is too crap, you'll go out of business as soon as a competitor makes a product that's just a wee bit less crap. But since everyone wants to make money and not lose it, they won't make it too good, either. So you're looking for an equilibrium that's neither good nor bad.
Ideally, you produce art because you like it, period. You don't want to show it other people.
@Robusto Duh indeed; but one often reads articles these days in which this is not seen as a problem, but as the normal state: "success" for art means it got attention.
@Cerberus Haven't you ever noticed that the most popular things are actually the worst? Do you think J. K. Rowling became the richest author in history by putting out masterpieces? She's the Horatio Alger of her generation.
I suppose in some way the desire to share one's aesthetic experience with others is benign. But it's nearly always mixed with a strong squirt of attention-whoring.
Actually unbearable is perhaps too strong per se, it was just not interesting. At all. So I had to force myself to read on, and that is why it became unbearable.
Asimov annoys me too (now reading some of his short stories), because he doesn't seem to think things through at all, even the most basic and important things. But it's still enjoyable.
I mean, again, I jumped on the bandwagon very late. I had heard all kinds of positive feedback from friends I deeply respect. And I think I had even seen the first movie by then, though I might be mistaken on that part.
@Cerberus I read too little of Asimov's to comment on that with confidence, but from what little I know, it would appear to me that it's sort of the whole point that he entertains exactly one central idea per story.
(Asimov's bicentennial man, for example, wants to be human: but there is no clue or explanation of why he would want to. And it doesn't make sense at all against his background. It is a bit like Data in Star Trek: he has no emotions (whatever those are), and yet he "wants" things and is a good friend and stuff. It's cheap.)
@RegDwighт And that's great: his plots are very strong. But these central ideas contain glaring mistakes, like the one above. In another story, the best scientists in the world are trying to solve the problem of locating inhabited worlds. And all the computers they design have to be in the body of a man-sized robot, and they communicate with it through human language. I mean, come on! And one of the central problems about these robots is that people are afraid of robots that resemble man!
@Robusto Of course. But I just don't understand how looking at Sarah Jessica Parker's face mole is going to fix that. But to each his own. To each his own.
Hey, I have an idea. Let's start closing questions as duplicates that are cited as originals in other dupe closings. We might create a wormhole or something.
@Kris this nTuplicate is earning upvotes because it is not an nTuplicate but the original question. Look at the dates, look at the post IDs. The question you linked to is a duplicate of this one, posted forteen months later. And if you pay attention, it was closed as such, almost a year ago. There are two more duplicates, both identified as dupes and closed. You are now suggesting, for reasons that escape me, to close the original as well, so we have four questions closed as duplicates of each other, and exactly zero questions on the subject open. — RegDwighтApr 18 at 8:49
> When a fox is in the bottle where the tweetle beetles battle with their paddles in a puddle on a noodle-eating poodle, THIS is what they call... ...a tweetle beetle noodle poodle bottled paddled muddled duddled fuddled wuddled fox in socks, sir!
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…