beautiful_boater

the NB Dr. Who iteration is kind of weird.

I think that it was supposed to be mostly a commentary on the negative aspects of the norms and societal expectations, along with the shame from his father causing him to act that way out of deep insecurities. Because his fixation with honor and masculinity was so heavily focused on how he was seen in the community and not giving an opening for people to see him as weak or feminine, that is hammered home in his own internal justifications for his actions.

I do have to say, I think a lot of my distaste of it on the first reading is that superficial reading causes Okonkwo to often come off as the most two dimensional portrayal of toxic masculinity.

I will preface this by saying that I haven't read it again in over a decade, but I remember mostly liking it on my second read. I switched schools mid high school, so I had to read it twice for school. I didn't like it the first time, I think I was too young and not interested in interrogating it much the first time I read it, but enjoyed on the second reading.

As you mentioned, it did try to portray precolonization Igbo culture as Achebe understood it. And I thought that it was a brave choice to focus on a lot of flaws and issues with precolonization society, where many characters are some shade of moral grey. Though this does lead some people to think for the same reason that it downplays or softens the problems of colonization, despite that being the titular "things fall apart", but I obviously feel that wasn't what Achebe intended. I think that Achebe was trying to portray the motivation for the various downtrodden and Nwoye to go along with Christianity and colonization.

I wish we had more portrayals of precolonization societies in literature.

On the other hand, something like ReactOS could, in theory, work if it was much more mature and had more developers behind it.

Not usually. The main thing for lab equipment is that it is controlling hardware. So you are often using proprietary drivers for custom hardware. Wine can't handle drivers and for security reasons can't get low level hardware access.

Wow, 14/24 that was more difficult than I thought. TBF I haven't fully reread the Silmarillion since Middle School, but I didn't expect it to be quite this hard.

They can't make them non-reflective enough to not interrupt really deep observing. Also, that just shifts the problem around. If they are absorbing in the visible, they will likely have huge amounts of blackbody radiation in IR, sub/millimeter, and radio. You would need to make a satellite out of dark matter to not interrupt astronomy.

Man, I just went to a good seminar today on finding habitable exoplanets that emphasized that we currently need ground based telescopes, because it is still impractical to make 30+ meter telescopes in space and would be very expensive, even if could be done. But progress is just launching a bunch of bullshit into orbit to avoid real investment in infrastructure like fiber and other telecommunication lines.

sci-hub has already been mentioned, but I will say that though it is not piracy, depending on the field, you can find free version "pre-prints" of papers on arxiv.org and socarxiv.org

We love our nutritional yeast, don't we folks!

But imagine the quality of service. Unfortunately, the rice in the back kitchen has been spilled, and no food will be prepared until the staff counts all the grains of rice.