Software has logical ‘states’ that work best when they flow into each other as planned. If you have a bug and get into a weird state, powering down and up sends you back to the known initial state, from which things should progress as expected.

A lot of effort in embedded software goes into not getting into bad states and if you do, recovering, but sometimes mistakes are made, or management cheaps out and bugs remain.

One thing I have learned from Yelp and other online review sites is there are two kinds of people: Those who consider expected mediocrity as 5 stars and those who use the entire rating system. The former rate a greasy spoon 5 stars if their hot slop was not thrown in their face. The latter are the only people who actually leave useful reviews.

Corporate types want everyone to the the former. If they don't have a 4.5 star+ rating on a product or service, it is utter garbage because they are only concerned with marketing their junk by any means necessary. So they punish their workers and unsubtly tell users that they must rate 5 stars or they are assholes.

I use the whole rating system, because I am not leaving reviews for marketing wanks, I am leaving them for other readers so they can find the best stuff easily.

As a side note, a friend is a struggling author (is there any other kind?) and he has noted that high ratings are great, but it is the number of ratings that matters on places like Amazon. If you don't hit a certain threshold in reviews, your book will never make it onto suggested lists, and you will never be read. So if you like something mildly obscure, throw it a review on amazon, google, as many services as you can find. They need it. If it is a major release by an author with a publishing deal, fuck it they are fine.

Including himself sometimes.

I was just rewatching Venture Brothers, and thinking it interesting that such a colorful personality was now enshrined in so many different cartoon characters, including his own writings where he became an artificial version of himself.

Seeing early footage of him dealing with his increased popularity and people not only assuming Raoul Duke was him, but expecting him to behave that way at all times was kind of sad. But he def leaned into it.

No. Next question.

It also depended strongly on class. All classes had less 'no homo' kind of bullshit, but upper classes in particular did not need to pose as manly in order to be powerful and respected. Working class folks still needed to prove dominance over each other and had less tolerance for genteel behavior.

Libertarianism is logical until the moment it touches reality and has to deal with running a society full of people with different desires and needs. It is a fantasy for the comfortable. It is a fig leaf for folks who want the low taxes and no social programs of the GOP, but also want to smoke weed and not be associated with all the knuckle draggers and bible thumpers the GOP need to gain power.

> There were some points when her political opinions completely distracted from the book she was trying to write.

I loled at this, thank you. Pushing her fantasy based political philosophy is the only thing she was trying to do.

You are asking for a nice clean ending to a story about how nice clean endings and war don't go together.

I could not get thorugh the first chapter of book 1. I think his world building is good and creative, but his prose is very boring to me. No poetry, just mechanics. Like a video game.

That is allways ok though, art is a matter of taste.

Same junk, different day (and channel). The heart and soul of the Ancient Aliens pseudoscience has allways been the same: racism. Brown people could not possibly have built huge megastructures while my ancestors were still working out bronze smelting! So it must have been aliens!