Moonside

Moonside wrote

I must agree with Devtesla - the conclusions about Lisa are mostly spot on, but the diagnosis on the whole about the Simpson's decline is mistaken. Actually it could have been a better piece if it was all about Lisa as now the first part seems abandoned in the end.

As an example where the essay falters is seeing one of the episodes this piece mentions (by quoting it) as something absurd and as a vehicle for jokes is Selma's Choice. However, it actually has a very clear three act structure:

  1. (The Proposal) Marge's mother dies and her family and Patti and Selma meet at her funeral. Mother has left behind a video tape about her deathbed regret of remaining single and tells in it for her daughters avoid her fate. This gets Selma nervous. (Proposal: life without family/lover is unfulfilling.)
  2. (The Argument) Selma begins dating but doesn't succeed at all. Men are garbage. Selma also visits a theme park with Lisa and Bart and it all ends with chaos.
  3. (The Conclusion) Selma has a speech in which she concludes that the company of her iguana is plenty enough for her and that not everyone has to have the family or love life like others. She rejects the proposal of her mother. And I'd say this is presented as a positive thing.

Thus the episode is hardly random and in fact the first act is laid down with care, length and clarity to set up the whole thing in motion. You don't even have to know about The Simpsons to get it! "I am the Lizard Queen" is funny in part because it's basically pointing at how terribly Selma fares with kids.

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Moonside OP wrote

I feel like we had better discussions in the fandom in the early days because with a weekly schedule there was time for reacting and anticipation at the same time. So reactions had a direction to go towards and any fan theories already had an excuse which to hook readers with. Now it seems like 98% of the time only fan art makes it in the fandom and there's only so many ways Peridot can smooch Amethyst, right?

I think the bomb format roughly exists because times are difficult in broadcasting and the company needs to have something to make kids excited so boom they have events they can advertise. And the Teen Titans Go! stuff is partly because the parent company owns DC and they need to manufacture the future film audiences.

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Moonside OP wrote

The answer is... have you considered blankets?

Personally speaking, what I like about this affair is that I know what's coming. Three bombs? Three bombs. No need to go to checkout /r/StevenUniverse every three weeks. The relief does, I think, makes up somewhat for the bomb format. Like previously we never had any inkling what might be coming up until like two or three weeks in advance, if someone leaked some info or if Brazil or France broadcasts or mobile app streams an episode before CN in US? Like hell yes I now know what we're in for.

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Moonside wrote

The warmer stuff gets, the sweeter it generally tastes. So if you have sweet dish you want to serve hot and you taste it cold when adjusting sweetness, you should totally lowball it. In other words, people who bake cinnamon buns are basically wizards.

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Moonside wrote

It also seems like the PostMill code base is like a million times more tractable than what Reddit had. Like there were a few small fixes I had in my mind to open as issues on Gitlab which are still perfectly feasible to implement. And if I bothered to learn PHP I could apply my own elbow grease in the spirit of oakreef too.

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Moonside OP wrote

Reply to comment by outwrangle in Pizza or Jupiter? by Moonside

I thought the issue with bad pizza wasn't that it's overcooked, but rather that the oven wasn't hot enough or cheese had too much moisture and it remained gross and soggy.

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Moonside wrote (edited )

To add to what the admin said, the software this site runs on, PostMill, will on some future date probably have more options for adding images to themes and shit.

EDIT: ok the author stopped development of PostMill so that's not going to happen.

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Moonside wrote

I feel like this is, again, some Uncle Bob bullshit. Seriously, fuck that sexist prick. He has this schtick about how TDD is all and other techniques to improve reliability and reduce errors are bullshit. Like I would be much more congenial to the attitude if it implied things like (choose your own picks):

  1. programming by contract
  2. property based testing
  3. fuzzers
  4. unit testing
  5. integration testing
  6. good method documentation, perhaps with (an) example(s)
  7. literate programming
  8. code review
  9. formal specs
  10. some nicer type system
  11. pair programming
  12. safer languages - if there are no segfaults, you don't need to advertise the risk of one
  13. Have some people dedicated on hammering your software in evil manners
  14. proofs (but that's avant garde tbh)
  15. stats on commits/bugs per product, project, package, module, file, method/function. If something gets a lot of work done, unleash the testers.
  16. Outsourcing to Donald Knuth

I think it's the case usually that this comment hater has one or three favorite techniques they like and thus disregard the rest of the universe and I bet they don't even have TAOCP on their book shelf.

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