aGlassDarkly

I’ll bite. What?

Guys, I dunno if you know this, but we could probably have multiple trials simultaneously and speed this all along.

Affected workers say the shutdown has been a continuation of attacks they have experienced under the Trump administration, from mass firings – many of which have been overturned or blocked in federal courts – to drastic budget cuts, pushes to take early retirements or resignation buyouts, and threats of withholding back pay for workers furloughed during the shutdown.

I mean…no?

Is The Count of Monte Cristo really that much better than Robin Hood? I don't think it should be, but its adaptations hit harder and I think there are more of them.

Speculating here, but maybe the rich people that pay for these adaptations to be produced find it easier to relate to Dantès, who starts poor and ends rich than Loxley (or however they want to spell it this time), who starts as an aristocrat and becomes an outlaw.

Dantès does most of the “work” of the story himself; sometimes he gets a plucky sidekick, depending on the adaptation of the book. Loxley, in almost all of the adaptations I’ve seen, bands together with the common folk and leads them to rise up against oppression inflicted on them by the greed of one or two men.

I’m probably stretching it a bit, but if I was a billionaire deciding what people get to watch, I assume the Count would scare me less than a band of commoners overthrowing their rich oppressors.

Then again, even though I’m common as they come, I’ll admit that I like Dumas’s coherence and Dantès’s complexity more than the looser jumble that comes with the Robin Hood myth. Monte Cristo will probably always be at the top of my list of books to read and reread every couple of years until I’m dead, simply because it has everything for a fun adventure story — a simple guy, the woman he loves, the enemies (and one drunk sot) who betray him, a wise mentor, growth through adversity, revenge, saving your friends from bankruptcy and suicide, helping nice people marry each other, realizing that revenge tends to not limit its damage to the targets you choose, more growth, and…weirdly marrying that nice lady you bought.

Okay, the last thing is a bit odd and Haydée gets left out of some adaptations, which is a bit of a shame, since the scene with Dantès and Mercédès where they realize they’ve become different people than they were when they were in love 800 pages ago, and they’ll never be together and that’s okay, is probably my favorite part in the whole thing. Someday, someone will do that scene well.

kernel-level AC

This sounds like they did you a solid by not working. I’ll have to look up this genre of shooter, though; not something I’ve heard of before. I tend to be too easily annoyed for anything that isn’t single-player or local co-op these days, although some part of me still remembers some MMOs though rose-colored nostalgia glasses.

When the internet was better, sometimes people just made entertaining things for no particular reason.

I keep waiting for the headline to be something like “Vance slammed face-first into the sidewalk by passersby until he stopped twitching,” but I’m always disappointed.

This may be the first time I haven’t fallen into the subset of “everybody.”

Everything I want to play runs using Linux/proton. It seems like the only things that have trouble are things I’d never consider even installing, let alone running.

Every time I think it can’t get more embarrassing, they find an even more cringey way to act.

Feels weird that the thing I’m looking forward to most is left alignment for a bunch of currently center-aligned text. I’m not sure when I started to hate center alignment, but I’m always happy to watch it die.

Oh, that I did not know about. Sounds even worse.

Thanks for the link, that was a fun read.