Metaphors and beautiful language don't change the plot. The Great Gatsby can be summed up rather easily: A man named Nick moves to town and is fascinated by his wealthy neighbor, Jay Gatsby. As they get to know each other, he discovers that Gatsby is enamored with his cousin Daisy Buchanan, who is married to a complete asshole. Over time, Nick and Tom both discover that Jay is not old money but rather most likely a man who amassed wealth by participating in fraud.
Tom Buchanan and Jay fight over Daisy, and Tom's side chick is overcome with emotion and is hit by a car. Tom couldn't give a fuck about what happened bc he's a total monster who only cares about money and power. Gatsby takes the blame for the woman's death, and her widower tracks down Gatsby and murders him in revenge.
Long story short: pre-Crash capitalism was an orphan-crushing machine. Gatsby got money to pursue love and ended up dead. Buchanan had money and has little positive emotion toward anyone else in the world. Daisy is also concerned with wealth and prestige and allows herself to be mistreated by her husband and thought about leaving him for a richer man. The narrator is also wealthy, and we see him do the same bad acts he criticizes others for, making him ultimately a hypocrite.
No one even talks about GOT anymore bc the ending was so bad.
> No ending was going to be good
Why do you say that? Plenty amazing shows have great endings. And GOT isn't some uniquely incredible story. Killing MCs is not new to GOT, either, and you give that show too much credit. Lost did it long before GOT. 24. Grey's Anatomy is SUPER famous for it. They killed off like half the original cast in a single helicopter crash.
ASOIAF wasn't original bc it killed MCs. It was original bc it treated fantasy as political first, fantasy second.
I don't doubt that the show ending mirrors the book's intended ending, however a huge part of it is how you get to that ending, which they rushed and fumbled horribly in the show. Like Bran becoming King could work, but not when he basically shows up out of nowhere and nobody knows anything that happened to him or what he is capable of, he basically disappeared for years and when he came back he said a few nonsense things but wasn't involved in much of the politicing that could make him a viable candidate for King. Or Dany going full Mad King, after they spend seasons showing her trying to not be a crazy ruler but then suddenly snapping, instead of going through a series of harder and harder choices that turn out worse each time and drive her to more relatable desperation and violence.
At minimum they needed a full extra season and a full final season, if not more. But without GRRM handholding them throughout the entire plot they completely lost the path.
Gatsby isn't supposed to be bad. He's supposed to be tragic.
The bad guys in Gatsby are Tom Buchanan and, to a lesser extent, Daisy. One might make a case that Nick is not a good person, but he's telling the story as a salve for his guilt. He's mostly just a hypocrite who doesn't want to admit he's the same kind of wealth that grinds non-wealthy people up for pleasure.
But Gatsby is a man who became obsessed with a woman and did everything he could to win her heart, including fraud. Yes, that's not good behavior, but he's not meant to be taken as a bad guy so much as someone who made some mistakes because of higher emotions.
Tom OTOH is just toxic masculinity. Fucks other women, can't stand any other guy getting attention, doesn't give a crap about people who die, etc.
> 50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files
I'm not sure 50 years from now there will be flash emulators. Who is going to write on for the XP3.12345235 Fruity Ununpentium Silicon x256^2 neuralink devices.
Didn't Flash die because iPhones weren't going to support it? So one of the major OSes people spend most of their lives on can't even run SFW files. Can Android? I've honestly never tried.
Assuming RAM and GPU prices come down again so that we can afford to buy our own hardware instead of running everything in the cloud, which forbids "nefarious" software. /s?
A couple days ago, someone published their archive of HN that works in any browser.
Archiving sites is easy anyway. I wrote a Scrapy app that archives everything within the a specific fandom on Ao3. TH hardest part is remembering how beautiful soup queries work.
I mean highly dynamic, entirely frontend sites like these are hard to archive, since you have to really preserve every bit of JavaScript dependency, including any dynamically loaded dependencies, and rewire everything to work again.
And then hope that whatever browser features you rely on aren't removed in 20 years. Flash applets from 20 years ago are usually more self-contained and Just Work if you have a functioning runtime (either the official one or Ruffle)
Until you realize that child pornography would be protected by the First Amendment without obscenity carved out.
The Miller Test is what defines obscenity, and it seems pretty reasonable to me: is it about gross sex according to the average person (not the most Karen person), and does it lack serious literary, political, scientific, or artistic merit.
Honestly, I'm not aware of a Supreme Court case that held something to be obscene that was IMO wrongly decided. Pornography is fine. Even lolicon (cartoon sex of children) has been protected under the First Amendment and not deemed obscene.
The problem with opening the "which obscene is protected" door is that it gives the government (presumed to be correct in judgement by default) too much power. See Bush W admin's leaning on credit card processors to freeze out content they didn't like.
If a Miller bargain must be struck, then "not allowing pornography to be exposed to minors (and no other limits for everyone else)" seems a better line.
Then putting some safeguards in around what can and cannot be used as an age test in order to maximally preserve privacy (e.g. independent, non-government company, no identifiable information persisted, non-id verification options, etc) and what constitutes pornography (and what isn't).
I'm a free-speech maximalist, but "porn for kids" is a tough hill to die on. Even if there are sound technical reasons why that should be allowed, there are too many social ones to make that the all-in bet in a democracy.
Production of child pornography is illegal even without obscenity laws
That doesn't criminalize possession, and arguably there's a compelling interest to do that. But I hate the dance that lawyers do, pretending to legal rigor while simultaneously carving out exceptions that the text cannot justify.
> Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.
> isn't HN more like professional news/discussion place?
I see enough racist and misogynist comments here to know that isn't true. And that's not even considering the low-knowledge comments offered up as expertise.
I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis. (Granted there was also plenty of GNAA frist psot stuff.)
>I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis.
If you had a similar filter here it'd likely have the the opposite effect.
Tom Buchanan and Jay fight over Daisy, and Tom's side chick is overcome with emotion and is hit by a car. Tom couldn't give a fuck about what happened bc he's a total monster who only cares about money and power. Gatsby takes the blame for the woman's death, and her widower tracks down Gatsby and murders him in revenge.
Long story short: pre-Crash capitalism was an orphan-crushing machine. Gatsby got money to pursue love and ended up dead. Buchanan had money and has little positive emotion toward anyone else in the world. Daisy is also concerned with wealth and prestige and allows herself to be mistreated by her husband and thought about leaving him for a richer man. The narrator is also wealthy, and we see him do the same bad acts he criticizes others for, making him ultimately a hypocrite.