Also the schools. Houses in the our city in safe-by-city-standards neighborhoods are not only way more expensive (and, nonetheless, smaller) than the 'burbs, they're usually served by some of the worst schools in the area. So then you're paying for private school, on top of more expensive housing. The math for living in the city doesn't work out unless you're really rich—or don't have kids. You could maybe do it with one and not hurt your wallet too much, but the costs scale quickly with 2+.
Between promoting sponsors (ads), promoting their own programs (ads), and trying to get me to give them my car (ads), it seems like my local NPR station's ~25-30% ads even when it's not pledge drive week.
I'd say that it felt like the movie wanted Rey to join Kylo. It was what it was building to. It would have fit with the taking-an-old-thing-and-twisting-it vibe of the rest of the film. The momentum of the film seemed in that moment to strain and fail against what I assume were the limits of how far off the rails JJ/Disney would let it go. It'd have taken what was already probably the 3rd most interesting and original Star Wars movie and given it a real shot at the #2 spot (A New Hope's nigh-unassailable in its #1 position, having created the phenomenon of the multi-genre pastiche film).
There are a number of places where the movie felt like the plot turned away from where it was heading.
Rey and Kylo unite? Nah.
Leia dies? Nah.
Luke overcomes pain and returns as a master? Nah.
Finn does something impactful and important? Nah.
Poe is a hero? Nah.
Like, imagine if instead of Admiral Holdo it were all Leia. It sure as hell felt like it was supposed to be Leia. Imagine Leia never went into a coma, but she was clearly terrified by her near death and experience with the Force and upset over the loss of the command staff. (I mean, Admiral Ackbar is dead!) What if it were Leia's sacrifice at the end? I can't help but feel it should have been, and not because of Carrie Fisher's loss.
The problems inherent to the narrative, like Luke Skywalker being completely without hope when he literally is the New Hope are just... weird, and it goes on a bit too long. Yoda should've shown up sooner. I get that Jedi masters are old and crusty and don't want to teach the ways of the Force anymore. I get that the Jedi were wrong to ignore all emotion. Qui Gon was wrong to take Anakin away from his mother and leave her behind. Obi Wan was wrong to hide Vader's identity from Luke. Yoda was wrong in Empire Strikes Back to tell Luke to let his friends die. Luke is wrong to tell Rey to leave. Luke was right about Vader in Return of the Jedi. Rey was right to go to Kylo (surprisingly, somewhat). What does Obi-Wan tell Luke in A New Hope? "Trust your feelings. Let go." It seems that Jedi only gain enlightenment in death.
What the Jedi have done out of fear of the Dark Side is eliminate all emotions and therefore all virtue. The Jedi are not good. They're neutral. They're safe.
But safety doesn't make heroes. Safety doesn't protect your friends. Safety doesn't overcome tyranny.
In the end, again, Luke does overcome his despair. Again he follows his feelings and helps his friends, even at the cost of his own life.
Say what you will about the end of TLJ, but Luke still died a hero.
> Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.)
You can still do this with React. Some of the most-common general-purpose libraries for working with React aren't that big and could be written from scratch pretty easily. If you recognize when something's entire purpose is apparently to replicate OO features while staying "purely" functional by jumping through a series of awkward hoops, you can recall that the language you're writing in does, in fact, support OOP, and avoid the library altogether by using built-in language features (I keep seeing this in the React ecosystem and it drives me nuts).
Probably use Redux because everyone and everything expects that you are. It's easy to understand if you ignore their bad terminology and go in knowing it's just an event/messaging system, more or less. Action = event. "Action creator" = anything that dispatches an event. Reducer = your event handlers. Exactly what you'd expect from an event system with centralized event handling. Utterly mundane and non-magical. Figure out how to leverage "combineReducers" to keep your file structure sane and just go. The closest thing it has to magic going on is that when an event comes through it checks to see whether any of the refs in your "state tree" changed as a result of that event, and triggers re-renders on relevant connected view(s) (React views, in your case). That's it. Note that with a very little creativity one can decouple one's Redux code and most/all of one's business logic into its own library to share it between React and React Native.
If you use React Native, you're in for a treat if you're used to fully native cross-platform dev. It really does a great job of rounding off the many, many rough corners on Android that make it such a pain-in-the-ass to work with. Warning: the ecosystem's kinda nutty and does a bad job of keeping in sync, so avoid dependencies that directly target React Native as much as possible if you want to ever be able to, say, upgrade your React Native version without breaking everything. Pure JS libs that have no truck with React Native, good. Libs that add narrowly-scoped extra native integration for RN, usually good. Mostly JS libs that add on to React Native itself, typically just a disaster waiting to happen, no matter how nice they seem at first.
Oh, and use Typescript. For the love of god use Typescript. Just start the project with it, and never look back.
Yeah, Henry James is the novelist. William's brother. I'd call his output... mixed, but much of it's really good. Big fan of Washington Square, myself. Probably better to approach shorter novella-ish works like that, and his actual short stories (there are lots) first, and work your way up to the novels (there are also lots of those). Do not start with Daisy Miller. It's among his most famous and widely-read, but just don't.
"I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered ‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is that they are supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we’ll leave each other strictly alone."
- Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, 1961
I don't wanna go dig through my copy to find it right now, but there's also a pretty long bit where he describes how most of the "work" that most of the "workers" at his (the character, Frank Wheeler's) firm do is making brief comments on various proposals or memos or whatever then sending them off to other people for their comments, trying to avoid being caught with the hot potato and actually having to do whatever's being proposed. They're all very good at it.
It doesn't take a ton of time to be way better-informed than most people on current events. Background reading of big ol' books is a lot more valuable than keeping up with the headlines every day. You can catch up on the need-to-know current events with one monthly paper you scan on a lazy Sunday morning, and maybe a weekly or monthly newsletter or two. Reading about the stuff daily is 100% not necessary.
Similarly, and especially given our two-party system in the US, following every twist and turn in a political race is pure entertainment, of exactly no more value to you or anyone else than watching soap operas. You can make an as-informed-as-it-needs-to-be decision by spending that time on building up foundational knowledge instead, then catching up on the happenings of the race and the candidates' positions an hour before you go vote.
> Congress seems to be more dysfunctional now than it was in the 80's and 90's.
Electoral punishment for gaming the system to extreme levels, and even for misconduct that has no benefit for a party or candidates image or efficacy (blatant corruption, Roy Moore-type behavior [edit, 1]) has proven to be non-existent. The more various candidates and officials push, the farther it's clear they can go without punishment. Things are getting worse because they keep trying to push farther, and succeeding.
This is largely because of wedge issues—especially abortion, but also guns to a lesser extent. The problem won't go away unless we modify our election system to permit more than two viable parties at a time, so that, say, an anti-abortion party can go way off the rails and its saner voters can defect to another anti-abortion party, without losing anti-abortion voting power in legislative bodies (as, say, a protest vote would), and so on for every other issue. Proportional representation or something along those lines would help a lot. Most any effective change like this would also eliminate or greatly reduce the power of gerrymandering.
[1] Nearly non-existent—he did lose, after all, but narrowly.
