Grim Fandango was one of the first games I bought out of my own pocket. And as was the norm back then, this used up all my games budget for months, so I had to stick to this game, for better or worse, for a long time.
I remember it took me a very long time to even find the Tube Room, it's easy to miss unless you do the 3D equivalent of pixelhunting to find the place where you need to take a turn. And boy, was I stuck in Rubacava!
I also remember that it was slightly difficult to buy the game - I was at least 13 at the time, the game had an age rating of 12, but (gasp!) there were skeletons on the cover, and the tag line mentioned corruption and crime. So the lady in the shop actually called her boss before eventually selling the game to me.
I didn’t write the previous comment, but I think the point here is that there is a long-running trend aiming to protect users both from malicious intent and to a certain extent from themselves.
In the past, viruses had it easy to infect and spread computers because of both inattentive users clicking on mails claiming someone loved them, and the default access mode for any user granting them admin access.
Even though review processeses generally do not exist for computers, they are part of that same trend.
The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones:
An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.
It feels to me as if the author got it backwards - in turning the AC back on, they didn’t „say no“ - the person who put up the note has „said no“ in the first place (to the practice of turning the ACs off) and the author was ignoring this clearly visible outlined boundary that other person has drawn.
Don’t get me wrong, the note itself wasn’t great either, but ignoring it wasn’t some great sign of „saying no“ - it was needlessly escalating a conflict instead of trying to resolve it.
100%, the author believes they learned the lesson, but failed to recognize what it looks like when a person on the other side initiates this process. It's amazing the dissonance here:
> They should expect a possible answer to be 'No' and be prepared to negotiate the difference. I didn't throw these wise words back at him, but that's what was going through my head. And it emboldened me further. I simply told him the room is unusable for yoga with the AC on and we've paid rent for the room.
They were emboldened to discard even mentioning negotiation and stood their ground instead. That might be fine if the lesson you're trying to illustrate is one about firm boundaries but the advice they're holding up here was very much the opposite.
Probably because LLM output only gives the appearance of cohesive writing, but the more you try to understand the author's intent and meaning, the more confusing and annoying it gets, as there is no author, no intent and no meaning there to understand.
That’s not it in this case, because the book is mostly a recounting of what happened.
I narrowed it down to two things:
One is that every aspect of the story is treated equally - unimportant facets get an equally profound sounding prose like the really important bits.
And the other one is the repetition of phrases. Everything is worth slowing down on.everything is load bearing. That’s so annoying.
As you read it, you would naturally try to understand why the author used such profound-sounding prose in that particular part of the text. You would expect that the author's intent was to emphasize the important bits. When the author talks about slowing down or something being load-bearing, you would expect that they're going somewhere with this, that this particular bit is especially important in some way.
But with an LLM-generated text, these attempts at understanding will get you nowhere and only produce frustration. The reader is left trying to interpret a signal that isn't really there.
I find it very hard to find books worth reading. It’s so difficult to separate Signal from noise - there are just too many books and too few reliable curators. Amazon ratings, goodreads, some book awards, best seller lists - they all are sometimes hit, mostly miss for me.
Depends on what you want to read. For fantasy and sci-fi fiction I really like the Youtube community. I did not expect this at all but there are a lot of great "Booktubers" in the 3-5k subscriptions range. Tiktok and Instagram have a lot more "vanity" people and it feels like more of a "look how much I read har-har" kinde of vibe and I avoid them completely.
It is indeed an odd challenge to find good books because I hate to be spoiled and that limits the search options quite a bit.
I used to be in that boat of not knowing what to read. Even using r/books didn't always give me good books.
Until, I realized Hacker News users sometimes recommend books in their comments, and the books are related to the topic being discussed. Also, sometimes there are submissions asking people to list their favorite books ever, favorite books read in a particular year, etc. It was a game changer.
Reminds me of m favorite late 90s messenger, Odigo[0]. It had some sort of radar which showed you people who were visiting the same site. It sure had this town hall feel, but admittedly most sites were simply empty.
Yeah me too. It felt like it was designed exclusively for me, it ticks all the boxes in what a dumb phone should and shouldn't have in terms of functionality.
> If it had an option to install a messenger of choice (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp etc)
It has that capability. From TFA:
> A flip phone with the apps you need: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. Music, podcasts, maps, rideshare, a great camera for the moments worth keeping.
I also remember that it was slightly difficult to buy the game - I was at least 13 at the time, the game had an age rating of 12, but (gasp!) there were skeletons on the cover, and the tag line mentioned corruption and crime. So the lady in the shop actually called her boss before eventually selling the game to me.
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