• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Hard disagree here. I’m a rabid wheel of time fan who has read the books at least 6 times.

    Ir would be downright impossible to “stick to the source” for book one (or really, any if them) and have it be good on film. It just wouldn’t work on film, there is too much going on. The story would feel like it drags and is being forcefully stretched out, because the book is rather repetitive. That repetition works in a book because you are getting to read the characters inner thoughts, and in paper it adds tension that, for example, Rand and Mat are unsure whether the next place they stay will be full of dark friends.

    But after the third time they get chased out by dark friends a TV audience would be like “OK they did this already get on with it.” Repetition on TV gets boring FAST.

    And the magic system is all kinds of messy in the books. They’re diving into it a bit more now, but it’s still got Tobe simplified for screen. You can’t convey characters thoughts on screen, which basically neuters the whole system. The book is VERY exposition heavy, and that gets boring real quick on screen. Look at the LOTR theatrical VS extended editions. There is a reason that Bilbo talking about Hobbits at the beginning got cut. I like that scene, but it also is too much exposition to drop on the viewer right after the intro, which is also exposition. EOTW is like half exposition, and most of the books are at least a third exposition. That all has to get cut or reworked to be actually fun to watch without being super preachy. It’s

    Listen to Brandon Sanderson talking about the adaptation of Mistborm he has been working in for ages now. He has said that he had to make big, fundamental changes to the characters and story to make it work on film. He said his first draft was closest to the book, and that it was quite bad.

    The biggest fuckup season 1 of the show did was not including the prologue. Idk why they cut it, it’s such a good intro. Besides that, I thought they did alright. Season two has been much better so far, and has shown that they really do understand the core of this story and all of the characters in it.













  • For close to 2 decades we had near 0 interest rates. VC daddies used that as an excuse to throw loads of money at every itiots pet project because hey, why not? They were able to absolutely roll in money and take out loans at criminally low rates.

    But now rates are getting back to actually sane levels again, and suddenly the vc daddies are all sad because the infinite money pit has dried up and they actually have to be responsible with their money again. So now they’re turning to all of the companies that they gave money to and are saying “hey remember when I gave you money? Pay me back now. I don’t care if it means you have to fundamentally change the service that’s making you money, get me my money or I’ll bring you down with it.”

    And since our economy is structured such that the money of wealthy people is more important than literally anything or anyone else in our society, the companies have no choice but to comply. So they all raise their prices and shore up the holes that weren’t letting them milk every cent out of their users.





  • But like, using LaTeX as a replacement for microsoft word is NOT really useful advice for the vast majority of people who use Word. I don’t need ANY of the special things LaTeX does, and I’ve been using Word all my life to do the basic stuff I need it for.

    I get where people here are coming from, but the whole point of this thread is talking about proprietary software which is better for the average use case than open source stuff, and I think the point still stands that MSOffice products absolutely fit that bill. Yes, open source or free alternatives exist, but they aren’t nearly as good, feature-full, and easy to learn and use as the open source alternatives.

    The fact that we’re here arguing whether LaTeX is a viable alternative to Word and Power Point kinda proves that MSOffice is the best for this IMO, because LaTeX isn’t exactly easy to pick up and use and is really intended for industries that need extremely complex formatting on their presentations and papers.


  • This guys reply to me was literally “git isn’t too technical, mathematicians use this extremely complicated program for generating highly technical documents all the time so obviously grandma could too!”

    I agree 100% with you, I tried to use LaTeX ONE time in college and nearly chucked my computer out the window, and I’m a software developer. I was using it for a math class and couldn’t get my head around any of it.

    It certainly isn’t a good replacement for MSWord or PowerPoint for the VAST majority of people who don’t need to put mathematical notation into their presentations and just need words on a screen


  • Adobe Acrobat. I have tried at least 5 other PDF readers and editors for windows, and none of them are remotely close. Either they don’t have any document editing at all and are just PDF readers, or their editing capabilities are VERY clunky, not feature rich, or just don’t work.

    I haven’t ever found another program that let’s me directly edit text in a PDF that already exists.

    I don’t need to edit PDFs much but when I do it’s usually quite important, and Adobe is by far the easiest and quickest to do it in.

    I hate that that’s the case, because I really don’t like Adobe as a company and would rather not have to use their software, but there it is.