Even as a 13-year-old, I could see gaping holes in the plot and inconsistencies. The aliens were hardly alien.
Even more so, I could see that the writing was clumsy and the dialogue was stilted. I could see how the writer was developing the story, and so I was not pulled into it at all. I was actually thinking to myself that I could write something like this. And I was 13!
I haven’t seen the movie, but from the sounds of it many of the problems with the book are also on screen.
I don’t know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven’t finished. Shows you just how bad it is.
I haven’t done it, bit I believe that with a pressure cooker you don’t need to soak the chickpeas.
All but one of my grandparents had died before I was born, and the remaining one died when I was about 10. She was a stickler for social rules, so I found her kind of intimidating.
A quetzal in the rainforest of Panama.
To sleep, perchance to dream. And in that sleep of death, what dreams may come!
Hamlet (hopefully I didn’t get it too wrong)
I have been using walkscape as well. My walks with the dogs have almost doubled in length, just because I have a little incentive to achieve a goal in the game.
Several years ago, we were given clothes by a woman whose husband had died. I still wear some of them, and we refer to one of the shirts as “the dead guy shirt”.
I don’t think that off-ease laptops are very good as they are sold. The batteries are often on their way out and so that’s an additional expense (and some, like Macs, are very expensive to replace).
There are some incredible deals on off-lease desktops, though. Most modern computers are way overpowered for what the average user needs. You can get a perfectly serviceable machine for doing email, serving the web, and office work, for $100 or less. Just don’t expect to play any games released within the last five or more years.
We have ways of making you talk: a historian and a stand-up comedian explore the nooks and crannies is WWII. Insightful and entertaining. I’m still enjoying it after 600 episodes.
I second this. I have learned four languages aside from my native English, and Language Transfer is easily the most natural and effective system I have ever used.
My wife has a lot of trouble learning languages, but she found Language Transfer very effective as well.
It’s completely free and relies on donations. I have been a monthly donor on Patreon for about 5 years now.
Back in 1996 I was studying computer science, and one of my courses required me to write programs in Prolog. Rather than go to the school to work on the computers there, I bought an enormous book (I think it was a printout of all the man pages) that had Yggdrasil Linux CD-ROM, and ran it on my home desktop.
Some people don’t think it be like it is, but it do.
I was listening to a podcast that suggested the main reason the Nazis wanted to kill Jews is because they felt that the rise of Christianity, originating among the Jews, was what weakened the Roman Empire and caused it to crumble.
For their own empire, modeled along Roman lines, they didn’t want the same thing to happen.
Back when the X-Files was ruling the airwaves, in the 90s, there was a companion show called Millennium. The first season was a bit weak, focusing on serial killers and gore. Second season went completely off the rails in the best way possible. The third season was a lackluster attempt to regain a wider audience.
I would recommend watching the second season for sure. It has religious satire (you will know exactly who they are skewering when you see it), the occult, end of days, mixed in with humor and solid human drama. The season finale, when they thought that they weren’t going to be renewed, is extraordinary.