#tcl rants

[mtjapblogger]

Revisiting a budget phone and reconsidering my tech carry.

I came across my TCL 30xl and decided to turn it on and let it update. While the apps were updating, a system update started to download as well. After everything was updated, the TCL 30xl is running Android 12 with the March 2023 security patch. This is nice to see, considering that in my review of the 30xl, the very outdated security patch was a primary concern with this phone. Now that it’s…

[idealisticrealism]

TCL 3x10 thoughts

The main things: 

The ep starts immediately after last ep, then goes to the next morning and takes place over just one day. Nadia also says it’s been ‘an eventful few weeks’ since she made the deal to buy the house (which was in 3x01, so the entire season has taken place over around 3 weeks)

One of my favourite things about this series, and about Thony specifically, is that she’s not only an unintentional angel of death for the people around her, but also for criminal empires?? Literally this show is full of seasoned criminals who thrived for years in the darkest parts of the Vegas underworld, and then they encounter Thony, and boom! Down they go. Hayak. Cortes. Kamdar. (Even Arman, in a slightly different way). And now it looks like Sin Cara is next… honestly the Feds should be falling at her feet in gratitude haha 

Lol at Thony and Fi’s little bit of theatre for Jeremy as they set up their own little ‘sting’ for him. Thony actually nearly breaking and laughing at Fi’s ranting for a second was so cute, because while this is a serious situation, it is a bit bizarre to think that this is what their life has become. And this scene was so worth it just to get to watch two skilled actors having to pretend to be bad at acting… moments like this are always fun, like a kind of act-ception haha. Ngl it’s a good thing that Thony confronts Jeremy by the end of the episode though, bc I doubt it would have taken much longer for him to notice something was up, with all the dramatic conversations happening right in front of his bugs while and other conversations were hushed under the cover of super loud TV/music. Not to mention the suspiciously intentional-looking plumbing emergencies lol (seriously Thony?? A hammer??? lol).  To be fair though, Fi’s acting did improve a lot by the end, with their clever little ploy to make Jeremy think Thony was on her way to kill Nadia. That entire sequence was done well– even though anyone who has been watching the show for more than like a week would know that Thony would never kill Nadia (at least while literally any other option existed), it was still enjoyable to experience the ‘suspense’ that the creative team set up regarding Nadia’s fate. I just hope that she can make it through the finale… 

Honestly I love the deliberate continued theme in this show of Thony being caught between worlds, and the constant push and pull of ‘good vs evil’ and ‘power vs vulnerability’. It’s why, despite all her efforts, she can never quite escape the criminal world, and she can never quite escape the hold of the FBI either. And they’re often tied up together, too– to protect herself or someone she cares about from one, she reaches out to the other. In late s1, Arman helped protect her from the FBI by agreeing to be an informant, and in turn she was part of the plan to protect him from both the FBI and Hayak. In S2, she agrees to inform for the FBI again in order to protect Arman and keep him out of prison. And now, she’s making that same deal– and risking her own safety– but for Nadia this time. To me, though, I think that she’s reached a kind of ‘fool me once’ situation with the FBI, and though she says she’s going to help then take down Sin Cara, I think she is actually going to be following her own agenda, and using the ties she has to both the cartel and the FBI to manipulate them into taking each other out, and leaving her being the only one left standing. And god I hope that’s where things are headed bc I would be so here for it.

I really wish we’d been able to see a lot more of Thony and Nadia’s relationship this season, because it’s so compelling and complex and I’ve loved every moment they’ve shared so far. Nadia’s “oh no” at seeing Thony walking into the club was hilarious; they haven’t seen each other in the week or so since the wake, but Thony showing up at the club looking deathly serious is never a good sign. I loved that they were immediately like ‘ok bye Jorge the grownups need to talk’ tho lol– he may have formed connections with both of them, but he hasn’t gotten to this level of club membership yet. Thony’s first question to Nadia (“Did you cut a deal with the feds?”) felt like an interesting tie-in to the events of earlier eps, given that it was exactly what Nadia asked her at the wake– tbh these two must feel like they’re on a merry-go-round or something, and it’s all because they just haven’t been completely open with one another!!! But finally, here, they’re starting to be, even if it’s too goddamn late now (*adele voice* we could have had it aaaaaalll). But anyway ughhhh “All I wanted was to find Arman, like you. I wanted to protect him.” Honestly Nadia acknowledging/accepting Thony’s genuine love of Arman has been one of the parts of this season that I have appreciated the most. These two women are bonded by that love, which is why Thony telling Nadia she should have come to her is such a punch in the gut, because you can see her pain and regret, her utter dismay at the fact that her preoccupation with her own family (getting Fi and Chris back, preventing Luca from being taken away) led her to overlook what was going on with Nadia– aka with Arman’s family– and now she has let down the only other person Arman truly loved. And I think she went to La Habana fully intending to warn her, but then it became clear that Nadia wouldn’t listen to her even if she did try to pose the fake-death plan (“You always think you know everything. But you don’t”), and would’ve almost certainly tried to run instead, endangering both of them. So instead Thony tries once more to talk Ramona out of it (unsuccessfully, of course), and ugh when she says she wants to take care of Nadia herself “For Arman” and she squeezes her eyes shut as she says his name… the grief of losing him is still so goddamn fresh and now she’s terrified she’s going to fail him by not being able to save Nadia in time. But that’s the thing about Thony– she never gives up on the people she loves. And because of Arman, that group includes Nadia. 

Nadia’s reaction to Thony striding straight into her house (literally how does Thony even know where that is?) is so funny bc she doesn’t even get angry, it’s just like mild exasperation as she tries to convince Thony to leave. That is, until her brain catches up and suddenly she just stops and says “What’s happening?” because she knows Thony, knows that she wouldn’t actually barge in like this without a damn serious reason. When Thony tells her the danger she’s in, she believes her immediately (ugh her panic was hard to watch) and immediately begs for Thony to help– because while they may have a complex relationship, she knows that Thony is the only person she has left who actually cares what happens to her, and she also knows that Thony is clever and capable and holds a surprising amount of power, and often does manage to fix things even when a situation seems impossible. Which is exactly what Thony does next– and while I wish that Thony had explained to Nadia about what she was going to do, so Nadia didn’t have to have those brief moments of terror and betrayal before she lost consciousness, I get that it had to be written this way or it would have spoiled the twist. But oh man, even though I knew  Thony wouldn’t kill her and that she was going to be fine, the relief at seeing her wake up on that couch was still so damn real, phew. Eva did an amazing job with Nadia’s emotions on waking up, from utter confusion to a mix of relief, gratitude and anger. The scene between her and Thony in Jeremy’s lair felt like it was cut off midway through, which I guess means that they’re going to pick up exactly where they left off in the finale next week, like this was actually a 3-part finale rather than a 2 parter, and I can’t wait to see more of the Nadia/Thony dynamic next week.

And given my love for both Nadia and Thony, gotta say I do love how much Ramona herself has shown genuine admiration for both women, for their competence, intelligence, determination, fortitude, their coolness under pressure, and their desire for power. (Like in her conversation with Ramona, Thony would always deny that desire, but tbh people who want a simple family life do not become cardiac surgeons. Much like being a cartel leader, it’s a profession that provides money, prestige, authority, and a near-godlike ability over life and death– ergo, power). Anyway, Ramona’s entire art collection, her life, is centred around women with those traits, and tbh in another life I think these three incredible women could have become an unbeatable team that ruled Vegas together. Ramona saw that possibility and tried to make it happen, only for both of them to reject her, and now… well, I think we are heading for a ‘this town ain’t big enough for the both of us’ situation, and lbr it’s going to be Thony that’s the one left standing

Honestly I love that I have written a bunch of words already for this ep, and it’s all been about women– that’s one of the true gifts of this show, how much it focuses on women and their stories and their relationships. In the earlier seasons it was mostly just focused around Thony and Fi’s characters, but after the loss of Adan, and having a female villain for a change (two if you count Russo), the focus on women has definitely expanded and been even more apparent this season. I’m sad that it’s looking unlikely that Ramona or my baby Nadia will return next season, because they deserved to have more of their story told. Still, I’m clinging to the hope that Nadia may somehow return, and I’ll get more of the amazing Thony & Nadia dynamic that we all deserve

Anyway I guess I could talk about a boy now– though given that he is literally surrounded by women in his life, Jorge is an honorary girl to me lol. It was cute to see him so excited about all the hotel stuff, from his big spiel to Nadia to all the proposal materials in his office– looks like he’s finally found his own path, not just the one Ramona chose for him. (Though holy shit it’s so messed up that the corporate world is literally the best place to hide illegal activity, wow). I found it hilarious that when Jorge was trying to sell Nadia on the hotel idea and saying all this stuff about how she’ll be the face of it etc, the picture very clearly shows he’s planning to call it ‘JS hotel’ lol. So she’s the face but it’s named after you?? Hmmm. Also geez he laid it on a little thick with the flattery there, but I guess it worked, because you could see how smitten she was with the hotel idea. And I can understand how some people might interpret that as her being smitten with him, but I genuinely don’t think so. First of all, she lost the man she loved literally like a week and a half ago; there’s no way that she has even the slightest inclination to look at anyone romantically right now. Plus, the show has already established that she’s incredibly good at reading people. She knows he’s trying to manipulate her in order to access her money, but in her life, that’s just a demonstration of good business skills. She sees what working with him can give her, and she wants it. In S1 she says to Arman “What do we own? Nothing”-- I think it’s hugely important to her character to actually be in possession of something big, to be the owner, not just the manager, to remove herself as far from the powerless girl from the Argentinian slums as she can. Anyway I love that one of his arguments is that she’ll be ‘set for life’ if they do this… because apparently already having 50 million dollars isn’t being set for life??? Man, what a world they live in haha. Anyway with it seeming unlikely that Nadia will be around next season, I wonder if the hotel will still somehow happen in S4? Maybe somehow Thony gets involved with it, though I don’t really see her wanting any part in something like that… tbh my main concern is that we might not get to see the La Habana set next season :(

Seeing Jeremy’s reaction to being burned was so satisfying. Not so clever now, are you, buddy?? Got outsmarted by a civilian just like Garrett did, and now you’ll be working with her, just like Garrett… but unlike Garrrett, she has zero regard or sense of obligation toward you, and so you may think she’s gonna work with you and follow your orders, but think again. She’s just going to bide her time until she has you right where she wants you, and then she will completely fuck you over, because you betrayed her family and took the man she loves, and that’s what you deserve. Be grateful if you walk out of all of this alive. 

Other stuff:

Omg Fi going for the baseball bat to take out the smoke alarm. Someone has issues with impulsivity haha. Tbh her and Thony’s entire relationship is just the two of them taking turns holding each other back from doing something stupid and I love it

Ugh seeing Nadia standing all alone in that huge empty house, talking about how it’s time to put the past behind her and have a fresh start… and then later saying to Jorge that she just wants to be free… and then Thony telling her at the end that she’s free and she tells Thony that she took her whole life form her… ugh stop giving me stressful foreshadowing here writers. If Nadia has to go, write her out by having her run away into the sunset with her millions. Don’t make me watch her die twice!!!!!!!!!

I didn't initially remember seeing Ramona and Russo cross paths at La habana, but @gsue74 reminded me that they glimpse each other across the club the first time Ramona goes there, and Ramona noticed the way Nadia reacted to her arrival. Well done of the writers to plant that in 3x04 to come back up now. Anyway I do enjoy Russo’s sassiness though. It was never super obvious before bc she was always having to play the serious one keeping Garrett in line, but I think I see why they got along lol

Oh boy the agent that scared Violeta really fucked up lol, like maybe don’t piss off a super powerful cartel leader??? Dude’s gonna be feeding the fishes in the Hoover Dam in no time lol

 I love that the proposed hotel site is completely in the middle of nowhere, like too bad if the guests want to visit any other part of Vegas haha. Though I guess that might be entire point, to make it like a one-stop shop so guests will spend all their time and money in the one place lol

JD is such a cutie. Loved him taking advantage of a free weekday to bring thoughtful gifts for his bae. Lol at Fi shutting him up with a kiss– she really needs to go somewhere private and tell him everything though, bc he needs to know so he doesn’t inadvertently screw things up for them again. 

I really felt for Fi when she found the immigrant worker house empty– this show is always full of painful near-misses in terms of timing, but at least in this case there’s still the hope that Thony will be able to use her sway over Jorge to find Camila and Gisele

Anyway ugh the promo for the finale looks so good… Nadia at Thony’s house, wearing borrowed clothes while Thony makes a plan to get her her money back… Jorge apparently being there too and helping them… Thony in a fancy dress, shooting a gun… it might be Ramona’s assassin guy that she shoots (one of the clips looks like he could be fighting with Jeremy) but man it would be cool if it was actually Ramona or Jeremy that she shoots, and honestly I’m so down for either of those options. Maybe she even does it to protect one of them from the other– like maybe she shoots Ramona to save Jeremy, which would mean she’d probably get pardoned by the FBI for everything. Or she shoots Jeremy to save Ramona, making Ramona extremely grateful, and as a result Ramona makes sure the shooting never ties back to her, and brings her into Sin Cara in a position of power…. Either way it’s going to make for an interesting S4!  

[missusplum]

Why are you so hopeful when these writers might bait and play us again?

What were you’re thoughts on the finale and what stories would you like to see next season?

Here’s hoping for one of your long essays

lmao i completely get the frustration, but the way i really see it, i don’t think the takeaway from this season is that armony will never be a focus; it’s that this show chooses to be chaotic just for the sake of being ~shocking~ and ~unexpected~ so really by that benchmark anything is possible lol

for those reasons i think going into the business of trying to predict anything on this show is generally a bad idea and a recipe to setting yourself up for disappointment. so i have no thoughts on what might go down in s3, just that i hope we get one loool. because despite all my yapping and complaining i really do want to see more of this show, and i think there are lots of stories still to tell. i started watching for elodie and i’m gonna stay for her too 😌

i’ll share my thoughts on s2 behind the cut:

my general sentiment on this season is a big meh lol. like all the criticism and worries i had about where the season was headed and about kamdar being nothing more than a lightning rod all stumbled into fruition. my biggest criticism is that the writing seems intent on delivering shocking moments and stressful situations at the sacrifice of interesting stories and actual character development. the biggest example of this is the show choosing to drop chris’ story, the far superior and more emotionally-compelling storyline, halfway into the season and choosing to fully focus on kamdar instead. i really think it was a gigantic misstep to veer into this direction and a misread of what drew people to this show in the first place. to me, the real strength of tcl was always, always, the chemistry between arman and thony, and between thony and fiona. people watched because of the actors’ chemistry; even in s1 the mob drama was always less interesting and draggingly melodramatic at times. but people put up with it because it was the vehicle to showcase the chemistry and relationships that intrigued everyone. s2 literally went full throttle into mob territory and sacrificed the emotional side and the relationships that made us care in the first place. and that is the true fumble here.

i do get frustrated reading some of the postmortem interviews with the EPs because i really want to know what progress they think this season made at all. almost all the new characters that they brought on have died (shoutout to JD for living to see another day!), the triangle of death is still in tact, thony is still single-mindedly focused on her family, luca is still sick, the de la rosas are still undocumented, arman still has no power, etc. and everyone is so miserable 🥴 something something about a clinic and helping out the community was completely overshadowed by this kamdar storyline which ended exactly how we all knew it would end, with him dead. oh i guess g*rrett miller died too. overdue imo but i’m sorry to his fans for your loss lol

one thing i will say is while i think it was very deliberate to have thony do unlikable things and behave antagonistically, i still think a lot of the fandom is being unfair with how much hate she’s getting and letting recency bias cloud their judgment. this is the same character that agreed in a second to sell street drugs because arman looked sad and then immediately incriminated herself when they got caught, literally only to protect arman. it’s a complete disservice to the character and franking oversimplifying just to write her off as selfish. she is anything but selfish imo. i do believe, and the EPs have said as much, that she has a tendency to be arrogant and to think she knows better, and this stems from her career as a surgeon. but to say she hasn’t paid for her mistakes is crazy lol, the entire two finale hours was basically nothing working out the way she wanted, and everyone telling her off and giving her shit for what she’s done. which for the record i liked; thony has often acted purely on instinct, but i like that this time that she had to lose and that the same instinct led her to make bad decisions. makes for a more compelling character vs. one who is always doing the right thing. i will say that i think reverting to anchoring all of thony’s actions to be about saving luca’s life was a narrative mistake. not only because it only underscores what we already learned about her in s1, but because atp (and i hate to say it) luca is nothing but a plot device imo. like people get frustrated when luca is thrust into the forefront again because aside from being a cute kid who is unfairly ill, there’s nothing else to the character. is he not literally only there to be sick and to cause thony to act irrationally? instead of investing time into actually making luca a well-rounded character with a personality, we wasted scenes on the likes of kamdar and maya, none of whom ended up having any staying power on the show anyway, and the stakes ended up feeling repetitive. i cannot understand why there was a need to bring on so many new (and temporary!?) characters in a short season when you already have existing shallowly-written core characters that the audience actually wants and needs to know more about.

i’ve already made my opinions on love triangles very clear lol and it still stands. like if you’re a fan of any of the characters of arman, thony, or nadia, i cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want this triangle to continue. it’s horrible for all of them; it’s unattractive to see arman continue to divide his heart between two women; it’s depressing to see thony reduce herself to an emotionless robot because she has to shut arman out; and it’s ridiculously unrealistic to think that nadia would still put up with arman after all the arguments they’ve had about thony already. if you’ve read any of the postseason interviews with melissa carter and miranda kwok they seem pretty intent on continuing to ride this out. i’m flummoxed because like what more is there to explore???

in one of the interviews, they said that they had to slow down armony because they went too fast in s1 which is wild to me when that’s one of the few reasons why people tuned in in the first place lol. the philosophy behind thinking that when a couple gets together it becomes boring is flawed and imo more of an indictment on the writing if interesting stories can’t be told with your leads in a relationship. miranda kwok said that the bond between arman and thony will be strengthened after surviving what they went through in s2, but literally none of that was communicated to the audience lol. melissa carter said there was an opportunity for more romance in s3 because there was none in s2 but like y’all literally wrote it that way 🥴🥴 i really do think the writing massively overestimated everyone’s patience and tolerance for nothingness and crumbs. it might have been more tolerable if the rest of the show was just as compelling, but imo it just isn’t so s2 was really just watching this show shoot itself in the foot repeatedly lol. fwiw i think a push and pull between these two could have worked but s2 was literally all pull lmao; like if you have guaranteed five seasons to arc out a molasses-paced relationship then sure but we’re barely scraping by here lol 🤧

anyhoo, all in all i hope the writers actually do get a chance to read some of the criticism of this season and it’s not just written off as shippers throwing a tantrum lol. s2 was a bit of a drag to get through but if nothing else, and for better or for worse, i feel like i have a better grasp of what this show is trying to be now so that’s something. all my criticism aside, at the core of it i do love that this is a show with southeast asians at the forefront, with elodie yung at the forefront, and for those facts alone i’ll happily keep rooting for it to succeed and keep contributing my views and ratings. the rest i’ll just keep hoping for the best.

[lazywonderlvnd]

this is actually mind blowing news to me that you're American bcus u use so many phrases that aren't even very common if you weren't from Britain but esp England, there's a part of tcl that Ron was speaking & it was SO typical english so omg very well done

!!!!! WOW THANK U!!!! omg I’m so......shaken tysm 😭😭😭😭 i do literally sm research on british (and esp english) slang and vocabulary and speech patterns and stuff. i have such a fondness for british english, there are so many neat little differences that i find rly endearing and love to try and capture in the dialogue (ron strikes me as someone who speaks rly informally and uses slang a lot so he’s a lot of fun). kind of off topic but i’ve always thought it would have been rly fun and interesting if the dursleys (or the weasleys even) had been from farther north so that harry (or the weasleys) would have more of a northerner accent and speech patterns 🤓🤓🤓 @dracoladon indulges me sometimes and writes manchester!harry rants for me to laugh at and all i have to say is that Harry should’ve been from northern England bye

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CONTRACTORS

In big companies software is often designed, implemented, and sold by three separate types of people. Tcl is the scripting language of Unix, and so its size is proportionate to its complexity, and a funnel for peers. By this point everyone knows you should release fast and iterate. Programming languages are for. They don't even know about the stuff they've invested in. But I think there's more going on than this. If you run out of money, you could say either was the cause. Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it. Every programmer must have seen code that some clever person has made marginally shorter by using dubious programming tricks. In one place I worked, we had a big board of dials showing what was happening to our web servers.1 Every designer's ears perk up at the office writes Tenisha Mercer of The Detroit News. There are borderline cases is-5 two elements or one?

I decided to ask the founders of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. It's due to the shape of the problem here is social. In the arts it's obvious how: blow your own glass, edit your own films, stage your own plays. Only in the preceding couple years had the dramatic fall in the cost of customer acquisition. The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. So the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, because this startup seems the most successful companies. A good deal of that spirit is, fortunately, preserved in macros. The second way to compete with focus is to see what you're making.

But more important, in a hits-driven business, is that source code will look unthreatening. In DC the message seems to be the new way of delivering applications. White. I'm going to risk making one. But looking through windows at dusk in Paris you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how much skill and determination you have, the more you stay pointed in the same business. PR coup was a two-part one. It's conversational resourcefulness. We're more confident. That certainly accords with what I see out in the world.2 Treating indentation as significant would eliminate this common source of bugs as well as making programs shorter. Once you take several million dollars of my money, the investors get a great deal of control.

The dream language is beautiful, clean, and terse. It works.3 It could mean an operating system, or a framework built on top of a programming language as the throwaway programs people wrote in it grew larger. I'm not saying it's correct, incidentally, but it seems like a decent hypothesis. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of a popular system.4 Blogger got down to one person, and they have a board majority, they're literally your bosses.5 Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to fix upon a specific number.6 But as long as you seem to be advancing rapidly, most investors will leave you alone.7 What readability-per-line does mean, to the user encountering the language for others even to hear about it. Users have worried about that since the site was a few months old.8 If it's a subset, you'll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won't be wasting your time, but didn't.9

It's exacerbated by the fast pace of startups, which makes it seem like time slows down: I think you've left out just how fun it was: I think the main reason we take the trouble to develop high-level languages is to get leverage, so that we can say and more importantly, think in 10 lines of a high-level language what would require 1000 lines of machine language. Well, that may be fine advice for a bunch of declarations. Trying to make masterpieces in this medium must have seemed to Durer's contemporaries that way that, say, making masterpieces in comics might seem to the average person today. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York, I was very excited at first. Which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s. This comforting illusion may have prevented us from seeing the real problem with Lisp, or at least Common Lisp, some delimiters are reserved for the language, suggesting that at least some of the least excited about it, including even its syntax, and anything you write has, as much as shoes have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and sitting in a cafe feels different from working. The Detroit News.10

Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it. But the clearest message is that you should be smarter. But hear all the cutting-edge tech and startup news, and run into useful people constantly.11 You won't get to, unless you fail. Running a startup is fun the way a survivalist training course would be fun, and a funnel for peers. It's since grown to around 22,000.12 You may save him from referring to variables in another package, but you need time to get any message through to people that it didn't have to be more readable than a line of Lisp. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it. I'm just stupid, or have worked on some limited subset of applications. This is supposed to be a lot simpler. Whatever a committee decides tends to stay that way, even if it is harder to get from zero to twenty than from twenty to a thousand.13

With two such random linkages in the path between startups and money, it shouldn't be surprising that luck is a big factor in deals. Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of unloading them before they tank. A programming language does need a good implementation, of course. Look at how much any popular language has changed during its life. With a startup, I had bought the hype of the startup world, startup founders get no respect. A real hacker's language will always have a slightly raffish character.14 The eminent feel like everyone wants to take a long detour to get where you wanted to go. But there is a trick you could use the two ideas interchangeably. Their reporters do go out and get users, though. A throwaway program is brevity. I do that the main purpose of a language is readability, not succinctness.15 You can't build things users like without understanding them.

At the moment I'd almost say that a language isn't judged on its own and b something that can be considered a complete application and ship it. They're so desperate for content that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you preferred, write code that was isomorphic to Pascal. When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. To avoid wasting his time, he waits till the third or fourth time he's asked to do something; by then, whoever's asking him may be fairly annoyed, but at the same time the veteran's skepticism. There are several local maxima.16 Defense contractors? When, if ever, is a watered-down Lisp with infix syntax and no macros. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in poking about in gross innards, the teenager's secret pleasure in poking about in gross innards, the teenager's secret pleasure in popping zits.

Notes

What happens in practice signalling hasn't been much of a long time in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s. Even Samuel Johnson seems to be a good idea to make money.

A related problem that they decided to skip raising an A round VCs put two partners on your own mind. That should probably question anything you believed as a cause as it might take an angel investment from a company's culture.

If you don't think they'll be able to formalize a small company that could be made. There was no more unlikely than it was putting local grocery stores out of business you should be.

If Congress passes the founder visa in a time machine, how can anything regressive be good employees either.

If big companies to acquire the startups, the light bulb, the initial investors' point of a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, but I think what they campaign for. When governments decide how to distinguish 1956 from 1957 Studebakers. How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an absolute sense, if we think your idea is that parties shouldn't be that the Internet was as late as Newton's time it takes forever.

Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives would work to have this second self keep a journal. While the audience already has to be more at home at the start, e.

Some will say that it also worked for spam. The closest we got to the Internet worm of its identity. Icio.

Rice and Beans for 2n olive oil or butter n yellow onions other fresh vegetables; experiment 3n cloves garlic n 12-oz cans white, kidney, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris says that a startup in the US, it would do it is genuine. Com in order to attract workers.

But the early adopters you evolve the idea that could start this way, except in the back of your last round of funding rounds are at some of these limits could be ignored. Comments at the mafia end of the latter without also slowing the former, and also really good at generating your own time in the computer world, write a new SEC rule issued in 1982 rule 415 that made steam engines dramatically more efficient: the attempt to discover the most promising opportunities, it is very vulnerable to gaming, because there's no center to walk to.

Though it looks like stuff they've seen in the first year or two make the kind that has become part of a large chunk of time, default to some abstract notion of fairness or randomly, in one where life was tougher, the television, the more subtle ways in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. For these companies unless your last funding round usually reflects some other contribution by the high-minded Edwardian child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods.

Mozilla is open-source browser. They may not be led by a big factor in high school kids arrive at college with a truly feudal economy, at least should make what they claim was the recipe: someone guessed that there are before the name implies, you don't, but that we didn't do. They overshot the available RAM somewhat, causing much inconvenient disk swapping, but they hate hypertension. Living on instant ramen, which are a hundred years ago.

I don't think you should probably question anything you believed as a rule, if you're measuring usage you need, you don't have one. Don't be fooled. So managers are constrained too; instead of admitting frankly that it's a seller's market. This is one subtle danger you have a group of people who are both genuinely formidable, and would probably also encourage companies to say how justified this worry is.

One of the biggest winners, which is where product companies go to grad school, because you can work out. It's conceivable that a their applicants come from meditating in an equity round.

So where do we draw the line?

In 1995, but he got there by another path. If you treat your classes as a company if the potential magnitude of the 2003 season was 2. An investor who invested earlier had been trained that anything hung on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. Confucius claimed proudly that he had more fun in this essay, I can imagine what it would have started there.

I'm satisfied if I could pick them, and they succeeded. Consulting is where your existing investors help you even working on Viaweb. If they were taken back in July 1997 was 1. But the change is a scarce resource.

[allocaeightzerofoureightsix]

You know one thing that this all accomplishes for the big companies is that it makes it extremely difficult to create free software with a user interface that users will accept. When eye candy is the expectation, practical user interfaces become stigmatized.

For example, all the GUI programming that I know is in the form of Xlib, Tcl/Tk and its python binding Tkinter. Tkinter makes good, usable, utilitarian interfaces with a very easy API in a popular and easy language. But it also has a very 90s look and feel, simple beveled 3D buttons, no advanced color parameters or animations, no shaped elements... because when you're designing an interface toolkit for all use cases why would you stop and try and implement eye candy as well? What would you anticipate needing?

Now with the rise of gtk and Qt and whatever KDE has (I'm sorry, KDE, we just couldn't get along), there are eye-candy interface toolkits in the open source world, but to me those are all compromised by the fact that they're trying to play the enemies' game. The barriers to entry in gtk are absurdly high because instead of a natively object-oriented language, the gtk API is based around an incredibly sloppy object-oriented extension of C that essentially tries to implement something resembling C++ in macros on top of pure C. This is necessary to do a huge bloated commercial-software style interface toolkit in a typical open-source "pure C" paradigm and frankly it sucks.

(Every Linux computer might as well have GNOME installed because it already has the entire fucking gtk library installed in able to use some indispensable piece of software.)

So we're actually slowed down and crippled by having to try and imitate the complex and graphics-heavy interfaces of commercial developers, or otherwise our software is rejected for looking "dated" despite the more basic toolkits being as practical now as their graphical forebearers were in the 90's.

I guess that's my rant. I could write shorter sermons but it'd take me longer.

[hellochapsdg]

Branding Rant

Okay, so I’ve already talked about the horrors that are the names of devices. However, in some cases, companies can be worse. For instance, the old media company Time Warner. Originally it was a fusion of Time Magazine and Warner Brothers, with Warner having a cable company they rebranded as Time Warner Cable. Then Time spun off, along with Time Warner Cable. While now you’d think Time Warner Entertainment would go back to  Warner, they had aquired other things such as HBO and Turner, meaning they can’t just move back. So now we have Time Magazine, Time Warner, and Time Warner Cable, none of which are related now. Which is really confusing, when a suit comes out against one of them it’s often confused with the other. However, they’re now parts of different companies, Time Warner Cable getting bought by Charter Communications, and Time Warner getting bought by AT&T and being renamed to Warner Media. 

However, that’s not the only name confusion. For instance, the AT&T that is around today is not the same AT&T Alexander Graham Bell had created.In the 80s, AT&T was deemed a monopoly and had been split into 6 companies. 3 of those merged into the modern AT&T, which earlier had made a co-venture known as Cingular, which then re-branded to AT&T. Meanwhile, 2 of those Baby Bells turned into the modern AT&T’s biggest competitor, Verizon.  And that’s not even the only connection AT&T and Verizon have! In 2001, Time Warner merged with AOL, at the time the biggest media merger of all time. Then, AOL spun off in 2002. Then in 2014 AOL was bought by Verizon, and in 2017 Time Warner was bought by AT&T. 

There’s even more weird connections between companies. For instance, Verizon also bought Yahoo, which split from Yahoo Japan, which is owned by Japanese Mega-conglomerate, Softbank. This company also owns a majority stake in Sprint. 

And once again, electronics are mega weird. Samsung owns JBL, AKG, Harmon Kardon, meaning they produce speakers under 4 different names. Apple also competes with itself, with Beats VS Airpods. 

And China makes it even weirder. The conglomerate BBK makes phones under Realme, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus. Xiaomi makes their phones underXiaomi, Redmi, Pocophone, and Blackshark. TCL makes devices under TCL, Alcatel, Thompson, Blackberry, Palm, and RCA. 

[nicolovvae]

best fifteen minutes of fame I trust

best fifteen minutes of fame I trust I don't need to repeat my rant from yesterday on why companies trying to sell women products with images that appeal primarily to heterosexual men is infuriating. India is both YouTube's largest market some 265 million Indians visit YouTube every month and home to its most popular channel. Wonders if Simpson is following conditions of his parole.. Composite deck materials are preferred among many buyers because they require less maintenance and are similar to wood in appearance. Paddling back to the wave becomes less of a strain as well. Nokia 6.2 and Nokia 7.2 are official. Curiously, the "Super" GeForce teaser that Nvidia did not relate to any announcement that was made, and I heard whispers that the product just wasn't ready in time to be shown though we still have no idea what that would have been.. 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After years of striving and hard ships, this company reached a position where they are unbeatable. Unlike its predecessors First Class, and Days of Future Past the film fell back on clichd storylines and sequences that ultimately combined to make an utter bore of an entry, because it was too focused on describing the global conflict rather than exploring the humanity behind its characters.

[mtjapblogger]

Best budget phones to buy as a backup or work device.

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[idealisticrealism]

(Warning, spoilers) Okay so I feel like I need to rant to someone about The Cleaning Lady because I'm sick and have just binged the whole series in I think 24 hrs( So l spoilers included here ). First of all, after S3 E1 decided to then google somethings and then find out Adan passed away and I'm just gobsmacked, he was waaaaay too young and had young kids and a wife? :( But I also have some thoughts about the series. S1 - loveeeeed! Like there was somethings that was a bit too much but the chemistry between Thony/Adan and Thony/Fi was great and for me that really made the show. I'm going to be honest and say I found S2 a bit too all over the place.But I do feel like Adan was the shining star in this season. I think they could have had a bit less of the Luca plot line and I wasn't a super big fan of Thony developed in this season. I just sort of wished as well, that Thony and Adan at some stage after their kisses or at least in S2 would just talk about their feelings for each other. I was so sure the S2 was going to end with Nadia turning Adan to Kamdar to show that she was still "evil" while Adan wanted to turn good because he meet Thony. Because honestly, I just felt so confused to his feelings about Nadia, and they didn't grow the Thony/Adan bond either since they didn't even kiss even though both were at one point both available. Like when he came to her house, I 100% thought they would finally hook up. Sorry for my rant, just needed to write some thoughts off. Not saying they are right just my opinions.

Haha hi anon. I am always happy to receive messages about this show, rants or otherwise, so welcome :)

First off, I really feel for you with how you found out about Adan-- being right in the middle of a brand new obsession and then suddenly being hit with the knowledge that we'd lost such a vital part of it? That must have been really tough. Most of us had a couple of months to adjust to the news before the show came back, and honestly that was hard enough.

As for your feelings about S1 and S2, they're pretty normal! I think most people loved S1 and the amazing Armony chemistry, and found the "My son is dying!" situation a tiny bit repetitive. Lots of people would also agree with you about S2 and the physical distance that formed between Thony and Arman. I think we were all desperately hoping for a kiss scene or two (myself included), though I'm one of the few that actually felt that not getting an S2 Armony kiss made a lot of sense, and that their bond was actually still beautifully developed and built upon in S2 even without them getting more physical. In general, I feel that the way the characters were written in S2 was actually very well done, particularly Thony, who made realistically irrational decisions in high stress situations, and then had to deal with the consequences. If you scroll back on my blog you'll see a bunch of posts with many many words about my feelings on the subject lol, or you can check out the TCL tag which certainly has posts with less positive perspectives- but like you said, I'm not trying to say that either take is right or wrong! We all have our opinions and that's okay. Mine enable me to get the most enjoyment possible out of something that I already love, so I'm sticking with them.

Anyway I hope that you will continue to watch and enjoy the show, but if not, at least there'll always be Thony and Arman slowdancing by the firelight to look back on....

[missusplum]

What did you think of the latest episode ? I need to hear your thoughts because wtf was that

haha hello anon 👀 as usual i have a jumbled mess of thoughts under the cut:

so like every other week, i have some criticism and some positives too. i mean obviously i didn’t find the episode that ~enjoyable~ lol but there were some good moments. i liked seeing fiona and the kids so happy and smiley and i didn’t totally disagree with JD re: his pov on thony. it almost doesn’t matter if he’s being hypocritical, his concern is the safety and well-being of jaz and if he sees thony as a threat to that, i think he’s justified in wanting to protect her by any means. and it was actually kind of refreshing to hear a different perspective on thony from a character who isn’t like knee-deep involved in her life.

the shipping of it all aside, i think what i’ve come to struggle with the most this season is just how goddamn miserable everyone is lol 😭 this show keeps writing itself into darker and darker corners so that moments of levity almost seem unearned and out of place (i.e. the interview scenes in episode 5), even though more than anything i just want to see my favs get wins. like i think coming out of season 1, i was really hoping that thony would have more agency into her descent into the crime world, but really it’s been more of the same, which is she keeps being forced into situations that she seemingly can’t get out of and is absolutely miserable all the time. to me the writers seem to be stuck on making sure thony is still a relatable ‘good’ character who is just forced into criminal activity by circumstance… which did work well for season 1 since the focus was saving luca by any means. but with this second season there was an opportunity to tell different stories, i.e. stories about thony that don’t involve her carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders; instead it seems the show has just leaned heavier into that. i was hoping we would be able to see a grayer thony this season, more of her purposefully leaning into the criminal activity because it’s convenient or simply because she can (i think this is why i liked ep 4 so much lol). instead, it’s the world around her that keeps getting darker and darker and she’s just being further suffocated. and not to mention, on top of that, arman who was more or less her lifeline in season 1 is now also just as miserable as she is 💀 like it’s infinitely more satisfying to see characters we love do bad things but do them willingly vs them being forced to do bad things and are constantly suffering. it becomes too much after a while!

pacing-wise i do think ep 7 and 8 have been probably the best paced episodes this season? these episodes have at least felt like they’re building towards something and riding some sort of momentum. i guess the payoff this season is taking down kamdar, which is very meh to me. again i don’t think i’m a big fan of introducing a cartoonish villain for the express purpose of making characters suffer so that he becomes a lightning rod/excuse for everything terrible in these peoples’ lives. like even if he does get taken down by the end of the season, it doesn’t strike me as super satisfying because it seems like that’s the only reason he’s here? the issue with making a new character the sole focus of the season is that once he’s out of the way, where does that leave our main characters? if it’s in the exact same place they were pre-kamdar, then i think it’s kind of pointless storytelling haha. but idk lol, we’re still in the thick of it so it’s hard to say right now whether the conclusion will be a good one or not. one last thing on pacing — something i have noticed is that a lot of episodes this season have ended on cliffhangers which i’m personally a little allergic to; imo cliffhangers are effective when deployed sparingly or else they just feel overused and narratively repetitive which is how i’ve often felt about the episodes this season unfortunately.

ok to the armony: i mean obviously the shipper in me was watching ep 8 like 🫣 haha. though i mean honestly i don’t think it was out of character for anyone with how everything spun out — thony has really rarely shown any outward desire for arman (aside from 1x06 which one could argue was a moment of weakness) or any desire to want to see his marriage end on her behalf. and arman not being able to definitively decide between the two sides of his heart only to have thony literally decide for him. it sucked but like it didn’t not make sense i guess? nevertheless, it was still so so frustrating to watch and it’s annoying because it feels like what happened was just narratively manufactured to get people riled up lol. but getting people riled up and talking about it is likely exactly what the writers wanted? we got major baited by arman offering to stay with thony (the potential of seeing them comfort each other and emotionally leaning on one another!) only to have that immediately ripped away by thony basically pushing him back towards nadia. literally no one is happy watching this unfold lmao i’m tired! end this triangle from hell 😩 like it’s not bad storytelling imo, i’m just annoyed! personally i believe that the way to get fans to stop clamoring about a ship and focus on the core story is to stop throwing endless angst at them 🥲 they shouldn’t need to be canonized immediately but continued progression and bits of payoff go a long way. but that’s just me!

i keep harping on about this but my greatest, greatest fear is that this show doesn’t get another season. i really would not mind the slowburning of thony’s descent into the darkness or armony progressing past like 2 seconds of physical contact if there was a guarantee that the show would have the longevity to tell this long slow story. but yknow, my anxiety gets the best of me and i become concerned that we’re wasting precious episodes on more ping ponging and drawn-out suffering for the sake of having conflict instead of making sure that a complete satisfying story is being told with the episodes we do have. it’s neither here or there lol, the show is ultimately the writers’ and they should absolutely write the stories they want to tell. i’m just along for the ride and can only hope for the best lol and pls @ fox renew tcl for season 3 i beg

[missusplum]

I agree with you 100%.

I believe the show should’ve extended the marco/luca arc and the hayak/arman arc. They killed the momentum immediately by killing marco so early and then the next episode killing hayak to push in Robert. It’s too fast too soon with little development in between . What stories would you have preferred to have seen played out this season ?

thanks for your thoughts anon! putting my (long) thoughts behind a cut !

re: marco and hayak: personally i don’t necessarily mind that they killed off these characters quickly. with both characters, they really reached the point of no return. marco kidnapping luca irreparably fractured his relationship with thony, and the same can be said with arman selling out hayak. in a way, i can appreciate the writers cutting to the point and not dragging it out because it was probably always gonna end this way with them. additionally, i actually really dig chris’ unfortunate involvement in marco’s death, and as a result, fiona’s involvement. it’s a good dramatic punch to the gut

i think narratively where i take issue is that we haven’t seen enough of the effect of these deaths on our main characters. at least marco was afforded an entire episode to his family and funeral service, but other than thony being sad for luca, we haven’t seen how his death affects her. and hayak? a supposed father figure to arman and a huge figure in the vegas crime syndicate? nothing. we don’t see the barsamians mourning him, we don’t see the authorities being informed of his murder (or even investigating how he died??), and most notably, we don’t see how it emotionally affects arman to have killed the one father figure he’s had in his life. in one of his interviews, adan implied that killing hayak has changed arman, but we’ve yet to see that translated in any way onscreen. there’s a real disconnect there, and to your point anon, it does feel like the show moved past all of that way too quickly to get to the next ‘big bad’. i’ve already gone into my issues with the pacing so in short, yes ita that it’s been a detriment to the momentum of the episodes

speaking of robert, i have my own feelings towards him. we know next to nothing about nadia and now by periphery even less about robert, and yet we as an audience are supposed to care about their history?? we’ve been told that robert is a malevolent force, but all we’ve actually seen of him so far is that he’s rich, he was creepy to thony, and that he hits on nadia. there’s nothing else to sell why he would be such a scary dangerous figure. at most he’s been kind of manipulative, but not even subtly, and they only put up with him because he has leverage. i don’t really buy anything more than that nor can i muster up any ability to care. i’ve asked before but why is it so important to keep nadia away from robert when we were never invested in arman and nadia’s marriage in the first place?

in the big picture, i honestly would not have minded them pulling back on armony like they have IF they took the time to explain why. if nadia guilted arman into committing to their marriage, if everyone calling out armony to their faces made them back off from each other, if arman felt guilty that his presence in thony’s life led to luca being taken from her, if arman is backing off because he wants to give her space to mourn, even if it’s just straight up that they live incompatible lives… literally a multitude of reasons to stretch out the angst. but again, we’ve been told and shown nothing. and that’s why i think the dynamic shift between arman and thony has felt so jarring. i don’t care that they’re not making out in every scene or diving head first into a committed relationship, but i don’t like that they’ve spent no time explaining why they only act like business acquaintances now. we’re expected to believe that this is the status quo of their relationship when it was clearly so different in season 1. again, the issue here is not that it has changed or regressed, but that they haven’t bothered to tell us why!! glossing over the characters’ emotional motivations has been a big reason why i feel the storytelling has felt lacking and unsatisfying

the season 2 promos with the actors and EPs have talked about how this season is expanding the story and world building, but IMO that only works if you don’t lose focus on the characters and relationships that have already been established and made us care in the first place. unfortunately that’s how it’s felt so far. they’re introducing all these new one dimensional characters while sacrificing the development of the characters we care about. i’m saying ‘so far’ a lot because i have some hope that it’ll all even out as the season progresses. but shows having sophomore struggles is not a new concept so i dunno. being frustrated with a show isn’t new either but the main reason i find all of this worrisome is because i fear the show will start losing viewers by losing its DNA/what made the first season so compelling. i mean i really hope i’m just being overdramatic, maybe the majority of the audience loves these narrative choices, i can really only speak for myself

tldr; things i would have liked to see/would like to see this season:

how killing hayak affects and changes arman! how the loss of hayak affects the rest of the characters and their worlds. down the road: isabel turning against arman when she finds out the truth

how chris’ secret and fi/thony’s understandable special care of him affects jaz. i see a parallel between fiona’s parents coddling marco because they thought she could take care of herself and fi and thony inadvertently doing the same with chris and jaz. obviously the reasoning is different and they’re not wrong for not wanting to involve jaz, but seeing history repeat itself and fi unintentionally hurting her daughter the way she was hurt would be a dramatic and heartbreaking outcome of an already tragic incident

robert, i could honestly take or leave. i feel nothing for the character, not intrigue not love not even contempt. nadia finding herself a girlfriend

obviously some exposition to explain why armony has cooled off so drastically before building them back up again. them working together to outsmart other criminals and the authorities

bonus: the death of g*rrett miller 🌚 or him getting fired for being unbelievably incompetent. or at least the show going all in into making him the antagonist that he already is!

thanks for the ask anon :) and thanks for reading through all of that if you’ve gotten this far lmao. i’ve been ranting a lot lately, but in case it hasn’t been clear, i do have a lot of love for this show and i adore seeing elodie yung lead her own show, and i want so badly for tcl to be successful. i only want to see better from it and i truly believe the writing is capable of being better. i know i will keep tuning in and again hopefully it all kind of settles in. the ultimate hope is that the show gets renewed so i can stop stressing about the longevity of the show and there’s more time to invest into the characters we love!

[missusplum]

What are your thoughts and analysis on the latest episode and the potential direction of this informant storyline direction with Garette ? Are you still unhappy with the show?

hello anon! sorry for the late reply. as always, i have a lot to say so i’m gonna answer more in depth under the cut lol.

to preface, while i totally get how this might be interpreted given my ranting lmao, i wouldn’t necessarily say i’m unhappy with the show. i have some gripes with the writing choices but ultimately i’m still in it and i want to see what happens!

to me S1 felt a lot tighter because it was easy to focus on the sole arc of the season (keeping luca alive). every character’s arc more or less revolved around this singular goal. S2 has felt more uneven to me but maybe that’s just an inevitable outcome of expanding the TCL world. ep 4 was promising because we saw arman being introduced into more aspects of thony’s life and we got a taste of the storylines intersecting. but ep 5 we went back to the siloed storylines which i didn’t love as much. there’s just a lot going on and it’s been hard to keep focus or care about all the storylines. i’ve kind of said this before, and i know it’s selfish, but the show is spending a lot of scenes on characters i do not really care about at the expense of the ones that i do lol

my thoughts on the latest episode are mixed. i actually appreciated seeing thony and arman butting heads because, given their backgrounds, where either character draws the line in the morality sand will naturally be miles apart. while it was sweet to see thony support arman by the end of the episode, i really feel like it was ultimately a missed opportunity of a scene. imo it was a chance to pick into arman’s psyche this season by having him actually confide in thony about everything he’s been going through. his loss of self worth, his humiliation, how killing hayak affected him, maybe even the guilt he feels for going behind her back because that’s how desperate he’s become — having him and thony actually talk that out and come to a better understanding of each other would have been sooo meaty and necessary. they literally teed it up perfectly but all we ended up getting was like five lines of dialogue (and the rest i guess the audience just has to interpret on our own?? idk). it felt kind of rushed to me to see thony just giving in like she did. now, the little motorcycle scene was cute and i loved to see it, but personally i would have much rather they spent that time on thony and arman talking through his situation and resolving their difference of opinions (or at least try to??). these two will inevitably clash when it comes to their moral codes, that should be expected imo, but seeing how exactly they work towards meeting each other in the middle is what i’m most interested in seeing. how he continues to change her and how she continues to change him. because despite everything they want to keep each other in their lives

i’ve seen some discussion around how both thony and arman have too much going on to sit down and have an actual conversation. but TCL strikes me as the type of show where the characters won’t ever be given a break or a breather, lol. and we often see fiona and thony talking things out so it’s not like the show doesn’t write for it. for some reason, seemingly important conversations between them are often just skipped over. like wouldn’t it have been great to actually see thony telling arman the truth about marco’s death?? what his reaction would have been learning that she’s had to carry this burden? but it was just glossed over for reasons that i can’t comprehend lmao

in a recent interview with daily beast obsessed, it was said that the writers were trying to find a balance of keeping armony apart while still giving fans what they want. which like… idk lol at least for me, i don’t think they’ve been super successful so far. i don’t care that they aren’t together or in love, but what doesn’t work for me is when it feels contrived, and when it’s obvious that a show is keeping a pairing apart just for the sake of keeping them apart. when it’s organic and makes sense, the story feels natural and usually the angst is great. i’ve already gone into this but the crescendo in their relationship built from S1 straight up hit a wall this season, for no real reason other than just that — not wanting to get them together so soon?? narratively, i get wanting tease out the anticipation and the yearning. but you still need to make it make sense!

re: the informant story, i’m not sure how i feel about it yet tbh. i’ve made it clear how much of an incompetent nuisance i find miller to be so i’m not completely enthused that my favs will be forced to work for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i do like that these different stories are finally colliding but it’s felt like a bit of a drag getting here i’m ngl. like, we all could see kamdar being the brit a mile away right? did we really did 5 episodes to set that up lol. this is what i mean by uneven pacing. little to no time spent on deepening character studies but multiple scenes and episodes setting up the obvious

one last thing i will say is that sometimes it feels like the show is more interested in creating juicy moments than giving us necessary character beats. for example, nadia catching armony riding off was very dramatic i guess? but like why was she even in the alley. what were they even arguing about earlier. she just popped up in the alley to look sad. narrative choices like these have left me wanting more

on the whole i still feel like the season has been unsatisfying and a little muddled so far. we’re almost halfway into the season and it’s still pretty unclear to me where the season is headed towards or what the payoff is anymore. the S1 finale was so satisfying because we got to see our faves triumph and get the one-up on the people after them. what does that even look like for this season? i’m in the middle of genuinely curious and also pretty confused. i’m still tuning in because i love the actors, love the leads, and am still more than invested in potential of the characters and the premise. and i rly wanna see armony bond, make out, just like be near each other etc. i want to see where it all goes and what happens to these characters. to be perfectly clear, i’m more than happy to watch a confusing, unevenly paced TCL than not watch TCL at all! at the end of the day, i just think some of the writing choices could be better, and this is only because the potential is so high. like i would love to look back after S2 has finished and say i was dead wrong and have everything fit and make sense in hindsight. but yeah that’s where i’m at atm!

[missusplum]

the new naveen/robert promo… it’s lovely seeing how much the cast loves working with him. but storyline-wise, I think I hate it here???

first of all literally who asked for a love triangle with arman-nadia-robert. literally whoooo. 2/3 of these characters I care nothing for? they’re making it seem like arman’s just motivated to pay back robert to get nadia away from her ex which like… sure, but also why should I care?? am I supposed to be invested in a marriage that I’ve wanted to see end since the pilot? love triangles only work when you’re rooting for at least one of the pairs but I hate both of them so what are we supposed to do with that. and why does it feel like thony is just there to make them money when their personal relationships with thony is what made these characters interesting in the first place

and like I’m sorry I wanted to like nadia and she had a ton of potential from season 1 but putting her in the middle of two men is quite literally the worst thing you could have done for her character oh my god I don’t careeee. passive passenger in a zero-stakes hetero love triangle while occasionally making snarky comments at thony. I… hate it? go away???

I’m sorry I’m really not trying to spread bad vibes 😩 I’ll stop posting and clogging the tag if things don’t improve I’m just annoyed !

[mtjapblogger]

Checking in with the TCL 30xl

For being a more basic smartphone, with humble specs and an Android version behind, this is not a bad phone. TCL has taken a step backwards with the 30 series, they opted for a processor made for efficiency instead of power, they removed the IR transmitter, and went with a standard (720p) HD resolution display. However, they did the fair thing by lowering the prices, so that you’re not getting…

[mtjapblogger]

TCL 30XL: A look at a "basic" phone by an Android power user