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drfuzzy89

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Ogres Are Cool 1 year ago

This was a really great article. This part stood out to me in particular:

But what these tales are absolutely forbidden from representing is any agent or action that falls into the social class or milieu of the people who chiefly collected and read them. So the Grimms’ own world of government employees, highly literate women, libraries and universities is perhaps the most profoundly forbidden space of the folk tale. Indeed you might even say that not including that world is what makes a tale seem folkish, rather than, say, novelish. Part of the fiction of the Volk is that there is an absolute social void between the princes, the kings, the princesses on the one hand, and the tailors, discharged soldiers, huntsmen, kitchen maids and impoverished forest dwellers on the other.

I wonder why we don't see this perspective more often in modern popular fantasy. It seems that for the most part, they stick close to Tolkien or Arthurian models, primarily following the exploits of kings and knights. Even the popular fantasy authors who actively seek to subvert the genre's tropes tend to stick close to that perspective. And when we are treated to the perspective of a "common" person, they often turn out to have been born special for some reason, soon finding out they're some powerful person's lost heir or the subject of some prophecy, with the character being swept off into the world of the ruling class. Obviously, a lot of folk tales end with the commoner running off with a prince or princess, which isn't terribly dissimilar, but I don't remember Cinderella or Snow White being special beyond being pretty and charming.

It may be a blind spot of my own, but I can't think of many examples of fantasy with truly common folk as the primary perspective.

There are a lot of similar anecdotes in this thread, but I'm still skeptical. I've had similar issues with my Brother printer randomly not accepting a new toner cartridge and telling me that it's empty. It happened twice. In one case, I had to use some obscure button combination to force it to reset and then everything was fine. In another case, I needed to remove and reseat the cart a dozen times before it suddenly worked.

Anyway, it's definitely possible that these newer issues are Brother doing something nefarious, but I could also see a lot of these issues being with finicky sensors.

Joanne Jang, who works in products at OpenAI, tweeted that no influence had been at play. “The google doc broke so people texted each other at 2-2:30 am begging people with write access to type their name.”

Also, this line seems self-contradictory. There was no influence, but people were "begging" others to sign?

I was promised tracking-free web searches, which has not been violated, though the Brave employee who tweeted this clearly meant to imply that it was. I don't use their web browser and I don't care to. But the original tweet is out of context and deliberately misleading and was posted by a competitor to DDG and so was clearly done in bad faith.

I don't think it's great that Microsoft is exempt from some restrictions in the DDG browser, but this tweet is also referencing a post by a DDG employee freely disclosing the issue and stating that they're working to improve it. In my opinion, this sort of mudslinging makes the folks at Brave look petty while not really changing my opinion of DDG very much. I also think this is a case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Feel free to continue to tell me how I feel about things, though, internet stranger. You're clearly much more in tune with my opinions than I am.