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One of the reasons Adventure Time is so interesting is that it manages a delicate balance - it is both your typical "kids cartoon" but also manages to appeal to an older audience. Most cartoons try to do this by slipping in pop culture references/jokes that will just go over children's heads - and AT does this too, there's a lot of literary and pop culture references; for example there's a great episode with Jonathan Frakes guest starring that heavily references the ST:TNG episode "inner light".

However, AT also goes beyond that.

It deals with themes like love, rejection, death, identity, and morality in very real and mature ways...but also in a way that children can relate to and laugh at it. There are quite a lot of episodes that deal with the main characters struggle with an unrequited love and heartache. An incarnate Death and "the cosmic owl" are reoccurring characters. One major arc is one of the characters struggle with (magic induced) mental illness. The show itself takes place after a nuclear holocaust has ripped apart the planet and mutated the inhabitants (referred to in the show as "the mushroom war").

One episode for example, the main character finds a bag full of miniature figurines in the form of all his friends. When he takes them out of the bag, they come to life. He becomes fixated on them. Obsessively pairing them up and taking them apart to observe their reactions. He takes the miniature version of his best friends girlfriend and pairs her up with another man. He stops sleeping, he just sits surveilling this tiny world he has become god of. It's depicted very much as a descent into madness.

There are quite a lot of episodes like this, and while they often get heavy and dark they never lose their young audience or fail to maintain an overall uplifting and optimistic tone.

I wish I had a show like this when I was young.


It's not hard too eat so that it only costs ~5$ a day depending on your situation. Most simple meals like a sandwich or some pasta can be made for ~1$ and a little more effort. Where I live in Philly a little ad hoc produce stand sets up right down the street regularly with very cheap produce. 5$ would buy lettuce, some apples, carrots, potatoes, etc - enough for a couple days. I can go to the Italian market and get cheap rolls and meat. The Amish and Mennonites have markets around. There are grocery stores where I can get bags of beans, rice, and other staples very cheap.

The problem is if you're in a situation where it's like you get 5$ at the beginning of each day, you can't buy in bulk and save. Likewise if you live in a "food desert" it's harder to shop.


Higgs is looking for contributors.

Higgs is a JIT compiler for JavaScript targeting x86-64 platforms. The core is written in D, but most of the runtime/libs are written in JS.

You can contribute by testing, suggesting features, submitting PRs with new libraries (graphics, sqlite, etc), more tests, bug-fixes, documentation, and more.

We're very welcoming and will assist anyone wanting to contribute. Come hang out with us in #higgsjs on freenode (heck, come hang out even if you don't want to contribute) or check out the issues on Github:

https://github.com/maximecb/Higgs


Hearing "DHTML" reminded me of Thomas Brattli's old site[1] and it's successor dhtmlcentral. I learned quite a bit from those sites in the late 90s early 00s.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20001019064945/http://www.bratta...


Hang out on forums, #javascript, etc some time and see how many people have problems because their understanding of the DOM begins and ends with the jQuery API. I see it all the time. I've seen big-name sites bug out or slow to a crawl because some dev wasn't thinking about what was going on behind their $()'s.

The DOM API isn't very large/complicated, and it shouldn't be hard to MOSTLY memorize it. It isn't a "gotcha" question though, a good interviewer is not gonna ding the heck out of you if your forget bits of it (most web devs do spend most of their time with jQuery, YUI, etc after all) - it's about whether you understand what's going on behind the scenes.


The Google search is only mentioned once in passing in the text, and in the image.

Their argument is based on the number of users/groups on lift. This is of course, also pretty flimsy - but I don't think its being presented as scientifically rigorous; just as an observation that many people are trying to give up Facebook (and apparently having some trouble).


Is it ethical to get up and get a cup of coffee on the clock? Stop and chat with coworkers? Browse the Internet?

It's unreasonable for employers to expect you to spend 100% of your time 100% focused on the 'task at hand'. You need to have a little downtime on the clock for reflection, thinking, stress relief, etc especially if you are a programmer. Frankly if I was an employer I'd be happy if you were using it try and keep sharp as opposed to looking at lolcats or something (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Of course this has to be "within reason", and an employer is well within their rights to decide that certain activities are too disruptive and ban them. Violating an explicit ban would be somewhat unethical.

Another question: is it a polite thing to do? There are certain general and company specific social norms for what and how much of that stuff is acceptable.

So I would say go for it, with the caveat that you shouldn't abuse the privilege.

This is for employees ofc. As a freelancer I try to be very conscientious about stopping the clock when I feel I'm not adding enough value for the client. I get paid a higher rate than I probably would otherwise, and therefore don't screw around. I do sometimes bill for reading that's done for research for the project, just as I don't stop the clock every time I look up something in the docs - but I do this as little as possible and always with the clients understanding.


To be clear, the specific part you mention is fair...but I don't think anyone would object to that.

The part where it seems somewhat unfair is where the director asked weixiyen to give up pay they were entitled to.

It's fair enough to ask for a favor ("hey, do you mind using up your vacay days before you leave?"), but you should make clear that it is a favor and what it entails - it sounds like that may not have done in this instance.


Unless the state has particular laws, every contract I've had as an employee allows me to quit at any time, and be fired at any time, without reason given.

The director was under no obligation, after that notice, to allow him to work those last two weeks and then take the vacation. He was obligated to pay the vacation as it was compensation earned by weixiyen. But weixiyen (again, could be wrong if his/her state has certain laws) had no legal grounds to compel the company to allow him/her to continue working.


You may be "thinking backwards". If their language doesn't have this feature, or their society these concepts...it's because they don't really run into these situations to the point that it becomes detrimental.

I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

My family bred dogs growing up so we always had a good number (~10) running around. When I let them out and in, I don't recall ever counting but rather ticking off names. Even then I don't think it was generally a conscious listing, but rather a scanning and the ability to "feel" that someone was missing.

For a very long time (well into adulthood) I had no concept of the proper order of the months. I could recognize month names, and with great difficulty name them all...but not their proper order. I had missed that section in school and it never really came up. When it did it really blew peoples minds for some reason. Eventually, I did come across it enough that I learned it.

I know nothing of the tribe in question but I don't think it's that much of a stretch that if they have things like a communal attitude towards property, few pieces of property they consider valuable, small flocks of livestock, etc... the issue may simply never come up.


> their language doesn't have this feature, or their society these concepts...it's because they don't really run into these situations to the point that it becomes detrimental.

Not necessarily. Just because something is detrimental, it doesn't mean that a society will automatically come up with a solution for it. It took people in the west millenia to come up with (or more accurately to be introduced to) zero - and the entire arabic numeral way of counting. That's not because it wouldn't have been useful before. It's simply that no one had figured out that this is a better way to count than their existing representations.

>I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

You may well be right - I'm no expert in Amazonian culture, so I don't whether they have flocks/herds/whatever of any particular animal. But that's just one possible example. I struggle to believe that they've not got some situations in their lives where numbers would be an advantage. Like I mentioned - it could be counting animals, counting the number of bits of rotten wood that might need to be replaced in their house, dividing a crop of fruits equally between the tribe, or something entirely different. But the lack of numbers in the language is no proof that there was no call for them.


Kudos on being a bigger person than me; I'd be tempted to name names.


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