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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • Iain M. Banks’ Culture.

    I’m deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.

    For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of

    The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"

    in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about “superhuman AI” or the like, then went “ah, got it, I’ve seen Terminator”.

    In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They’d not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as “…with a dark secret / actually dystopian /…” tones.



  • Computer Science (at a rather “prestigious” university for CS, for that matter, at least as far as that’s a thing here). Not in the US though, and none of the three universities I’ve studied at had mandatory attendance, for anything (exception: seminars, where attending talks by your fellow students was mandatory). As a result, I’ve never seen any prof take attendance.

    A lot of comments on this post say that attendance was called esp. for freshmen classes, but frankly, I don’t see how that would even have been possible here, with sometimes 500+ students in a lecture hall.

    In regards to assignments, at least in my experience, studying the lecture material and consulting it while solving the exercises was usually the fastest way to understand them and get them done.