The fellowship of true friends who can hear you out, share your joys, help carry your burdens, and correctly counsel you is priceless. ...
The best place for product reviews is Reddit?
Vox: “Whether you’re looking for a new TV or the best bagel in Brooklyn, you’re bound to come across online reviews, and it’s hard to find something that feels trustworthy. There are a lot of reasons why this is true, and it doesn’t look like the situation will get any better soon.
Despite regulators and tech platforms’ best efforts, the billion-dollar fake reviews industry is too big and complex to stop, as the New York Times reported this week. Meanwhile, professional review sites aren’t as useful as they used to be. More and more of them seem like they’re chasing search words and affiliate marketing revenue rather than serving the readers’ best interests. (Affiliate marketing represents the special links to buy a product in a review, which give the media company a commission when the reader clicks through and purchases that thing.
Vox Media, which owns Vox, does this, as do many other media companies, including the New York Times.)So in an absence of authenticity and authority, where does an industrious internet user turn? Reddit, of course. Sometimes known by its old slogan “the front page of the internet,” Reddit is most valuable for the knowledge collected in its very specific, often obsessive communities called subreddits. This is where you’ll find lots of real people with helpful things to say about the stuff you’re thinking about buying or the bagels you’re considering eating.
And it doesn’t take much to tap into the Reddit hivemind. Just try tacking “reddit” onto the end of a Google query (e.g., “best white noise machine reddit”). You’ll quickly find quite a few other internet users with the same question, dealing with the same set of frustrations over the lack of reliable information in the traditional product reviews ecosystem…”
Gangsters raiding Maroubra and its surburbs the four Ali babas - cowards covered by hoodies and Covid like face masks … who park car not far from their break ins
In many ways, “The Killer” is exactly what you’d expect from a David Fincher movie centered on a hired assassin: a detail-rich procedural about what a hitman is forced to do as his calculated world implodes. And by telling this story of a deadly perfectionist who repeats phrases like "Forbid Empathy" to keep himself centered, Fincher leans into his reputation as a precise—almost obsessive—filmmaker. "The Killer" may be based on a graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent, but it feels like Fincher's most personal film to date
Those Move Easiest Who Have Learned to Dance'
Hugh Kenner glosses a well-known couplet in Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” (1711) by reference to Newton’s second law of motion (published in 1687 in his Principia Mathematica, one year before Pope’s birth) and “numerous points of disequilibrium”:
“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.”
Perhaps. I’ve always taken Pope’s notion as strictly rooted in lived experience, though Pope was only twenty-three when he wrote his “Essay.” Writing is labor, even if we’ve spent more than two-thirds of a lifetime earning most of our living with words. We can’t rely on chance, which is not the same thing as inspiration, a gift that has to be exercised or it gets stiff and unresponsive. A young reader tells me she wants to be a writer but not of poetry or fiction – essays, she tells me, which is admirable though a little vague. She has certain advantages – much reading, no college degree. She works for a living. I envy her ambition.
Among the most valuable sources of writerly know-how published during my lifetime is The Poetic Art (Carcanet, 1975), C.H. Sisson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica. The work consists of a ten-page overview titled “The Ars Poetica in English Literature,” the 467-line translation and twelve pages of notes. There’s nothing stuffy or Strunk-and-Whitey about any of it.
In the writing trade, masters are few. Most of us remain forever apprentices, a few are promoted to journeyman but the learning and hard work never cease. There is no graduation. Even the better among us remain perpetual beginners. Implicit in apprenticeship is knowledge handed down. We study under those who excelled before us even if they died, like Horace, two millennia ago, or Dr. Johnson, more than two centuries ago. There are no guarantees. Perseverance doesn’t necessarily forgo failure. Here is Johnson’s definition of apprentice: “One that is bound by covenant, to serve another man of trade, upon condition that the tradesman shall, in the mean time, endeavor to instruct him in his art.” And here is Sisson in his notes to Horace:
“Find what you can write about and you have solved your problem. Of course the aspiring writer has to face the possibility that the answer may be, Nothing. At any rate the beginning, as the continuation, of literary capacity involves a certain self-knowledge. Nothing is further from it, therefore, than the intoxications of publicity and reputation.”
[You’ll find Kenner’s reading of Pope in The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy, Indiana University Press, 1968.]
