People like me are why I believe the slippery slope is a fact, not a fallacy...

I'm asking this in the context of a school project mainly because of 2 things:

1: 2 of the questions of the project are about main and secondary characters and their physical and psychological characteristics, so the book is gonna require those unless I'm misinterpreting those questions.

2: The project is for March 12th so something like 1984 with 300+ pages is probably too long. (Although there are probably many technicalities to blur this, like how much text there is in a page and the actual amount of pages I can read in a given time and how much time can I dedicate to reading the damn book.)

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I've been posting about this in various topics but now that it's on Github, I thought maybe it's time to give it a topic of its own. From the README:

My goal is to eventually replicate the keyboard and sound of the bass side of an accordion in an electronic device that accordion players will find easy to adapt to. So far I've built three prototypes:

• Prototype 1 was trying out a Teensy 4 with an audio shield on a breadboard, with 4 bass buttons.
• For prototype 2, I put the buttons on two double-decker circuit boards (9 bass buttons). Here's the Video. You can see the remains of prototype 1 in the background.
• For prototype 3, I built a real case out of wood and laser-cut acrylic panels, to make a desktop device that's more easily portable. This one uses a Teensy 3.6. Here's the Video. I designed it in Onshape and you can look at the CAD model online.

I was a Homeland fan right from the start. Great performances, constant suspense, smart developments. The show remained watchable in later seasons, but the amount of action was greatly increased. Previously smart characters became dumb, and on season 7 Carrie Mathison was more action hero than spymaster.

Most recently, this is happening in Amazon's series Jack Ryan. The first season was a good thriller with interesting twists. The second was basically "Jack Ryan: Navy Seal". We know right from the start who the bad guy is, and, in the end, we get a "twist" that is both lazy and predictable. Not only that: Jack's "cowboy" behavior gets absurdly dumb (he's kind of an asshole too...), in a way that is not compatible with his backstory. I won't spoiler anything, but in this season he does things that would make Jack Bauer stand and applaud.

To me, that's frustrating because I love all that spy shit, preferably with large doses of realism. If I want action I'll watch Mission Impossible or something.

One of the possible reasons for the increase in action scenes in successful spy shows is the larger budgets. They start small, with character-driven stories, and grow to be action movies.

Another might be the need to please and retain a larger audience gained in the first seasons.

They also tend to get less and less realistic, like The Americans.

I wish there was a spy show that kept being a spy show all the way through.