I've very loosely applying the title I used in yesterday's post because quite honestly, I can't even call what they did with the movie a modernization.

Intro

Old stories are always being updated for lots of reasons, ranging from trying to appeal to new audiences to correcting toxic depictions to fitting better to the current social or political climate and more. There's nothing new there. However, one thing I find a bit odd lately, as in the last five years or so, is that a lot of this modernization is actually done pretty poorly in main stream media. We see more forced diversity, queerbaiting, and generally bad storytelling.

There will be spoilers for both.

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore (1988)

This is probably my least liked batman comic that I still recommend fans read.
It's one of the few Joker origin stories and have impacted the tone of Batman since. It's honestly the story I think of whenever I'm thinking of Batman and the Joker's relationship, and makes Joker the all-time greatest DC villain.

And of course, through the paralysis of Barbara Gordon (Batgirl), we get one of the strongest female heros in DC - Oracle.

The Killing Joke is infamous for adding Batgirl to the list of Women in Refrigerators. The treatment of women, specifically Batgirl, is probably the most easily agreed upon aspect to modernize. She was pulled into this story without much thought on the effects of the character before or after.

Batman: The Killing Joke (2016)

When details about this movie was in the works, it was hinted (and then confirmed) that about half an hour will be added to the beginning of the movie and better flesh out Barbara Gordon. This was exciting. The end result was disappointing almost to the point of offense.

The additional time was devoted to Barbara debating with her "gay best friend" (who is every stereotype that phrase can embody) how her "boss" (Batman) doesn't respect her and that she should just quit. Also comes with a scene where she insists on being heard, is aggressive and then has sex with Batman. Yeah...I can't even truly describe how bad it was... (I'm just glad tickets were sold out at the theater so I didn't have to pay money to see it. I borrowed it from the library for anyone wondering.)

The quitting thing in particular really bothered me. Barbara is one of the few heros in the DC universe that does not have a tragic back story. She chose to be Batgirl for the same reason someone chooses to be a cop in a corrupt city like Gotham. In the animated series and in Adam West's Batman, Barbara became Batgirl independently. She wasn't seeking approval or permission.

Enough of the rant...why it didn't work? Ultimately, it was a lack of respect in general. There was a feeling all around that the team was asked to modernize, but they themselves weren't convinced. The end result was what you would expect a bunch of closed minded straight guys to write. Obviously no research was done to better understand gay men or women. They were ultimately not treated as real people. There was no research on Batgirl herself, and this includes watching Adam West's Batman, or reading any comics with Batgirl or Oracle.

Final thoughts

The sad thing is, they had a chance to really add to the original story. I would have love to see Batgirl in her prime. Show how strong and capable of a hero she was before she was paralysis and emphasize the loss Batman and Gotham will feel from loosing Batgirl. Show Barbara's determination in perhaps a little Oracle origin story. She's very smart, let's see some of that. Show her dealing with her own loss while still carrying a duty.

Edit to add: I would also drop the gay best friend. In the new 52, Barbara's roommate is trans and they build a real friendship before she's comfortable enough to tell Barbara. Steal directly from that!

What are your thoughts? Any other comic adaptations that stood out for you? (There are so many!)

In keeping with Tildes' general philosophy of supporting budding technologies that have the potential to reform large domains of the internet for the better, I think you should look into Flattr (www.flattr.com).
A Flattr subscriber reserves any set amount of money per month which will then get automatically distributed to content creators on the web, in proportion to an algorithmic estimate of how much the user has used that particular site or resource.

First-tier support for Tildes on Flattr would be as simple as registering an account and connecting the tildes.net domain to it. From then on, a percentage of the reserved amount would automatically get transferred to Tildes' account for every Flattr user who uses the site (I myself have generated 64 "Flattrs" on this site as of this moment, which would lead to a significant portion of my reserved $5 to be transfered to Tildes for this month).

For sites that host content creators, like Twitch and YouTube, Flattr offers a deeper support, where Flattrs go toward individual content creators as well as the host site in itself. An intuitive way to connect Tildes to this feature would be to have each upvote of a Tildes post generate a Flattr for the poster. I believe the money would then be divided between the user who was upvoted (if they have a Flattr account) and Tildes' own Flattr account, but I am unsure about the exact fraction that would get routed to the individual poster as opposed to Tildes itself. I'm sure Flattr's tech support can answer this in detail, though. Flattr is currently owned and maintained by the company behind AdBlock.

What do other users think? Is Flattr's model good? Are there other sites or providers that offer a similar service? A notable difference between for example Patreon and Flattr is that Flattr is indirectly based on a "pay what you want" model, which marks a pretty significant shift in economic control from producers to consumers. This will obviously have both advantages and drawbacks. Personally, I think the model has a lot of potential on an arena like the internet, where the sheer number of potential consumers can make microtransaction-based models like Flattr really powerful.

Before elections or just in general, what do you do to get to know people in power?

I personally use Wikipedia as a clear, quick way to learn about politicians from front to back. Also, near elections, I tend to do a quick web search alongside this to try and get a feel of what current events are saying about candidates, now that they're in the limelight.

Our current plan is to stay in Oxford for three days, and "go with the flow" for the next four. In Oxford, we have a few plans, but still a lot of free time. For the remainder, we have no fixed plans other than to do the WB studio tour in London. Mobility wise we are pretty much entirely free, though ideally public transportation as opposed to renting a car would be good.

Do you have any suggestions for what we should do in those free days?

Something about posting on psuedoanonymous internet forums tends to quiet panic attacks for me personally, at least. I'd be interested in hearing your methods of coping/mitigating symptoms for things that ail you from day-to-day.

I've gone through heart break a lot and I just recently met someone that I really like. We haven't even been hanging out for 2 weeks and we both really feel strongly about each other already. Honestly it's pretty scary becoming this vulnerable to another person. My last gf I didn't feel this way with like when it was over I was like meh but this gf is like... I don't know if I want it to end. Not for now at least.

Sorry I'm just sorta typing my thoughts out etc etc if anyone has any input feel free to comment.

I'll be moving out of state in Nov so the longest it will probably last is until then because I'm not sure if I want to do long distance. Like, I just had a buddy come home to a gf that was sleeping with another dude IN THIER HOUSE soooo I just don't want anything like that to happen to me but I also know when it comes to leave I might not be willing to break it off. Plus, I think she already wants to last longer than November but she hasn't explicitly said so.

Idk life and stuff and bullshit and yea... anyone out there feel me?

we will travel to mars and devour the stars
run fingers through wild dusty meteor scars in the dunes
of faraway moons till the tunes of their soundless bassoons become ours
when we sight the next staggering flight
from every direction bends infinite light in an arc
you and i will embark to each spark till it's dark and together sail into the night

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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 2 - Playtest

An American traveler short on cash signs up to test a revolutionary new gaming system, only to discover the thrills are a little too real.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

TLDR: What programming language would be useful for taking info in an excel file and producing a text file (that is organized and arranged in a particular way) containing that info? Which would be useful for this problem but also helpful in general? And also, are there any recommended online courses where I could learn it?

I have no real experience coding or anything but have always wanted to learn. Recently at work we've encountered a problem. My boss had created a matlab program in order to take text/numbers from an excel document and transfer them to a text file, but in an organized way.

Say you have something you call "Pancakes" and the cell next to it has the number "3", as in there are three pancakes. I want to be able to create a text file that would read something like this:

NUMBER OF PANCAKES

• Pancakes: 3

We recently have changed around the format of the excel document for a different item, for example "French Toast". I've tried to mess with matlab briefly but was unable to change the program to compensate, and I no longer easily have access to matlab.

I'm seeing this as an opportunity to learn some programming and also fix some stuff at work. So what programming language would be useful for fixing this problem? Which would be useful for this problem, but also helpful in general? And also, are there any recommended online courses where I could learn it?

Thanks for any help, I appreciate it.

Hi there,

It looks like codecademy took down their PHP course, which stinks becuase I love, love, love how that site approaches teaching by doing. Any other free resources out there for a do-not-show approach for learning PHP?

Looking to get my feet wet so I'm a little less dangerous when tinkering with my WordPress templates.

To put this into context: I'm still minor, in Europe, and I was hired into SW company as backend developer. I'm making about 2-3 times as much as my friends in fastfoods.

I'm basically making WS that would be unified wrapper for about 15 another WS - instead of crafting request for each of those, you will just call the API and it will do everything for you.

Everything was fine, until I encountered a nightmare: WSDL/SOAP protocol over HTTPS with need to use client certificate.

Full of false hope, I thought: "It'll be easy, I finished communication with another companies in few hours, this will be quick".

I was very wrong. I spent countless hours on this. I tried 3 programming languages and 4 different frameworks, copy-pasting solutions from stack overflow and wondering why does this still throw errors! I copied it from stack overflow! I used windows alongside linux and installed like 10 wsdl/soap clients from 2008 forums.

I created 8 or so SO questions, most about different language/framework, but the same problem.

Worth of mentoining, at the time, I could obtain wsdl and xsd of the WS with usage of two certificates (crt.pem and key.pem) over PHP. I tried to use PHP SoapClient, which accepted just one certificate file. I used .pem certificate that I received and should get the work done.

Then, I started writing the final question. Including PHP that downloaded wsdl and SoapClient that didn't work. Knowing someone will probably want to see certificates, I used cat key.pem cert.pem > certCombined.pem and diff certCombined.pem cert.pem. cert.pem was the certificate I received and should work. I expected no differences. When I saw two pages of differences, I started to suspect the cert I was given is wrong. So I pointed the PHP SoapClient to certCombined - and it started working!

This would have never happened (at least for several more hours) unless I known someone will want to see diff between working and not-working certificates. Thank you, rubber duck debugging! Next time I'll be solving something, I'll write on paper everything I use and know.

What are your stories?

Old stories are always being updated for lots of reasons, ranging from trying to appeal to new audiences to correcting toxic depictions to fitting better to the current social or political climate and more. There's nothing new there. However, one thing I find a bit odd lately, as in the last five years or so, is that a lot of this modernization is actually done pretty poorly in main stream media. We see more forced diversity, queerbaiting, and generally bad storytelling. Not totally sure how I'll do this yet, but I'm thinking of posting stories that stand out to me for better or for worst, starting with a classic.

There will be spoilers for both movies.

Cinderella (2015)

This is one I honestly didn't think worked at all. To be fair, I believe Disney's goal was just to sell a beautiful movie, and not a good story. This whole movie was gorgeous. It was also really boring, which I honestly believe is the greatest sin in storytelling.

Cinderella herself is "smarter" in this movie than the old classic cartoon. She's well read and has some agency, which honestly makes her more a damsel than the original cartoon for me. In the cartoon, she was an abused child that had no where to go. Her being trapped made sense. In the new one, she's sort of a fighter...who doesn't fight. I didn't get it.

Another issue is that Cinderella was really the only character they modified, which is why the story is still shallow.

Ever After (1998)

This is honestly one of the best modernization of the fairy tale I've ever seen. What worked for me, is that they fleshed out all their characters. Danielle, Henry, the stepmother, stepsisters, everyone! This makes for a much richer story, where characters themselves can be modernized, but still fit the time of the period piece. It's not about dropping a fourth wave feminist into an aged story, but about adding the dimensions that would have still existed then. Danielle is strong, well read, and obedient. Her servitude is not without reason. She's seeking a "mother", and her relationship with her stepmother is more than simply being a slave. The audience is shown the moments of kindness Danielle seeks from her stepmother.

My quick two-cents. I also find it interesting that Ever After came out over 15 years before Cinderella.

So what are you thoughts? Any good fairy tale adaptations you can mention?