- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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I remember the those angled brackets being the way they spoke telepathically, right? What is the significance with those quotes ending in commas?
I’m guessing the brackets are just supposed to be a direct replacement for double quote symbols.
So the proper grammar of:
“This is an example,” she said.
Is the same as:
<This is an example,> she said.
I’m surprised nobody uses single guillemets as a primary quotation mark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark
French does, doesn’t it?
Also in German literature, but only printed books not newspapers.
deleted by creator
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----6
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----That is almost 50% more secure than the other one !
Finally, we’ve got decryption Ouija up and running
Animorphs goes surprisingly hard. I fully recommend it and got more out of rereading it as an adult than I got as a child. It goes a little off the rails once it starts being ghostwritten, but the ending is excellent and very much worth getting to.
Eeeehhh the ending was a little…
Like, the author said she wanted to make it as depressing as possible to drive home the point that war is bad.
And yeah, I agree war is really, really bad, and plenty of people never really recover from it. But at the same time plenty of people do, and go on to live at least decent lives. Some of them even turn what they went through into something inspiring. I doubt The Lord of the Rings would have been half as good without JRR Tolkien’s experiences in WWI, for example.
I think that exploring both those themes, and what it takes to come back to yourself after the horrors of war, would have been more poignant. And I also feel that perhaps showing a way through that darkness for at least some of the characters might have been better than the message ‘war sucks and since you got involved you’re going to suffer and have a shitty life forever with no possible escape from the pain but death, fuck you’.
I think it’s fair to say after all these 13 year olds (!) have been through, return to happiness is rather safely out of the question. I agree with you that that’s a hopeful and sweet theme, but I rather appreciate her willingness to say, no, sometimes things, and people, just break under terrible circumstances beyond their control. The tragedy is that it had to happen at all, that the invasion forced them to become heroes when they were only children.
But with their sacrifice and heroism, from which they could have easily walked away at any time but didn’t, humanity is saved and the awful slavery of the yeerks is ended not just for humans but for everyone. But they did too much, and while it was necessary and worth it, it’s a tree they planted whose shade they’ll never see and which cost them everything. Sometimes it’s just not okay.
And that to me, while sad, is far more <real> than stories that bend over backwards to make it all okay. There’s a place for both, and Animorphs is not hopeless or gritty grimdark just to be edgy, I actually think it’s full of hope that the war could be ended at all, with such good outcomes for the galaxy, and against such odds, and with the heroes they happened to have on hand. But it’s not free or without consequence.
I’m not saying bend over backwards. I’m saying ‘everyone involved in war will SUFFER and live horrible lives and be miserable WRETCHES until they die!’ is in its own way just as bad as ‘and after the war everything will turn out SPARKLY and PERFECT with sunshine and unicorns and rainbows!’, just on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The message ‘you’ll have a terrible life and there’s nothing you can do’ isn’t ever a good message to teach kids, I think.
The truth is the human condition is more nuanced than that. From war, you get everyone from Mad Jack, who routinely charged entire enemy camps with his bagpipes, his sword, and maybe one person as backup, complained when the war ended ‘because it was so much fun’, stayed in the army until retirement, then went on to race boats and make radio-controlled model ships; to the grimly determined people like JRR Tolkien who went through the trenches, processed the horror, and eventually moved on from it, to people like General Ulysses S Grant, who never really recovered from the horrors of war and descended into alcoholism.
If children are old enough to be taught ‘war is hell’ in graphic detail, then I think they’re old enough to understand that different people will react to traumatic events differently. I also think showcasing how people can maybe recover from the trauma of war if they seek help is a better thing to teach than a blanket ‘you’re doomed’.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that they all end up doomed. I’m rereading it now, so maybe I’ll eat those words but remember, this is a war fought by 5 human children, alone, with very little help along the way. Maybe in a conventional war you get all sorts, but in the guerilla secret war run by just them? It’s all about their individual selves and interpersonal dynamics, and the fact that they alone held on with no support is why they personally suffer the way they do. (spoilered for series end. Seriously don’t read, just go read the books, they’re worth it)
spoiler
Rachel was never going to be happy with the war’s end, she was always going to be the Mad Jack of the series, and that fact made her so terribly unhappy that she took the decision she did to give her life for the cause. If she didn’t they would have lost. Her death is the spark for a lot of the worst sadness as the series ends
Tobias loved her, deeply, and had been falling for her the entire time. He’s also doomed to live as a bird, and had struggled with that doom since literally book 1. Rachel was his link to humanity and she’s gone. He is untethered and returns to the wild, unable to deal with being human, and very literally not human at this point.
Cassie was Rachel’s best friend, and a pacifist, and in her own mind a hypocrite. She’s had to to so many things she never wanted to do, harmed more than she they felt like she helped. She did it because it was necessary, but the horror of tearing so many throats out with your own teeth is just too much. She’s lost her best friend, and Jake is being raked through the coals as the rest of humanity learned what happened and start asking questions.
Marco has never wanted any of this, he was only really in it to save his mom. I don’t remember, but I think he does? And I think he gets a lot of the peace he’d been missing in his life, and quietly just carries on with his family that has actually been reunited by this war.
Jake… Jake became the person who had to make every hard decision, including the one that kills his cousin, Rachel. He made the call that tapped Tobias. He made the calls that forced Cassie to break her principles. He made the calls that won, with no certainty they ever would. If there’s anyone who has been under pressure, it’s him, and it just ratchets up as people realise who he is and what he’s done.
And even with all this sadness, we only ever see the immediate couple years later, and we know Cassie and Jake are going to love and support each other beyond that. We have hope that Tobias will return, better, happier, more at peace. We hope that Marco gets what he always wanted, happy parents and happy home. We know the story continues, Kathleen just doesn’t give it all to us as it ends.
So, yeah, it’s a sad story and it builds over like 54 books. Maybe with more forethought it could have been even more nuanced than it is, but by book 3 they’re already discussing the awful nightmares and torturous nights they have. I think for what it is and what they’ve been through, the ending makes the most sense.
I did a full read last year, and it’s a great series. Not sure how far I made it as a kid.
They need to put out the audiobooks as a couple of collections. I’d love to have them but charging full price per book for 50+ books is fuckin nuts. 💀 They’re like 3 hours long. I can’t justify it when it’s the same price for a 60 hour Brandon Sanderson book, as an extreme example.
I think that Dan Brown book about computers also had something like a password that was immune to brute force, that ended up being a single digit password. (it was immune to brute force because the password had plot armor).
Digital Fortress! I don’t think it had plot armour (I’ll spoiler tag it as it was the very end of the book):
spoiler
The password was to stop malware (that was leaking all their secrets in real time) and every wrong guess sped up the process. Also their brute force machine was the thing that was caught by the malware in the first place so maybe they were extra cautious and wanted to try and solve the riddle?
It’s been like twenty years since I read the book though so maybe I’m misremembering. Cool story though (or at least my younger self thought so), taught me about how the NSA can read your messages years before Snowden.
i mean the programming has to suck but i like places that let you use emoji in your password
like who really is going to make their password “👉password👈”
or “🧙”. it’s obviously a fake wizard, got no beard.It probably isn’t an issue if you’re doing things properly. Your hashing algorithm shouldn’t care if the character is latin, Chinese, Arabic, or emoji. It’s just a number at the end of the day.
It shouldn’t, but you will get issues of how to convert to number.
I made a password protected zip on my Android phone with a few non-ASCII characters, and the password was not accepted on PC. I am 99% sure they botched the encoding, like using UTF-32 instead of UTF-8 or something
