3, but the pajamas erasure here is unfortunate.

From a Doylist/marketing perspective, though, I honestly think most people gave the novel a chance because Andy Weir made a name for himself with The Martian. In Sci-Fi publishing, he’s the brand, so the publishers can indulge a surprise plot point. For a mainstream movie, “from the author of that one Mars movie that didn’t suck and did quite well ten years ago…” doesn’t really move the needle, but "Ryan Gosling is a…

Well, that just might.

Destiny Color Correction is all.

I’m also one of those people who doesn’t own a record, but I agree. He hit an absolute sweet spot for being the quintessential American artist. Definitely rock, but story songs for the folkies and country-heads, and unapologetically of a specific place that happens to be urbanized and diverse. Left-leaning politics, but not a scold or a bore so people of a more conservative bent can pretend he’s not talking about them, or (and this is generally better) find that a little bit of empathy is sneaking in under their radar.

If it’s within your means, could y’all take a long trip out that way?

This is a very good idea, again, if they have means, though it’s probably not absurd if he’s looking to buy. AirBnB’s in Wyoming aren’t super common, but there are options, and frankly most of them are probably “easy mode” in the sense that they’re close to SOMETHING. Get a feel for what it would be like to be stuck there doing your shopping, finding something to eat, finding something to do. Drive to the nearest hospital, then imagine doing it frequently or while in a lot of pain.

Maybe it will be fine, even for ten or fifteen years, but they’re absolutely right to take this one slow and be wary. I know Massachusetts is pretty built up, but it’s not fully paved. I wonder if OP might float the idea of moving another 20-30 minutes farther out and finding a little patch of ground? Or doing something SUPER crazy like moving to New Hampshire? 🤣

As another alternative, if he’s determined to have mountains, something just outside Denver or even, sigh, Salt Lake City would blunt some of the biggest issues. Wyoming has almost literally nothing. Cheyenne metro has around 100k people, smaller than Lowell, MA.

Just to add, my very bookish aunt and uncle moved to the Appalachian foothills outside Charlotte after they both retired from government jobs in DC. After a couple of years of dealing with rural bullshit like annoying neighbors and poor infrastructure, they moved into suburban Charlotte and seem happier.

As everyone else has said, this is a pretty normal hangup, and if it’s really where you plan to live for the foreseeable future, only time will wear down the edges of that anxiety. It sounds like your parents raised you to be very open and you have an honest relationship with them and open invitation to live with them until you find a path that takes you elsewhere. Frankly, that’s great. My own daughter is a pre-teen but honestly I think we’re on a fairly similar path, but that’s more because it’s what feels like the right thing to do and the right way to treat someone, compared to the arbitrarily rigid households my wife and I grew up in. It doesn’t make make it magically not-alien.

It’s only been a month and he likely grew up in a different style of household. Honestly, in the US at least, the communities that most commonly do multi-generational living are very much not the ones okay with unmarried partners staying over. That’s a pretty significant cultural disconnect, and it’s going to be a while before he gets over it and truly believes that your parents are as okay with it as you claim. It’s probably going to require them to be almost comically over the top about it being okay (which has its own social hazards, LOL), or else it’s going to require baby steps. A trip together could help, as someone else mentioned. Or, a movie night that runs long and he stays in a spare bedroom. Eventually, with exposure and with a relationship between the two of you that proves to be solid over time, he may come to feel that it’s less awkward or disrespectful. He might also be a bit (overly?) self-conscious about the slight age difference in front of people whose primary job over the last 20 years has been keeping you safe.

So yeah, he’s sort of bringing his hangups into the relationship in a way you likely find frustrating, but I wouldn’t worry about it, certainly not until it’s been a good bit longer. It’s a common thing, coming from an honest place (and as mentioned, anxiety+expectations could create a lot of issues around the very intimacy you want to promote). In the meantime, it’s fairly easy to work around, especially since you do have the kind of relationship with your parents that makes staying at his place unremarkable. Eventually, yes, he should grow to trust you and your parents enough to believe you all when you say it’s fine, and if that’s still not enough then to have the kind of open conversation with you as his partner to understand why it’s not going to happen. For now, just keep doing things to make him comfortable at your place, but for the most part I’d let this one go.

If I bowed out early, would that make me a Dik?

The easy example is to think in terms of chatting with a Christian: Jesus died, but Jesus is not dead.

I find that I want some politics, and the politics that leaks into News and elsewhere is just about right. I un-subbed from anything specifically with the word politics in it and I mostly avoid .ml, and generally I find it very pleasant around here.

I have mine, and frankly I still use it to read about college football and Star Wars and check AskHistorians and post about keyboards. For shitposting and actually engaging with humans – yes, many of whom are my political speed or even further left – I really prefer it here. I “left” during the Mod Rebellion and APIpocalypse when it kind of became clear things were not going to be getting better. If it dies, it dies. We got beans over here.

You know what? Go for it. Only existing brands get adapted these days and this is a good one. The book is different from the movie and both are very wink-and-nod about the creative pursuits. Maybe it will be good. Maybe it will suck. More even than other “franchises,” a crappy musical would take nothing away from a good book and a great movie.

There’s constant running commentary and speculation, and biographical segments, and sometimes a little drama when surprising things happen, or expected things don’t, and a large group of people simply care enough that they want to know as soon as a pick happens, though how organic the growth of that group has been is certainly open for debate.

So it’s basically a combination of everything that everyone else has said.

1. NFL is by far the most popular sport in the country, but it also only has 17 regular season games (versus 82ish for NHL and NBA, 40ish for MLS, and 162 for MLB), and the entire season is spread over only 6-7 months of the calendar year, versus 8-10 for the others. There is an appetite for any content at all that materially affects the most watched sport.
2. College Football itself is probably the fourth most popular sports “league” in the country, though its organization and economics are WAY different (for now) than the normal pro leagues’. There’s huge overlap in general of course, but the Draft brings all of the fans together as CFB fans see where the top players will move.
3. Going back to number 1, the NFL and media companies, being what they are, noticed the gap in the sporting calendar (after March Madness, before NBA and NHL playoffs, very early in the MLB season, MLS well… (LOL, I love MLS and it’s a miracle it’s stable but it’s still not an important “TV sport” in this country). They also noticed that a certain segment of die-hards have been watching the draft for 30 years, and they saw an opportunity to tap that dormant interest for months of “segments” and a big day of ratings and revenue, so of course they did.
4. More recently, seeing that their hype efforts were working, they’ve moved it out of an auditorium near League HQ and made it a travelling road show, goosing local attention and furthering the image that it’s an event.

As to why all that worked, I like the posts that talk about the optimism and renewal that the draft represents. The NFL is unique in how it handles player development, in that it mostly doesn’t because it has an independently-popular lower league that will do it for free. Since that lower league is effectively the sole source of players, and since the NFL is an American-style sporting cartel, the Draft becomes the single biggest infusion of talent that a team will see in a given year, some of it ready to contribute on the field right away, and the teams that need the talent the most usually have the best picks and therefore a real chance to improve quickly, though the same bad management that gets teams in a bad place will often squander that chance.

For those who follow European football (soccer, not the niche gridiron leagues over there), imagine a single day (okay, three days now, but Rounds 2-7 are still for the nerds) that combines the anxiety of a promotion playoff final (though with deferred results) with the excitement of the summer transfer window (let’s consider NFL free agency the equivalent of the winter window).

FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the “crutches”) and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)

I mean, we don’t really notice the BMW drivers who are acting sensibly, and it’s probably the vast majority. But that being said, outside Germany they attract a certain enthusiast demographic that will include a statistically relevant minority who think every trip outside the neighborhood is Gran Turismo.

I don’t drive a BMW, so yes, I do use my blinker.

He’s not wrong exactly, but to a certain extent the market has spoken. A critical mass of people would prefer to watch quiet dramas in their own time and on the setup they control. The takeover by HD and the proliferation of bigger screens and soundbars or easy home theater solutions has created a “middle space” where the average viewer has something that, while not a proper cinema, is miles ahead of the 480i standard definition nonsense we had at home in the 90s and earlier. Then, at the other end, those same trends have allowed some percentage of connoisseurs to invest their resources into home theaters with curtains and posters and tiered seating and the works. Any form of home viewing, of course, avoids the scheduling and interpersonal downsides of going out to see a movie.

So, these types of films are getting squeezed at both ends. Most people will just catch them on their 50" Roku 4K from Walmart and be happy with that. Others who appreciate getting to 95% of the “cinema experience” will watch on their fancy projector and surround sound system. The only people left are the ones who value the communal experience and/or that last bit of quality presentation. If that’s not enough to support wide distribution of “adult drama,” then I just don’t know what to tell the auteurs. For all the same reasons we don’t bother with many lowest-common-denominator revenge dramas on the live stage, we’re not really going to see a ton of prestige character pieces scheduled into the limited slots at the multiplex.

Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.

Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.

What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.

I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)

So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.

Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.

Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.

I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”

And even then, everything screamed “quirky project with Terry Gilliam vibes.” I want to see it, but it didn’t look like the sort of thing whose charms were dependent on a huge screen and a roomful of strangers. I had no idea its budget was well over halfway to a Marvel movie.