OmIsMyShield

South Africa is another antipodean country where pencil means Staedtler in black & red

Not the parent - but I think it's because it can be seen as too subjective and too open for debate. Like: Oh, so one person opines that x, y, and z are not for them, let's debate it (or outright dismiss it).

And the resultant debate might well be polarising or destructive by itself.

Without knowing what the parent experienced to cause their take on this type of politeness I'm just guessing, though.

It is interesting because I think I see a cultural thing here too: in some cultures "I feel" and "I see" and "currently" are as firm as "unacceptable until it changes" - just worded in a way that conveys respect for the author. But in other cultures it is read as vacillating. Dunno. Guesswork, as I said.

I too struggle very often with the pause and the recognition of emotion before acting on it.

Something that has been somewhat helpful to me is a meditation method called mental noting. Please note no method will work for everyone but in case it's useful to you, here goes.

Basically, my version, please do search for more qualified people's version of mental noting on the internet:

1) Rest attention on my breathing

2) Notice (I don't always notice, I don't often notice, but sometimes I do) that I'm distracted

3) Note and label the distraction (mentally say "I'm thinking" or "I'm itching" or "I'm worrying" or "I'm replaying conversation" etc)

4) Thank the distraction for allowing me to flex the mental "noticing muscle"

4.5) Remind myself not to beat myself up about how long I was distracted, haha

5) GOTO 1

This practice has helped me in slowly building up a mental observer that can pause from time to time. But, as I said, I still struggle with the pause.

I read it as how culturally distinctive her evaluation of a romantic partner is:

a) She actually had a list of the desired / required traits of romantic partners on hand.

b) Desired traits include morning prayer.

c) Said traits also seemingly included the romantic partner having a daily to-do list.

Taken together you do get an interesting cultural phenomenon being displayed here.

So in my reading of the original post I found it more interesting than just "hating on religion".

Not minimizing the horror - but the _What if it was your city_ maps drew circles that were somehow quite a bit smaller than I imagined.

Maybe it's precisely because it's so horrific that it loomed larger than life in my head, who knows.

Protecting underage members of society from potentially harmful substances that they are unlikely to consume in moderation is hardly dystopian; it is in fact a key responsibility of a well-functioning state. Alcohol is also banned at schools, for instance.

Yup my PC was... what's the polite phrasing? Let's say "not envied by my peers". A hunk o' junk, in other words.

Ha! Likewise. I borrowed money from my grandmother to buy a soundblaster II if I remember correctly. I also remember that I got home, it didn't work, turns out I had insufficient RAM, had to upgrade to 1MB, and fiddle with EMM386 in some .sys file to get the voice to work in Dune II. But oh man, that first "The planet Arrakis" spoken by a human gave me the shivers

Wow - not the sense I got from the series. I'll attempt the books, thanks :)

I really like Inspector Morse, too :)

Did you watch Lewis? I enjoyed that.

Babylon Berlin is also one of those things that are particularly relevant at the moment as there are lots of parallels between the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the current state of the west.

It just wasn't for me.

Space Sci-fi TV:

I think the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica was great.

Non sci-fi:

I think Babylon Berlin is good.

I only watched the first series of The Expanse.

It's very subjective - if you enjoyed it then I'm glad. I'm certainly not in the majority among my friends in disliking The Expanse, but also not alone.

Sure, I'll try. I can obviously only speak from my own perspective, though one or two things were echoed in discussions with friends.

Disclaimer: I only watched the first series, and I know most people actually like the show. Subjective dislike abounds here: you can prefix "In my eyes only" to every sentence below. I speak about the show, not the books here.

So first thing that struck me is that I'm not emotionally invested in any character. I'm not rooting for anyone. I don't care about them, and they don't have any drives or characteristics that immerses me. They are wooden, shallow, unrealistic caricatures of banal archetypes.

Amos is probably the most obvious example: he is a grab bag of overly obvious machismo and pulp tough-guy slapped together in such a way that he is concurrently completely unremarkable, unrelatable, and unbelievable. Every time he got on screen I would lose immersion and start wondering how the writers could settle for such cheap tactics and obvious low effort characterization - they basically bludgeon us with a few standard examples of machismo and violence. I end up completely uncaring about the character and I don't identify with any of his supposed drives. It just screams artifice.

Another example: the same obviousness and wooden characterization goes for Avasarala, but it's compounded by properly bad acting. I don't know what happened here - Aghdashloo was heart-achingly convincing in _House of Sand and Fog_, and her voice is so beautiful that one would think she'd be able to carry any role. But no - Avasarala is a character so badly scripted that I go from watching the story to irritation in 2 seconds flat.

In a variety of ways this goes for all characters. One cannot get a grip on their internal worlds and start caring about them - what should've been the complexity and contradiction inherent in human behaviour comes across as accidentally acting in a way counter to their shopworn character traits. Why does Miller care about Julie? Instead of adding meat (his exception to his internal rule) to Miller's character it just feels inconsistent with the rest of his actions. They flap about in thinly disguised cliché suits - thereby often acting unexpectedly in completely uncharacteristic ways (think Naomi for example), so they just come across as unbelievable.

The world building is also so-so. For instance, I found the Belter patois to be more irritating than supportive, mainly because it comes and goes in various amounts without enough consistency. The whole backstory is also a bit... bland? Made up of cheap tropes? Two untrustworthy governments with tension between them, a possible but oh so avoidable war, oh wow that one is a double agent all along, a group of disadvantaged blue-collar outsiders being manipulated by everyone, meh. The politics is so cartoonish and predictable as to break immersion, again. Oh, and how many hackneyed sci-fi inanities do they want to repeat? Hypoxia much?

The acting: least said, soonest mended.

The random violence. I don't care about the characters, and I don't worry if they live or die, and the violence is still so unexpected and over the top that I still roll my eyes. Also, Amos again. How do characters go from trying actively to kill each other to backing each other up in a fight in 5 minutes?

The CG is good, though.