A lot of the stuff written on "izzat" is questionable or wrong, but it is true that India has a collective concept of saving face. This can be an adjustment even if you're used to the East Asian concept of saving face.
The enduring success of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (despite its hokey Coca-Cola sponsored origins) strongly runs counter to this idea. The other kids in the special are outright mean to Charlie, but at the end no one identifies with the other kids' perspective, nor do they themselves.
Part of the reason the Halloween Special never gained the same cultural relevance/popularity is probably because it doesn't have the same progression. The other kids are mean to Linus and he persists despite it all, but ultimately it ends with no resolution to the mocking.
[Content warning: this post has been written while the author is on cold medicine and before having any coffee. Read at your own risk!]
But you know those other kids are going to go right back to being assholes as soon as "the magic of Christmastime" wears off.
It seems like the message is kind of, "It's ok to be an asshole, as long as at certain, 'special' moments, you show a token gesture of goodwill."
I haven't watched the whole show through in decades, so it's possible my memory is faulty, but I don't recall any of the mean kids making any sort of apology or atoning for their behaviour. It's just "and now we're all friends because Christmas!"
And then the next day, Lucy's back to tormenting her ostensible "friend".
It's easy enough to interpret Peanuts as being that. But Charles Schultz was not trying to present that. He was presenting the world as it is, and how one person can still maintain his optimism in spite of all that. This is made abundantly clear in some of the other strips, like the Father's day strip where he explains to Violet that no matter what, his dad will always love him, and he doesn't care that Violet's dad can buy her all the things.
Schultz was a relatively devout Presbyterian (though still very much a free thinker and criticized the direction American Christianity was going and its attitude about the various wars during the 60s-80s). He was incredibly optimistic about humanity, but he showed in Peanuts the reality of our "default" state, especially among kids.
Keep in mind that these are all 2nd and 3rd graders in the story.
In the Christmas Special, the kids come to see Charlie Brown as right and are fairly vocal about this ("he's not a blockhead after all", etc.). It is somewhat tethered to the religious elements voiced by Linus, which gives the turnaround to Charlie's perspective a kind of cultural weight, i.e., the audience is intended to understand the kids as wrong in some kind of fundamental way. It's not as simple as "the magic of Christmas".
In the Halloween Special, the kids don't do the same for Linus, apart from Lucy who pulls him out of the cold and tucks him into bed.
The dynamic between Lucy and Charlie is a lot deeper than her cynical kicking the ball trick. Schultz uses their interactions (the psychiatry booth, him keeping her on the baseball team even though she's consistently terrible) to reinforce an overall theme that optimism is better than pessimism. Occasionally he directly peels back the layers behind Lucy's crabbiness like when Charlie's in the hospital.
The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
Yes. See also Fleming’s James Bond. Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. *
This phenomenon is post-WWI and post-WWII and losing the greatest empire in history in a single generation trauma being retconned as if were the historical English perspective.
* Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
I'm not sure I understand the Burroughs example as relevant to the UK, but another good illustration is Thomas Hardy. His books sold well but were never seen as consistent with the UK cultural mainstream, and the reaction to Jude the Obscure in 1895 stopped him from writing novels entirely. Yet post-WWI he came to be seen/adopted as a mainstream cultural icon.
I'm surprised that Germany never relaxed the in-person notarization requirements during COVID. A lot of jurisdictions around the world did change their rules to allow remote notarization.
Interesting, thanks! Apparently it requires a German eID-enabled ID card (or compatible EU ID) and doesn't include transactions involving real estate, but still it's progress.
That same paragraph also describes ways in which it can be accomplished other than chemical etching ("...chemical etching, laser ablation, mechanical removal of material, mechanical pre-treatment followed by etching, lithography in combination with etching, and combinations thereof.").
There are also paragraphs describing applying "a plurality of inorganic dielectric layers".
Like most patents, it's hard to understand what has actually gone into production here. Could be done in a variety of ways consistent with the patent. The inorganic coatings are mentioned in claim 1, so the actual new aspect is probably the combination of etching and specific coatings.
Rainbow isn't really the right term. It's more of a sparkling effect. Apple actually uses the term "sparkle" for this characteristic in their patent for the display treatment (see para 0073). They also mention that different diffractive layers can be used to minimize the effect, so it is possible that the issue is worse on some devices than others.
Well whatever it is, my MBP screen looks perfectly fine. It's like a matte display, but not with the colors all washed out like the matte displays of yore. No visible artifacts of any kind that I can see.
It is true that nVidia GPU-CC TEE is not secure against decapsulation attacks, but there is a lot of effort to minimize the attack surface. This recent paper gives a pretty good overview of the security architecture: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02770
That's probably a clue that maintaining Photomator is not on Apple's long-term roadmap. I imagine they'll merge some features into Photos and eventually discontinue it.
Photos would need a lot of work to rival Photomator.
If they're essentially shutting down Photomator development, after doing similar with Aperture many years ago, they do seem very determined to drive people to Lightroom....
There's also the problem that not every window in Tahoe has the same corner radius. Some people thought this was laziness/lack of polish or a bug, but Alan Dye confirmed on a podcast that it was intentional.
So then they're left with a conundrum: do they adjust the 19x19 region on a per-window basis, depending on the per-window corner radius, or do they stick with one standard drag region? Probably it should be the former, but that comes with its own set of issues.
That's like asking, "if the title bar can have different sizes, should we make the hot area for moving the window also of different sizes?" The answer to both questions is "obviously yes!" The shape of the thing and how it responds to user input do not match by coincidence.
Do you recall what podcast? I know hearing him say this was intentional is only gonna make me frustrated, but I’m dying to hear the justification for such a bad decision.
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