It's a matter of setting up expectations and balancing that with good story telling.
Ambiguity, elision, out-of-order story telling, etc. are all part of art but it's a delicate balance. There's a contract that artists set up with the audience that will allow them to use these techniques. Primer is one of those where I'm OK with my confusion because the story was interesting without all the answers, and it was setup pretty early on that this wasn't an A to B story. On the other hand, the fade-to-black ending of The Sopranos was, in my opinion, a total violation of that contract. Nowhere did they setup that kind of ambiguity. Yes, it's a series vs. a movie but my point still stands.
No Country for Old Men, again IMO, rides that line a little close. Sure the Bardem character checks his boots at the end but there were some other major gaps that I don't think were set up. It was well acted and produced but expectations were not managed so it still goes into my meh pile.
When it works the it's a lot of fun figuring things out. I'll have to give The Big Sleep a try.
Edit: At the other end of the spectrum, expository lumps are no fun either.
My takeaway from Primer (perhaps my favorite movie) is that the confusion is the message of the movie. If a time machine existed, and was used repeatedly, it would become impossible even for the persons involved to maintain a clear understanding of what had happened and what was happening.
> On the other hand, the fade-to-black ending of The Sopranos was, in my opinion, a total violation of that contract. Nowhere did they setup that kind of ambiguity.
I respectfully disagree. One of the qualities of "The Sopranos" was exactly that things weren't always spelled out explicitely. Also, I did not really find the ending to be extremely ambigious. I mean, it is pretty clear what happened.
I mean even that exact ending was spelled out a few episodes before, when the characters are (and I'm paraphrasing) discussing death, and how you never know, because for you, things are just happening around you, you're living, then ... nothing.
Michael Imperioli even pointed it out on a late show interview, that there were multiple hints in the previous episodes that spelled things out entirely clearly.
> No Country for Old Men, again IMO, rides that line a little close. Sure the Bardem character checks his boots at the end but there were some other major gaps that I don't think were set up. It was well acted and produced but expectations were not managed so it still goes into my meh pile.
Really? This is one of my favorite movies. What did you find overly ambiguous? If anything I felt the closing dialog and monologue were sort of on the nose about the theme of the movie, but I don't mind that.
I dunno, I agree that data flow is important and maybe the most important part of functional programming. But the ability to sling program fragments (partial application, pointless functions, etc.) around as if they were data seems pretty important to me. I think of it as Lego-blocks for programs. If the program parts snap together real easy and the data moves seamlessly (or seemlessly-ish) from end-to-end then you're on the right track.
But I suppose there are many paths to functional programming... I have only followed one so far.
Well it's certainly better. But, as some one who has to run Selenium at work a fair bit (it makes me so sad), I can tell you that Aurora is quite savvy and the memory use never really got out of hand but FF24 still crashes after running a fairly long suite.
unfortunately, our ageing selenium scripts do not work on anything but firefox. Again I want to stress that Aurora works really well on most everything. I personally prefer Firefox to other browsers. But that doesn't mean that FF is perfect... nothing is.
I don't think anobody stated that Firefox is the perfect browser. Each browser has its strenghs and weaknesses but I am more keen to accept flaws on a browser that's opened by nature: that's why I have always been using Firefox, even when in term of performance it was way behind Chrome. Today I am happy that Firefox has caught up and is even doing much better in some area.
Your question misses the point. Animals may not have the rights we grant a human, some would argue that they have no rights. But that does not mean that we then have the right to treat that creature with arbitrary cruelty. In fact, we don't allow arbitrary violence to be performed on inanimate objects, for instance you might get in trouble for damaging the Statue of Liberty. We decide what we will allow based on our own convictions, morals, customs, religion, etc. Many, likely most, people would agree that torturing animals,even those destined for slaughter, is wrong.
In fact, we don't allow arbitrary violence to be performed on inanimate objects, for instance you might get in trouble for damaging the Statue of Liberty.
That's not a right of the object, it's a right of the people who own the object. If I make a replica of the Statue, I can do whatever I please with it, including burning it to the ground.
Ambiguity, elision, out-of-order story telling, etc. are all part of art but it's a delicate balance. There's a contract that artists set up with the audience that will allow them to use these techniques. Primer is one of those where I'm OK with my confusion because the story was interesting without all the answers, and it was setup pretty early on that this wasn't an A to B story. On the other hand, the fade-to-black ending of The Sopranos was, in my opinion, a total violation of that contract. Nowhere did they setup that kind of ambiguity. Yes, it's a series vs. a movie but my point still stands.
No Country for Old Men, again IMO, rides that line a little close. Sure the Bardem character checks his boots at the end but there were some other major gaps that I don't think were set up. It was well acted and produced but expectations were not managed so it still goes into my meh pile.
When it works the it's a lot of fun figuring things out. I'll have to give The Big Sleep a try.
Edit: At the other end of the spectrum, expository lumps are no fun either.