This is also my impression after reading Isaacson's biography and Creativity, Inc. At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.
I remember Isaacson's interview of Woznick, and The Woz stated he felt Jobs could have done most of the great things he did without being a jerk. In other words, the jerkiness appeared to be a quirk and not a business tool from Woz's perspective. But then again, the Woz often didn't understand the marketing side of things, according to some of his critics.
> At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.
How do you mean by "behaved like a feudal lord"?
Admittedly not read up on Jobs (sacrilege in this venue, I know), so I'm struggling to understand why he who pays the piper calls the tune is somehow objectionable.
You can own something without pettiness and employing someone does not give you total control over that employee. In my mind, a feudal Lord is someone who wants everyone to know and acknowledge they are in charge and demands exacting obedience.
Still not quite making the link between "feudal lord" and "pettiness" (both seem equally subjective/vague).
By "total control", do you mean well beyond the boundaries of labor law? In my mind, I'm admittedly inclined to interpret this color as a consequence of the music stopping at an unprofitable creative house with an internal culture of unabashed freedom on someone else's dime.
Maybe I just need to read the books mentioned by the parent sometime.
Perhaps "petty dictator" for connotations (a would-be not an absolute dictator). We might or might not have many too-distant impressions of what ancient feudalism involved. For example, I have heard suggested that it was a system fundamentally characterized by reciprocal obligations upward and downward (including a kind of labor law?). Abused no doubt, but not lawless.
Here let me explain it with concrete examples. Let's say you're a smart engineer, you know how to write code and make things happen and you have pretty good idea of what users seem to want or need.
You have a boss and you have a meeting with your boss to make a decision about including a new feature you've coded up a prototype for, into a product that is going to be released in a year. You demo it, and it goes mostly OK but there are some hitches.
You boss has several ways of responding. One way could be to call you an idiot, a stupid idiot who's wasting everybody's time. The other way would be to provide a more polite way of saying that the feature might not be ready yet and could use some refinement.
Multiple employees of Jobs reported this sort of behavior (screaming, belitting, etc):
"""Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were “fucking dickless assholes."""
""" He shouted, "You guys don't know what you're doing. I'm going to get someone else to do the ads because this is fucked up."""
"""A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the Xerox Star team. "Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?"""
"""When Steve had to make cutbacks at Pixar, he fired people and didn't give any severance pay."""
"""“How old were you when you lost your virginity?" he asked. The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?” “Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward technical question.”""
"""To address the problem, Jobs gathered the MobileMe team in Apple's auditorium and asked: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" When the team gave their answers, Jobs replied, "Then why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
Jobs then fired the MobileMe boss on the spot and replaced him with Eddie Cue."""
I think Jony Ive pinpointed it:
"""I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, "But I don't stay mad." He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that."""
The only question is: if Jobs hadn't been an asshole, would the computing world have come so far so fast, and does that justify his behavior?
Being a jerk is always bad. The only difference is that people who aren't "paying the piper" don't get away with it for very long before someone throws them out.
Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's ok.
Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.
I mean, the argument is essentially one of "sure, he may have been completely awful, but it all worked out so, if we assume that's the reason things worked out (ignoring the myriad other factors and pure luck) then we suppose that, however they had acted or the damage caused, they were right to do so. The ends justify the means - even if we can't tell for sure or not that by those awful means we arrived at those desired ends."
Frankly, it's ex post facto justification by false entailment. I don't buy it.
Not the person you responded to but I find it an interesting situation. I agree with you that jobs (from what I've read) seems to be awful but at the same time I don't believe theft is okay. If I pay someone to do a job and they choose not to do the job after taking my money they have stolen my money. I am not okay with that. In this case jobs invested in them. It was clearly enough money to give him power over them. He had an agenda, they decided they didn't like the agenda and weren't going to do it his way and he came in and cracked heads (in an awful way probably). They can choose not pick his way, but BEFORE they take his money. Once they take the money they are obligated to do it his way or give the money back in my opinion.
Jobs paid that money for the business as it was at the time of sale - not for what he wanted it to be in some theoretical future - and he got precisely that. The theft analogy doesn't hold because the deal was completed upon transfer of the organisation. There could be no theft, only the inability to meet the expectations Jobs placed on their employees - for which I'm sure many were fired. That's the only prerogative Jobs purchased when they purchased - and were delivered - ownership of the organisation. That is to say, they bought - and were given - the decision making power over who to hire or fire and for what reasons. Nothing more, nothing less.
> Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.
So if someone spent for example 44*10^9 dollars on some venture, would it still be ok to be jerk, or would it be counterproductive to viability of such investment?
> Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole
What does this even mean in the context of the story from TFA? The "impediment" was one of his employees getting a competing job offer, and the "irreparable damage" was...having to actually pay someone as much as they'd be valued elsewhere? That's not a reasonable way to behave, and masking it in impersonal language doesn't somehow make it more reasonable.
I've never been a fan of Jobs or Jobs' Cultists for exactly that reason, but... there is room for jerks. If everyone got along, no progress would ever be made.
I forget the author, but someone famous once noted, "The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. The unreasonable man adapts his environment to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men."
Like any quote, there's a hint of truth to it and also not applicable in ALL situations.
Interestingly not everybody seems to take away the same lession from what's happening at Twitter. I keep reading from people who say that finally now people can focus on what matters and are not allowed down by lazy people, yadda yadda. Some even claim that Twitter now works faster for them and is generally better.
How can we be objective about subjective things when we can't even be objective by objective things?
Executives paid bucketloads to come in and lead a Transformation™ can only dream about the empowerment of actually making changes that Musk is enjoying.
That job tends to be virtually impossible as companies launch a transformation then reject each individual change as "this is fine" or as a sacred cow.
If, to survive, you must change many things quickly, some decisions will be wrong, but that's why you iterate.
Whether it's "a small price to pay" depends on each and every individual that paid the price.
I don't think it makes any sense for 1 single person to decide if the price paid was small, simply because they don't know what actual price was paid (in terms of suffering).
Also, it sounds to me that's you're assuming that's a necessitated price to pay, which I don't believe is true (but I don't have any examples either).
If the two options are "Pixar exists, but some employees were treated unfairly" or "Pixar never exists", I will choose the first. Whether or not there are other options is not a hypothetical I care about, I am interested in thinking about the morality of ends vs means of this scenario.
"Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer-animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply 'make it great.' He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity, and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar's DNA."
You're quoting the top two Pixar executives, and from immediately after Jobs' death as well. How about someone who isn't a millionaire?
aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives
Yes that's what I'm saying. The statement of two men who stood at the top of the ladder about the man who put them there immediately after that man has died is absolutely not credible in regards to judging how that man treated regular workers. At all.
A legendary animator and director, both who helped found Pixar with Jobs, aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives?
Jobs didn’t found Pixar; it spun out of George Lucas’ world and works and Jobs bought into it when it was several years old, even several years with the name Pixar. The Wikipedia article is self contradictory as its first paragraphs talk as of hee were a as founder, but hee was a much later major investor.
So far I haven't seen a counter experience from you about how Jobs treated the "regular workers" at Pixar, so as I see it, it's a quote from people who were close to what happened versus the absence of a counter experience.
Oh please. Googling "steve jobs bully pixar" reveals at least one story of horrible behavior directed toward regular staff members.
Jobs could be a bully, it's well documented. Pixar wasn't somehow immune to this behavior.
You've painted a utilitarian, partisan viewpoint: that the cultural and technological significance of Pixar outweighs any negative experiences of staff. The two are not easily comparable. How do you quantify them, what's the denominator? Jobs didn't have a crystal ball, he couldn't know Pixar would succeed. What was his calculus? How did he determine the trade-offs between success and bullying? Finally, cultural/tech significance is most certainly possible without putting staff through negative experiences.
You're suggesting an unreal scenario, so the thought experiment isn't going to do much good, IMO. Each employee gets to make that call themselves, "do I want to be treated badly?"
Fresh graduates may not realise they are being treated badly, lacking a frame of reference. Immigrants may be on a visa where they have no choice but to put up with it or leave the country.
Locals who've been around a bit, who know their discipline, the proven (local) best of the best? They don't stay on teams led by bullies.
It's not an unreal scenario at all. It's entirely plausible that a company falls apart when lacking the specific motivators and pressures that Jobs brought, and therefore never really exists in the first place. What's unreal about that?
I addressed why the hypothetical is limited to two options, and taking a subset of plausible scenarios does not reduce the plausibility of the selected scenarios.
Yes, because a and b represent a specific combination I said I was interested in exploring. What you've shown doesn't lower the plausibility of those scenarios. Are you being intentionally contrarian or is there a reason why you are trying to muddy a simple thought experiment?
That makes it unreal. It changed the environment too much to exclude it. Ignoring it breaks stuff. I'm not saying thought experiments are bad — do them often myself — I'm saying my response to get thought experiment itself is: it can't work like that (riffing of an unrelated but recent comment from yesterday where I'm the one doing the thought experiment as an existence proof, it's a "spherical cow in a vacuum" model).
It's not a nonsensical "spherical cow in vacuum" thought experiment to say "Pixar exists but some employees are treated bad" vs "Pixar doesn't exist". If you think that it becomes impossible for a rational mind to weigh those two choices, then there's no point in me continuing this discussion with you.
If Pixar didn't exist, the same people would do the same (or close enough) work under a different brand. Quite possibly with each other. That's as distinct as two identical dice placed in no specific order, i.e. not. Ergo, not a realistic scenario.
I’ve noticed that a lot of HN comments tend to be utilitarian, in an “ends justify the means” sort of way. This can lead to all sorts of ethical quandaries but it seems prevalent in business.
The joke was that under extreme duress, and individual (or a team) might produce a miracle.
The ethical question is: if it's a genuine miracle (say, a discovery or invention that breaks new ground or was previously thought to be impossible), can the duress be justified?
If the question is "Is the limited bullying and serfdom of 40 people (the original Pixar team size) justified by bringing joy to billions of people (more accurate than millions) for decades (and likely a lot longer)?" Then I answer yes. I think that's a small price to pay.
I think you overestimate net joy brought by Pixar. Some people watched a movie and were entertained for the duration of the movie, some were moved by it and it lead to a couple of hours worth of joy more. Some did not understand the message in the movie and just liked colorful pictures. Yes, there were a couple of movies, but not like tens or hundreds. In the end those movies would not have the success they enjoyed without powerful marketing and distribution machine. Those movies were also used as a vehicle to sell overpriced toys.
I prefer not to mythologize (very good) products of billion dollar companies too much, even if they could stand on their own.
Amen brother. He was not a "bully". He was a coach. A tough coach. Anyone could have walked away. No one was being forced to work at a top .1% company in the world. If you were there it's because you wanted to be do your best work and be part of the best. You wanted to make the world a better place. You believed in the power of these devices to do good, and to fight evil.
Jobs wasn't out there hurting civilians on the streets. You want to see a real bully, go to Ukraine and see what Putin is doing to civilians.
You talk as if Jobs brought us innovation that never would have arrived without him. In reality, he was able to get it to us a year or two earlier and maybe with a little more style.
Being slightly earlier to market and with a little more style is what made him a business juggernaut. But I don't think being first really means all that much when it comes to an ends justifying the means conversation.
Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
> You talk as if Jobs brought us innovation that never would have arrived without him. In reality, he was able to get it to us a year or two earlier and maybe with a little more style.
I think this is a reasonable perspective, and you could be right, but you could be wrong too. We don't get to run an experiment on this one. There are obviously huge things Jobs did that I take issue with (I hate the copyright and DRM crap in Apple Music, for example, and the whole patent war with Samsung was terrible), but at the same time, he grew up decades before me and I got the privilege of living in a world he helped created. Who knows where the world would be without him pushing it.
> Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
I think we may be able to get to a world where we can have that, but not in today's world, IMO. There's still far too much evil and not enough infra for truth, that if the good people don't push much harder than the bad and indifferent, we may never get there. Of course, not something we can test, just have to discuss and place our bets.
There was a time when I got used to eating a big plate of fries with my normal lunch (the student canteen at the university where I studied was just phenomenal), and after a couple of months, I had put on considerable weight. The problem was, I was thin my whole life, and I just couldn't imagine being overweight, so I didn't ever get on a scale, and had no idea how much I had put on. It was my mother telling me "my son, you've become properly fat" that made me realize that something significant had changed. The scale was now showing 90 kg, closer to 100 than my to my normal weight. After a couple of months of eating properly and running, everything was back to normal, but that was a stark reminder of how anyone can become obese given the right (or rather wrong) conditions.
Usually, it happens insidiously. After 30-40, metabolism slows down and it's easy to very slowly gain weight, even for people who didn't have weight issues before. Losing weight can be quite hard. To me the solution is to monitor my weight and avoid junk food as much as possible. I never drink soda, avoid fries. Sometimes you have no choice (e.g. traveling and no easy healthy options), then I try to only eat once or twice a day.
Thanks for those two links. I'm in the exact same place as the OP, and would love to start something of my own, but I have only technical skills, meaning all my startup ideas are for devs, a domain that's absolutely saturated. In the best case, I would pair with someone who is a "nerd" of a different domain, but somehow I find it rather difficult to meet such people. In case you (or anyone else) know of similar programs for Europe (esp. Berlin), I would be grateful for pointers.
Very sorry to hear about your father's illness, and how the situation was made even the worse by such brazen disrespect for user experience. My parents also have to regularly go through what I think amounts to violence by their electronic devices, but nothing as horrifying as this.
This terrifies me, TBH. I'm almost 50 and a little bit technical (used to admin Solaris boxen), and I just know the day will come when I haven't a damned clue how any of this works any more. For the time being, I'm happy using Linux as a bootloader for Emacs; will that be enough to see me through to my personal end? I sadly doubt it.
> and I just know the day will come when I haven't a damned clue how any of this works any more
I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?
I have family in their 90's who can navigate whatever tech you put in front of them, because they think it's important to figure things out when they get stuck. My father can barely turn his phone on because at the slightest frustration he gives up and waits for someone to "fix it" for him. Certainly different folks have different aptitudes, but choice and working through things plays an exceedingly large role.
> I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?
The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently. Learning a new interface just isn't as important to us as spending that time doing something enjoyable.
Imagine if car companies randomly update the way you drive a car overnight every 7 or 8 years. You go out one day, and suddenly instead of a steering wheel and pedals you have a stick with paddles, then a few years later its changed to something that looks like an oar. Eventually you too might say to hell with it.
The irony is that if a vendor can't provide a consistent experience every time, why should I remain loyal to that vendor on the next update?
If Windows is going to change their user interface every other year, why would I relearn their UX-du-jour when I can just re-learn once on a Mac and be good for a few years (if not longer)?
If I use hosted Gmail and my UI changes every other month, it just tells me that I should host elsewhere where the UX is more stable.
If you abuse users long enough with this everchanging, constant-beta UI nonsense, you are just telling them to move on to a platform that isn't so unstable, where you only have to learn the UX once, not every X months.
> The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently.
> Eventually you too might say to hell with it
I agree 100% and that's even kind of my point. You're choosing not to care about that stuff, which is fine (honestly, probably even healthy at a certain point), but it's not as if there is some biological imperative that as you age you are less able to use technology.
I’d point out that it’s not necessarily those people’s problems. It’s the tech makers’ problems. Hardly any of this stuff needs to change so wildly and so often.
The somewhat recent FaceTime updates have befuddled even my brother and I. And there’s zero reason for any of the changes. They were just changes, not improvements, and were probably even regressions.
I am typically able to poke around and figure out why something broke so I can fix the dependencies. And I can search online to figure out where some feature I depend on was moved to, or what extension I need to re-enable it. But I nevertheless resent this kind of mandatory administrative overhead that comes with relying on computers.
On the flip side, I enjoy learning new techniques, languages, and approaches to advance my craft.
The difference is that the former is dictated by developers and required on a periodic basis just to tread water, whereas the latter is self-directed and helps me become more capable.
I am an active engineer and software developer, and I already feel like I don’t have a clue how any of it works already. I am being a little bit hyperbolic of course, but that’s the feeling.
And to be honest, I don’t think it’s me. It isn’t clear to me that the people who make all this stuff know how it works either. Nothing works as intended in technology. At least some form of technology doesn’t work as it should every day, from your work machine’s OS, or some program, or your smartphone, or Android Auto or Apple Car Play, or your TV, or your Internet provider or WiFi router, or that website you visit, or your smart thermostat, and on and on. And that’s stuff just plain not working or encountering bugs. It doesn’t even address the usability of all this.
We are just shitting out technology left and right, all at the alter of scale. In my opinion, capitalism is part of the problem. The other is human nature. There are no incentives to get this right. And these days, large companies do not care that they get it right. Statistics of failure and user frustration are explicitly part of their business models. They don’t want to even know if there’s an issue with their product. They just let some statistics drive their decision making.
It’s all just a tragedy and comedy all in one. Amazon has their 12 principles they hire with that makes it seem like they hire geniuses left and right. And they can’t even get book selling right these days. And there’s no way to report issues. They do not care.
It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when his/her bonus depends on not understanding it.
Most of these bonuses are probably tied with frivolous, often highly unpopular and unwanted, feature updates. I doubt people get bonuses (or as large bonuses) for fixing usability bugs or improving quality.
A coworker of me never switched from DOS to Windows (he told me he tried it a few times but... meh), recently i helped him getting his new(-ish) Lenovo workstation set up with FreeDOS 1.3.
So... it IS possible to stay on a system where you are comfortable with, if you are willing to make concessions...
He mostly uses it for embedded programming, but also does the finances for a club he is in via a spreadsheet (As-easy-as) and does write the occasional letter in (if i remember correctly) wordstart. For emails and web he uses Arachne (with a hack that allows arachne to fetch https via wget).
Already happened to me, I have less and less idea how my linux system works now. I haven't kept up with all the various systemd rewrites, buses and random shit I don't know about and it's annoying when I actually want to do something
has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever or am I just an idiot? when I restart nginx I want to know if it failed, why , what's the syntax error. instead old reliable /etc/init.d/nginx configtest no I have to dig around
# Output all logs since boot
journalctl
# Follow all logs in real time
journalctl -f
# Output logs for a given systemd unit
journalctl -u $unit
# Combine follow and unit flags to follow logs for a given systemd unit
# Easy to remember: You are saying F*** U to a broken piece of software
journalctl -fu $unit
# Output kernel logs
journalctl -k
# Follow kernel logs
journalctl -fk
# Tip: Use -b flag to see logs from previous boot cycles
# Learn more, including advanced filtering and formatting
man journalctl
You can also add that configtest command as an ExecStartPre to the unit, and it will run that before starting nginx and optionally fail early if it finds an error.
> has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever
It can be useful when there's potentially multiple things leading up to the error in whatever you're running, as it is showing and explaining nearly every action that's recently happened in the system log. But if you're just wanting to look at logs related to nginx starting at the most recent then just query for niginx's system log instead of the whole system.
If a process or service is using systemd to start and stop it (e.g. You start it with `systemctl start $SERVICE_NAME), I often do `systemctl status $SERVICE_NAME` to get the service-specific logs. For me, it seems to get the job done much better than journalctl.
If you can set up nginx to do what you want, you can learn how to use systemd. In my experience it is quite usable once you get a handle on it. I'm sure there are plenty of "getting started" kinds of introductions that could make it useful to you after maybe half an hour of time investment. Other commenters have answered your specific question.
YMMV. I find systemd a lot easier to work with (I actually started wrapping daemons in proper services instead of sticking everything into nohup or tmux sessions).
Right, then I have to relearn my userspace setup... well maybe it's time - but I've been on debian longer long before I met my childs mother, before I even grew a single hair on my chest, before I had a bank account, a job, or a cell phone. But perhaps you are right, it's time to quit it
MX Linux (Debian-based, uses sysvinit with systemd shims) and Devuan would seem to be obvious alternatives that wouldn't require changes to your setup.
I'll check it out. I have all sorts of weirdness with this system. snap is great because debian doesn't package a lot, yet then all my snap programs are sandboxed in a non useful way. (like mysqlworkbench won't save passwords in a keystore because that hookup doesn't work - and it cant run without a working keystore. like firefox will start once, but if you run the firefox command, it'll error out that firefox is already) lots of annoying little things
Yes, a well run / nice project. KDE3 seems far better than anything in the KDE or Gnome world since.
(I don't use kwin, but instead a different window manager, and only part of trinity for this and that, but that's not due to a lack of quality, I just prefer to mix and match.)
I'm wearing a W-800H since quite a while, and it feels like an updated F91W. Strap doesn't break, improved lighting, 4 buttons instead of 3 so that you can adjust it in the dark, better date display, and still light, cheap and reliable. Highly recommended.
I so wish this were true (and seeing it at the top of HN would make you believe it were true), but my experiences in the last 6 years or so with 4 different laptops speaks otherwise. 2 of those were sold with Linux on them (Dell and Tuxedo), 2 were Thinkpads, and they all had all kinds of issues. The best is the Tuxedo, but even that thing has issues with hybernating. Unfortunately, none of them comparable to the smooth functioning of a Macbook.
The serene joy I get from watching this film with my kids is comparable to nothing. The scene where the parents are turned into pigs is a bit taxing on them, but even that has become an in-joke, with my daughter reminding me that I might suddenly start grunting and keel over if I keep on eating. There are so many inventive moments like those that are also animated with such mastery that you want to rewatch it as soon as you are at the end credits.
At the moment, the general impression I get from people working at Amazon is "Join for the experience, get it on your CV, move on after a year". This is even across departments and countries. The wife of a very good friend who lives in China is working there since nine months in some kind of operations role, and made up her mind months ago that she wouldn't take it any longer than a year. Here in Berlin, I just recently talked to a dev who left exactly a year after he started. He said it was interesting seeing the whole AWS machinery from the inside, and there was quite a lot to learn in terms of process and management, but shoving around legacy Java was just not worth it.
For a technology to be legacy, I think it needs to be stale and falling out of use for new projects. I don't see that with Java. New releases with new language features are being released at a faster pace than ever, and companies are still building new products on it.
Java hits a sweet spot of performance, tooling, and productivity that few other ecosystems can. It's biggest competitors are probably C# and golang, and, for various reasons, it is holding its own just fine against them.
If you remember Duke, you're old. I still remember when Sun was going around holding Java events, touting the advantages of Java, with Duke shirts, mugs, etc.
Even when I was a student and loved a particular class, there was the constant distraction of having to attend and do homework for four or five other classes.
Total Recall has it all: The rather bloody action and shooting, the gimmicks (digital nail polish! Live X-ray scanners!), abstruse ideas and images (Kuato lives!), Arnie delivering zingers with an Austrian accent. And then, once you grow up and read Philip K. Dick, you actually understand how much of his ambiguous mind games made it into the movie, and watch it a couple of times with that additional perspective. There are very few films which deliver similar amounts of cinematic joy, unfortunately. The last two that I watched were Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, and surprisingly a Tom Cruise film, Edge of Tomorrow. Both highly recommended if you like Total Recall.
As a Cruise film, it may fall off many people's radars, but it's got some really well worked out trippy stuff in there.
But I'm a sucker for non-completely-dumb time travel stuff. If you are too, be sure to check out Tenet and Predestination, if you haven't watched them already.
Both are well done, evoke consistent atmospheres, and didn't get the attention they deserve. Predestination is more physical in a Cronenbergian sense, while Tenet is pure Nolan administered intravenously.
I generally like Tom Cruise movies, they're good more often than not. Edge Of Tomorrow was one of his best.
I've even shown it to my 9 years old kid, he was flabbergasted. Might have not understood everything (he doesn't have the context) but overall he said it was the best movie he ever saw (so far).
Edge of Tomorrow was such a sleeper hit for me, I watched it on a plane while browsing for something mindless, and I was riveted. I must have watched it another five times since.
Tip: Don't read anything about it, just watch it.
I similarly loved Children of Men, they really nail the dystopian aesthetic.
> once you grow up and read Philip K. Dick, you actually understand how much of his ambiguous mind games made it into the movie
PKD didn't write "mind games"; according to one's own view of reality, he was either among the most sincere intellectuals since Kant, or a deeply paranoid, mentally ill individual - and everything inbetween. He was truly invested in the questions about perception that he poured over all his work.
You're right, they aren't mind games, I wasn't particularly happy about that formulation myself. Better would be maybe psychological conundrums? Or thought experiments on consciousness and the mind?
I love PKD but having read most of the biographical material about him and a large chunk of his exegesis ( a journal that he kept after experiencing a break with reality late in his life) I'd put my money on deeply patanoid, mentally ill individual.
But god bless him, he certainly did leave us with some marvelous tales designed to make us question the world around us and ourselves.
