Language: English

Money

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Mike O'Sullivan - Money

I never really had some money on my own. I started having some budgets and money to spend after I finished high-school.

Although I always had plenty of things, and food, and shelter, and fun, and all sorts of pleasures, I never had a big sum of money at my disposal, some things were off-limits. I didn’t live a poor childhood, but, certainly, not a rich one. (OK, if you say “rich” = food + education + love + shelter + some pleasures, then, yes, we were rich)

In the whole childhood, we only went on a trip outside visiting some relatives two or three times. I still have some rather strange travel habits.

So, when I was about 19, I started having some budgets and some money to spend. I made huge mistakes with money for a while, I had no clear way of handling them, I wasn’t aware of what’s expensive and what’s cheap, why should I buy from a supermarket instead of a nearby store, why sometimes the nearby store was the better option, and so on.

It took me a while to get accustomed to the idea of having money, on how to budget them, and to know what’s more important than having money.

As a lesson out of all of these, if you have children, I’d consider giving them a little budget. They will make mistakes, for sure, but sometimes it’s better to make a mistake when you’re 15 than when you’re 20.

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IMDB ratings of a movie

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Rami ™ - M for Movies

If you look at the grades of the movies on IMDb, most of the popular movies fall between 6 and 7.5. If it’s above that, it’s likely a good movie, if it’s below that, it’s likely a very poor one.

Sure, there are certain specificities to this: comedies don’t get good grades on IMDb, you’ll rarely see a comedy having a good grade.

Also, action-movies, more recently, especially if they have some special effects, tend to get high grades.

I prefer watching movies with a grade above 7, but don’t always do so.

Also, for the movies in IMDb Top 250, I prefer to see them again as time goes by. It’s one thing to see the Godfather when you’re 20, and another thing to see it again 20 years later.

When I grade a movie, I tend to give it a minimum 8, 10 if it’s highly good, a 9 if it impressed me somehow. Recently, I haven’t given grades below 8, and even if I do, not less than 7. I think that the movie creators deserver a bit of appreciation, even if I don’t agree with the ideas in a movie 100%.

I follow a similar principle on Goodreads, where I give most books 3/4 stars, and to the top books 5 stars.

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“The hell was I thinking?”

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Emil Wu - Memory

There’s a funny line in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997): (recalling memories about a person whom she loved/admired in high-school): “The hell was I thinking?”.

Memories tend to be like this. In childhood, you get first memories. First memories of a technical game. First memory of ice cream. First memory of a toy. First memory of a friend. First memory of a person. First memory of riding a bicycle.

And time passes, and your taste in technical objects, in food, in people, in some activities, changes.

You also change, you’re not the same.

People, objects, activities, technical things change.

And you look right now, in August 2020, at a memory some years ago, when you were a child, and you liked ice cream X, game Y, activity Z, and you still think that the memory is nice, that you might have enjoyed it, that you do know why you liked it, but, on another hand, you’re a bit surprised by the choice back then.

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