I wrote a piece in 2014 entitled How to ask for help with software. I gave it an easy-to-remember title so I could find it in Google when I needed to send to a user. I just did the search, Google didn't find it. I was concerned this day would come. BTW, opening the page in my browser (I found it by other means) was enough to correct Google, it seems.#
BTW, I just learned about fake timeouts in basketball. Didn't even know it was a thing. Apparently they work, but you can't do often because the other guys will anticipate it#
Quite out the blue I notice that longtime friend Scott Knaster enthusiastically agrees with virtually everything I write about the Trump mess. Of course I wonder what the common thread is, and I've come to believe it is that we are both avid sports fans, even though they're not all the same sports. #- Lots of strategy in sports requires compromise. You take one player out and replace with another who is better at defense because what you need right now is a better chance of stopping the other team. It comes at a cost. Yet a sports fan knows there's a randomness to it, or is it spirituality? God sees what you're doing and perhaps (as my dear departed uncle would say) goofs on you. You put in the best defensive squad and they score more points than your offensive-strong team would. Go figure. But you have to be prepared for whatever comes your way and let it guide your thinking. And you always have to be thinking about how fate could deal you a cruel blow, because that happens all the time in sport, and of course in life too. And especially in politics.#
- If you don't believe me, look who's in the White House. 💥 #
- Linear thinking doesn't work. If I do X the other guy always does Y is not a good bet. Because the other person is sentient too, and knows you're expecting Y and one time, when it really makes a difference will do exactly what you don't expect because it's what you don't expect.#
- But one thing's for sure. If there are two seconds on the clock, and you're in field goal range, and you're down two points, you go for the field goal. Even though a touchdown is more fun. #
- PS: Another reason sports fans know how to absorb mistaken thinking. Watch the analyst predict that the Warriors will blow away the Raptors in Game 6, which of course we now know didn't happen. So we know when listening to pundits, or even our own ideas, that nothing like that is actually going to happen.#
If you're the kind of person who likes an early look at new things, here's my collection of stories from feeds I follow in River6. By design, it's an evolution of the river of news readers we had for earlier apps. I've put considerable time into fixing bugs and adding new small features, and of course the engine on the back-end is completely new. The GitHub repo is still private. #
2016: "I'm not going to pay to get through 100 paywalls. They need to work together to solve this."#
- First, thanks to the team at GitHub for allowing me to be an early tester of this product. I'm a regular user of NPM, I publish my own packages, I use it to manage my Node code base. So I'm interested in innovations in this area. #
- Here are some very basic questions. #
- Is it either/or? If I use GitHub Package Registry, can I still access packages in NPM?#
- If I can't, are common NPM packages also available in GHPR? For example, I use nodejs-websocket in some of my projects.#
- What are some use-cases for GHPR? #
- What advantages does it have over NPM?#
- Drawbacks?#
- These are all questions I will try to answer as I do my investigation, but it would be helpful to get the answers from others first. Might save me some time. #
In school, it was puzzling to learn about the rise of Hitler. Why didn't the people rise to stop it? We're living the answer now. They didn't believe what was happening. They thought the nightmare would end without them having to do anything. That's the mistake we're making too.#I watched Maddow last night, saw it with new eyes. What Trump said isn't outrageous, it's the present, it's the truth, it's the future. It doesn't matter what the FBI thinks.#
Google treats the web as if it were its own private platform. Chrome is always generating new errors. Okay they don't like the way software I wrote five years ago works. I need a browser I can recommend that thinks the open web is not a corporate platform. Not Mozilla, btw, they generally do what Google says. #
At the Great Democratic Debate, one of the candidates should suggest they draw straws. Everyone who picks a short straw withdraws from the race, then and there, and endorses the candidate with the long straw. That would be the Democrats finally waking the fuck up and leading.#
- At any given time I seem to have a few projects that I feel strongly must be undertaken right now or the world will crumble. I'm not kidding, I think they're that important. #
I started watching When They See Us three times. I'll get through it. But it is so anger-making to watch how the cops treated the kids and their parents. If you believe we can depend on the basic goodness of people, well, clearly we can't.#
The news should reflect what's obvious about what the next steps are for our increasingly authoritarian government. Project out from here. When do the loyalty oaths start for government employees? Members of Congress.? The courts? Teachers? You and me. When do the concentration camps for American citizens start? We need a thread that isn't looking backward as the news mostly is, but is focused on the present and near-future. That would help people see why impeachment is so important. Didn't they see it coming? Answer: They didn't want to look. #You know the old idea of visualizing the audience as naked to overcome stage fright, analogously consider that every bit of hate you get on Twitter comes from an algorithm, a few lines of code and records in a database, not from your mommy or daddy, or even the police. You are not actually being threatened, even though it may feel that you are. #
Update: They added me to the beta group for GitHub Package Registry. Now I have to figure out what it is and how it might fit into my work. Have questions or suggestions? Post them here.#
Idea for a Serial-style podcast. Actors play various roles in the Mueller Report. Need screen writers. I'd definitely listen to it all. #
One thing I learned from being an entrepreneur and software developer is that you have to listen. Put aside any anger or fear coming from the person with the idea, sometimes the best ideas come with angst. Journalism circles the wagons, listens only to ideas of the sort "Oh woe is me, we have been unfairly treated by tech, give us your money, or else." I've been hearing this since shortly after the web came about. Oddly the people who turned me on to the web were journalists They were excited about this great news distribution technology. That's the right way imho to look at it. The money is there. Look at all the money Facebook and Google make. A big secret of business is so obvious people sometimes miss it. If you are being hurt by a competitor, think about doing what they do. It's hard to listen to them, but then no one is entitled to tune out while their livelihood is undermined. #The season finale of Gentleman Jack was just lovely. Not too perfect, because there are big clouds on the horizon, but a sweet ending. Most people I know didn't see it, but it and Chernobyl, both from HBO are the highlights of the year. And of course I'm going to binge season 2 of Big Little Lies, when it's done, no matter what. Adding Meryl Streep to the already estimable ensemble is too much to miss. #
It’s about time journalism started covering itself without the dishonest hype. "The industry doesn’t need—and shouldn’t ask for—a special law to help it compete with Google and Facebook." #
Yet journalists have lots of opinions about tech, and have no grounding with experience, nor do they listen to those who do.#
I signed up for the GitHub Package Registry beta, but wasn't selected as one of the lucky few. I do most of my server development these days in Node, and am of course using NPM. Sometimes it gets flaky, and I keep thinking there's more it can do. Am intrigued with the idea of an integrated package manager and GIT repository. If you have any experience wiht the new GHPR beta, write a post somewhere and send me a link. I'm really curious. #
Cory Doctorow is right. Make new laws that make lock-in illegal for dominant tech platforms. We've learned this over and over. Tech stagnates while platforms dominate, then there's an explosive new platform, the incumbent tries to kill it, and that slows things down again. Tech has an undeserved reputation for moving quickly. Actually it tears itself apart frequently, the periods where progress can be made are too short, and always comes with backward motion. Other technologies don't this. You can create a treatment for one disease without starting an epidemic of another. You can add air conditioning to bowling alleys without coming up with new rules to the game. #Wirecutter on rating online banks: "We haven't covered this yet. We're planning to eventually, but it will be a big project and we want to get it right, so it's a ways out."#
Consumer Reports does rate online banks, but the page with their ratings and reviews is 404. I reported the broken link a few days ago, but it's still broken. #
I've been emailing with longtime friend and open web advocate Jon Udell about my campaign to convince Elizabeth Warren to post her position papers on the open web. Of all the presidential candidates Warren is, imho, the one who would most likely support the open web, and getting her campaign on board would help raise the issue for other American political leaders. I admit I am using the political campaign of 2020 to try to make the survival of the open web a more visible issue. I think it's important. #- This is what Jon said, and the questions he asked.#
- I agree Warren should be on the open web. Now I'm trying to sort out exactly what I think that means nowadays, given the option to use one or another service behind your own domain name. If the campaign asked my advice, what would it be? That's what I'm asking myself. What would yours be? You've said what not to do. But what should they do?#
- So here is the basic criteria: Her position papers should survive the failure of a single company. Currently, Warren's presence, and the presence of many other political leaders, is dependent on the survival of Medium. That's the most important point of failure. It's one thing if we lose Warren's writing, that would be bad enough, but the idea of losing all the political writing, that's an unacceptable risk. It's bad tech, and bad politics, which are increasingly becoming the same thing. And for elected officials it might be illegal. In any case it's exactly what got the Clinton campaign in so much trouble in 2016, the Hillary's Emails issue. #
- So at a minimum, the Warren position papers should be hosted on a domain that Warren owns. They should have a near-perfect archive, and be ready to redirect to the archive when there's an outage. #
- Jon: I gather from your previous email that Medium offers part of this service. That's a surprise to me. I know they did at one time, but I also heard stories about them canceling the feature, and thereby taking content offline. At least there's confusion as to whether they offer the feature, but here's the really important thing -- they can change their policy at any time, and they have changed policies, and business models, many times. So there's no argument possible that Medium has allowed for survival of writing they host beyond their own existence, when there's no guarantee that they, or their survivors would be bound by that commitment. In tech we have lots of experience with companies going back on their promises, esp when they get in trouble and have to refinance. #
- Probably the best place to host her position papers is on elizabethwarren.com, a site they already own. I understand why they wouldn't want to mess with their fund-raising site, if so create a sub-domain. If they're posting their position papers there, then they should use that URL in their promotions, and then as far as I'm concerned, the problem is solved. They are no longer sending a message to users that Medium is a safe place to post, they're not helping to make Medium too big to fail, which right now, they certainly are. A crash of Medium would be a shock to the web the way the crash of Lehman Brothers was to the financial markets. #
- PS: I wrote a piece called For-the-Record Blogging in 2018 that outlines a strong solution to this problem. #
I've been thinking lately that when you win an NBA championship, you automatically lose your top two players. There's a new lottery, redistributes the power players around the league, breaks up dynasties. So if Toronto wins, Kawhi will have to leave, possibly to go to Minnesota or Atlanta. The reason is that dynasties are not only boring they are unsportsmanlike, imho.#In case you were wondering, the pragmatic cost of an unimpeached criminal in the White House is that there's no reason for him not to continue breaking the law, breaking more laws, ignoring Congress, and the courts, purging disloyal people in the DOJ, FBI, intelligence services, and even cancelling the election which the Dems are counting on winning. You have to put up the barrier as soon as you can, because all the time you wait they become less potent. By the time you realize you should have done it, that you had to do it, given how things have been going, it'll be too late. He'll just have you arrested for being disloyal. Maybe he's already threatening to do that behind the scenes. #
If you believe in the open web or the indie web (they're exactly the same thing) -- how could it hurt to ask Elizabeth Warren to post her position papers on the web instead of in a corporate silo? Get involved. Help. All you have to do is RT. 💥#
I'm working on River6, as I reported here. One of the things included with this project is a new river browser, the JavaScript code that runs on the client. There are a few new features here and there, but mostly it's just reorganized and debugged, and hopefully easier to work on. Today I decided to do something bold, I removed all the layers of CSS that define how a river looks. Starting with a clean slate. It had been written by several different people at different times, and in the interim my understanding of how to write modular CSS has come a long way. It was too hard to change things. I wanted to put this note here for this screen shot to show what a river looks like without any CSS at all. Not pretty! #
What's going on with Huawei and Android is the most extreme example of Dilbertism that's probably ever happened. There's Trump, the ultimate PHB making a grand royal proclamation, which ultimately forces a fork in Android, so the Chinese add even more malware to the world. I said a few years ago, during the 2016 campaign, that tech and politics are one and the same now, and our journalists are vastly unprepared for it. I urged the J-schools to run topical bootcamps for reporters. No one has done anything about it. #
Dr John was a phenomenon at a time when I was listening to lots of new music. I saw him at the Palladium on 14th St in NYC in 1973 or so. I couldn't figure out what kind of person he was. He was dressed in a long robe, holding a staff like a god, masked, and had huge colorful feathers coming out of the top of his head. Sang all the Dr John hits. He got me interested in New Orleans, where I ended up going to college. He died yesterday at 77. His music lives on. #Journalism has been very conflicted about Craig Newmark. Truth is he isn't responsible for anything other than making a product that people wanted. The news industry could have done it, but for some reason didn't.#
There will come a day when a presidential candidate will be judged by where they choose to post their policy statements. If they use a corporate silo, that will be like accepting campaign donations from Goldman Sachs. Not a good appearance.#
GPS is an amazing thing, but there are places it just doesn't work, like what we used to call The Big Dig in Boston. Too many levels of tunnels. GPS can't tell if you're underground or on the surface. #
Consumer Reports does rate online banks. I thought I had searched for it, but there it is, thanks to a pointer from Tobie Stanger on Twitter. She is a senior editor at Consumer Reports. #
Seriously, a guy who ignores the Constitution and gets away with it is going to have a real election? Is that what you think?#
Weird. Same logic that says impeachment is futile because Senate would never convict also seems to apply to passing symbolic bills that also have no chance in Senate. #
New header graphic, a rustic country road. Previous, my brother and mother walking to desegregated school in Corona, Queens in 1964.#
- It bothers me, of course, that Elizabeth Warren, candidate for president, is posting her position papers on Medium. I wrote a tweet yesterday, and cross-posted it here, saying as much. #
Constantin Basturea, a longtime reader of this blog, did a bit of research and found the Twitter accounts of the people who run the Warren web presence, suggesting I contact them. At first I thought, they won't know who I am, and they might not care about the open web. But then I thought, why wouldn't they care?#- There are a lot of parallels in the ways big tech companies and banks regard their customers, and Warren has been such a pioneer in the reform of banks. It's a bad environmental decision, imho, for Warren to go with Medium, when the open web is just as easy, the results are as good, and the writing more likely to persist. It's worth a careful explanation of why the open web is a better choice for a thoughtful and futuristic campaign like Warren's. #
- Writing for the record#
- When Senator Warren posts a position paper, it's a matter of public record. It's important that it be accessible for the indefinite future. #
- If she was elected, her consituents would want to see what she promised during the campaign, in her own words, to see how it matches up with her policies as an elected official.#
- And if she isn't elected, it's still good to keep the ideas accessible. The problems probably won't go away, and her proposals might be useful to a future candidate.#
- Preserving ideas is something the web can be good at, but we have to make the right choices.#
- Medium is not a good choice for creating a public record.#
- Medium could go out of business#
- If Medium went out of business everything published there would go away. This has happened many times in tech, it's the norm. Even successful companies, such as Google, sometimes walk away from existing sites because they weren't profitable.#
- Medium does not have a stable business model#
- Their software is good, easy to use, and the resulting pages are easy to read. But this is the only thing that has been stable about Medium since its inception in 2012, as they repeatedly pivot trying to find a profitable business model.#
- Medium has a paywall#
- It's not clear whether Warren's posts are behind the paywall, because their policies are not clear, and they change. Sometimes I hit a wall reading a random friend's post on Medium. The paywall is not only an irritant, but it limits access to people who have a credit card and are able to pay Medium for access. #
- Set an example for others#
- People look at Medium and if they've been around a while, the questions above all come up, but then they see that a great progressive like Senator Warren is using Medium, so it must be okay. This is not good leadership, especially when setting up and running a blog in 2019 is so inexpensive and easy.#
- We'll help#
- My politics happen to align pretty well with Warren's, but even if I were a conservative Republican, I'd want to help get Senator Warren on the open web, because it's that important to have a serious presidential campaign take a leadership position on the independence of people who write on the open web. #
- PS: There's a follow-up to this post. #
I wish Elizabeth Warren would set an example and not post her position papers on a silo. Her archive isn’t very robust since she doesn’t control the domain. Pretty sure it’s behind a paywall. She could set a great example of how to use an open and free web.#
I've been working on the next River product. This time I'm using a MySQL database. Three tables -- feeds, items and subscriptions. The folder structure is exactly as in River5, except there is no data folder (the data is in the database). I am still a relative newbie in SQL databases, but I think this model works. I'm documenting as much as I can and of course I will release the Node.js source. I hope it serves as a basis for distributing RSS intelligence around the net. Last time around (Google Reader) we centralized. That was a mistake. If enough people run instances of this database we'll have a less interruptable base of functionality. I want to try out more new ideas as well. We've been really stuck for a long time. 💥#
Braintrust query: I have a Node server app that's behaving badly, on an intermittent basis. I finally tracked down what's going wrong, but it's a mystery. I also have an easy workaround, but before I do that, I'd like to see if anyone has an idea what might be going on. #If journalism had the ability to look at itself critically, the way it looks at Facebook, they would find a smoking gun in this Les Moonves quote from 2016. You could argue whether Facebook knew it was profiting from Trump trolling, but there's absolutely no doubt that journalism was. We need a Mueller report on this too. Any journalism outfit could do it, btw. They have access to all the sources. There should be a Pulitzer in it. But of course none of them will do it. it would require an integrity they don't have.#
Disclaimer: I hate platitudes.#
What happened in Game 2 of the NBA finals? It was pretty evenly matched. Both teams were real strong on defense. Golden State found its groove at the beginning of the 3rd quarter, and the Raptors went cold. They got good looks but didn't make them. #
Every reminder about Father's Day on the net, supposedly directed right at me, are total triggers of grief and regret. You'd think with all their sophisticated data mining they would know what this isn't a holiday I want to hear about.#
- My longtime friend Stan Krute sent an email asking how I do my blog. Rather than do a one-off email, I am going to explain it via blog post, so it's documented publicly.#
- In the spring of 2017, I wrote a piece of software called Old School. It's a Node.js server app that is configured via a big JSON file. It handles incoming REST-style messages telling it to build blogs that it knows about via the JSON file. #
- I write the blog content with an outliner, and the result is a big OPML file. The server software (Old School) knows where to look for the OPML file, via the config.json file. You can use any outliner to edit the content as long as it produces an OPML file as output. #
- I archive the content of the blog in a GitHub repository, so you can see how the content works, going back to May 2017. #
- The <head> elements of the OPML file also configure Old School and it contains information other applications might find useful. #
- Here's a search for Old School on my blog. #
- Even though Old School is undocumented and unsupported, I did provide an example app. Never know when I will need to install a second instance.#
- The outliner I use is called Electric Outliner. I've never shipped it, and don't have any plans to. I got tired of supporting "products" that few if any people use. This, and Old School were the first two products I made just for myself. It's cool, because the users of the product really respect the hell out of the developer, and the developer knows the users will understand the software even with no docs. 😄#
- You can use LO2 -- it's very similar to EO, in fact the core outliner is the same code. #
- If I want to attach a video to a post, I add an attribute called urlvideo, which points to a YouTube file. The runtime of the blog, a browser-based JavaScript app, looks for these attributes when the page is loaded, and builds the necessary structures. #
- Similarly for urltweet, which points to a tweet. #
- If you put an attribute named flNumberedSubs on a headline, Old School generates an <ol> element. flBulletedSubs generates an <ul> element.#
If you put an attribute named image on an element, its value should be the address of an image, i.e. something that can be put in the src attribute of an <img> element. Old School adds it to the output with a CSS style of float: right. That's how I create right-margin images that I love so much. #- That reminds me, you can use emoji short codes. 💥 #
- Old School also supports a glossary, a CMS idea that goes back to Clay Basket in 1996. It's a simple two-column table represented in an outline. It does string substitutions of the top-level string with its sub-head's value. The glossary I use for Scripting News is also archived in the repo. #
- If you have questions about this, post a comment in this GitHub thread. #
I really enjoyed last night's NBA Finals game. Because it was a real contest. Playoff basketball is like nothing else. You can go to a regular season game if you want, but it's like spring training. The problem with the Warriors is that they, like other dominant teams before them, forced the league to form around them. For example the Rockets, an excellent team, can't get by Golden State, so they'll rip up the team this summer and start over. Possibly the only player who's untouchable is James Hardin. When KD went to the Golden State that's when the NBA turned a bad corner imho at least for this fan who just likes a real game, not a rout, at the very end of the season. We got that last night. Looking forward to the rest of the playoffs. I don't really care who wins btw, I just love great basketball. #
You don't hear this on the news, but I assume at least some of the strange behavior of American politicians is due to blackmail or threats of physical harm.#
What Steve Jobs says here is true. You find new ways of doing things by building tools to do them, and follow your nose. #
NYT: "Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats."#
Leon Redbone died. His obit is of course a total kick. For me his most memorable song is Lazy Bones. #
Request to journalists. When impeachment is discussed instead of talking about Democrats, say it's the House that's taking it up. That's more accurate, and it helps reduce the partisanality of it. Esp now that there's a Repub pushing for impeachment.#
I always thought, for some reason, that the YACC source for Frontier was lost, but I looked in the repo and searched for YACC, and there it was in langparser.y. I still want a nice scripting language for my JavaScript outliner, and it can't be JavaScript. There's some great food for thought here, and lots of memories. The last time I worked at this level was in the late 80s. Thinking maybe of starting with this syntax for a simple scripting language that can be plugged into JS apps. #
I wish the Mueller Report was an HBO or Netflix series. The actor who plays Trump should be a TV president, yet do the corrupt, desperate and sad things he does. Create a contrast betw the president we deserve and the one we have.#
I just realized that Mueller is like Michael Clayton. Specifically, the scene at the end of the movie with Tilda Swinton and George Clooney. The pivotal line: "I'm not the guy that you kill." Translated to Mueller, "I'm not the guy that testifies." He's right. Like Michael Clayton, Mueller is a fixer. He was given a mess to sort out, and he did. Along the way there were indictments. But he did his job. It's now Congress's job. #Mueller: "Read the report."#
Bingeworthy is pretty good, my first real SQL app. I never do enough to promote these things or even finish them. It needs features to draw you back into it. #
The Wikipedia page for podcasting still has some misleading info about how the name was arrived at. How it actually happened.#
I remember watching the series finale of Mad Men realizing that one of the hundreds of fan theories I had read was right! That doesn't mean the author came up with the ending. Another analogy. I thought Apple's phone was going to be called iPhone. I didn't get credit for naming the phone, however. The naming of the podcast is very well documented, the archives all there. There's no reason for the Wikipedia page to carry this mistake forward. All the reporters echo the mistake. It's not fair to Dannie Gregoire who actually coined the term, or respectful of the open process we used to develop it. It was all very deliberate, took a lot of trial and error, hard work, cooperation, patience and creativity. #
Feeling much better. My appetite has returned, somewhat, and I took a 20-minute walk at a brisk pace through the woods. Very uplifting. And I watched two excellent movies today, Cold War and Roma. It was not part of a plan, I just stumbled on them while browsing on Amazon and Netflix. Both were slow and quiet, very dramatic, and beautiful in every way. Perfect movies. Such an unusual thing! Two in one day? Wow. #
Over the last few days I've also watched the full second season of Barry, am caught up on Gentleman Jack and Chernobyl, all on HBO. I know people rave about Barry, but like the second season of Killing Eve, it is a letdown. It's funny that's for sure because Bill Hader is an amazing comedian, like a Jim Carrey or Robin Williams. It's easy to watch, it kills a few hours, but won't give you a lot to think about. It's like popcorn. I think both shows were hurt by running while Game of Thrones was finishing up, btw. It kind of sucked all the air out of the room. Amazingly, now I have absolutely no interest in reading about GoT, where just a week ago, that's pretty much all I wanted to read about. #
I was intrigued by Gentleman Jack through the first few episodes. The principal character, Anne Lister, played by Suranne Jones, is very appealing and has an unusual problem, which she sets out to solve, all while leading her remarkable life. I'm not being sarcastic. I was drawn to it because I watched Doctor Foster which also starred Jones, and it was riveting, and kept my attention through two seasons. But the potential of Gentleman Jack never seems to come together and the show drags and repeats, for what? She's brilliant, but we see before she does that what's she's chasing is unattainable. Or so it seems, the season is only half-done. But the elements of a great show are there so hopefully it's turn around. Episode 5 airs tonight on HBO at 10PM.#
Chernobyl, a 5-part miniseries, is something you should watch. It's a really well done thriller about a historic event that I didn't really understand at the time, but I remember how freaked out we all were that it was the end of the world. Now it's easy to watch because we know that it more or less worked out, the world is still here. Episode 4 airs tonight on HBO at 9PM.#
I have a really bad cold, or something. I'll start writing again when I feel better. For now I'm sleeping, hydrating and binge-watching. Just watched season 2 of Fleabag. Not sure what's next. #
At what point will cities license their name to companies. So San Francisco changes to Salesforce. "I'm catching a flight from JFK to Salesforce, honey." You can imagine the rest. The United States is already spoken for. #
Turkeys in my back yard. I shot this through a window, unfortunately when I went outside to get a clearer picture they turned and ran away. I wasn't going to hurt them.#
A friend asked me now that it's over what do I think of Game of Thrones. She hasn't watched the show, but knows that I did. I don't have a ready answer. Here's an analogy. What do I think of San Francisco? I lived in the Bay Area for a long time, and for a very short time I lived in the city (on Broadway). There are some things that are incredible about it, the weather down the peninsula is about as perfect as weather can be about eight months a year. Food is excellent. Lots of smart people. I had a lot of very positive experiences there. But the traffic is awful and you always have to be prepared for an earthquake, and I've lived through one, and didn't like it. People are obsessed with money, I find that dull, which is probably the main reason I left. I've been watching GoT for a long time. It's impossible to say what I think of it. It's a thing. It's like asking me what I think of a close relative, perhaps one who just died. #Now I think the best season finale ever was Six Feet Under. The show wasn't pretentious, in fact its point was to make mundane the most dramatic thing that happens to each of us. So the ending was an ending and nothing more. I'm not going to spoil it here. I think there needs to be a site where you can keep your watching history and you can write things like this with enough metadata so it knows not to show it to you if you haven't seen the finale of the show I'm writing about. Maybe in Internet 4.0. #
The only show that I can think of that didn't punt on the ending was Mad Men. The end was a surprise, but someone I knew had guessed it. It was clever and satisfying. The Sopranos ending was almost a pure punt (we did find out the ending for a few characters in the last episode). Unlike a lot of people -- I liked the ending. I also liked the ending of Lost. Someday someone will do a show (like Seinfeld duh) that disclaims up front to be about nothing, therefore the finale, by definition will be nothing. I guess that was also Newhart. I didn't watch either of them. #
One of the best things I read about GoT was in a Facebook post. Maybe you can read it. I'm not going to port it. Not my job. :-)#
GoT spoiler. NakedJen do not read. The sanest ending for GoT would be Khaleesi doesn't destroy Kings Landing. She takes the throne. (Keep the end of Cersei and Jaime.) She marries Jon Snow, and he takes up sculpting or pottery, maybe farming and bends the knee. Everyone relaxes and has a good time.#