There is some minimum that seems to work well enough in a lot of hobbies. Can’t always go for the cheapest, but you may not have to go that high, either.
Amateur astronomers tend to hate on Walmart telescopes, and there are reasons for that. Still, the optics in any of them are better than Galileo had, and he saw a lot (admittedly, he also didn’t have a hopelessly light polluted sky). It’s a matter of setting expectations.
A $25 Baofang can get you into amateur radio after getting your technician license. There’s even a version now that doesn’t spew spurious emissions on harmonic frequencies and fuck things up for everyone else.
I once traded a somewhat older GPU for a fretless bass, amp, and effect pedal. The guy had just moved, his GPU died, and seemed like he wanted to get rid of some of his stash. While that was an exception, there’s probably some guitar guy in your city that wants to clear some stuff out and is willing to make a deal.
The author in question here was pretty shitty. He wrote his own sequel to called “Fellowship of the King”, and then sued Amazon and the Tolkien estate saying they stole elements from his book. He lost, and the Tolkien estate countersued.
The guy played stupid games and won stupid prizes.
The books go into public domain in 20 years. Now that Christopher Tolkien is out of the way (who tended to block a lot of stuff, for better or worse) , the current heirs want as much out of it as they can.
20 years might sound like a lot, but that’s about as much time as between the Peter Jackson movies and now.
Works made for hire are 95 years from publication. LotR is not a work for hire, so it goes by life of the author plus 75 years. It goes public domain in 2044.
It used to be common for clocks to be driven directly off the electrical frequency. The US Navel Observatory would call up generator plants and tell them to slow down or speed up a little to make a correction to all the clocks. I’m not sure if that still happens, though.
For that matter, why do we read Shakespeare? They’re plays. Watch them as plays or movies. If kids first exposure to Star Wars was by reading the script, they’d hate that, too, and they should.
I never learn my lesson (startrek.website)
Amazon and Tolkein Estate force author to destroy all copies of his work. Only pirated copies will survive. (variety.com)
Trig (lemmy.world)