Comments by "Magic Beans" (@Magic_beans_) on "" video.

  1. The spoiler thing bugs me so much.  I read a lot of history books, and when we're talking about big stuff I think it's safe to assume we're already pre-spoiled; you don't have to pretend it's going to work out between King Henry and Anne Boleyn.  If we're talking about something more obscure, like a bunch of slaves stealing a ship and sailing it past the freaking White House, just let me enjoy the ride.
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  2. Arceushero If I drop my Nook and it breaks (unlike the dozen times I actually have dropped my Nook, or the time my friend dropped a Kindle in the bathtub) my library is still intact.  I can go to my computer or my phone and continue reading.  Also, e-readers don't cost $300, multimedia entertainment tablets do.  Black and white e-readers cost about $69 and can go a month between charges.  I use mine all the time in small villages without Internet access or reliable electricity. That said, I still give e-books a big negative mark in one category: sharing.  If I like a book and want somebody else to read it, I can just give her the book.  To share an e-book, the other person must have a compatible reader and the publisher must enable sharing.  Assuming those are true, I can only ever share a given book with one person one time for 14 days.  For me, that's a huge handicap, and as such I only use my e-reader for public domain classics and mass-market stuff that everybody's already reading.
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  3. No, that was real.  In the late 80's and early 90's, it was trendy to wear jeans with rips and holes along the front of the leg.  The look started with early punk bands like the Ramones, who often had worn-out clothing because that's what they could afford.  One could encourage specific spots to tear with a razor blade, but this wasn't something one would admit to doing; the generally accepted thing was to buy new jeans and let nature take its course. Anyway, capitalism looked at this and saw money to be made, so they started selling pre-torn jeans at a premium.  As you might expect, the only people who bought them were rich kids who didn't really understand the concept and just wanted to be trendy.
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  4. Audiobooks can be a great way to sneak some reading into a busy day.  I listened to "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" in half-hour shifts during my commute.  Librivox provides free recordings of public domain classics.  Since the readers aren't compensated, the quality ranges from "really good" to "just okay", but it allows anybody to tap into a huge library of material. Audiobooks aren't the same as reading from a page and imagining everything from scratch, but sometimes the performance adds something of its own.  I've read "The Handmaid's Tale", but hearing it again through the voice of Claire Danes shed light on several parts that I didn't really notice before.  Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" was recently released as a full-cast recording, sort of like a radio play, which again presents the work in a new fashion.
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  5. It's on the Staples website.  Go to your search engine of choice and search for "Staples reading speed test."
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