Funny you should say that, since I feel that angst-filled teenagers are portrayed extremely poorly by popular culture, and almost all depictions of youth feel as if they were done by adults with only a vague understanding of what being young actually feels like (it's always girls this, girls that, my parents don't understand me, when those with real angst seem to have problems, which are a tad more serious). In Catcher in the Rye, Salinger went above and beyond this, making the character stranger than reality instead of approximating and falling short. I felt that this was the whole point of the book, and precisely the reason it was interesting.

If I were meaner, I'd ask whether 14 years of age really was the best point of life to read this work and make the permanent judgments, which you pass on to middle-aged strangers in the internet, but instead I simply admit, that 13-15 was also the point in life where I had the most free time and did the most reading. Most of my impressions on literature stem from those years.

I still have one request, however. Please tell me who has, in your opinion, done the whiny, ennui filled adolescent properly. I really can't think of anyone.

Indeed, but my dud:good ratio for Heinlein is more than 2:1, which is why I brought this up.

So far this is the most absurd line in the whole comments section.

I have to agree to this, but on the same breath, I kind of dislike Heinlein on the whole. He has written things like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Sixth Column, which are absolute garbage.

In this light, it's difficult for me to decide what to think about the author. Is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress just an accident, like Ender seemed to be for Orson Scott Card, or have I read too little of him and stumbled on the bad ones?

Others have already objected to this, but I'd really like to know why Catcher in the Rye is a bad book. Do you care to elaborate on your position?
I read it just a while ago, and found both the atmosphere and the main character interesting. The book is also very fast-paced and compact, so it is by no means tedious.

I admit that personally the main character had views, which were extremely far from my own positions on life, and considering how smart he is portrayed as, the general mentality of the book feels very off. I.e. you'd think that a person in his situation and with his mental faculties would not act the way he acts. However, I don't think that this is enough to actually dislike the book, considering its strengths.

I was wondering whether this currency would pop up. It was certainly the first thing on my mind.

It's also telling of the diversity of possible answers, that I had to Google most of these, even though I consider myself a scifi fan.

While I try to refrain from insulting entertainment by insinuating that it's aimed at pubescent boys, and while this might make me seem one in your eyes, I feel that Dr. Who actually is cheesy and lame.

I had avoided the show for various vague reasons until recently, when a friend of mine forced me to watch the first episodes of the most recent series to change my mind. While the writing was rather interesting and the retro visuals had enough charm to make me understand why someone might like it, there are some serious problems with the show.

First, I was annoyed that The Doctor is portrayed as somewhat all-powerful for no reason at all. He can threaten his enemies and make appeals with no credentials whatsoever. I kind of understand that scenes where he says that "the Earth is protected" by him are perhaps awe-inspiring to a 50's born nerd who has watched all of the previous 200 episodes, but I really don't get why the aliens he is currently facing won't just incinerate him on the spot. To an outside observer, it simply seems like a lame would-be superhero saving the day by just boasting about it. This is actually repeated twice during the first three episodes.

Secondly, while all of the previous posters are talking about strong female leads, I was left with pretty mixed feelings about this character in the most recent show. Of course she is shown as intelligent and resourceful, but at the same time, she is shown to be a slave to his charms, eloping the very day before her wedding. The convenience of the former is rather astounding, as the series of course contains time travel and implies that the female lead can experience a whole new life, whisked away to adventure by an exciting man, and still return to her life with the random beta (or absence of it, depending on the attitude of the scriptwriters), like nothing had happened.

Is this really what being a strong woman is about?

In context or out of context, this is the single most retarded line I've ever seen in Slashdot.

I'm not the one you're responding to, but as a curiosity, what is the mechanism behind genome reductions?
What kind of copying errors decrease the size of the DNA chain and how probable they are compared to block copies etc., which increase it.

Everything suggests that EM hypersensitivity does not exist. Not one person suffering from it has been able to prove that he could, directly or indirectly, sense an electric or magnetic field of any magnitude.

If you have the supernatural ability you state to possess, please demonstrate it for science. This will benefit society greatly.

When answering to this message, I have to ignore the fact that, in my opinion, Dark Souls is just as great a work as Dead Souls, while in a whole different way and utilizing different ways of storytelling and mood delivery. Yet I'll easily see your weak bet and raise by not naming games you think I would (so NO Final Fantasy, NO Metal Gear Solid, NO Zelda, NO Baldur's Gate, NO Fallout and NO weak-ass modern shit like Mass Effect).

Then I'll raise the bet further by not selecting two games from the same authors.

Bioforge
The Longest Journey
Loom (Do note that selecting this rules out a bunch of high profile stories from Lucasarts)
Odin Sphere (Do note that selecting this rules out Murasama Demon Blade)
Psychonauts
Shadow of Memories
Shadow of the Colossus (Do note that selecting this rules out ICO)
Star Control 2
The Void
Torment (Do note that selecting this rules out NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer)
Witcher 2

I count 11. Will you call?

This is not a valid statement and has never been. Entirely different games are marketed for PC and consoles, and if you want to play all the games you enjoy, eventually you will be forced to own both a fast gaming PC and a console.

I had a comparable processor, which I bought on the christmas of 2009. However, some new games such as Mechwarrior Online and Planetside 2 are heavily CPU-bound and the machine was lacking when running them. I upgraded to i7-3770K and the improvement was dramatic (30-40 -> 60fps for MWO and 40-50 -> 90fps for Planetside). The graphics card did not change, as it was already rather powerful (Radeon 6970) and not a bottleneck on the detail levels I was using.

This was literally the difference between unplayable and playable, so if you play those games, there absolutely is a reason to upgrade.

Might I ask what you review and for a link to the site (if there is one)? It would be nice to check out reviews using this philosophy.

This line of thought seems faulty, but I have to admit that I feel the same way for most scores reviewing sites and magazines deal out. A score of less than 7 out of 10 is reserved for seriously failed works, and typically these works never merit a recommendation. However, if anything below 7 is not worth experiencing, you essentially only have five possible scores: bad, 7, 8, 9 and 10. The rest of the scale is simply wasted.

I always wondered if this is caused by school grades in youth influencing what people think as acceptable ratings. For example in Finland, grade school grades go from 4 (failed) to 10 (best), where 7 ends up being an average score and anything below it is considered poor.