Tragic Comedy | Tragic Comedy

How's life treating you? Want to discuss the issues of the day? Tragic Comedy is where the members of Funeratic get to know each other, by discussing life, current events, and the rest of the site at length. Sign up and join the conversation: You control the privacy levels and whether people can respond.

Featured Blog Post

All King and No Kubrick Make Jack a Dull Boy

I recently got to talking with friends who liked The Shining, both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of it, but who were unaware that King has always loathed the movie, despite its reputation as one of the best horror films ever made. It's hard to imagine that a writer doesn't know his own work better than someone interpreting it, but I think this is one of those rare cases where the writer is just too close to the story to get it. Here are three reasons why I think Kubrick's film better understands the material, and is better overall, than King's novel: 1) In King's version, Jack Torrance is a fundamentally decent man who wouldn't hurt a fly, but who is down on his luck and desperate....

Dude, Where's My Site?

Two errors have been happening across Funeratic lately: 1) Weird problems with data not showing up on the page correctly, such as the list of Members being blank, or turn data in a Rock Block concert not populating correctly (such as "Turn 1: played to on" instead of "Turn 1: Scott Hardie played Metallica to Stage Right on March 20"). Go »

Scott's Pet Peeve #6020

Interesting thought experiment. There are ways to take it further of course: Up to a certain level of wealth, anyone in my community who makes more money is going to spend more money, which means more capital moving about in the economy and thus more opportunity for everyone including me to earn more, so Dave's raise is arguably good for me as his neighbor. Go »

The Sleeping Beauty Problem

Kelly Lee and Matthew Preston were both halfers from the start and never wavered. Me, I was a thirder at first and quite confident about it, thanks to probability puzzles like The Monty Hall Paradox that demonstrate some biases in our understanding of probability and how something with a truly random outcome can subtly become less than random. Go »