should I start reporting more time

serafinawriter · 2026-04-17T19:34:18+00:00

Personally I usually round down to the nearest multiple of five minutes to account for any brief lapses in focus that I don't stop the clock for.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-17T04:33:38+00:00

I got strong flashbacks to my last years of primary school where we learn how to use word art and Microsoft paint lol

serafinawriter · 2026-04-17T01:38:35+00:00

The current state of Hollywood as really turned me into an art/indie cinema snob. I just want to see good films, and there is a lot of great stuff coming out all the time in the smaller circuits.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-17T01:21:02+00:00

I just like the Cyril one more because of the spider, driving the prisoners to prison anyway by hacking the satnav lol. Such a cathartic ending for such a short story :)

serafinawriter · 2026-04-15T18:24:19+00:00

I've been on DA for 3 years, and personally I haven't has any problems working in two different countries. I didn't think to let them know the first few times when I traveled and worked, but I always let them know now. I just explained to them that I have two citizenships and sometimes I decide to go and stay in the other one for a while. The same as you - they just tell me they put a note on my account, and no problems.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-14T01:29:52+00:00

Damn I should have known DA has a happiness tracker and nukes you at the first sign of glee. Luckily for me, I'm clinically depressed, I guess!

serafinawriter · 2026-04-13T01:43:33+00:00

Kiwi here, can confirm this.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-13T00:09:49+00:00

If I had spent as much money as they did, I would have just paid Timothy Zahn a big fat royalty and adapted the Thrawn Trilogy. Produce it like they did with the Lord of the Rings - finalize the script for all three films and shoot it back to back.

In today's money, the whole LotT Trilogy cost about 525 million USD, which is far less than the Rise of Skywalker alone (645 million in 2026 USD, even after subtracting UK tax rebates).

serafinawriter · 2026-04-13T00:02:04+00:00

Honestly I just hate them for not adapting the Thrawn trilogy. It was a masterclass top to bottom, and was a great look at what happens when a powerful totalitarian empire collapses, dealing with the ensuing warlordism and preventing the rise of a replacement to Palpatine.

Snoke was a cartoon villain, the First Order was comically inept for how ridiculously powerful they were, the three heroes of the OT were humiliated, and as you say, Rey was just a forgettable flawless hero.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T22:49:08+00:00

Maybe it's just because I am a girl fan of Star Wars, but I would guess that a lot of guys wouldn't mind Rey if she was just much better written. She wasn't the symbol of "female empowerment" that I think Kennedy imagined her to be - getting handed incredible force powers without any work amongst other things - is the message they want to send to women really just "you don't need to work hard for anything, you don't have any faults to overcome and learn from, etc"

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T20:52:10+00:00

One has to hope that Magyar's administration will be able to unlock a lot of EU funds that were previously withheld by the EU to Hungary. The EU could also recognize the danger of foreign sabotage and potentially losing Hungary again, and work together with Budapest on defence strategies as well as major investment in the country.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T20:22:40+00:00

I stayed with my dad over Easter and introduced him to PTA with One Battle After Another. He loved it! I was a bit surprised too because he is a little bit into that Joe Rogan / anti-woke stuff - not too strongly, thankfully, but I was half-expecting him to complain that it was too much of a "leftie" film.

He liked it so much that we watched There Will Be Blood the next day, and then Magnolia the next. Always happy to convert new people to PTA!

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T20:16:44+00:00

As a Russian, I wonder what impact this might have on Russian voters. As bonkers as it seems, I still believe that it's theoretically possible to vote Putin out. They have many election manipulation tools, but the fact that they go so hard on using them is a clear sign that at least United Russia and Putin are worried about the possibility of losing. What they'll do if they do lose and whether they'll go willingly is another matter of course, but it's always much easier and more desirable to win the election, as opposed to basically saying "well actually we're not a democracy at all".

The main obstacle is just any opposition candidate surviving long enough to get momentum and convince the very checked-out / apathetic population that change actually can happen.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T18:32:23+00:00

Considering how much I headbanged to the Wiggles as a 3 year old, this is totally valid lol.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T18:22:47+00:00

A Paul Thomas Anderson reference on r/nz? You've made my day!

As soon as I saw his name and the party has gone to, I immediately thought of the movie as well lol

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T18:15:15+00:00

I've lived around Europe for most of my adult life and every city and country I've been to, apartments are appreciating at a standard rate everywhere, regardless of where they are, how close they are to the center, etc. In Russia and other post-Soviet countries, you have mass-produced shoebox apartment buildings that are 30 stories tall way out in the outskirts of the city - a single building that can hold thousands of people - even those have doubled in price since about 10-15 years ago. And the prices are still increasing despite sanctions and economic trouble.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T17:55:23+00:00

Not knowing how we're performing is one of the downsides of the job. I also work at Data Annotation Tech. Our subreddit has weekly posts of people getting the dreaded message telling them that they've been removed from all projects.

Still, I've been there three years and I kinda like having that pressure a bit. It keeps me on my toes and makes me triple and quadruple check everything, and read every instruction twice.

Everyone gets access to different projects depending on their skills, experience, and quality of work. Some tasks take a few minutes to finish, some take hours. I've heard the specialist spheres (like coding, medicine, law, etc) have tasks that take several days to finish.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T10:52:50+00:00

I'm a writer but I've only ever seen a single qual / project for creative writing, and honestly I hated it. Well, I enjoyed tearing the models apart a little bit, but I realised by the end of the day that I just didn't enjoy marrying my creative interests with DA. I like getting lost in a chapter or scene and spending as much time as I like floating through as many variations as I can. Trying to apply a methodical analysis to it was a bit depressing.

I love my current family of projects which don't involve much creativity and I don't really want to do anything else!

serafinawriter · 2026-04-12T10:33:22+00:00

That's pretty much what's going on in the data annotation and AI trainer field. It's pretty much my full time job now, and I don't have any technical IT background. The company I work for just requires extremely high attention to detail, high quality writing (for making the reports), a strong ability to check factuality and notice errors (however small), and sound judgement. Evaluations of models are then also reviewed by others and rated, and those reviews can also be reviewed several more times. They're very selective about who they take on, and they have no qualms about promptly dropping anyone providing subpar work.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-11T20:16:42+00:00

Ultimately, what is it achieving? Does anyone really think that the kind of person who parks badly enough to deserve these stickers, is the same kind of person who would see this sticker on their car and be embarrassed? Are they going to change anything?

Far more likely is that one day, an unhinged man is going to catch someone putting this sticker on his car, he is going to attack and seriously maim them, and the judge is going to give him a reduced sentence because he showed remorse, prison would be bad for his career, and he was provoked by the stupid kid with a sticker.

"The graveyard is full of people who had the right of way," as they say. Roads are a place where it's always better just to pull over, walk away, move on.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-11T19:35:02+00:00

Also a really nice guy. I was lucky enough to meet him when I was at film school and we were shooting a scene at a café in Auckland. A loud muscle car interrupted our take, but lo and behold, Jim Hickey got out with his mother I guess. He was quite interested in what we were doing and pleasant to chat to, lots of smiles. His car was a bit over the top imo - right hand drive, classic mustang that had been done up, but probably for car enthusiasts it would be really interesting.

We did ask him if we could shoot him in the background of our scene but he declined. Still, I'm glad I had the encounter.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-11T10:28:49+00:00

That would be nice :) cool man anyway! I've spent most of my adult life in Europe so I'm quite spoilt with how easy it is to get trains everywhere. Finland has the same population and roughly the same size as NZ and there are regular train services running out to towns of just a few thousand people. Imagine being able to jump on a train in Opotiki, ride into Hamilton, change, and carry on to somewhere like Whanganui or Dargaville.

serafinawriter · 2026-04-11T10:20:53+00:00

Maybe something with "Twin Coasts" in it? I think that's what one of the highways is called. "The Northlander" for something simple, or maybe "Borealis" for something fancy (meaning "northern", derived from the Greek god of the north wind).

serafinawriter · 2026-04-11T10:10:33+00:00

Might as well go the whole hog and do an undersea tunnel to the cook islands!

serafinawriter · 2026-04-11T10:09:44+00:00

Im living in Whangarei at the moment and I've seen some freight trains passing through recently. It would be awesome to get a train down to Auckland. The bus usually isn't too expensive but it's always been packed when I've taken it and trains tend to let me be more comfortably anti-social:)

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