One of the nice things about ripping the lord of the rings extended edition DVDs to digital files is that I now have a playlist of all files that just runs in a

One of the nice things about ripping the lord of the rings extended edition DVDs to digital files is that I now have a playlist of all files that just runs in a continuous showing. I think it’s 11-13 hours or something. And my friends and family have made it through nonstopped in a single day quite a few times (it’s a Christmas tradition although that usually gets interrupted). There is an intermission after the first and second films as the credits are very long, but it’s amazing how people will stay transfixed to good material. I think it’s just really hard and rare to make great things and easier to make short, acceptable things that are successful to a lesser, but marginally acceptable level. I call this the “machine learning effect” as it’s regression to the mean and good enough, but not great. The most frequent place I see this is in Amazon recommendation engine where they don’t want you to buy a great book so much as they just want you to buy something, and a perfect transaction is where you only like the book enough not to return it and come back to buy another because you’re unsatisfied.