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> LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life.

Farming is hard, the boom and bust cycle is harsh. Most early farms were too small in scale to survive.

Not to criticize LHOP here, but generally there is a sort of romantic idea of a family farm that for large chunks of time wasn’t sustainable financially no matter how hard they worked.

Before the mechanization of agriculture, the family farm was subsistence level only. This meant a bad harvest resulted in starvation.

Right, but LHOTP showed the importance of community--and the power of cooperation. [1] This was a strong theme in the first season. I grew up in Kansas in the late '70s to mid '80s, and the "theme" back then was the accretion of family farms by bank repossession into large agribusinesses--but there were still small to medium sized farmers at the co-ops. Having your means of support repo-ed is another way to starve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative#Unite...

We planted our own trees 15 years ago and now, we cut, split and dry our own firewood, it's a lot of work, though it is an extra pleasure to sit in front of such a fire I can see why people stopped doing it.

Although some of their time was freed up by not having to diagnose issues with CI pipelines on the cloud, or writing meta-manager code to tame Slurm :)

And even with today's tools, cutting and splitting firewood is still very dangerous.

Correct and hard on your back! I do get a kick out of it though. Makes me feel like a real man in a way my sedentary day job does not.

My father taught me how to chop wood in the early seventies at the age of 8 in the remote territory of suburban Connecticut. More dangerous was the wasps whose nest I disturbed near the wood-pile, and my face swelled up like a balloon. We didn't call an apiary to humanely remove them back then, my dad used kerosene to burn the nest.

> My wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books

Only up to a certain point. For example, everything about Albert. And Colonel Sanders didn't visit the town when they were starting up the chicken restaurant.

The later the series ran, the farther they strayed from the books.

> My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD again currently.

FWIW the Blu-ray version is great, although they didn't remaster the audio to remove pops/hisses.

> She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look strangely like Southern California?"

Do you do this for every show/film that is set somewhere outside of SoCal but obviously filmed there?

I do

And every alien planet which seems to resemble Canadian prairie.

They didn't even film Alien on location, smh

At least Kubrick had the good sense to film the moon landing on location.

A Kubrick-directed LHOTP would have been a different series, too, I imagine. I don't think NBC had a Kubrick level budget either.

On a side note, there was a rumor that the Capricorn One movie was filmed on location too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One

And every NY or Chicago scene that is actually on and around Bay Street in Toronto.

For a big chunk of TV / film it was noticeably repetitive.

> For a big chunk of TV / film it was noticeably repetitive.

Well, there is a reason for that, and a reason why it is often more noticeable in older works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_zone

Oh yeah there’s good reason, can’t take everything on the road, budgets and etc.

It’s hard not to if the show does it a lot - JAG’s ‘orange lit’ Northern Ireland episode was particularly jarring!

It’s actually not that hard to keep your mouth shut about it. It’s not like anybody thinks the cast of JAG went to film in Belfast. Pretty annoying to watch something with someone who has to point out something so obvious.

Just enjoy the show!

If you can't suspend my disbelief, then you've faild at your job. If you can't handle the criticism of your job, get better at your job or get a new job.

As if you've never maintained someone else's code and didn't make any kinds of comments about how bad it was or anything similar. Just shut up and do your job!

I don’t program professionally. Just here to keep an eye on the tech-bros who think they’re above everyone else.

if you can't make the leap of imagination to substitue your career path with the provided example, then...boy, I don't know

To be fair, I really am pretty stupid.

Little Chatroom on the Prairie, MMXXII

"Yore a poo-poo face, Laura, shut-up. I'm an idiot and this is my Internet." @WillyOlesonXXII

"Don't you try to josh me, Willy Oleson, I know durn well there ain't ever been no idiots on the Internet, you sh*tposting, edgelord jasper!" @LauraIngallsIV

"Now you two, I was on Usenet before either of you was kneehigh to a grasshopper. Couple of half-pints is what you are. 'Don't feed the trolls' we used to say, then ignore our own advice and throw 'em a handful of ASCII quotations." @CharlesIngallsVIII

"Are you aware of my law?" --Godwin

-- Stooge, er Stew-J

P.S. I'm going to do what the founders of this site are probably doing now, enjoy a good book with cup of coffee.

He was just colloquializing a sweet moment with his wife. Didn’t seem like anything to get worked up about.

To be fair, I know you didn't have much context. I had to look up "tech bro":

https://www.wired.com/story/stop-calling-everyone-tech-bro/

Tech bro does not describe me (I agree they should have an eye kept on them though), I'm a 55 year old man who watches LHOTP on a 10 year old DVD player, has 10.5 years of Visual Basic programming, and wears sandals with white socks.

Last week I had to look up "sh*tpost" and "edgelord", and before that "know your meme" when those were leveled at me. Maybe people on the Internet and social media too need to understand, like TV show fans, that it is NOT reality. It also doesn't foster the kind of wonderful, 20+ year marriage we've had--we are BFFs forever my wife and I, like Mr. and Mrs. Ingalls in some ways. I also reserve my right to laugh at the incongruities of the Internet--I have a headache from laughing so hard at it today, so I will spare everyone more annoyance and quit for a long time.

On your advice, we just agreed to watch it separate rooms with no discussions at supper. No more calling Mrs. Oleson the meanest person that ever lived, in jest, that is OVER (we both are guilty of this one). We are going to enjoy it even if it strips the all joy out of life.

The actress who played Nellie said she used to get hate mail from fans of the show, who apparently couldn't distinguish her from her character. (She said IRL she was friends with the younger Melissa, and some of the cast attested to how nice she was offscreen--both from a special feature on one of the DVDs) Man, we aren't that far gone. It actually is the best part of our day, spending time making fun of Landon's hair.

> It’s not like anybody thinks the cast of JAG went to film in Belfast.

Oddly enough, they did do a couple in Sydney Australia - that, and Aussie lawyer "Mic" (Mick, ffs!) were probably an attempt to sell the show in another anglophone market.

Not every one, just Star Trek TOS. :)

We're about even though, every time she sees a horse on screen she says "Why can't I ride a horse to work instead of driving our 20 year old Mazda?" Having lived in Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming, and having mucked a few horse stalls in my day--I know why we 9 billion people don't still ride them.

> Not every one, just Star Trek TOS

There’s not that much in TOS which is distinctly SoCal, since even most of the planetside “outdoors” sets were soundstages, with matte painted backgrounds.

The Gorn rocks are totally worth a visit. After we visited there, I showed my wife that episode, and while she still dislikes sci-fi in general, she now loves Star Trek TOS.

My grandmother was a child in the UK when horses were still common in the streets, which was also where all the children played. One thing she mentioned that stuck with me was that when children cut their knees falling in the road they would end up running green with pus - presumably from infections from the horse crap.