u/jackfaire

I can discuss Sherlock Holmes and no one thinks I'm talking shit about Benedict Cumberbatch, RDJ, or Jeremy Brett.

But if I discuss Dawson Leery that role is forever tied to James Van Der Beek. Doesn't matter that I know he's not that character. That I don't think of him as that character and that when I'm discussing the character I'm literally only talking about the character.

I can't do so without evoking the image of James.

Now that the actor who brought the character to life has passed it feels almost disrespectful if I discuss the character in a negative way just because odds are no one will ever replay that character while plenty of other characters will have more faces than The Doctor.

I don't like that. I never thought of the character and actor as interchangeable when he was alive but now my brain worries others might.

When I was a kid my dad was a software something I don't remember the exact title. He spent most of my childhood in school to get degreed in computers even co-writing books on the topic. Where some kids were taught how to fix the carburetor my dad sat me down at a computer and told me to mess around and figure it out for myself.

I've been figuring it out for myself ever since. I don't know how to program. I can't open deeper functions without an already created program but I can generally figure out if a computer can do a thing I want to do and how to locate a program that does it.

The way I would put it is that while I can tell a computer to dance my dad could teach it a dance.

I feel like a power user is much closer to what my dad did than what I can do. I'll be honest the idea of trying to run Linux scares me. But at the same time what I can do is beyond the stuff many of my co-workers can do.

It's annoying that there isn't really a term between those two. The term User often, depending on whom you speak with, evokes images of someone who knows how to use a spreadsheet and that's about it. While power user evokes someone building their own machine and then loading a Linux framework.

I wish there was or I knew of some commonly accepted term between the two that I could utilize.