5434a
2mo ago
Indeed. I've never seen the original TV show but I've read Shogun twice now.
I thought it was time to try out a second Clavell Asian Saga book, and choosing the next one by internal chronology made sense.
5434a
2mo ago
Started in on Jame's Clavell's Tai Pan. Still on the intro but I'm already learning some (pseudo) history about the opium trade that I never knew before, which isn't too hard because all I knew before was that Britain and China had an opium trade and it led to a war.
5434a
2mo ago
It's been a trend since the '70s via simple hybridisation and selective breeding but since the decrim/legalisation in America what I've seen on social media is people moving from the already strong weed to ever more potent extracts and concentrations, which they then use by eating them (which counter-intuitively gets you wrecked for hours because it's too easy to underestimate and eating it sounds more benign than smoking) or by vaporising them in elaborate "dab" rigs. I guess it's driven by the previously unavailable access to industrial tech like chemical analysis services and the removal of the need to be clandestine. Now you have people on Instagram posing for photos with their kilogram balls of lab refined 98.8% pure THC.
In the '90s you might see a variety of weed that was hyped up on claims of being analysed at ~25% THC (on an ideal sample a single time). Now, at least if you live in a decrim state and my impressions are correct, you can buy all manner of products that are regularly analysed by dedicated professional labs.
You also see more interest in the other cannibinoids now that the labs allow them to be distilled out and separated by people who know what they're doing rather than mad scientist stoners burning down their houses while playing with ether after reading a couple of articles in High Times.
With that said I think there is a separate phenomenon where people spend their youth smoking lots of weed, burning off all the neurochemical novelty and good times and being left with little more than the side effects that were probably always there but weren't very noticeable because they were having too much fun. They blame it on the weed being too strong but it's more like an alcoholic blaming the nausea and broken relationships on brewers putting diesel in their overproof rum. Yeah, the rum is too strong, but if you gave a couple of shots to a teetotaller they probably wouldn't shit their pants and start a fight with a policeman. They'd probably fall over, start laughing and tell you you're their best mate.
The stupid thing about illegal drug use is that people massively disregard dosage. There's a Scott article about Adderal vs street meth where he describes how the dose street meth users are taking is something like 100x more than the typical prescription dose. At that level it's no wonder that instead of studying harder they rip up their floorboards looking for listening devices. Instead people think that doing more = being hardcore, and people ignore that an overdose doesn't have to mean dying, it just means that you experience negative and unwanted effects from having taken too much.
5434a
2mo ago
I looked through and downloaded IMDB's top rated original (1959-1964) TZ episodes a while ago. I ended up with 9 episodes from S1, 8 from S2, 9 from S3 and 4 from S5. There's lots of other selected Twilight Zone episodes lists out there to browse, they're all roughly in agreement. If you're not bothered about filtering the best of the best you can't go far wrong by starting at the start as that's where the benchmark that justified the additional series and reboots was created.
I don't know about the '80s and '00s reboots but I'd avoid Jordan Peele's 2019 reboot, it's more concerned with moral commentary on $current_year American culture war than it is the human condition.
Like Atelier says TZ is lacking in the sci-fi aspect compared to The Outer Limits. You could try 2017's Phillip K Dick's Electric Dreams but I haven't seen any of those. TZ is a bit dated and unsophisticated compared to modern counterparts like Black Mirror but like OG Star Trek it's classic television that stands the test of time.
5434a
2mo ago
Invested, happy:
I can only think of luck related sayings like hit the jackpot, struck gold, full house, come up trumps, backed a winner etc
5434a
3mo ago
The point is that exploring our cultural frontiers diminishes the amount of territory left unexplored, and a lot of the charted territory has been marked as being of limited interest and value for more than a generation. We know the extremes are out there and most people choose the alternative not out of ignorance but out of preference.
5434a
3mo ago
The [short] Stories Of Ibis is turning out disappointingly girly.
So far I've had a story about a woman who rescues/redeems the morality of a bully victim turned killer using the power of Star Trek fan fic, one about a blind girl who is chatted up in a VR chatroom by a boy who likes her for who she is, and one about a girl's relationship with her best friend character AI who lives inside a vanity mirror toy.
This is tied together with intermissions about a man who has been captured by a caring and enlightened yet powerful robot who knows that she's sexy but is quick to pre-empt the man by letting him know she doesn't have a vagina.
5434a
3mo ago
it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings [...] Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.
Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.
The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.
If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.
These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.
5434a
3mo ago
Today the doom is climate change and we get... nothing.
Because we're all complicit. It's easy to protest against The Man with The Button, it's a lot harder if the enemy is our own inescapable lifestyle. Follow the logic through far enough and you're left with a choice between tech evangelism or retvrn to anti-natalism and depopulation.
The other alternative is to shrug and/or put your head in the sand, hence the "...nothing", or to argue that it's all fake, but that's limited by its reactionary nature. It doesn't advance an independent agenda.
5434a
3mo ago
The internet has diminished the cultural isolation art and culture needs to gestate and develop organically leaving us with a choice between big budget, mass market, safe investment, market-led retreads or retro nostalgia for "authenticity". The shortfall is filled up with short-lived memes that people can latch onto and share but don't engender any feelings of lasting personal investment ("I was a let's go brandoner before it was cool and I'll remain one when the casuals have moved on").
There's a whole chapter in David W Marx's Status And Culture that covers this in some depth if you want to read something longer than Motte comments.
There's also the matter of consumer technology maturing and effectively stagnating. When technology phases into affordablity there's a lot of low-hanging fruit available, plus the promise of higher-hanging fruit as the tech improves, plus a residual barrier of entry to casual participants. Now everybody has a combined office/studio/library/theatre in their pocket whether they need it or not and its workings are locked behind bootloaders and signed certificates on one hand and hot-glued security screws and millimetre scale surface mounted components on the other. You either have to be a team of specialists or a border-line autist savant to meaningfully explore beyond the walls of the heavily populated omni-garden.
5434a
3mo ago
If you swapped the newspapers for cardboard boxes I have a box room that's at roughly 3 and that's after over a year of using it as a staging area for de/cluttering projects.
I clean the house to floor level roughly once a week and leave the kitchen clean every night.
Just finished W. David Marx's Status And Culture. Interesting and expansive without tediously reiterating the same points over and over to reach the magic 350 page count as so many pop intellectual books do. A little too blinkered though; yeah status plays into and undergirds a lot of society, but it's not literally everything*. Most of it will be familiar material to everyone here but it's still good to see the theories fleshed out and not just used as stick to beat on the outgroup de jour.
About to start The Stories Of Ibis.
*Edit: What I find frustrating about the typical analysis of status is that it treats status as an end in itself. I see status as a means to reach/achieve/reflect the underlying concretely valuable objectives and avoiding the suffering of being deprived of the same.
5434a
3mo ago
I don't know Sargon's style but I assume it's a drily ironic joke that the world didn't change, the people who say it did did.
5434a
3mo ago
Oh nice, I didn't know about the new miniseries. I'll add it to the download queue.
I'm content to take a punt on Tai-Pan next seeing as it's the next chronological installment, hopefully it's okay even if it doesn't measure up to Shogun.
5434a
3mo ago
I re-read Shogun last year for the first time in 20 years. Is the plot slow? Well, I also read Crime & Punishment and Brothers Karamazov last year, and compared to those the plot is a rocketship.
I found the plot moved faster the second time because I was familiarised with all those aspects of foreign culture and language that are used. More importantly, on reflection the feudal Japanese culture is a critical plot mechanism; the extreme honour based social structure is exactly what the main character has to adapt to in order to understand and participate in the power struggle he finds himself caught in. And the more his understanding improves the more his agency develops giving the result that the plot is pushed along faster.
I won't say that it's a "great" book but it was good enough to make me think I should get around to reading the next book in Clavell's Asian Saga. On the other hand I won't be looking for any more Dostoevsky.
5434a
3mo ago
I've started a "quick" project to apply some basic maintenance to my bike. Just enough to get it up to acceptable standards and out of its decline into neglect. In the process of changing the balding tyre for a new one I discovered one wheel is not only a little wobbly and malformed (whatever, lol) but also cracked. I'm not an expert but I assume that a cracked metal wheel is a significant hazard and demands replacement. So I started looking for a replacement. Long story short what I learnt is that bicycle standards are all over the place (apparently 1.75 and 1 3/4 aren't the same - who decided to cross the streams by decimalising imperial measurements anyway?!) and that the first cheap one I'd seen really was a suitable replacement and not the potential risk of a wasted purchase/return/repurchase I was worried it might be.
I don't know how many hours I've wasted (it was more than two), or whether they really count as wasted, but I know that a 1 day job won't approach being finished until next week when I finally collect the new wheel that I had no idea I needed to order. Such is the work of being a jack of all trades. I could have handed it to a bike mechanic, had it fixed the same day and eaten the bill but by that logic I could just take taxis everywhere.
5434a
3mo ago
Similar story here.
you never get any "holy shit I need to change my life" moments
I stopped smoking weed because that was literally the only effect it was giving me. It became like a boredom magnifier where instead of zoning out and happily wasting time I'd zone alllll the way in and get frustrated about the lack of progress on my ambitions. Made worse by smoking it at the end of the day when there was no opportunity to make any concrete progress on those projects beyond ruminating on how I could do them if this, which I would do if that, which I can't do because...
5434a
3mo ago
Same as last year: keep punching my to-do list in the face until one day I can begin doing things I want to do instead of being preoccupied with tying up the loose ends of things I haven't finished or fielding the various entropic have-to-dos that crop up. In brief: keep tightening up with the long term view of gathering some slack.
First significant project on the agenda is to build out some built-in bookcases that will furnish me (get it) with enough storage space to absorb all the overflow that's accrued, with extra space to use for staging following projects (sorting through my tools, disposal of surplus, etc).
5434a
3mo ago
Stir fry with a home made scratch sauce takes about 15 minutes with practice, maybe 30 without or if you have to slice the vegetables instead of using a pre-packed mix. There's a few variations you can spin on it too (add peanut butter = ersatz satay, switch the meat for cashew nuts, switch noodles for rice, etc).
2 parts soy sauce
2 parts ketchup
1 part vinegar
1 part honey
Five spice / garlic granules / chilli powder to taste
Adjust to taste.
5434a
3mo ago
I've read most of the replies and I wonder if it doesn't boil down to unwillingness to entertain anything short of a perfect case. If a vegan can't provide a watertight case for how turning vegan will generate ideal outcomes on all aspects under consideration then their argument is irredeemably flawed, and if their argument is flawed it can be rejected wholesale and we can all carry on as we were. And of course The Motte is a filter for people who live to pick holes in arguments (cue "no we're not!").
What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat? Or does it have to be the once-and-for-all slam dunk that settles the matter for ever?
5434a
4mo ago
A friend lent me Sum, a collection of very short stories about different permutations of the afterlife. It's refreshing to read something that gets straight to the point.
5434a
4mo ago
How do you retrain your brain to say ‘although you think you’re winning, you need to reset the rules of the game’?
Impose a change of routine on yourself so that you can't idly default into your unsatisfactory habits. I guess the simplest one would be to power off your networked devices for a time, maybe say for two hours after dinner. Then find out what your now unoccupied mind prompts you to do instead. Maybe you tidy up. Maybe you fix something you've been putting off. Maybe you go for a run, or start writing, or start the prep for tomorrow's meals. All fairly mediocre, but still a switch from passive to active. Or maybe you start planning your personal Hock.
Mediocrity isn't going to reject itself.
5434a
4mo ago
There usually are other places that you can ask your questions but nowhere that offers such a broad range of topics to such a large userbase with such a low barrier to entry and all in one place. That was always a double-edged sword but it progressively swings further towards the low effort = low quality side.
In terms of content it used to be like HackerNews and now it's like Facebook. People don't go there to discuss questions, they go there to reassure each other they're in the right.
The scale of users means you get increasingly squeezed between the opposing forces of shitposters and overworked moderators. So they get a lot of idiots asking questions and a lot of replies that assume anyone asking questions is an idiot, and then the mods have to spend time cleaning it up instead of building out better tools that might help prevent those questions.
It doesn't help that Reddit's search has been shit forever. The sorting algorithm and karma system also incentivise repeating popular questions no matter how any times it's been asked before. And instead of fixing search to improve the UX for existing users Reddit prefers to chase new users by gamifying and appifying, while marginalising their smarter users (who might have contributed a lot of the better quality content but didn't represent much/any value to their revenue).
It's not like being drunk and having patchy memories, or remembering the dumb things you did and wishing you couldn't remember, or needing to be prompted and then remembering. All three times it's happened to me the last thing I remember is taking my nth shot of vodka in x minutes on an empty stomach. Then waking up.
I've drunk the same amount of alcohol on an empty stomach many times, often much more. I think the critical factor is drinking high strength alcohol much too quickly. Much easier to do when it's just a little shot instead of a big glass of cold gassy beer.
I also used to think blue balls and jaw-dropping were merely colourful euphemisms for sexual frustration and surprise.
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