Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
Most of what just about everyone does is just a thought inside their head and other people's heads.
But this phrase is not true of video games, specifically the thoughts in "other people's heads". Politics and sports and news are shared human experiences, and while many people have the shared experience of playing a game, they do not have the same experience of the game itself - that is the whole appeal of player-led video games. Even an unhealthy fixation on any of your three examples will still produce opinions and actions based on shared human experiences. They incentivize interaction with other human beings, whether positive (people who agree with you) or negative (people who can argue with you). Ultimately, the many adventures, lessons, trials, and triumphs of video games are solitary experiences curated for the player in a controlled environment in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
I think that part of the reason so many of us have difficulty with self-controlled weight loss is the rarity of examples like your uncle; that's an incredible story that can serve as a powerful "carrot" for many who know him. 90% of adulthoods are descents into overfed and underactive lives, so I imagine many people lack the evidence that such a transformation is even possible.
sure.jpg
It's interesting; despite the "Sophia Loren" reputation attached to Italian women, imo most have the much more nuanced attractiveness of the girl in the video. While Eastern European and Scandinavian women have major surface appeal with relatively uninteresting/utilitarian minds, Italians are truly wild... manipulative, creative, unpredictable, and worldly-wise. The tradeoff occurs in their design - rarely gifted with golden-ratio faces and generally ambivalent to cosmetic surgery, with extreme ranges based on their ancestry (north vs. south vs. Sicily/Sardinia). In total, they're extraordinarily interesting but difficult to ever pin down (leading to the Italian society we see today - committed, married couples routinely engaging in "side quests").
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
What a brilliant response. Your takedowns of the common "cop-outs" are of such an undeniable verity that, I think, you sufficiently lance any notion of video games as worthy of inclusion at all in a life not be wasted. Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs. Your hours-spent thesis is a fatal blow to simulated productivity, as even one minute of real productivity in those 50 hours is infinitely greater than the faux-accomplishments of a simulated world. Your last paragraph is a very clever retort to a common excuse that I'd neither heard nor considered before.
Is there any reason to not forgo video games completely? Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets - no benefit of any kind beyond a dopamine release - or more like classic movies, dime novels, and social media - escapism with some degree of social and intellectual benefit?
I’ve enjoyed my two-week trial run of Lex Fridman’s maximally productive daily schedule but do find myself missing my offline career-based sports games. How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”? Are books and television and film so far above video games in the usefulness ranking (after all, they can confer knowledge and social benefits, if not maximally condensed) that it’s a no-brainer to stop gaming completely? Or should sedentary leisure as a whole be relegated to “break in case of emergency” status, never part of a daily routine but “around” when more productive options are not available, or only to be used in the company of others?
I’ve wrestled with this for every day of these two weeks and still see benefits of escapism, while simultaneously seeing the futility of time spent achieving nothing in the real world - even if only for an hour or two.
EDIT: I coincidentally just discovered the "End Poem" of Minecraft; a poignant take on this discussion:
[teal] and the universe said I love you because you are love.
[green] And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
[teal] You are the player.
[green] Wake up.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
If it’s any comfort, most people pick up this tic simply by being immersed in leftist academic or professional environments, not necessarily by being a leftist themselves. Compared to some of the other answers in this thread, the rhetorical “right?” is a sort of “hidden indicator,” not necessarily a conscious change of vocabulary.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
Is eating 100 calories and walking two miles (supposing that, at my height and weight, one mile walked burns an additional 50 calories above TDEE) chemically the same thing as eating nothing and doing nothing? I'm in the middle of a weight loss campaign and love to walk, but am continually baffled at the futility of "exercising to lose weight."
Ex_Nihilo
8mo ago
This is still the case for me in my thirties. The idea of being 55 and well-established, or 70 and retired, or 80 and physically worn, are impossible to tangibly imagine.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
Not sarcasm; I really do think your response was fantastic. I tend to overenthusiastically react to good points that I hadn't considered before.
That thought was not to say that cocaine is a viable, more productive alternative to gaming, but simply that, if even one of the most dangerously addictive substances on Earth has the potential to leave more of a positive impact on the progress of one's work, that's a pretty good indicator of where video games should sit on the hierarchy.
Human Biodiversity is the Foundation of the Woke Civic Religion
I enjoy a long Sunday walk ("Just like Dickens and Beethoven," I think to myself as I stare at my own reflection in the local duck pond), mostly as a primed canvas for whatever thoughts pass my way. Today, I was captivated (or captured) by the concept of "Native Americans;" a term we apply as a gift of copium to once-enormous numbers of Russo-Asians who, a long time ago in a biome far far away, happened to be curious about where that land bridge led. In Canada and ANZAC territory, they are called "First Nations" or "Aborigines," again applying a Cracker Jack prize term to groups of people whose claim to fame, whose founding mythology, whose justification for sanctity in our modern era is.... getting there first and doing nothing about it.
The irony is especially delicious in that the "Indigenous" term is exclusively applied to those who wandered the farthest from their native lands, and that "Sacred Native Land" is a term applied exclusively to the territory where the "Indigenous," at least as far as the story goes, just happened to stop wandering for an unspecified period of time. The brouhaha over Mt. Rushmore and Indian Reservations and all the rest of it has about as much sanctity as Richard Nixon claiming the Sea of Tranquility or the North Pole as Ancient Sacred Nixonian Lands.
Yet, for once in my life, my thoughts today were not captured by Futile Fury (my natural emotional resting state nowadays), but instead by the mere concept of... "us." For all of its hilarious hypocrisies and unaware self-satire, I believe that the Woke Civic Religion's lasting legacy will be a potent dissolution of any concept of "the human race;" a term which, for a 1990s schoolboy at least, evokes images of "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" music videos, children's books about the Summer Olympics, and felt cutouts of the world's children - all of which required the paints, inks, and dyes of every skin tone and every form of native dress known to man.
If the past is any sort of indicator of the future, the de facto leaders of the WCR (aka angry young women and their social hostages in Washington) will eventually clarify and codify the currently uncomfortable contradictions within their worldview concerning the treatment of races as something akin to various "species" or "tiers" or "sanctities" of human being. This new dictum will most likely appear for the first time in a viral TikTok from the mouth of a vaguely-transish black person who teaches one or all of the social studies at an exurban public elementary school. And I predict that the WCR will, while publicly reviling the concept of HBD-RedEdition as the mindset of an IncelFascist, reveal HBD-BlueEdition.
It will not be a sensational revelation; it will have its real origin sewn, in the now-trademark Actually1984 manner of the WCR, deep into the goldfish memory of the populace, such that, by its second week of existence, HBD-Blue will appear to have AlwaysBeenThere.
Because, without HBD-Blue, the Indigenous are just "us," and the Black Trans Women are just "us," and the Asians we need to StopHating are just "us," and suddenly no one is special and everything is an accident of history and, worst of all, that blood relative you hate who DefinitelyVotedForTrump... is "us" too. The WCR wholly relies, in the only part of its identity that has any foundation at all, on an unshaken belief in the metamorphosis of humanity into the Twelve Tribes of InThisHouseWeBelieve.
Over the land bridge, Humans became Indigenous.
In darkest Africa, Humans became BlackandBrownBodies.
Through the vast deserts of the Middle East, Humans became Asians.
Hidden in a university dorm, or a Lower East Side nightclub, or a San Francisco bathhouse, Humans became TransLives.
And over the straits of the Bosphorus, on papyrus rafts across the Mediterranean, or rock hopping around Gibraltar, Humans remained Humans, a crime for which we will pay with our blood and our bounty until the children are standing on the same number of boxes, and then onward still, until the poor whites of West Virginia or Florida or Alabama retreat to the swamps and caves and outlying trash heaps, and then onward still, until their offspring view the homosexual as purity and the heterosexual as filth, and then onward still, and then onward still.
And then, just when the BaBBs have been reeled in to the precipice of the doorframe of power, HBD-Blue will be at its most useful. For only then will the BIPOC and the Activist, the Queer and the Ally, who always believed themselves to be the greatest servants in the Master's House, come to realize that they are merely the last lines in our modern remix of "First they came for the... but I was not a..."
And there will be new reservations for these new Indigenous, these muted urban aborigines who, just like the Cree and the Mohawk and the Nez Perce, once thought they ruled their land, only to realize that, an ocean away, another species had harnessed thunder.
So the question… how does it really end? When are the scales balanced, the veils torn, the doors open?
Ex_Nihilo
1yr ago
I love those types of shows too… I highly recommend Mad Men and The White Lotus if you haven’t watched either. Guessing you would also enjoy the BBC anthology series Inside No. 9 - there’s an episode called “Tom and Gerri” that’s pretty close to what you’re describing.
Ex_Nihilo
4mo ago
Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I'm reminded of the great Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton. Payton was notorious for a stubborn, enduring discipline rooted in sky-high self-determination and -esteem, even refusing medical treatment in the face of life-threatening cancer and all the little problems that led up to it (he died at 46); there are definitely continent-sized holes in that methodology. All the same, seeing as you're past the "accepting the legitimacy of modern medicine" phase and into the "mindset and self-discipline" phase, there might be something of use to you in a "fuck it" attitude toward your own capacity for feeling "up for it" or not. Here's how Payton summed up his mantra:
Never die easy. Why run out of bounds and die easy? Make that linebacker pay. It carries into all facets of your life. It’s okay to lose, to die, but don’t die without trying, without giving it your best.
Substitute the football terms for just getting yourself to the office and sitting in your chair, even if that's all that happens. I'm also reminded of a (perhaps more apropos) quote from Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick:
Inspiration is the act of drawing up the chair to the writing desk.
And if all else fails, there's no shame in stocking 24-packs of Monster in the fridge. Do whatever you have to do to "get yourself there," then start critically analyzing what's necessary to maintain that level of focus and what's superfluous or harmful.
Ex_Nihilo
5mo ago
I'll mention Thomas Merton as a (sort of unexpected) voice of spiritual clarity for the modern world. While a committed Catholic monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he pursued intellectual and theological connections with the world of Buddhism, spawning new ideas about both religions in the process. He's very candid and "human" in his writings (two qualities largely absent in theological treatises); while The Seven Storey Mountain is his best-known work (and his "official" autobiography), I prefer his smaller collections of essays titled Love and Living and Contemplative Prayer - they each approach the paradox of belief with honesty and open questions.
Ex_Nihilo
8mo ago
Completely agree. He revolutionized his and all other - by way of gesamtkunstwerk - art forms. He was as much a renaissance man as there’s ever been, and the power of his vision (and his ability to execute that vision) is rivaled by a sparing handful of aspirational entrepreneurs: Ford, Disney, Jobs/Gates, Musk. His pamphlet on Jewish Music is an overblown non-scandal due to its later admirers; his views were absolutely standard for his day - more charitable even, in parts.
Ex_Nihilo
1yr ago
Honestly? I have to know who wins the Champions League this year. And the next. And whether Haaland becomes a true rival to Mbappé. And what the coaching career of Will Still looks like. And how good Endrick becomes. And if the USMNT will ever win a World Cup. And whether I’ll get that interview with Carlos Valderrama. And what that opportunity will lead to. And whether my work will be produced at a high level. And what that achievement might mean for finding love, simple happiness, and stature in my industry.
And when Michigan State will win the Big Ten again.
Ex_Nihilo
1yr ago
I’m fascinated by the female propensity to watch ads, to the extent that nearly half of all commercials during sporting events are aimed toward women. What’s going on there?
Ex_Nihilo
7d ago
Two questions about American colleges:
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What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.
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Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?
It’s a good video, but it unexpectedly reminded of the sad ways some of my past girlfriends were “gravely funny,” like they could come up with funny things and recognized when something was stupidly hilarious, but wouldn’t actually laugh at any of it… they were clever enough to see the opportunity for a joke but couldn’t enjoy the delivery, as if they had to be “corporate” or “grown up” all the time but still wanted to ensure they had a humor slider setting.
Ex_Nihilo
1yr ago
Thank you for sharing that. It's surprisingly heartening to hear of others in similar situations.
To draw from the example of Dietrich himself, the Bonhoeffer is more outwardly counteractive than the Schindler from the very beginning:
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Forming and/or joining groups and associations meant to oppose the oppressive ideology, with a particular concentration on reforming the thought processes of schoolchildren and young adults.
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Constantly plotting with sympathetic colleagues about how to strike the seat of power at the opportune time.
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Leaving academia (as Bonhoeffer did) as a countercultural statement.
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Signing one's own name to inflammatory documents and incriminating papers.
I also generally operate on your concept of balance; not being seen to advocate for the dominant ideology while building up just enough evidence in my favor that would give pause to any Inquisitional tribunal with suspicions that I am against them. I intend to live to see the end of this war, and to have had a hand in deciding its victor.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
I have found one of the strongest subtle clues to indicate that someone is a leftist (or mired in leftist ideology) is their use of the rhetorical “right?” to end statements of dubious fact, or just statements which they know are unacceptable to refute, mostly things “we all know, right?”. It’s like a tic where they can’t stop doing it even if they tried.
Great post.
“Thot,” in my understanding, is much more complex than “slut” or “easy” or “loose” - it carries a subtle gentlemanly warning that the woman in question is a honey-/thirst-trap whose attractiveness and/or complexity (and/or complexion) is only profile-deep.
Welcome to the Venn crossing of sports and venerated subclasses; the scandals are made up and the truth doesn't matter. For additional interest, see this week's story of the Bay Area sports media losing their minds over a laughably overrated YoungBlackMan getting replaced at quarterback by a White dude working his ass off.
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