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FiveHourMarathon

Wawa Nationalist

17 followers   follows 6 users  
joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

And every gimmick hungry yob

Digging gold from rock n roll

Grabs the mic to tell us

he'll die before he's sold

But I believe in this

And it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns

Will later join the church


				

User ID: 195

FiveHourMarathon

Wawa Nationalist

17 followers   follows 6 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

					

And every gimmick hungry yob

Digging gold from rock n roll

Grabs the mic to tell us

he'll die before he's sold

But I believe in this

And it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns

Will later join the church


					

User ID: 195

The problem with TV is that unless you have an extremely hard headed creative at the head of the show saying "this is going to run precisely this number of seasons and at the end of that we're done" and they have full backing from the money men and full buy in from the cast, you don't know in advance when the last season is. The show might lose funding, or commitment from stars or writers who want to move on to other projects, or be riven by internal conflicts that make it unworkable. And then you have to wrap it up.

And at the same time different audiences have different appetites for more seasons, at different quality levels.

I went to see a high school play recently, a production of How to Succeed in Business without really trying and on a talent level it was SPECTACULAR. I kid you not when I say that (other than casting, particularly kids in old man parts) if I had paid $100 for a ticket to see a touring company do the show, I wouldn't have expected more. But it was entirely too long. It ran over three hours. They crammed in extra dance sequences and songs, and dragged them out. And I was tired of it by the two hour mark, but at three hours most of the crowd was still screaming and whooping with joy at the spectacle. Because they were there to watch their kids or their friends or their old program, not to see a tightly paced performance. They would have cheered for another hour!

TV is the same. A casual fan, and at some level we're all casual fans compared to someone, wants a show to wrap it up; a hardcore fan wants it to keep going, they love the characters and want more of them. I want to watch another season of Mad Men only if it's .9x as good as the others, but there exists an audience that would watch ten more mediocre seasons taking us to the Reagan years if it were only .5x as good because they'd prefer half of Mad Men to all of something else.

So typically a show gets dragged out until the latter audience is too small to keep it going. So to members of the former audience it looks like it dragged on too long. That's probably as it should be from a utilitarian perspective, the existence of more bad seasons hurts me less than it helps someone who enjoys them.

AI is going to make this a nightmare. We're going to have to completely rejigger our conception of what is Canon, and what is a head-Canon, to make sense of it all.

Note that an under-reported aspect of the Peter Magyar story in Hungary is that Fidesz put in all kinds of tricks to allow them to push through constitutional changes with a plurality vote share, getting huge majorities in parliament despite pulling mid-40s vote percentages. The flip side of this is that the "landslide" much lauded by global libs that pushed them out of office, came when Tisza got just over 50% of the vote.

With 97.35 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s centre-right party secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, while nationalist Orban’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 percent, according to official results.

A gerrymander can quickly become a dummymander if things shift.

So all Republicans have to do to turn this into a huge Republican advantage is actually appeal to suburban VA voters again.

You think that, and I think that, and it might even be true. Aristocrats of the time, true believers, did not think that was true. Aristocrats truly believed that they looked, thought, acted, simply were different at a biological breed level than their lessers. No matter how much you dressed a peasant up, the true nobles would see right through him. He could not imitate the nobility that comes from generations of breeding.

For significant portions of Russian history, serfs were also understood as of a different blood and breed to the point of being practically speaking a different race.

Oh no offense taken, it was just very funny to me that I've mentioned Mrs. FiveHour enough that she's a recognizable side character.

Why is my wife catching strays?

Isn't this just the natural process for any slang term?

I don't think "transferred from owner to owner and not bound to real property" is actually a good map to "slavery" as a concept across multiple cultures, at least not in terms of "what are we talking about when we are talking about slavery." Other factors that seem relevant:

-- Are the children of slaves free or are they also enslaved?

-- Can the owner beat or otherwise corporally punish the slaves? How severely?

-- Does the owner have a legal right of sexual access to the slaves?

-- Do the slaves have the right to property or marriages that the owner must respect?

Classical Greece had a tradition of agricultural slavery, but functionally the slaves were simply peasant farmers who didn't have the right to move or leave their farms. There were no overseers, no whips, no chains. They had money, friends, marriages, families.

The legal regimes and the customary treatment given to slaves varies wildly. I constantly bring up the anecdote in Frederick Douglass' memoir of a young Freddy making white friends who taught him to read, something they were legally obligated to do at school, in exchange for bread, of which Freddy had an endless supply from his master's kitchen.

I don't think discussions of slavery are terribly valuable absent a discussion of the particulars.

The problem becomes comparing different forms of slavery/sefdom/free labor which are incommensurate.

As in injections one gets off of websites shipped from China designed to help with injury recovery.

I had an odd experience at jiu jitsu this morning. A few of us have a 6am open mat group, we show up and roll for 45 minutes of rounds in rotation. It's great, even though I'm normally bottom man on the totem poll there and just getting smeared by the blue and purple belts. I'm strong enough and learned enough now that even when I'm losing I'm doing jiu jitsu rather than just flailing around. I'm getting submitted in more creative ways, at least, trying things that fail rather than just resisting.

And everyone was chatting before and after, and I realized I might be the only one in the room not on gear. Everyone is using TRT or peptides or something.

And it's weird because I get the "blond white guy" stereotype of "farm strong," and I'm typically stronger than my opponents on raw power. But if I stick with this, am I going to end up on gear?

I recall a factoid that young men have a higher crash rate when they have male passengers, but a lower crash rate when they have female passengers in the car. A variety of explanations were offered.

Ditto. My bugaboo is tailgating.

Who is "they" in your mind?

Any Trump supporters care to steelman this?

It's funny and not that big a deal. An AI generated image like that of Lebron or Vic Fangio would be a perfectly normal thing on sports twitter.

I'm surprised people are making such a big deal of this. In the WSJ Doug Wilson said it was blasphemous, while Rod Dreher said that while Trump might not be the The Antichrist he was engaged in Acts of Antichrist type vibes.

I find the obvious horse trading here fascinating, you kick out your sex pest and we kick out ours. I wonder how that convo went.

It doesn't matter if it's an opinion shared by 99% of Americans, or 48% of Americans, or just me personally. It's morally correct and believing otherwise is wrong.

Words have meanings, and I'm not a fan of constantly excusing the use in official communications of words that mean something completely different.

Perhaps Iran and Israel nuke each other in the next decade, but at this point I can not really bring myself to care...

You should. A nuclear exchange would be a disaster for humanity. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Iranians would be a huge loss to the world. The loss of human capital and consciousness would be a tragedy, the suffering would be immeasurable.

Taiwan

Oddly, I think the Iran war probably precludes a Taiwan war in the near future because two things have become clear. Iran has demonstrated the USA's superiority in technological warfare to an absurd degree. The United States and friends were able to decapitate the Iranian leadership, they've been able to operate with impunity over Iran, they were able to land a small force and operate an airstrip inside Iran during a war. If the USA is even marginally interested in fighting China, it will be extremely costly for China, and especially for the Chinese leadership elite. But also, the Iran war has apparently hastened the decline of American influence abroad. Niall Ferguson brings up, over and over, that this could be the American Suez crisis. America's irresponsible behavior is causing rifts within the alliance system, the special relationships with the anglophone countries are gone, NATO could die. American may have sacrificed its alliances in Europe for its "alliance" with Israel. This increases the odds significantly that Taiwan peacefully unifies with China, with no American opposition, because China grows in power and prominence and Taiwan eventually sees the hand writing on the wall.

As for the blockade war, I can see the logic, but a lot depends on China and India. If China sends a naval escort for a Chinese flagged ship, what happens?

None of us knew he had a purple heart, I'm actually going to run down to the VFW at some point and ask some guys I know there how I would go about finding that information.

They're already framed and labeled.

I recently inherited a distant uncle's medals from the Korean war. They're nicely mounted and framed, mostly campaign medals and a purple heart. I'm the closest relation left as a going concern, his only son predeceased them.

I'd like to hang and display them, to honor my uncle, but I'm wondering what the boundaries of good taste are, given that I never served, and he wasn't an immediate relative. What level of prominence is appropriate? Is it wrong to hang them at all?

I personally watch English Youtube videos on x2 speed because it feels like they take forever to get to the point, but how do I know this is not a form of brainrot, rather than a sign of high processing speed (the lie I tell myself)?

When guys brag to me about the speed they listen to podcasts and youtube videos, I think of the Woody Allen joke: I took a course in speed reading and I got so good I read War and Peace in two hours. It's about Russia.

When you say that you are confident that quality is down across the board, have you tried watching some real trash from the past? Marathon The Nanny or Yes, Dear (as a very tired and pregnant Mrs. FiveHour has recently), listen to the top-40 straight through from a few random weeks in the 80s and 90s, drive a Ford Taurus and a Chevy Cavalier from 1998, and tell me again how everything is getting worse.

I think what's breaking down is less that things are worse, as that the selection channels and mechanisms we used to use are getting worse. You talk about Steam search being useless, I think that's become a problem across domains. Quality clothing has never been cheaper or easier to find, but it's also the case that you can't just rely on spending money anymore, buying high cost brands does not guarantee anything anymore. Netflix and HBO used to exclusively produce good stuff, every time they made an original it was something I wanted to watch, now they mostly make trash.

There was lots of trash in the past, but it used to be easier to find the good stuff. Or maybe I've lost the plot and can't find it.

To shift fictions for a second, Stephen King's excellent short story Nona from the collection Skeleton Crew is essentially an allegory of the 60s dynamic of guys being drawn into the world of leftist radical violence by hot women.

I have to confess my ignorance and say I have no idea how a private server works.

Which version do you play? Right now I'm just playing TBC Anniversary, but I think my old main WoW characters should still be there, albeit back at 80.