FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
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
3hr ago
I don't like engaging in generational whining but...what's with the trend of reverse-oedipal complexes in media these days? Mrs. FiveHour wanted me to watch The Hawk with her because she liked the first episode she watched. And it's fine for the most part, an inoffensive zany comedy with a solid cast of "Oh look it's Dr. Spaceman from 30 Rock?" in every role. But I'm confounded by the plot: at the opening of the pilot Ferrell is a kind of cross between Tin Cup and Jon Daly, a washed up drunken slob former pga star trying to find his way back to the tour, while his son is a tour pro on the rise. Within five or six episodes, dad has fought his way back to the tour (with a direct Tin Cup homage along the way), and son is frustrated that his dad is better than him and can't handle the competition.
And look I get it, Ferrell is the star people like and tune in for. But how did we get to the point where being just literally irrevocably better than your son was something we celebrated in media? Sure, you have some of the later John Wayne movies where the old timers were still tough, but taking McClintock as our example piece, it is implied and directly written into the script that he expects his heirs (his daughter and the college boy turned ranch-hand he wants her to marry) to grow into their greatness. It's a genuinely weird plot orientation, I have trouble thinking of past examples. Are there a lot of classic "Father is just literally better than his idiot Son at the same task they are both trying" plots that I am not thinking of?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I've been on a big Martini kick for the last few months. I tend to pick my drink based on the books I'm reading or tv shows I'm watching, I'll read a book that features a drink and get a craving and get on a run of it. Hemingway puts me on an Absinthe kick, Frasier inevitably gets me to buy a bottle of sherry. I finally figured out a good cocktail shaker: a YETI tumbler I got at a Bachelor party, close the sliding top to shake, open to pour. I love olives in general, and a nice ice cold Martini gets me right when I get home after work at night.
In this day and age when I want something new, rather than mix up complicated drinks, I mostly let the local distilleries do the work for me. When I'm at the state store and I see a local jalepeno infused gin, now I'm mixing up jalapeno martinis for a bit.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I would prefer that we teach the diary for what it is: a horrifying document showing the awful crimes of war. I mean, actually I think the Diary of Anne Frank is outmoded as a teaching tool and that Holocaust education is a moral failure. But if you're trying to teach a unit on hope, Victor Frankl would be the choice. If you're trying to teach someone the idea that hope is a positive good, you should probably use a teaching tool that shows that hope can pay off.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
And the narrator in this book is likeable in part because of her hope in dark situations, which is a positive example for the reader.
Hope which is completely misplaced. It's a negative example for the reader! "Even when things look dark, have hope, like Anne Frank!" "What happened to her?" A line in a comedy too stupid to be believed, yet here we are.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I'm not sure what you're saying here at all.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Unrelated Anne Frank Complaint
I listen to my local college radio station constantly when in the car. It's one of the few places left in the world where I can genuinely discover new music, without searching in any way. But because it is a public station, they play PSA's constantly, and the worst are the Pass It On people. And the worst ad they've ever created started airing recently:
Her words weren't written under peaceful shade, but under fear for her life. "Everyone has inside, a piece of good news." For two agonizing years she worried about being caught by the Nazis. "The good news is, you don't know how great you can be." Though her story ended early, her words live on. "I don't think of all the misery, but the beauty that still remains." With her positive outlook, Anne Frank continues to fill us with hope. Hope. Pass It On. This message is a courtesy of The Foundation for a Better Life at Pass It On.com.
This is actually offensively bad. Anne Frank's story shouldn't fill us with hope! How exactly does the story of a young girl who was murdered by an industrial racism machine fill us with hope? That's not the message we're meant to get from that school assignment! The point of assigning The Diary of Anne Frank in school is to place us in a state of empathy with the victims of the Holocaust*, to make us understand that these were real humans just like us being herded into camps. Whatever hope she had was misplaced! Her life ended ignominiously and miserably! To turn her into an inspirational self-help guru is to lessen the impact of the crimes committed against her.
It's offensively preachy and bad.
*FWIW I think we all need to stop empathizing with the victims and start trying to empathize with the perpetrators, and realize that It Could Happen Here
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Exciting, anything particularly fun?
Several first printings of Hemingway, a first edition of Candace Bushnell's original pre-tv Sex and the City for Mrs. FiveHour, several James Baldwins, an 1831 leather set of Napoleon's memoirs, a French set of Hugo's works from the mid 1800s, a copy of the War Department's official history of "The World War" published in 1919, and another item so rare and strange that I have no idea how to describe it on the public web because I would irrevocably doxx myself if it were searchable.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
So even though Anthropic didn't have to destroy their books, at least they apparently haven't destroyed anything truly rare.
I'll note first that I am one of those hippy-dippy people with a sacred feeling about books. I don't throw them away, I don't destroy them. It took an effort of will to become a person who writes in books, and then only for very special reasons.
I recently purchased a huge number of rare, old, or first edition books at auction. I don't intend to physically read any of the copies, they have a totemic value to me. Owning a first printing of Hemingway is something I imagine has a kind of mystical field about it, like an item in a video game.
I have trouble believing that they destroyed anything truly valuable, and rare does not equal valuable. Within the auction were many books I'd never heard of, first edition first printing, but just some airport novel about people on Nantucket published in the 80s that hasn't much been preserved or cared about or read since then.
It's possible that Anthropic purchased one of those books that is "rare" in the sense of infrequently appearing, but not "rare" in the sense of valuable or desirable.
In a sense, a book like that, a dead novel that hasn't been read in decades, has been given new and eternal life, becoming a mote within the great consciousness. Couldn't a turn of phrase or a piece of advice from an 80s airport novel become, by whatever occult means within the system, revived and returned to the discourse?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Herodotus notably states that Ethiopia produces the most beautiful women in the world, and Herodotus is Right About Everything.
That said, I agree with you that this particular actress undermines the trope being played.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Philly sports fans how drunk are you right now?
It'll be cool if I can get tickets to a game this year and see Lebron play, but idk that even King James can beat the curse of Embiid.
It makes sense in that they are probably the best team he can join and still get a lion's share of the credit if they win.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
factory pickup with high-quality all-terrain tires will take you almost anywhere
A rwd chevy s10 and a brain will get you 99.9% of the places that 99.9% of the population ever goes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Yeah, the number of people that live there and does that rounds down to zero. A tiny fraction of the population does that a tiny fraction of the time. And frankly, they don't need to anyway. Going hiking twice a year in no way justifies spending ten thousand dollars to ruin the ride of your daily driver pickup truck. That would be like if I walked around in my bjj gi at the office.
And anyway, from the video that appears to be a stock bronco, not a lifted pickup truck.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
While I disdain Starbucks, I frequent local espresso shops and order all kinds of girly drinks. It's tasty, it's fun, it's something I can't entirely recreate at home, it's a fun outing with Mrs. FiveHour or by myself with a laptop to sit for a few hours. I don't think I could go every day, but on the scale of indulgences, I find it perfectly fine.
But I can't understand:
-- Lifted pickup trucks. Nobody drives off-road. Nobody. It's not a real thing people do at the scale where you would need any kind of rig to do it beyond a Subaru Outback with good tires. But I can't go anywhere without seeing trucks that have been lifted to the point where they handle like hell, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
-- The vast majority of DoorDash traffic. I understand the value when one is three sheets to the wind, or ill, or whatever and getting food delivered becomes more valuable. I don't understand how it accounts for such a large share of orders that it's a huge element in the service economy. I'd think the average person would order delivery once a month or less, it appears to be much more than that.
-- Cruises. The whole set-up seems wildly unpleasant, particularly if I'm going to have spend my time on a boat cooped up with other people who wanted to go on a cruise.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
I think to some extent it does undermine the critique. The contrast asks the question: ok, cool, smart guy, you can critique the noble war made by noble warriors, the noble men obedient to and believing in a noble king, but can you come up with something better? You can critique, but can you build? Which approach is better if one can build an ending, and the other cannot?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Ok I'm gonna need a longer comment on your answer to this question.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
There will be no epic poems written down in this house, young man!
We have written evidence of the criticisms of writing down stories and wisdom, as opposed to personal oral transmission.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Related: my opinion that GRRM's failure to end ASOIAF undermines his positioning the work as a critique of Tolkien. You can write the beginning of an interesting story that deals with "Aragorn's Tax Policy" and the grimdark of a fantasy setting...but you can't write the ending, because a satisfying ending to the work GRRM began is impossible, it's ultimately sterile in that way.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
You know, Mrs. FiveHour watched The Big Lebowski recently, and I was struck by how much the quirked-up aesthetic has influenced everyone since, and how it must have hit when it first came out, but now it just kind of feels like everything else but a bit better.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
I'm all for AI art but right now the state of video is absolutely godawful. Elon is completely delusional if he thinks he can make something good in a year. Than again nano-banana came out and nobody expected it (though most people are still using gpt-image-2 ... YUCK!!!)
If the theory is that in a year video generation will be on a level where you say "Grok make a movie" and it does it, then I agree. But take our current tools and a gifted artistic team and spend a year carefully prompting and editing, and I think you could make something pretty extraordinary. Even when I'm just making a joke image like "grok make me a poster decrying anti-italian discrimination" I have to re-prompt it at least four times. Once to get it to what I actually wanted, once to edit some problems, and twice to remove weird artifacts from the first two edits. For a feature length movie, you'd be prompting every scene dozens of times. Which is basically what a director does now with actors, they reshoot scenes over and over until the actors understand the prompts and the director sees what they want, and sometimes at the end they have to go back and reshoot scenes that didn't come out right or that they have to change later.
On a related but unrelated note, casting a black girl as the green girl in Wicked completely ruined the movie. Because despite being green she was just so black.
I didn't like it because they made her skin color a metaphor for...her skin color. Why not just have her be black at that point and skip the green altogether? Though my bigger problem is Ariana Grande, whose face I find disturbing. She looks, after all the plastic surgery, like a black girl wearing whiteface.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Weird, I haven't seen an unreconstructed "Ancient people's believed myths because they were just so fucking stupid" just-so story in the wild in a long time. Because that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Alternatively you have the "Greek Dark Ages" explanation, that there was a distinct and observable reduction in level of organization and civilization in Greece between the collapse of the Mycenaeans and the rise of the Polis, and that the myths stem from shepherds living among ruins they couldn't build, seeing script they couldn't read or write, knowing these kings fought wars with chariots.
Or the Jungian Ishmael explanation, that the universal myths of Golden Ages and great long-lived heroes of the past are archetypal stories of the distinct downshift in health, lifespan, and quality of life that resulted from the shift to agriculture. It is agricultural humanity's preserved ancestral memory of older nomadic peoples who were taller, stronger, tougher, and longer lived than the early agriculturalists.
Or you could just say that nostalgia for a lost golden age is a universal of human society, present even in those times and places that we call Golden Ages now, and the narrative of infinite human progress is an oddity of the Enlightenment period lasting until WWI, briefly lit and quickly extinguished.
But no, it's definitely just a weird quirk of metallurgy and the myths are stupid because ancient humans were stupid.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
Magic? Idk similar to whatever mechanism by which the heroes in the Iliad frequently toss large stones at each other "such as would take five men to lift in these degenerate times."
It's pretty well attested in mythology from China to Israel that the earlier generations of humans were longer lived and generally better than the modern breed.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
If Penelope was much older than 40 then it wouldn't make sense for her to have so many suitors.
Typically when this is acknowledged it's explained in one of two ways:
-
People lasted longer then, among the heroes it wouldn't be unusual for her to still be beautiful and fertile at 40 or 50
-
This is precisely what makes the suitors evil, that Penelope is old/infertile, their intention is purely negative, to marry her and become king of Ithaca, but not to produce anything.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
I hope he does both. The Matter of Troy offers an infinite canvas for reinterpretation, and I'd love to see a firm effort from a Grok lead AI team to build a new version. Every work on the Matter of Troy, including Homer, is an interpretation, a new artistic spin on a series of events. The Greeks and Romans fought endlessly about Agamemnon: heroic leader or jackass who would get cucked while he was away and murked upon his return? Odysseus, charming trickster hero, or villain set for the inner circles of hell? Paris, romantic hero or kidnapper?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11d ago
I might just be overmapping to myself, where i became a strict no-shoes guy once I started vacuuming.
Ages are funny among the Homeric Greeks, it's implied that Telemachus is not yet at full manhood though the timeline suggests he has to be about 21, while Odysseus is implied to be in his prime though he must be somewhere in his mid-forties to early 50s at least.
To some extent I suspect that the rise of firearms and peasant armies has permanently altered the perception of ages to modern men. Heroic-era warfare required a combination of physical strength, experience, and skill that peaks in the 30s; not at 18, which is the peak of the combination of endurance, stupidity, and raw courage that is ideal for firearms. Ancients thought of 20 year olds as barely fit for military service, in much the same way that only rare 20 year olds are physically mature enough for combat sports or the NFL, and thought that 35-40 year olds were still plenty fit to fight. While today we place 20 year olds as the ideal military recruits, and 35 is just barely legal to enlist.
The Odyssey does play into this trope somewhat, I agree, but it's pretty heavily implied throughout the Telemachy in the first four books that Telemachus is coming into his own, and will someday be a hero equal to his father. This is addressed in ancient days in the lost Telegony, in which Odysseus is killed by his bastard child of Circe, who then marries Telemachus. ((As a personal aside, reading Madeleine Miller's Circe there were a bunch of details, like Circe marrying Telemachus, that I thought had to be modern flights of fancy but were actually part of the mythological corpus))
More options
Context Copy link