George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Has anyone else watched, or did anyone else watch as a child, the documentary series World At War? The link I just provided is to all 26 episodes on Youtube. Not the best resolution, but really this must be one of the best documentary series about WWII ever produced, not least because of the interviews with men who were actually in the war and who are now dead (it was made in 1973.) Narrated by Laurence Olivier. Highly recommended. I remember my dad watching it as it was released--he'd sit in his lounge chair, and I can still recall the theme playing. I got bored quickly and usually only watched a few minutes, but I was a kid. Recently I've been watching the whole thing.
Not really fun, however, so I'm not sure it's appropriate to this thread. I didn't want to put this in the main forum and I am not interested in a culture war take.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7mo ago
Do you expect you're talking about the same women? The women I know best wouldn't dream of setting up an OF account. I am sure they have their secret garden like all women, the face they don't show me and would never show me, but I am not sure the OF types are the same girls one might be approaching at, say, Starbucks. Of course you could argue you're talking about some sort of female psychology here, but that seems like women assuming all men are subscribers to OF or are dangerous potential rapists. This is only true in the least charitable view.
Also I am not sure it's either realistic or ideal (despite the modern idea of writing up a dating profile) to be "open about preferences" from the get-go (primarily because I think these preferences should be a natural growth based on shared experience of one another, and not, say, what one learns one gets off to via watching porn).
Many women are students of male weakness, yes. For various reasons. But I'd argue against anyone who suggests all men want one type of inamorata, actually. There are commonalities, probably, among men, but I mean camgirl and porn sites all have the Category button for a reason. If what you mean is "All men want to see your tits" then you're probably right. Past that it's vague. But presumably for most the draw of such sites is the same as the draw of the waterlogged magazine cache in the woods for boys of my era--the erotic forbidden. There have been Playboy centerfolds for a long time. That doesn't mean that's everyone's ideal (thus you get sexless wonders asking on reddit and elsewhere "Would U date an Onlyfans girl?") Regardless of the answers, the fact that this is a question that gets asked suggests these girls and women who put themselves in that marketplace are not the norm, despite how it seems.
I will offer that I think the normalization to some degree of this sort of virtual prostitution is very troubling and I can't imagine it sending us anywhere good. An equivalent would be normalization of, say, fighting and violence for men. We all have that side in us, buried to some degree. Make it acceptable and people suppress it less. There probably is a zone where girls who never would have imagined themselves dancing naked to shitty music in video are doing so because as you say, easy money and some degree of anonymity.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
8mo ago
The point presumably is that using the phrase "He was mean to me" suggests that you yourself are weak in a way for allowing meanness to get to you, whereas "He used violence against me" lays all presumptive blame on the violent. At least that's how I read it.
I don't know but I somehow doubt it. Saying almost anything explicitly here is considered bad form--or, actually I only guess that it is bad form, as even that has never been said to me explicitly. Even in my earlier post when I said that it was "put to me" that I was accruing on inadvertently, this was not really put to me. It was hinted at and I got the message.
If I had to imagine it, I would say that I could, yes, state to one or two neighbors that I just wanted to piddle in the garden park for my own gratification, and I would then be seen as a tolerable eccentric (which is how I am usually seen anyway.) But it would contribute to an imbalance of what I will probably inappropriately call the wa of the neighborhood. I would set things off kilter, and as a foreigner here I always take pains to not do that any more than I do by my presence alone. And probably someone would still not feel right about it.
On is one of those things that never ends. The cycle commences and then it never stops. We have one neighbor whose sole interactions with us are greetings--no other kindnesses or gestures--for once those begin, they can never end. It's nothing personal. I guess. All of this is just me intuiting the unwritten rules.
Interesting. I'll do that. Even with the software I used the gold ones stayed, but I manually wiped those as well just out of spite.
edit： Yes a few are still there though [deleted] shows as author. Odd that tge search engine for my username (same as here) nevertheless turned up the posts.
No recourse, as my acct which could redelete them is gone. Thanks for telling me, though.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11mo ago
"There's a lot to unpack here" god I hate that, irrationally so, almost as much as cringe used as an adjective, though cringey is no better.
The word leftist itself is right-coded. You don't hear a lot of left-leaning people use the word (or, I myself don't hear them).
The term indoctrinate seems more right-coded now, particularly when referring to education. Deplorable used ironically as a noun to refer to a person, for obvious reasons.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
29d ago
What's with the men-only part? I am sincerely asking for clarification because I am not sure of the rationale.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
ACE numbers, to my knowledge, are almost entirely about interpersonal experiences (Did anyone in your family go to prison? is an exception but not by much) and have little to do with the physical environment of the child. A kid could be raised in BFE and have a non significant ACE score. If the parents neglect, slap, insult, etc. that's going to show up in the ACE score.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
Yes.
No.
Not interesting, and anyway I'm already too self-revealing by half on this site. I've lived in Japan since late 1998, anyway.
What's your story?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Do we not, to use your words, "meddle with the primeval forces of nature" routinely? Fill in relevant medical practice/research. It may be prying, but are you, as well, against contraception? Or the onanist spilling of the seed, aka jacking off? These, too, depending on the scope of the term "primeval forces," may fit the category, particularly if we're talking about propagation of the species.
This is not an attempt at gotcha. It may be that you do not want to rest on the statement that you abhor abortion for religious reasons (I understand if you are hesitant) and felt the need to add caveat in order to be taken seriously. For my part you don't have to do that, and I'd also agree that in most ways Trump is a huckster. He's also not wrong in his logic regarding electability here, it's just that he, in his typical style, has the gall to say it out loud.
The electorate is not, in my experience discussing the topic, consistent in its collective view on abortion.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
I don't know if reddit has changed or I have. I used to browse it daily on my commutes and I posted regularly. I had numerous comments gilded. I got in one of those mega karma subs. Then last year or so I deleted everything with a third-party app (or tried to. Reddit just wiped my name but resurrected some of my comments for some reason.) I don't know what happened but part of it I suspect is the userbase has seen a lot of old users getting quieter and new aging up users taking over. The mod nannying is uncanny--even benign comments are sometimes deleted for seemingly no reason. It's odd, I agree.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6mo ago
It all looks extremely legible and vaguely feminine to me. Perhaps my standards are far too low (re. legibility).
It depends. On what? In how much you love her. And your relationship. And whatever it is you both build out of it, whatever family you make. It depends on how committed you both are to fidelity, how much of a deal breaker it is. It will also depend on how careless you allow yourself to be by putting yourself into situations where you'll be tempted to stray--and let me assure you now that there are and will be many, many such situations unless you willfully and consciously navigate away from them. Pence isn't the fool people make him out to be, at least not in this regard. The clashing rocks, as it were. They'll get you. Then you'll be playing guilt and intrigue games forever. You needn't go far to find examples of this.
It frankly sounds to me that you're not ready. Sex is just sex. The variety of women and women's bodies, that thrill, the hunt, the look, that way a girl's eyes change when she realizes she wants you, how her body language picks up, the little pulses of interest, the smell of her make-up, and hers, and hers. I could go on. I won't. Gold can't buy this. (Of course it can, but not really. Gold buys the facsimile.) Juxtapose that next to growing old with one woman--will she lop off her hair? The inevitable graying and broadening. In both of you. But also the intimacy, the knowing without being told, the chatty suppers, the contented silences, the shared life. Trust. Is anything more valuable?
I won't--can't-- tell you which you are meant for. One or the other. Or maybe neither. If you're lucky you have a choice, and you can fuck up either one easily. Good luck.
Edit: 18 1/2 years of marriage here.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7mo ago
Then there's the idea that learning sales frames the world as a sea of marks or buyers to be maneuvered and manipulated. Maybe I'm biased against sales as I saw my dad do it for years and it eventually left a bitter taste. To be a good salesperson requires social savvy, sure, but when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you.
Peripherally relevant but one of my old favorites.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
8mo ago
What does "remove from society" mean here, as regards in particular the 20 teat-sucking factory workers? Job severance? Imprisonment? Or something more sinister?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
9mo ago
God I love Wagner. Why do people hate Wagner? Because of the Nazi thing? I mean okay fine, but I mean have these people listened to Wagner? It's like when in that Motte podcast and @KulakRevolt kept hating on The Great Gatsby. I mean I feel like at some point people aren't paying attention to the things they should be paying attention to.
Exhibit A: This is Siegfried's Funeral March. Yeah, from a film, but hey, I have never had the good fortune to watch the 17 hours which is Der Ring des Nibelungs though I would do it in a heartbeat.
Many years ago I watched a pretty uneven film called Aria and was introduced to Wagner apart from the usual Apocalypse Now sequence. The film had only one Wagner piece, a haunting section from the longer opera Tristan Und Isolde called Liebestod. You can find this in both instrumental and vocal versions. My favorite is the one done by Leontyne Price, and was the one used in in the film. You can watch that here.
So why the Wagner hate? Too rhapsodic? Too emotional? Neither of these critiques holds water with me. I mean listening to Wagner 24/7 is probably not advisable, but sometimes a little Wagner is just what the musical doctor ordered.
Fight me!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10mo ago
Wow, a reply. Thank you. Yeah, it's long as hell. Of my non-Japanese friends I am the only one with such a punishing commute, it's true. I've only been at this particular gig for about a year, but it's tenured so I will stay at least a year or two--and I'm no spring chicken so I may just call it and settle. I have kids to put through school, after all.
There is actually something called 単身赴任 or tanshin funin where dads live literally away from their families--as in, you have a wife and kids in Osaka, but you live in Tokyo and just send money home. So you don't commute, you just live way the hell away from your own family. That is not as uncommon as you might imagine. I don't think it contributes much toward family harmony, either. I would never do it. I am not sure how common long commutes are in Japan--I have been commuting this way for some time, and some of my students have nearly equally long commutes.
As for a "long hard day" it's for me just prepping, grading, and teaching, and most of that is done either standing stationary or sitting at a computer, and there are a helluva lot more rigorous jobs. I use the commute time to meditate and will probably start writing in those times. Mornings especially I find my brain is very alert.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
Find some event, be it a movie, gallery exhibit, new restaurant opening, power tractor pull, airshow, whatever. An event that has a set time. Ask her to that in a way that suggests you are excited to go to it. She will say either yes, no, or put you off. If either of the latter, you will hace a good sense of how interested she is in how she does them. If the former, you're golden.
I would strongly suggest never "telling her your romantic feelings." Or, not for a very long time past the moment when romance has already blossomed, assuming it does. There is, among many young men of otherwise high intelligence, a strong urge to put in words one's feelings. That urge should be squashed.
Good luck!!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
Maybe you mean that there will be no "official" appraisals? There have already been papers written on the effects of official COVID measures in higher education--for my small part I have been part of the writing of at least two of them. These were bith qualitative interview studies with university students in the first two years of the COVID period, and I and my co-researchers, at least, tried to be careful to not frame the study as about "the effects of COVID" but the effects--on them specifically, as it was a qualitative study--of how the governmental, educational, and social systems (which the students had no recourse but to flow with) moved in reaction to COVID.
I am just speaking for my own experience. Certainly many others in education have written with agendas far removed from my own perspective.
I am confused by this post but because you have said you don't read fiction I suppose some of your assumptions about it (that Capote was famous only because he was a "homo who wrote about homo stuff," that all classic literature contains the themes you listed) can be dismissed with that in mind.
Out of curiosity do you read the books your wife fiancee is reading or just the blurbs or someone else's commentary on them? I ask this not because I have (I haven't read or heard of either of the authors you listed) but because a book's content is no way of judging its literary value, any more than the topic of a poem determines its relative poetry.
You do seem to have informed yourself enough to form opinions about fiction (in that you list what you suggest are popular themes) and I'm wondering if you're imagining this from reading book blurbs, from asking around your friends who read (or who don't read) or some other source.
Your question "Is this widely known?" takes as fact your assumptions (which I would suggest are unwarranted) about the degeneracy of book awards, and because I generally disagree with that assumption I don't think the question is answerable.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
26d ago
You're not going to see the results. Even if you're good. And by "good" a dozen possibilities could be inserted there for your imagination. You're funny. You seem cool. You look like the guy they knew one time. You tell great stories You sing. Whatever. For kids learning language is about making them want to immerse themselves in the language, and they want to do that because something makes them interested. A generation of Japanese girls "love English" because of One Direction, and not because Zayne knew anything about comprehensible input. You're not going to see the results because language teaching and learning is slow, and people get better or don't because of many, many reasons, but a specific method or methodology is way down on the list.
I taught English in the Peace Corps 30 years ago. In a country in Africa. I guess those kids were underprivileged. They seemed pretty resilient though. One girl messaged me on LinkedIn a year or two ago after having become a doctor. I cannot claim responsibility. If you want to teach kids, be interesting. Be amusing. Keep their interest even if it's just playing the lyre. Instill that interest in English and they'll do the hard part on their own. As we all do. Or don't.
If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
In Japan this behavior wouldn't even be noteworthy. The tattoo might be seen as gauche, unless of course it washed off and was applied to your cheek or something. I knew a girl once named Mitsuki because her mother loved Disney--in Japanese Mitsuki is a play on ミッキー or Mickey, where the ッ there represents a pause, unless it's a big ツ in which case it's just TSU, as in Mitsuki. She's a lovely girl, I still follow her on Instagram.
But we were talking about porn, sorry for the derail. It's true a non-Japanese person engaging in this (Disneyphile) behavior would probably be seen as a square peg--probably not a fucking loser though. More like a white girl in a kimono. Noticeable, but not in any bad way (I'm talking Japanese perception here). My former girlfriend (not Japanese) used to walk around Osaka age 25 wearing a Curious George backpack because she imagined she could get away with it here. And true enough, probably she did. But I knew better.
Edit: As for porn, it's illegal here to show genitalia in porn, so there's a giant underground, of course. I think the same stigma on porn buyers that you mention applies here.
2nd edit: After reading the pocket pussy comment below, I reflected on the ubiquity of the Tenga in Japanese drug stores. I've never seen anyone buy one though.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
So if I'm getting you, your view is that the kind of music video you've linked is, in your view, not just distasteful to you personally, but is in fact objectively bad--bad as an adjective here not quite capturing the really badness of it. It's an abomination to proper values and taste. Ruskin would be spinning in-his-grave-bad. And further, the fact that such a video is popular (or this is how we are proceeding, because probably it's popular) is symptomatic of the badness of those who like it or watch it, or for whom it was meant, its target audience. Those people (Indians) are bad, too. But not only do they have poor musical taste, they're actually Bad. I am not using other adjectives here because I don't want to put words in your mouth. (You used garish, tacky, bitter, and one of my most loathed words: cringey or cringeworthy). You further suggest that this is not just a cultural difference between you and them. It's a deep gulf, a difference in fundamental make-up, something neurophysiological that causes them to be that way, a way that to you is revolting. (I am using that word but you didn't. But I think it's a fair assessment of what you are expressing--revulsion.) This same quality (if we can even use that word, maybe condition or state) in these repulsive beings is what also compels some of them to behave in unhygienic and woefully ill-mannered ways. It's just who they are, it's what they are.
If all of this is an accurate, perhaps less lyrical but more succinct crystallization of your views, I think I've got you. I disagree entirely. I also think sideswiping other users of the Motte to make a point is something we might do without and not be the less for it.
I don't think I'm going to convince you of anything and unless you invite that dialogue I won't even try. Please do however correct me if I've misconstrued your intent.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
I prefer @2rafa 's explanation of your viewpoint to your actual viewpoint, which I am not sure I even understand, mainly due to its vague word salad. I'm sure you have a point but I don't understand it yet beyond what seems to be a visceral disgust you have for India, and something to do with I presume Hinduism.
Thames isn't a name of a person or video creator it's taken from the logo of Thames television
More options
Context Copy link