Incanto
7mo ago
I've only watched a few of these but for me it was primarily a way to vicariously relive the excitement of seeing or playing something awesome for the first time. Probably a parasocial element too, like streaming.
Incanto
7mo ago
I typically sit cross legged.
Try sitting with your feet flat on the floor. This provides better support.
Incanto
7mo ago
If you liked Jonathan Strange I can recommend Piranesi by the same author - also good but much shorter and tighter (though on the downside, from my point of view, the homoeroticism moves from subtext to text).
Incanto
7mo ago
The library of Slaanesh by Qiaochu Yuan.
Incanto
7mo ago
In Australia it's potential illegal to even question someone's claim of Aboriginality.
For gaming get the best GPU you can afford[1], 16GB RAM, and a decent SSD. You can skimp on the CPU a bit as long as you get a 6-core at least.
[1] check benchmarks, focusing on raster performance. I wouldn't worry about ray tracing at this budget level.
Tried it on Gamepass but didn't really like it. Feels like 50% of the game is loading screens, menus, and inventory management, and the other 50% is pretty bland combat.
Incanto
7mo ago
If the class is mandatory, asking him that risks him retaliating against you if he gets offended.
Incanto
8mo ago
Did they become more ethnically homogeneous and develop higher inborn disposition for intelligence over the course of that time?
Basically yes! Many things happened since 1AD to impact northern European genetics, including the church ban on cousin marriage (leading to less clannishness), harsher punishments for violent behaviour, and the accidental pressure for high IQ in Jews due to usury laws.
Incanto
9mo ago
I used to use Firefox with the tree-style tabs plugin, but ended up switching around for Mac performance reasons. Have currently settled on Brave also - it's nice to have ad blocking and vertical tabs (even if they aren't as powerful as tree-style) without needing plugins.
Incanto
9mo ago
Correction: the Sudanese crime rate is more like seven times the native population, not 50+.
Thanks, looks like I misremembered the actual number or muddled it with something else.
Incanto
9mo ago
There is some - years ago there was a scandal where there was a spate of Indian students being assaulted on suburban trains - but not sure it's any worse than other Anglo countries.
As a (white) immigrant to Australia this is much rosier than my view. I've heard plenty of woke and anti-white rhetoric from non-white immigrants (including from Indians and East Asians), to the point of losing friends over it. And while Australia's immigration story has been pretty successful overall, a lot of that is down to selectivity. The cases where that's been abandoned, such as Sudanese refugees, haven't always gone so well - the Sudanese commit crimes such as burglary at a rate a whopping 50+ (edit: 7) times the native population - a fact that was reported in The Age, hardly a right-wing outlet.
I also think COVID lockdowns were largely unjustified bullshit (especially the restrictions on outdoor activities), but that's another story.
Edit: now that I think about it, the most aggressive wokeness from non-whites I've heard has mostly been from 2nd gen or people who immigrated here as children rather than adults, so probably more down to absorbing the surrounding woke culture. Of course 2nd gens are an inevitable effect of immigration so that doesn't fundamentally change the story.
Good summary. There's scheduled to be a public congressional hearing on July 26th which will hopefully help clarify if there's any substance here or just more of the same old rumours and blurry videos.
Incanto
9mo ago
I think something like your last paragraph is the most likely story - heavy secrecy and over-compartmentalisation around aerospace secrets that has lead to a persistent UFO rumour mill that's now being amplified by true believers within the DoD itself (Elizondo, Grusch, etc).
Incanto
10mo ago
A good 3 minute song wouldn't necessarily be better stretched to 10 minutes, and the same goes for stories.
Incanto
10mo ago
If it takes 1 minute with AI instead of 20 minutes manually, that seems significant enough to affect volume.
Incanto
10mo ago
Unlike the other respondents here I liked the books but didn't care for the show (watched a few eps).
Incanto
10mo ago
“I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically and provides a generally uniting issue for nations of the world to re-assess their priorities,” Grusch said."
This makes it sound like he's doing a one-man pro-bono psyop to try to unite humanity or something.
Incanto
11mo ago
That seems like a matter of China having had repressive policies for longer (Seems Qin's saga started in the 80's), not that they're necessarily more repressive now.
Incanto
11mo ago
In which country are you more likely to actually be arrested (or at least have the police show up) for posting in contradiction of state mandated beliefs? I actually don't know the answer. I do hear about it more often from the UK but that doesn't prove much for multiple reasons.
War brides and loot goblins: The Iliad
(Epistemic status: The Iliad is 2700 years old and practically a field of study unto itself. I doubt anything I have to say here is original.)
(You can skip this paragraph if you're familiar with the story). The Iliad is an epic poem composed in ancient Greece by oral poet(s), first written down around 700BC and attributed to an unknown poet called Homer (along with the Odyssey). It describes events towards the end of the Trojan War - a legendary event occurring hundreds of years earlier where mainland Greeks travelled to Greek Anatolia with the ostensible goal of rescuing/re-kidnapping Helen, a beautiful woman who'd been taken away by the Trojan Paris. Notable characters on the Greek side include warrior Achilles and his close friend/possible lover Patroclus, ineffectual king Agamemnon, and got-his-own-spinoff Odysseus.
Recently after a lifetime of mostly reading sci-fi and fantasy I was thinking that I should catch up on some of the classics. After comparing a few translations of the Iliad I went with Robert Fagles' version as it seemed the most energetic. (People like to say that the Iliad was meant to be listened to rather than read, but I'm not an audiobook guy). With the high and mighty reputation of Homer I was expecting an eating-your-vegetables experience where I might be encultured but not necessarily entertained, but it was actually rather engaging. The story is mostly (rather violent) action with a bit of drama and pathos and was clearly composed as popular entertainment first and foremost. Some sections get a little repetitive (there's a bit too much back and forth action - it starts to feel like a long MOBA match after a while) but overall it was both enjoyable and an interesting insight into bronze age society. I have a few scattered thoughts, some of which touch on culture war issues.
Tropes. Some things I think of as Hollywood tropes are already present here. Random fighters die instantly and reliably in a single hit while major characters get injured if not missed entirely. The few that die get just enough time to make a dramatic speech before death. On the other hand they hadn't come up with quippy one-liners yet - when characters try to dunk on each other they make speeches.
Names. An interesting difference from almost all modern media is that almost every single character who dies in battle, no matter how minor, gets named, usually with their father's name and often even a mini-bio as well. This does get a bit repetitive at times but also takes the cost of war more seriously than the typical Hollywood mowing down of faceless mooks. One interesting exception to this is that the dozen Trojan soldiers sacrificed by Achilles for Patroclus's funeral pyre are not named - perhaps their deaths were not heroic enough.
Morality. Ingroup-outgroup morality is very strong here, as well as an absence of altruism in the modern sense. The characters don't see anything wrong with looting random cities, slaughtering men and taking women as slaves, nor with summarily killing (or human-sacrificing) prisoners or desecrating their enemies' bodies - indeed they tend to boast about these things. Achilles just barely softens a little at the end, with bribery required. The Trojans are worried that they might be sacked and killed/enslaved, but they don't seem object to this on moral grounds. Meanwhile both sides show a great deal of concern over protecting the bodies of their fallen comrades, even at great risk to themselves.
Loot. The characters are obsessed with loot and on multiple occasions get killed or injured while trying to loot their enemies' armor mid-battle. They also send people back to base with loot mid-battle instead of trying to win the battle with their full force. Even the god Ares, fighting in the battle, stops to loot one of his victims - I guess even gods could use a spare set of armor.
Gods. The gods are involved surprisingly directly and frequently in the story, going so far as to redirect spears and arrows or even fight in the battles personally. Most often the gods seem to be used to explain events that in modern times would be attributed to good or bad luck - oh your chariot broke down, or your spear missed? Must have been the interference of Zeus again. They also seem to think character's thoughts for them at times - something that formed part of the basis for The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, if I recall correctly.
Women. Human women play little role in the story except as prizes - an explicit goal of the Greeks is to take the Trojan women as slaves/war brides, and both the Trojan war and the Iliad itself start with disputes over the possession of women. At the funeral games a woman, 2nd prize for one of the events, is even rated as being worth only 4 oxen, compared to a 1st prize cauldron worth 12. (This may have been intended as a joke, perhaps implying that this woman was not so desirable - another woman is also part of the first prize for the prestigious chariot race). It's interesting that the goddess Athena is portrayed as something of an ass-kicking girlboss, unlike any of the human female characters.
Theme. The theme could perhaps be summarized as "War is harsh and tragic, but at least it's glorious. Also you can really load up on loot".
One thing I speculate about - for a long time Homer was prestigious partly because you had to know ancient Greek to read him. Then there were various English translations (famously Alexander Pope's rhyming translation), but they weren't so easy to read, so there was still some prestige from the effort. I wonder if relatively easy/readable translations like Fagles have hurt the prestigious nature of Homer and, along with feminist opposition to the very unfeminist portrayal of women in the story, contributed to the apparent decline of the classics in academia.
I'll leave you with an excerpt from the end of book 20, which reminded me a bit of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
Achilles now
like inhuman fire raging on through the mountain gorges
splinter-dry, setting ablaze big stands of timber,
the wind swirling the huge fireball left and right—
chaos of fire—Achilles storming on with brandished spear
like a frenzied god of battle trampling all he killed
and the earth ran black with blood. Thundering on,
on like oxen broad in the brow some field hand yokes
to crush white barley heaped on a well-laid threshing floor
and the grain is husked out fast by the bellowing oxen's hoofs—
so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions
trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed
with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car,
sprays of blood shooting up from the stallion's hoofs
and churning, whirling rims—and the son of Peleus
charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth
splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms—
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