@Southkraut's banner p

Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users  
joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

All alliterations are accidental.


				

User ID: 83

Southkraut

Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.

3 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

					

All alliterations are accidental.


					

User ID: 83

Still on my second reading of Moby Dick, but made little progress. Not the book's fault. Also watched the 1956 movie, which was a pleasant surprise. Obviously it severely cut down the source material to fit within two hours, but it deviated very little and even lifted most of its dialogue verbatim from the book. They even let Ishmael do some narrating, rather than to cut the narrator and try to do without as most films-of-books do. The acting was decent, though somewhat unlifelike. Though the movie was entertaining overall, I gained absolutely nothing from it but I am pleased by the faithfulness of the adaptation.

Edit: This post had an image attached to it via CTRL+V, but it's not showing up. Trying again.

Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West, by Cormarc McCarthy.

Best book I ever read.

What did you perceive as dark or pessimistic about it? Sincere question.

Southkraut, reporting in.

I found the occasional but temporary problems charming. Reassuring. Work was obviously getting done.

What is a "web app"?

I had a phase like that.

Played some Borderlands a while back, for old times' sake when I used those games as a tool to learn a foreign language with. Characters constantly jabber at you, but it's still an action game so it manages to retain my attention better than the more dialogue-heavy genres. And since it's from big-time publishers, it's fully voice acted in many languages, and with subtitles to boot. Worked well!

But to the point: I skimmed through various titles just to take a look, and I was somewhat surprised by how suddenly they took a woke turn. BL1 and BL2 seemed to have relatively little of it (or I missed it all in my brief excursions), the Pre-Sequel had some, but it was very limited and could be ignored or even missed with ease (though some research showed that it was included very intentionally), but BL3 is pretty much just one big propaganda piece for progressive sexual ideology. Male characters are almost all incompetent whining buffoons in constant need of saving, women are all competent and/or sane and can handle themselves. The women are always right, the men usually wrong. Family is practically always depicted in a deliberately negative light, romance mostly comes up in homosexual contexts, and of the four playable characters two are women, one is a "non-binary" robot and one is an old man. The old man is alright, probably a lifeline tossed to the median gamer. Other men in the various plots, especially old, white and straight ones, tend to just get killed so as to free up narrative space for the women.

In BL2 and the Pre-Sequel, the character of Jack, or Handsome Jack, was very entertaining. The Pre-Sequel existed mostly just to explore him further after he proved very popular in BL2, but was killed in the finale. Handsome Jack is a lowly programmer turned corporate apex predator, a tyrant with a hero complex, a supreme egomaniac and usually funny in his completely over-the-top violent antics. In BL3 he is long dead, but a DLC adds a side-campaign to milk him some more - by having a woman explain how bad Jack was, and that the player must now commit some damnatio memoriae to heal some of the harm he did to that woman. The DLC is very negative in tone, varying between depressive and condemnatory, and by-the-by shows some more sleazy or incompetent or spineless male characters withering under the gaze of various competent and powerful women. It's the opposite of fun.

It's very on-the-nose, and given that the writers announced their desire to add more progressive elements in the Pre-Sequel, it seems obviously deliberate that BL3 would have orders of magnitude more of them. And it's a worse game for it. The series may have steadily improved mechanically, but in terms of entertainment value it's gone downhill.

German normally uses the Gänsefüßchen, Einführungszeichen or inverted-plus-normal quotation marks, as the Spanish do with their exclamations. Not the guillemet.

Moral vegetarianism is ethically backwards in that it accords far too much moral value to powerless creatures that are unable to participate in human society. Moral value is a social construct, and cows are part of economy, gastronomy, landscape or perhaps someone's personal pets, but they are not part of society.

I think I'm fine with being left behind if that's the future.

House of the New Sun

Did you mean Book Of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe? Because the only thing I found on google for HotNS was a reddit post by a user named "VerbalAcrobatics".

For the time being, no moral restrictions that you do not impose. If nobody save you knows the baby exists, and you are perfectly amoral, then the baby has no actual morality to count on. So much for the first question.

As to the second, the main difference is that the question of the moral value of animals hinges on the animal's permanent biological inability to influence society, whereas the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society and people assign some to it, or it grows up and becomes able to assert some for itself.

figure out how to substantially increase their intelligence/sapience.

But why?

Hell, if it means all the crazies of that other flavor lock themselves up in their pods and crazies of my flavor inherit the actual outdoors world, then yeah, bring it on.

Yes. I don't see what any amount of theoretical morality will do for the baby in that situation - the buck stops with you in that scenario; if you are the Fritzl type then very unfortunately your morality is all that will have a tangible effect, and the only questions left to ask revolve around whether you assign moral weight to the baby and how you will act on it.

Is there any way to display replies to your own comments? I'm having a hard time keeping track of conversations.

Same here.

Blood Meridian is the best novel I ever read, but it's also a hard and unrewarding read for most people. I doubt it'd be suitable for highschoolers. If you want them reading McCarthy, then I think the Border Trilogy - either of the first two (All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing) or the whole trilogy - would be much better-suited on account of their more personable protagonists and less violent plots.

Dune I'm similarly not sure about. There are lots of people who just refuse to take Sci-Fi seriously. Maybe Dune can overcome this to some degree thanks to its fame, maybe it'll just cause a bunch of culture warring due do its mighty whitey plot, hard to say - but it's also been around for a long while; surely teachers somewhere must have experiences on how students react to Dune?

Not a lot, got a load of problems to deal with. I'm sincerely polite and nice to people I deal with? I try to keep my marriage affectionate even when its sorely stress-tested? I somewhat regularly check up on family even when I have little time for it? Feels more like love damage control and love maintenance than love expansion.

It's Das Boot.

How dare you get your German wrong!

I made that statement too brief - I gained nothing from watching the film that I did not already gain from reading the book. The film is superfluous to me.

The film offers a plot, characters, themes, imagery, actors, dialogue and music. The book contains most of those in greater depth and detail. What the film has that a book cannot was alright, above complaint, but not a significant gain.

Dunno about the latter. When I was on my own and free to go about each day as I pleased I practically jumped out of bed every morning to get at doing the things I wanted to. Now that my life is almost entirely about being a provider and caregiver and the course of each day is mostly outside my control, I stay glued to the bed each morning until I'm forced to force myself to rise.

Coffee still works though.

Yeah, I also prefer the free-form style of the chans where you can reference whichever post you like without tumbling ever further down some tree structure. But then again, would that stand up to the thousands of posts a megathread often gets?

Small forum threads are nice because they're easy to keep track of. Discord is just about the opposite of that.