TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
No bio...
User ID: 2854
This one defined a childhood summer for me. I rode my bike to the movie theater at least a dozen times to watch that. No idea where I got the money for tickets. Sometimes I went with friends. It was a white town and we could just leave our bikes unlocked outside the theater. Why would we lock them up? Every time I went to see it I made a pit stop at a convenience store and bought a sprite, and every time (except the last one) I looked under the bottle cap and won a free bottle, for which I'd trade that cap in the next time I went to see the movie.
This break in luck portended many things, in retrospect. The next year our school was suddenly about 40% Mexican and we didn't learn much in class anymore. Most of my friends had their bikes stolen from one front yard or another, where they'd been trustingly thrown to the lawn while visiting each other. Mine never was but then I'd wised up quickly. Pretty early in that school year this Mexican boy named Ricardo and his flunkies surrounded me at lunch and made a bunch of threats; I don't recall the details. They got too close and started shoving me around.
I had taken a week-long karate course not long before and the 'sensei' told us a story about a fox and, let's say (because I forget), a hare. They met up and recognized each other as martial artists. The hare bragged about how he knew a thousand techniques; he had a move for everything. The fox said, well, I only know one move, but I've practiced it a lot. Just then a group of hounds burst in upon them. The rabbit hesitated, trying to decide which technique to use, and was torn to pieces. The fox executed his one move perfectly: he ran away, and lived.
Running wasn't an option for me, and I calculated that if I wanted it to be I'd need a distraction. And anyway the story had a second moral, which I'd decided was "Just get really good at one move." I really liked the snap-kick. Look it up and try it; it feels great. So while everyone else in my dojo did all kinds of other things I just worked at the snap kick for the second half of the week.
Ricardo's eyes about popped out of his head when I delivered a flawless kick into his solar plexus. Folded over and dropped with the least resistance I've ever seen from someone who wasn't already unconscious. The henchmen gaped. I ran.
They caught up to me out in the field; idk why our school had such a big play area, or why none of the adult peacekeepers were around. Anyway my next memory is of six boys kicking the living shit out of me while I tried to maintain something like a fetal position on the ground. How that feels on the ribs. Shadowy impressions of their forms around me against the too-bright sky. Nothing after that until the disciplinary hearing, where they were all let off with detention and I was suspended for three days because I 'threw the first punch.'
My dad had told me that if I ever got suspended for self-defense he'd take me to Taco Bell, and that's what we did. The Mexicans still gave me shit after that but only softly. Softly.
So anyway yeah, great movie. Really takes me back.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Would you rather be alone in the woods with a herd of American bison or an educated professional white woman?
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Do you ever talk to AI? I have this unaccountable sense that you'd probably enjoy it.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Such a squandered character. Idk, Firefly used to be the best thing ever to me but at some point in the last couple of years I seem to have gotten over it.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Zadok from the Old Testament? Is this one of those "move all the Bibles into the fiction section of the bookstore" things?
Admittedly at first I got him mixed up with Zardoz and was like man I guess I should have finished watching that movie.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
The older I get, the more I've come to believe that humans are only mostly monogamous, or rather "serially monogamous".
We don't need to paint all of humanity with the same brush. In fact there's lots of room for individual and group-level variation here, even speaking on a purely instinctual level before nurture comes into it.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
I used to have fun asking people if they could think of a few examples of evil priests in fiction. No problem of course; there are many. Then I'd ask if they could think of any non-evil priests in fiction. Crickets.
Over the years a couple of examples have come up, of course, but mainly it's a landslide in the other direction. Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
No, I'm afraid not. I'm unlikely to see it either because I'm just not in the habit of watching TV. I like the idea of watching more TV and have several series I've been meaning to finish, but who has the time?
But thanks, that does sound interesting.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Yeah no, I have a lot of kids and another on the way and no plans to stop for a while yet. I get that part. I'm just hung up on the bit about society, yeah.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Yeah, I'm in a much better area for that sort of thing. Quite the mix of rich and poor. California, really.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Sold it, I hope. Exercise equipment drifts in and out of my home for various reasons but I'm usually able to recoup about as much as I paid for it initially.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Turning the dial converts some of the mass to energy. Warranty void if attempted. User assumes all personal and planetary existential risk.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
To show off to guests, of course. Or to cool off on hot days. Knew a guy out in the desert who'd jump into his pool several times a day over the summer months.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Wait! I want to comment on the cartoon too!
While basically sympathetic to the artist's point, what mainly occurs to me here is that in the first three panels people were living a lifestyle that let them be home with their kids a lot.
Both parents out of the house working, and especially if it's for low wages, is indeed hard. Also lack of family or community around to help with that. Also can't let them play alone outside. Also you're gonna need a bigger car if you want more than two, and those things don't grow on trees. Also also also...
So it's like a system where the handle goes down into some kind of arrangement of plates, you dial in what you want, and those ones engage and become attached? So basically just a convenient way to load and unload plates?
Does it use magnets? :3
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
This seems to suppose that the society in which I find myself -- and perhaps more importantly its leadership -- has incentives which are nearly-aligned with my own, which seems pretty debatable both presently and historically.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county
So you're saying there's a chance!
I'm having a real fun time trying to figure out how the mass of a dumbbell can be adjusted by turning a dial!
Edit: best I can come up with is some kind of onboard air compressor and storage tank.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Coordinating that and managing the people involved, who would then have standing for adventures like minority shareholder lawsuits, would be much more troublesome.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
Thanks, that's mostly what I wanted to know. Still curious though about tradeoffs and where our personal obligations to sacrifice for the society begin and end.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
The avoidance of pain is the central tenet of our societies.
Not sure I'd phrase it quite like this but agreed that it's a major factor. In practice it looks a lot to me like a desire for what amounts to palliative care until death.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
I think it was pretty smart of me to not have sex in high school.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1mo ago
This seems like a fully-general argument against, uh, laws? I can't think of any that don't come down to what amounts to values. Murder has been legal and even encouraged in plenty of societies, for example, though with certain (values-based) restrictions.
I think that [the modern notion of] consent is a troublesome concept for any number of reasons. Actually more than troublesome; unworkable, even.
The way things actually work in my experience is that sex is something that happens within marriage and marriage must, by its nature, be approved by the community or at least the priest, which is a pretty excellent filtering mechanism.
All the handwringing about consent occurs to me as people having shattered a priceless vase and hurriedly trying to work out hacks for handling the shards without nicking any arteries. But one has only to take a glance at the sheer amount of blood on the floor to realize it's not going well.
I was once exploring a new (to us) state park with my wife, just hiking around at random. Asked the ranger at the entry booth where we could go that wouldn't be too bad for ticks. He recommended the 'Bobcat Trail', so we did that.
When we encountered a second ranger later and related the story he laughed and said "Well, that wasn't nice." And yeah, I don't think I've ever seen so many ticks per linear foot of trail before or since. Not by half, or maybe even a tenth.
Anyway @erwgv3g34 I haven't seen I Am Legend but suspect it is that kind of recommendation.
More options
Context Copy link