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1: The Amazing Digital Circus (ongoing). I watched it all from episode 1-7 after hearing a lot about it, expecting to find nothing but mediocrity at best and brainrot at worst. But... I'm ashamed to say I like it. It's a weird mix between a Pixar movie and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
There are some parts that feel unnecessarily fan-servicey (e.g. putting a character in a maid outfit temporarily), and the characters have one too many Ted Lasso-esque heart-to-hearts, but there are good character moments and in general it toes the line between absurd zoomer humour and existential dread quite well. Despite the fact that it's clearly not meant to be overly highbrow (and it isn't), there's also some surprising references hidden in all of the bullshit, such as a brief reference to Searle's Chinese Room which just gets played off as a gag. Overall, it's a pretty decent and fun watch, I see why it achieved internet fame. 7.5/10 enjoyment.
2: Pluribus (2025). Against my better judgement, I watched the season all the way through, and it was somehow more disappointing than the first 3 episodes made it out to be. Oh, this rant is going to be long and angry.
Firstly, the pacing and themes: The series is hilariously slow-paced and spends a large amount of its runtime on expository scenes that primarily serve to illustrate the same handful of themes over and over again, you can see all of the plot developments from a mile away, and it covers all the bog standard fare for a sci-fi hive mind show (asking questions about the value of individualism vs collectivism, about if it's worth it if the cost of peace is one's selfhood and the loss of these valuable human things that arise from our attempts to reach out to each other, about if a person is ever really "independent", etc). I can't see it as treading much new ground in that regard, aside from the fact that it does so in a far more ponderous and soap-operatic manner than other science fiction. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I also can't help but think that the people who actually think that the show adventurously breaks new ground are the pseudo-literary kind, the kind who would stay away from anything that they consider as pulp, and who genuinely believe that this concept is a new vehicle through which to tackle these philosophical themes because they would never be seen dead consuming genre fiction.
Secondly, the characterisation: Considering its fans tout it as a character study, there's noticeably little character development. Carol starts the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, and... she ends the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, after a brief period of wilfully deluding herself into believing that Zosia loves her. Pretty much the only dynamic that ends up changing is the newfound presence of Manousos at the end of the season. And most of Carol's (circular) character arc, far from redeeming her, seems to paint her as a worse character than you initially thought she was; initially it's possible to think of her as steadfastly principled in spite of her abrasive, aggressive nature, but the second she finds out that the hive can't convert her without her consent she immediately embraces pure hedonism, and goes so far as to have sex with a member of the hive (something she hypocritically criticises Koumba for doing earlier on in the show). The second she finds out again she can be converted by means of her frozen eggs, a plot point that makes zero sense for various reasons (including the fact that induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from virtually any bodily cell and germ cells are actually some of the worst candidates for stem cell creation due to the fact they only contain half the genome), she reverts to her original stance on the hive. It reveals that her opposition to the hive was not out of any kind of principle or selflessness, but out of her own self-interest. By the end of the season, I genuinely could not think of a single thing to like about her - she started out as a miserable Karen who you might have been able to argue had principles, and that argument gets eroded so heavily throughout the course of the season such that there isn't anything to like by the time the season is done. And she's so stuck in a holding pattern that the season leaves no room for her character growth.
Thirdly and finally, the visuals. In spite of an insane per episode budget of $15 million, many of the shots just look bad. There are multiple scenes that are clearly and obviously greenscreened: the rooftop scene in Episode 5 (which is so ugly it looks like a certain shot from The Room), as well as Kusimayu's conversion scene, Manousos and Carol's fight scene, and the scene with Carol and Zosia in "Thailand" in Episode 9 just look awful. And apparently the rooftop scene was by far the most costly scene in the show! Some other scenes were shot on location and look fine, but some scenes require such terrible VFX, are so expensive and yet are so irrelevant to the plot that it boggles my mind why they even attempted such a shot in the first place. Frankly, it's so obsessed with its cool visual concepts that it almost feels like the point of the story: Karolina Wydra flying a plane, the hive emptying out an entire supermarket and coordinating a large cast of extras to "fill it out" again, Carol's rooftop scene, etc; the show often feels like it's visuals-first and plot-second. There is so much pointless VFX and so much shooting across multiple continents with many extras, and that's a stark difference compared with Breaking Bad, which had little VFX, a small budget, minimal sets, etc, and managed a 10-13 month turnover between seasons. Meanwhile Pluribus is going to take a long time apparently despite being greenlit for a second season from the get-go. What does any of this actually ever get you?
In other words, I'm disappointed. I liked Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and had high hopes for this, but this isn't it. 5/10 enjoyment, basically the show equivalent of drinking water.
There are country- and culture-specific ones all over the internet.
For South Korea, there's Dale's blog; he's a Korean temple-obsessed autist who provides extremely exhaustive coverage of temples in South Korea, there are hundreds upon hundreds of posts where he talks about their history, provides photographs and rates them on a one to ten scale. He has also put together lists where he details the ones most worth visiting, such as this post and this post.
For China, Nick in China's youtube channel is a good resource. There are also twitter accounts devoted solely to cataloguing Chinese architecture, such as this one. Though researching China is not easy at all and I ended up having to go down Chinese sources sometimes - the Chinese government puts together rather exhaustive lists of culturally and historically important sites called the "Major Sites Protected for their Historical and Cultural Value at the National Level", and they're quite good. Here is the list for Shanxi province.
If you're interested in Greek and Roman sites, Scenic Routes To The Past is a good youtube channel for that. It's a travel channel run by Garret Ryan, who also runs the history channel toldinstone, and it's quite extensive in covering Greco-Roman historical buildings and remains while providing historical context.
Also, this isn't for any specific destination, but Antiokhos in the West's twitter is generally a gold mine for fascinating historical sites. And if researching for a country you’re unfamiliar with, starting with the UNESCO world heritage list is never a bad idea.
So I'm making this with the disclaimer that the countries I have travelled to at this point include the following: Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Northern Italy (so, no Rome and Sicily), Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, and Northern China. Note I cannot comment on other areas like Egypt, the UK, Spain, Greece, Southern China, Japan, India, or Cambodia.
With all that out of the way here's my list of favourite historical things I've seen (that are not in China, if you include the China ones the list becomes a good bit longer). It's a small list of favourites because I'm picky.
1: Sainte-Chapelle, France. I need to provide the disclaimer that I was not generally very impressed by Paris - it was rather chaotic and seedy, far from the romantic vibe it attempts to cultivate in tourist adverts, and I hear things have only gotten worse since I visited. But Sainte-Chapelle is the one thing in the city I really think justifies travelling there, and it does so stunningly; it's a 1238 Gothic cathedral with a lower and upper chapel, the latter of which is covered from top to toe in stained glass depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, Ezekiel and Job, Genesis and so on. When the light hits the chapel at the right angle the interior looks positively kaleidoscopic. It's a small chapel, it's not large at all compared to many of the others in Europe, but it's so good I would say that if you travel to any historic site in Europe you should make it this one.
2: Changdeokgung Palace, South Korea. This is a rather out-of-left-field one, I don't think most people would put the Seoul palaces on the top of their list, but I would. I even prefer it to the Forbidden City, to be honest, which I don't think is a popular opinion. I went here in winter and had the palace grounds almost entirely to myself. It's an elegant, mazelike early 17th century palace painted in bright red and teal, with a throne hall that's adorned with paintings of uniquely Korean iconography such as pear blossoms and the Irworobongdo five peaks. But what really sold this one for me was the hidden garden at the back of the palace that I don't think most people ever find their way to; you have to pay an extra fee to go there, but it adds a lot of depth to the experience. It's so big it represents 60% of the palace, it's full of very naturalistic garden design and gorgeously framed pavilions and ponds, it contains what used to be the Korean royal library, and it's also full of cats (supposedly they have been there ever since a Joseon Dynasty king became an inverterate cat lover, I'm not joking). It's worth it if you can see this one off peak season, it needs to be serene.
3: Mausoleum of Emperor Khai Dinh, Vietnam. Vietnam is one of the most overstimulating and chaotic places I've been to, it is not for the faint-hearted, but it's also got some incredible things. This mausoleum is by far the youngest historical site on the list, hailing from the early 20th century during the final tumultuous years of the Nguyen Dynasty, and it was built as the tomb of an emperor who was largely a puppet of the French. But it's on here largely because its architectural style is one of the most unique things I've seen, and you will never find it anywhere else in the world. It's an eclectic East-meets-West hybrid of French and Vietnamese architecture, and it doesn't do so by mixing in French and Vietnamese-styled structures into the same complex, rather the whole mausoleum looks like a perfect midpoint between the two disparate architectural styles. It also features more modern construction techniques such as the usage of concrete and steel, and somehow makes all of it work seamlessly. Elements like neoclassical pilasters, pillars and arches sit comfortably alongside reliefs and paintings of dragons, Asian tomb statues, carved Confucian sayings and porcelain mosaics. The dragon-and-cloud mural on the ceiling of the mausoleum is a particular highlight, it's quite incredible.
If including China, include the Great Wall, Yungang Grottoes, Shuanglin Temple, and Terracotta Army. There are a few others that nearly make it but don't. For example Venice might have made it on here, but ultimately I thought it was too touristy and shoulder-to-shoulder crowded for me to be able to truthfully say that it was experientially special for me. It was very beautiful but it also felt like being in an ant farm, which degraded the experience. I would still say to visit because it's Venice, you have to, but it still won't be on the list.
I'll end this with another disclaimer - other people probably won't agree with my list and this kind of thing is obviously rather subjective. Ultimately the best way to refine your travel list is to just research a lot.
China is definitely one of the best places in the world for ancient history, I’ve only made one trip there and yet it already contains more than half of my favourite historical sites. And this is coming from someone who’s travelled quite abundantly. Shanxi province, in particular, is probably the part of East Asia with the most preserved history.
Though I will say if you ever go, brush up on that Mandarin Chinese, that will be an obstacle. Barely anybody speaks anything but Sinitic languages and it's likely you'll have to use a translate app at many points. Also, be flexible, be tolerant and don’t take shit too seriously. This is good advice for travelling anywhere, but China in particular has a tendency to induce culture shock.
Thank you, that's very flattering. The Great Wall picture is one of my favourites of the entire trip, I devoted about an entire day to getting all the colours right.
There's another photo I really want to work on involving a vendor perched on a plank on the side of the wall, far above the valley below, but I've been holding off because it'll probably involve yet another marathon editing session.
It was exceptional. Not always an easy travel, but the immense sense of age and scale you get in China is just unparalleled anywhere else in East Asia. There's also a whole lot of culture and it's not difficult at all to find active religious and ritual practice (Yonghe Temple in particular had so many chanting monks inside its halls).
I keep meaning to write a longform post about it but just get busy and sidetracked. Someday soon, maybe.
Been trying my hand at proper photo editing this week. Over Christmas I took thousands of shots in RAW format, whittled them down to a chosen hundred, and am now only starting to edit them properly. I've been taking it quite seriously, checking the histogram as I go along for dynamic range, trying to do proper colour balancing, and so on. It's quite surprising how long it takes; it's not uncommon for me to spend hours on a photo before I'm satisfied.
Here is an album of my completed photos thus far. There's not much there yet due to how time-consuming the process is; currently I have seven photos down, with ninety-three more to go.
Agreed on the high quality of the fruit (and poor quality of the meat). Didn't try any mangoes in Vietnam, but the pineapples and coconuts I had there were so very fresh. Fresher than anywhere else I've been. I had at least one coconut every day with my meal and it didn't matter where I went - regardless of if it was a sit-down restaurant or some tattered stall on the side of the street they were delicious.
I very consistently had a good time with Vietnamese desserts, which was unexpected. I was a big fan of the che when I was there, and there's a gigantic variety of these sweet soups; there's even one featuring a savoury pork dumpling (che bot loc heo quay) that actually kind of works in spite of the flavour contrast.
Never been to Cambodia, though Siem Reap is a destination I've had on the backburner for a while now.
It's funny, you just listed the main Vietnamese dishes/drinks I would really consider a must-try. Vietnamese coffee is truly incredible albeit a bit sweet (though understandably so given the use of Robusta), and southern-style banh mi is the only food I tried that I would call great. I only had a short layover in HCMC when I went, and I'm very glad I ventured into the city just for that one banh mi stall.
I suspect I would have liked Vietnamese food more had I spent more time in southern Vietnam; the more south I went, the more flavourful the food became. I'm typically more accustomed to heavily-spiced food, and much of northern Vietnam seems to enjoy food that's perhaps even blander than Cantonese cuisine.
The answer to this hugely depends on what "Chinese food" we're talking about here.
China has a ridiculous number of regional cuisines, so many in fact that one attempt to categorise them all identifies 63 cuisines. Throughout the trip I was only able to scratch the surface of only 3 cuisines in that list - Beijing, Shanxi and Central Shaanxi food, and they're quite different from the mostly Cantonese-inspired (and increasingly Sichuan-inspired) Chinese food in the West. It's different enough that all of these cuisines barely feature rice as a staple grain since it doesn't grow well at all in the desolate and harsh climate of the north.
Shanxi food is by far my favourite - the dishes there are very vinegar-heavy, and it's something the province specialises in. The vinegars there are made from sorghum, barley, and peas, and they're ridiculously varied and malty and deep in flavour (I actually got to see some being actively fermented the traditional way in an old Ming/Qing dynasty building). Every restaurant in the region will provide a variety of vinegars to pour onto each dish, as well as a large pot of chilli oil. The food in this province is flavourful and hearty, and many of these dishes aren't well represented outside of China, I highly recommend it. Though there are dishes that some laowai should maybe avoid unless particularly adventurous - I saw dishes featuring rabbit head being served in places like Datong, which I imagine would turn off a large number of Westerners.
On the other end of the spectrum, Beijing food is not all that fantastic. I find that their dishes tend to lack depth and flavour, and while I wasn't hugely excited for the cuisine there in the first place I was still surprised at how little I cared for it. It's not bad at all, but their flavour preferences don't excite me. Peking duck is still good though, and another thing that I really enjoyed there was their jianbing, a sort of savoury stuffed crepe popular in that part of China.
Something that really unexpectedly blew me away when I was in China was their yoghurts. Nai pizi and suannai are less sour than Western yoghurts and way more texturally satisfying, and in Shanxi province they come in weird flavours such as sea buckthorn and vinegar (I am not joking when I say it works; some vinegars in Shanxi are downright caramelly in flavour and actually complement the taste of yoghurt really well). They run circles around Western yoghurts all day, and being back in Australia now I can no longer find them anywhere, something which I am extremely disappointed by. In addition, China also has the most comforting drinks - their coffee is good, their tea is super fragrant, and their soy milk is downright delectable. I don't even like soy milk usually, but the Chinese really know how to do it right.
All this is to say that overall I really liked Chinese food (it was certainly way better than Vietnamese, come at me), and I don't just think it's as good as western MSG slop, I think it's often better. But food in China is far from a singular cuisine, the dishes in different parts of the country are nothing alike, and it's not really possible to say whether real Chinese food is "good" or "bad" without specifying which Chinese food we're talking about.
Not really, for a few other reasons - for example there's a pretty distinct lack of homelessness and drug addiction in Chinese cities, and the country is extremely safe, which actually makes it feel rather non-dystopic compared to many Western cities I've been to (which are often very visibly riddled with these problems). The country also doesn't feel very totalitarian compared to many other one-party states of its ilk, police presence isn't heavy and you can generally travel quite freely. I would not call China third-world as a whole, I'm unsure where I would slot it within that definition because it's not really easy to categorise along that axis.
There are elements that you can pattern-match to a Hollywood dystopia (like having to scan your bags when you enter the subway), but as a whole China doesn't feel "low-life" or dystopic as much as it feels contradictory. People love trotting out extremely polarised and sensationalised views of China - people will either say it's "living in the future" or that it is a CCP hellhole that's about to collapse, but I don't think what I saw actually matches either view particularly well. I think people can come to these conclusions because they focus in on aspects that already confirm a preexisting view - there are things that it's extremely good at, and there are areas where it lags. In general it seems the Chinese government and people have a very different view of what their country should look like, as opposed to the West.
I just got back from a December trip to northern China. It's a country that's modernised in a very non-Western way, such that it appears like a weird cyberpunky juxtaposition of hypermodernity coexisting with third-world elements - the streets are very clean, robots in hotels deliver stuff to your door, face recognition for check-in and boarding is a thing in some airports, the whole country uses pretty much only payment apps, etc, but the AQI can be bad, the public toilets are dirty, taxis and some train stations smell like cigarette smoke, nobody speaks anything but Mandarin (or some other Sinitic language), there are touts who will try to sell you shit, and so on.
Personally, I think it's an amazing destination. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. I have so many superlatives for it, and I won't forget being almost completely alone on the Great Wall with mist rising over the surrounding mountains like some Chinese ink painting, or stepping into an ancient grotto cave the size of a cathedral with thousands of religious carvings covering every square inch of its walls, or suddenly encountering a colourful festival in the streets of a Qing dynasty walled town. There is an astounding amount of history and culture there, I think it boasts by far the greatest density of genuinely historical stuff in Asia.
I have a travel report lined up and pictures to upload, but I'm suffering from severe jet lag and am too lazy to do that right now.
I don't really disagree with that, rigidly planning out every moment of your vacation is an absolute and utter slog. But I never really have an exceptionally clear idea of what I would want to do on a day by day basis; I don't plan things out for the purposes of prescriptively defining what my vacation should look like. My kind of planning looks more like keeping a register of what's there so I can make an informed decision of where to go in the moment (which doesn't exclude exploratively walking around and seeing what's there, either).
It's also particularly important to understand what's in your vicinity when you're vacationing in a more rural area, since unlike a city it's harder to just walk around and stumble across things spontaneously.
That being said, I do get the sense I like to travel in a significantly more hectic way than most people. I get bored very easily just kind of lazing around for a significant portion of the time; beach and cruise vacations are exceptionally unappealing to me.
Personally I find planning for a holiday pretty entertaining. I'm travelling on the 15th too; going to China, and the number of places I have written down is ridiculous and I will probably will not be able to visit them all. If I were in Madrid I would at least visit the following:
- Royal Palace of Madrid (official residence of the Spanish royal family; reserve a ticket in advance for this one)
- Church of Saint Anthony of the Germans (17th century baroque church with some spectacular floor-to-ceiling frescoes, you can't really miss this one in my opinion)
- Royal Basilica of Saint Francis the Great (18th century church, baroque style, possesses the fourth largest dome in Europe. Here are some of the paintings you can find on the interior).
There's also the Temple of Debod, an Egyptian temple moved straight from Aswan to Madrid, the Cerralbo Museum, a private mansion containing the private art collection of the Marquis of Cerralbo, alongside a bunch of other museums and palaces that are worth visiting if you have time.
If you're willing, a trip to Toledo is just a 30 minute train ride away. It's a historic town that's on the UNESCO register; its centrepiece is the Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo, a High Gothic church (one of the only three in Spain) featuring a gigantic carved altarpiece. I'd say it may be worth your time; there are many other historic sites, synagogues and even former mosques in the city from the Moorish period. Just walking around the old town and checking out whatever you can would probably be rather fun.
So which will it be? Do you want $100,000 in 1959 or $100,000 today?
$100,000 in 1959, please and thank you.
This probably comes off as unnecessarily cantankerous, but I fervently refuse to use DoorDash, UberEats, Hungry Panda or any other kind of food courier service since 1: I am annoyed by their """bikes""" on the footpaths all the time speeding by pedestrians at rates that may hurt someone if a collision occurred, and 2: I am steadfastly convinced that this refusal to actually go outside, touch grass and do things for the sake of pure "convenience" is part of what is wrong with people today. In similar fashion, I don't order anything online and don't drive either. I take the train and walk everywhere in the city. I do this even when working late and when it would be inconvenient to get food later in an early-morning city like Sydney.
When other people go out, they barely seem like they're even there. I'm not immune to this myself since the superstimulus is strong, but every single person on the subways and sidewalks is stuck on their phones, moving at the speed of a Roomba, and possessing almost zero awareness of the people around them. I walk an order of magnitude faster than them and want to slap them on the back of their heads sometimes. Everyone's caught up in their own world, they're so utterly atomised, it's increasingly rare to have any kind of spontaneous pleasant interaction with people when you're going out aside from what's strictly necessary; mostly I'm only capable of finding the kind of scripted, perfunctory interactions with a cashier or service industry worker that nobody wants. When there are spontaneous interactions, it's people asking me for help finding directions or carrying their bags for them (or other self-serving reasons for pursuing interaction), or some insane belligerent person who I don't want around me, it's always something inconvenient or abrasive and barely ever something that improves my day. The world around me feels empty even when it's not, most of the people I come across may as well be zombies, and it decreases my own motivation to actually engage with it. Nobody is actually interested in talking to other people. The sci-fi authors of yesteryear writing about themes like loss of humanity were right; their only problem was failing to make their stories sufficiently boring and insipid to mirror reality.
Things were not like this just a generation or two ago (depending on where you live, in many parts of Asia and particularly rural parts of the West you can still find the last remnants of a more social dynamic). While there are benefits to technological convenience and the current-day Industrial Society which I happily make use of myself and take for granted, such as TheMotte, with the exception of medical science I'm not convinced it has made people happier or more fulfilled on the whole - if anything, I lean the opposite. And I am definitely certain that for any average, reasonably healthy person it doesn't outweigh the benefits of owning all that excess wealth.
Hmm, I think it's definitely true the average (as in the mean) man does more dangerous and arduous work than the average woman. The workplace fatality rate for men in 2023 (that was the year I could find consistent numbers for) was ~7-8x the maternal death rate that year.
Not only that, but the workplace fatality rate for men exceeds the maternal death rate + the female workplace fatality rate by a huge amount. For example, I looked into the BLS numbers surrounding this a while back and the number of men killed during 2018 by occupational injuries caused by transportation incidents, contact with objects and equipment, falls, slips and trips, exposure to harmful substances or environment, and fires and explosions is 4,119 men killed. This excludes injuries caused by "Violence and other injuries by persons or animal" as that category includes deaths by self-inflicted injuries on the job. Even excluding that, the number of male deaths exceeds the number of women killed in ALL occupational deaths (413 women) AND maternal deaths (658 women) added together (1,071 women).
Just to give you a sense of how large that margin is, in 2018, the number of men killed in occupational-related transportation incidents alone (1,929 men) exceeds the number of women killed in all occupational deaths and maternal deaths added together.
However, I'm less convinced that the average (as in the median) man does as much dangerous work. About 65% of men work some kind of management/service industry/sales job, and I don't think these jobs cause as much pain as birthing a baby. Even if the do, there's just as many women working them as men.
Define "dangerous". Work is something you do for most of your life, whereas childbirth is a very transient condition (especially today). Management/service industry/sales jobs are highly disparate types of work with highly differing demands, the stressors encountered there definitely impact health, and just because women are as likely to participate in that large category of work does not mean they are subject to all the same stressors. It's been brought up fairly often in the context of the wage gap, but even within the same occupational categories your median man is likely to work more, take more strenuous and demanding jobs, and prioritise flexibility less, which results in women having higher satisfaction with their jobs (a consistent finding within the literature).
Occupational deaths do happen in these jobs; proper numbers are hard to come by but have a gander at this BLS list of fatalities by occupation. Deaths in private sector jobs under categories like "professional services" (585 deaths), "financial activities" (108 deaths), "information" (31 deaths), "administrative and waste services" (497 deaths), "educational and health services" (168 deaths), "leisure and hospitality" (253 deaths) etc collectively exceeded maternal deaths in 2018. No breakdown by sex is provided, but as mentioned in the previous section, women can only make up 413 of these deaths at maximum, suggesting a large sex disparity in mortality within these occupations. But even discarding that, the indirect health effects of constant stress results in elevated levels of cortisol over a long period of time, poor sleep, and so on, increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, infections, strokes, etc. These kinds of pressures are endemic in many kinds of professional and service industries and is not a trivial source of health issues; for example WHO made an attempt at estimating the number of ischemic heart disease and stroke-related deaths linked to long working hours for the year 2016, finding that the worldwide number of deaths from long working hours was 745,000 from only these two causes of mortality. Men made up 72% of the deaths, and if you do the maths that means men represented 536,400 of these deaths and women represented 208,600. In contrast, worldwide general maternal mortality for the year 2016 accounted for an estimated 309,000 deaths. And there are undoubtedly more sources of death from long working hours than just those, and there are other job-related stressors which don't just amount to things like "death by lobotomy via a falling metal pipe". It is likely not the case that job-related mortality in even these kinds of management/service jobs is less of an issue than maternal mortality is for your average American woman of the same social stratum, and it is not the case that the prevalence of this mortality is the same between the sexes.
The costs of obligation manifest in many ways which aren't immediately obvious. In general I tend to think people overweight things that are obviously unpleasant but transient compared to stressors that cumulatively accrete over one's lifespan - and in general I think the latter tends to have a greater overall impact on health and wellbeing in spite of the fact that they're often overlooked as sources of mortality. Attrition is important; it's the difference between feeling intense temporary grief vs. clinical depression. Unexpectedly getting kidney stones, while more painful in the moment, would not impact my overall life as much as being stuck in a job I dislike. I have a sedentary job which sometimes requires me to work a lot of overtime and weekends during crunch time (in fact I did so earlier this month), if asked to make a tradeoff between spending large swaths of my life slogging away at an inflexible, stressful job and giving birth to 1.5 kids at any given point in my life I'm inclined to say that at least personally, I think the latter may be a superior value proposition. That's not to trivialise any of it, but I don't think this conception of unpleasantness actually aligns with how people experience it for the most part.
EDIT: added more
So, has anyone else watched Vince Gilligan's new series Pluribus yet, and if so, what do you think of it?
Personally, I'm currently a bit lukewarm on it so far. It's still early days so I won't pass premature judgement on it, but a common complaint is that the show past episode 1 doesn't seem to have enough compelling material per episode to justify its runtime, and frankly I agree. Episodes are long and drawn-out, with much of the second and third episode being focused around a core repeated cycle of "Zosia (or some other stand-in for the hive) tries to do things for Carol" - "Carol gets aggressively angry at Zosia" - "[insert bad thing] happens" - "Carol feels bad" - repeat. The story beats are so repetitive.
I understand that this show is in part meant to be a tone piece and that the long extended shots are meant to build atmosphere, but the vibe isn't good enough to carry the show on its back alone (sometimes the show is so sterile and clean-looking that it comes off almost like stock footage to me), and there are plenty of shows which achieve a thoughtful pace while also moving the plot along in interesting and compelling ways. Severance, season 1 in particular, comes to mind as an example. The problem's not so much that it's slow and more that it's not intriguing, that the extended scenes don't achieve much for how long they are, and that there's a lack of economy in the writing. So many scenes exist to achieve only one goal; e.g. the extended scene where Carol tests the thiopental sodium on herself and watches the footage from it just accomplishes one very simple aim, and yet it takes so long.
My barometer for whether I like a show or not is whether I'm interested to see the next episode, and frankly I could drop this at any point and not really have much of an urge to see what happens next. There's a serious lack of compelling mysteries within the show to drive viewer interest, with the only question I can think of amounting to "How are they going to progress this?" which is a question that moves the focus from something within the story to something outside of it, namely the writers' intentions. In addition, there's so much philosophical ground you could explore (Does disconnecting a member from the hive amount to lobotomy or even murder? Is "de-integrating" the hive, like Carol wants to do, tantamount to killing a hyperconscious, hyperintelligent organism that might have more moral worth, strictly speaking, than any human in existence? And it does claim to be happy), but the show just doesn't engage with much of that. At least, not at the moment.
Carol as a protagonist is quite unagentic, which means that much of the series consists of long sections of her engaging in pointless filler like sleeping on the couch, getting impotently mad at the hivemind, wanting her Sprouts back, etc, while not probing the hive or asking questions that a more interesting protagonist would when placed in such a situation (Episode 4 features more of this, to be fair). A common defence is that her behaviour is realistic given the situation she's put in, but a more important question IMO is if she's a compelling protagonist to watch, and I don't think that's the case - her characterisation and behaviour is paper thin, and she doesn't particularly get up to anything that makes you hugely like her or root for her either. She is demonstrated to be an absolutely miserable person even before the soft apocalypse occurs, and it doesn't make her a particularly enjoyable or interesting character to follow when you're in her shoes all the time.
Yet another element that makes it worse is that she only has a bunch of eternally jovial yes-men to interact with the whole time, and this makes the premise wear thin very quickly. All the interactions feel as deep as a puddle, and this may be the point, but it also makes for a very shallow viewing experience. Most of the other human characters aren't much better either. I was fucking flabbergasted by how easy it was for them to accept life with the hivemind looming over them without thinking too much about what it implied, and in fact outright aggressively attacked anyone who suggested doing anything about it. They seemed almost like ridiculous caricatures, completely in denial, who had been set up just so the writers could knock them down.
I don't think it's a bad show, not yet at least. But the unending positivity towards this show makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and I often see such criticisms of the writing being addressed with thin, condescending dismissals along the lines of "You only think the show is uninteresting because you have TikTok brain", or worse, "People don't like Carol because she's a woman" (which is the way the entire Gilligan fandom has been dismissing criticism of the writing of female characters ever since people had the temerity to dislike Skylar White). I'm not saying it's impossible to like the show for valid reasons, but any and all criticism has not been not treated well.
Off the top of my head I have one from East Asia: Mongols > Chinese, Chinese > Vietnamese, Vietnamese > Mongols.
The last of these three is the most tenuous due to persistent ambiguities about the success of the Mongol Empire's first invasion of Vietnam, as well as about whether the Yuan dynasty's later campaigns into Vietnam should be considered Mongol expeditions due to how sinified and multi-ethnic the dynasty and its armies were (though if "Roman armies" are admissible as a coherent ethnic group really anything goes). But it's the best I can do at the moment.
Today I read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. I think it makes a very good case in favour of the idea that premodern China was not a stagnant, conservative, pacifistic Confucian state indifferent to warfare as it is usually imagined in popular conceptions, but was actually an exceptionally dynamic place that was receptive to new technologies and ideas both before and after the Renaissance hit Europe. In fact, even after the development of the musket and the Renaissance-style star fort, East Asia was no paper tiger; it adopted and modified European-style firearms quickly, and managed to maintain its military might against Europe until as late as the seventeenth century.
It's well known that while the Chinese developed gunpowder during the Tang and used it in increasingly creative ways during the Song Dynasty (with Europe having come across it relatively late), Europe was the first to refine it into the classical cannon style. What's less known is that guns in China were actually developing concurrently in a similar fashion to those in Europe, growing longer relative to muzzle bore, until the existential wars that rocked the Ming Dynasty ended around 1449 and the Ming enjoyed a long period of peace - meanwhile, warfare in Europe grew progressively more intense. What seems to have been a decisive early Chinese advantage was quickly eroded, and to a large amount of historians on the topic, this is viewed as the beginning of European hegemony.
In reality it's not nearly that simple. Once the Portuguese introduced their cannons to China in the 1510s, the Chinese learned rather quickly from it. During the first Sino-Portuguese war, Chinese artillery was inferior to that of the Portuguese, but the following year the Portuguese suffered a serious loss to the Chinese, with every account of the war suggesting that Chinese artillery had improved to the point that it was a decisive factor in their victory. As the Portuguese attempted to collect water, they were pinned down for an hour by heavy firepower, and after they made it back to their ships Chinese gunners blasted them so fiercely that Portuguese guns were incapable of answering. This marks the beginning of a rapid military modernisation in East Asia that brought them well into parity with Europeans during 1522 through the early 1700s.
The Chinese seem to have innovated not only in the design of artillery, but they also innovated in many serious aspects of how firearms were used, the most notable being their usage of drilling and coordination. Most historians seem to think that volley fire for firearms was developed twice; the first being in Japan during the 1570s, and the second being in the Netherlands in the 1590s. But Japan was in fact not the progenitor; volley formations have a long history in China, being described in texts as early as 801 (it initially used crossbows). After the introduction of muskets this strategy was applied very quickly - in 1560 there are already military texts that demonstrate the Ming Dynasty were firing arquebuses in volleys; it is likely this was a common strategy before then.
Possibly the East Asian state most affected by the musket, though, was none other than Korea, who developed advanced musket strategies after the Imjin War and ended up with one of the most effective musket armies during the seventeenth century. Their musketeers were exceptionally lethal in battle with extremely high levels of accuracy, and were feared by pretty much everyone participating in the East Asian sphere at the time. Two of the most expansionary European forces in this period took on East Asians on the battlefield - the Dutch against the Ming and the Russians against the Qing and Korea - and they both lost. When the Dutch actually ended up facing off against the Ming loyalists, of an initial army of 240 European soldiers only 80 escaped, with the remainder either hacked to death, drowned, or captured. European military advantage over East Asia was actually a very recent development in history.
While Europeans had big advantages in defensive fortifications and shipbuilding which the East couldn't quite emulate, Qing China in particular had far superior logistics, with the Kangxi Emperor's careful planning being instrumental in defeating the Russians during the 17th century. This advantage allowed the Qing to consolidate their power and establish an unprecedented period of dominance in East Asia during the high Qing period - which ended up being a double-edged sword. Without external threats, the Qing developed a gay and retarded bureaucracy incapable of responding in an effective centralised manner. Britain came back newly industrialised and pretty much wiped the floor with Chinese forces during the Opium War, and while Japan centralised and threw out their ancien regime (and, as an aside, destroyed a ton of traditional Japanese culture as a side effect of this culture shift, involving the iconoclastic destruction of many feudal castles and historical Buddhist temples), China was still funding armies that had been established in the seventeenth century which had metastasised into powerful interest groups in spite of their effective uselessness. Their shipbuilding and artillery after the Self-Strengthening Movement was actually superior to Japan's, but their internal politics were so dysfunctional they were unable to mount a capable response during the Sino-Japanese war. The rotting corpse of the late Qing held on until 1911, and at that point China was a source of global entertainment and derision: an article from the NYT in 1895 claimed "China is an anachronism, and a filthy one on the face of the earth". Well, it certainly didn't remain that way for long.
As an aside I'm quite stunned by how ridiculously advanced the Song Dynasty was for its time, to the point that I think it represents one of the most dizzying heights achieved by a premodern civilisation. More people lived in urban centres during the Song period than at any other time until the late eighteenth century, and 10% of the country was urbanised, a metric that Europe would not reach until 1800. Their production of iron around 1100 was equivalent to the output generated by the entire continent of Europe in 1700, using refined techniques that would only occur in Europe centuries later. The Song utilised automation in textile production to an extent that exceeded medieval and even early modern Europe, in fact it wasn't even until the eighteenth century that Europe achieved such devices.
There were significant advances in gunpowder, printing, anatomy, the discovery of tree dating, rain and snow gauges, rotary cutting discs, the knowledge of magnetic declination, thermoremanent magnetisation, magnetism in medicine, relief maps, all kinds of mathematical innovations and discoveries (including effective algebraic notation and the Pascal triangle of binomial coefficients), steam sterilisation, pasteurisation (of wine), artificial induction of pearls in oysters, effective underwater salvage techniques, all kinds of silk processing devices, including reeling machines, multiple-spindle twisting frames, and others, smallpox inoculation, the discovery of urinary steroids, the use of the toothbrush and toothpaste, a method for the precipitation of copper from iron, the chain drive, the understanding of the camera obscura phenomenon, and new types of clock mechanisms.
They may even have been the first people to become anatomically modern, developing the "modern overbite"; for context, throughout most of history people's top and bottom incisors met tooth to tooth instead of overlapping each other, once food started being cut into small pieces this changed. In Europe this shift only started occuring during the eighteenth century when the fork and knife came into common usage, during the Song Dynasty it was already common at least among the upper class.
Anyway, it's a rather interesting book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in a comparative history of warfare.
problem_redditor
3mo ago
I don't think the chemical plant was disused, rather it was emitting waste into the water and it's not implausible that it emitted fumes as well. Apparently the crew were getting allergic reactions on their faces as well during production.
Admittedly this is based on a statement by the sound designer Vladimir Sharun, and it's not quite clear how supported his claim is. But it's a thing that's been weaved into the mythology of the movie.
So I recently watched Tarkovsky's Stalker, an eminently wanky, pretentious arthouse film I was fully expecting not to like. The plot is simple - three characters (the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor) conduct a pilgrimage through a wasteland called the Zone, supposedly filled with traps, to reach a room at the centre that's said to grant people their greatest desire.
I am the furthest thing from a cinephile you can imagine (I truly hate most of what New Hollywood put out, for example, and that's way less wanky than Tarkovsky), but I ended up watching the full thing and being thoroughly transfixed the whole way, and I can't really even explain why. The pacing is slothlike and tends to linger on specific moments, with an average shot length of over a minute and a total runtime of almost three hours, and not very much happens throughout the film - but there's such a dreamlike and liminal quality to the filmmaking that it doesn't really matter. The film fosters a trance-like rhythm that lulls you into a reverie and gradually accustoms you to its slow pace.
The Zone portrayed in the movie feels downright haunted, in spite of little that's overtly supernatural in it; the site is overrun with overgrown tanks from previous aborted military expeditions into the area, and abandoned industrial structures that were built on the site before it became anomalous. All the characters, particularly the Stalker, treat the area with a certain reverence, and you're constantly waiting for the Zone to react to the presence of the main characters. The film is perhaps the only one I've seen which perfectly captures the feeling of being in an empty church or temple, perhaps with all the candles somehow still lit or incense still burning, and being overcome with that ineffable sense of hallowedness which religious spaces inherently evoke. The kind of reverie which makes you feel as if you shouldn't speak loudly, because it somehow feels like doing so would be to defile the very space in which you're standing. I think the lack of any clear and explicitly spelled-out threat only intensifies that feeling, it almost creates a sense of pareidolia where you're assigning supernatural explanations onto events in the film, and given that Tarkovsky was a committed Orthodox Christian who infused the film with a lot of religious imagery, I find it hard to believe that this was not intentional.
Apparently Tarkovsky was incredibly fastidious about every shot in the movie, at one point asking that all the dandelions be picked out of a field before shooting. As such the filming process was arduous, with at least one reshoot required due to improper development of the film. An aspect of this that makes Stalker even more surreal to watch is that the production possibly killed much of the crew - all the shots in the Zone were filmed around a small river nearby a half-working hydroelectric station which was actually contaminated by a chemical plant upstream. Tarkovsky, his wife, and the actor that played the Writer all died from lung cancer after the filming of the movie.
I could analyse the movie to death (to be honest I didn't find the main thrust that difficult to glean), but it's a movie you feel in your gut more than pick apart, and as the director himself said:
Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.
In line with his filmmaking philosophy, it's a movie that's probably not going to click with everyone, and I don't think there's a coherent argument that could be made for why someone should like it. It's just a vibe.
Watching the video, he's talking about a completely different thing - he's addressing the recent sensationalised claims of megastructures under the pyramid of Giza using SAR, where skepticism is absolutely warranted. There are many reasons to doubt that their methodology could detect anything that deep - nevertheless, everyone has publicised these claims in spite of their questionable nature and a lack of historical documentation attesting to any of these structures.
OTOH the proposed location of the labyrinth is nowhere near Giza, it was a much older find, and is completely unrelated to this controversy.
The Labyrinth at Hawara
In Egypt, there is an enigmatic labyrinth, greater and more lavish than even the pyramids, attested to by ancient classical sources which has attained almost legendary status in the Western world ever since Herodotus described it in his Histories:
"[T]hey caused to be made a labyrinth, situated a little above the lake of Moiris and nearly opposite to that which is called the City of Crocodiles. This I saw myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all the great works produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth, though it is true that both the temple at Ephesos and that at Samos are works worthy of note. The pyramids also were greater than words can say, and each one of them is equal to many works of the Hellenes, great as they may be; but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the North side and six upon the South, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside; and there are in it two kinds of chambers, the one kind below the ground and the other above upon these, three thousand in number, of each kind fifteen hundred. The upper set of chambers we ourselves saw, going through them, and we tell of them having looked upon them with our own eyes; but the chambers under ground we heard about only; for the Egyptians who had charge of them were not willing on any account to show them, saying that here were the sepulchres of the kings who had first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles. Accordingly we speak of the chambers below by what we received from hearsay, while those above we saw ourselves and found them to be works of more than human greatness. For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that way through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers beyond it, and from the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts. Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls; and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them, each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly; and at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of forty fathoms, upon which large figures are carved, and to this there is a way made under ground."
Herodotus describes it as a multi-tiered structure nearby a lake named "Moiris", with one set of chambers above the ground, and yet another set of chambers beneath it which outsiders were forbidden from entering due to housing the sepulchres of its kings. Just the surface level of this labyrinthine mortuary temple seems to have floored him to the extent he declared it superior to the pyramids, and superior to anything built by the Greeks. This labyrinth would also be described by the Greek geographer Strabo in his book Geographica 17, writing that at Lake Moeris there was a Labyrinth "comparable to the pyramids, and, near it, the tomb of the king who built the Labyrinth."
Despite likely never seeing this labyrinth himself, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus would go on to assert that the labyrinth was constructed by a native king named Mendes, who "did not accomplish anything at all, but he did build himself a tomb known as the Labyrinth,48 which was not so remarkable for its size as it was impossible to imitate in respect to its ingenious design; for a man who enters it cannot easily find his way out, unless he gets a guide who is thoroughly acquainted with the structure. 3 And some say that Daedalus, visiting Egypt and admiring the skill shown in the building, also constructed for Minos, the king of Crete, a labyrinth like the one in Egypt, in which was kept, as the myth relates, the beast called Minotaur. 4 However, the labyrinth in Crete has entirely disappeared, whether it be that some ruler razed it to the ground or that time effaced the work, but the one in Egypt has stood intact in its entire structure down to our lifetime." So he even goes as far as to claim that Knossos was inspired by the Egyptian labyrinth.
It seems that the structure has degraded significantly from the time of Diodorus to now, because this mighty labyrinth appears to have been long stripped from the Earth, and barely anything remains. The Jesuit priest Father Claude Sicard identified current-day Hawara as the likely location of the labyrinth, drawing extensively from ancient descriptions of the location. There is a lake at that location, albeit shrunken from the original size of Lake Moeris, and sure enough, there is also a pyramid there - the pyramid of Amenemhat III, which is likely the tomb which Strabo recounts in his description of the location. When archaeologists investigated the location, things seemed to match up satisfactorily - except for the labyrinth itself. There was almost no trace of it, and few archeological remains could be found near the site. Flinders Petrie, upon visiting the site in 1889, found an enormous 300m x 244m artificial stone plateau - apparently the foundation of the labyrinth - and suggested the original labyrinth had been quarried for stone. This was the archaeological consensus up until relatively recently.
The Mataha Expedition, a geophysical study conducted by the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, was carried out in March of 2008. It was done with the permission of Zahi Hawass, president of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and carried out with the support of Ghent University. They used ground-penetrating radar to examine the site at Hawara, and their research "confirms the presence of archaeological features at the labyrinth area south of the Hawara pyramid of Amenemhet III. These features covering an underground area of several hectares, have the prominent signature of vertical walls on the geophysical results. The vertical walls with an average thickness of several meters, are connected to shape nearly closed rooms, which are interpreted to be huge in number." This nexus of rooms and walls that they interpret as a labyrinth is completely submerged below the water table at this point, and above it there is a much more haphazard set of observations which appear to be decayed mudbrick features - likely the remains of a Roman settlement. In between the two layers of this underground structure there is the large stone slab identified by Petrie, and the authors posit that this was not the foundation of the structure, but its roof instead. Upon presentation of the scan results at the Ghent University public lecture, Hawass requested that the team stop communicating their results, "intimidating the Mataha Expedition team members with Egyptian National Security sanctions."
In other words, the Labyrinth of Hawara may have been quietly rediscovered over 17 years ago, and this find seems to have been buried in a way where it has gotten almost no mainstream attention. As far as I can tell the original study that located the labyrinth released to nothing but deafening silence, with only a small handful of obscure tabloids covering it. The most mainstream it's ever been was when Joe Rogan hosted a content creator in his podcast who brought attention to the possible discovery, and that's pretty much the most high-profile coverage it's ever gotten. No proper front-page coverage in mainstream media outlets. Nothing that would bring it to the attention of your average Joe on the street.
Meanwhile, the results of the Mataha Expedition have been independently reconfirmed multiple times now. In 2010, the authors of a study named "VLF-EM study for archaeological investigation of the labyrinth mortuary temple complex at Hawara area, Egypt" applied VLF-EM (very low frequency electromagnetic method) techniques to the site at Hawara, and found subsurface features consistent with descriptions by Herodotus. "[S]omewhat elongated and square filtered in-phase VLF-EM anomalies can be observed. They are approximately oriented in the SE-NW and NE-SW directions. These anomalies are produced from alternative positive (good conductors) and negative (bad conductors) peaks. These linear features may be interpreted as the remains of the labyrinth, which was described by Herodotus (II, 148–9): the visitor was guided from courtyards into rooms into galleries into more rooms and from there into more courtyards. Strabo (ca. 64 BC–19 AD) also described the labyrinth as hidden chambers, which are long and large in number and have paths running through one another that twist and turn." The location map they provide confirms this to be the very same structure the Mataha expedition analysed.
In 2023, yet another paper was written about it summarising the results of both the Mataha expedition and the VLF-EM studies, and supplementing that with further evidence. According to this author, there was even a 3d reconstruction of the subsurface features at some point, revealing at least two levels to the structure, but no accompanying scientific paper detailing their methodology was ever published, making it difficult to substantiate or check their findings. The author presents results from his studies of the site with Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar, where he finds the following: "Below the pyramid in what is believed to be a mortuary complex are at least three returns that are rectangular in shape. One of the delineated regions (B) is about 275,000 sq. feet – almost the estimated size as the rectangular area excavated by Petrie. Another region (C) may be the continuation of the above structure. A second rectangular area (D) west of the Abdul Wahbi canal is also evident in the SAR image. The lack of visible structures in Google Earth imagery over these areas suggests the possibility that these returns could be subsurface features." Note though that this specific study is using SAR, which is cost-effective but has extremely low subsurface penetration and is far from the best tool to detect extensive underground structures, so this must be taken alongside all the other evidence and not in isolation.
A more thorough study with a better setup for the task was conducted in 2024 using electrical resistivity tomography, which is a non-invasive geophysical technique that creates images of the subsurface using the spatial distribution of electrical resistivity within the ground. They found that "Based on the resultant ERT profiles conducted at the area and its surroundings and the extracted resistivity values across different profiles, it has been realized that the ERT profiles that cross the labyrinth area south of the pyramid show areas of very high resistivity values that appear in purple color and high resistivity values that appear in orange and yellow colors. These values could indicate an empty volume (Open cavity, Shafts, Halls, Rooms,…etc) that may reflect the presence of possible subsurface archaeological remains, as pointed by arrows in Figs (4 to 7)."
It really strikes me just how possibly staggering these findings are, yet they're completely unknown by your average member of the public - at least one that isn't highly interested in archaeology or Egyptology. If it's actually the site attested to by the ancient Greeks, this might well be one of the most interesting unexcavated sites from antiquity I've seen (second only to Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum), and hopefully more work will be done to preserve and investigate it in the future. And hopefully it gets opened to the public within my lifetime. I for one would like to be able to follow in the footsteps of Herodotus and see the remains of this massive mortuary temple with my own eyes.
EDIT: added more studies, clarified certain methodological points
Pretty much all of the most stirring and wondrous fiction I have read is inextricably tangled up with existential horror. Oddly enough, I think this feeling is most straightforwardly illustrated in a 1908 children's book, The Wind in the Willows - it's all based on bedtime stories the author told his son, and in line with this the vast majority of the book consists of extremely comfortable and idyllic stories of life in the English countryside. But there's one chapter that's completely distinct from the rest, named The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in which the Mole and the Rat venture into the woods to look for a lost baby otter, and start being lured into the wilderness by a pagan god:
Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees— crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.
'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'
Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror— indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy— but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'
'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'
It is only a side story unconnected to the main narrative thread - this brief delve into the cosmic is completely out of place and comes out of nowhere, and plays no part in the story going forward - but it's by far the most memorable chapter in the collection. It was removed from many versions of the book because it was deemed too strange or too creepy for its target audience. Now, this chapter certainly has a lot more of a positive and uplifiting tone than much horror, Pan here is depicted as a benign presence, but it does carry with it a haunting supernatural vibe that's merely incidental and necessary for such an encounter.
I feel as if a lot of the best horror fiction gives me a more extreme version of that same feeling - it isn't gratuitous; it's just an intrinsic part of confronting something (an entity or a concept) that by nature inherently threatens your sense of security and place in the world. It's the deep-seated, queasy emptiness and awe you get when you first realise on a gut level just how truly vast and gaping the distances between planets are even in our own stellar neighbourhood; it's the kind of memetic virus that has you staring absent-mindedly into your morning coffee once it crops up in your train of thought. Shock (the thing a lot of bad horror films optimise for) is one thing. Horror is another. Done right, it's deeply affecting in a way I barely find in any other fiction.
Oh, jesus. Speaking of unasked questions, don’t even get me started about the very concept of the hive. We first see it being cultivated in rats, who seem to exhibit the same kind of behaviours that humans do once infected (convulsing, a subsequent desire to spread itself) and then it jumps to patient zero. This opens up a whole can of worms that somehow never gets explored in spite of its implications.
Does this mean there are rats in the hivemind now? Does the hive know everything the rats know as well and partially see the world through their perspective? Since there are estimated to be as many rats as humans in the world doesn’t that mean the hive mind’s perspective is half rat? Or do different species have their own hives? Why aren’t the coyotes and dogs featured in the show ever affected if the virus can effortlessly jump species? Surely at least close relatives such as chimpanzees and bonobos could be affected, etc.
The show has a million things like this that it doesn’t even seem the writers considered, and it makes it feel very sloppy. Also, is there a fuck pile featuring the most genetically fit individuals so the hive can continue to live on? I want to know these things way more than I want to see Carol crashing out for the three millionth time.
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