The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
New Year's resolution check-in:
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
I haven't read The Dark Tower, but the other two books have very different themes. The theme of ASoIaF is, to quote another work, "Come see the violence inherent in the system". It treats violence as something humans choose to do. GRRM wants us to judge them.
Blood Meridian, on the other hand, considers violence a force, an innate property of the universe, like magnetism. It doesn't emanate from the people or the systems they create, it permeates them. The Judge is not a monstrous human, he's a personification of violence, its avatar. And, contrary to his name, he doesn't judge and neither does McCarthy.
I did not view Blood Meridian as suggesting that violence is inherent to human nature. The judge wants you to think that's the theme, but the judge is a liar. I think Blood Meridian also wants you to see how a system of social pressure allows people to commit violent acts without blinking an eye because everyone else is doing it. The judge claims that this is a property inherent to humans, but from the first moment we meet the judge he is lying to get people to do what he wants, so why would he be telling the full truth when he monologues to the reader (credit to my friend Emory for this realization).
It's not inherent to humans alone, it's inherent to nature! Human violence is just a single facet of it.
I don't believe that this is the case. The kind of violence present in Blood Meridian is very much not inherent to nature. Animals do not engage in the kind of orgy of killing that Glanton's gang gets up to.
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