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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2037 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 30, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Kind of a silly question: is being concerned with living a moral life a reliigous/ideological affliction that you shouldn't need to concern yourself with if you're enlightened?

Is there anything, well, "wrong" with being 100% self-interested? E.g. when you do work for mutual benefit, it's to build credit, not because you inherently care the benefit of others.

Is this nihilism? Or something else?

Late to the party here, but I would ask you: would you rather live in a world where everyone is 100% self-interested or one where most people have some level of concern for others? The thing is, if you prefer the latter then you kind of have to have the same concern. I mean that's not entirely true, you could potentially "leech" off the concerned-for-others society but if there are too many leeches then the general level-of-concern people have for others will drop.

Take the subway as an example. Would you rather ride on a subway where people were generally courteous or completely self-interested? For example would you prefer a subway where riders immediately rush to the nearest seat and put their bag down so others can't sit next to them? Or would you prefer one where people more courteously figure out who sits where? Would you prefer a subway where everyone plays loud music on their phone with no headphones or one where people use headphones and quietly go about their business?

What a fascinating question to phrase that way! Your thoughts and values are alien to me, yet each word is clearly comprehensible! There is so much bundled into every turn of phrase which I must clarify and/or dispute just to come to my own answer.

is being concerned with living a moral life a religious/ideological affliction that you shouldn't need to concern yourself with if you're enlightened?

I get the impression that you have an idea of enlightenment which is separate from the idea of living a moral life. To what truths or modes of being must one have been enlightened to that living a moral life is a lesser pursuit? What kind of morality is less enlightened?

Ayn Rand promoted the idea that freedom and self-interest go hand in hand, and disallowing one disallows the other. She railed against the altruistic morality that all men belong to all other men, and find their worth only in aiding others. Yet she did not discard morality; she insulted altruism as a bad morality and said that man seeking his own purpose is the highest morality.

If you’re looking for someone who, like me, agrees that self-interest is both rational and noble, read some Ayn Rand. Start with The Fountainhead, move on to The Virtue of Selfishness, and then read Atlas Shrugged. These answer the question I think you intend to ask.

I read quite a bit of Ayn Rand when I was a bookish teenager. Both her semi-pornographic fiction and also non-fiction essays. They were fun but I'm not ever sure I truly followed. She was like <start, law of identity> and then <virtues of selfishness, here> and kind of left out the middle steps from formal logic to complete human moral system.

But, why do I need to have warm fuzzies about it? Can't I just say self-interest is fine and any guilt I might feel about it is my socially obsessed brain trying to tell me lies and I should only worry about group dynamics in a game theoretical sense?

Apparently you have some sort of idea that living a moral life necessarily includes emotional rewards and excludes guilt. Guilt is a somewhat faulty instinct which, like all instincts, is only a thumbnail sketch of reality’s proper shape; treating emotions as reality has always been a fraught exercise in frustration.

As for warm fuzzies, there is a socioemotional component to the human mind which despairs if not fulfilled. Dunbar’s Numbers say that you should have four to eight really close friends and family you see weekly, to feed your brain.

Rdrama Bookclub Discussion Thread #1 :marseyreading:. “The Master and Margarita” Chap. 1-7

You're welcome to join, 100 pages per week is actually not a lot given how well it's written, I accidentally got to chapter 5 on Monday night lol. Also apparently people are very surprised that rather than Dostoyevsky it's more like Douglas Adams with some extra dark humor.

The discussion is pretty good too!

You can pirate the supposedly best English translation here: https://libgen.is/fiction/819D3E8A110577E3C53018814ECAAACD, I checked out the first chapter, I guess it's about as good as you could expect a translation to be. Anyways, people seem to really enjoy it!

Thanks to whoever posted The Man from Waco album a few weeks ago. I've listened to it at least ten times since then.

For background music I've been enjoying the OST to the game Hardspace: Shipbreaker even though I've never played it. It's got kind of a sci-fi western theme going on.

Also, found a fun bluegrass style cover of Rocketman.

If you like scifi western music, check out the Rimworld OST. There's also a mod for it called P-music that is even better than the base game, and you listen to it on YouTube by the creator, Pepsen.

Iron Horse is good. And of course the excellent Thunderstruck by a Finnish band that I wrongly thought were Americans until I googled them right now.

Is there a music sharing thread? Probably not, and I get it, people have varying musical tastes. Anyway I am throwing this out there:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5x-u7iw7W1Y

The faux-ballet is called "Ma Mere L'Oye" and was composed by Ravel, and this is called Le Jardin Feerique which translates, alas, as "The Fairy Garden." A more fey title does not exist. Yet I love this part, and this iteration, in particular, though you can find others on Youtube. Enjoy. Or don't, of course.

Speaking of harps, here's my favourite piece.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hV2-zFh3tAU

Lavinia is an incredibly talented harpist, and she arranged Glass' Metamorphosis 2 for the harp to show it off. Too often technically challenging pieces are boring to listen to and to watch. Liszt was great at writing technically challenging pieces that are delightful for the audience: it's pure pleasure to listen to Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 when it's performed by a talented pianist and it's a joy to watch them play it. The same applies to Metamorphosis 2 for the harp. I guess it depends on how much you like American minimalism, but I do like it a lot, so I am in awe of Lavinia's flawless handovers of the rhythm line. It's one thing to be the first... woodist? when performing Reich, doing what she's doing on a harp is a whole another level.

I liked it! I can't comment much on the details as I'm unfamiliar with the overall composition, but the execution was top-notch and the music superlatively combined a bucolic vibe with real passion and spikes of power.

I'll add this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cuOae6-GA-g

I've been really impressed with, of all things, what some Chinese composers are doing in video game sound tracks. This one uses an old German poem about torn-apart lovers to start, then...travels from there. I haven't played this game, but apparently the person you're fighting as this plays is an old friend turned against you by an opposing perspective - perhaps a pro-post-humanist one, judging by the musical themes? Anyways, it stands on its own.

As I read one commenter opine on the Chad Orthodox Chant playlist: 'I salute all my brothers on the final stage of “i listen to any genre of music”'

That’s a gorgeous piece! Also, I think this is the first male harpist I’ve ever seen. Certain instruments have a significant gender imbalance, and if there’s a more female-coded classical instrument than the harp, I’ve yet to discover it.

I would have guessed the flute would be up there as a female-coded instrument for reasons, and cursory research suggests it indeed is; the harp is generally a clear number one with flute a distant second. In my brief research, I stumbled across a bunch of articles to the… tune… of certain instruments being too male and so are orchestras and This is a Problem that We Need to…

I would have guessed the flute would be up there as a female-coded instrument for reasons, and cursory research suggests it indeed is;

I've never considered the flute to be female-coded with fife and drum music being hypermasculine.

The flute definitely is girl-coded, and yet: Ian Anderson.

Right-tail male/greater male variability strikes again.

I had a long conversation about this with a family member who often attends classical concerts with me, despite not being very knowledgeable about music nor having ever played an instrument past childhood. She was intrigued by the gender imbalances she’d noticed with certain instruments; like any good liberal feminist, she assumed it must be a result of girls and boys being socialized differently and, subtly or explicitly, nudged by music educators into picking up certain instruments rather than others, as a result of sexist stereotypes about which instruments are “supposed to” be played by each sex.

I explained that this doesn’t match my experience of being a musician in middle and high school. You don’t really see significant gender differences in, for example, the stringed instruments, with stand-up bass being a notable exception due to the fact that it’s a tall instrument which tends to be played by taller individuals. Wind and brass instruments are where you really see the biggest differences. (Other than, as previously noted, the harp.)

I chalked it up to the fact that when it comes to a wind/brass instrument, you’re using your actual lungs and voice to produce the sound. When you blow or hum into an instrument, you’re subconsciously expecting the sound to at least somewhat resemble your actual voice; if you’re a deep-voiced man, and you blow into an oboe or piccolo, the sound that’s going to come out is extremely different from the sound that your brain is used to your lungs and throat producing. I think that this produces a sort of cognitive dissonance that naturally drives people to prefer playing instruments that are more similar to their natural voices. Since stringed instruments don’t involve the use of the human voice, they don’t suffer from this same issue of needing to “identify” with the sound the instrument makes, and therefore you see less gender splits with those instruments.

The gender coding of instruments sort of holds but generally falls off when you get to the professional level. Any social stigma of 'oh your a man that plays the flute' falls off significantly by the time you're making a living playing an instrument, so skill level matters a lot more than social acceptance. Also, by the time you're a professional you survived every cliche and bully about playing a male or female coded instrument that no one cares about the current social coding of any instrument.

There was a study done about 'gender inequality' of professional orchestras, and while strings have gender equality, brass and winds are still VERY heavily male dominated except for flute which is female dominated. Clarinet is, oddly, the most male dominated instrument in professional orchestras.

I chalked it up to the fact that when it comes to a wind/brass instrument, you’re using your actual lungs and voice to produce the sound.

No brass or wind instrument uses their voice unless they're doing some fun extended techniques. Generally, the vocal cords are not used at all. I think it's more that winds and brass use the most musculature of any instrument. To maintain the level of air pressure necessary to activate and sustain notes requires a lot of core strength and embouchure also requires a lot of musculature. I think this amount of physicality when playing a woodwind instrument tends to favor males over females.

Since we're talking about classical music - here's a video of me with my woodwind trio playing a movement of Francaix.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lBvdIxBYQFw

Some disparate thoughts from me on the topic:

Harp - Needs a lot of fine motor control, so women are probably better at this. Plus it's very delicate and the player gets to show herself off to the audience, unlike something like the double bass or the drums where the player is behind the instrument.

Brass - Puffing your cheeks out is unflattering, teenage girls don't wanna look like this.

Flutes etc - High pitched tone and pursed lips, kinda girly so puts off the boys.

Drums - Big man hit thing hard with stick. Seems very masculine.

Guitar - This one I'm not sure about. My impression is that players are mostly male but the only reason I can see is that teenage boys think it'll impress the girls, maybe because it allows you to sing at the same time as playing. Electric guitar also means you can play in a band.

I don't know much about other instruments, but playing guitar is physically painful for a while. Less so with electric but if men go electric more than women by default do to tech bias or harshness bias then that cancels that out.

Harp - Needs a lot of fine motor control, so women are probably better at this. Plus it's very delicate and the player gets to show herself off to the audience, unlike something like the double bass or the drums where the player is behind the instrument.

Indeed. Given the low degree of straining involved and the high degree of visibility, the harp is a great instrument for women to look cUuUte while performing.

Funnily enough, here’s a Reddit thread on harpists and body image issues, started by a woman complaining that performing makes her feel self-conscious about her tattoo and looking “like a squashed dumpling sitting down.” Of course, the blame lies not with her choosing to get a garish tattoo or her being overweight, but rather “the current aesthetic stereotypes of harpists.”

The thread exemplifies Redditors in all their glory. I went between mentally eye-rolling and thinking “☕️” as I went from comment to comment.

I’m not suggesting that this is a conscious thought process; I’m suggesting that this is all going on at the level of the visceral and subconscious. Those people looking askance at you for playing flute were doing so because it is weird to see a big deep-voiced man with his lips pursed blowing into a little flute and making a girly pretty noise. And it’s equally weird seeing a quiet and feminine girl blasting out noise from an extravagant tenor-voiced trumpet.

I’m not saying that these are rationally correct value judgments. And certainly I’m both glad that you found joy in playing woodwind instruments and confident that you’re very skilled at them! I’m just saying that the “socialization” you’re talking about is not the cause of the gender imbalances we observe, but rather the result of more hardwired bio-social dynamics farther upstream. If half the girls in your music class had eagerly picked up trumpets, and half the boys had eagerly picked up flutes, I don’t think the music teacher would have forced everyone against their will to trade instruments until the gender assignments were “correct”.

Do you disagree? Do you think that all of those male trumpet players were secretly pining to play flute, but felt like they were forced against their will to play loud tenor instruments by the oppressive shackles of socialization and imposed culture?

I think it's pretty possible there's a feedback loop, or several, going on here. First, it does feel more masculine to be making loud, blasting, boisterous noises and more feminine to be making small, high-pitched, well-controlled ones.1 As such, more men choose brass and drums and more women choose flutes and harps. Then that becomes a stereotype - 'only girls play flutes, loser!' - that reinforces itself in a feedback loop of its own.

  1. Going one step deeper, what feels masculine or feminine does indeed change culturally a bit, but some basic outlines seem to hold pretty constant.

Interesting implication being that when men made up the whole orchestra, from flute to timpani, a wider range of masculine expression was allowed. Flute was a purely male instrument in the best Vienna orchestras until the early 21st century!

It's only the introduction of women into the orchestra that marks one instrument as masc and another as femme. Until then all orchestral performance was masculine, and the variety you chose could implicate the kind of man you were but not your masculinity itself.

I think this is what's missing from the modern gender debate with the supposedly traditionalist right wing view (that I am sympathetic to). Traditionally if there was a profession, men were almost exclusively doing it, and so we can realistically expect men to have a pretty broad palette of expressiveness.

I basically see it as male security -> women enter workforce -> male anxiety -> men undermining and sniping at each other, enforcing too restrictive gender roles. The result is broader male expression gets twisted into shame-coated "queer" outlets rather than being healthily expressed, and traditionalists are confused into not realizing the anxiety itself (part of) the problem.

You’re missing one key factor, which is that woodwinds objectively suck.

“Yes I would like to go eeeeeeee in the background, how did you know?”

Haha, I mean. I did choose to play the clarinet in Mid/High School, just to be different, and it was a great choice. There were 12 male trumpets, 11 female flutes, and like 6 other players, so it was a bit unbalanced.

My male friend did flute to be different too, but man did it not work. Skinny tall dude fluttering away in the front row, firmly embedded in a sea of girls tinier and cuter than him. I got to slack off in the middle row with 3 girls, 2 of them among the cutest in the class, and didn't even have to practice hardly at all bc who cares what the clarinets are doing so long as it's in the right key. Too bad I was socially incapable of acting on IOI's; our teacher was often trying to motivate me to practice by telling me how talented I was at pitch and breath control, which works great to impress 14yo band girls I guess.

Of course the real masterclass was the other, naturally social, friend who chose to be the saxophone player. the bastard

Ron Burgundy really was ahead of his time.

When is the last time you truly got sucked into something, and experienced a sense of childlike wonder?

For me it was, predictably, watching the VisionOS demo. I found it magical, and so exciting to think of the future of where that technology could go.

The GPT-4 release and my first tryst with Stable Diffusion as a closed Alpha tester.

Had that sense of future shock yesterday, that dawning realization that I'm on the cusp of the Singularity and that you all need to learn to love sci-fi novels, 'cause you're living in one now.

Playing King's Bounty: The Legend. Watching some of the movies by Wes Anderson. Both are quite eager to defy genre conventions.

Oh, and watching Bobby McFerrin live. It's the same feeling of discomfort as Anderson's movies when an old Black guy in front of you starts to babble, but then you get into it.

Honestly, playing with midjourney when it first came out was really exciting. I've never been good at drawing but always had ideas of things I wanted to draw, and being able to generate decent approximations out of thin air felt like magic.

Edit: also recently tried an E Bike. That felt like I was Iron Man or something, like it made me feel like a super person. Super fun.

Last year when I started playing Breath of the Wild

I've been playing it the last few days! I struggled to get into it, but it finally clicked yesterday and I'm having a blast. Part of the reason I wrote this post, actually.

Out of curiosity, what made it hard for you to get into it initially?

Have you played Tears of the Kingdom yet?

Not yet - I'm still slowly making my way through Hyrule in the BoTW. It's taken me over a year and counting to finish the game; I only play a few hours a week and when I play, I explore every nook and cranny because I find the map so enchanting and fun. The sense of "childlike wonder", as the OP put it, is still going strong.

What about you?

I don't own a Switch nor have the desire to emulate the game on PC. But, I've only read good things about ToTK, and it's great to hear that, after all this time, you're still enjoying BoTW.

A new insight to fill the last gap in my last graph theory paper. It was incredibly bitchy to prove the nonexistence of a counterexample in generality, but there suddenly appeared a bijection with a large but ultimately finite family of strings that could be ruled out case by case.

I’ve had the feeling before (research, homework, Project Euler). The secret sauce is 20+ hours of fruitless struggle beforehand :)

Fascinating. I'm too uninformed to understand this, but it sounds nice. Congratulations.

I'm currently in the middle of probably my third playthrough of Alien Isolation. Within about half an hour of my first playthrough I had a really strong feeling that this would be a game I would find hard to put down and would return to again and again. The controls are tight and responsive, the level of detail and craft that went into replicating the visuals of the original Alien from 1979 is breathtaking, the sound design is impeccable, the atmosphere is more powerful than BioShock.

Suffice it to say that, even though it's my third playthrough, I'm itching to get back to playing it.

Having seen the film several times, and having read about the game, the idea of playing it seems just.. incomprehensible.

The film shows what you get for being insufficiently paranoid and unarmed out there in the unknown. It's meant to be unpleasant for a good reason.

Doing it over and over again ... well, we are all different.

The game alternates between sequences in which the player character must evade the Alien; and downtime sequences which advance the plot, or in which the player character must face off against other enemies.

The latter sequences are at worst a little tense to play, but manageably so. The former sequences with the Alien are exhausting. When I get to the end of such a sequence, I typically find myself needing to take a break for a little bit just to calm down. I think that's the mark of an effective horror story, really.

I felt bad about never finishing the game, about giving up, stuck, at a save game where I can either sneak out and inevitably get slaughtered shortly afterward or stay in my hiding spot until the end of time ...

But you've given me a whole new perspective! It's not that I suck too badly to win and lack the fortitude to keep trying through death after terrifying death, it's that I'm trying to be faithful to film canon.

stay in my hiding spot until the end of time

Wait, you can get soft-locked in the game like that, or do you merely have to wait five minutes for the alien to wander off ?

In theory: wait a few minutes for the alien to wander off, sneak out, use well-practiced stealth skills to evade the alien, make progress.

In my game (when I got enough levels in): wait a few minutes for the alien to wander off, sneak out, realize my stealth skills are not well-practiced enough when the alien inevitably finds me...

Not the game's fault, I'm sad to say. I was improving from level to level, but not quite as quickly as the difficulty was increasing.

While I played a bit of Minecraft early on, it was VERY early on, pre-nether.

During the summer of 2020 many of my friends and family, including those who hadn't played many video games in years, were stuck inside more for obvious reasons. So one of my friends spun up a Minecraft server for everyone to play on.

Between the new stuff added to the game in my long absence, the fresh world and people playing and building stuff at all hours (between furloughs, different shifts and different time zones) I was constantly discovering new things while playing and was often sharing that experience with people who I had not talked to as much as I'd have liked in recent years due to diverging paths in life.

Died down over time, once again for obvious reasons, but for a month or two it recaptured the feeling of playing games with friends back in elementary.

Didn't make up for all the stuff we couldn't do, but it definitely helped take the edge off.

Ahh yeah, that's my favorite thing about videogames. Every now and then you can recreate that feeling of freedom you had when you were a kid. The sense that there's a large open world to explore, and you have so few restrictions. The surprise, etc is crucial. Glad to hear it helped you through the lockdowns bud.

Everytime I go to the ballet. Those dancers can almost fly. And to be able to do so while making putting their body into a pleasing pose I'm still amazed after years.

I sort of chase that feeling with the stories I like to read. Big expansive fantasy worlds. There is sometimes a moment when reading where I lose sight of the words in front of me and the specific story, and my mind wanders to other possibilities within the world. I will also chase it at night when I'm trying to fall asleep by conjuring up my own fantasy worlds and cities. Sometimes my dreams will deliver even if my waking mind has been too distracted with the real world.

I also have two young kids, and sometimes I can experience a bit of vicarious child wonder by watching their reactions.

There have also been some video games I've played where I realized early on "oh hell yeah, I'm in for an awesome ride, this game is gonna be awesome!" Usually happens the first time I play a game of a newish genre. Terraria, Factorio, Minecraft, Mount and Blade, Kerbal Space Program, Hardspace: shipbreaker, and Hades were all games I found as an adult, but also instantly knew I'd enjoy them for many hours.

I was struggling to gesture at this exact feeling.

There is sometimes a moment when reading where I lose sight of the words in front of me and the specific story, and my mind wanders to other possibilities within the world. I will also chase it at night when I'm trying to fall asleep by conjuring up my own fantasy worlds and cities. Sometimes my dreams will deliver even if my waking mind has been too distracted with the real world.

Wow, I can relate to this 100%. I could've written those sentences, I have done the exact same thing most of my life. It's truly an amazing feeling, the only time it seems my mind can truly relax.

Don't plan to have kids, but I could see that being a huge plus.

I absolutely got that feeling with Terraria as well.

Without outside substance influence? I can't remember. But I was in Thailand in February and for whatever reason decided with some friends to consume cannabis gumi. I have smoked pot probably a few dozen times in my life, but because of where I live and the draconian laws I haven't done so in at least 20 years. So this sudden reacquaintance with mon vieux had unexpected effects. I recall we were sitting at some bar, as one does in Thailand at night, and I had the most intense feeling that everyone present I had known before in a previous life. Now I know what you may be thinking. But no. This was not some sentimental cloying feeling of camaraderie, but a very real conviction, without passion, that all of the people present I had not only known before, but known throughout a full lifetime that had a beginning, middle, and end. And I also realized that none of the people there knew it, or needed to know it. Nor did I announce this in some slurred declaration. I just knew it.

I know it was bullshit. But this is one of the reasons that I absolutely love pot--with the caveat that I never go near it in normal life. A good reason to get back to Thailand someday.

I apologize if this isn't quite what you're after, and I suspect it isn't. I do know what you mean though, and those moments of childlike wonder are worth coin.

This reminds me of an experience I had in Western China.

My brother and I had been traveling through random places throughout Yunnan for about a month and found ourselves in the historic district of a city in the low Himalayas. This being the region where tea was first cultivated, we found a tea shop to browse; they had thousands of teas, fresh and aged, fermented, cakes pressed into elaborate shapes hanging from the walls. The owner and his wife were fascinated to see us (blonde, Dutch young men, one of us fluent in Mandarin) and invited us into their living area where we enjoyed drinking many rare and expensive teas with his family late into the evening. They had a tea preparing table carved into an elaborate landscape, the teaset occupying clearings and civilized areas, the runoff water and spent tea rushing down miniature mountain streams.

Now, if you've ever had much truly good tea in a short time, you may know that it can affect you in ways foreign to mere caffeine. https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrLaKX9J8Uo The Cha Zui, tea drunk, is usually a state I perceive as a mild euphoria accompanied by a moderate strengthening of subjective experience and creativity. I use it to read or write a good fantasy.

This time was different.

As we left, red lanterns burned high over cobblestone streets and lit the edges of golden carved eaves above us. We stopped for a quick drink at a basic bar; everything was delightful and dreamlike, time seemed utterly meaningless; it was just now, light, color, sway, peace. We returned to our lodgings and I sat on the bed, suddenly caught in an urge to meditate, and the elaborately carved lantern above my bed exploded into ten thousand sides and facets, each with a divine message, purpose, meaning that I seemed to plumb without end. After, I simply felt content with it all and fell asleep.

Still the most vivid ecstatic experience I've ever had. Perhaps all the new experiences of travel can leave us susceptible to such things? Or perhaps I've just never had that many decades-old teas over the course of a few hours before.

Funnily enough, a few days later we found ourselves in the home of some old crone trying to sell us some wild marijuana she had harvested from the mountainside, but that's another story.

Ha! An amazing experience, thanks for sharing. I would like to hear the old crone story at some point down the line as well, if you ever feel like telling it. The most obscure tea I have had is Lapsang Souchong which some call "bacon tea" and which was purportedly Churchill's favorite tea. I measured out a bag of it last time I was in the US (though it is a Chinese tea it is hard as hell to find in Japan). I have to keep it wrapped in said bag and locked in a metal tin to contain the odor--which I like, but which is a bit potent. Never had any groovy experiences drinking it, but a hot cup of it is great, nothing at all like the usual Earl Grey (that I also enjoy.) Did you ever get any names of those teas you drank?

Hah, Lapsang Souchong is a flavor blast to be sure! I like it from time to time, but my favorite use for it is actually to steep it in bourbon for a day to get a more complex, smokey Old Fashioned out of it.

No other tea I know of is so deliberately and strongly smoked, but some very rural/single family teas still have a bit of a smokey aroma from having been dried just in the rafters of their family homes, which tend to accumulate smoke from cooking or heating fires.

The specific teas we were drinking are long gone - they were aged Pu'erh teas, which like wine are sold by grove and year, each production being a small and local affair, and many were several decades old at that point. But you can find various ones like them, say, here - https://yunnansourcing.com/collections/aged-raw-pu-erh-tea

I stay stocked up on them, imho it's the most interesting genre of tea out there. Stark and bitter, though! It's an ascetic enjoyment.

Rock Oolong and Dragon Well are two excellent teas that will also reliably give you a tea buzz, but if you're in Japan a high-quality Sencha can do the same. Wouldn't try with Lapsang or Earl grey, you're gonna blast out your taste buds and stomach before you get close.

Red Dead Redemption 2, maybe?

Interesting. I’ll have to add that to the list. Picking up a lot of games this summer sale.

Is it sad that this unironically seems cool to me?

Skinsuits are standard tropes favored by older 'impossible women', and I thought this would be something like it but it's vastly less sad and vastly more hilarious.

but ...cool ?

Did we read the same thing ? I don't think I've read a more disturbing thing this week

I mean the ending is crazy and disturbing of course, by design. But a totally impervious suit that basically augments your movements, makes you stronger, makes you perceive more, and lets you record all of your sensory input? That sounds amazing if we can get it right, leaving behind the tongue in cheek dystopian bullshit.

.. I don't think you were reading it carefully enough.

(euch)

:(

What's an "impossible woman"?

Impossible women are to women what Impossible Meat(tm) is to meat.

It's a humorous euphemism.

Hah I like his writing, thanks.

Today on the morning train nothing of import happened. This is not unusual. I should say nothing happened that would make me want to write a haiku, or villanelle, or sestina, or whatever. It was a usual day. The usual day is as follows:

Wake: 4 a.m. Yes, 4 a.m. This is 5 days a week. You get used to it, even at my age. Do the usual hygiene things. Suit or whatever has been laid out by me the night previously, so insert myself into whatever getup I imagined.

Walk: To the train. I used to bicycle, but my bicycle of ten years eventually turned into a pile of moving junk and was a deathtrap with capricious gears and dubious brakes, so when the recycle truck guy came by chanting his chant for computers, bicycles, old fridges, I flagged him down, scraped off my ID sticker, and threw my bike in the back of his truck. Now I walk. This only sucks if it is raining. The walk at that hour is dark as a motherfuck in the winter, but this time of year is almost bright, and I find my best clear thinking happens at this time. All the rebuttals I might have made. all the best arguments I might make, every clear thought and esprit d'escalier I might have had in the previous week or day or two crystallizes at this time, on this walk. I see no one and say nothing and walk the whole length in silence. Sometimes I quietly sing Billy Joel's My Life and think of the proper piano chords I might play and that will get me a third of the way.

Arrive: At the station around 4:45. Yeah I get ready fast. It takes about 20 minutes to walk. Train leaves at 5:03. On the train is a bald construction worker guy who is always on the platform with me. He always squats on the platform, and plays apparently some inane mobile game on his phone--I heard the wakawaka sound this morning as he was playing it. One asshole old man who wears a bucket hat and button-down shirts with a suit. One woman with long, perfect legs down the end whose face I have never seen but who looks vaguely, from a distance, like a Japanese Ingrid Bergman to my Humphrey Bogart. I'll never speak to her. I love my wife, after all.

Ride: The train. The first of three. The first is the longest, a local, lasts around 40-ish minutes. I typically read a book, browse The Motte (TM), or do something like DuoLingo so I don't lose my place in the Diamond League.

Ride again: The next train This one is more of a subway and lasts about 10 minutes. For some reason this one is always overly cold. In the afternoon on the return version of this same commute you can sometimes see the prostitutes from Tobita shinchi heading home. That's a whole other post.

Eat: I have a coffee, usually from the McDonald's. Sometimes there is an old woman there who reminds me of Bathilda Bagshot from the Harry Potter movies--if you don't know what that means I guess you don't have kids the age of my sons, which is fine. Bathilda Bagshot in the films is actually a serpent, and there is a scene where she transmogrifies into said serpent (we later learn its name is Nagini, and even later learn this serpent is actually not Bathilda nor a serpent but originally a fairly hot Asian woman). Anyway that scene where the old woman reverts into a giant Anaconda-like magic snake thing is disturbing as hell, as far as disturbing CGI snake images in fantasy films go--and this woman at the McDonald's, I am not saying she is a magic evil snake Horcrux, but if somehow it turned out that she were let me say I would not be surprised, not in the slightest. Her voice is too deep. She possesses a dark look in her eyes; her irises and pupils are the same oily black. Not cool, is what I'm saying. Her sclera appears to be dun-colored. Something seems really really wrong. It's probably in my head.

Ride again: The final train. This train arrives 6:21. On it one finds those youthful souls returning from nights out. Girls in immodest dress, once two guys in tightish jeans holding hands as they slept on the bench with their mouths lolling open. Once a girl with raven hair and sneakers, looking like what I would imagine a girl who had spent some time in LA might look, lay half fallen over on the bench, drowsing off a drunk or a really good time, and whatever Bluetooth or other technical function allowed her Iphone to play music out of something besides its speakers had come undone, and her phone lay splat on the floor blurting out Hip Hop. Big no-no here.

Ever the hero, I walked over and sat beside her, knowing enough that I couldn't touch her even to wake her. I nevertheless tried to accomplish this by speaking to her with authority, lowering my voice intentionally, but keeping a kind tone. They say if you hear your own name when you are asleep you will wake--this is probably bullshit. Nevertheless I tried Yuki, and Misato, and Moe and similar, but nothing worked. She kept sleeping, her phone kept blatting out its insufferable American hiphop.

Eventually I get to my final stop and ride the bus to work, which as it happens is a hospital. There is a a cardiologist who rides the same bus as I do, but I never speak to him and he never speaks to me. I think we both realize that if we ever did speak we would have to then speak every day for eternity, and who wants that? Or maybe I'm just a rude shit.

This started out with me imagining it would be more interesting than it actually is. If you got this far, thank you. Happy Friday, all. I really enjoy this place, as crazy as some of you drive me with your bullshit.

Cause he wakes up in the morning

And he goes to work at five

And he comes back home at five-thirty

Gets the same train every time

And he's oh, so good

And he's oh, so fine

And he's oh, so healthy

In his body and his mind

He's a well respected man

I'm trying to think of a Kinks quote but I only come up with Come Dancin'

Not a bad read.

Spending over 4 hours on commuting every day sounds like hell to me. I admire your endurance. And wonder at how it could possibly be worth it.

And wonder at how it could possibly be worth it.

I mean, technically, if you like reading stuff, it's about 4 hours of rest time. Personally I feel comfortable in trains unless they're crowded.

Still, it's 4 hours out of the ~7 you get after work, so..

Still, I don't know. If I had work like that I'd wonder about maybe figuring out a four day working week and sleeping three nights in the city, so I'd get four nights at home.

I would genuinely be interested in hearing a similar play by play for the trip back at the end of the day.

Thanks. I might do just that next Friday fun thread.

Why couldn't you touch her shoulder or something?

I suppose it doesn't beggar credulity to imagine I could have, but for whatever reason intuition kicked in and I felt like it would have been untoward. I'm of two worlds--the Japanese, where even the wildest seeming transgressions are fine in the right context, and the American, where #takebackthenight from my university years, and, more recently, #Metoo, has probably dug its hooks into me to sufficient depth that I feel any physical contact that is uninvited is setting me up for accusation, and, worst-case scenario, martyrdom. I admit I probably should just subdue all that and act in the moment, but didn't. And probably wouldn't again.

But openly lightly touching someone on the shoulder or elbow while saying "excuse me" while watched by rest of the train?

Perhaps I don't understand Japan but this sounds more than a bit paranoid to me. But you probably know best.

Hindsight is clearer than I might prefer. I can only give you the vibe I felt at the time. Though I had not yet had the clarity provided by my morning coffee. I don't understand Japan that well, either. I did say the requisite すみません or "excuse me," but yeah, touching seemed off.

Given the context of being on a train, I'm a bit surprised you put most of the blame on your American background. I recall a fair bit of emphasis on cracking down on men groping/molesting women on trains (eg, with signage reminding men not to do so and encouraging women to report it) when I was there a few decades ago. Has that died down, or is my memory or impression of how seriously it was taken faulty in this case?

Hm. Maybe I am as you say "blaming" it on my American background. That's food for thought.

There are 女性専用車両 or women "only" train cars here, and in fact the car I usually ride is adjacent. But those are for instances of 痴漢　or chikan which essentially means "pervert" but in practice mans sleazy drunkass man who has lost his inhibitions and tries to cop a feel. You see signs at the station that being a chikan is bad (as if one needed to be told via sign) and that there are harsh penalties. Has it died down? I am not sure. Dads I know report their daughters, even at age 13 or so, have experienced discomfort or even unwanted brushing-up on trains. This suggests to me that it has not gone away. At the same time, the world here is different. Japanese women don't step up or protest, or they don't in the same way that say, an American, might imagine that they should. I don't even want to get into it, but they don't.

At the same time, touching a girl on the shoulder, well, I didn't think I'd be seen as a chikan in the Japanese sense, but a creep in the American sense. And as any man who isn't already a criminal pariah can attest, no appellation has quite the same sting.

Has it died down? I am not sure.

To be clear, I wasn't asking if such behavior had died down, but rather if the apparent furor over it had.

This suggests to me that it has not gone away. At the same time, the world here is different. Japanese women don't step up or protest, or they don't in the same way that say, an American, might imagine that they should. I don't even want to get into it, but they don't.

While this is true and I wouldn't expect her to cause a scene, I would be worried about her later reporting it to the station attendants. Being a foreigner sometimes excuses such things, but sometimes makes it worse. It'd certainly make it much easier to be identified if she were to, and I had perhaps the incorrect impression that the cultural norms against stirring the pot that typically make Japanese women reluctant to report such behavior weren't as big an obstacle if the perpetrator wasn't Japanese.

At the same time, touching a girl on the shoulder, well, I didn't think I'd be seen as a chikan in the Japanese sense, but a creep in the American sense. And as any man who isn't already a criminal pariah can attest, no appellation has quite the same sting.

Hmm...maybe I was the one projecting then. The impression I got while I was there was that there wasn't much of a distinction. EDIT: Or rather, that there wouldn't be much of a distinction in this situation--moving to touch a dozing girl on the shoulder looks a lot like testing the waters before actually molesting her.

I probably present myself as more of an accurate correspondent than is warranted. I have never read or heard of a foreigner who was accused of being a perv, molester, or chikan; the perpetrators are always Japanese. (Mind you, murderers, thieves, drug peddlers and whoremongers, yes, these are nearly always foreigners--or at leas the news stories with foreigners in such cases are sensationalized.)

Probably you're right in that if the perpetrator is foreign the accuser is more-or-less guaranteed at least a day in court. You seem to have a pretty accurate sense of things; I am not sure what I can add. I don't like making sweeping declarations, though I often do just that.

I very much enjoyed it. Especially this section:

Eventually I get to my final stop and ride the bus to work, which as it happens is a hospital. There is a a cardiologist who rides the same bus as I do, but I never speak to him and he never speaks to me. I think we both realize that if we ever did speak we would have to then speak every day for eternity, and who wants that?

Is a two hour commute common in Japan? It seems absurdly long to me, at least if you’re doing it more than once or twice a week. If daily, thats’s 20 hours a week on the commute!

In high school, my physics teacher commuted three days a week from a village in upstate New York (well, mid-state, maybe) to Manhattan. I think in his case he and his wife lived very simple lives (such that they got by on his part-time salary, although he was quite old), and they preferred the deep country, had chickens and things. A nice guy, but still, a big sacrifice. Nothing like finishing a long, hard day and realizing you have three hours to go before you can sit down on your own couch.

Wow, a reply. Thank you. Yeah, it's long as hell. Of my non-Japanese friends I am the only one with such a punishing commute, it's true. I've only been at this particular gig for about a year, but it's tenured so I will stay at least a year or two--and I'm no spring chicken so I may just call it and settle. I have kids to put through school, after all.

There is actually something called 単身赴任 or tanshin funin where dads live literally away from their families--as in, you have a wife and kids in Osaka, but you live in Tokyo and just send money home. So you don't commute, you just live way the hell away from your own family. That is not as uncommon as you might imagine. I don't think it contributes much toward family harmony, either. I would never do it. I am not sure how common long commutes are in Japan--I have been commuting this way for some time, and some of my students have nearly equally long commutes.

As for a "long hard day" it's for me just prepping, grading, and teaching, and most of that is done either standing stationary or sitting at a computer, and there are a helluva lot more rigorous jobs. I use the commute time to meditate and will probably start writing in those times. Mornings especially I find my brain is very alert.

What do they offer that made this arrangement seem like a good deal to you? If I understood your situation correctly, you are an anglophone foreigner with a tenured teaching position at a Japanese research/teaching hospital, and the mental flexibility to be undertaking real steps to culturally assimilate. I'm far removed from medicine, but based on my vague understanding of academic salaries and conditions across the world I would have pegged Japan as an unfortunate example where simultaneously the standards of medical research are among the highest in the world and academic salaries and non-monetary perks are unusually low for a country at that level of development; and on top of that, the commute you described? It's hard for me to imagine how there is no employer, country or even field that could offer you a better life.

Hmm. That's a good question. I suppose autonomy, a generous research budget including travel to international conferences, and some degree of clout. I have sons of an age where my pulling up stakes for an unknown would be irresponsible. We built a house. We have a community we like in a good location and I don't want us to move.

If I were still single, and had no kids, I might make a lot of different decisions. I've never been particularly cutthroat or ambitious beyond providing a reasonably comfortable standard of living for my wife and children. And oddly the commute for me is a very Zen experience, to use that term inaccurately and shallowly. I mean to say that it is meditative for me, and because left to my own devices I am very much a homebody, it thrusts me out into the world. Kind of like how my whole life I was profoundly shy, and chose a career where I have to lecture to 120 students in two languages. It's good for me. Well, probably. Keeps me from being too comfortable.

If this isn't a satisfactory answer, well, I am still thinking about your question.

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