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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2554 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 18, 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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What’s your favorite holiday? I’m especially curious about non American ones. Doesn’t even have to be an extant holiday.

Saturnalia is mine, for instance. Having servants and masters switch place for a day is just such a wild concept, sounds like a blast.

That's an interesting question. I guess it's Forgiveness Sunday, the last day of Maslenica and the last day before Lent. Simply because the ritual is so simple: ask everyone you know to forgive everything you've done or said that upset them and be ready to forgive them in return. Bearing grudges, like you're some Warhammer dwarf, is for losers.

Christmas cuz Santa 🎅🏻 and his reindeer 🦌 and all the presents 🎁 and Christmas tree 🎄 and candy canes 😋

Halloween.

As a millennial, I have to say this is not because I'm some suburban goth with a weird Nightmare Before Christmas fetish (have never actually seen that movie). It's for two (groups of) reasons.

  1. Autumn, where I grew up, was just fucking phenomenally beautiful. Explosive oranges and reds across the forest. The crispness of the air - not chillingly cold and definitely beyond the sloth inducing slow humidity of summer. Finally, my High School had a weird location / situation where our football team was good and fun to watch, but without the generational fanaticism of Texas / Alabama / Georgia / whatever other Southeastern state often has that makes a game between literal children into something one step removed from Presidential Politics / Sunni-Shia schismatics.

  2. Chicks dig Halloween. I'm not referring to the cliche about "dressing up like sluts" or whatever was in (I think) Mean Girls. I mean the (far more effective) woo-woo witchy vibes that seem to work wonders for setting the mood. The harvest season, and themes of agricultural abundance have always had some strang association with fertility and sexual activity. The VVitch has this featured prominently. For some reason, even very modern and post-modern raised women seem to sense this. I'm not going to speculate on the psychology in a Friday Fun thread. All I know is that I first caught wind of that many years ago. I had a friend who was a horror movie connoisseur and introduced me to Dario Argento's original Suspiria. The "gore" is fairly tame for current standards, and it's mostly very moody / atmospheric film making. But part of that atmosphere is taking off your clothes, I guess. If there was ever a fantastic wingman in film form, it's Suspiria.

Another Suspiria fan! Have you seen the remake? Very different, but also excellent. I flip flop constantly on which has the better score though.

I haven't. I'm scared too because I'm worried it will ruin the original for me. That's very ... silly thing to say, but it's also the truth.

Plus, I'm a sucker for Jessica Harper from the original as well as her doppelganger Karen Allen (Marion in Raiders of The Lost Ark)

No favorite holiday. I do not care for any of them.

I feel a bit sad that I'm almost entirely isolated from 'society' on this. The only thing I have in common with plurality of population is that I appreciate law & order and being polite. I deeply value groups and friendships, but I have no tribal feelings, it's like that instinctual part of humanity is missing from me entirely.

As I love fireworks, close-hitting thunder and artillery fire. Holidays don't feature these. I consider every great storm directly overhead a minor holiday and always enjoy listening to it.

So I care for no holidays, I have no religion, I feel little kinship with my fellow Slovaks, even less for Czechs among whom I hide, there are no communities I could work to join. Were I to get a stroke and find God I'd probably end up in some serious orthodox church as I'm in a 95% agreement with them on behavioral norms. Very much enjoyed talking to a priest from such a group while signing a petition against the Istanbul treaty. He seemed a lot like me. Mindful of the gravity of the problem, serious yet also had a sense of humor. But, Christians aren't my people. God doesn't know me, I don't know God. ....

There is no God but Evolution and she cares nothing at all for us and ťhat is how it is and probably must be for our own good, for we are imperfect rationalising, not rational animals and can't function without getting periodically brutalised by reality. I know I can't, I observe empires can't do, companies can't manage either. Seems like a law of nature, no?

We always fight against the cold cruelty of nature and every victory of ours leaves us weaker and worse off. Few seem to understand this at the meta level, so in modernity we go from blunder to blunder and become ever more cringe with each generation.

What holidays could someone like me appreciate?

I've examined my soul and found out I'd not care at all had Germans won the war and replaced Slovak with German, or had Hungarians succeeded in extirpating Slovak language. Why should I feel anything there? Tribal identity is an essentially meaningless marker here, the cultural differences between Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks are rather small. Would the world be worse off for missing one tiny slavic language 90% of whose speakers were usually alcoholic, frequently wife-beating and typically petty subsistence farmers ?

Can you explain more of what you mean in this section? [We always fight against its cold cruelty and every victory of ours leaves us weaker and worse off. Few seem to understand this at the meta level, so in modernity we go from blunder to blunder and become ever more cringe with each generation.]

Are you talking about a 'fight' against evolution? Can you explain what you mean by 'cringe'? I understand this word to mean social awkwardness but it is always viewed relatively.

We are animals whose sense of drive fulfillment evolved to be derived from sustaining our material needs, war, tribal belonging and pursuing power. Yet now we perform abstruse specialist tasks which are usually far less satisfying, we are exposed to too little violence, commercial services allow us to eschew community and the judgement of others, to our own detriment.

Pursuit of agency and power typically involves people selling their soul and time to some corporate shoggoth. The traditional way of having a war band and stabbing more or less distant neighbors or maybe even tearing off some territory to claim your own is now a distant memory echoing only in certain computer games.

Pretty much every historically basically inevitable societal advance has removed us further away from direct fulfilment of most of those goals and having to resort to replacement activities.

E.g. So I'm exposed to the spectacle of my highly paid (for the region, $5k a month is chump change in the US) specialist ancestor spending a lot of her scant free time at desultory attempts at growing some salad and beans. People cheer and care for absurd sports, it forms their identities. And so on.

Eliminative materialism is a false path my friend. It’s not too late to turn back.

I'm not an eliminative materialist. I believe mental phenomena are, however, arising from the processes in the underlying physical matter. Maybe the thought processes themselves matter, and aren't purely an 'experience', maybe not, but they of course exist.

Going to school in the American north, that first early beautiful week of good weather after winter, students would move their futons and couches onto the quads everything with a wonderful atmosphere of sports and studying on lawn blankets.

Rouketopolemos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouketopolemos). Every year for Easter, two church congregations in a small Greek town have a firework war where they try to ring the other church's bell. I love it, it's like someone asked a drunk 10-year-old to design their Easter celebrations

That’s as collegiate as it gets. Amazing!

I think it's interesting that the UK still celebrates burning Catholics at the stake once a year. Guy Fawkes Night is pretty fun actually, and I like the ritual of it - starting with the bonfire in the late afternoon/early evening as it's getting dark, watching the effigy burn, warming up by the fire, then watching the fireworks. I'm always surprised at just how warm it is, even when it's cold out, near the fire. I guess that sounds stupid, but it still feels a little like magic. That it takes place during what is probably the UK's rainiest, most depressing month (yes, even over January) in terms of weather is also nice, and it seems to be the main holiday (other than New Year's Eve) where people throw big parties, like the 4th of July in the US.

It isn't a public holiday though, which is a shame. Instead, the UK stacks up almost all its public holidays between April and May (two for Easter, two in May), with one extra one in late August. Thanksgiving is really situated perfectly as a holiday IMHO, late November demands it.

I've been considering attempting to start a ritual centered around burning the effigy of the head of the EC to remind ourselves of the liberties and independence we foolishly gave away in our swinish interested in material well-being so now we are subjects to dictates from an idiotic, unaccountable bureaucratic shoggoth festering in Brussels.

Pascha

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