Friday
sohois
2yr ago
It's funny, I literally just made a post to this effect in last week's Friday fun thread. As I said then, the dumbing down of the space is inevitable given the growth of the subreddit and the number of good posters who have simply moved to other spaces like here or DSL. I'm surprised people are only just noticing though, I'd say the decline has been obvious for 2+ years
algae
2yr ago
I haven't been on this site since they moved off Reddit but I used to love these threads every Friday. I'm glad they're still happening.
I've been reading a lot of textbooks. Working through the problems in Gil Strang's Introduction to Applied Mathematics; this is the third textbook of his I've used; none have been for classes. I just love the man and his presentation of mathematics, it feels so relevant, useful, and meaty. I just finished reading Principles of Vibration by Benson Tongue and highly highly recommend it - very conversational style with fun and hilarious problems.
On the non-textbook side, I just started Moon Dust, an account of the Apollo astronauts after they came back from the Moon. I love the writing style.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2yr ago
Checking the text it does say companies that choose not to comply will have to say why. There don't appear to be any official punishments for picking that option. "The Exchange would not evaluate the substance or merits of a companies explanation" seems to support that.
But then Blackrock has ESG/DEI guidelines.
BlackRock Is Sick of Excuses for Corporate Boards Lacking Women
BlackRock Inc. isn’t buying excuses from companies that say they can’t find women to fill diverse slots on boards.
The world’s biggest asset manager earlier this year sent letters to companies in the Russell 1000 index with fewer than two women on their boards, asking them to explain their lack of progress. Some of the responses were surprising, said Michelle Edkins, the firm’s global head of stewardship.
“On board diversity, frankly some of the answers we got were from the 1880s,” Edkins said Friday in an interview at the SRI Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Among the most frustrating responses: “There aren’t any qualified women,” “We don’t need a woman director” and “We’re not a consumer-facing company.”
But BlackRock, whose research shows that more diverse boards get better results, sees a wide pipeline of female directors available. Edkins said the New York-based fund giant, which has five women on its 18-member board, wants companies to look for directors in more uncommon places.
“Every man was a first-time director once,” she said. “If someone took a bet on an untrained director who happened to be a man, you can take a bet on an untrained director who happens to be a woman.”
From one side or another, at an earlier or later point of your business development, if not from Nasdaq then from Blackrock or Goldman Sachs or silent or not-so-silent conspiracy of antagonistic HR managers whom you cannot replace with loyal ones, you will start to feel pressure mounting and compelling you to actually make costly decisions.
Does this count?
US stock exchange sets diversity rules for listed companies
America's second largest stock exchange has said it will set binding gender and diversity targets for its listed companies.
Firms on the Nasdaq, which include tech giants such as Apple and Tesla, will have to have at least two diverse directors, or explain why they do not.
The directors should include one person who identifies as female and another as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+.
It follows complaints about the lack of diversity in corporate America.
According to a Nasdaq study last year, more than 75% of its listed companies would not have met its proposed targets.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates financial markets, approved the plan on Friday, meaning it will be binding.
"These rules will allow investors to gain a better understanding of Nasdaq-listed companies' approach to board diversity," SEC chair Gary Gensler said...
Is a binding decision that requires changing the boards of 75% of Nasdaq companies something worth taking note of?
INTUITION ESSAY CONTEST VOTING
My Intuition Essay contest, is concluded. Voting is today. The contestants are as follows
@TheDag entered Intuition in a Scientific Age
@f3zinker entered A Case For/Against Education, Intuition
@felipec entered My Intuition About Intuition
@Pitt19802 entered This Untitled Piece Comparing Statistical and Intuitive Approaches in Baseball and Politics
Technically, these two came after the deadline, but I also received quality submissions from
@Gaashk on a Jungian View of Intuition
and
@ryandv on Forming Connections via Similarity of Mental Models
In the tradition of my law school moot court contests, I will include these submissions in the poll, because I don't feel the need to be technical about deadlines in a casual game; if you feel strongly that they should not be included simply don't vote for them.
@DaseindustriesLtd also wrote this piece on the topic but explicitly asked to be excluded from the competition, hoping to leave the field to the rest of us mortals.
Vote here. It's going to be simple voting, I'm not doing ranked choice or anything. I will contact the winner on Wednesday, after the SSS thread is supplanted by the WW thread, and we will choose which charity I will donate $300 to.
If I missed any appropriate posts, please link them below and I will add them to the list and the ultimate voting. ANY EFFORTPOST ABOUT INTUITION, EVEN IF IT WAS NOT WRITTEN TO BE INCLUDED IN THE COMPETITION IS ELIGIBLE. As long as it was written between my original post and the end of the day Friday, it can be included in the ultimate voting. I looked through the CW threads for the appropriate period, and found nothing else which made sense to include, but feel free to point out anything I might have missed.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
I may have mentioned this before, but for those of you don’t know, I’m an unapologetic music junkie. Since 2010 or so, I’ve been making my way through the corpus of music history in a semi-systematic way that makes sense only to me, and rating albums as I go through it using a scale of 0 to 5 stars, half stars included. To date, I have awarded 186 albums the highest ranking the criteria for which are as follows:
The crème de la crème. Albums that have no serious weak moments and many transcendent ones. Any weak spots or less than captivating songs are overshadowed by the splendor of the glorious majority. In any event, these are minor enough that pointing them out is the kind of petty nitpicking that even fans of the work in question will argue over. Nearly all of these records defined either the genre which they belong to or the era in which they were recorded.
I don’t normally rank the albums as I rate them, but I’ve done so for the top tier. As a sort of personal indulgence, I will include capsule reviews for all the albums on this list over the next several Fridays, including as many reviews as character limits allow. Without further ado:
186 Lynyrd Skynyrd – One More from the Road (1977)
Most live albums are superfluous—they include pleasant live renditions of the familiar studio material but rarely offer anything essential. The best live albums are usually the shorter ones that highlight a few key performances rather than attempting to provide the full concert experience. Unfortunately, there was a trend in the 1970s where any artist nearing the end of its contract would release an obligatory double live album that clocked in at over an hour and contained everything a fan could want in a live release. Most of these are decent, but inessential. This record is one of the few exceptions. Lead guitarist Steve Gaines had recently joined the band and would only be present for one studio album, but the performances he gives here are nonpareil, giving the familiar classics a level of sophistication they hadn’t had previously. And the performance of "Freebird" that ends the album makes it abundantly clear why calling for it at the end of unrelated concerts became such a cliché 20 years later.
185 Strawbs – Ghosts (1975)
Strawbs were about as undistinguished a Progressive Rock band as you could get, never having any commercial success, always showing flashes of brilliance but never making a truly great album (though Hero and Heroine came close). Then, in 1975, as Progressive Rock was in its death throes, everything finally came together. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the album, just that it combines great songs with enough of the usual progressive elements to keep things interesting.
184 Organized Konfusion – Organized Konfusion (1991)
Most rap albums—even the important ones—suffer from some critical flaw that prevents them from achieving the highest ranking. I’d be remiss if I claimed that this album held any particular degree of importance in the history of rap music, but it manages to run for nearly an hour without a bum track in sight. The liberal Steely Dan samples don’t hurt, either.
183 Thievery Corporation – Sound from the Thievery Hi-Fi (1997)
Downtempo albums can be difficult to judge because they are, at some level, supposed to exist in the background as much as the foreground. Ones that emphasize the former tend to be generic and unmemorable. Ones that emphasize the latter can be good albums, but they aren’t really effective as Downtempo albums. Not only does Thievery Corporation manage to strike this balance perfectly, they also manage to strike a similar balance between Hip-Hop and Easy Listening, making this album equally suited for smoking a joint as it is to being played in a department store. And, of course, the individual cuts are great as well.
182 The Byrds – The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)
It seems odd looking back at the catalog of one of the most significant bands in Rock history that this was the only album they released that makes this list. There are at least five other Byrds albums that probably have better critical reputations than this, and they are very good albums, but all suffered from pretty significant flaws. What makes it all the more unusual is that this album was recorded at an uncertain point in the band’s history; personnel changes were rampant, with the only constants being Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, and session musicians were used to complete the songs. Nonetheless, this album manages to encapsulate everything that was great about the Byrds: “Goin’ Back” echoes back to their early Folk-Rock period, “Wasn’t Born to Follow” looks ahead to their Country-Rock future, and there’s plenty of psychedelic weirdness thrown in for good measure.
181 Bob Seger – Night Moves (1976)
While Bruce Springsteen has always fashioned himself as the working-class Heartland Rocker par excellence, Bob Seger is a much better choice for that distinction. He’d spent the past decade as a true working musician, putting out albums regularly, touring constantly, and getting little recognition outside of Michigan for it. His breakthrough album was the typical double-live Live Bullet, but this was his first real studio success, containing great songs that encapsulate the heartland approach without resorting to the theatrical bombast of Bruce Springsteen or the overearnestness of John Mellencamp.
180 Roy Harper – Stormcock (1971)
Roy Harper’s claim to fame among most Rock fans is as the namesake of the Led Zeppelin song “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” and as the lead vocalist on Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar”. He was always bound to be the kind of guy that was more popular among musicians than among the general public. This is certainly an unusual album in the Rock canon—only four tracks, two per side, just acoustic guitar and vocals. But the length of the songs works to their advantage, as Harper is talented enough to make them seem epic rather than overlong, and his guitar playing is intricate enough that the spare instrumentation never seems inadequate.
179 Boards of Canada – The Campfire Headphase (2005)
The critical consensus may be that Music Has the Right to Children is the best Boards of Canada album, and while that record was more influential, it had to much weirdness for the sake of weirdness to make it into the top tier. By the time The Campfire Headphase was released, the band was no longer on the cutting edge, but the more deliberate composition and integration of acoustic instruments made this the better album.
178 Donovan – A Gift from a Flower to a Garden (1967)
Donovan was by far the dippiest member of the British Folk-Rock scene (he went to India with the Beatles and actually took the whole trip seriously), so it’s no surprise that he recorded a children’s album that was more than a lazy cash-in. While the individual songs are relatively short, the album is a double, and it’s clear that he was contributing A material. The dippiness actually works to this album’s advantage, as Donovan can parlay that into a sense of whimsy rather than simply dumbing-down the music, as so many other musicians are wont to do when playing for children. The end result is a kid’s album that you wouldn’t even know is a kid’s album unless someone told you.
177 Fleetwood Mac – Tusk (1979)
Lindsey Buckingham abandons the tight pop songs that made Fleetwood Mac icons in favor of his own eccentric weirdness, which isn’t merely limited to his contributions but to the arrangements he provides to the Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie songs. And it works! The counterbalance the rest of the band provides makes this more palatable than his solo material (where he simply runs wild). The rest of the band would tell him to cut it out after this and release more conventional pop albums, but they’d never reach these heights again.
176 Big Star – No. 1 Record (1972)
This is one of those overrated critical darlings whose reputation precedes it. As much as I want to resist fellating this album the way so many critics do, I have to admit that this is a pretty near perfect collection of Power Pop songs, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.
175 Heart – Dreamboat Annie (1976)
Heart has developed a reputation as a sort of female-fronted Zeppelin, and while that characterization isn’t entirely fair, what makes their early career is their Zeppelin-like ability to blend Hard Rock riffage with more contemplative acoustic material. By the time the ‘80s rolled around, commercial pressures forced them into a generic power ballad arena band, but at the beginning, they were able to craft thoughtful albums with a cohesive artistic vision.
174 Rush – Hemispheres (1978)
Most people would rate their next two albums as better than this, but for me, this is as good as Rush ever got. The title cut might be the last great sidelong suite, “Circumstances” is a solid Hard Rock cut, and the Harrison Bergeron-inspired “The Trees” doesn’t disappoint either. But the real standout here is “La Villa Strangiato”, which is the best instrumental of Rush’s career and is in the running for best Rock instrumental of all time. Rush would find a more distinctive voice in the ‘80s, but they never really topped this.
173 Bad Company – Bad Company (1974)
Bad Company’s reputation isn’t the best since they’re viewed as responsible for all the generic arena bands of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s like Journey, Foreigner, Loverboy, and, well, all the other Bad Company albums. But this is still a killer collection of songs that remains unparalleled in the genre, and that won’t change regardless of how much crap it inspired.
That's it for now. Let me know what you think!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
If this is worth posting at all (ehhhh) it belongs in the "Friday Fun Thread", not here, "main thread" comments should have an interesting topic and at least a few paragraphs of context/commentary.
Fantasy is a way of exploring the taboo and the transgressive. A rape fantasy enables someone to play around with the idea of being forced to do something they might want to do (e.g. have anonymous sex with a stranger) but would not do in reality (e.g. the old idea of "nice girls don't have casual sex", and don't tell me that one has gone away, what with the term "cock carousel") or of exploring kinks and fetishes. It's safe because you are in control, can set the parameters of the fantasy up however you want, and can end it at any time it becomes distressing or too real. You can create the rapist however you like - one guy, several guys, how forceful or violent it gets, and so on. And best of all there are no physical consequences like injury or disease.
There are people who participate in BDSM but that doesn't mean that they want to be mugged and beaten up in the streets in real life (or go out and beat someone up in real life). Same with porn - they set up unrealistic scenarios because people like the thrill of forbidden fruit or something spicier than vanilla sex, but that doesn't mean anyone thinks it could really happen (no your hot teen barely legal stepsister won't ask you to help her with her homework and somehow you both end up naked in the shower fucking).
Sex can be scary and troubling and something you need to grapple with, and using fantasy to explore extreme scenarios is one way of working through it all. Nancy Friday wrote a series of books about women's sexual fantasies (among other topics) and the famous one is from the late 60s/early 70s, My Secret Garden:
Need I add that we win in all of our fantasies? Yes, even those involving the so-called rapist, that deus ex machina we roll in to catapult us past a lifetime of women’s rules against sex. That fantasy is as popular today as ever. The women I interviewed don’t really want to be hurt or humiliated. His male presence, that effective battering ram, neatly “makes” her relax sufficiently to enjoy orgasm and then allows her to return to earth, her Nice Girl, Good Daughter self intact. The rape fantasy fools them into thinking the loss of control isn’t their fault.
What tribute to the power of the unconscious that in the day of the internet, of pornographic videos, not to mention of the erotic assaults on television, that with all this seeming permission, there is still a nay-saying voice that requires answering before we can reach orgasm.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2yr ago
I've discussed in a past comment that "high status" women not being the most biologically attractive is just status competition rearing its head once again.
Also I think there is a disconnect between biological attractiveness and "beauty standards". A mate that looks a certain way is an indicator of status, that certain way might not be the most biologically attractive.
cjet79
2yr ago
I have been playing Icarus, alone (as always).
Its hard to know where to start discussing it.
First of all I'm loving it and playing the crap out of it (185 hours logged in just 1 month).
But second of all I do not recommend playing it.
Before I get into why those two things are at odds, I'll describe the game:
Shortest: Roguelite RPG action survival.
Mid: Get dropped off on a large map, built up items to survive, complete an objective, and then leave it all behind to do it again.
Longest: The survival mechanics are pretty standard. Pickup sticks and rocks, build basic tools. Chop down trees, mine some rocks and iron for better tools. Build some better crafting stations to unlock even better tools. Fight off the wildlife, hunger, thirst, and suffocation. But all of these mechanics are tight. They aren't trying to string you out on these mechanics for weeks on end. You are meant to progress through the stages of survival relatively quickly. Because you have to start from scratch each time you drop into a new mission. There is also a set of RPG type mechanics where you gain levels, each level gives you some perk points to spend on being better at some aspect of survival, and each level gives you blueprint points, which you use to unlock new buildable items. The planet you land on (called Icarus), has some nasty storms that can tear apart most buildings. So you are either building temporary shelters to huddle in, or sitting in one spot for a while trying to gather up resources for the more expensive concrete permanent structures. The planet also has some harsh environments. There is a temperate forest/river valley starting area. There is a hot desert area, and cold snow/tundra area. Both require some degree of preparation if you want to traverse them safely. Also polar bears are scary as hell.
If that all sounds great, you know why I am playing the game so much.
But now, the bad news, and why I don't recommend the game. I'm dealing with constant performance issues. The framerate can slow to a crawl during some storms (especially fires), and I'm playing on the lowest graphical settings (and have a decent rig).
This week in particular has been a rough week for the game. They just implemented some weather changes last Friday, and the changes were messed up in some way, and as a result there are nearly constant storms. If I hadn't already been playing on a map where I had a permanent base I might have just entirely dropped the game. As it is I spent most of my time playing this past week huddled up in a shelter while storms passed by. And before the latest update the 2nd highest tier of building material (stone) could withstand all storms, but after the update, only the highest tier building material (concrete) could withstand all storms. So if you want to have any permanent structures that won't collapse after a few hours you have to build up to concrete.
Overall this game has the potential to be one of the greats in the survival RPG genre. The updates are coming out every week, and the progress has been good. I'd suggest that people who are interested in this general genre keep an eye on the game, and keep an eye out for good deals on higher end graphics cards.
DradisPing
2yr ago
The website says next Friday, at least for me.
SSCReader
2yr ago
She knew what she was doing. She knew it was wrong.
Well that is literally the point, she may not have. That's why psychiatric assessment is needed. With acute mental crisis events, you may not actually know right from wrong, or be aware of what you are doing. Now that may not be the case here. But it does fit some of the cases I was involved in the past when I worked in social care.
Dr. Roy O'Shaughnessy testified that Allan Schoenborn believed his children were being sexually abused, and felt the only solution was to kill them.
"The distortions in the thinking led him to believe - I think probably at a moment's notice at the time of their deaths - that the only way to protect them was in fact to kill them and put them in heaven," the psychiatrist testified. "In his disillusioned view of the world it was logical."
"A B.C. man found not criminally responsible for the killings of his three children about a decade ago has been granted the ability to take multi-day leaves from the Lower Mainland psychiatric hospital he was sentenced to. Dave Texeira, spokesperson for the victims’ family, confirmed the decision on Friday (March 11). “This is not good for anyone,” he tweeted. Allan Schoenborn has been held at the hospital since 2010 after being convicted of killing his 10-year-old daughter and two sons, aged eight and five, in April 2008."
I find that people who have not much in person experience with truly mentally ill individuals sometimes struggle to understand how disordered their thinking can be. In this case she attempted suicide, but also there was no real attempt to disguise her crime and get away with it. That suggests (but does not prove) some kind of break. A planned methodical killer might have smothered them, or gassed them or staged an accident.
That is not to say she should just walk away, if she was suffering from psychosis (which is much more than just the blues to be clear) then she needs to be committed and treated for a long period of time.
Rex
2yr ago
Thanks for asking. I haven’t googled this in a while but it looks like the iron air battery projects are moving right along.
Here’s some detail that was just announced on Friday. It’s all moving very quickly.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-energy-form-energy-storage-coal-iron-battery/641386/
No_one
2yr ago
I've seen too much of related corporate bs , and between that, and effective altruists, I'm practically allergic to people who say they want to make the world better.
But hey, this is the friday fun thread, so I won't go any further.
Rex
2yr ago
I work in the energy industry, specifically around deploying new power plants. The latest round of nuclear renaissance talk has been quite annoying to read about. I can say with certainty that the utilities and power generation companies have zero interest in this stuff for a few reasons. One, its way more expensive than wind, solar, and gas. Like north of $5/watt. The other tech is about $1 to $2/watt. Conventional nuclear is also big, so your talking tens of billions of capital on a single project. Second, its incredibly risky. And not just risky for a nuclear disaster, I'm talking risk of failure to even build. Something like 2 of the 6(?) nuclear units the US has tried to build in the last 10 years have failed and left the owners with $30 billion in sunk costs. Noone wants to make that bet.
Maybe SMRs change the equation if the total cost to deploy a few is cheap enough that some companies give it a try, but im skeptical. The industry has zero appetite for this stuff. They've decided to invest their capital in wind and solar. All this nuclear talk is exclusively coming from the media and academia. SMR might work on paper, but noone has commercialized it yet. Plus the fact that 15 years ago we went through this same nuclear renaissance talk, the industry bought in and was subsequently burned badly.
I have a lot more to say but ill stop here. Things like how the U.S. has pretty much lost the industrial capacity to even build nuclear anymore. How wind and solar is actually the right choice for investment dollars rather than nuclear. Etc.
I'll leave you with one thing. On Friday i was watching Bill Maher (who i do actually like) and he had a bit on how the country hasn't really done shit to solve the climate crisis yet. He showed a stat that in 1979 we got around 40% of energy from coal and in 2019 we got around 39% of our energy from coal. Implying that we've made no progress. That seemed wrong to me, so i looked up the 2022 stats from DOE. Coal as a percentage of total generation is down to the low 20% range. A ridiculous number of coal plants have been turned off over the last 4 years. And almost every remaining plant is set to be retired in the next 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if were well under 10% by 2030.
I'm exceptionally skeptical that 10% of the population are 'ruining' their lives over porn. Even groups promoting the concept give closer to ~6% as the upper edge for the entire class of porn addiction (not endorsed), which in turn is more built around self-identification than serious personal impact, which in turn isn't the same as actually going from correlation to causation, nevermind all the way to 'ruining their lives'. More mainstream analysis gives significantly smaller numbers.
((And, uh, 'motions to the entirety of alcoholism discourse, or football stuff' for the sort of tradeoffs we're demonstrably willing to make as a culture.))
-if you think porn is bad now, what do you think it's going to be like when people will be able to get whatever sexual fantasy they have generated within a few hours in high resolution by NNs ?
I'm pretty skeptical.
More critically, I think this points to broader problems. You don't have a toggle of 'people masturbate/don't'. You're openly talking about situations that would require limiting access to pretty generic ML tools, and that's honestly just the starting point. Even fairly 'limited' laws like this will discourage a lot of not-solely-porn speech, and anything broad enough to seriously slow porn 'usage' will unavoidably touch on broader works.
No_one
2yr ago
It's CW because of the discussion and comments around it, or just because the content of the audio clip itself is sort of CW?
Suppose next time if I posted just the profane audio (this hilarious bit of florid SAS bullying)- which is only funny, not really that worth of discussion, would that be ok for the next friday fun thread?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Material conditions of Americans require them to outsource most of the parenting to the State. They are in organized education for all of their high alertness daylight hours Monday through Friday outside of breaks. Mothers who were the primary moral pedagogues of the young in history (see Augustine) are pressured to work stressful jobs and were themselves raised by stressed overtaxed mothers. It’s not feasible for parents and communities to instill real morality in a young who are forced into bureaucratic education and then need to spend the remaining hours studying and checking off college app boxes to obtain a high-status profession. What’s left is the Asian mode of punishing bad results, which is useful for creating fearful and dedicated workers, but will create an essentially immoral population.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
This is pretty clearly a Culture War item, not a Friday Fun Thread item. Leaving it up since it's already spawned a lot of discussion, but just because something is "Twitter drama" doesn't mean it doesn't belong in the Culture War thread.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2yr ago
I would read that! Make sure you link it in the Friday fun thread if you do.
buffy_bot
2yr ago
A couple of Fridays ago there was a comment thread on what the best series you watched in 2022 was/were. In honor of @EdenicFaithful's weekly Sunday reading question, what were your best reads of 2022? What did you enjoy or find interesting? Anything of note you didn't finish?
For me:
God Emperor of Dune. Such a good book. Well, Idk how to qualify it in terms of goodness. Such a unique book. How many have a near-omnipotent, centuries old, giant worm-man with voices in his head as the main character? My favorite bit: Leto is so wrapped up in his own ancient internal monologue about the voices of his ancestors inside him and the future he can see that he almost misses getting a gun that he knows is going to be pulled on him pulled on him.
I read a bit of horror later in the year. Ghost Story by Peter Straub would probably be my favorite of the bunch. It loses some steam near the end, but I think that's a flaw intrinsic to the horror genre. Or maybe that's all the Stephen King I've read talking. Speaking of, Revival would be my runner-up. It's the only post-car accident King I've read that's not The Dark Tower, and I wasn't disappointed. He maybe could have used a little trimming in the second quarter of the book to shorten the gap between the inciting incident and the next big plot movement, but other than that I think he even stuck the landing.
Books I did not finish:
I didn't read a lot of books this year. Sometime around March I attempted to do what I thought of as a "liberal arts" read: reading world history, art history, music history, philosophy history, and literature concurrently, going through sections that aligned with the same time period. A bit ambitious. Couple of problems with it, besides coming up with the "curriculum" on my own based on what we already had in our home library: I started with human pre-history, which kept me hopping between just a couple of books at first; a couple, particularly the philosophy book, were Western focus, whereas I wanted to be more comprehensive; the literature portion (the first volume of Norton's world lit anthology) covered a lot I had already read; for world history, I picked a book that's like the notes to a world history encyclopedia - very dense and dry, and I wasn't trying to skip any of it; finally, the sections just didn't line up that well for jumping between things and keeping it "fresh". My goal was to get to 0 AD. I barely got to the Greeks. After a couple months or so of spending my bedtime reading time on this, I was worn out and needed a narrative I could start and finish without interruption and moved on to a fiction splurge. I'd like to go back and read some more of the individual books on their own. Except that encyclopedic notes one. It's literally organized in a ABC, 123 subnote style. Very dense and dry. Overall, and interesting experiment.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
The Whale, the most important men’s health movie you haven’t seen yet
The Whale is a 2022 drama film written by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his play of the same title, and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The story follows Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a reclusive writing teacher attempting to reconnect with his daughter Ellie.
I bought a ticket to The Whale last night because I want Fraser’s career to flourish. He had some rough years there because of sexual assault by a powerful man in Hollywood. He’s doing better emotionally, and has starred in a three-season remake of Six Days of the Condor and four seasons of DC’s Doom Patrol.
This film is, quite simply, powerful. The characters are all fully fleshed out by the ending, the relationships are realistically dramatic and fraught, and the situations are terrifyingly common.
But why am I posting this here instead of the CW thread (for the missionary character) or the Friday Fun thread (for being a film recommendation)? It’s the best damn movie about codependency ever.
Fraser’s Charlie is a morbidly obese food addict awash with guilt, despair, and self-delusion. His life is one of the most pathetic ever put to film, chronicled in excruciatingly ugly detail. Everyone in his orbit is affected by his immobility and his sorrow for his lost lover. They are in his life because everyone in this film is codependent, unable to form relationships in which neither person is trying to save the other.
At first it feels exploitative, because you know people actually live like this: growing so fat they can never leave their home without assistance, compulsively eating, slowly dying of heart problems, while those who love them wish somehow something could be different but don’t know how to change anything. It becomes moving, but just when you get sympathy for one of the characters, they do something ugly.
I watched this the very day I bought a YMCA gym membership, and it hasn’t been out of my mind for more than a few minutes.
I too have gained more weight than I wanted, because of what I can now call food addiction. I’ve been in recovery from codependency for ten years this March, and I’m grateful I can say I’m healthier than I’ve ever been emotionally. I’ve attended a couple of overeaters meetings and applied the lessons I learned from the codependency group; at this last one, something changed deeply, and I feel free, finally, of what drove me to food, in addition to what drove me to make bad friends.
The name codependency comes from a common pattern of behavior: when one person in a relationship is an addict, the other tries to rescue them, to save them from themselves. The addict is substance dependent; the partner is co-dependent.
Over the years, the definition has been expanded to include compulsive behavior and thought patterns of low self-esteem, control/manipulation, avoidance, denial of reality, and abnormal compliance. Co-Dependents Anonymous, a twelve-step goup, has compiled a four-page list of codependent tendencies and choices (PDF link) that everyone owes it to themselves to read at least once.
The lesson I get out of the film is that I can’t save anyone from themselves, I can’t save anyone who isn’t pulling their own weight in seeking help, and I can’t save people while getting something from the relationship.
And I can’t keep eating like I have or bad things will happen to me. Getting a genuine plan is my only sane option.
sliders1234
2yr ago
Are food allergies another aspect of the culture war? I was reading Reddit and a person was feeding 100 people and someone mentioned to make sure you have all the allergies/food restrictions covered. Being honest I’ve never met anyone with a food restriction I can think of except a lot of brown friends who won’t eat sausage but also have no problem with alcohol.
Ancient religions had a lot of restrictions, now Im borrowing this from elsewhere that the rise of food restrictions is just the same thing as ancients banning certain foods as holy acts. I’ve long argued that the culture wars are less of a culture war and more of a religious war and dietary restrictions are just a modern form of Jews and Muslims banning pork/shellfish etc and Catholics not eating meat on fridays. All religions seem to have focuses on eating and sexual rituals.
I know mental illness has far higher rates amongst lefties. My guess is dietary restrictions and food allergies are much higher in lefties and if your not in that religion it’s something you never think of.
Good list, but missing some big ones, especially from comedy. His Girl Friday, Some Like it Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Die Hard, Tootsie, Network, Star Wars IV, Airplane!, Rambo, Gone with the Wind, and I’d throw in some Marx bros. and James Bond.
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