periphrasis

If you think all art is bullshit I pity the emptiness of your life. No wonder you defend the MCU. We have nothing further to discuss.

How about this: MCU movies begin production with the VFX work for the major action scenes. This happens before they have a script or even a director. Have you ever noticed how MCU movies feel like a completely different movie once the CGI action sequences start? It’s because they are. These are not serious works of craft: they are marketing exercises meant to keep a money tree well watered.

I was never the target audience for this stuff but I was willing to be dragged along to Iron Man and Captain America because at that time “October Movies” still existed. That is mid budget Hollywood dramas and thrillers targeted towards adults, typically with an edgier tone, released in October after the summer tent pole season has run down but before Oscar candidate season has fully started. Basically everything David Fincher directed prior to being scooped up by Netflix fell into this category. Nightcrawler, All is Lost, and Captain Philips, are other “recent” examples, but of course they’re from the first half of the 2010s because Hollywood no longer green lights projects like these in the cinematic universe era. When MCU critics talk about crowding out better films, this is the sort of thing they’re referring to.

Look I apologize for not containing my scorn, but the fact is that the typical 9 year old can understand everything there is to understand in an MCU film modulo the punchline of a couple jokes. These are thematically simple films with no point of view and nothing to say for fear of shrinking the size of the big tent. The sad thing is that films targeted at children don’t have to be dumb; Bambi for example is a shockingly grownup film that sensitively deals with the passage of time and seasons, death and grief, coming of age, the hardness of life, and the cycle of generations, all within a runtime of under 70 minutes. There’s a lot going on there for the story of a fawn who does stuff in the woods. Yet that kind of depth does not exist in the children’s cinema of our times, ie the MCU, and the popular audience doesn’t even know to ask for it anymore.

We’re a stupid people and we get served correspondingly stupid culture. Sorry to rant and be rude, but in my view the MCU’s popularity is one of the leading indicators of our cultural decline, right up there with Trumpism and social media.

If you think it’s elitist to ask adults to like adult things rather than things for children, have at it. I should note that the poster I responded to, in listing the merits of MCU films, discussed only technical details and the baseline of coherent storytelling; theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit shockingly did not enter the discussion. I would call that underdeveloped taste and a limited understanding of how literary media work as art. If that makes me elitist, fair enough, but I’d much rather be an elitist than go through life thinking comic books are the height of human expression.

Have you considered the possibility that critics of the MCU are not elitist and that you merely have underdeveloped taste? That ostensibly educated adults will go to bat for the cultural dominance of stories that are thematically simple enough to be understood fully by children will never cease to amaze me.

Obese people do not directly affect your health. I get that you’re trolling and don’t really believe what you say, but at least show some creativity here, rather than repeating nostrums that grew tired 250k dead ago.

One who understands that those “informed” strangers are making a decision that puts others at risk. Frankly, I do not understand why someone who presumably understands why second hand smoking and drunk driving are bad cannot transfer the same logic to being unvaccinated in the midst of a deadly and contagious plague.

The New Hollywood era is generally considered to begin with 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, following the accidental but hugely successful US mainstream release of the 1966 British film Blow Up. Kubrick’s career straddles the eras, so he doesn’t belong to the young crop of new directors, e.g. Scorsese, Mallick, Coppola, Spielberg, that defined the movement, but I think it’s fair to say Kubrick’s output from the late 60s onward, to include 2001, absolutely leveraged the creative freedom studios were relinquishing to directors and writers.

Regular use gradually bent the pins in the NES cartridge slot. Without really good pin contact, the NES10 lockout chip wouldn’t authenticate the cart, and the flashing red light and blanking screen were the indicators for authentication failure. Using a game genie increased the stress on those pins due to its altered insertion angle for the cartridge. So it wasn’t your imagination: game genie really did “break” your NES.

As it turns out though, the pin array can be easily removed and serviced (just clean the pins and gently bend them back into shape) with next to zero risk of damaging the NES. Of course, none of us had the web to look any of this up back in the day, and we were left with schoolyard superstitions like blowing on the cartridge. Now though, it’s quite easy to get a “dead” NES working again. Or just get the revised NES model from 1993 that dumped the NES10 lockout chip and the failure prone front loading slot.

>> The ancient Greeks seem to have been incredibly xenophobic and negatively disposed towards other peoples.

I don't know that they were any more xenophobic than is inherent in all peoples. While Barbarian is a Greek word, it's also important to note that in the Greek context it didn't have the Roman implications of lack of civilization: it simply meant a non-Greek speaking people.

During the Bronze Age, the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations were highly imitative (and pale imitations at that) of the hydraulic civilizations that had taken hold in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Near East. These immediate predecessors of the Greeks were much poorer than, much less powerful than, and geographically at the periphery of what was then the heart of civilization. As a consequence, there's a certain sense of material inferiority in Ancient Greek culture from the beginning.

In much of Greek literature, the East is portrayed as being much wealthier and more powerful, with greater societal sophistication and stratification. In contrast, the Greeks view themselves as poorer, but scrappier, less sophisticated and urbane, but more egalitarian and self-determined, physically weaker, but morally stronger. The Greeks certainly viewed themselves as a "better" people overall, but that didn't prevent them from feeling a sort of awe towards their more ancient neighbors, particularly Egypt and Persia.

Likewise, the Greeks absolutely could feel empathy for the other civilizations they came in conflict with: Aeschylus's The Persians presented the glorious Athenian defensive naval victory at Salamis from the perspective of the death and suffering it inflicted on the Persian people. Aeschylus's The Persians was submitted for tragic competition less than 10 years after the events it depicted, events that would have led to the destruction of Greek civilization and the enslavement of its people had the battle gone the other way. It won first prize.

Finally, the Greeks, if Herodotus's Histories is any indication, had a deep curiosity in the cultures of other peoples. Herodotus wasn't afraid of making judgements about other cultures, but he wasn't afraid of learning from them or advocating some of their customs either. More than anything, Herodotus felt that there were things that Greeks could learn by traveling among and talking with non-Greeks. Herodotus was surely an outlier as compared to the typical Greek farmer, but the fact that Herodotus's work was instantly acclaimed and kept alive to the present tells you that it had a significant Ancient Greek audience, and wasn't just appreciated in posterity.

My understanding is that it's not that significant in terms of lines of code in the codebase, but it is significant in terms of its official support and its rate of growth.

> It's a story about a man trying to get home, and a woman staying faithful in the face of uncertainty. Anything else is reading too much into it.

Of the 24 books of the Odyssey, Odysseus' famous seafaring wanderings account for just 4. Likewise, the narrative focuses on Odysseus in 20 out of the 24 books, and he is at home, on Ithaca, for 12 of them. Clearly, Odysseus trying to get home is not the main point of the story, however memorable some of his nautical adventures are.

If you ask me, the poem is about barbarism versus civilization, revenge versus justice, family, and the nature of heroism.

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War

While a different program, Google's Engineering Residency reportedly pays about $100k, depending on location. I would imagine that the Brain Residency pays something comparable.

You misunderstand my final comment. Under the original system there was no popular vote for President. If we still adhered to the original system, the main candidates for President in 2016 would be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, and if the state legislatures maintained their current partisan split, then Jeb Bush would be the heavy favorite to win. Trump would be a non-factor since he wouldn't have had the institutional support of the GOP across enough of the state legislatures to really be in contention.

As for your characterizations of Clinton and Trump, let me say I disagree. Someone who looked at Tiananmen Square and openly cheered the "strength" used in putting down pro-democracy protesters, and indeed continues to praise strongmen everywhere as models of leadership, is someone whose values are fundamentally incompatible with leading a democracy. Why that is less objectionable than a generic center-left candidate who is a bit too cozy with monied interests is beyond me.

As I understand it, the Constitution was designed to provide several layers of indirection when selecting federal officials. In the original design before subsequent amendment, voters only directly elected their congress person and their state legislatures. US Senators were behind one layer of indirection, being selected by state legislatures who were selected by popular vote. The Presidency was behind two layers of indirection: selected by vote of electors, who were selected by state legislatures, who were selected by popular vote. Finally, the Justices of the Supreme Court sit behind multiple layers of indirection: nominated by a President who is selected by electors, and confirmed by Senators, with both electors and Senators selected by state legislatures, who in turn were selected by popular vote. The idea was that the greater individual role an office had in preserving the constitutional system, the more insulated they were from the direct influence of unruly voters, and the more institutional support was necessary to assume office.

I always thought this system was overly complex and did not adequately respect the views of the people, but now in the year of Trump, it increasingly seems like a wise idea lol.

Sure, it's called The Ruin, and is available in the following collection: https://archive.org/details/anglosaxonnorsep00chadrich

It had been a while since I read it, and on rereading it, I'm not convinced the narrator was ignorant of who built the ruins he is looking at. Nevertheless, it's a pretty amazing artifact of someone looking at the ruins of collapsed culture, imagining how grand it must have been in comparison to the bleak present.

Maybe. On the other hand if the place is visibly menacing, and anyone who visits it gets sick and/or dies, then wouldn't a culture otherwise ignorant of the dangers of nuclear waste quickly put two and two together and stay away from the haunted, evil place? Shrug I don't have the expertise to judge whether this will be effective or not so it's all just supposition on my part.

Admittedly, I haven't read the article, but the tone of the message suggests that it's not meant for future generations of our civilization, but for future generations of whatever cultures come after our civilization is gone.

There's a pretty remarkable old English poem that survived from Dark Ages Britain, in which the author marvels at the ruins of Roman Britain, wondering what giants must have once inhabited the land in order to build such things. From the sounds of it, these markers are targeted towards people like that, not our own immediate descendents who will already know it's a nuclear waste site.