Its been a long time, like I said I read it right when it came out. I’m glad people enjoyed it! It was quite an investment, and I loved most of the books leading up, even the Wizard and the Glass. You all make some good points but it just didn’t hit me that way and I’m not liable to go back. I hardly read any fiction anymore, except the occasional classic, Philip K Dick, or whenever Joe Abercrombie comes out with a new book I’ll usually pick it up.
I hated book 7, ruined the whole series
I hated book 7. Ruined the whole series for me. I read the last 3 books (excluding Wind through the Keyhole, I’m done) when they came out, book 6 was just a setup/tease for book 7 and I was so excited for it. But it was so dumb and disappointing. I’ve talked to people who liked the ending and I just don’t get it. 6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it’s just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades. You have to suspend so much disbelief to get there, trudge through thousands of pages, and it’s just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
I was singing this the other day to my wife and she was confused. Haven’t listened to Bungle since college, gotta dig Disco Volente out soon
I recommend Clown Core all the time, but yeah it’s not for normies
“I Got a Feeling” by Neva Denova. It’s not a famous band or song, but its so incredibly sad and angry and nihilistic and there’s nothing else that comes close. When I’m feeling really shitty though, it kind of cheers me up. It has this long sing-along outro, “The world’s a shitty place, and I can’t wait to die.” But after repeating this over and over the song ends and someone in the background says affectionately, “I’m just kidding world, you know I love you.” I’ve struggled with intrusive negative thoughts for most of my life, and there is something cathartic about having my internal pain externalized in song-form, and that final line is like a voice I’ve had to develop that fights against all the negativity, to like survive the worst of the blackest depressions. Except instead of taking no small amount of energy to consciously or automatically summon that voice, it comes easy; it’s right on the recording, and it plays every time.
I wouldn’t say I’m embarrassed to tell people about the song, but I do think people would worry about me if they knew I listened to it when at my worst. But it really makes me feel like, “well at least I’m not that depressed and nihilistic,” and it helps.
Noone believes that people have full freedom with no context, no extenuating circumstances. What makes arguments like this seem convincing is how uncommon it is for people to think dialectically.
Here’s a very good essay that steps through all of the different parts of the problem, and looks at different views historically. https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
To the hard deterministic explanation that “something always came before,” it asks “what is the role of the individual in history?”
This excerpt isn’t a substitute for reading the whole essay but it makes a point pretty concisely:
But let us return to our subject. A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes. Carlyle, in his well-known book on heroes and hero-worship, calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others. He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying these needs. He is a hero. But he is not a hero in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course. Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal, and the power is terrible.
Why are we assuming we don’t have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.
The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, “assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?”
Sorry to be a soulsborne weeb but I have something like 1500 hours in bloodborne and I still pick it up from time to time
I don’t know, maybe a proclivity but our family wasn’t really the type for diagnosing mh disorders. I had to fight like hell to get my own diagnoses as an adult.
Quitting smoking and vaping is harder, last year was the first time in my life where, after not having a cig in a long time, I was at a thing and people were smoking and I bummed one and it was absolutely disgusting to me. Felt great to hate it tbh.
But in like 13-15 years of habitual smoking I never had a psychotic episode from it.
Granted I was an almost constant user, I maintained a “high” basically from when I woke up until I went to bed at night. It was def a form of self medication, it did help with a lot of ADHD symptoms because rather than getting lazy I would get hyped and very active. Used it that way basically from a little before covid, all through covid, until November of last year. It did affect my work performance, looking back, but I interviewed for that job high, I went to work high most of the time, still got good reviews, raises and a promotion. I was addicted or dependent or whatever term you want to use. But like high functioning I guess.
But in November I crashed hard. Had a complete psychotic break. I thought the government was using 5g to beam mind control beams, an array of numbers containing hidden brainwashing instructions, to make me believe I was this person, when really I was a fake, an android put into this life to do their bidding, they killed the real me and I was the replacement, and this happened all the time, I just happened to pick up on one of their transmissions.
I’m a rational guy, I don’t know where this shit came from. I have pages in my notebook documenting it. Luckily my wife is amazing and I was kind of able to talk myself out of it enough to have her convince me and remind me of what was real. Since then I had to quit. I def got some intelligence points back. And I haven’t had any more episodes. But damn that scared the shit out of me. I didn’t even know it was possible.
Omg I remember having this argument with my friends. “Well there are some home remedies that work, modern medicine doesn’t have a monopoly on all knowledge” OK but homeopathic medicine just means its water, plain water that remembers being able to cure a disease, its fake “Yeah but they’re not all like that some of them work, my grandma would use a half of an onion to take the pain out of bee stings” jfc I’m literally not talking about that, I’m talking about water sold as medicine that is covered by most major insurance! look it up!
Cronenberg be cronenbergin
I think so. I’m kind and caring, I have really great friends who wouldn’t be if I wasn’t also a genuinely good person.
I haven’t always been but I always tried to be. For a long time I was really chaotic and had some personal issues that made it hard for me to like actually follow through with it. But I worked on myself a lot and I continue to. I still fuck up and I’m sure there’s people who think I’m a dick. But for the most part I’m a nice, kind person
Holy shit he cracked the code! This CEO finally found the solution to the mystery of the unhappy workers! CEOs truly are amazingly brilliant, thank god those workers have him to be the cure for their unhappiness. This is such amazing news. I wonder what other problems CEOs will solve for workers next?
Figure out how your boss is ripping off/stealing from the company with this outdated system
You see real democracy is when you subvert the will of the people and call it “checks and balances”.