[Admin mode] Doing some maintenance behind the scenes, might be a bit slow for the afternoon. Hoping the maintenance will improve overall performance.
It just occurred to me that people who pronounce "actor" as "hawk tuah" want to tell us how to vote to run the country.
Either way, can we make John Bolton the ambassador to space and then just shoot him in a rocket into space? We can make it a lifetime appointment.
I sometimes wonder if AI will get so good someday that it'll be able to take your life's worth of social media posts and turn it into a simulacrum of yourself. Once I'm gone, will an advanced AI be able to take all my effortposts from the fediverse and create a longwinded, incredibly pretentious version of me (to fit my posts on the fediverse :P)?
I feel like anyone who doesn't see the story as redemptive has never been in the dark place as a NEET hikikomori.
I spent some time as one after a pretty good job I had right after high school ended. Part of the reason was that I was in the rust belt and the town's main employer just laid off 2/3rds of its workforce so every minimum wage job in town already had plenty of applicants, but I won't pretend it wasn't also somewhat my own fault for having some unrealistic expectations about the world. It was my millennial reality check. I wasn't going to get life on easy mode because being good on computers was a secret cheat skill and I was going to go work for cisco making six figures to start. I ultimately did get a job, but it was a shitty job pumping gas for half of minimum wage (no idea how that worked, I just needed a job)
Yes, that was almost 25 years ago now. Today I'm married, I have a son, I have a job scrubbing toilets at a truck stop (or something like that). It was an 8 month period back then, but I'm often reminded that my life didn't have to turn out the way it did. I meet NEETs, or I meet people who have fallen off and didn't make it to a good life in other ways, and I can see how easily I could have become that person. The way I ensured I did not wasn't by waiting until I became perfect, it was by leaving my room. It was by breaking down the walls I built between me and the outside world and showing who I was to people including the fact that I was and still am imperfect.
It isn't just about physically leaving your room, it's about a cycle of fear and self-loathing that makes you desperately want to go back even if someone coerces you outside for a few minutes. People who point out that Rudeus has negative characteristics doesn't realize that part of getting out of your room, getting out of your house, getting out of your yard, is realizing that it's ok to be imperfect, and everyone has their own imperfections, and the world isn't going to immediately and irrationally hate you for not being perfect. If you meet a woman and she realizes you like T&A it isn't this immediately disqualifying thing, and all the people on the Internet talking like there's a secret cabal waiting there for you to mess up even once and let the secret out that you're actually a man.
Then you're trapped on the Internet (I'm old so it was dial-up for me back then, and you had a limited number of hours even), and while the world outside seems so scary the Internet seems so inviting, like it doesn't care that you're weird. Altavista will just serve up the next search query without asking questions. It's why after the Internet became popular the phenomenon became so much more common.
In the end, Rudeus being imperfect is a requirement for the real redemption story -- it's about him going out into the world and being genuine and flawed and finding the courage to keep putting himself out there despite the fact that he's imperfect and he knows he's imperfect. Along the way, he also grows into a still flawed but significantly better person than he ever was in his previous life.
For the people who point out Rudeus is still flawed at this point in the story, the question needs to be: Should he go lock himself up in his mansion until he stops being a pervert then? Will that help? Should he lock himself up in the sex dungeon in his basement and stay there until he dies to ensure he doesn't accidentally offend a woman? He could, but he's had a positive effect on many people despite his flaws, including a major positive influence on Eris, Sylphie, and Roxie. Eris would have died on the demon continent if Rudeus wasn't there. Sylphie would never have learned the magic she did and would have died in the fall after the teleportation incident. If he didn't have that redemption of choosing to leave his room in this world, of choosing to make connections with people, of choosing to be open and let people in and not just put on a fake facade of what he thinks people want to see about him, none of that would have happened.
This is already kinda too long, but my favorite direct hikiomori story is Rozen Maiden, and in particular season 1. One of the top moments in anime of all time for me is in Episode 11 where Jun's sister Nori is inside Jun's inner world, and it's filled with his self-doubt and all the reasons he's a loser keep playing on TVs in a dead world. She doesn't snap him out of it by saying he's perfect, she snaps him out of it by saying everyone is struggling, everyone is failing, and admits she's struggling because she feels like a loser for not being able to help her little brother. It speaks to exactly what I'm talking about that the key isn't to be perfect, but to just get out there and try and not let your self-doubt stop you. (I've attached a copy of the video, but unfortunately it's the far inferior dub because I couldn't find the sub anywhere)
I spent some time as one after a pretty good job I had right after high school ended. Part of the reason was that I was in the rust belt and the town's main employer just laid off 2/3rds of its workforce so every minimum wage job in town already had plenty of applicants, but I won't pretend it wasn't also somewhat my own fault for having some unrealistic expectations about the world. It was my millennial reality check. I wasn't going to get life on easy mode because being good on computers was a secret cheat skill and I was going to go work for cisco making six figures to start. I ultimately did get a job, but it was a shitty job pumping gas for half of minimum wage (no idea how that worked, I just needed a job)
Yes, that was almost 25 years ago now. Today I'm married, I have a son, I have a job scrubbing toilets at a truck stop (or something like that). It was an 8 month period back then, but I'm often reminded that my life didn't have to turn out the way it did. I meet NEETs, or I meet people who have fallen off and didn't make it to a good life in other ways, and I can see how easily I could have become that person. The way I ensured I did not wasn't by waiting until I became perfect, it was by leaving my room. It was by breaking down the walls I built between me and the outside world and showing who I was to people including the fact that I was and still am imperfect.
It isn't just about physically leaving your room, it's about a cycle of fear and self-loathing that makes you desperately want to go back even if someone coerces you outside for a few minutes. People who point out that Rudeus has negative characteristics doesn't realize that part of getting out of your room, getting out of your house, getting out of your yard, is realizing that it's ok to be imperfect, and everyone has their own imperfections, and the world isn't going to immediately and irrationally hate you for not being perfect. If you meet a woman and she realizes you like T&A it isn't this immediately disqualifying thing, and all the people on the Internet talking like there's a secret cabal waiting there for you to mess up even once and let the secret out that you're actually a man.
Then you're trapped on the Internet (I'm old so it was dial-up for me back then, and you had a limited number of hours even), and while the world outside seems so scary the Internet seems so inviting, like it doesn't care that you're weird. Altavista will just serve up the next search query without asking questions. It's why after the Internet became popular the phenomenon became so much more common.
In the end, Rudeus being imperfect is a requirement for the real redemption story -- it's about him going out into the world and being genuine and flawed and finding the courage to keep putting himself out there despite the fact that he's imperfect and he knows he's imperfect. Along the way, he also grows into a still flawed but significantly better person than he ever was in his previous life.
For the people who point out Rudeus is still flawed at this point in the story, the question needs to be: Should he go lock himself up in his mansion until he stops being a pervert then? Will that help? Should he lock himself up in the sex dungeon in his basement and stay there until he dies to ensure he doesn't accidentally offend a woman? He could, but he's had a positive effect on many people despite his flaws, including a major positive influence on Eris, Sylphie, and Roxie. Eris would have died on the demon continent if Rudeus wasn't there. Sylphie would never have learned the magic she did and would have died in the fall after the teleportation incident. If he didn't have that redemption of choosing to leave his room in this world, of choosing to make connections with people, of choosing to be open and let people in and not just put on a fake facade of what he thinks people want to see about him, none of that would have happened.
This is already kinda too long, but my favorite direct hikiomori story is Rozen Maiden, and in particular season 1. One of the top moments in anime of all time for me is in Episode 11 where Jun's sister Nori is inside Jun's inner world, and it's filled with his self-doubt and all the reasons he's a loser keep playing on TVs in a dead world. She doesn't snap him out of it by saying he's perfect, she snaps him out of it by saying everyone is struggling, everyone is failing, and admits she's struggling because she feels like a loser for not being able to help her little brother. It speaks to exactly what I'm talking about that the key isn't to be perfect, but to just get out there and try and not let your self-doubt stop you. (I've attached a copy of the video, but unfortunately it's the far inferior dub because I couldn't find the sub anywhere)
The perfectly natural process of seed oil extraction would happen in nature anyway if nobody was doing it so why are we being kept from our delicious seed oils?!?!
3d printed a replacement wheel for this farm truck because the original one suffered a little accident. About 5 seconds in tinkercad, about 7 minutes on the printer, about 1 minute with a lighter pushing the new wheel on, and now we're hopefully good for another year.
This generation was actually going to look great as grandma's, because most of the people who wouldn't aren't having kids...
It's literally the only good thing Trudeau did.
A lot of sketchy people lost a lot of "friends" that month.
A lot of sketchy people lost a lot of "friends" that month.
What kind of racist country is America even?! Everyone who is racist knows how much of the country is black!
And she said she's going to try to run again in 2028!
Someone's going to have to explain to me exactly what she thinks she's going to bring to the table in 2028 that she wasn't able to this year.
Someone's going to have to explain to me exactly what she thinks she's going to bring to the table in 2028 that she wasn't able to this year.
Which fitness test measures how much you masturbate?
"Hung lo! You are strong, smart, brave, but you failed the masturbation test! We will not let you fight in World War 3"
"Not allowed to join World War 3 due to grip strength too strong"
"Hung lo! You are strong, smart, brave, but you failed the masturbation test! We will not let you fight in World War 3"
"Not allowed to join World War 3 due to grip strength too strong"
One of the important meta-lessons of the matrix movies is to have a new set of values ready because once you tear down what such people know they'll be horrible without anything to replace it.
Which would be classical virtue ethics paired with Christian guilt ethics I think.
Which would be classical virtue ethics paired with Christian guilt ethics I think.
Well I think that there's two points to be made here.
The first is that a lot of the issues in Japan today are a direct effect of modernist ideology. The fact that you can use modern ideology to get everyone together to push for a certain goal is one of the reasons for the acceptance of an extremely poor work-life balance, everyone ends up focusing on ganbatte as a cultural touchstone, and the reality is that modernisms focus on productivity and a shared cultural goal and certain elements of Life has those same negative connotations. The fact that kids work so hard in school and then leave school and go to work so hard at work is exactly because modernism tends to drive everything towards the one goal of modernism.
Japanese democracy and rule of law are arguably just as corrupted as for example Victorian England's corruption of democracy and rule of law. Both are parliamentary democracies with a relatively weak emperor or King at the top of the hierarchy. Modern society during the Western modern age was also dramatically imperfect, which is one of the reasons that the World wars ended up happening.
The other point I think is that it doesn't really matter whether Japan is truly successful or is just maintaining face, in terms of acting as a repository of modernist ideology for a fallen postmodern West. We can see absolutely the problems with postmodernism in the west, whereas Japan is a very orderly society perhaps too much so, the West is accepting of a lot of horrific crimes without really judging those crimes to the extent that they should because postmodernism rejects Grand narratives and most values. If you'd rather walk outside at night in a postmodern society or a modern society the question is absolutely indisputable.
But a return to mere modernism definitely isn't going to save the West. We can see from both modern and postmodern societies that both ideologies have massive blind spots that end up with the extinction of its people. However, what is undoubtedly necessary in the west is for a return to an ideology that at least recognizes that virtue exists and is something worth striving towards and that some ideas are good and some are bad and goodness and badness of ideas does exist.
A lot of your criticisms could be levied against the Arab world, they are absolutely tribal, in a lot of ways they are backwards, they ended up facing a period of massive humiliation because in spite of a fairly warlike ethos they we're just rolled over by the West in the world wars, and that's one of the reasons why they've returned to the highly conservative religious doctrines that they're in right now. None of the criticisms of the Arabs change the fact that their work ended up helping to fuel the Western Renaissance.
Also note that the advancements of the Renaissance were not towards a return to classical culture. What resulted was a synthesis of Christian culture and classical culture which actually ultimately resulted in modernism. This suggests that the west, even if strongly affected by Japanese modernism, isn't going to just move into that but into something different based on the cultural zeitgeist at the time, for better or for worse.
The first is that a lot of the issues in Japan today are a direct effect of modernist ideology. The fact that you can use modern ideology to get everyone together to push for a certain goal is one of the reasons for the acceptance of an extremely poor work-life balance, everyone ends up focusing on ganbatte as a cultural touchstone, and the reality is that modernisms focus on productivity and a shared cultural goal and certain elements of Life has those same negative connotations. The fact that kids work so hard in school and then leave school and go to work so hard at work is exactly because modernism tends to drive everything towards the one goal of modernism.
Japanese democracy and rule of law are arguably just as corrupted as for example Victorian England's corruption of democracy and rule of law. Both are parliamentary democracies with a relatively weak emperor or King at the top of the hierarchy. Modern society during the Western modern age was also dramatically imperfect, which is one of the reasons that the World wars ended up happening.
The other point I think is that it doesn't really matter whether Japan is truly successful or is just maintaining face, in terms of acting as a repository of modernist ideology for a fallen postmodern West. We can see absolutely the problems with postmodernism in the west, whereas Japan is a very orderly society perhaps too much so, the West is accepting of a lot of horrific crimes without really judging those crimes to the extent that they should because postmodernism rejects Grand narratives and most values. If you'd rather walk outside at night in a postmodern society or a modern society the question is absolutely indisputable.
But a return to mere modernism definitely isn't going to save the West. We can see from both modern and postmodern societies that both ideologies have massive blind spots that end up with the extinction of its people. However, what is undoubtedly necessary in the west is for a return to an ideology that at least recognizes that virtue exists and is something worth striving towards and that some ideas are good and some are bad and goodness and badness of ideas does exist.
A lot of your criticisms could be levied against the Arab world, they are absolutely tribal, in a lot of ways they are backwards, they ended up facing a period of massive humiliation because in spite of a fairly warlike ethos they we're just rolled over by the West in the world wars, and that's one of the reasons why they've returned to the highly conservative religious doctrines that they're in right now. None of the criticisms of the Arabs change the fact that their work ended up helping to fuel the Western Renaissance.
Also note that the advancements of the Renaissance were not towards a return to classical culture. What resulted was a synthesis of Christian culture and classical culture which actually ultimately resulted in modernism. This suggests that the west, even if strongly affected by Japanese modernism, isn't going to just move into that but into something different based on the cultural zeitgeist at the time, for better or for worse.
Historically, it makes sense to consider Japan as a contemporary modern state, and the west's nations as contemporary postmodern states. The people who rebuilt Japan after World War 2 were somewhat conservative -- businessmen and military men -- and so rebuilt the world to the ethos they understood, which was modernism. You can see this in their media which may question narratives but does not wholesale reject them. Japan is a fundamentally conservative country who modernized because they realized if they did not the colonial powers would eat them whole just as they did to much of the modern world in the era before World War 1.
Both the west and Japan use the trope of the bad guy who turns out not to have been a bad guy after all. There's a big difference in how the two accomplish this trope, however. The west believes in destroying existing standards and narratives, so it asks the question "Maybe what Dr. Evil is trying to do isn't so bad after all? From another perspective maybe trying to stop him from using his moon laser to blow up the earth is wrong?". Japan derives this trope from the Chinese stories "Journey to the west" in which the evil can be chastened to understand they have been wrong and convinced (through either force or reason) to change their evil ways and become good, suggesting that there is a good and that people ought to strive towards that good.
Modernism isn't perfect, mind you. There's a reason why it ultimately failed in the west despite its overwhelming successes. It helps align entire peoples towards a set goal, it has a focus on rationality and moral certitude which helps ensure modernist people are good people. It has a drive towards progress with a positive end goal in mind but that drive can push a people to feel morally justified to go well beyond what would normally be considered just. The world wars shattered the modernist mindset in part because they showed that the European man was not as morally perfect as his modernist ideals suggest he was.
On the other hand, modernism is incredibly powerful as an ideology. It allowed tiny Great Britain, an island nation so tiny you could barely find it on a map if you weren't looking carefully, to take over an empire so massive the sun never set on it. It produced almost every technology we consider important today. It massively increased the human population and increased the quality of life of people. Look at Japan, and consider that a tiny island nation is a cultural and manufacturing powerhouse, renowned around the world despite the country being an insular backwater just 200 years ago before the arrival of Commodore Perry's ironclad steamships.
I sometimes think of Japan as similar to the Muslim world during its golden age during the time after the fall of the Roman empire. The west lost a lot during the fall of that empire, but the Muslim world was still carrying on philosophical traditions of antiquity -- both maintaining transcripts and building on them. When that work finally made it back to the west, it sparked the renaissance as the wisdom of antiquity combined with the internal advancements of Europe at that time to produce something new and powerful. I tend to think that Japan is successful in part because there's a thirst for the positive traits of modernism in the west. Entire generations of kids are growing up not watching the dreck being produced by Hollywood for the most part, and instead is gravitating towards the modern storytelling of Japan. It's only a matter of time until that fact ends up leeching into the culture and media of the west, perhaps seeing a postmodern resurgence of modernism.
Both the west and Japan use the trope of the bad guy who turns out not to have been a bad guy after all. There's a big difference in how the two accomplish this trope, however. The west believes in destroying existing standards and narratives, so it asks the question "Maybe what Dr. Evil is trying to do isn't so bad after all? From another perspective maybe trying to stop him from using his moon laser to blow up the earth is wrong?". Japan derives this trope from the Chinese stories "Journey to the west" in which the evil can be chastened to understand they have been wrong and convinced (through either force or reason) to change their evil ways and become good, suggesting that there is a good and that people ought to strive towards that good.
Modernism isn't perfect, mind you. There's a reason why it ultimately failed in the west despite its overwhelming successes. It helps align entire peoples towards a set goal, it has a focus on rationality and moral certitude which helps ensure modernist people are good people. It has a drive towards progress with a positive end goal in mind but that drive can push a people to feel morally justified to go well beyond what would normally be considered just. The world wars shattered the modernist mindset in part because they showed that the European man was not as morally perfect as his modernist ideals suggest he was.
On the other hand, modernism is incredibly powerful as an ideology. It allowed tiny Great Britain, an island nation so tiny you could barely find it on a map if you weren't looking carefully, to take over an empire so massive the sun never set on it. It produced almost every technology we consider important today. It massively increased the human population and increased the quality of life of people. Look at Japan, and consider that a tiny island nation is a cultural and manufacturing powerhouse, renowned around the world despite the country being an insular backwater just 200 years ago before the arrival of Commodore Perry's ironclad steamships.
I sometimes think of Japan as similar to the Muslim world during its golden age during the time after the fall of the Roman empire. The west lost a lot during the fall of that empire, but the Muslim world was still carrying on philosophical traditions of antiquity -- both maintaining transcripts and building on them. When that work finally made it back to the west, it sparked the renaissance as the wisdom of antiquity combined with the internal advancements of Europe at that time to produce something new and powerful. I tend to think that Japan is successful in part because there's a thirst for the positive traits of modernism in the west. Entire generations of kids are growing up not watching the dreck being produced by Hollywood for the most part, and instead is gravitating towards the modern storytelling of Japan. It's only a matter of time until that fact ends up leeching into the culture and media of the west, perhaps seeing a postmodern resurgence of modernism.
I was reading "Enough with this slow life! I was reincarnated as a High elf and now I'm bored volume 7" the same day I wrote the article about the Matrix, and it had a great scene in the first third of the book that proves my point. Spoilers, I guess.
In the story, we've seen the main character spend decades learning to fight with a sword to honor his teacher. We've seen him master magic with a great mage. We've seen him make friends with many different people, and become a world-class blacksmith and later learn to make magical weapons. We've seen him help build a nation, and we've seen him help to win a war.
He is approached by one of four true dragons in this world asking "Do you want me to destroy this world?", and he had previously made friends with that dragon but he said "No, and if you try I'll fight you". The dragon was his friend and took that as proof that the world was still worth saving so they go off to fight another high elf who wanted to destroy the planet to kill all the humans.
The two of them in their capacity as high elves are roughly equal, but he's slightly stronger with a bow. His opponent is surrounded by the spirits of dead high elves from the war that broke her heart and made her want to destroy the world. With his century of mastery of the sword he learned from the humans, coupled with the sword he crafted with lessons he learned from the dwarves teaching him blacksmithing imbued with magic the mages taught him, he was stronger than the other high elf and would be capable of beating her, except with the spirits of the dead high elves around her he'd have to kill her, and he despaired because he didn't want to kill her. As he prepared to do what was required, the spirits from his village alongside all the spirits he'd met in the blacksmithing forges, and in the waters he sailed, and in the wind against his back as he walked, and in the statues he created from stone came to back him up. It never said it out loud, but it was obvious that this battle was actually about the connections each fighter had gained, and it wasn't even close. With all the connections he'd formed with all kinds of people through his travels he was able to stop the other high elf without killing her, and that thread of the story ended (One of the story's core themes is that there's a lot going on because the high elf lives for 1000 years, 300 years longer than even the elves, so we revisit people and places and their descendants, so there's another book and a half)
It hits so many different points I mentioned in that post -- winning through superior diligence and industriousness, winning through connections with everyone you've met along the way, focusing not just on winning but on being just in doing so. One side had the angry spirits of dead soldiers, the other side had the spirits of nature. One side actively sent its spirits to attack, the other only used its spirits to defend.
I actually got a bit misty eyed at the whole thing, because it was a beautiful moment after 7 volumes, even if it was just a tiny piece of the book (I said in another post that this series of books are super dense)
In the story, we've seen the main character spend decades learning to fight with a sword to honor his teacher. We've seen him master magic with a great mage. We've seen him make friends with many different people, and become a world-class blacksmith and later learn to make magical weapons. We've seen him help build a nation, and we've seen him help to win a war.
He is approached by one of four true dragons in this world asking "Do you want me to destroy this world?", and he had previously made friends with that dragon but he said "No, and if you try I'll fight you". The dragon was his friend and took that as proof that the world was still worth saving so they go off to fight another high elf who wanted to destroy the planet to kill all the humans.
The two of them in their capacity as high elves are roughly equal, but he's slightly stronger with a bow. His opponent is surrounded by the spirits of dead high elves from the war that broke her heart and made her want to destroy the world. With his century of mastery of the sword he learned from the humans, coupled with the sword he crafted with lessons he learned from the dwarves teaching him blacksmithing imbued with magic the mages taught him, he was stronger than the other high elf and would be capable of beating her, except with the spirits of the dead high elves around her he'd have to kill her, and he despaired because he didn't want to kill her. As he prepared to do what was required, the spirits from his village alongside all the spirits he'd met in the blacksmithing forges, and in the waters he sailed, and in the wind against his back as he walked, and in the statues he created from stone came to back him up. It never said it out loud, but it was obvious that this battle was actually about the connections each fighter had gained, and it wasn't even close. With all the connections he'd formed with all kinds of people through his travels he was able to stop the other high elf without killing her, and that thread of the story ended (One of the story's core themes is that there's a lot going on because the high elf lives for 1000 years, 300 years longer than even the elves, so we revisit people and places and their descendants, so there's another book and a half)
It hits so many different points I mentioned in that post -- winning through superior diligence and industriousness, winning through connections with everyone you've met along the way, focusing not just on winning but on being just in doing so. One side had the angry spirits of dead soldiers, the other side had the spirits of nature. One side actively sent its spirits to attack, the other only used its spirits to defend.
I actually got a bit misty eyed at the whole thing, because it was a beautiful moment after 7 volumes, even if it was just a tiny piece of the book (I said in another post that this series of books are super dense)