Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Day 5 of NaNoWriMo. Day 1 was surprisingly fluid, especially considering that I didn't start writing until getting home from work, and had only gotten about 4-5 hours' sleep the night before as a result of being a good Samaritan. Day 2 was torture, getting the words on the page was like pulling teeth. Days 3 and 4 have been pretty plain sailing. On the whole I'd say I'm enjoying the process so far. I crossed the 7k mark this morning - perhaps the part of the experience I'm most surprised by is how easily I've found it to write on the train during my commute.
I tried doing NaNoWriMo before, I think in 2021, but gave up literally on the first day as I had only the vaguest idea of what I wanted to write about. The difference in this case is that I've had a month's planning going into it, so at the outset I knew what had to happen when, the names of most of the major characters etc. This has made all the difference in the world in motivating me to keep writing.
RationalWiki used to call this "crank magnetism": people who are receptive to one "crazy" opinion rarely limit themselves to just that. In other words, "don't be so open-minded your brain falls out". I'm not linking to RationalWiki, because it's RationalWiki.
Another way of framing it is that once you've established that conventional wisdom on some topic is wrong (perhaps even knowingly wrong i.e. the powers that be know what the truth is and are keeping it from you), it's only natural to wonder what other topics are so affected. To name but two people, Graham Linehan and Lionel Shriver have both admitted that realising the extent to which the mainstream lied to them about the transgender issue (as they see it) made them sceptical about whether climate change is real.
Folamh3
17d ago
I read Lying for Money earlier this year, and enjoyed it so much that I'm rereading it. Just as entertaining on the second pass.
Folamh3
17d ago
Forgive me if this question has already been asked. What would this medical report imply for Khelif's lawsuit against JK Rowling and Elon Musk, if anything? If Khelif has testicles (and is hence a man/male by any reasonable definition of either term), how can Khelif claim JK Rowling defamed Khelif by describing Khelif as such?
Folamh3
20d ago
Started playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker around 11 last night and ended up staying up till around 2. Very absorbing, the methodical gameplay really appeals to me, and the zero-g six degrees of freedom movement with conserved momentum is nauseating (in a good way). My first death really took me by surprise.
My point is not that having lived experience will lead you to have a more accurate picture of how the world works. I'm saying that if you have lived experience of X, if you're writing a book about X, then all things being equal it will probably sound more convincing than a book about X written by someone who has never experienced X firsthand.
Could a novel written by an underprivileged black youth about his experiences growing up in the hood contribute to a progressive's erroneous impression that unprovoked police shootings of unarmed black men are widespread? Sure. But all things being equal, I would expect such a novel to be a lot more affecting and convincing than a novel on the same topic written by a creative writing MFA from a wealthy family who's never even set foot in the hood.
If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that.
Sure, but even having broadly comparable lived experience might be more beneficial to the creative process than just pure research. The experience of fighting a battle in Baghdad in 2003 is unlike the experience of fighting a battle in the Somme in 1916, but I would expect that the two experiences have far more in common with each other than they have with the experience of sitting in a warm cottage with a pot of tea reading a book about the battle of the Somme.
Folamh3
20d ago
I read The Hurt Locker, it was pretty good. Although I was really talking about movies etc. rather than books - did anyone involved in making the adaptation actually go to Iraq?
Folamh3
20d ago
According to his biography:
Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs
While I have mixed feelings about Oliver Stone, I have to concede that at least his confrontational "war is hell" movies about Vietnam actually drew on his personal experiences of serving there. Which leads me to an interesting question - have there been any films about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan written or directed by people who took part in said invasions?
Folamh3
20d ago
I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies
I have this thought every time I watch a movie directed by John Carney. It's as if he's an alien who's never met a human being face to face and only learned how they talk and behave from watching movies. Oppenheimer gave me the same feeling.
I keep coming back to this article by a guy talking about the National Book Awards, and how they've become increasingly insular and self-referential over time. He talks about how previous generations of award-winning books were written by people who had actual practical "lived experience" of the things they were writing about (e.g. Hemingway actually fought in a war), often without having ever attended college. Increasingly, the people winning or being nominated for these awards are people who hold MFAs in creative writing and have never lived outside of the academy for any significant period of time. They're books written by people who learned everything they know about life from reading other books, rather than from the primary sources of actually doing and experiencing things firsthand.
Pointedly, he notes that previous generations of award-winning books often had mass populist appeal and were just as widely read by ordinary people and educated people. Increasingly, National Book Award-winning novels are novels you've never heard of: they're written by and for MFA graduates.
There was a campaign video (which I haven't seen) where Vance tried to present himself as a "regular dude" by going into a donut shop and buying a box of donuts. Apparently the person behind the counter wasn't interested in taking part, Vance stumbled over his words and the whole thing was awkward and uncomfortable for everyone.
Folamh3
21d ago
Tangentially related but this reminds me of a tweet playfully mocking Vance which I found pretty funny, primarily just for how it was phrased:
[vice presidential debate]
moderator: what makes you smile
tim walz: my kids
jd vance: pass
moderator: what’s your favorite donut
jd vance: what if i killed you
Folamh3
21d ago
Anyone starting to feel like there's nothing really that dystopic about A Clockwork Orange?
Folamh3
21d ago
I mean, we do have our token progressives. Darwin/guesswho was active as recently as April, and I had a spirited and productive debate with @TokenTransGirl more recently than that.
Deiseach is still active in the ACX comment section. Reading between the lines I get the impression he lives they live in Ireland.
I'd love to see a source for this claim. According to Wikipedia, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting research into coronaviruses in bats as early as 2005.
In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.
That sounds pretty similar to GoF to me.
Also:
[In 2014], the US government granted exceptions to the GoFR moratorium to 7 out of 18 research projects that had been affected.
Folamh3
22d ago
Since you asked for modern works, a world without the film Tár would be poorer than one with it.
To me, it seems like it's useful to have that stuff around, just as a canary test that free speech is really working.
Of course, I'm not calling for creepy fetish art to be banned. Just like "hate speech" - I think that people yelling racial slurs makes our culture slightly worse, but I'm not calling for them to be banned.
I placed a bet a few weeks ago that Trump would win the presidency, and a second bet that Kamala would win the popular vote. Earlier this week I was thinking "well I'll lose the former, but I'll still win the latter".
But now it's looking like there's a good chance I might win the former and lose the latter! Never saw this coming.
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