FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
30m ago
Yeah, off the top of my head I couldn't remember which episodes were from which season. There are a few episodes from season 10 I remember enjoying as a teenager ("The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace", "Mayored to the Mob", "Viva Ned Flanders", "Screaming Yellow Honkers", "Maximum Homerdrive"), but I don't think I've watched any of them since, and suspect I wouldn't find them quite as amusing if I watched them again now. It looks like the most recent season containing an episode I watched as an adult and enjoyed was season 8, featuring "You Only Move Twice", "A Milhouse Divided" and "The Springfield Files" among others.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
42m ago
It seems odd to say that the casual fans are the ones who enjoy all of the output, where the hardcore fans are the ones who only like the best output.
By "hardcore fan", I'm referring to people who make a point of watching every episode when it comes out, buy the merch, know the lore etc. By "casual fan", I'm referring to people who will watch an episode when they're bored at home flicking through channels, but won't go out of their way to watch every episode. The impression I get is that the people who watch newly-released episodes of The Simpsons are mostly in the latter camp. I imagine if you surveyed people "in the last year, have you watched at least one episode of The Simpsons?", the number of people who would answer in the affirmative would be massive compared to the number of people who would answer positively to the question "have you watched every episode of the most recent season of The Simpsons?"
To illustrate, imagine you have a show with a hardcore fanbase of 1 million people, and a casual fanbase of 50 million people. The hardcore fans make a point of watching every single episode within a day or two of release, while the casual fans only watch the show when they're aimlessly flicking through channels, and only one in ten happens to land on it any given week. The show ends up with ratings of 6 million people per week, which comprises the same 1 million hardcore fans every week, plus a rotating roster of 5 million casual fans. The show eventually undergoes so much change and declining quality that it alienates the hardcore fans, but if the population of casual fans who'll tune to watch an episode occasionally is big enough, it can sustain the show even if it no longer really has a hardcore fanbase.
It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
That's very weasily wording. A permanent resident is not necessarily a Finn.
I agree, I was paraphrasing the citation I provided. It seems that's how Statistics Finland defines "a Finnish person". It's not the definition I would use, but it was the best one available.
Each of these countries has a smaller population than Israel
To nitpick your nitpick, Sweden's population is slightly higher than Israel's.
If Israel is not an ethnostate, then I just want European states to implement the same laws that will also make them not-ethnostates.
Fair enough, I don't think I'd really object to that. I do find it rather tiresome how the people criticising Israel for being an apartheid ethnostate never apply the same criticisms to, say, Japan or Korea.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
17hr ago
I'm calling it a speculative thriller, set in the medtech industry. If you're interested feel free to DM me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I see your point. But as I'm fond of noting, contrary to claims that Israel is an ethnically homogenous ethnostate, Arabs make up fully 21% of Israel's population, while 6% are listed as "other", meaning ethnic Jews only make up 73% of its population. How does that compare to the other countries you mentioned?
- According to the most recent census, 84% of Lithuania is Lithuanian.
- According to the most recent census, 63% of Latvia is Latvian.
- According to the most recent census, Estonia is 69% Estonian.
- According to the most recent census, Sweden is 72% Swedish.
- According to Statistics Finland, 89% of the current Finnish population were born to mothers who were permanently resident in Finland at the time of their birth
- According to a 2012 government study, Norway is 81% Norwegian.
- According to 2025 statistics, 84% of Denmark is Danish.
- According to the most recent census, 84% of Ireland is Irish.
- According to the CIA World Factbook, 79% of Iceland is Icelandic.
The total population of the countries listed above is ~40 million, and the percentage of that population who are considered native to their respective countries is about 79%. So contrary to claims of it being an ethnostate, Israel is actually more ethnically diverse than the average of all the countries you listed. The only countries which are more diverse are Latvia, Estonia and Sweden (and that last one could well be a rounding error). And it hardly needs stating that, in pretty much all of the countries listed above, the lion's share of the non-native population is made up of people from ethnic backgrounds closely related to that of the native population e.g. 24% of Latvia is Russian, as is 20% of Estonia; Scandinavians often migrate to their Scandinavian neighbours and so on.
Frankly, based on the countries you mentioned, I don't really buy this narrative of conniving Jewish rootless cosmopolitans pushing for the great replacement in foreign countries while jealously maintaining perfect ethnic homogeneity in their homeland. Lithuania, Finland, Ireland etc. are far closer to being ethnostates than Israel is, or ever was.
You might well object that, even if Israel is more ethnically diverse than a lot of people acknowledge, the Knesset aren't exactly pushing for open borders or letting in asylum seekers in their hundreds of thousands. That's a fair point. At the same time, Arab Israelis can vote, stand for election, serve in the military and so on, a majority of Arab Israelis consider themselves proud citizens of Israel, and if there are serious plans to ethnically cleanse Israel of its Arab population by forcible deportation, I'm not aware of it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Are you saying that white supremacist organisations are flocks of wolves?
Conservative estimates of when The Simpsons stopped being good put it at season five, while more generous estimates (I'm in this camp) put it around season ten. No matter how you slice it, The Simpsons has been bad for at least twice as long as it was good. It's weird to think of The Simpsons as having a net-negative impact on popular culture, with its molehill of classic episodes which left an indelible mark on the popular imagination being dwarfed by its mountain of unwatchably bad ones. But maybe I'm thinking of this wrong and entertainment is a strong-link problem, where it doesn't matter how much rough you create as long as there are a handful of diamonds scattered throughout.
The Simpsons doesn't feel like the kind of show where they kept it going because the hardcore fans want it even if the quality is declining over time. It feels like the kind of show where the population of casual fans is big enough that a critical mass will keep watching, while the original hardcore fans look on in horror as it transforms into a shell of its former self.
I don't know how this didn't occur to me before, considering I just finished it recently. My girlfriend recommended a German black comedy series called How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), whose fourth and final season came out last year. It concerns a recently dumped teenaged boy who, in a quest to win back his ex, starts a darkweb site to sell ecstasy in a bid to impress her. Consistently funny and engaging throughout with a cast of likeable characters, and no major drop-offs in quality from one season to the next. I will admit that the pacing in the last season felt a little rushed, but not fatally so, and the ending felt earned and satisfying. The only major downside I can see is that it's so much a product of its time that it may come off as somewhat dated ten years from now. As black comedies about unlikely drug barons go, for my money it's a better series than Breaking Bad, and I mean that without a shred of irony.
I recently finished the fourth draft of my novel. In the next couple of weeks I'm hoping to submit the first three chapters to a competition, but I'm still not completely happy with them (particularly the first few paragraphs of the first chapter, which have been heavily revised since the third draft).
Would anyone be interested in acting as a beta reader for just the first three chapters (~5k words)?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
For example? "Progressive policies" is a large set.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
the defection dynamic causing the conflict is still observable today.
How are the Jews defecting now?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
2:41 is incredible. My PR is a hair under four hours and I was chuffed to bits with that.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Having taken it for six months, I'm coming off Nutrafol tomorrow. It had the desired effect, more or less: my hair looks visibly thicker and far less of my scalp is visible. However, I think it made me gain weight, and I'm curious to see if my weight will go down in the coming weeks.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
New year's resolutions check-in:
- Went to the gym three times last week, planning to go for the first time this week in ten minutes. Can deadlift 1.84x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.15x for 7 reps and bench press .87x for 6 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @falling-star, @Tollund_Man4 and @self_made_human?
For many years I considered Twin Peaks my favourite TV show of all time, and everything from the pilot to the episode in which the killer is unveiled is pretty much perfect. But the back half of season 2 is painfully padded and drawn-out, just barely managing to pull a satisfying cliffhanger ending out of the hat. I watched The Return a few years ago and liked it, but watching it for a second time recently found it extremely erratic in pacing, with lore-heavy episodes that go nowhere and take forever to get there, to the point that I gave up on it halfway through.
I'm not a big TV person, but Silicon Valley is probably the most consistently high quality TV show I've ever seen. Over on IMDb, the top-rated episodes are the season 1 finale and the season 2 finale, which is accurate, but having watched it several times there never comes a point where I feel like there's a major drop-off in quality, a sense of serious discontinuity with what has gone before. Some episodes are stronger than others, obviously, but none ever struck me as major duds. (Even one of my favourite shows ever had at least one episode which was unwatchably bad, where it felt like even the actors didn't know what they were doing there.) And you might say this is a bad example because it's a sitcom, but it's an unusually narrative-driven sitcom in which each season has an overarching plot arc, and there's real dramatic tension in watching the characters extricate themselves from the latest corner they've found themseles in.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
My fear is that trying to avoid LLM-isms is just going to be another pointless euphemism treadmill of sorts. Writers will start finding non-LLM-y voices, and then in 6 months when the newest LoRA is rolled out the LLMs trained on that batch of writing will start talking that way and the writers will have to adapt again.
Isn't this just how style has always developed? Every expression we now consider clichéd was once a surprising and evocative turn of phrase.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
This sort of reminded me of Katy Waldman's essay in the New Yorker, "Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?". Waldman takes young novelists like Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan to task for their apparent belief that having their characters acknowledge how loathsome they are is sufficient to excuse their behaviour. But as the saying goes, admitting you have a problem is only the first step to resolving it. (Curious if Waldman ever read The Last Psychiatrist.)
The most beautiful passage about mercy in the whole English language is literally someone trying to persuade a Jew to be merciful to an outsider:
I have no idea what this is meant to prove. Go through Shakespeare's oeuvre and you can find eloquently-worded expressions of ideas lots of moderns would find repellent: use of the word "Ethiope" as an insult (Much Ado About Nothing), a thirteen-year-old girl marrying an adult suitor (Romeo and Juliet), treatment of physical disability as evidence of moral degeneracy (Henry VI Part 3). So the most revered writer in the English language thought of Jews in terms we would now consider bigoted – so what? You haven't begun to establish that he was justified in holding these opinions – we don't even know if he ever personally met any Jews in his lifetime. "Shakespeare said it, so it must be true" marries you to a lot of really backward opinions.
If your explanation for why so many people hate Jews is because they lack compassion for Gentiles, that invites an obvious question. Would you say the Israelis are less or more compassionate to outsiders than, say, the Palestinians, or the Arabs more broadly? What about compared to Muslims?
The Islamo-left doesn't seem have to much of a problem admiring Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, despite the fact that so many of them are openly hostile to infidels and apostates (not to mention their hostility to women, LGBT people and so on). To me, this suggests there's something else going on other than people correctly recognising that Jews lack compassion for outsiders and acting accordingly.
Additionally, for all your talk of Jews being hostile to outsiders, I don't think it's controversial to assert that an Arab citizen of Israel enjoys a higher standard of living and faces far less harassment and abuse compared to a Jewish citizen of any Arab country. Of whom there are vanishingly few, owing to the Arabs' hostility and lack of compassion for outsiders.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.
This is a reasonable objection, but even leaving aside these marginal examples there have been a lot of civil wars, revolutions etc. just in the past eight decades.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I don't deny that it's starvation, but I'm unconvinced that Israel is solely to blame for this state of affairs. I read several articles independently claiming that Hamas were seen stealing aid packages and selling them to fund their war effort.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
No, it says that one in three children under 3 went a full day without eating in the past 24 hours (kind of an oddly phrased question, but whatever).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I mean, the Persians aren't Arabs either, but many of them are obviously darker than white Europeans. While I'm sure there's nonzero shared heritage between Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, rounding this off to Mizrahi Jews being a subset of Arabs seems misleading and inconsistent with how we catalogue other ethnic groups.
You made the right choice. I sat through the whole thing and it didn't improve.
It's bad enough when people die as a result of making a good movie. No one should die as a result of making a boring movie that sucks.
More options
Context Copy link