FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
Books
Admittedly I don't read a lot of horror, but I'm curious about people's recommendations.
- HP Lovecraft: In particular "The Rats in the Walls", maybe the scariest short story I've ever read.
- The Shining: I read this as a child and remember enjoying it.
Films
I want to focus on lesser-known entries here. Alien, Psycho, The Thing, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist etc. are established classics and need not be mentioned.
- Cure: One of the best psychological horror films I've ever seen. A bit of a slow-burn, but becomes unexpectedly terrifying at the halfway point.
- Perfect Blue: Terrifying, and perhaps even more topical now than it was on release.
- Kill List: A clever film that starts off like a crime thriller (in the vein of Danny Dyer, The Long Good Friday and so on) but modulates into something very different.
- The Descent: Perhaps the most purely frightening film ever to come out of the UK. Shame that the developing doomed characters scenes at the start are bad even by the standard of slasher films.
- Session 9: In my view, a sorely underrated psychological horror which benefits from being filmed in an actual abandoned mental asylum. The early-generation digital camerawork looks a bit cheap and the characters are kind of underwritten, but it's second to none as far as atmosphere goes.
- Obsession: You don't need me to tell you this movie is good, but of all the newly released films I saw this year (among them Die My Love, Hamnet and Late Fame) I still think it's the best.
- The Others: An old-fashioned ghost story that doesn't get enough love.
- Audition: I could see this landing in my top ten films of any kind. Not for the faint of heart.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
Video games
- Silent Hill 2 (original, not remake): As reviewed here. The undisputed masterpiece of psychological horror, not to mention perhaps the best story ever told in the medium.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil REmake: The GameCube remake of the first game, later ported to Windows. Brilliant.
- Resident Evil 4: For GameCube, PS2 and just about every other console going. Changed the way third-person shooters would play for literally decades. So many quotable lines.
- Resident Evil 7: Successfully switched up the formula by moving to first-person. Wonderfully creepy and atmospheric.
- Manhunt: As reviewed here. A remarkable fusion of stealth and survival horror, from the people behind Grand Theft Auto.
- Alien Isolation: Successfully translates the vibe of the original 1979 film into a first-person stealth context. I knew from the first ten minutes of playing it that I would be coming back for more, and I wasn't wrong.
- SOMA: My wife and I started a playthrough of this last night (her first, my second). The best game set in an underwater base ever made except for that other one.
- Condemned: Criminal Origins: I used to play this once a year. Terrifying, with some of the most brutally realistic first-person melee combat I've ever seen.
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent: Finished it once, a long time ago, and remember enjoying it. Tempted to try The Bunker this year.
- Outlast: Terrifying, and spawned innumerable imitators.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
As it's now Spooky Season '26, I wonder if you folks would be interested in sharing what your favourite works of horror media are. I'll get the ball rolling in the sub-threads below.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
21hr ago
Agreed, I was using "explain the difference between mean, median and mode" as a metonym for "have a basic understanding of fundamental statistical concepts".
I cannot believe how facile the basis for this claim is.
It's embarrassing that so many progressive journalists uncritically reported such an obviously spurious finding. But what really alarms me is that it wouldn't surprise me if the level of numerical or statistical aptitude among the journos at the NYT, the BBC etc. was so remedial that they literally wouldn't understand why this finding was spurious.
No one who is unable to define the differences between "mean", "median" and "mode" should be working as a journalist. (Okay, fine, you can be a film or literary critic. If you're reporting on the news, you need to understand stats. Your opinions should not be taken seriously if you don't.)
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
But the right has its own version of a USAID conspiracy theory: that closing USAID somehow killed leftism in South Africa.
Since USAID was shut down, seven countries in Latin America...
Was that meant to be South America?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
That's usually referred to as "self-harm", which is strictly synonymous, but "self-abuse" has a very different connotation.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
About one-third of the way through The Story of the Lost Child.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
So "gentleman" either means
- An adult male who was born into a gentry family.
- An adult male who comports himself as one would expect someone born into a gentry family would, regardless of whether he was born into a gentry family or not.
More or less?
(This post starts off talking about trans issues, but that's really just a jumping-off point for a question about language. I'm not soliciting people's opinions about trans issues in this thread.)
I've made a lot of posts about transgenderism this year, in the course of which I've had numerous opportunities to debate with our assorted trans-affirming posters. One of my most recent top-level posts was largely concerned with the ease with which one can embarrass progressive politicians simply by asking them to define the word "woman".
In attempting to define this word, several of our resident progressives have independently converged on something like the definition below:
woman [noun]:
- An adult female human.
- An adult male human who wishes to be an adult female human.
I will concede that, unlike many definitions proposed by trans activists, the one above has the virtue of not being circular. My main objection to the definition, however, is that no other word in the English language is defined this way. We are using the same word for "a person who is X" and "a person who isn't X, but wants to be". The word "billionaire" means "someone with a net worth of $1 billion or more"; it does not carry the secondary meaning of "someone who wishes they had a net worth of $1 billion or more". Likewise "lawyer", "doctor", "soldier" and so on (some of these are even protected terms, and you can land yourself in legal hot water for describing yourself as such without good cause). It strikes me as profoundly odd to use the exact same word for people who are X, and for people who aren't X but who wish they were X.
Yesterday, a second example popped into my head: "entitled". Wiktionary defines it as "having a legal or moral right or claim to something" (e.g. "If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with Mesothelioma, you may be entitled to financial compensation."); in other words, a person who is entitled to X is a person who deserves X. However, in common parlance, the word is often used to mean almost the converse: holding the erroneous belief that you have a legal or moral right or claim to something. Wiktionary again: "(figuratively) Convinced of one's own righteousness (self-righteousness) or the justifiability of one's actions or status, especially wrongly so [emphasis mine]; demanding and pretentious."
So we have a curious situation where a single word means both "having a legal or moral right or claim to something" and "believing that one has a legal or moral right or claim to something, but erroneously so". In other words, when we criticise someone for being "entitled", what we really mean is that they have a false sense of entitlement. I presume what happened was that someone criticised someone else by saying "he thinks he's entitled to sth" or "he's acting like he's entitled to sth", then over time this got compressed further and further until you can say "I can't stand entitled people" and everyone understands that you mean "I can't stand people who erroneously think they deserve things they don't" as opposed to "I can't stand people who deserve things".
In effect, the word "entitled" is almost a contronym: a word with two meanings which are directly opposed, a word which is its own antonym. (Examples: "dust" which can both mean "to remove dust" [cleaning a house] or "to add dust" [adding icing sugar to a cake]; "sanction" which can mean both "to give approval" or "to impose a penalty upon".) Some of these are only examples because the same word can mean different things in British English and English (Simplified) American English, but not always. The other obvious example is "literally" which, in common parlance, can mean both "in a non-figurative sense" and "figuratively". A possibly related example is "guilty" which refers to both "responsibility for wrongdoing" and "a feeling of regret for wrongdoing". Notably, one doesn't imply the other: plenty of people who are responsible for wrongdoing don't regret their actions, and plenty of people who haven't done anything wrong nonetheless subjectively feel guilty (so much so that there are at least two different kinds of guilt specifically associated with people who are or may be innocent of wrongdoing).
The two definitions of "entitled" aren't quite the same as the two definitions of "woman" offered by our trans-inclusive posters. The two definitions of "entitled" boil down to "he is X" and "he isn't X, but he erroneously thinks he is". For this reason, no one would ever describe themselves as "entitled" under the second meaning of the term. But the secondary meaning of "woman" proposed by trans activists concerns itself not with belief but with desire or aspiration: "woman" either means "she is X" or "he isn't X, but he wishes he was". While there are some rather batty trans-identified males who claim to be literally female (up to and including claiming to be capable of menstruating and similar), the impression I get is that the majority of trans-identified males understand that they are not female. As such, the word "woman" either means "a female person" or "a non-female person who aspires to be female".
Can you think of any other examples of words like this, where a single word in isolation can either mean "X" or "wishes to be X" or "erroneously thinks he is X"?
As an aside, I was curious if the ideological capture of Wikipedia I and others have been complaining about for years extends to Wiktionary. The website offers the following definitions of the word "woman":
- An adult female human.
- (collective) All female humans collectively; womankind.
- A female person, usually an adult: a (generally adult) female sentient being, whether human, supernatural, elf, alien, etc.
- A wife (or sometimes a fiancée or girlfriend).
- A female person who is extremely fond of or devoted to a specified type of thing. (Used as the last element of a compound.)
- A female attendant or servant.
None of which seem trans-inclusive on their face: there's no mention of "a person who identifies as X" or "a person with a female gender identity". The "usage notes" section likewise makes no reference to gender ideology. However, the image used to illustrate the page is a 5x4 grid of thumbnails of various people, including Mother Teresa, Marilyn Monroe, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, Oprah Winfrey... and Laverne Cox, a trans-identified male, who is not a woman according to any of the six definitions above. (Not even #4: Cox isn't married.) In effect, this means that the Wiktionary page for "woman" is not internally consistent: the image it uses to illustrate the concept of a "woman" uses a photo of someone who is not a woman according to the very definitions it espouses! Imagine if you searched "horse" and the definition was accurate, but one of the images used was a photo of a donkey.
The page for "man" is illustrated with a similar 5x4 grid. Unsurprisingly, none of the people included are trans-identified females.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I always thought "self-abuse" had a nice ring to it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I thought it was a joke about Pedro Pascal's omnipresence in movies and TV shows these days.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
The Exorcist is based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, it doesn't have a novelisation.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Ever since first hearing about the Cornell 7 I've been unable to stop thinking about this article from this time last year, "The Preppy Gang Rape Crisis", which argues that there's a huge appetite for stories about scions of the white wealthy educated elite gang-raping women (and if those women happen to WoC, all the better) – but reality stubbornly refuses to comply, and in fact this demographic is one of the least prone to committing sexual assault.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
It also has more than twice the rate of HIV compared to the US.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Ah, I see. I thought maybe the colour yellow had some special significance in Japan (e.g. "yellow journalism").
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
@George_E_Hale – forgive my ignorance, but what's the significance of the road being painted yellow?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Maybe I'll follow @FiveHourMarathon's lead and start playing Long War when I become a father.
Perhaps the most recurrent complaint in these threads is magnum opus dissonance: the comment you tossed off in five minutes gets showered with accolades, while the one you slaved over for days doesn't get a look in.
It's impossible to predict which comments will resonate with posters here, and which won't. All the same, I will admit to being amused that my lengthy effortpost about the importance of marriage and my desire to start a family didn't get nominated, while my (roughly as lengthy, admittedly) effortpost about the most efficient way to kill aliens without save scumming did. My wife was also amused.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I don't claim that this pattern is unique to anti-Zionists, but I find it a bit strange the way otherwise sensible and down-to-earth people (people who might have even scoffed at previous generations of conspiracy theories, turning "9/11 was an inside job" and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" into punchlines) reflexively reach for the "it was a Mossad false flag" explanation the second they hear about anything bad targeting Jews.
@Tanista below me writes:
The Israelis and Ukrainians and Russians and everyone else who shrugs at reports of crimes from their own are at least behaving in a normal, if not morally upstanding, way.
Acknowledging that the bad thing happened but insisting that the victim had it coming is, indeed, a perfectly ordinary human response. But in my experience, Western anti-Zionists/pro-Palestinians seem to be afflicted with a far stranger kind of conspiratorial cognitive dissonance. When a bad thing happens to Jews, they demand far more evidence that it really happened than they would ever demand had it befallen a different ethnic group. (Indeed, lots of people who are credulous about hate crimes targeting black people or Muslims are maximally sceptical about crimes targeting Jews.) When you can finally get them to begrudgingly concede that it really happened, they'll insist that it was a false flag, or that the IDF knew about it and allowed it to happen as a casus belli. When you can finally get them to concede that this is absurd (why would a nation capable of and intent on committing genocide wait until they were attacked to start doing so? Does that pattern-match to any historical genocide?), only then will they say that the bad thing happened, the Jews didn't "allow it" to happen to them – but they had it coming because of Gaza.
I don't quite know why this is the case, but it's a pattern I've observed across dozens of people who call themselves pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist. To reiterate: I'm not claiming this pattern is unique to them.
It's a fair point. The iconography of horror movies is a goldmine for game developers, but that doesn't necessarily translate into frightening gameplay. The games I listed above were exclusively ones which made me feel scared (even if only intermittently), as opposed to fun games which were marketed as horror but which never induced feelings of fear or dread. F.E.A.R. is an entertaining shooter, but at no point while playing it did I feel scared, not even during the bits where it was aping The Ring. I haven't played Dead Space to completion, but don't remember finding it scary.
I know what you mean, but were the TV show and comic even horror? I was under the impression they were both more like post-apocalyptic dramas in a zombie setting.
My understanding is that Doom 3 is the major exception to this, although I haven't played it.
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