FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
Why didn't Candace Owens just join the Left?
She did, originally. The competition for black female influencers was too stiff, so she jumped ship.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
About halfway through The Age of Diagnosis.
I went into the chapters on "long Covid" and autism pretty much knowing what to expect, and I wasn't disappointed. But I was genuinely surprised to hear that cancer screenings exhibit no net increase on all-cause mortality.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Before seeing it, I was expecting a rather gritty survival movie, sort of like The Revenant IN SPACE! When I finally got round to watching it, what surprised me about it was its lightness of tone and comedic elements. In principle that's the sort of thing that should survive a first watch, but on the second watch I was disappointed that I didn't find it nearly as funny as the first time round. A lot of the quippy dialogue sounded positively MCU-tier to my ears.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
This was beautifully written and I'm glad you're in a good headspace. Wishing you all the happiness you obviously deserve.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
According to Wikipedia, since Smollett's hoax the only things he's appeared in were movies he directed himself or documentaries about said hoax.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Not to mention that even after all the controversy, Simon & Schuster were still publishing his memoir. If there's no such thing as bad publicity, he could well have lived very comfortably on the royalties until he found a job as a diversity consultant or something.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Hunter did crack in the white house while hooking up with Obama's daughter.
Excuse me?!
I'm getting a serious "two movies, one screen" effect reading about this. Cofnas's painstaking demonstration of the plagiarism Arday committed is irrefutable. The claims Arday made about his personal history are so ludicrous that I can't fathom how anyone ever believed them, and the fact that so many of them were quietly softened or retracted by organisations associated with Arday in the last few years is a tacit admission that he was a fabulist. Not even the Guardian believed he was really a victim of racist harassment. I assumed (perhaps naïvely) that everyone would interpret his resignation as an admission of guilt. Likewise his penchant for threatening his critics with legal action or reporting them to the police.
But when the Journal reported on his suicide, the comments were full of people mourning him who apparently believe that he was a nice, well-meaning academic hounded to his death by a racist right-wing misinformation campaign, and that he was innocent of all of the allegations made against him.
I cannot understand it. Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI? Is his Wikipedia article being updated as we speak to reflect that narrative? Poor Comrade Ogilvy, a noble goodthinker cruelly snatched from us in the prime of his life.
I described the Henry Nowak case as an anti-scissor statement, in which there's absolutely no way one can possibly spin it which is remotely favourable to the progressive worldview. I thought this was another example of the same. But I underestimated the vindictive ingenuity of progressive journalists. All they had to do was keep hitting the "NATHAN COFNAS IS A RACIST" button, and enough people arrived at the desired conclusion that there's nothing to see here.
I assumed that, where the Guardian goes, the Journal follows. Maybe not.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
You know it's over when you're a black autistic sociology professor who writes about intersectional issues, and not even the Guardian will go to bat for you.
I think Scott's reputation as one of the all-time greats is almost wholly unearned. Alien is a masterpiece and Blade Runner is brilliant, but aside from those two, can you name a third film he directed which rises above the level of "pretty good"?
Black Rain? It was okay. Gladiator? Haven't seen it in full since I was a child, remember thinking it was pretty good. Ditto Black Hawk Down. Matchstick Men was elevated by a predictably great Nicolas Cage performance, but was ultimately a pretty shallow and predictable conman movie. The Martian was a lot funnier than I expected it to be, but I watched it for a second time a few months ago and found that I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first.
Obviously there are stacks of other films in his filmography I haven't seen, but of those I have, none are even approaching the standard set by Alien.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Wake up babe, new euphemism just dropped.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I must have watched that movie five times and I never noticed that. I might suggest putting the third paragraph in spoiler tags for people who haven't seen it though.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Terribly sad. Of course it was good to see him exposed for cheating and lying, and he made the right move by resigning his post, but I certainly didn't wish ill upon him. He may have lied and cheated, but to the best of my knowledge he never really hurt anybody.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I once stayed in an Airbnb where the host provided coffee and freshly baked scones every morning, probably the nicest Airbnb I've ever stayed in. But in general, you're right.
Well, some genes certainly are "good" in the sense of an objective value system. If given the choice, no one would choose a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia or ovarian cancer. All things being equal, people without such genetic predispositions are genetically superior to people with them.
In terms of beauty, progressives believe that what people find beautiful is contingent and socially constructed. This is true up to a point, and yet there are obvious commonalities in what's considered beautiful between vastly disparate cultures. Show me a culture where the average man finds middle-aged women more sexually desirable than women in their early twenties, or in which short men are seen as more desirable than tall men, and then we can talk about how malleable beauty standards really are. In pretty much every culture, most straight men are attracted to young petite women with symmetrical faces, healthy BMIs, narrow waists, wide hips and large breasts, while most straight women are attracted to tall men who are older than them with symmetrical faces, strong jawlines, wide wingspans and broad shoulders. (The fact that so many of these traits are clear proxies for reproductive fitness seems so obvious as to hardly even be worth mentioning.) Black guys place a larger premium on big asses and Asian men place a larger premium on slimness, but if you were to find the ideal female physiognomy (as rated by straight men) for every country in the world and compare them, I daresay they'd exhibit far more similarities than dissimilarities.
One of the ways Scott demonstrated the lunacy of the "social model of disability" is by pointing out that being blind would be disadvantageous even if one got stranded on a desert island, in which the concept of "social accomodations" simply wouldn't apply. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, with the corollary that being beautiful is only socially advantageous if there are beholders around to behold you. If you were stranded alone on a desert island, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if you were a 2 or a 10. But the nearest equivalent thought experiment is: if Sydney Sweeney was teleported to another part of the world completely at random, would she be seen as more desirable than the average woman there, and could she convert that into social capital?
Beauty standards do vary from culture to culture, but my guess is that Sydney Sweeney would be considered unusually desirable in just about any culture in the world. This seems as close to "good in the sense of an objective value system" as makes no difference. Stranded alone on a desert island, being sighted is always preferable to being blind. When moving to a new town where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language, a petite young woman with a symmetrical face, healthy BMI, narrow waist, wide hips and large breasts will always have an easier time of it than a woman with none of these traits. I mean, is this even controversial? What's the difference between "my appearance would provide me with a competitive advantage in essentially any social environment" and "I am objectively attractive"?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
It occurred to me the other day that there might well be people who don't know what "BnB" in the name "Airbnb" means.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Fair.
It's a difficult question to answer, as the genre has become enormously stylistically diverse over the last four or five decades. Of the nineteen metal albums listed above, I think only five used blastbeats in any capacity, and only seven could be described as "technical" under even the most generous definition of that term. (Paso Inferior sounds downright primitive, like the guitarist only learned how to play the day before.) Maybe if you tell me some non-metal bands you like, I can recommend some albums that might serve as gateways.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
When you say "modern metal", what kinds of bands are you referring to? I think Songs of Blood and Mire is the only one of the albums listed above that came out this decade.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Henry's contempt is so real. I saw a post earlier joking that, with AI "musicians" now becoming a thing, DJs must feel so relieved that there's someone even they can feel superior to.
One of the most famous lines from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is (I'm paraphrasing) "Which came first: the music or the misery? Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"
For many years I was an avid listener of music, and would constantly have my headphones on during my morning commute. I owned dozens of CDs and went out of my way to convert them to FLAC format, under the delusion that I could tell the difference from MP3s with my budget Sennheisers. When I read the above question in High Fidelity, I dismissed it as an obviously rhetorical one: of course I listen to music because I'm miserable!
Somewhere along the way I got out of the habit of actively listening to music in my own time, and rarely sit down to listen to an album from start to finish: most music I listen to is just something to put on in the background while I'm doing something else. And you know what? My subjective feeling of ease and well-being is dramatically improved compared to the earlier periods of my life in which I was an active and compulsive listener of music. There are many possible explanations for this improvement (I'm more physically active; I'm in a stable relationship; I've outgrown my depression; the period in my life in which I listened to music most compulsively was my adolescence, never an easy time for anyone), but I no longer think the question from High Fidelity is a rhetorical one with an obvious answer. Maybe listening to music did make me unhappier than I would have been otherwise.
All that preamble aside, I'm trying to get back into the habit of actively listening to music – not for the sake of enjoyment, but for research. I've been trying to write my next album and the riffs aren't coming as easily as I'd like. Surely part of that is because I'm not listening to music: the periods in my life in which I wrote the most riffs were also the periods in which I was listening to the most riffs. To that end, I drew up a list of albums which I've either been meaning to listen to for years, or which have a sound I'd like to emulate on the next album. I've been listening to them when I can get around to it. In no particular order, here are the ones I've listened to so far, and my thoughts.
| Artist | Album | Genre | Thoughts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ulver | Silence Teaches You How to Sing | Dark ambient | I encountered this as excerpts from it were used in the film "Sinister". It only really works in context, not as a standalone piece. |
| Ulver | Bergtatt – Et eeventyr i 5 capitler | Black metal | There are a million bargain-bin second-wave black metal albums just like this one. |
| Botanist | Photosynthesis | Black metal | Legitimately unique. Intend to listen to it again |
| Accurst | Fragments of a Nightmare | Dark ambient | I turned it off after the first five minutes. Corny af. |
| Aghast | Hexerei Im Zwielicht Der Finsternis | Dark ambient | A track from this was also used in the film "Sinister". Unlike the Ulver one, this one can stand on its own. Particularly liked the fourth track. |
| Katatonia | Brave Murder Day | Doom metal | The fifth track is pretty cool, but I have no intention of listening to this one again. |
| Shining | V: Halmstad | Black metal | Profoundly silly. Barely even warrants the "black metal" genre tag, never mind "depressive/suicidal black metal". The vocalist supposedly said that he wants people to be so affected by his band's music that they kill themselves after listening to it – I certainly would if I had to listen to boring corny dreck like this for the rest of my life. The cover art is the most interesting thing about it |
| Killswitch Engage | The End of Heartache | Metalcore | Great album, on the level of "Alive or Just Breathing", even if I prefer Jesse Leach as a vocalist. |
| Thantifaxath | Sacred White Noise | Black metal | There used to be a website called Metal Ireland, which was both a forum and published reviews of albums and EPs. One of their critics reviewed this album and said something along the lines of "I know as critics we're meant to be 'objective'. But it's hard in this case, because this album is pretty close to the Platonic ideal of what a black metal album is supposed to sound like". I finally got around to listening to it (twelve years after release) and wasn't disappointed. Jaw-droppingly brilliant. |
| Daughters | You Won't Get What You Want | Noise rock | Contra Fantano, I don't know if I'd call this "perfect", but even as someone who normally disdains noise rock and spoken-word vocals I can say it didn't disappoint. |
| Corrupted | Paso inferior | Sludge | Pretty good, but hardly memorable. |
| Eyehategod | Take as Needed for Pain | Sludge | I like the sound collage, and the tenth song. |
| Gnaw Their Tongues | All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity | Black metal | I first heard of Gnaw Their Tongues when a recording engineer compared my band to them. They collaborated with Dragged into Sunlight (immediately below) on an EP which included samples of actual serial killers talking about their crimes. It creeped me out, but I wasn't sure of how much of that was because of the music and how much was the enormously tasteless sampling. This album employs no such gimmicks, and I can say that Gnaw Their Tongues can produce some genuinely horrific soundscapes. |
| Dragged into Sunlight | Hatred for Mankind | Death-doom | I really liked it. I should listen to it again. |
| Isis | Panopticon | Post-metal | Meh. I once heard someone quip that if a band describes their music as "post-[anything]", that means it's boring. While this isn't true of every band, it's true more often than not, and certainly true of Isis. |
| Mastodon | Leviathan | Sludge | Its reputation is entirely deserved. |
| Meshuggah | Chaosphere | Progressive metal | Great, perhaps even better than ObZen. Buy it |
| Portal | ION | Death metal | Loved it. All the compositional insanity of "Swarth", but with production improved just enough that you can follow what's going on. |
| Spectral Wound | Songs of Blood and Mire | Black metal | Heard this album playing in a record shop in Athens and decided to check it out. Loved it. |
| The Angelic Process | Weighing Souls with Sand | Drone metal | Meh, did nothing for me. Getting signed to Profound Lore Records is now considered a hallmark of quality, but this was back when they were still finding their feet as a label and couldn't afford to be so choosy. |
| My Dying Bride | The Dreadful Hours | Doom metal | Rather corny |
| Cryptopsy | None So Vile | Death metal | Pretty cool, but so technical and complex that your brain can't really process it all in one go. |
| Type O Negative | World Coming Down | Gothic metal | More of the same. "Slow, Deep and Hard" had more stylistic range. |
The claim in the book is heavily qualified, I was hastily summarising.
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