problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Trying to manage end-of-year job burnout at the moment.
I'm pretty exhausted and can barely even bring myself to competently write this comment, let alone work on clients' returns. I've been making an oddly large amount of stupid errors recently, which isn't really common for me; I'm generally known for having a fairly high quality of work, and often catch other people's mistakes rather than the other way around. My job has a very production-line quality to it; there is always another job, and the goal is to get the greatest amount of client work done with a high accuracy and in the shortest amount of time.
This failure to focus is... quite bad, considering that my job is one that requires a pretty large amount of sustained concentration - for every client I handle, I receive on average like forty different financial docs, each containing disparate pieces of info about their financial situation. I get provided with a gigantic corpus of tax legislation and accounting best practices (the former, especially, can get indecipherably complex) and have to identify which laws and guidelines to apply. There’s a lot of info missing often, and the gaps necessarily have to be filled in with some assumptions. My job is to receive incomplete and poorly arranged info from the client, decipher how to treat it based on a knotty, vague, conflicting tax code, and transform it into something comprehensible. When you're burned out, this appears almost insurmountable, paralysing to the extreme, and doing it quickly doesn't seem possible.
That level of concentration is really hard to maintain day after day for a sustained period of time; the job is monotonous and taxing at the same time (as much work in such fields is, to be fair). This funk has been slowly settling in throughout the entire year, but it's begun to really hit me after rushing out a bunch of urgent client work last week, and I've gotten into a pretty big slump. Even after work I can barely focus on anything I care about, and it feels almost like my brain is buffering whenever I try to concentrate at all. I find myself staring passively at my screen a lot, I've done that multiple times now writing this embarrassingly short comment.
This fucking sucks. Any advice for how to force your brain to hard reset over Christmas break? I'd very much like this feeling not to carry on to the new year, I don't think a whole year of running on fumes would be particularly healthy.
The answer here (or at least, a large part of it) is state-enforced monopolies on drugs preventing the emergence of new entrants that could reasonably compete with them. Near-limitless patent exclusivity causes the individual pharmaceutical company to have a ridiculous amount of pricing power, and the largest pharmaceutical companies file hundreds and hundreds of patent applications and extensions to keep the gravy train running. About 78% of new patents are granted for existing drugs, not new ones, and while the introduction of biosimilars decrease prices and improve access for consumers, the FDA has approved relatively few biosimilars (only 50 or so as of 2024).
It's quite funny to me how the problem is always portrayed as a lack of government regulation which we need Socialism to fix when the problem was caused by government regulation leading to over-patenting. It's because of too little free market that the problem persists, not too much.
They're all ugly in my opinion, but I don't think these >3500sqft mansions really prove the case that they're ugly because of their size: perhaps in part they are, but mostly I think they're ugly because they're not actually traditional designs. They're a weird mix of styles that end up coming out absolutely disgusting because they're combining the boxy, undecorated modernist aesthetic with various other architectural conventions all mixed together in the worst way possible. No. 2 in your list doesn't even possess any huge windows or gigantic rooms far in excess of what you would find in traditional architecture, the features of the house aren't inherently that demanding and could probably fit into a typical Georgian mansion, but they've been put together in an ugly and nonsensical way.
They look like they were put together cheaply and without skill, designed by architects who either don't know how to design anything remotely traditional or don't care to do so. It almost seems like they were made just by checking off an incoherent list of design things they think houses should have without considering how best to put them together.
I vote on same or worse. Hope I'm wrong, but yeah this is hugely reminding me of the Arab Spring in Libya, which resulted in an even worse spiral of conflict after Gaddafi was killed and "we came, we saw, he died". Within a short time of his death there were open-air slave markets in Tripoli.
Middle Eastern power vacuums are always fun. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it goes well, but there seems to be no way out of this that doesn't involve a lot of warlording.
Pretty much, yeah. Once I've decided to plan some kind of trip I go all-out, and it also helps that I trawl every square inch of Google Maps extensively in my free time when I don't have anything else to do, and just put pins in every single landmark that looks interesting and that I'd like to see. I hardly watch TV or engage in other passive activities to relax after work, I get bored by that easily, and one of the activities I engage in for fun (aside from researching a bunch about whatever niche topic catches my fancy) is to stake out possible destinations from my armchair. I do this even when I lack travel plans.
It's surprisingly easy to thoroughly map out countries - it's almost a mediative affair, in fact. You build up a gigantic reservoir of interesting sites after even just two months. After a while you get good at it - you can eventually identify the nature of buildings and even natural sites from how they look from the air, temples and traditional houses and so on, and can do further research on them on that basis. I've had family members ask me to plan their trips on their behalf. I come back to them with a gigantic slate of destinations, and see which ones they like.
This level of sheer autism certainly isn't for everyone and I don't expect everyone to engage in this kind of planning, but it works for me. And it feels better in my experience, less like you're getting a surface-level tourist view of a certain destination and more like you're actually experiencing a place outside of the heavily trafficked destinations where everyone gets shunted to. Also, less crowds. Fuck crowds.
I have travelled quite a bit myself, and my personal dreams are just dreams and are not actually a description of anything I would actually end up doing - I'm not actually expecting people to do full backpacking when one plans stuff. Completely unstructured travel isn't particularly feasible in practice. Mostly, what I do is the kind of semi-structured self-directed travel that still allows me the ability to wander around a city myself, flaneur-style, and pick and choose what I want to see. That neither requires too much executive function or free time (both of which I lack). There's a gigantic middle ground between "lying on a beach" and "backpacking through the Amazon rainforest".
It's pretty obvious how most hidden things are crap by their nature since most things anywhere are pretty unremarkable, but in my experience most of my favourite destinations have been quite out of the way and not on the average tourist's radar. The ability to make these discoveries is an integral part of travel for me.
EDIT: Also, don't mean to seem like I'm randomly shitting on someone's travel plans here - that's not my intention. Casual conversation about low-stakes topics are just sometimes enjoyable.
The primary thing for me personally is that most of it is just being in your ship and watching the world move past. You're not really getting to explore the country you're visiting in any significant way, you're just getting little glimpses of it from the deck while it glides through the water. Though I suppose that is the appeal; to passively see the country without having to put in too much effort of your own - trying to make it through a foreign and unfamiliar place can be rather daunting.
But even that's part of the experience of travel IMO, the ability to get lost in the back alleys of some city or wander the trails of some national park and find all kinds of special hidden things you otherwise wouldn't have seen is a big attraction to me. I've long dreamed about driving west into the Australian outback with no clear plan and no destination in mind and just holing up in towns along the way, though that seems unlikely to materialise in the near future. It's a very stirring idea that lurks somewhere deep in my subconscious for no particular reason. Some nights I get a barely-controllable urge to walk blindly and directionlessly until my legs can't carry me any further.
I do understand why not everyone wants this kind of thing for every holiday though, sometimes the goal is primarily one of relaxation (as valid a reason as any other), so the explanation holds up well. I just think it comes down to the fact that I'm more likely to find things monotonous than your average person.
Yeah, that makes some sense and is consistent with the behaviour of many vacationers I see. I'm not someone who does well doing nothing and being catered to for too long; the idea of relaxing on a beach also sounds suboptimal. I quickly go stir-crazy when presented with a dearth of things to do.
Not an answer to your question, but I've always been a bit confused about why one would go on a cruise in the first place - the idea of going on a vacation to see the ocean and a ship crowded with people sounds a bit hellish to me. Would like to hear a description of what's attractive about cruises to people.
Honestly, I wonder if McMansions aren't just the way they are because of a lack of people who are capable of and willing to competently design a beautiful New Traditional building while still meeting a client's requirements - after all, we sure seemed capable of doing that just a relatively short time ago. As Scott's post notes, even if we wanted to go back to the previous architectural styles, we can't. Modernism and the rise of the International Style basically killed the careers of many architects and artisans who made livings out of this stuff, and they've become increasingly hard to find as a result; the people who would've known how to do these things properly are just not around anymore, and trying to find them would add too much cost and inefficiency to the project.
Architects who know how to design anything but modernist/postmodernist structures are increasingly rare, and there are fewer and fewer people who know how to integrate certain types of design features into a building in an aesthetically pleasing way while still mostly preserving the client's requirements. I actually read the book Scott is referencing in his post, and one of the quotes that stuck out to me is that "deans of architecture went about instructing the janitors to throw out all plaster casts of classical details, pedagogical props that had been accumulated over a half century or more". Learning how to reasonably achieve a client's specific requirements while still making a building look beautiful and stately in the Beaux-Arts or Art Deco style is just less and less relevant to your average architect now, and much less of their education will be focused around that. Sure, a lot of McMansion design styles scream "cost-cutting", but part of the reason why it seems so difficult and costly to build anything traditional and beautiful nowadays is due to there being a lack of people actually well-versed in designing in the old ways, and the lack of artisans capable of actually implementing these designs. We can no longer competently mass-produce traditional architecture.
Another aspect of the problem is also that because of the rise of modern architecture, very few people who seek to make a name for themselves in architecture care to tackle old architectural styles anymore - it's mostly the people who want to make a quick buck who go into doing that kind of thing now, since there is no more cultural cachet in designing beautiful old-style townhouses and so on. Everyone knows the new thing is making terrible dystopian structures that look like they were commissioned by The Empire, so why would any competent architect try to attempt anything even remotely traditional? The masses want traditional vernacular architecture, but the institutional incentives aren't there for any self-respecting architect to meet their sets of preferences, and so rows and rows of unsightly McMansions proliferate across the suburbs like cancer, designed by architects with no reputation to lose and who lack incentive to tell the client (or their company) "no, you can either have X or Y".
Of course, then the proponents of modernist architecture point at these and sneer about how kitschy they are, as if that's not a consequence of them percolating their disgustingly ugly style into the mainstream and cancelling architects who dared to add any ornamentation as "bourgeois". Personally, I consider it a great loss for humanity - with our technology today we could have democratised the beauty that was once the sole domain of the upper class, we could've had public spaces as beautiful as the Alhambra Palace or the gardens of Suzhou. But instead we get endless wastelands of concrete blocks, and "traditional" architecture that's a poor echo of what came before.
I'd add that failing to negotiate the JCPOA as an Article II treaty also has implications regarding its effectiveness; properly following processes actually has an impact on how seriously the party you're negotiating with takes the agreement. Foreign leaders are very aware of the political capital necessary to acquire a two-thirds Senate majority, which makes it highly unlikely that the U.S. will renege on the engagement. The President’s predecessors are less likely to back out when support is high; legislators are less likely to pass laws inconsistent with the treaty, putting the U.S. in breach; and foreign heads of state are less likely to resist execution or withdraw knowing that the President, the legislature, their predecessors, and the American people stand behind the agreement. There is a reason why these kind of significant nonproliferation agreements have traditionally been negotiated as treaties: these kinds of matters deserve focus and commitment.
In the absence of this, why in the world would Iran take the agreement seriously whatsoever given that there had never been a demonstration of American commitment to it? Keep in mind too that Iran is a country with a long history of secretly exceeding limitations placed on its nuclear program. The JCPOA was negotiated in the first place because of Iran flouting multiple legally binding UNSCRs for a period of years and blatantly violating its Safeguards Agreement; they were willing to lose billions of dollars in sanctions to continue pursuing nuclear weapons in secret. Without the necessary two-thirds majority, the JCPOA was effectively a non-binding statement of intent; it was a gentlemen's agreement without much force behind it, one which involved a hefty frontloaded benefit to Iran (if adhered to) while basically just asking for Iran's word that it would not violate the rules of international law - something it already had been doing surreptitiously for years on end prior to the JCPOA. Such a weighty and fraught agreement at least deserved to be a treaty, and circumventing the mechanisms meant to ensure consensus was a failure on the Obama administration's part.
Shikoku in particular should also satisfy @jeroboam. I'd hazard a guess that it's probably the main Japanese island that sees least tourists. In terms of places to see, there's quite a bit; perhaps visiting a handful out of the 88 temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage route might appeal. There's also Dogo Onsen, the oldest operating onsen in Japan, and Kochi Castle, an actually non-tourist-trap Japanese castle - many of the extant structures were rebuilt last in the 1700s and it is considered one of the last twelve original castles in Japan with an intact main keep. Much more authentic than the ever-so-famous Osaka Castle, I'd say.
I pretty much agree with this. In the specific case of South Korea, I also think people come away with bad impressions of SK as a worse Japan because they approach it wrong - they typically weight their trip in favour of large metropolitan sprawls such as Seoul and Busan and expect it to feel polished and put-together and historic in the same way that they would expect from Kyoto and Tokyo. This, I think, is the wrong way to structure one's trip there. Korea was downright catapulted into modernity after a long period of poverty, destruction and war during the 20th century, and the modernisation effort under Park Chung-Hee was haphazard and quick - the sole aim was accelerated industrialisation at all costs, without too much regard about how the cities would turn out. SK's metropolises reflect this - many buildings were cheap and utilitarian constructions, and they certainly look it. This was a good move that made Seoul into the "miracle on the Han River", but the result of this is that their large cities have less of a glossy feel than that of Japan's. Outside of the Joseon palace complexes in Seoul, there just aren't too many truly historic things to see within the metropolis proper (though there are a handful of very pretty historic-looking neighbourhoods, such as Bukchon Hanok Village).
This isn't to say that SK doesn't have a historic feel! But you have to look elsewhere outside of the megacities to find that old South Korea. Old villages and temples are everywhere, but they're typically located deep in the countryside, such as the UNESCO-listed Hahoe and Yangdong folk villages which still preserve that old Korean spirit; down to retaining their clan-based social structure. There's pavilions, study halls, traditional Confucian academies for learning and so on, and they often run traditional folk festivals out of these villages. They're not tourist traps or outdoor museums, these are actual places that people have lived in ever since the days of the Joseon Dynasty. These aren't the only ones either, though they're certainly the best known - Naganeupseong, Oeam, Hangae, Goesi-ri and so on are other living folk towns which are lesser known. Stationing yourself in some smaller towns in the countryside and using them as a base to explore a certain area, such as Gyeongju, is also a good idea if you want to see a lot of historic stuff. As noted, the mountain just south of Gyeongju was sacred to the Silla Dynasty and has over a hundred Buddhist sites that can be found just by walking aimlessly through its trails. Bulguksa Temple and Seokguram Grotto, located on Mount Tohamsan, can also be accessed from there via a short bus ride. I've located so many spectacular historical sites in easy distance of that town in my research (much of which is poorly marked and practically hidden within the mountains). Suncheon and Gwangju are also good jumping off points, I've heard.
I feel like when planning holidays, most people don't really care to do this work. They typically want to situate themselves in a really big and famous city and walk around and explore neighbourhoods without having to research too much, and in South Korea this approach just doesn't work quite as well as it does in Japan since most of its attractions are in the countryside. It also doesn't help that SK seems to want to make everything as hard as possible - in order to navigate and find out bus timetables and train routes you can't use Google Maps, you have to use Naver Maps, which has an awful UI and is in Korean. The only way you can use Naver Maps in English is on the fucking mobile app, and even then using it is still a pain. Granted, they're doing this out of security concerns, but it makes it more difficult to plan one's trip. Many sights are just missing from tourism sites, such as the Buddha sculptures at Gunwi Grotto and Sanginam Grotto or the pagoda stonework and statuaries at Unjusa Temple or the views of Boriam Hermitage or complete oddities like the placenta chambers of King Sejong's sons (you heard me). I think SK gets shafted relative to Japan despite having an equally large heritage to boast about (relative to land area, at least; SK is a quarter of the size of Japan) partially because of these factors.
With regards to the character of its cities, this seems to perhaps be changing. In 2000 the Korean government began to subsidise hanok projects, and more and more traditional hanok villages have been built in the surrounding areas of Seoul and other big cities (Eunpyeong Hanok Village, for example, was built in 2017). Lots of new traditional architecture is appearing all the time in Korea. A law involving a restoration project for the core historical relics of the Silla Dynasty, named the "Special Act on the Restoration and Maintenance of Core Ruins of the Silla Royal Capital", was passed in 2019, and this will probably make the city of Gyeongju proper have even more of a historical feel. In this sense, it's not too different to Japan, where most of their historical buildings are not, in fact, historical but regardless help contribute to the feel of the city. I guess we'll see how this all turns out.
EDIT: a word
problem_redditor
1mo ago
I do genuinely feel bad for the people who have to live close to the over-touristed sites in Japan. A lot of the temples and neighbourhoods that get traffic are places where people actually live and work, and I can't imagine living in, say, Kyoto and getting exposed to this absolute bullshit. Even as a tourist I hate it, I wouldn't be able to handle it in my day-to-day.
If I'm ever going to Japan, I'm almost certainly picking somewhere out of the way, like Koyasan and their Shingon Buddhist temples. Too much of Japan suffers issues with overtourism, and it just kills the vibe of these places which are ostensibly supposed to feel quiet and calm.
Place; Place, Japan
So, I'm currently planning a holiday in South Korea over the Christmas period, and when researching it's common to come across posts on social media asking whether SK or Japan is a better place to visit. The outcome is always the same: regardless of the comparison, Japan is virtually always touted as the best destination in East Asia. Note - I don't want this to be any kind of anti-Japanese post, since I actually quite enjoy Japanese food, culture, etc quite a bit, and see how it would be attractive to a tourist. However, I'm not quite certain why it is that Japan gets hyped up to this degree, compared to other Asian countries.
I am a very archaeology and history-focused person, so keep this in mind when reading this post.
The arguments many travellers make in favour of the pro-Japan position primarily rely on historical significance: there's the characterisation of Japan as being a uniquely cultural place, filled with ancient historical shrines, palaces and temples that can't be found elsewhere in East Asia - Korea in specific is considered to be generally devoid of meaningful culture as compared to Japan due to the history of destruction in the country from the Imjin War onwards. But once you've looked further into this Japan begins to look more and more like any other East Asian country: it certainly wasn't unscathed by wars and destruction, and because many of its buildings are wooden it's been repeatedly ravaged by fires, bombs and so on that have destroyed many of its cultural sites, most of which have been rebuilt repeatedly over time.
Here are a handful of examples:
Senso-ji. This is one of the most significant temples in Tokyo and a major tourist site. It was destroyed during the extensive WW2 firebombing in 1945, and the buildings still standing today are reconstructions dating to about 1951-1973. These buildings are undoubtedly beautiful, but certainly not old - the famous five-storied pagoda is younger than Nicholas Cage. Additionally, they're also made of concrete, unlike the original wooden structures, so as to prevent the thing from burning down again. Not very authentic.
Osaka Castle + Nagoya Castle + any number of other "historical" castles in Japan. These are probably some of the most egregious examples, considering that they're unashamed ferroconcrete pastiches of the original castles. Osaka Castle was destroyed in the Boshin War in 1868 and Nagoya Castle was destroyed in WW2 in 1945. The current reconstructions hail from 1931 - 1959, with the insides being tourist-trap museums complete with lifts and other modern amenities.
Kinkaku-ji. Probably the most obvious and recent example of a reconstruction in Kyoto - this reconstruction was built in 1955 after a schizophrenic, suicidal monk burned the original structure down, and now it draws so many tourists that it's definitely suffering from overtourism. You can hardly see the temple for the most part, because of the throngs of tourists lining up to get even the slightest glimpse of the (admittedly very beautiful) golden pavilion.
Nijo Castle. Let me be clear, this palace is incredible. The Ninomaru Palace is wonderful and truly historic. While I bet it's been thoroughly Ship-Of-Theseused over the years due to the need for constant renovations and upkeep, it is a structure that's persisted continuously over the years and its construction was fully completed in 1626. Many of the other structures in Nijo Castle, however, are not like this - the actual Honmaru Palace was burned to the ground in the 1700s, and the current structure standing there today is actually a completely separate building taken from the Kyoto Imperial Palace.
Kyoto. Yes, Kyoto. This is attacking a steelman, since Kyoto is the historic city of Japan, but even that's not an ancient city - 90% of the city was burned to the ground during the Great Fire of 1788, and as a result in the bounds of the old city there are not more than 10 to 12 buildings pre-dating 1788. Of course, this doesn't mean the city isn't historically or culturally significant - but most of Kyoto is not older than the Edo period.
There are many more examples I could offer - Kiyomizu-dera is a temple hailing from the late Nara period but which had to be rebuilt in 1633, To-ji Temple was rebuilt in 1644, and so on. I'm sure you can find some truly old structures in Japan - the opulent Golden Hall of Chuson-ji comes to mind, a structure that was built in the 11th century and remains extant up to this day. But as a general rule, most of the structures in Japan are generally not that old.
It's necessary to note that Japan has a different viewpoint surrounding "authenticity" than the West does. As Douglas Adams notes on his visit to Kinkaku-ji: “I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s burnt down?” “Yes.” “Twice.” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burnt down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
It is a not-uncommon East Asian view that buildings can be demolished and rebuilt and still be the same structure, just as long as it sits on the same site and serves the same purpose. Many believe that changes to the structure are another step in its evolution, and this is perfectly okay - the Japanese answer to the Ship of Theseus is in fact "yes, it's the same ship". Ise Shrine, in fact, gets ceremoniously demolished and rebuilt every 20 years in an event called Shikinen Sengu. But this results in weird, unintentionally misleading marketing, where buildings that are barely older than the 20th century get marketed as "ancient", which leads a Westerner to think that the actual extant building in fact does date back to the 5th century or something when in fact it's newer than some New York buildings.
The historicity of South Korean buildings, in this light, seems not that different to that of Japanese ones. Here are a couple of notable examples:
Changdeokgung. This incredible Joseon palace was finished in 1412, but multiple wars and fires have resulted in a wildly differing age distribution among the structures of the palace. All of it was destroyed during the Imjin War in 1592, except Geumcheongyo Bridge which dates back to 1411. The palace was restored in 1609, and the oldest proper building (the Donhwamun Gate) can be traced back to this date. Other structures date from the 18th to the 20th century, though the reconstruction generally seems to have been fairly authentic. The secret garden, located north of the palace complex itself, is generally quite authentic - the buildings and gardens there have sustained their original forms from around the end of the Joseon Dynasty.
Jongmyo Shrine. This is a Joseon-era Confucian shrine housing the spirit tablets of Joseon monarchs, initially built in 1394 but (unfortunately) burned down during the Imjin War. The spirit tablets were saved by hiding them in a commoner's house, and the current reconstruction dates all the way back to 1601. Note: This shrine is old enough that its reconstruction is as old as the aforementioned Ninomaru Palace in Japan.
Haeinsa Temple. This remarkable place houses the Tripitaka Koreana, a series of 81,258 wooden printing blocks with over 50 million Hanja characters inscribed on them - they constitute one of the most complete Buddhist canons ever, one that's 750 years old. The buildings themselves were first established in 802 AD, but most of it was destroyed by fire in 1818 and rebuilt shortly after. The Janggyeong-panjeon (the storage hall housing the Koreana), however, is very old, and while it's not known exactly how ancient it is it's probably original, having survived both the fire and the highly destructive Imjin War.
Seokguram Grotto. This is an artificial grotto facing the East Sea with a truly monumental statue of Seokgamoni-bul (the Historical Buddha) inside it. Its construction dates all the way back to 742, at the height of the Unified Silla kingdom. The structure fell into ruin over the years, and while there were some repairs over the Joseon period, disrepair continued because of their suppression of Buddhism. During the Japanese colonial period, there were attempts to repair the Buddhist sites around Gyeongju (including Seokguram) as an attempt to establish a sort of pan-Asian buddhism to unite their colonies and distinguish themselves from the Joseon Dynasty, and their photos here from 1922 suggest that the statue of Seokgamoni-bul is ancient.
I could go into more, but this post is already long enough with the histories of random East Asian buildings and artefacts, so I'll move on. Maybe it's the amount of historical sites in each country that are informing people's evaluations. But I don't see South Korea as having less in this regard either, at least not if you conduct any amount of cursory research. There are historic tombs and burial mounds all over the country, including in Seoul, Gyeongju and so on. The Namsan mountain south of Gyeongju alone boasts over 100 Silla buddhist sites, many of which are spectacular like the Chilburam buddha sculptures (8th century) or the Sambulsa statue triad (7th century). There is just so much to find once you dig a bit deeper beyond the Instagram-friendly sites.
Choosing SK as a point of comparison is also making it harder for me than it really needs to be. Comparing Japan with the big granddaddy of East Asia, China, makes proving my point that Japan isn't the be-all-end-all of East Asia trivially easy: there's the ancient walled city of Pingyao that looks like something out of a fantasy movie, the Mogao cave temples, etc, there's so many truly epic sites there it's really hard to know where to start. The Cultural Revolution, try as it might, couldn't erase everything; China was a huge stable empire for most of its history and its historical sites are appropriately spectacular.
Note I'm not bashing Japan, again I quite like it and think it's a very nice place to visit. It's just always baffled me to see the amount of esteem it receives over... well, pretty much any other travel destination. Perhaps the explanation is just that it was a big cultural and tech exporter during the 20th century, and that's kind of rippled through our cultural consciousness and resulted in Japan being The Place To Be.
EDIT: accuracy
My grandmother died at the start of the month, after a long year of close brushes with death. I wasn't there for the bitter end - I was in Sydney while she rotted away on the other side of the world, crippled by a tumour she would never get over.
The last time I ever saw her, it was over a call. She wasn't responsive enough to say anything or even give any indications that she was there, and it was disconcerting to see just how unrecognisable she was. The way she looked was halfway between human and mummified corpse. Her eyes were half-open and defocused, and her arm, now shaped like a long, attenuate claw, jerked up and down haphazardly. My family tried to convince me she could still hear and understand; they were almost certainly lying either to me or to themselves, drawing spurious correlations out of random noise so they could hope there was something there.
Even if she could hear me, everything I could say would just have been a pathetic insult. "How are you doing?" Terrible, thanks. "I hope people are taking care of you well." My catheter is uncomfortable, and the nurses won't do anything about it. "I've been pretty good on my end." Fuck off. I ended up telling her about my day, and the last thing I said to her was something laughably trivial and inconsequential, hilariously stupid in hindsight. There was nothing particularly graceful or poignant or even sad about it. I was never close to her - quite the opposite; she had done a good number of ethically questionable or downright repulsive things during her life - but seeing someone I once knew turn into a flesh puppet, flailing around aimlessly on the bed like a poorly rigged 3D model, was profoundly disturbing in a way that's hard to articulate.
Shortly after the call ended, a blackout fell over my apartment building. This had never happened here before, and it was night time so the entire room was blanketed in darkness - all there was to do was sit in the silence and think. Walking out into the corridor presented a scene from a horror movie; the halls of the building were lit with a strange liminal yellow-orange light, and the background hum of the building - which I usually take for granted - had completely died out. It took two or three hours for the power to come back on.
A couple hours after the call and the strange blackout, my grandmother died. It appears her husband took her death extremely badly. He initially seemed in denial about what had happened - he was surprised to realise her body was cold, and refused to let the undertakers take her away, snapping at anyone who tried. For a while he kissed and slept beside her deteriorating corpse, and by the time they managed to pry her away from him she was disintegrating so badly they had to rush out a cremation. Her ashes are now in an urn at the home she once lived.
Ever since then, this has popped up repeatedly in my mind. I'm not even in mourning - I'm more relieved that people can start moving on now, since everyone was being held in stasis for the longest time - rather, it's something else. I've thought about death a lot, but the existential dread of seeing someone wither away like that is really potent, and the weird, coincidental timing of the blackout doesn't help. I certainly won't try to find any meaning in it; that would be doing the same thing my family did when they insisted she could still understand, but this is probably one of the most terrifying coincidences that has happened in my life, and I am still rattled by it despite my agnostic nature.
I don't know if I should even post this, to be honest. If this comment gets deleted later, don't be surprised.
EDIT: Thanks to everyone for sharing their condolences and their experiences with the death of family, it's much appreciated. I don't think I'm going to delete this now, but it did feel strange posting about something so personal on an anonymous online forum.
Divorcing my wife because she fell into debt is very different from deciding not to marry her because she revealed she revealed to me late in our engagement that she'd been in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt all along, even if both could be described as "Making marriage decisions on the basis of money."
This is a very obvious false equivalency and I'm not sure how you don't see it. Failing to disclose something, like your debts, that you know will affect the other partner personally is beyond the pale precisely because it is so relevant to their future wellbeing - you can't really say you care for a person and yet want to dupe them into taking on your debts.
Something like voting for Trump, on the other hand, is just not super relevant to the other partner's personal life or material wellbeing outside of "You hold opinions I don't like and that makes me feel bad". Who your partner voted for is not your business in the way that your partner's debts are your business. If someone wants to abandon a relationship for that reason, it's certainly their prerogative, but it is their own hangup that's at fault.
This is true, but typical-minding someone who's been described to pen comments "more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit" is probably a bad idea. And I do personally know people who have dumped friends who have voted for Trump - incidentally (or not), they themselves generally happen to be fairly shit people in my experience.
I genuinely think you're typical-minding here. There is a contingent of people so intent on hating Trump supporters that when there's a conflict between their idea that 1) Trump supporters are horrible human beings who support Bad Things and 2) this person I know is good and principled, they'll resolve the cognitive dissonance by sacrificing 2) to protect 1), instead of entertaining the idea that there's a remotely valid train of thought that might allow someone reasonable to consider supporting Trump.
It seems quite bizarre for me as well that this would be someone's reaction, but people can indeed be so afflicted by political derangement so as to do this - they see casting your vote for Trump as tantamount to ushering in the American equivalent of the Third Reich. It's just such an illegitimate position to them that they refuse to humanise their supporters; it's a close-to-irredeemable action that overrides much of the positive personal qualities you may have had and makes them see you as barely even human once you've done that. I am only slightly exaggerating.
Tiptoeing around this is a gigantic mistake - this is going to come out at some point, and the values difference will have to be confronted. If she truly can't handle it and is going to want to force consensus, it's not going to work. I know of a guy who married a strongly religious girl who's extremely domineering in terms of beliefs, and he's slowly changing his own stated beliefs. Not just on religion, too - he's even allowed her to not vaccinate their baby daughter just for the sake of harmony. This kind of relationship dynamic where you just keep quiet and hide things about yourself to keep the missus happy isn't sustainable or healthy, I think, though it's unfortunately common.
My partner and I talked about politics very early on in the course of the relationship (homosexual relationship, take that how you will) and laid bare all of these value differences that bother most people. We knew what we were both getting into before we got too invested. Our political opinions are similarly divergent, and we had pretty gigantic blowouts about it early on - there was a point in which he linked me a BreadTube video and I did not hold back when tearing into it, to the point I had a whole script written complete with sources as to why it was wrong about everything. At this point, we have a pretty high level of certainty that neither of us is going to leave the other for such things, and while we may still disagree every now and then it's not going to jeopardise the relationship.
My prediction is that the DNC will just double down. They did it when Clinton lost, there's no reason to believe they won't do it again. I expect that after this there will be a lot of hand-wringing about how Harris lost because she's a black woman, gigantic screeds on the supposedly pernicious nature of misogyny and White supremacy in America will be penned, and Trump will be scrutinised for any hint of wrongdoing a la the Steele dossier. Expecting the DNC, their voter base, and their institutional apparatus to have any self-awareness at this current point in time is, I think, completely unrealistic. The strategy they've been going with for a while now is just to claim that it can't be anything they've done, it must be these horrible voters who are the problem. See also these exemplars from other countries: Brexit, Australia's Voice, the Irish referendum on women and family. Every time the voters vote "wrong", it is a sign that democracy itself is flawed. Perhaps much of this will be driven by strategic party-political considerations, but I think many members of the DNC certainly still believe that this tactic will help them garner support for 2028. They certainly have enough institutional clout to (try and) make it work.
Besides, the current tribal political landscape is not conducive to self-examination - oddly enough I'm reminded of the situation in many former communist countries. ln Mao's China, the horrific failure of the Great Leap Forward was attributed not to the communist system that produced it, rather it was attributed to the members of the cadres trying to sabotage their great political project. Despite the fact that the cadres acted the way they did because of the incentives created by the system, they were portrayed as secret members of the Kuomintang plotting a bourgeoisie revolution under the noses of the communist authorities, and Mao's reputation remained untouched. The ideological can never admit that what they're doing isn't working - rather, it is because their enemy is just too strong and too powerful, and it needs to be railed against even more until it goes away. These kinds of narratives are very easy to capitalise on, and I doubt one failed election will stop the DNC from using it.
As for the Republicans, I expect they will take this as a sign that populist politics are working, and it might motivate them to lean into it even more. I don't expect anyone to do anything that will decrease the temperature of the culture war. Perhaps something like a bringing back of the fairness doctrine might help prevent these partisan bubbles from forming, expose people to a more balanced information environment and stop people from creating superweapons backed by The Authorities, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
My biggest hope personally is that the DNC loses enough elections to moderate themselves significantly on the topic of idpol or discard it entirely as a part of their platform, but unless they have a very long string of losses under their belt, I think the only thing that'll happen is a doubling down. I think they'll need to be forced into having a major come-to-Jesus moment before any of this materialises. And until they stop being "woke" entirely, I'll take pleasure in their losses. I am also not of the opinion that a Trump win is a "win for wokeness", I certainly think they'll try to use a Trump win to drum up support, but I don't believe in giving your enemy what they want with the faint hope that maybe they stop stepping on you. The right way to deal with this is to make it very clear that such tantrums do not yield results, and if that entails increasing the temperature of the culture war, so be it.
Found a new album recently that I'm hugely into, an event that's increasingly rare nowadays especially considering how voracious I've been with my music consumption in the past. The album in question is 裸の王様 (The Naked King), an absolutely ridiculous funk album from the Japanese band JAGATARA, released in 1987 and which sounds like a seamless blend between Talking Heads-like afrobeat and Japanese city pop. Unfortunately this band didn't have a very long life, as the bandleader Edo Akemi died while taking a bath in 1990.
This is one of the finest albums I've heard in a bit, they juggle these mammoth 7-10 minute songs while maintaining the energy throughout in a thoroughly engaging way. I think the only thing that drags it down is the final track, where the infectious flow built up by the first three tracks is interrupted by a more ballad-like number - which I don't think they particularly excel at, and is the only song on there which really seems to have aged. Still, this album is very worth your time.
Sure, but "brutalism is apt for buildings that are meant to be morbid" is hardly an argument in favour of its application everywhere a la Chandigarh (in Toronto, that kind of architecture is a staple of everyday life). I also think the Kyiv Crematorium is quite ugly, and I wouldn't build a crematorium like that, but different strokes, I guess. The only one I like in there at all is the museum in Tashkent, and that's because it uses some ornamentation and maintains some level of continuity with earlier architectural traditions, but ornament is anathema to many modernists.
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It's long distance, and "member of my family" here just means people related by blood.
However while I can't make any insight into whether the art community is shrinking or growing, the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist.
They certainly succeeded at making a piece of art that evokes emotions, but that's just not my criteria for what constitutes good art since (as someone who dabbles in arts myself, primarily literature and music) I think it's trivially easy to do so - especially if you consider "intense hatred of and anger at the artist" a valid emotion. Part of the problem is that the art in Union Station looks like it was taken straight from an unfinished sketch. Skill is an integral part of it for me - an important part of being an artist is constantly questioning what you bring to the world others couldn't already offer themselves, and if your art lacks technique and is easily replicated, you genuinely don't offer much. In order for any art to be considered good at all, there also needs to be a way for it to be bad, there needs to be a non-trivial set of failure-criteria that a sizeable amount of people would not be able to satisfy. A lot of modern artists, even celebrated ones (e.g. Rothko) don't have that.
Furthermore, there are works that fit an art gallery that don't work in a public space people have to frequent every day. I don't know about you, but I don't think Francisco Goya's Black Paintings should be displayed in a public square, and that was constructed with infinitely more talent than whatever was in Union Station. I would honestly rather have an inoffensive, bland piece of public art than something that makes me feel depressed or annoyed every time I encounter it.
I do this full time (don't worry, it's not too bad, it's only endless pain and suffering) and I endorse the sentiment in your comment wholeheartedly. Ideally tax should be easy, but it's prone to accrete over time and increase in complexity as politicians play political football, and in addition there are a massive amount of anti-evasion mechanisms in the tax code in order to try and cover up every loophole as they're discovered, like trying to plug a pipe that keeps springing leaks. The legislation inevitably becomes an unwieldy, incoherent mess that most people would give their left testicle never to look at again.
In addition, tax collectors' incentives are so ridiculously misaligned with that of the rest of the public that it's often farcical. Their leniency or harshness is highly dependent on their revenue collection targets at any given point, their audits can be capricious and arbitrary, and in cases of conflict between the tax office and a business (I have actually seen this before) they'll try to wear said business out through attrition and limit the avenues for appeal. Contesting them in court is difficult because they have a practically endless reserve of public money to fight you, and if you're a small business lacking knowledge of the intricacies of taxation law and accounting, your best course of action is to submit to the terms of the tax office. The whole thing is fucked beyond belief.
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