Two very different protest songs I heard this year

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals - The Iron Wall

Hen Ogledd - Scales will fall

I love steam and valves hardware products, but the thing is, I’m not the primary customer in their business model. Steams product is digital shelf space in one of the most popular digital arcades, access to which they charge their real primary customers: independent game devs and publishers.

Whatever their activities are outside that, even the much appreciated proton and contribution to Linux gaming, is in the context of capturing more gamers on their platform, making their real product an irresistible choice for their real customers to release their game on, despite the steep per-purchase cut Valve takes.

That’s not an entirely…erhm…nice business model imo. It’s remarkabley like Amazon, but at least Valve didn’t put a bunch of local bookstores out of business becoming the juggernaut they are.

I’ll go against the grain here. It’s not as much, to me, about whether homeschooling is good or bad. I think it has the potential to be really good and really bad for the kid, depending on the parents.

But people who say, “kids won’t get socialization” if they are homeschooled seem to think that tossing all our socially-unformed people into one location, with little socially-formed supervision, is automatically going to teach the former group how to socialize with others in a healthy manner. It’s not. It just creates trauma for kids all around. Child on child abuse.

Not only that, but you strip kids of agency by putting them in a building where they can’t leave, controlling their movements by a bell, assessing and grading their performance by “objective” measurements, subjecting them to authoritarian teachers – it’s all so degrading and the opposite of what id consider a healthy learning environment.

If schools had more adults integrated into student activities – all the activities – sitting at lunch, class, band, whatever, – removing the barrier of superiority, removing lettered grading system, paying more teachers more, maybe id consider it. But as the school system is in the US now, id never want to send my kid

Edit: obviously not all schools are like this. But they are in my city. Id have to move to a more affluent town to be able to trust the school system.

I’m just so tired of seeing 1984 and Brazil and Idiocracy and every other political warning and satire played out in the real world every goddamn day of my life

Ahhh…Well, in that case, I think you should quietly ask her out. I personally don’t think its wrong of you to do that. I’d keep it on the down low, of course. Who knows, maybe one of you gives the other the ick and it turns out to be nothing more than two platonic coworkers hanging out outside of work (I know, unlikely). If it does develop further romantically, at least you’re now out of the love triangle and into a secret romance…which im kinda inclined to think that is better than a perpetually unresolved love triangle. But yeah, its tough. Wishing you good luck!

How realistic is it for you to be able to talk to Jane about it all? Maybe you could get a clearer picture about her (perhaps, lack of) feelings toward John.

Feels kinda silly for him to stay at a job he hates just for someone he hasn’t been on a date with yet…sounds like could be an infatuation situation but im not sure…

definitely juicy though! sorry you’re in the middle of it

edt: phrasing. also, course its not as simple for John as “just leave the job and find another.” surely there are other factors to him staying on board

Emperors new groove is the only one up there in snark for me

check out this book

https://interesi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/technopoly.pdf

Tech is a tool, you don’t need to connect with it in any transcendental way. According to this guy ^ Neil Postman, you may feel this way because we live in a TECHNOPOLY

I hear you, especially because there is a lot of pressure from the right to destroy public education outright – But I didn’t really say much about what a school system could/should provide? Only what it currently does not provide, at least in the US. It’s a pessimistic take, for sure, but the reality is so bad here that if I had to choose, my (nonexistent) kid would be home schooled. For sure, the current system could be improved a whole lot simply with more teachers (or adults), I’d guess, taking part in the learning experience – but not completely fixed.

I’m focused on the learning environment because in my view, a schools primary purpose is to impart knowledge through learning. I don’t think that purpose can be achieved without an environment conducive to learning. Throwing all the kids in a community into a building with little adult supervision, where they cannot leave for 6 hours, where they must move when the bell tolls, where they have to deal with the myriad social issues of a young person – that is not a physical environment conducive to learning. A compulsory curriculum with graded assignments and examinations does not, IMO, make a kid (me) open to knowledge – it makes him aware of conditional acceptance and a hierarchy of accomplishment. At best, it makes him want to get a good grade, or be in good standing with the teacher. And he will! But all he’ll learn is, as I said, how to find out what the teacher wants and give it to them.

Now that I’m older, I’m finding I missed out on a whole lot of good books, for example, because I was compelled to read them for a class, rather than curious to find out what was inside them. In classic capitalist fashion, I did the most efficient thing when I was in school: I read a summary of the books online and nailed the tests.

Obviously, there are also the secondary purposes of school, like learning acceptable socialization and conflict resolution strategies, but, as I said, dumping 10 kids to 1 teacher (and even this is a relatively low ratio) in a classroom is not going to be conducive to learning these things. They ought to be learned, for sure, but school as it is now fails and only outputs trauma and a stratified student body – the exact thing you’re thinking school should prevent! The whole structure of public schools here teaches that there are good students and bad students, that the good students are rewarded and the bad students are punished or, at best, ignored. There are parallels there, in my view, with how we treat the disabled, the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, or anyone whose ability does not fit neatly into the structure we’ve provided (capitalism) that our current school system feeds into.

sorry for the novel lol.

I think its because both need to house a large amount of individuals in as small a space as acceptable to the outside society. But also, both are ultimately mechanisms of authority that shirk their supposed goals of education and restitution/rehabilitation.

Related, perhaps unpopular opinion: It’s outright silly how we expect a good learning environment to come out of putting all of our socially unformed minds into one big facility, with little behavioral supervision (10-to-1, 15-to-1, or worse), and compel them to move from location to location by a bell, and to perform rote memorization in order to meet some metric of success. It’s sillier how we expect children to come out of this environment socially well-adjusted, having learned something of value, without psychological trauma, besides the experience of navigating a system of hierarchical authority. You know the wisdom passed down by my liberal (using liberal here in a very strict sense – NOT necessarily left leaning) Catholic father, who ostensibly would defend the value of educating the public (though, perhaps not the value of public education)?

“Find out what the teacher wants and give it to them.”

I’m more partial to a more human Superman

You just found the words for me, thanks! I’ve had trouble explaining to people why I didn’t love the most recent movie. I guess I prefer God-Superman rather than human Superman. I’m glad you liked this rendition though – here’s hoping Supergirl is good too!

I get it works in the context of the plot, the characterization just didnt work for me. When I say he’s underpowered, what I mean is I wish there were more moments where he’s SUPERMAN and not just a super guy. There weren’t many of those WOW moments, to me, where you and all the other characters are just astounded by his raw power. He struggles through the whole movie and that’s just not the version of Superman I like, I guess.

The JLU animated series version is more how I see Superman so that’s kinda the model I judge the live action movies against

I hear you, but weirdly enough I feel the opposite! I do get that the hope and optimism part was severely lacking in MoS, and it’s more present in Gunn’s new movie. But I kinda think of Superman as the wooden goodie-two-shoes of the JLU animated series, and to me Henry Cavill did that better than David Corenswet did. I feel like the Superman from Gunn’s movie is kinda underpowered and a little too “normal quirky funny nerd guy” rather than the straight-edge force of nature I feel like JLU Superman is. I feel like MoS almost got that, but then injected a bunch of sadness and desaturation which brought it down a bit

Man of Steel had an amazing first trailer that included the music from the crying scene in Fellowship of the Ring after Gandalf falls to the Balrog.

I think Man of Steel is a better movie than it gets credit for, but the trailer is legit great.

https://youtu.be/wArmHSPIvlQ

That’s awesome you got back into it for pure enjoyment!

Gear acquisition syndrome is real though. Fortunately for me I was able to recover from it in the context of guitars. Unfortunately for me I picked up photography as a hobby…

I play guitar casually since a little before COVID. Becoming more fluent with it every time I play is an amazing feeling.

Getting into a groove, putting my own spin/expressing myself with songs I like, and jamming with friends are experiences that are unmatched in enjoyment for me.

Making up my own silly songs on the fly is fun too.

Learning to play is the best thing I ever did. I had to get over the idea that it would be hard work to get good, or the idea that I’d never be as good as someone who started as a kid, or that I’d ever even be technically good, at all. Letting go of that stuff allowed me to enjoy each moment playing, and just have fun.

I choose I. Why? I-C-E-D. Free? Yessiree. Cold and totally bold. Aloned and totally stoned.

I is the place to be. I is the place for me. High is the state of me. I choose I.

Yeah. In middle school I was gonna be an NBA player 😂

Damn.

I enjoy these types of movies. The most recent one I watched was Terry Gilliams Days of Heaven. I saw it described as a visual poem (This is accurate) about a boy running from his past with his girlfriend and sister, arrives to work as a farmhand on a Texas farm during harvest season.

I enjoy Tarkovskys films, those are generally quite slow but philosophically dense. Stalker, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev. I haven’t seen the rest.

I also enjoy abstract documentaries. Baraka is a dialogue-less epic showcasing the alienness of human culture. Amazing visuals and music. Life changing for me. In this genre, I also love Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil – a directors reflections on memory and time. A more serious, focused documentary following several men responsible for the mass execution of communists in Indonesia in the 60s as they act out their atrocities for what they believe will be a great action movie, called The Act of Killing directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, is also powerful and surreal. These three films had a drastic effect on me personally are the greatest documentaries I’ve seen, though not much happens in them.

More recent slow movies I’ve enjoyed: Past Lives, about childhood love. Scored by Daniel Rossen of the indie band Grizzly Bear, it is a beautiful and different outlook on love. Very touching. Not much happens.

The other is The Brutalist, an epic about a Jewish architect escaping the Holocaust and moving to America, seeking the American dream. Haunting, looming.

Edit: Richard Linklaters films generally have very loose plots. I’ve only seen School of Rock and Boyhood though. Love Boyhood.