• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2024

help-circle


  • As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

    The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

    “How are you?”

    “Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

    Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

    The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.


  • Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

    I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

    Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?


  • I’m gonna sound a little “old man yells at cloud” here, but the majority of original movies are trying to jam way too much into a 2-hour runtime. Characters are dropped into the plot out of nowhere, protagonists change their minds for no apparent reason, 30-second montages are substituted for meaningful emotional beats, the pacing feels rushed after the first half hour, it’s just a mess of stuff happening because the scriptwriter wanted it to. (Or maybe it’s the editor’s fault, idk, I don’t make movies.) A movie is the same length as a short story, not a novel, and trying to do a novel is going to make it feel like a super-long trailer instead of a movie 99% of the time. Critics are gonna pan it and no one is gonna watch it.

    Sequels and franchise films can sometimes overcome this by benefit of familiar terrain. You already know the setting, you already know the characters, so we don’t need to spend time on that. It’s a definite advantage.

    (The downside is that a lot of sequels forget to tell a story. I didn’t tune in to “hang out” with my favorite superheroes. I was expecting, y’know, an emotionally compelling plot.)



  • For anyone who likes the video: definitely read The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus. Exurb1a does a solid job summarizing it, much better than most YouTubers, but skips a lot in order to keep the video short. It’s a very accessible book, especially if you skim the Kierkegaard stuff, and the core of it is strenuously punk and badass.

    Of note: Camus doesn’t just think you should live in defiance of a meaningless universe. He argues that you should live as long as possible, experience as much as you can, repeatedly do what you love most even to the exclusion of everything else. Absurdism is not mere hedonism nor optimistic nihilism; its rebellion is tenacious, passionate, intentional, and incapable of passivity.

    For a followup read, I recommend Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which is a great crash course in staring into the abyss.