isaacd
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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.
“If you knew what it was, you’d be using it already.”
4·1 month agoOne of my best friends in high school was a Norwegian exchange student. He was easygoing and smart and we rode the bus together because his host family lived nearby. Some of the funniest conversations of my life happened on those bus rides.
When he went back to Norway we lost touch. I think it must have been difficult for him to be here—the isolation, the culture shock, the language barrier, I can only imagine. Maybe it was a relief to leave our little town in the rearview mirror. But I’m forever glad I met him.
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.)