For three solid minutes, we stared at a huge Chevrolet logo. Just stared at it. Nothing else was happening. Three minutes.
Wait, why hasn’t anyone done “Catullus, but in the present day” yet? Like as a cable TV comedy/drama or something
He’s an accomplished writer, pioneer of a seductive new genre that’s about wit and frivolity and emotion instead of epic grandeur; a prankster known for his elaborate, extremely vulgar disses; beloved by the powerful – his a friendship with the head of state (Caesar) was strong enough to withstand his brutal mockery of the latter in print; and yet … he’s not happy! Why? He’s in love. With a married woman – wife of a powerful politician. Who’s not as into him as he is into her. And boy is he into her – this formidable, urbane, rapier-witted man, reduced to quivering jelly by thought of his Lesbia
Guys the TV show writes itself
Wait, why hasn’t anyone done “Catullus, but in the present day” yet? Like as a cable TV comedy/drama or something
The Recognition of Śakuntalā (sometimes known as ‘the Śākuntala’ – i.e. ‘the play about Śakuntalā’ – but more popularly simply as ‘Śakuntalā’, after its heroine) is generally considered to be the best of [4th-5th century writer] Kālidāsa’s dramas and, by consensus, the paradigmatic Sanskrit play, a work of poetic brilliance and complex structure which has provided a benchmark for all classical Indian literature. Indeed, Śakuntalā has a cultural cachet in India similar to that associated with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the world at large, although it is a very different kind of play. Yet to say so hardly reveals the true extent of Śakuntalā’s cultural significance. In the words of one commentator, it is judged by the tradition itself to be ‘the validating aesthetic creation of a civilization’, a play whose form and content unite to ‘express persistent cultural verities’.
(W. J. Johnson, introduction to his translation of Śakuntalā)
This … seems like something that ought to be more widely known than it is?
In addition to his plays and fiction, Schnitzler meticulously kept a diary from the age of 17 until two days before his death. The manuscript, which runs to almost 8,000 pages, is most notable for Schnitzler’s casual descriptions of sexual conquests – he was often in relationships with several women at once, and for a period of some years he kept a record of every orgasm.
Another funny thing about dreams: transportation seems to play an outsize role? Or, it does in my dreams, anyway, and I’ve gotten the impressive that it is pervasive if not universal, the way the “naked in class” dream is pervasive.
Lots of dreams about getting places on buses and trains – complicated transfers, unexpectedly ending up five counties over, maze-like stations. Some people have similar dreams about airports (and I’ve had a few, but it’s mostly buses and trains for me).
Freshly minted bullshit just-so story: dreams play a role in consolidating memories, and memories that are very emotionally salient or stressful tend to get consolidated extra hard. Transportation-related experiences are the closest that many people get (on a regular basis) to the “fight or flight” scenarios regularly experienced by many other organisms (time is critical, you’re doing a lot of frantic spatial navigation). So our brains try extra hard to consolidate these memories, like they would with memories of predators and stuff
If that’s true then we would also remember transportation experiences extra well, which sounds pretty weird but is, at least, a testable prediction
But if you do some digging, you can find sites that Microsoft has ordered taken down from Google, but which are still available via Bing.
Bing finds its niche: “piracy of Microsoft products”
Me: “Hmm, so say you had a genetic algorithm where fitness was determined by performance in a prediction market”
Me: “That could potentially sidestep the problems with wealth disparity and/or market power in prediction markets – you could reproduction could work by splitting a trader who owns $N into N traders that own $1, with mutation, and hopefully the mutations would help de-correlate things … although exactly copying the parent’s behavior would be the best short-term approach in this environment, so the mutations would experience negative selection … huh idk”
Me: “Wait, what if this were the setting for a science fiction story though”
Me: “Babies are made through a process akin to trust-busting, you are more likely to split up the more money you make, no one exists at the same time as their parent and it’s overwhelmingly common to have a rich parent but also very many siblings … whoa”
Inside every brain, be it that of a communist revolutionary or a bourgeois swine,
there exist a class of proteins called the neurotrophic factors.
If there’s one thing we can learn from this, it’s that butternut squash isn’t cheese, and it will never become cheese – no matter how much we complain about it.