@nostalgebraist I am the worst fiancée in the world
now that’s what I call definite wrongness
I have used the term “post-Twitchellian” because I think it best emphasizes the crucial importance of Paul Twitchell on Eckankar.
People have all these grandiose and scary ideas of what goes on, but sometimes it’s really simple. There was a man who called himself the couch, and he would lie on the floor covered in a sheet, and all you would do is sit on him and talk about stuff and drink wine. That was it.
“I’ll just look something up on Wikipedia real quick,“ I thought, and before I knew it I was knee-deep in a 1995 usenet argument in which noted SF/F author John M. Ford derisively refers to D&D as “Dund”
This kind of carelessness in game writing leads to things like the idea,
still very common among people who get their history from Dund, that all
medieval weapons had precise names. This simply isn’t true; a “morning
star” might be anything with spikes sticking out of it, with or without a
length of chain. (What Dund insists is the True and Only Morningstar is
more accurately a “horseman’s flail” – it was short, so you could use it
from the saddle – but even this is a general term, not a precise one.)
And the exact distinction between a glaive, a guisarme, and a voulge
exists only in poor ole Gary’s mind.
As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are literally under siege
— (via sbnkalny)
When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they’re quoting Fight Club, a satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized, and that Tyler Durden isn’t the hero but a personification of the main character’s mental illness, and that his “snowflake” speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.
So basically people who say “snowflake” as an insult are quoting a domestic terrorist who blows up skyscrapers because he’s insecure about how good he is in bed.
The thing about this is – to write a good satire you need to make it close to reality (in some ways, to some extent). Which means you run the risk of creating something that your targets still find appealing.
Every other argument about the quality of Fight Club aside, I think it’s an important movie because it captured a thing that’s out there, which appeals to a certain large subsection of the male population. The fact that this subsection celebrates an ambivalent-at-best depiction of the thing suggests that there wasn’t anything else out there crystalizing the same thing with as much accuracy – if there were more unambiguously positive depictions of the thing, you’d think their popularity would have swamped Fight Club’s.
Yeah, maybe it’s making fun of guys who like the thing (and maybe without their knowledge), but it also revealed that there are a lot of those guys, and showed us exactly what it is that they like. (I’m not saying there weren’t other movies about masculinity; as I said, FC crystalized something more specific.) Even if you think the movie’s a satire, the humor of “these guys misinterpreted a movie, lol owned” is outweighed for me by the gravity of the realization “these guys exist, they aren’t going away, and they do unironically want the thing.“ Feels like they get the last laugh, here.
The problem with fight club is that while the text of the movie is obvious satire, the tone of the movie is seductive as hell. So even to the end, everything about Durden “feels” cool, rebellious and seductive. It’s a movie that seems almost purposefully constructed to make the audience miss the point.
Wall Street is another movie that I think sort of falls into that camp. A certain of person still uses “greed is good” non-ironically.
Also, I’m not sure there can be “positive depictions of the thing” in Fight Club because the core of it seemed pure, nihilistic rebellion without cause.
Yeah, I guess “positive depictions of the thing” would be more like “negative depictions of everything else.”
The nihilism of the characters comes from a wholesale rejection of society, a rising indignation or disgust towards normal life that eventually grows so far (“hitting bottom”) that them to think anything sufficiently abnormal is preferable, even joining a nihilistic cult. But the movie does nothing to make the viewer feel any strong negative feeling toward society. The movie depicts normal life by throwing together stock anti-conformity tropes (boring job, boring boss, buying furniture) without going out of its way to make them seem repulsive or wrong the way the characters do.
The alternative I’m picturing would focus a lot more creative energy on the depiction of society and normalcy – making the suits and dads seem over-the-top horrible, grotesque, unendurable, and depicting the Durden stuff as an oasis, an at least not that.
(Source: facebook.com, via furioustimemachinebarbarian)
My attempt to install tensorflow-fold thus far:
(1) follow steps on the repo’s installation page, which only gives instructions for binary installation, and links to the file for a specific build rather than a general binaries page
(2) try “import tensorflow-fold,” and get
undefined symbol: _ZN10tensorflow6tensor5SplitERKNS_6TensorERKNS_3gtl10ArraySliceIxEE
(3) google, find a thread where someone else had the problem, it turns out their version of tensorflow was too new to be compatible with the binary, they are advised to downgrade
(4) downgrade to tensorflow 1.0, now fold works but the activation function I used in my code isn’t in tensorflow 1.0
(5) google search with terms like “tensorflow fold install,” after clicking on several Q&A threads I click on something that turns out to be the fold repo’s “how to install from source” page, which apparently exists although there weren’t any links to it on the other documentation pages
(6) installation instructions tell me I need something called “Bazel” (”Google’s own build tool, now publicly available in Beta”), so I install that
(7) apparently I am supposed to use Bazel to … make a pip wheel for fold, so I can install it with pip locally? like, it’s not a registered PyPI package, but it still needs to get pip installed?
(8)
You also need to build a pip wheel for TensorFlow. Unfortuately this means we need to rebuild all of TensorFlow, due to known Bazel limitations (#1248).
(9) the machine is currently building tensorflow from source, something it has never had to do before, because it just had a … pip wheel … for it … …
Like I know this is research code, I’m not complaining, it’s just been such a weird ride, man
When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they’re quoting Fight Club, a satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized, and that Tyler Durden isn’t the hero but a personification of the main character’s mental illness, and that his “snowflake” speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.
So basically people who say “snowflake” as an insult are quoting a domestic terrorist who blows up skyscrapers because he’s insecure about how good he is in bed.
The thing about this is – to write a good satire you need to make it close to reality (in some ways, to some extent). Which means you run the risk of creating something that your targets still find appealing.
Every other argument about the quality of Fight Club aside, I think it’s an important movie because it captured a thing that’s out there, which appeals to a certain large subsection of the male population. The fact that this subsection celebrates an ambivalent-at-best depiction of the thing suggests that there wasn’t anything else out there crystalizing the same thing with as much accuracy – if there were more unambiguously positive depictions of the thing, you’d think their popularity would have swamped Fight Club’s.
Yeah, maybe it’s making fun of guys who like the thing (and maybe without their knowledge), but it also revealed that there are a lot of those guys, and showed us exactly what it is that they like. (I’m not saying there weren’t other movies about masculinity; as I said, FC crystalized something more specific.) Even if you think the movie’s a satire, the humor of “these guys misinterpreted a movie, lol owned” is outweighed for me by the gravity of the realization “these guys exist, they aren’t going away, and they do unironically want the thing.“ Feels like they get the last laugh, here.
(Source: facebook.com, via marcusseldon)
concept of a thieves guild: cool
reality of a thieves guild: tumblr shoplifting fandom
“Lifter”? I PREFER the term “treasure hunter”!