the fisherman of halicarnassus

a guilty pleasure is something that brings enjoyment or pleasure, but that is considered to be lowbrow, embarrassing, or otherwise unworthy of admiration. for example, someone might consider watching a cheesy romantic comedy or listening to bubblegum pop to be a guilty pleasure. guilty pleasures are typically seen as indulgences that are not to be taken seriously, and they may be something that a person enjoys privately or only with close friends. some weird examples of guilty pleasures might include eating raw cookie dough, watching reality tv shows, or collecting figurines of cartoon characters.

range anxiety is a term used to describe the fear that electric vehicles will run out of power before reaching their destination. this fear can be a barrier to the adoption of electric cars, as many people are concerned that they will not be able to find a charging station when they need one.

one humorous way to explain range anxiety is to compare it to the "quarter panic" that some people experience when using a payphone. just like with a payphone, electric car owners may worry that they will not have enough "juice" to make it to their destination. however, just like with a payphone, there are ways to mitigate this anxiety, such as by planning ahead and checking for charging stations along the route. and just like with a payphone, range anxiety may soon be a thing of the past as technology and infrastructure continue to improve.

the boys is a television series that is available on amazon prime video. the show is based on the comic book series of the same name and is set in a world where superheroes exist, but they are corrupt and abusive. the series follows a group of regular people who team up to take down the corrupt superheroes and expose their wrongdoing. the boys is known for its dark and satirical tone, and it has been praised for its exploration of complex themes such as power, corruption, and corporate greed. the show has been a critical and commercial success, and it has been renewed for a third season.

here are a few famous quotes on love from some of history's most notable philosophers:

— "love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies." - aristotle
— "love is not consolation. it is light." - simone weil
— "love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved." - soren kierkegaard
— "love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis." - pierre teilhard de chardin
— "love is an endless act of forgiveness. forgiveness is me giving up the right to hurt you for hurting me." - beyonce giselle knowles-carter
— "love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." - peter ustinov
— "to love another person is to see the face of god." - victor hugo
— "love is an untamed force. when we try to control it, it destroys us. when we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. when we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused." - paulo coelho

an internet video on demand service that has the best content so far (as of feb 2022).

it feels like the campaign to bring down pedro sanchez is still in full swing.

from my perspective, migrants are being funneled toward spain, videos are quickly amplified across x, and the reaction is almost always the same. after elon musk's takeover, the platform has become much more receptive to right wing narratives, and the response follows a familiar pattern. the left is blamed. sanchez is blamed. then come the sarcastic comments like, "why don't you take them into your own home?"

then, of course, giorgia meloni enters the conversation by calling for schengen rules to be suspended for spain. the political logic seems obvious. if life becomes harder for ordinary spaniards, public frustration is more likely to be directed at sanchez.

a production that somehow makes a world supposedly inhabited by millions of humans, dwarves, and elves feel like it's populated by no more than fifty or sixty people. for a story on this scale, that's a remarkable failure of world-building.

the film is genuinely good. if you're looking for a straightforward thriller packed with action and constant suspense, this probably isn't for you.

what makes it work is that it's clearly built around an idea rather than spectacle. it's a thoughtful piece that prioritizes theme, symbolism, and artistic intent over cheap thrills. as a psychological drama with horror elements, it's a strong example of what it's trying to be.

at its core, the entire film revolves around one deceptively simple question:

"if someone loved you more than anything else in the world, would that actually make you happy?"

that's the question that stayed with me long after the movie ended.

another piece of garbage film that nolan fanboys are, once again, hailing as the greatest movie of the century.

none of the positive comments written about it mention things like good storytelling, good acting, well-written dialogue, being a good historical film, or being a good literary adaptation. all of it is about the classic nolan showmanship, always the same stuff, all the scenes were shot in imax, no cgi was used, it's got this aura, the music was great, blah blah blah.

and nobody steps up to ask, why is agamemnon batman?

why does a story set in the 11th century bc have 5th century bc greek armor and clothing?

using practical effects instead of cgi is important, sure, but why isn't sticking to historical accuracy important in the adaptation of a historical literary work? when you point out that they should've used mycenaean armor and weapons instead of classical-era hoplite gear, the answer becomes "that's just how this adaptation is, that's the style," and then they lose their minds over the fact that they shot the whirlpool scene using actual jet skis to create a real whirlpool.

then go shoot a whirlpool movie, man, what business do you have with homer's literature?

and this is a literary work too. fine, you say it's fiction, let's not go looking for historical accuracy, but if it's not even going to be a good screen adaptation of the work's own original style, then what's the point? there's nothing of homer's actual work in this film, why is this called the odyssey?

what everyone needs to understand is this: this film isn't the odyssey adapted for the screen however nolan wanted, it's the odyssey adapted however nolan is capable of adapting it. this is the extent of what the guy can do. it works out fine when it's a space movie or a batman movie, but when it comes to bringing the late bronze age aegean world and classical literature to the big screen, all his limitations come pouring out.

batman-armored agamemnon's aura, gorgeous soundtrack, imax technology, special effects, a bunch of hollow nonsense.

a total dick of a documentary out to launder the reputations of the ultra-rich who make up the world's 1%.

setting aside the historical accuracy, the fact that americans can't get enough of praising this nonsense, made to defend and whitewash the 3-5 families who've been sitting on most of the wealth in the world, in other places, in youtube comments and so on, is truly unbelievable.

just as you can appreciate the smart, entrepreneurial sides of guys like rockefeller, carnegie, or morgan, it's essential that you also understand they were thieves who exploited the labor of the masses, usurped the rights of others, and found their way within the bounds of the law. yes, maybe to avoid standing out too much or being vilified by society, they gave away perhaps 1/10th of their fortunes, oh what a tremendous kindness, truly.

stupid people will always be searching for heroes and idols to deify and worship, to exalt and emulate. there will inevitably be clueless people who'll deem what i've written here envy of wealth. and those people are exactly the parasites of society who are knowingly and willingly content to be exploited. as long as they exist, thieves will keep on existing in every century.

a real shame.

"when truths come to light, there is no doubt or hesitation. the light of truth is now plainly evident. in this state, learning takes place, debate falls away, and hearing comes to be. between you and this state lie perilous breaches, thirst-inducing deserts, wearisome roads, effaced traces. on these roads even the guide loses the way. these roads can be traversed not by the one who lives and dies, but by the one who gives life and gives death. what is the state of the one who stands against these difficulties and crosses the boundaries? yet in measure with the pain of the hardship endured, relief and blessing come to be. there, there is no desert or breach other than yourself. so you are, from yourself, the veil of him. remove yourself, that the matter may be made easy! the one who knows the creation knows the truth; the one who does not know a part of this truth does not know the whole. because, before the whole, the part is, from a side unnoticed, like the whole. had he known the part in all its aspects, he would have learned the whole as well. because it was by moving from the aspects of its being a part that he came to know the whole."

i can't explain this by giving myself as an example. because i never claimed to be a good person. but i've seen plenty of living examples of it around me.

in my opinion the reason for this isn't that they're evil by birth. it's that after a while they start connecting cause and effect. getting ingratitude in return the more good you do, being used the more you sacrifice, losing out the more honest you are... at some point i think a feeling like "screw it, if being good doesn't pay off, then forget it" forms in a person's head.

maybe they don't really become merciless. maybe they just go numb. because a person who gets wounded in the same spot over and over eventually learns to protect themselves. from the outside it looks like they've lost their conscience, but really they've just lost their expectations and their feelings.

and that's the most dangerous transformation of all. you get used to the wickedness of wicked people, but when people who were once good give up, it tells you so much more.

in the 1840s, at vienna's largest hospital, women about to give birth ended up in one of two wards: the first ward, run by doctors, and the second, run by midwives. women cried and begged not to be put in the first, and some, purely to avoid ending up there, gave birth in the street and came to the hospital only afterward. they weren't wrong to, either; in the doctors' ward the death rate from puerperal fever climbed as high as ten percent, while in the midwives' ward it was two or three. the young doctor ignaz semmelweis became fixated on this difference. the turning point came when his friend kolletschka cut his hand with a scalpel during an autopsy and died with the exact same clinical picture as puerperal fever. the pieces fell into place: in the morning the doctors were dissecting cadavers, and in the afternoon they were delivering babies without washing their hands. the midwives never touched cadavers at all. semmelweis made handwashing with chlorinated lime mandatory, and the deaths dropped to one percent.

what came after is one of the most shameful pages in the history of medicine. his colleagues took offense, saying "a gentleman's hands can't be dirty"; since germ theory didn't exist yet, the talk of "cadaver particles" was treated like superstition. nobody wanted to admit they'd spent years killing patients with their own hands, that's all there was to it. semmelweis lost his job, and the more he wrote letters calling europe's famous doctors "murderers," the more isolated he became, until he was finally locked away in an insane asylum. there, a wound opened by a beating from the guards got infected, and within two weeks he was dead. from the very thing he'd devoted his life to describing, that is. the semmelweis reflex comes from this story: the reflexive rejection of new knowledge that contradicts established belief, no matter how solid the evidence. pasteur and lister proved the man right twenty years later, but by then it was too late.

in this period it was not only humanity that was subjected to genocide, it was works of art at the same time. adolf hitler, after becoming chancellor of germany in 1933, set up a unit to loot works of art, and he put einsatzstab reichsleiter rosenberg in charge of it, a man who was an enemy of art, a skull-measuring racist and a fundamentalist, and who was desperate to get into hitler's good graces.

in fact, on march 15 of that same year, through him and his unit, a blacklist was published. the first order of business was stripping george grosz of his citizenship. the bauhaus school was shut down. names like max liebermann, kathe kollwitz, paul klee, max beckmann and otto dix were removed from their posts at the art schools. and roughly a week before these dismissals, the propaganda ministry that joseph goebbels would be put in charge of had already been officially announced. so everything had actually been planned in advance.

as far as hitler was concerned, one of the biggest cultural obstacles standing in the way of national socialism was art. he defined the modernists as people who distorted art. the futurists, the cubists and the dadaists were included in that too. their work was worthless to him. because the way he saw it, art was supposed to serve politics, and it needed to be turned into a part of nazi propaganda as quickly as possible.

and sure enough, a short time later, on july 18, the first artistic exhibition of nazi propaganda, kunst, opened in berlin. the exhibition featured the paintings and sculptures of so-called artists who were hitler bootlickers, people like arno breker, josef thorak and adolf ziegler. and of course, with plenty of hitler portraits made by various people, the rise of his party to this point was being visualized in artistic terms.

and at more or less the same time, the commission led by max von schillings and wilhelm furtwangler was busy censoring the musicians, radio stations and composers who were active in that era. television programs and films got caught in the censorship machine too, of course. and in 1935, the first state-backed propaganda film in history, triumph des willens, was released.

but hitler did not stop even there. in may of 1938, he put into effect the degenerate art law designed by einsatzstab reichsleiter rosenberg and joseph goebbels. with this law, the government would be able to seize works of art on made-up grounds and without paying any compensation. and it did not take long at all. the great majority of the confiscated works of art were sold off at very cheap prices in order to belittle the art and the artist. the ones that could not be sold were burned in an orderly fashion in berlin, under the name of a festival.

the breaks fall at the natural shifts: the setup, the 1933 blacklist and dismissals, hitler's view of modern art, the propaganda exhibition, the censorship of music and film, and finally the 1938 degenerate art law and the destruction of the works. same text as before, just paragraphed.

it's entirely a matter of supply and demand. it's about the industry knowing what to get people to like. in every era people have wanted to consume things collectively, to feel a sense of belonging, and popular culture has filled that need. back in the day everyone in the neighborhood read the same newspaper, now they follow the same influencer, at its core not much has changed, in my opinion. turning up your nose and calling it low-quality would be taking the easy way out too, because not everything popular is bad, and by the same token we don't have to call something good just because it's popular. what's bad is losing your own taste inside this spiral. i mean, the part that matters is how much we, as people, have surrendered to it. being able to put a little distance between yourself and it, consuming it with a questioning eye, feels like the healthiest approach to me.