It's sooo good, but I think Yojimbo is still my overall favorite of his black-and-white chambara movies. It's got that absolutely unreal soundtrack. The whole movie feels like it has a pulse, and you're *constantly* waiting for when the horns will get busted out next.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IHL...
You have described the Primal Scene of the client-freelancer relationship.
The G.I. Joe PSA parodies belong on any Great Videos curriculum.
Man, I remember just beating my head against MOO3 in middle school. I thought that surely I would eventually get it and it would be fun. It did have a few cool ideas, like wasn't there semi-realistic slower-than-light travel?
Man, where was this energy when he was telling his guys to shoot at the American planes in 1962?
Huh... I wonder if this might have inspired the mercenaries' armor in Disco Elysium? It's such a dead ringer that I briefly thought this was DE fan art.
Yeah, my first reaction was like, "Wait, when did the Brits start having a supreme court?"
I used to catch a show like this that aired late at night when I lived in Japan.
I was also heavily involved in anti-Iraq war protests and I disagree that things were better back then. The growth of the American left in the last two decades means that sectarians and other nutjobs were a bigger percentage of the scene back then. Think of Code Pink or the human shield volunteers.
I distinctly remember reading Clash of Civilizations in high school because it was the first time I realized that a widely discussed book written by a proper professor could be not just wrong but actually *dumb*.
Bruuuenig!
And, unlike any other literacy campaign I know of, it was *everybody* since there was no preexisting literate elite. Like it describes in that quote, the king and his ministers were learning to read and write themselves even as they were overseeing the campaign.
The literacy campaign under Kamehameha III is mind boggling. From writing being totally unknown to mass literacy in a single generation. Hawaiian leaders instantly grasped how powerful of a tool literacy was and basically conducted a whole-of-government moonshot to acquire the technology.
I find the Kingdom of Hawaii‘s history totally fascinating. It‘s like the story of 19th century in miniature. The program of breakneck modernization that the Kamehameha dynasty carried out fully deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the Tanzimat or the Meiji Restoration.
A friend of mine dated a woman whose dad was a hardcore Hawaiian monarchist. He had a homemade Kingdom of Hawaii passport that he would try to use at airports. It‘s a super weird mix of, like, sovereign citizens, ethnic nationalists, and new age hippies.
That Peli Grietzer essay "Theory of Vibe" has really shaped my thinking about LLMs, because vibes does seem to be the thing they're best at, and the object of a lot of fetishes is pretty clearly a Grietzerian vibe.
"It was god that made the devil,
and the woman, and her man,
and there wouldn't be an apple
if it wasn't in the plan."
Is a wonderfully concise argument against the concept of original sin.
Oh wow, I'd never listened to him before and I've been playing them non-stop all day. The double-time version of George Fox absolutely rules. The way it makes Fox sound both heroic and slightly insane is perfect.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Ex...
In this case it's a bit weirder. The subreddit apparently got taken over by The American Communist Party (not to be confused with the Communist Party of the USA) who are a truly strange little cult of pro-Trump communists.
A.E. van Vogt‘s “Slan” should definitely be on any such list. I feel like “fans are slans” thinking is incredibly common in the modern day.
And I'm standing there watching all this with these two numbskulls who've been showing up to the protests every day but who have absolutely nothing in common with whatever media depiction of dangerous rioters led the guy in the car to panic and almost kill someone. It was like a hall of mirrors.
And then it turned out that the guy was (probably?) not even a terrorist but rather just some fucking jackass with a gun in his car who turned down the street without knowing what was going on and panicked? But he was also, like, an East Precinct cop's brother-in-law or something?
I think the main source of that unreality was that it was all very silly and serious in equal measure. Like, I was arguing with a hotep and a right-wing teenager about the NESARA conspiracy theory, and then we watched a man drive into the crowd and shoot someone.
I thought about recording something in the immediate aftermath, and I wish I had because I'm sure there's all sorts of little details I've forgotten, and everything at the time was swathed in a pervasive sense of unreality. Every depiction I saw of what was occurring was in some way misleading.
The thing I would stress though is that while these nitwits would sorta hang around in the *manner* of revolutionaries manning a checkpoint (and be photographed doing so by the news) they would never actually stop or even talk to anyone! Nor did they try to compete a perimeter. It was all vibes!
We weren't occupying anything. There was no perimeter. All the streets to the north and around the park remained open. But then I came back the next day and found that stupid fucking Free Capitol Hill sign and teenagers pretending to "man" the glorified traffic cones I helped set up the day before.
I have a funny perspective on this because I literally helped build the barricades on Capitol Hill in 2020. The people I was with were worried about another car driving into the crowd, so we dragged some metal barriers the cops had left behind and used them to close the streets south of the park.
That's a very good book. It really crystalized for me how "occupy a public space" isn't really a tactic per se, it's just the path of least resistance for a group with no leaders. I see it all the time now.
