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deltaengineering · 4 years

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Spring Anime 2020 Part 1: united states of whatever

BNA: Brand New Animal

So after Beastars wasn’t all that (feel free to tell me how wrong I am about everything ever, because I don’t already know this), Trigger is now taking a shot at the lucrative “Furries are a great metaphor for... society shit or whatever, I don’t know” market. It’s no surprise that it looks good; Trigger’s animation style is as easy on the eyes as ever and they brought in some of the ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ from Promare. Expect CGA palette 1 in here. Of course, it’s not Imaishi, so it won’t annoy the pants off you in seconds. Usually that’s a cause for celebration but keep in mind that this is Yoh Yoshinari instead, and Little Witch Academia TV did nothing to change my impression that a Trigger writer is the janitor mopping up after the animation bros are done partying. The first episode of BNA in particular is just as vapid as expected, but they helpfully released more and it does improve somewhat, with more effort put into the worldbuilding and characters than none at all and even a few attempts to intentionally subvert the lameness. There’s still issues; Michiru is just the goofy and dim Trigger main girl again and aloof loner Shirou is either extremely someone’s wolf fursona or an uncommonly stealthy pisstake on someone’s wolf fursona. The social commentary is very “I see what you did there” and there remain some doubts on the long-term viability of any Trigger endeavor. So, is it good enough to watch? I dunno, to be honest. More like it’s not bad enough to not watch. Thanks, Trigger.

Hachi-nan tte, Sore wa Nai deshou!

Oh boy, it’s the isekai light novel again, and expectations are so low that I’m positively surprised when I’m merely bored while watching it. Hachi-nan is one of those isekai things where the isekai is more or less perfunctory: regular dude gets reborn with complementary hax magic in ye olde kyngdomme of fantasy, whoop. A plus is that he’s put in a disadvantageous position and has to work for his power fantasy, i.e. he isn’t starting with an instaharem etc. - or rather, he does, but it’s a brief flashforward that seems mostly there to assure the viewer that they’re not watching anything good by mistake. And even that is not egregious, to be fair. It’s so “not even all that bad” that I’m wondering who’s supposed to watch this: People like me will never give it the time of the day with its tired gimmick and very unimpressive production, and people who start “lookin 4 ainme w/op mc” recommendations threads on reddit won’t get anything out of it either. How very curious.

Kakushigoto

I can only assume Kouji Kumeta (of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei fame) has a daughter now, and like all new dads he just can’t stop telling people how cute she is. Case in point: This manga, which is about a mangaka keeping his manga-drawing exploits secret from his very adorable daughter and that’s the joke. The character design is obviously very Kumeta, and so is the ceaseless discharge of puns, plus Ajia-do even put some light SHAFT touches on the adaptation. However, SZS’ semi-smart bickering is just replaced with very basic panic manzai antics here. You can even tell Kumeta is a good comedy writer, since the stories are fairly elaborate, introduce elements, go somewhere else and bring them back, and it’s all very technically solid - but that doesn’t change the fact that the punchline is lame and predictable. It’s like David Mamet writing a fart joke, you can admire the craft but at the end of the day, it’s still a fart joke. Adding to that is that I’ve grown rather tired of SZS over the course of its endless run, and this isn’t even as good as SZS. Maybe worth getting back to when we’re 30 volumes in and Kumeta reveals the daughter never really existed in the first place.

Tamayomi

I don’t know if you noticed this, but in baseball, there’s a pretty close relationship between pitcher and catcher. We’ve seen the BL version of this in Battery, and now someone’s doing it with girls, in Kirara no less. Even the name is Tama + Yomi, you know, like Haru + Kana (Receive). So far so good, only this is about baseball, the most boring team sport you’re ever likely to see an anime about, and Yomi’s special power is an unhittable pitch - which means that if everything goes right for our heroes, the game is even more boring. Some hackneyed tragic backstory about how only your waifu can catch your bomb-ass pitch doesn’t help. Being very dull isn’t even the worst problem here though. Tamayomi is adapted by Studio A-Cat (of Frame Arms Girl and Amazing Stranger “fame”), and they manage to make it look like episode 7 of a 2004-vintage DEEN production. Bad animation, dusty character designs, off-model shots, it’s all there, and this is the best-looking episode this show is ever likely to get. Ouch.

Tower of God

Crunchyroll is producing anime now, and I’m sure they know better than most people what sells. The answer is “Jump Shounen”, which is something I also knew, but whatever. Of course Jump doesn’t let them anywhere near their properties so they got the next big thing: An immensely popular Korean webtoon people unironically describe as “like One Piece” while thinking that that’s praise. And then it isn’t even like One Piece much, apart from where it’s about having fights to get to the thing (eventually). What it seems to be is the fighting shounen in the abstract: No “pirates” or “ninjas” or “shinigami” or other “setting” excuses here, the tower is just a whole bunch of fights stacked on top of each other and some shounen characters dropped in to excrete Jump-brand baby dialog. I guess that’s what fans of the genre are looking for. It isn’t much of a production either, the best I can say about it is that it’s colorful and has some really good music by Kevin Penkin. The animation is just functional and of course without a setting it doesn’t have any unifying aesthetic either. But the real decider is this: I thought the pacing was sluggish and interminable, and then I find out that fans of the source material think it’s rushing through it at a breakneck pace. This is likely going to be outrageously popular, so I will never struggle to find out what did or didn’t happen in the latest episode and can safely skip it.

#anime #impressions #brand new animal #hachi-nan tte sore wa nai deshou!#kakushigoto #tamayomi #tower of god #spring2020

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maximuswolf · 4 years

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The Serpent Decoded via /r/atheism

The Serpent Decoded

The serpent has a goal of looking like something and then it lies to itself that looking like something is the path to being something.

Genesis is a medley of poetic creative that conveys timeless truths to help the reader through life. The serpent is a warning about toxic human beings. He uses a set up of God's words as a poetic macrocosm for logical truth. So God tells Adam and Eve to not eat the fruit in the middle. Moses doesn't use over exposition as literary tool so it is left up to the individual reader to understand that all the fruit is the same.

The whole point of that beginning exchange is to poetically explain the power of God as all knowing and giving Eve all the tools to avoid a mistake.

It's also a clever way to point out that the serpent is not observed by God, which shows how advanced the Hebrews were. Think about it. The serpent is nothing because it is not observed by God, that's the observer effect.

Together, those things give a pivotal advanced life lesson that God isn't a diaper changer here to baby you. Think about it. God doesn't directly say to look out for the low life in your form that can talk to you that's scrounging around paradise. That wasn't needed to be said when all the fruit is the same and it's loving information to say to avoid the fruit in the middle. Eve was supposed to figure it out on her own. That to set the tone to the timeless saying, 'God helps those who help themselves' because you are supposed to be conscious so you can independently understand with accuracy. You're supposed to understand a serpent when you meet one.

They don't use words to exchange information for positive benefit at a level above itself. It only talks as a way to scheme to get something (from making you think that it's more advanced than it is to getting something from you like a gift or a date or an opportunity).

So Eve meets the serpent in it's latest scheme, trying to get understanding. The background is it has deluded itself that eating the fruit would magically make it understand. Now idiots add in illogical information that's not in the text by designating the fruit as magic because they are the type that Moses is lampooning with the serpent. What Moses was going for is that the serpent has a lifetime inability to understand and have tried many things and it never helped it understand so now it is fixated on the fruit but it never ate it before. The story is that simple but many toxic individuals like the serpent tries to confuse you about it.

So with a focus on the literary purpose and the situational set up it is easy to see how much work it took for Eve to get herself damned. Logic is the key, if something doesn't make common sense with sound logic then you are going out your way to cause your self trouble. So the serpent asks her what God told her about the fruit to slyly phish for information. So Eve's first mistake was not noticing that phishing attempt but that's a little bit of an advanced level of enlightenment.

The most important thing in life is being able to discern the motive of others. So Eve was supposed to understand that the serpent had a motivation of needing her to eat the fruit first and that was perfectly crafted poetry from Moses to display how mindless toxic human beings are by following what others do to fit in. Moses is conveying that the desperation of the serpent made it rise above it's codependent nature to trick Eve in to doing it first so it can follow along.

So basically the serpent turns Eve in to a crash dummy. She went out the way to allow it because God directly told her what the deal was. That is perfect poetry of how we go out the way to make mistakes and have no true excuses.

The rest of the story is the innovative literary tool of a connected medley of poetic universal truths. The way the serpent isn't punished is the most beautiful poetry because it is showcasing how the serpent was not punished. Get it. It was always helpless to the point of needing to use others like a baby crawling. It doesn't have legs because it stands for nothing because it is nothing. It never had arms to reach for it's own fruit. Moses also poetically tied the physical acts of child birth to Eve being so sympathetic to the listen to the helpless and desperate serpent that she went out the way for it and troubled herself.

Moses then tied Adam listening to her to a man being a laborer. That's one of the kinks in revealing that a man wrote it from their perspective because we all know that's not absolutely true in all ways because there have been early societies where women provided based on the connection to having children to take care of. A similar little hiccup shows up later in Genesis when Moses crafted a poetic scenario where angels in disguise visit Sodom and to denote evil he crafted a situation where the townsfolks tries to rape the angels. The fact that they tried to rape the angels isn't the wrong that was the focus but to understand how gays are attacked by that is to understand how simple minded toxic animals live with a permanent closed mind stuck in an animal pack system where they have to prey on easy weaknesses of others. They seized on that meaningless literary tool like vultures seizing on dead meat. Again, it's Moses displaying that amazing level of creative enlightenment when he used that situation of rape to set up a picture of true evil as not making sense by having Lot offer his virgin daughters to the stop the rape. Get it? That was the point that evil was shown. That's actually a good metaphor when you dissect it because it defines evil as not making sense. The assumptions by Moses, though, is the imperfections to prove that it was not written by God but is a sign of God because it is a creative masterpiece that shows someone at the height of creative enlightenment. Again, those of us with poetic souls and critical thinking that allows us to have wider perspectives can understand the poetry of being connected to God as being connected to logic.

There's a connection between the deeper and more detailed the truth then the more accurate the result is. Keep in mind that the serpent is incomplete from lacking a connection to God and in an Earthly sense that's a connection to logic. These loud mouthed losers acting like the poetry in the Bible of a hearing the booming voice of God is just them displaying that they're a crafty animal not made by the lord like the serpent.

The only personality it has is scheming it's something it's not to you and lying to itself to quiet the insecurity caused by the advanced subconscious logic of the brain. The need to scheme is just animal flight coming through in the skillset the DNA code allows for the human species. So the serpent is tasked with never being enough and can only result to scheming to trick others who may be viewing them that they are enough. That creates a handicap where their actions never go beyond eye level so that lack of forward thinking is a sign of not being able to critically think and incorporate control of emotions with logical benefits of desires and the effect it has on others because that's too complicated for simple animals like them

Look at the crafty animal not made by the lord and apply the motive, 'how can I scheme to get me a break' and you can see that it applies to everything they do.....seriously. Try it....the funny thing is whatever it is will never be smart enough to give them a break unless you're on the stupidity level of Eve and is listening to a scheming low life and ignoring what God told you directly.....you have to be so stupid that you ignore firm logic to listen to the scheming low life trying to talk to you.

They are so stupid that they can lie to themselves and that goes to an absolute level. Remember, the formula for lying to yourself is that you get a selfish benefit from it and it doesn't make sound logical sense to the point that it even makes you feel uneasy that makes you not even want to think to the point that you would rather risk hurting yourself with an avoidable mistake than helping yourself by catching a glaring hole you overlooked. If something has the belief that if they look like something they will be something then that means that they have no critical thinking skills. That means they are toxic and will even try to scheme on how being right is bad or how the truth can be bad because someone is crazy or how being unselfish means you're gullible. All those things mean that is a toxic individual who is capable of doing any level of negativity when under pressure.

The Bible is poetic universal truths. 'Serpents' lie to themselves that not being able to understand poetry doesn't mean that they are less than a person....if someone is a visual learner then that's showing they have no critical thinking skills. They're just looking what others do and mimicking like a parrot does with sounds. That's the basis of 'monkey see/monkey do to make monkey feel good'. The fact that they will then scheme to get a break by not admitting that they don't understand is what throws many off.

So the serpent is inspired by Moses' views on evil human beings through living in Egypt. They felt God was a selfish based word for their feelings and he leaves that for the person reading it to see by the serpent's use of the word.

Everyone looking for a big boat or talking about Adam and Eve as historic figures weren't the target audience of Genesis. Those types that don't have active and creative brains that understand poetry are like the serpent and capable of drowning in their thoughts because they're not swift enough to ride the winds of change.

Submitted January 31, 2021 at 04:33PM by KanyeWestisJesus via reddit https://ift.tt/39wmzHz

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wineanddinosaur · 4 years

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The 15 Best Drinks-Focused TV Shows — and What to Sip While Watching

Binge-watching a favorite television show is a universal hobby, and that was true even before the pandemic. While we wouldn’t recommend binge drinking while doing so, pairing a can’t-miss series with a must-have drink is a natural combination. With moderation in mind, of course.

As it happens, many of the best television shows of all time are also the booziest. We’ve seen everything cross our screens at this point, from iconic television bars to cartoon characters who would handily drink anyone under the table — and even entire drink revolutions spawned by popular shows. The Cosmo, anybody?

Pull up your streaming service, find your favorite show below, and get ready to pop open a bottle or mix up some cocktails with these perfect TV-drink pairings.

15. ‘Succession’

Viewers of ��Succession” were likely introduced to the idea of “hyper-decanting” (read: blending, as in, with a blender) your wine prior to serving. But beyond that questionable idea, the show has plenty to offer. “We think ‘Succession’ is the best show television has seen in a long time — from the acting, script, and the epic music, it’s a winning combination,” says Joseph Mintz, co-founder with Amanda Victoria of Siponey canned cocktails.

“Amanda is a huge fan of Scottish actor Brian Cox, who plays Logan Roy, and I would love to share a dram with Mr. Cox,” Mintz says. Not a bad idea, considering that Cox enjoys enduring internet fame for the video pronunciation guides for Scotch brands he made with Esquire. Pair with a hard-to-pronounce single-malt Scotch — only the best for the Roys!

14. ‘Dead to Me’

The Liz Feldman-produced dark comedy has gone through two seasons thus far, with a third en route. And while many shows have unofficial drinking games, “Dead to Me” and Netflix posted an official one before Season 2 dropped this spring. Highlights include drinking twice if someone drinks on screen, or finishing your drink if “Karen almost ruins everything” (trust us, it happens).

Wine is very much what’s being glugged on screen, though you’ll find a cast of characters willing to open a bottle of just about anything on this show. But for a pairing, go with a gluggable red or an orange wine, which gets name-dropped in the first episode of Season 2 by way of a sub-Reddit about menopause.

13. ‘BoJack Horseman’

Everything you need to know about “BoJack Horseman” the show, and BoJack Horseman the, uh, horse man, can be summed up with a scene where he’s looking for a drink to forget his problems, gets served vodka, and taunts the bartender in response, “What is this, breakfast?” For Ben Rojo, brand ambassador for Don Papa Rum, such a scene encapsulates the show’s ethos. “’BoJack Horseman’ is my favorite show of all time! It’s such an honest and human depiction of depression, through the lens of a giant cartoon horse-person,” he says.

For Rojo, the ongoing theme that setbacks are not the opposite of progress is a highlight, and one of the best reasons to watch. “The characters’ sublimation of trauma through substances is a little on the nose,” he says, “but there’s something oddly gratifying about watching Princess Carolyn down a bottle of ‘Catbernet’ after a rough day while sitting on your couch and doing the same.” “Catbernet” it is, though Cabernet will do in a pinch. Just don’t try to go drink-for-drink with BoJack.

12. ‘Entourage’

“Entourage” was either the show you loved or the show you loved to hate. But either way, you probably watched. And the freewheeling, big-spending lifestyle certainly lends itself to some fun drink pairings.

“So, with ‘Entourage,’ there’s one guy making all the money and a bunch of other people orbiting him and starting shenanigans; it’s like Seinfeld only everyone is super hot, and like all my favorite trash TV, it’s easy to get hooked whether you want to or not,” says Erica Long of Sourced Craft Cocktails.

She suggests going just as big as the characters might. “Watching ‘Entourage’ screams an occasion to be a little over the top to me and that means bubbles,” Long says. “A bottle of Moët and a bottle of Dom because Vinnie Chase would never pick just one.”

11. ‘The Simpsons’

“The Simpsons” doesn’t pull many punches with its social commentary, and the world of drinking is taken head on, too. Barney Gumble is the poster boy for a love of drink gone wrong, as is Duff for the ubiquitous big-brand beer that will sacrifice all for more profits. We’ve heard there are one or two scenes where Homer indulges in a few of the beers himself.

Then there’s Moe Szyslak and his eponymous Moe’s, a neighborhood dive if there ever was one. Until, that is, the smash success of the Flaming Moe, a drink Moe stole from Homer. Duh duh duh. If you’re feeling fancy (and have a fire extinguisher handy, just in case) make a flaming cocktail and you’ll feel like you’re right there at Flaming Moe’s, too. Otherwise, channel your inner Duff with Schlitz or Natty Boh.

10. ‘Archer’

If James Bond drank even more than he already does, followed even fewer rules, and generally caused even more mayhem, the result would be Archer, Sterling Archer. The title character of the show by the same name is famous for his one-liners, and none more so than, “All I’ve had today is, like, six gummy bears and some Scotch.” The man enjoys himself a drink or 12.

In the show’s world, Glengoolie is Archer’s Scotch of choice, a drink known as being “for the best of times.” At other times, though, Archer lambastes the use of sour mix in a Margarita, and praises the virtues of the Bloody Mary, saying: “Forget the glass, Woodhouse, just give me the pitcher. For I am a sinner in the hands of an angry god. Bloody Mary, full of vodka, blessed are you among cocktails. Pray for me now, at the hour of my death, which I hope is soon.”

You have plenty of options, clearly, for your drink of choice while watching. Of course, if you want the evening to be the best of times, Scotch is the way to go.

9. ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’

Pull me a pint at Paddy’s Pub and I’ll be a happy man. Just don’t make me do any Charlie work for the privilege.

“’It’s Always Sunny’ is the greatest show in general but drinking might help you get on the gang’s level a little easier,” says Nick Sadowski, distiller at Philadelphia Distilling. “The show comments on every hot topic in society, usually with some part of the gang taking one side and the other taking the other side.” The show is edgy, delving into controversial conversations that others might steer away from. What makes it work is that the characters have these un-P.C. conversations in a way that showcases their ignorance and obliviousness to the rest of society. “All the jokes are ultimately on them — with them or without them realizing it — and it’s the reason they’re still making the show 15 years later.”

Sadowski says he doesn’t want you to overthink your pairings here. “Rip some shots and drink a Coors or Hamm’s, or whatever you can find, bud,” he suggests. “Eat some rum ham and a hard-boiled egg while you’re at it.”

8. ‘Game of Thrones’

Raise your hand if you own an “I drink and I know things” T-shirt. There’s a few of you, at least. Meanwhile, in Westeros, the only thing more common than a dead royal is a dead royal who liked to drink too much. Siblings Tyrion and Cersei Lannister enjoyed more than their fair share, as did, of course, Robert Baratheon. But few characters didn’t imbibe heavily in the show, and who could blame them? Living in a world rife with betrayal and back stabbings, murders and coups, dragons and White Walkers and … yeah, that Dornish red looks pretty appetizing.

With the popularity of the show and its penchant for booze, some official options for your pairing pleasure were made available, including partnerships with Ommegang beer and Johnnie Walker Scotch. When you don’t want to go corporate, though, just fill up a beer stein with the strongest suds you can find — all the better if you opt for an old-school barleywine or mead.

7. ‘Futurama’

In the “Futurama” universe, robots must heartily consume alcohol as fuel, and the underpinnings of that metaphor are fairly clear. “Looking at Bender as a character representing the ‘working class everyman’ it’s easy to see why he’s literally fueled by alcohol,” says Sother Teague, beverage director of New York’s Amor y Amargo. “For him, it’s an absolute necessity to perform optimally. For us, it’s often a crutch to help cope with the things we either can’t change, disagree with, or don’t understand. Obviously this is an exaggerated characterization but one worthy of a little navel gazing.”

Even so, there’s room for bartenders in the show. “It’s also comforting to think that the role of bartender is still a valuable member of future society as portrayed by iZac, a parody of the beloved ’70s era barman of TV’s ‘Love Boat,’” Teague says. He’s going everyman with his suggestions, too, calling for you to find your favorite lawnmower beer, or what he prefers to call hammock beer, more properly fitting how he’d partake. “And on the side, Jägermeister! Plus, there’s a scene where iZac pours Jäger.”

6. ‘Absolutely Fabulous’

For Aubrey Slater, a bartender who’s worked at many New York bars over a 25-year career, British sitcom “Ab Fab” is the perfect call back to the neon-tinged ’90s, when “the economy was great, everyone had money to spend,” she says. “I was also a go-go dancer at Limelight and Palladium, and had a lot of friends in the vogue-ball houses. One of them introduced me to “Absolutely Fabulous”!

Slater describes the characters as icons who epitomized the decade as independent businesswomen, who were also fashionistas and party girls. “They had a frosted glass double-door refrigerator constantly stocked with Veuve and Bollinger, and they drank Stoli Martinis like water,” she says. As a perfect pairing, Slater recommends the Stoli-Bolli, a tall glass of Stolichnaya on the rocks topped with the Bollinger Champagne, which was created on the show.

5. ‘Billions’

In “Billions,” the only thing more important than having entirely way too much money is ensuring that the world knows it. Then there are a few subplots, like achieving those perfect moments of comeuppance, and planning new ways to screw over your rivals.

Both Bobby Axelrod and his cohorts, as well as Chuck Rhoades, know their way around a bar. Most typically, a whiskey bar, stocked with absurdly expensive bottles like Michter’s Celebration, or highly touted imports such as Kavalan. By all means, feel free to join in with a bottle of either. Or, just grab your favorite special-occasion whiskey from the shelf and pour yourself a dram of that.

4. ‘Sex and The City’

“Sex and the City” launched the Cosmopolitan to stratospheric heights, of course leading to its inevitable crash back to Earth. The Toby Cecchini-created drink is now often wrongly derided as a symbol of the darker years of cocktailing (when Appletinis and Long Island Iced Teas were the most interesting cocktails you could find).

Of course, there’s more to it than that. “’Sex and the City’ is the ultimate grab-your-girlfriends, veg-out-on-the-couch, and finish- off-your-favorite-bottle-of-booze show,” says Effie Panagopoulos, founder of KLEOS Mastiha. “That show was directly responsible for a huge increase in Cointreau sales in the ’90s, since it was a love letter to the Cosmopolitan and the city it was created in, New York.” For a classic combo, pair a “SATC” viewing session with a Cosmopolitan.

3. ‘Mad Men’

Ah, the good ol’ days of corporate life, when the two-Martini lunch wasn’t merely acceptable, but expected. From costume to set design, “what I loved most about ‘Mad Men’ was how incredibly detailed and on point every aspect of the show was,” says Alex Jump, head bartender at Death & Co Denver. “Of course, as a bartender, too, I appreciate how much attention they paid to the drinking trends and fads of the time, from how vodka was perceived, to Heineken’s role as a newer beer in the U.S. market.”

The bottle of whiskey at the desk channels Don Draper better than anything, and points us to the best show drink pairing. “Of course, I mostly drank whiskey while watching the show, particularly American whiskey for me,” Jump says. “I wasn’t trying to keep up with the guys on ‘Mad Men’ though, so sometimes I’d even enjoy mine as a Highball rather than slammed back in one quick gulp.” A modern solution!

2. ‘Scandal’

“Scandal’s” Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, lives a very stressful life, putting out one political fire after another. And in times of need, wine is her friend indeed.

Crystal Sykes, a cocktail and culture writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, says she thinks about “Scandal” every time she writes a story with a personal element. “There’s no Black woman alive who hasn’t felt gutted by being a superwoman placed in the shadows,” she says. “So, whenever Olivia Pope, at the brink of mental and emotional collapse, took solace in a glass — or bottle — of Bordeaux, I could almost swear it was cascading down my own throat as she gulped it down. And so did my homegirls.”

Sykes says that “Scandal” gave her friend group a reason to meet up on Thursday nights. “[We’d] drink wine and talk about how no matter how hard it may be to be a Black woman in today’s world, we’ll always be standing in the sun together,” Sykes says. A bottle of Bordeaux it is, then.

1. ‘Cheers’

“Cheers” depicts the platonic ideal of the neighborhood bar, the local, the “third place.” Sometimes — and we cannot stress this enough — you really do want to go where everybody knows your name.

“’Cheers’ is the ultimate drinking show because, well, it’s entirely set in a bar!” says Paul Hletko, founder of FEW Spirits. “It’s a caricature of bar tropes, sure, but the characters are all lovable but flawed, and, to a large extent, ‘Cheers’ was my first view into ‘bar life’ as a youngster unable to go to bars.”

Surely, this is no time nor place for a craft cocktail. No sir. “I would drink old-school for ‘Cheers,’ with a shot of FEW Spirits Straight Bourbon Whiskey and a High Life,” Hletko says. Beer and a shot sounds about right.

The article The 15 Best Drinks-Focused TV Shows — and What to Sip While Watching appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/best-drinking-tv-shows/

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johnboothus · 4 years

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The 15 Best Drinks-Focused TV Shows and What to Sip While Watching

Pull up your streaming service, find your favorite show below, and get ready to pop open a bottle or mix up some cocktails with these perfect TV-drink pairings.

15. ‘Succession’

Viewers of “Succession” were likely introduced to the idea of “hyper-decanting” (read: blending, as in, with a blender) your wine prior to serving. But beyond that questionable idea, the show has plenty to offer. “We think ‘Succession’ is the best show television has seen in a long time — from the acting, script, and the epic music, it’s a winning combination,” says Joseph Mintz, co-founder with Amanda Victoria of Siponey canned cocktails.

14. ‘Dead to Me’

13. ‘BoJack Horseman’

12. ‘Entourage’

11. ‘The Simpsons’

10. ‘Archer’

You have plenty of options, clearly, for your drink of choice while watching. Of course, if you want the evening to be the best of times, Scotch is the way to go.

9. ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’

Pull me a pint at Paddy’s Pub and I’ll be a happy man. Just don’t make me do any Charlie work for the privilege.

8. ‘Game of Thrones’

7. ‘Futurama’

6. ‘Absolutely Fabulous’

5. ‘Billions’

4. ‘Sex and The City’

3. ‘Mad Men’

2. ‘Scandal’

“Scandal’s” Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, lives a very stressful life, putting out one political fire after another. And in times of need, wine is her friend indeed.

1. ‘Cheers’

The article The 15 Best Drinks-Focused TV Shows — and What to Sip While Watching appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/best-drinking-tv-shows/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/the-15-best-drinks-focused-tv-shows-and-what-to-sip-while-watching

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joannalannister · 7 years

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hi, fisrt i would like to say that i love your blog, its very informative and your metas are excellent. i was recently reading some of cersei's chapters and she constantly references wanting to be jaime and hating being a woman, or how much better she would be at being tywin's son than her brothers, and it got me wondering, do you think its possible that cersei is trans? or is it just that she sees herself as "tywin with teats" and resents the gendered limitations of being a woman?

I personally don’t interpret Cersei as transgender, but I know that other people do and I think that’s also a valid interpretation.

When I say “valid interpretation” I mean “this interpretation does not explicitly contradict the text as it is written.” For example, saying Jon Snow has blue eyes directly contradicts what GRRM wrote and such a statement isn’t valid.

The way I was trained in literary analysis / criticism was to treat the text as my Bible, and to give paramount importance to whatever is actually written in the text. (tbh this might be why it’s so difficult for me and feels so disrespectful when I condemn certain aspects of ASOIAF … almost as if it’s sacrilegious.) “Text-as-Bible” is why I’m usually throwing large chunks of text at people whenever I’m interrogating a text, and from that I identify themes and narrative structure and all that jazz.

However, people often look at the same chunk of text and interpret it in many different ways. Interpretations of stories are ultimately very personal, and a single story can have many valid interpretations. For example, some readers interpret the character Jay Gatsby as a white-passing black man, while other readers don’t; I think both interpretations are cool, and both add to the cornucopia of meta-textual commentary surrounding The Great Gatsby.

Bringing it back to ASOIAF, when I read Cersei’s chapters, I never interpreted Cersei’s dissatisfaction and anger and unhappiness as being directed at her own body / at herself. In my opinion, she seemed rather disparaging of the male body, hurling criticisms likes stones from a trebuchet about how ~men think with their cocks~ and therefore aren’t as dangerous as she.

“Perhaps I’m dangerous too. You, on the other hand, are as big a fool as every other man. That worm between your legs does half your thinking.”

She thinks men are fools. This didn’t come across to me as someone who wanted to be a man. It came across as a woman who wanted to be taken as seriously as men, and to be seen as just as dangerous, imo. (Even fandom dismisses Cersei as unintelligent, which I don’t think is the case.)

Cersei seems to take pleasure in her sex:

Cersei found herself remembering all the times that Jaime had knelt where she was kneeling now, planting kisses on the inside of her thighs, making her wet. His kisses were always warm. The razor was ice-cold. When the deed was done she was as naked and vulnerable as a woman could be.

To me, it seems that Cersei equates womanhood with vulnerability, and it’s vulnerability that Lannisters hate and try to guard themselves against. (see also: Tyrion’s ”wear it like armor,” Jaime’s caustic comments as cutting as his sword, Tywin’s entire existence, and the ancestral Lannister stronghold as a giant invincible rock - there’s a big anti-vulnerability theme here.) So I don’t think it’s being a woman that Cersei hates, it’s her position in society as a woman, assumed to be weak, vulnerable, undervalued, unintelligent, non-threatening etc.

Also, I think Cersei takes great pleasure in having Jaime’s babies, in being a mother to them, and nursing them at her breast:

It is beautiful, she thought, as beautiful as Joffrey, when they laid him in my arms. No man had ever made her feel as good as she had felt when he took her nipple in his mouth to nurse.

That didn’t suggest to me that Cersei was angry/resentful/uncomfortable in her body.

Even as a child, when Cersei dressed as a boy, it was because of how she was treated so differently, not because she expressed a desire to be a boy:

Though he was ten years her junior, he wanted her; Cersei could see it in the way he looked at her. Men had been looking at her that way since her breasts began to bud. Because I was so beautiful, they said, but Jaime was beautiful as well, and they never looked at him that way. When she was small she would sometimes don her brother’s clothing as a lark. She was always startled by how differently men treated her when they thought that she was Jaime. Even Lord Tywin himself …

She resents the way that grown men sexualized her pre-teen* body (and everything that went with that), but it doesn’t seem to me like she was upset with her body in and of itself? And she was “always startled” that everyone treated her differently even tho she and Jaime were the same, identical, “alike as two peas in a pod … well, except between the legs.”

(This clothes switching probably would have been before she was even a teenager, because Jaime was then sent to Crakehall to be fostered.)

So to me, Cersei’s issues are external, derived from how society views her and treats her and dismisses her, rather than internal issues of self identity. Like, for me, Cersei has a very firm, very strong idea of self - she knows who she is, or at least she knows who she thinks she is. (Cersei would do very well in GRRM’s short story, “The Glass Flower”. tbh, now that I think about it, the narrator of the Glass Flower might be a precursor to Cersei; I have to give this more thought hmm.)

But yeah, I think Cersei’s problems are with society, and how a misogynistic society treats her unfairly as a woman.

Like, think about the FeastDance, how AFFC and ADWD were originally supposed to be one volume, and how GRRM bookends Cersei’s narrative:

Cersei I, AFFC (first Cersei chapter):

She dreamt she sat the Iron Throne, high above them all.

The courtiers were brightly colored mice below. Great lords and proud ladies knelt before her. Bold young knights laid their swords at her feet and pleaded for her favors, and the queen smiled down at them. Until the dwarf appeared as if from nowhere, pointing at her and howling with laughter. The lords and ladies began to chuckle too, hiding their smiles behind their hands. Only then did the queen realize she was naked.

Horrified, she tried to cover herself with her hands. The barbs and blades of the Iron Throne bit into her flesh as she crouched to hide her shame. Blood ran red down her legs, as steel teeth gnawed at her buttocks. When she tried to stand, her foot slipped through a gap in the twisted metal. The more she struggled the more the throne engulfed her, tearing chunks of flesh from her breasts and belly, slicing at her arms and legs until they were slick and red, glistening.

Cersei II, ADWD (last Cersei chapter)

When the deed was done she was as naked and vulnerable as a woman could be.

a smear of grease and blood down her thigh.

Halfway down Visenya’s Hill the queen fell for the first time, when her foot slipped in something that might have been nightsoil. When Septa Unella pulled her up, her knee was scraped and bloody. A ragged laugh rippled through the crowd

Her heel came down on something sharp, a stone or piece of broken crockery. Cersei cried out in pain.

They were at the foot of Aegon’s High Hill, the castle above them. [high above them all, where Cersei is at the end of ADWD]

Cersei’s AFFC dream comes true at the end of ADWD.

In the dream, it’s not that she dreams of being a man, it’s that she dreams of power, of strength (Tywin’s kind of strength), of respect. We talk about a lot of irreconcilable desires w/r/t the FeastDance, but I’ve never seen anybody talk about Cersei’s irreconcilable desires, namely to hold Tywin’s kind of power and to be a woman.

Look at the AFFC dream again. Look at it. Look at the blood running down her legs (strongly associated with womanhood in Westeros - see Sansa’s pov). Look at how the throne attacks Cersei’s breasts, butt, and her stomach/womb. “the more she struggled the more the throne engulfed her” - the more a woman fights gender norms in Westeros, the more she is beaten down, berated, shamed, engulfed by societal expectations. Her foot slips on the throne – maybe this sounds fake deep but it’s a metaphor for the uneasy path Cersei must walk, trying to balance her womanhood with her desire to rule, something that Westeros will not permit her to do.

So that’s why I personally interpreted Cersei’s story as a woman who resents the gendered limitations of Westeros.

Also, on a different note, Cersei is such a violent, abusive murderer. There are many harmful, negative stereotypes about transgender people being violent or abusive or w/e, and these stereotypes are totally wrong, and I have no desire to perpetuate these negative stereotypes in any way, so that’s another reason why I personally don’t feel comfortable labeling Cersei as trans.

However, as I said in the beginning, I think opposing interpretations are also valid! It might be better to get the perspective of someone who is transgender to answer this question. I would love to hear other interpretations!

Whatever you interpret her as, Cersei is at the crux of a very interesting discussion of sex and gender and gender identity in ASOIAF.

There are some posts on @asoiafuniversity about Cersei being trans that might be of interest to you:

Discussion of Cersei, Brienne, and genderqueerness

Further discussion

“Musings on Cersei”

Discussions outside of tumblr:

(Reddit) “Is Cersei trans?”

(Westeros.org) “Absence of transgender characters?”

(Westeros.org) “Sympathy for the devil? Cersei and gender”

#gabsarc #replies #lgbt in westeros #lannister thoughts #affc #adwd #cersei meta #cersei lannister #high above them all #Thank you for the kind words!#trans #transgender

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mathematicianadda · 5 years

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(META) Concrete thinkers, incapable of metaphor, are gate-keeping mathematics and eroding its most powerful property: abstraction.

Earlier today, I posted about the fascinating similarity between fractals and logarithmic functions. Though it stated in the first line that it resided in the conceptual realm, a boo-boo w/ a metaphor I used got the post flamed by a literalist. I deleted it out of cowardice. I shouldn't have. Whoops. I'm not wrong to connect the two concepts. When I get better in these fields' Algebras*, more will be written on this. But it indicated a larger problem...

In Lex Fridman's podcast w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown on YouTube (link below), he discussed 3 types of mathematicians: the puzzle-solvers, the physicists (broadly speaking here...), and those who "love abstraction and the power of generality." Certainly, this list is incomplete, but in a way that proves my point here. Throughout history, the mathematical greats who invented our studies in school, the Newtons and Eulers, were *wizards* of abstraction. Evidenced not only by their discoveries - take calculus, for example; the study of the behavior of infinitesimals - but by their prolific generations in disparate domains like Great Literature. Chock-full of metaphor and analogy, these thinkers thought deeply and solved even bigger problems. Through generality, they invented the frameworks our bachelor and grad degrees. They are our revered ancestors.

In the early 20th century, Abstractionists like Turing, Goedel, and the analytical demigod John von Neumann, trail blazed computational science. They needed insanely computationally complicated equations solved, so dammit, they put theirs minds to work. Using what they had already grasped, broke new ground via abstraction. We're indebted to the pioneer-class. They used their heads, drawing on intuition, the pattern-recognition software innate to homo sapiens.

Since the mid-1970s, it seems, (though cannot be verified via a gate-keeping function known as "peer review", check out Game Theory on Wikipedia for more information) that our technological prowess, the empirical furnace that has been alight since the dawn of the 17th century, has been burnt down to embers. Occasionally, we see a noteworthy digital innovation from the Valley. But outside of the strictly IT universe, astonishingly little. We go to college, then grad school, then some PhD program to learn complicated theories about complicated things so that we can handle minutia. Everything seems disparate because each course takes the top-down approach. We start at such a high level that half the class gets 65% on the first exam and drops out. The tech- or research-bound students are starving for some application, but the semester ends before that section of the textbook is covered. It almost seems malicious. The pattern-recognition software I referred to works from the ground up. It's quite clear for those familiar with psych and neuroscience. So if we are always fed the abstraction, our grass-roots, evolved, intuitive brains have nowhere to go with it. We can't perform the abstraction on our own, as they we're not allowed to have access to that part of the toolkit. We go into the workforce with a litany of equations our brains have vaguely mapped to {insert technical field here.} Then we wind up in sales jobs to pay the bills. In Business Schools (where I come from), it's even worse. They don't even apply calculus (dare I mention stochastic calculus or Brownian motion...spooky!) in economics class until grad school because they think our tiny Microsoft Excel brains would explode. For a concrete example here, it took me three years after college to the connect the dots on 'derivative', the tool of calculus, and 'derivative' the financial security class most known for its hand in 2008.

In any domain, when things begin to fall into place, divergent from complexity and into alignment, we find emergent simplicity. Our ancestors called it discovery, "innovation" better fits millennial vernacular. When things continue become increasingly muddled and complex, it's called stagnation. Stagnation in the Information Age no less. As a 24-year old debating a future in an expensive and unproductive graduate program or my soul's slow death in Big Corporate, I truly hope momentum will change on this one. Lets's ask more questions, make more mistakes, make more irresponsibly logical leaps (when the downside to said leap is low), do less incremental improvement, and math the s*** out of our future. Instead of worrying about today's hyped problem like the Middle East, climate change, {pick your favorite}, perhaps we could...maybe...just maybe...solve them? Let's use this beautiful, logical, intensely rigorous toolkit we've been gifted by our ancients, MATH, to solve the problems of the future.

PS - Please tear apart my ideas if you'd like. But, if you flame me ad-hominem style, you're just proving my point on this...gate-keeping ruins math.

_____

* Algebra is a anglo-bastardization (hope this isn't a swearword that get's me deleted) of 'al-jabr,' meaning 'bone-setting,' literally referring to how we move the 'bones' around on paper. Thank god the Arab world kept the mathematical lamp burning throughout the European Dark Ages. Why don't the literalists explain the meaning of this word...ever? Not even in high school? Because they take things for granted and don't read.

**I didn't make the mistake of apologizing for my learning issues in this post, unlike its predecessor. If you're still reading this, you're not the type to idiotically flame something thought out Reddit-style. Many mathematical greats have had issues in the over-structured, 100 equations in 30 minutes-classroom setting. Two examples are Albert Einstein and John Nash. The former worked in a patent-office because 1900s Barvaria didn't like that he was scatter-brained (or that he was Jewish; over-structured societies are more prone to racism, also known as tribal affinity); the latter, lived his 30s thru 70s deluded by the menacing condition of Paranoid Schizophrenia. The chiding he received in elementary, secondary, and university-level academia played a significant role in his social disconnect. See Isaacson's Einstein and Nassar's A Beautiful Mind to learn more. I'm not suggesting that I possess a mind bearing an ounce of resemblance with these legends, or any others. What I am suggesting, however, is that there are at least a few greats among us who are being crowded out of our institutions, and given an "ADHD"/"Dyslexic"/"Aspergers" diagnoses for their trouble. Why do we continue to call bright kids with learning superpowers 'learning disabled'?

*** Check out Lex Fridman's phenomenal podcast. Here's the link to the episode w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown; one of the few who understand the power of intuition in mathematics.

https://lexfridman.com/grant-sanderson/

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automatismoateo · 5 years

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UPDATE: I'm a Christian who started researching about the perspective from the atheist position. via /r/atheism

Submitted January 19, 2020 at 07:54AM by one_one_three (Via reddit https://ift.tt/2RwvTRx) UPDATE: I'm a Christian who started researching about the perspective from the atheist position.

See my first post about this here.

I didn't wanna seem like I was ghosting this sub so I just wanted to give you guys an update on how things are going.

First off, no. My research journal is still in progress and incomplete.

I have told some people who asked me when it would be completed, and I said that it would be around late February at max. I really wish I could stick to what I said about that, however it doesn't seem realistic as a deadline from my current situation. A bit about myself. I have a deep interest in computer science and programming. I started my degree in a certain university, where I failed miserably the first semester. My parents decided to let me have one more go at it. I did way better the second attempt, however I still didn't manage to pass. I ended up having to think about things for a while. After looking around for a few weeks, I managed to find another university that had a revised syllabus more appropriate for me while offering the field of specialization that I wish to pursue. Things are going relatively well for now and my life has been "re-arranged" if I could put it that way.

I'm simply letting you guys know that my life hasn't been the easiest the past few months, and so I didn't really have all the time in the world to work on this. Also, I am simply overwhelmed by how much information I'm soaking up. I used to deny evolution and insisted on a 6000 year old Earth, however I can confidently say that evolution is an undeniable fact of reality and the Earth is way way way more older. Learning about evolution was truly fascinating and I saw how humans evolved for the first time ever. I know now that chimpanzees and I share a common ancestor and that I am technically an ape. But for now I cannot say that I understand absolutely everything about evolution, let alone abiogenesis. These things are complicated to learn. And as someone who is only first learning about these things while being taught the opposite, it is really hard to take in initially.

Has anything about my beliefs changed? Yeah kind of. I still identify as a Christian, although more of an agnostic theist (I believe in a God but I do not claim to know with certainty and could be wrong). I have super super high doubts about Adam and Eve being literal people and it seems like it's more of a metaphorical thing. Sometimes random stuff pop in my head like, "What if religion is false and this is the only life you've got and you're wasting it?" "What if nobody's hearing your prayers and you're just uttering sound waves into the void?" "What if the times you thought there was an all-knowing deity intervening in your life was simply just your brain interpreting things the way you have conditioned it to?", among other things.

Going to church feels a lot weirder now and I sometimes get anxiety from it. I get thoughts like "man this all seems like I'm in a cult" and similar things. Whenever the speaker raises his voice I picture a dictator society submitting to its leader, accepting and obeying whatever he says, swallowing the dogma without questioning anything or else.

I also started pondering the thought of "if I step on a bug and it dies, I don't really have any good reason to believe that it's currently residing in an afterlife. And since I am also related to this bug, what reasons do I have to believe that I will reside in an afterlife after I myself die? Is every homo habilis and Australopithecus afarensis in an afterlife?" I also had trouble reconciling the nature of consciousness and the afterlife. I'm no neuroscientist but I know that it's a cumulative, emergent process. I learned about people with split-brains so now they're literally two people in one body. How does the soul work here? When your consciousness ceases, how can you claim to know that there's something after it? Do chimpanzees have an afterlife? Yes? Prove it. They don't even have a concept of it. What reasons do I have to believe that along the line of my evolution, there was a soul that had evolved throughout the millions of years? There's no way to measure this at all so how can I claim to know that? When a single cell dies, it just ceases to be, and that's it. And since I'm just a big big bunch of single cells, where does the soul come into play?

Furthermore, I developed a deep appreciation for science, the scientific method, logic, reason and epistemology. I enjoy learning how to analyse arguments and their premises, and how to evaluate whether they hold up to reality.

So that's kind of where I'm at right now. Still learning and being a practicing skeptic.

As for my research journal, I really want it to be exhaustive to a good degree. I have worries that I might spread misinformation, which is something that I don't want happening. Because of that I wanna make sure I verify my information properly before I use it. I don't want anybody yelling at me "hEY tHAT'S aLl ZeItGeIsT StUfF tHAt'S AlL BuLLsHit whaT tHe FuK DudEE!!!" and things like that. And with the overwhelming amount of information I'm coming across (evolution, abiogenesis, horizontal gene transfer, comparative mythology, epistemology, polytheism in the Bible, the origin of the universe, reliability of the Bible, morality, philosophy, contemporary evidence for Jesus, etc), it's really gonna take a while to make sure I do a good job on this.

I recently purchased a physical journal from my local bookstore so that I can properly organize what I'm coming across by documenting it. I might start a blog in the future but that remains a faint thought for now.

So all I'm asking for is your patience. I currently have 75 Reddit followers and it's sort of having some pressure on me. Not tryna point fingers. Thing is that I am currently re-attempting university and I need to sort out my priorities. So just carry on with your awesome lives while you wait for my big paper.

~~~Oh but in the meantime!~~

After my recent church service, I was passing by my apologist pastor and I just quickly asked him "Hey Pastor XXXXX, I just wanted to ask you if you have any resources I can look at which people use to prove that the Exodus was a literal historical event?" And he's like "oh yes! there's a documentary that I saw where it showed these artifacts relating to it and the flood and Joseph and all that, can't remember the name right now but I'll send it to you when I come across it. I'm kinda agnostic about it but I'm pretty sure it really happened".

So once I get my hands on this supposed documentary we can have a look at it together :)

Peace.

#reddit

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introverted-feeling-institute · 6 years

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“How do I deal with introverted feeling?” HOLY FUCK

So if you’re here if assuming you know about introverted feeling and cognitive functions- If not I’ll be pretty brief.

INFP’s and ISFP’s both have as their primary thinking process- Introverted Feeling. There are other processes involved but to make things quick- everything on the page is pretty accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INFP#Dominant:_Introverted_feeling_(Fi)

Introverted Feeling is what makes INFP’s and ISFP’s have a strong sense of moral identity as well as being individualists. Introverted feeling although has benefits it has its flaws- With how the INFP stack is especially. It can be pretty intense- Introverted feeling specially as a primary first function makes an individual pretty- emotional, It’s the price of passion which is what the mature emotionally controlled INFP gets as the end as well as being able to use that creativity. Well I’m not going to tip on the toes of actual modern day psychology. But either way, this tip is pretty universal for anyone who is struggling with their emotions- I recommend also keeping on any medical help you have currently, Keep taking your meds if need be. Thats what the doctor ordered.

But anyways- Tips.

1) Go on reddit, your facebook, your twitter, your tumblr and look at everything you’re currently following and subscribed too. If its negative and not needed I want you to unfollow/unsubscribe/unwatch it and replace it with more productive things. Before I came to this realization, on Twitter, Reddit and Facebook I was subscribed to so much negative stuff about the society that it made me see reality in a negative kind of light. Sure that stuff is there but you got to take the good with the bad right? I was focusing all my attention on the bad. You don’t need to see news coverage on a shooting 20 times, or on people doing gross things in public to their fellow human. Bookmark everything you follow- unsubscribe from it and subscribe to more positive stuff, If you want to be an artist, follow more how to art things. Want to be a writer, subscribe to more how to be a writer things. Come back and see how healthier you are in a week or two. Then decide how much of the outside world you need to see on a daily basis.

2) Read Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and other Stoic philosophers. Just know Stoicism isn’t about cutting yourself off from emotions but knowing how to manage them and redirect them in a positive way. Start by reading some quotes by the two and be aware if you only put a little into it you get a good bit out of it. No one is saying you have to give up possessions. I won’t ever do that but I’m happier knowing I’m less attached if worse comes to worse- and there’s no reason to focus on bad things that could happen unless you’re thinking about it to take steps to prevent it from happening, But not too much you dread it- Just read some quotes by them. I promise they aren’t as cheesey as your aunt’s facebook quotes.

3) Journal. See what things you think about on a daily basis. You’ll see that 90% of the thoughts you had yesterday are the same thoughts you had today. When you journal and do it more and more you’ll be naturally more likely to not fall into a pattern- infact a few hours ago I had an issue I was pondering over for months and I realized this. By just journaling about it I took steps on getting over this issue. I also found out a detail of what I was actually complaining about to myself was infact- wrong. (I thought a friend of mine stopped talking on a bad note when it was really a neutral last message- but I forgot the previous conversation and only remembered the negative conversation before that).

Fi can be passion, It can also be internal chaos. I learned that at times but I feel I’m growing and overcoming that. These are all tips recommended by actual therapists and psychologists and I’m merely parroting off stuff I’ve been doing by reading online ha! But if you do have a therapist I recommend letting them know about these, everyone is different I highly doubt anyone is going to have negative repercussions from journaling, looking at quotes or removing negative stuff from their social media feed but I always draw a distinction between “modern day psychology” and “metaphor might be something to this- might not be psychology”

Thank you for reading this- Keep me updated if this helps!

#INFP #INFP MBTI #mbti #cognitive functions #carl jung #Jungian #introverted feeling #isfp

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booksbroadwaybbc · 6 years

Text

Had a bit of a breakthrough as an overachiever in school/underachiever in life, hope it helps you too via /r/selfimprovement

Had a bit of a breakthrough as an overachiever in school/underachiever in life, hope it helps you too

I feel like a lot of us are in this position: "I [metaphorically] skated through school, got in the real world, and now I have nothing to show for myself and smoke too much weed." Now I'm an egotistical asshole so this post is mostly for other egotistical assholes. Some of this may be obvious, but it wasn't to me for a long time.

It's been sinking in for me over the past week: I am a temporarily embarrassed genius.

I had frequent thoughts like: I stopped trying cuz it wasn't paying off. I'm burnt out on society. Society doesn't deserve what I can contribute. I'd be ignored anyway because I think differently. I'm capable of whatever I want, there's just no point to put my skills to use. I put in the hours when I was young, now I'm just gonna veg out in life. I was naive to work hard as a kid, trying in this world isn't worth it. People just don't see my brilliance. I'm smart, I can wing anything and everything. If only I found the right workplace/partner/friends, if only my family didn't suck, I'd be in a better position in my life.

I would listen to all those empowering songs about status and achievement (along the lines of "Power" by Kanye, "Run the World" by Beyonce, etc) and go, "That's me. Just no one knows it yet." Or just: "That's me."

In my head, I was still getting A's and having classmates come to me for answers and help. I was still having teachers compliment me, use me as the example. I was still having parents brag about me. On the inside I was still bragging about colleges and majors and life plans I was considering. I was still expecting to show everyone a transcript and be let in everywhere. I was expecting people to know my reputation and revere me.

So why impress anyone? Why go off script when I was doing just fine working on the existing framework? Why bother being around people who couldn't see my GENIUS? The problem isn't me; it's everyone else. I was resentful that people couldn't recognize that.

If you're not familiar with the concept of the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire," there is dispute about the original quote and about which demographic the actual context is criticizing, but in any case: It is the belief that you are a person of higher status, just in a lull; the success and prosperity that belong to you will rightfully come back when outside conditions improve.

So obviously: it's hard to improve yourself when, very deep down, you don't actually believe that you have anything to improve.

I was under the impression that I took as much responsibility for my success and failures as possible, but that if one bold attempt to get someone's respect or to achieve something greater just didn't take root, then it was definitely that person's perception and not my underperformance. Sometimes we even force that bitterness and pain on to others in our lives and keep ourselves isolated, reinforcing the cycle of resentment.

Don't get me wrong -- there are a shitton of underappreciated workers, exploited overachievers, etc.

Additionally, sometimes that dynamic of feeling disappointed in yourself RIGHT when you're supposed to be kicked into high gear (leaving the school system) kind of leaves some of us with the idea that the disappointment/incompetency is just WHO WE ARE. It's easy to want to be numb after that, and to become reliant on drinking, pot, worse things, etc. It's just easy to give up in a lot of ways.

So now I listen to those songs of empowerment and self-celebration and understand just how hard other people do work, and why they can have that pride. I thought other people couldn't see my ~superior talents~ when in fact I was the person who wasn't seeing their persistence, emotional strength, adaptability, etc. I finally understand how much self-improvement there is for me to do. I am inspired instead of jealous that people "see" others' success and don't see mine. And maybe most importantly, I'm coming to grips with the fact that neither hyperachievement nor disappointment are a part of who I intrinsically am, and that my life is in my control and for my own personal fulfillment.

I'm not a temporarily embarrassed genius -- I am a beginner, on the same footing as most people, and I am fortunate enough to have a lot of talents keep moving upwards and forwards, as long as I work on the talent that didn't come natural: failing with grace, and persevering.

Submitted August 20, 2018 at 07:59PM by many_grapes via reddit https://ift.tt/2vTyA5N

#IFTTT #reddit

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newstfionline · 8 years

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Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?

By John F. Harris and Bryan Bender, Politico, January 06, 2017

At this naked moment in the American experiment, when many people perceive civilization on the verge of blowing up in some metaphorical sense, there is an elderly man in California hoping to seize your attention about another possibility.

It is that civilization is on the verge of blowing up in a non-metaphorical sense.

William J. Perry is 89 now, at the tail end of one of his generation’s most illustrious careers in national security. By all rights, the former U.S. secretary of Defense, a trained mathematician who served or advised nearly every administration since Eisenhower, should be filling out the remainder of his years in quiet reflection on his achievements. Instead, he has set out on an urgent pilgrimage.

Bill Perry has become, he says with a rueful smile, “a prophet of doom.”

His life’s work, most of it highly classified, was nuclear weapons--how to maximize the fearsome deterrent power of the U.S. arsenal, how to minimize the possibility that the old Soviet arsenal would obliterate the United States and much of the planet along the way. Perry played a supporting role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which he went back to his Washington hotel room each night, fearing he had only hours left to live. He later founded his own successful defense firm, helped revolutionize the American way of high-tech war, and honed his diplomatic skills seeking common ground on security issues with the Soviets and Chinese--all culminating as head of the Pentagon in the early years after the end of the Cold War.

Nuclear bombs are an area of expertise Perry had assumed would be largely obsolete by now, seven decades after Hiroshima, a quarter-century after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in the flickering light of his own life. Instead, nukes are suddenly--insanely, by Perry’s estimate--once again a contemporary nightmare, and an emphatically ascendant one. At the dawn of 2017, there is a Russian president making bellicose boasts about his modernized arsenal. There is an American president-elect who breezily free-associates on Twitter about starting a new nuclear arms race. Decades of cooperation between the two nations on arms control is nearly at a standstill. And, unlike the original Cold War, this time there is a world of busy fanatics excited by the prospect of a planet with more bombs--people who have already demonstrated the desire to slaughter many thousands of people in an instant, and are zealously pursuing ever more deadly means to do so.

And there’s one other difference from the Cold War: Americans no longer think about the threat every day.

Nuclear war isn’t the subtext of popular movies, or novels; disarmament has fallen far from the top of the policy priority list. The largest upcoming generation, the millennials, were raised in a time when the problem felt largely solved, and it’s easy for them to imagine it’s still quietly fading into history. The problem is, it’s no longer fading. “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War,” Perry said in an interview in his Stanford office, “and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”

It is a turn of events that has an old man newly obsessed with a question: Why isn’t everyone as terrified as he is?

Perry’s hypothesis for the disconnect is that much of the population, especially that rising portion with no clear memories of the first Cold War, is suffering from a deficit of comprehension. Even a single nuclear explosion in a major city would represent an abrupt and possibly irreversible turn in modern life, upending the global economy, forcing every open society to suspend traditional liberties and remake itself into a security state. “The political, economic and social consequences are beyond what people understand,” Perry says. And yet many people place this scenario in roughly the same category as the meteor strike that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs--frightening, to be sure, but something of an abstraction.

So Perry regards his last great contribution of a 65-year career as a crusade to stimulate the public imagination--to share the vivid details of his own nightmares. He is doing so in a recent memoir, in a busy public speaking schedule, in half-empty hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, and increasingly with an online presence aimed especially at young people. He has enlisted the help of his 28-year-old granddaughter to figure out how to engage a new generation, including through a series of virtual lectures known as a MOOC, or massive open online course.

He is eagerly signing up for “Ask Me Anything” chats on Reddit, in which some people still confuse him with William “The Refrigerator” Perry of NFL fame. He posts his ruminations on YouTube, where they give Katy Perry no run for her money, even as the most popular are closing in on 100,000 views.

One of the nightmare scenarios Perry invokes most often is designed to roust policymakers who live and work in the nation’s capital. The terrorists would need enriched uranium. Due to the elaborate and highly industrial nature of production, hard to conceal from surveillance, fissile material is still hard to come by--but, alas, far from impossible. Once it is procured, with help from conspirators in a poorly secured overseas commercial power centrifuge facility, the rest of the plot as Perry imagines it is no great technological or logistical feat. The mechanics of building a crude nuclear device are easily within the reach of well-educated and well-funded militants. The crate would arrive at Dulles International Airport, disguised as agricultural freight. The truck bomb that detonates on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol instantly kills the president, vice president, House speaker, and 80,000 others.

Where exactly is your office? Your house? And then, as Perry spins it forward, how credible would you find the warnings, soon delivered to news networks, that five more bombs are set to explode in unnamed U.S. cities, once a week for the next month, unless all U.S. military personnel overseas are withdrawn immediately?

If this particular scenario does not resonate with you, Perry can easily rattle off a long roster of others--a regional war that escalates into a nuclear exchange, a miscalculation between Moscow and Washington, a computer glitch at the exact wrong moment. They are all ilks of the same theme--the dimly understood threat that the science of the 20th century is set to collide with the destructive passions of the 21st.

“We’re going back to the kind of dangers we had during the Cold War,” Perry said. “I really thought in 1990, 1991, 1992, that we left those behind us. We’re starting to re-invent them. We and the Russians and others don’t understand that what we’re doing is re-creating those dangers--or maybe they don’t remember the dangers. For younger people, they didn’t live through those dangers. But when you live through a Cuban Missile Crisis up close and you live through a false alarm up close, you do understand how dangerous it is, and you believe you should do everything you could possibly do to [avoid] going back.”

For people who follow the national security priesthood, the dire scenarios are all the more alarming for who is delivering them. Through his long years in government Perry invariably impressed colleagues as the calmest person in the room, relentlessly rational, such that people who did not know him well--his love of music and literature and travel--regarded his as a purely analytical mind, emotion subordinated to logic and duty.

Starting in the 1950s as a technology executive and entrepreneur in some of the most secretive precincts of the defense industry, he gradually took on a series of high-level government assignments that gave him one of the most quietly influential careers of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Fifteen years before serving as Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, Perry was the Pentagon official in charge of weapons research during the Carter administration. It was from this perch that he may have had his most far-reaching impact, and left him in some circles as a legendary figure. He used his office to give an essential push to two ideas that transformed warfare over the next generation decisively to American advantage. One idea was stealth technology, which allowed U.S. warplanes to fly over enemy territory undetected. The other was precision-guided munitions, which allowed U.S. bombs to land with near-perfect accuracy.

During the Clinton years, Perry so prized his privacy that he initially turned down the job of Defense secretary--changing his mind only after Clinton and Al Gore pleaded with him that the news media scrutiny wouldn’t be so bad.

The reputation he built over a life in the public sphere is starkly at odds with this latest highly impassioned chapter of Perry’s career. Harold Brown, who also is 89, first recruited Perry into government, and was Perry’s boss while serving as Defense secretary in the Carter years. “No one would have thought of Bill Perry as a crusader,” he says. “But he is on a crusade.”

Lee Perry, his wife of nearly 70 years, is living in an elder care facility, her once buoyant presence now lost to dementia. Perry himself, lucid as ever, has seen his physical frame become frail and stooped. Rather than slowing his schedule, he has accelerated his travels to plead with people to awaken to the danger. A trip to Washington includes a dinner with national security reporters and testimony on Capitol Hill. Back home in California, he’s at the Google campus to prod engineers to contemplate that their world may not last long enough for their dreams of technology riches to come true. He’s created an advocacy group, the William J. Perry project, devoted to public education about nuclear weapons. He’s enlisted both his granddaughter and his 64-year-old daughter, Robin Perry, in the cause.

“I want to be very clear,” he said. “I do not think it is a probability this year or next year or anytime in the foreseeable future. But the consequence is so great, we have to take it seriously. And there are things to greatly lower those possibilities that we’re simply not doing.”

Perry really did not expect he would have to write this chapter of his public life. His official career closed with what seemed then an unambiguous sense of mission accomplished. By the time he arrived in the Pentagon’s top job in 1994, the Cold War was over, and the main item on the nuclear agenda seemed to be cleaning up no-longer-needed arsenals. As defense secretary, Perry stood with his Russian counterpart, Pavel Grachev, as they jointly blew up missile silos in the former Soviet Union and tilled sunflower seeds in the dirt.

Now, he sees his grandchildren inheriting a planet possibly more dangerous than it was during his public career. No one could doubt that the Sept. 11 terrorists would have gladly used nuclear bombs instead of airplanes if they had had them, and it seems only a matter of time until they try. Instead of a retreating threat in North Korea, that fanatical regime now possesses as many as eight nuclear bombs, and is just one member of a growing nuclear club. American policymakers talk of spending up to $1 trillion to modernize the nuclear arsenal. And now comes Donald Trump with a long trail of statements effectively shrugging his shoulders about a world newly bristling with bombs and people with reasons to use them.

“We are starting a new Cold War,” Perry says. “We seem to be sleepwalking into this new nuclear arms race. … We and the Russians and others don’t understand what we are doing.”

“I am not suggesting that this Cold War and this arms race is identical to the old one,” Perry added. “But in many ways, it is just as bad, just as dangerous. And totally unnecessary.”

Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk.

And just how high is the risk? The answer of course is ultimately unknowable. Perry’s point, though, is that it’s a hell of a lot higher than you think.

Perry invites his listeners to consider all the various scenarios that might lead to a nuclear event. “Mathematically speaking, you add those all together in one year it is still just a possibility, not a probability,” he reckons. “But then you go out ten, twenty years and each time this possibility repeats itself, and then it starts to become a probability. How much time we have to get those possibility numbers lower, I don’t know. But sooner or later the odds are going to get us, I am afraid.”

Almost uniquely among living Americans, Bill Perry has actually faced down the prospect of nuclear war before--twice.

In the fall of 1962, Bill Perry was 35, father of five young children, living in the Bay Area and serving as director of Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories--driving his station wagon to recitals in between studying missile trajectories and the radius of nuclear detonations.

Where he resided was not then called Silicon Valley, but the exuberance and spirit of creative possibility we now associate with the region was already evident. The giants then were Bill Hewlett and David Packard, men Perry deeply admired and wished to emulate in his own business career. The innovation engine at that time, however, was not consumer technology; it was the government’s appetite for advantage in a mortal struggle against a powerful Soviet foe. Perry was known as a star in the highly complex field of weapons surveillance and interpretation.

So it was not a surprise, one bright October day, for Perry to get a call from Albert “Bud” Wheelon, a friend at the Central Intelligence Agency. Wheelon said he wanted Perry in Washington for a consultation. Perry said he’d juggle his schedule and be there the next week.

“No,” Wheelon responded. “I need to see you right away.”

Perry caught the red-eye from San Francisco, and went straight to the CIA, where he was handed photographs whose meaning was instantly clear to him. They were of Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba. For the next couple weeks, Perry would stay up past midnight each evening poring over the latest reconnaissance photos and help write the analysis that senior officials would present the next morning to President Kennedy.

Perry experienced the crisis partly as ordinary citizen, hearing Kennedy on television draw an unambiguous line against Soviet missiles in this hemisphere and promising that any attack would be met with “a full retaliatory response.” But he possessed context, about the capabilities of weapons and the daily state of play in the crisis, that gave him a vantage point superior to that of all but perhaps a few dozen people.

“I was part of a small team--six or eight people,” he recounted of those days 54 years earlier. “Half of them technical experts, half of them intelligence analysts, or photo interpreters. It was a minor role but I was seeing all the information coming in. I thought every day when I went back to the hotel it was the last day of my life because I knew exactly what nuclear weapons could do. I knew it was not just a lot of people getting killed. It was the end of civilization and I thought it was about to happen.”

It was years later that Perry, like other more senior participants in the crisis, learned how right that appraisal was. Nuclear bombs weren’t only heading toward Cuba on Soviet ships, as Kennedy believed and announced to Americans at the time. Some of them were already there, and local commanders had been given authority to use them if Americans launched a preemptive raid on Cuba, as Kennedy was being urged, goaded even, by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay and other military commanders. At the same time, Soviet submarines were armed and one commander had been on the verge of launching them until other officers on the vessel talked him out of it. Either event would have in turn sent U.S. missiles flying.

The Cuban Missile Crisis recounting is one of the dramatic peaks in “My Journey on the Nuclear Brink,” the memoir Perry published last fall. It is a book laced with other close calls--like November 9, 1979, when Perry was awakened in the middle of the night by a watch officer at the North American Aerospace and Defense Command (NORAD) reporting that his computers showed 200 Soviet missiles in flight toward the United States. For a frozen moment, Perry thought: This is it--This is how it ends.

The watch officer soon set him at ease. It was a computer error, and he was calling to see whether Perry, the technology expert, had any explanation. It took a couple days to discover the low-tech answer: Someone had carelessly left a crisis-simulation training tape in the computer. All was well. But what if this blunder had happened in the middle of a real crisis, with leaders in Washington and Moscow already on high alert? The inescapable conclusion was the same as it was in 1962: The world skirting nuclear Armageddon as much by good luck as by skilled crisis management.

Perry has been at the forefront of a movement that he considers the sane and only alternative, and he has joined forces with other leading Cold Warriors who in another era would likely have derided their vision as naïve. In January 2007, he was a co-author of a remarkable commentary that ran on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. It was signed also by two former secretaries of state, George Schulz and Henry Kissinger and by Sam Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--all leading military hawks and foreign policy realists who came together to argue for something radical: that the goal of U.S. policy should be not merely the reduction and control of atomic arms, it should be the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons.

This sounded like gauzy utopianism, especially bizarre coming from supremely pragmatic men. But Perry and the others always made clear they were describing a long-term ideal, one that would only be achieved through a series of more incremental steps. The vision was stirring enough that it was endorsed by President Obama in his opening weeks in office, in a March 2009 address in Prague.

In retrospect, Obama’s speech may have been the high point for the vision of abolition. “A huge amount of progress was made,” recalled Shultz, now 93. “Now it is going in the other direction.”

“We have less danger of an all-out war with Russia,” in Nunn’s view. “But we have more danger of some type of accident, miscalculation, cyber interference, a terrorist group getting a nuclear weapon. It requires a lot more attention than world leaders are giving it.” Perry’s goal now is much more defensive than it was just a few years ago--halting what has become inexorable momentum toward reviving Cold War assumptions about the central role of nukes in national security.

More recently he’s added yet another recruit to his cause: California Governor Jerry Brown. Brown, now 78, met Perry a year ago, after deciding that he wanted to devote his remaining time in public service mainly to what he sees as civilization’s two existential issues, climate change and nuclear weapons. Brown said he became fixated on spreading Perry’s message after reading his memoir: He recently gave a copy to President Obama and is trying to bend the ear of others with influence in Washington.

If Bill Perry has a gift for understatement, Brown has a gift for the theatrical. In an interview at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, he wonders why everyone is not paying attention to his new friend and his warnings for mankind.

“He is at the brink! At the brink! Not WAS at the brink--IS at the brink,” Brown exclaimed. “But no one else is.”

A California governor can have more influence, at least indirectly, than one might think, due to the state’s outsized role in policy debates and the fact that the University of California’s Board of Regents helps manage some of the nation’s top weapons laboratories, which study and design nuclear weapons. Brown, who was a vocal critic in the 1980s of what he called America’s “nuclear addiction,” reviewed Perry’s recent memoir in the New York Review of Books, and said he is determined to help his new friend spread his message.

“Everybody is, ‘we are not at the brink,’ and we have this guy Perry who says we are. It is the thesis that is being ignored.”

Even if more influential people wake up to Perry’s message--a nuclear event is more likely and will be more terrible than you realize--a hard questions remains: Now what?

This is where Perry’s pragmatism comes back into play. The smartest move, he thinks, is to eliminate the riskiest part of the system. If we can’t eliminate all nukes, Perry argues, we could at least eliminate one leg of the so-called nuclear triad, intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are especially prone to an accidental nuclear war, if they are launched by accident or due to miscalculation by a leader operating with only minutes to spare. Nuclear weapons carried by submarines beneath the sea or aboard bomber planes, he argues, are logically more than enough to deter Russia.

The problem, he knows, is that logic is not necessarily the prevailing force in political debates. Psychology is, and this seems to be dictating not merely that we deter a Russian military force that is modernizing its weapons but that we have a force that is self-evidently superior to them.

It is an argument that strikes Perry as drearily familiar to the old days. Which leads him the conclusion that the only long-term way out is to persuade a younger generation to make a different choice.

His granddaughter, Lisa Perry, is precisely in the cohort he needs to reach. At first she had some uncomfortable news for her grandfather: Not many in her generation thought much about the issue.

“The more I learned from him about nuclear weapons the more concerned I was that my generation had this massive and dangerous blind spot in our understanding of the world,” she said in an interview. “Nuclear weapons are the biggest public health issue I can think of.”

But she has not lost hope that their efforts can make a difference, and today she has put her graduate studies in public health on hold to work full time for the Perry Project as its social media and web manager. “It can be easy to get discouraged about being able to do anything to change our course,” she said. “But the good news is that nuclear weapons are actually something that we as humans can control...but first we need to start the conversation.”

Einstein said in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

In Perry’s view the only way to avoid it is by directly contemplating catastrophe--and doing so face to face with the world’s largest nuclear power, Russia, as he recently did in a forum in Luxembourg with several like-minded Russians he says are brave enough to speak out about nuclear dangers in the era of Putin.

“We could solve it,” he said. “When you’re a prophet of doom, what keeps you going is not just prophesizing doom but saying there are things we do to avoid that doom. That’s where the optimism is.”

#William J. Perry #Bill Perry #nuclear weapons #nuclear war

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