36200+ entries in 0.925s
mircea_popescu: but obviously the english ordered ships they couldn'
t possibly pay for and called this "a cash problem". to be resolved by privateers - except the dutch privateers were both better and more productive.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform two points here being that a) the "global dragnet" is much more difficult to use than you imagine ; and much less productive, being more of a prestige item than a tool of any sort ; b) they're discussing a specific item. if i ask you how many stovetops you have in your house you wouldn'
t count the roof, notwithstanding the sun heating it is, energetically, more significant.
phf: pretty much definition of "op didn'
t deliver"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform honestly i don'
t comprehend why you entertain the tards above and beyond "honey, close your eyes and think of the empire", but each his own i guess.
mod6: "just imagine that these things don'
t exist. see, all better now!"
mircea_popescu: "insurance that never existed doesn'
t cover loss of funds we never had"
mircea_popescu: but he's that measure that doesn'
t dare speak its name.
mircea_popescu: and note that naming the tolkien for tolkien isn'
t blaming him for the gulag. merely recognising his intricacy in the civilisation-masquerading-as-a-culture that spawned him.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform aspie 14% needn'
t be paid. wonder instead how he hopes&dreams.
mircea_popescu: shinohai it's a toss-up whether it can'
t produce great stories because no ads or because being mean.
shinohai: "Ads are being blocked. For us to continue writing great stories, we need to display ads." <<< guess this is why Qntra can'
t produce great stories.
ben_vulpes: "in my bike bag. don'
t forget to antibiotic before applying the glue."
diana_coman: what can I say: it wouldn'
t even be the first time I saw someone as the best version they could be rather than what they actually really were
diana_coman: phf, in that case basically mircea_popescu has a point anyway and there isn'
t anywhere to go otherwise; I read it to mean what I said above (so no, not the best etc) - maybe I was just so tolerant as to miss the bullshit entirely
diana_coman: uhm, what, the dwarfs are now bad in there? (I am all open to seeing this in any other way - I did not grow up with it or something of the kind - but I can'
t say I see this in there at all)
mircea_popescu: the only reason they're not the best vacuum cleaner door to door salesmen is that selling vacuum cleaners door to door isn'
t all that great.
mircea_popescu: and no, you can'
t have a story of arbitrary length ; anything longer than a novel becomes a sludge of separate stories whether you want to or not.
phf: if jrrt was just saying "happy in their own world", there probably wouldn'
t be a story. he makes a point that shire values are best values all throughout the books. gandalf does all kinds of scheming in order to ensure that it's hobbits specifically that participate in the quests, rather than random guy from the street, and it's the kind of values jerome k jerome was making fun of that somehow make hobbits particularly fit for task
diana_coman: <mircea_popescu> really, byzantine fiction (currently known as the vulgate) is much better. but i don'
t think much more of the people who regard the bible as "great writing" than of the tolkien fans. <- fans, lol; out of curiosity: an example as to "much better"?
mircea_popescu: really, byzantine fiction (currently known as the vulgate) is much better. but i don'
t think much more of the people who regard the bible as "great writing" than of the tolkien fans.
diana_coman: I find it actually quite interesting that it's perceived as saying "britain the isolated , small, insignifiant by now island actually matters/is mighty/hero/whatevs" when I read it quite the opposite: as long as they are happy in their own world, they don'
t matter/contribute nothing/and if they are not interested in the world, the world at some point will be interested in them - and with a big stick at that
diana_coman: doesn'
t mean they have no responsibility for the current shit in the world
diana_coman:
http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-02#1513051 - it seems to me that you are taking what I said to mean what you meant; called to do something and responsible in some way does not mean everybody is the same/has same effect or some other such nonsense; the peasant in the hut won'
t save the world no matter what they do, but this doesn'
t mean they should do nothing/whatever; similarly, the same peasant may not have "done bad" but this
☝︎ mircea_popescu: the thing flew "look, this thing almost like in carroll is in tolkien" "yes but here's deluged in crap" "oh, well this guy deluges things in crap" "that he does or that he doesn'
t has no bearing on crap and deluging."
mircea_popescu: hanbot why would you place ~it in the actual work~ when it's a response to a meta-discussion you started with " i don'
t think tolkien had much mastery of economy of words" ?
mircea_popescu: it's the fundamental core of all bad literature, "what if the rules didn'
t apply". good literature is the work of "what if the rules applied differently", never a case of "let's all pretend britannia rules the seas."
hanbot: sure. and no, i don'
t think tolkien had much mastery of economy of words (somehow this'd seem to make him less a copywriter? or maybe merely a more monstrous one).
mircea_popescu: that he buries it under 5000 pages doesn'
t help. much of carroll's... lightiness, to call faggotry thus for now, is excused on the grounds of brevity.
mircea_popescu: mark twain being the best example as far as trouble goes - by "rights" you should add him, and yet he doesn'
t belong, at all.
mircea_popescu: or for that matter, woman shouldn'
t wear pink ? what if she's bonbon blonde ?
mircea_popescu: when i was a child i wore blue, and diana_coman wore pink. thanks god they didn'
t mix up the colors, lest i'd have grown tits ?
mircea_popescu: phf i couldn'
t tell you re stevenson. the only scott i ever read was shaw. anmd shaw is not in this.
phf: hehe, i don'
t care about dickens :>
mircea_popescu: i can understand others can be, and have no beef with it. and i don'
t necessarily even pity the situation, a test's a test.
mircea_popescu: the reason i don'
t watch "Star wars" or "sex and the city" ; nor bother with "lords of the rings" or "jezebel" is exactly the same reason i don'
t go around sex stores to sniff used condoms and napkins from the bin in their video booths, like isabelle huppert's character in the piano teacher : i am not quite that hungry.
diana_coman: hm; so far we established we agree (and apparently this wasn'
t in fact disputed although it seemed so) that tolkien's writing is not reflecting "real life" nor intended to really; this makes it crud in your view I gather
mircea_popescu: this doesn'
t make crackpots somehow inherit the empire of proper science, through the absenteism of everyhone else.
diana_coman: uhm, he wasn'
t; didn'
t even write it for that
diana_coman: but how does that make him crud I don'
t get
mircea_popescu: i even loved him as a kid, and thought it great fiction. just don'
t seem to summon the interest these days.
mircea_popescu: it's for people who don'
t like seeing peni, like alf here present :)
phf: i don'
t think even tolkien fans think of tolkien as a writer, that's why him and his brood get own section at a bookstore
mircea_popescu: just don'
t go around thinking / saying that "there's nothing outside of sin"
mircea_popescu: the message isn'
t don'
t eat this it's bad for you. wqhether something is good or bad is no direct relation of whether you should like it or not. if you like it, like it, and if you will sin go sin. come back when you've sinned enough.
BingoBoingo: phf: More, don'
t eat only this and for the love of god go out into the world occasionally and test it.
phf: but the message seems to be, don'
t eat this it's bad for you. BingoBoingo grew up with fat people who don'
t know how to cook and only eat at mcdonalds. i grew up with moscows girls who all know how to cook, and for them stopping by a mcdonalds for a milkshake was sort of a thing
diana_coman: mircea_popescu, absolutely; I can'
t compute it atm at all, not even enough to spit out something meaningful on it
diana_coman: other than that I don'
t see any link to either immersive universes or Gandalf or Tolkien or whatever else
BingoBoingo: Why did the midgets alternately love/despise gandalf with no middle ground if he wasn'
t special.
mircea_popescu: if you don'
t, it may seem neutral. it isn'
t neutral, not anymore than the glass fish on the milieu.
mircea_popescu: maybe you do or maybe you don'
t knbow the kitsch victorian xtianity that yielded the special midgets.
BingoBoingo: diana_coman: What, wizards don'
t get to count?
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> nothing wrong with this, EXCEPT it comes with instructions, and the instructions include "how to castrate yourself with your new lego set" << This does seem like Tolkien/Lewis/Rowling et al. Pretty much made to turn people into apies with "worlds where people are special but fucking doesn'
t exist"
diana_coman: I don'
t follow where the magical artefact came from; fwiw I fully agree that a book's a mechanism, true; I still can'
t fully grasp where you say this particular mechanism is broken/not even one ; I'll go through the old threads again, maybe I get it
mircea_popescu: how the fuck is it that english doesn'
t EVEN HAVE the word that describes its literature, ie, a rata, ratare ?
diana_coman: so basically that's what you are asking for: translate tolkien for me so that I can see what is worth in there for in the current language I can'
t see it
mircea_popescu: ~obviously~ you could translate, if that were the matter, "oh they brought him tolkien in islandic and he doesn'
t read that"
diana_coman: thing is: if you give gcc some python code, it won'
t be bothered to read it
mircea_popescu: you think what gcc can and can'
t be bothered to read has to do with bugs in gcc ?
diana_coman: mircea_popescu, thing is that what people can or cannot be bothered to read has to do with them, not with what is written really; so it's kind of circular: he writes "crud" because I can'
t be bothered to read it
mircea_popescu: one doesn'
t get out of literary criticism just by writing A LOT of crud people can'
t be bothered to read through.
mircea_popescu: otherwise this position is much like "but teach, you can'
t score me on my program UNTIL IT FINISHES COMPILING!!1"
mircea_popescu: eventually they decided to go with the dutch, and it turns out the dutch weren'
t anything but hayfire.
mircea_popescu: so i say "this man never amounted to anything" and you say "but he is rich" and i say "and it doesn'
t matter"
mircea_popescu: his characters don'
t fuck properly. read it side to side with, say, the decameron. ALSO an archeologist and whatnot. but one with things to say.
mircea_popescu also can'
t normally remember people's names. the people in question flatter themselves with the idea this is a fault of mine.
mircea_popescu: i for the life of me can'
t distinguish them, and this is never a good sign.
diana_coman: don'
t know where he is on that, but harry potter is a shit from what I saw and no way to compare it to tolkien
mircea_popescu: i can'
t help it, for all my patience i can'
t read ANYTHING integrally. some things annoy.
mircea_popescu: which can be said well but isn'
t worth saying in any case.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform their characters don'
t fuck properly. yes, good, as in crafty writer. still has nothing to say besides "god save the queen"
mircea_popescu: a bunch of tired oxford fags trying to give their miserable subculture breath in the heavens doesn'
t make it a sort of byzantine "chrstian faith"
mircea_popescu: can'
t even fucking remember any of this crud it's always the same words in a different souping.
mircea_popescu: yes, this includes tolkien. no, i don'
t see him as much more than an earlier, therefore craftier, woman what's her name.
mircea_popescu: can'
t really get fatlogic without reddit, they're both enmeshed in and the necessary results of the same dumb.
mircea_popescu: fatlogic is part of a larger series on "Socialism-brand Idiocy [I Can'
t Believe It's Not Stupid], and its consumerist aftermarket effects"
mircea_popescu: but economy has nothing to do with it. humongo traffic jams in ba mostly because a) everyone here drives like a confused miami senior citizen. they can'
t fucking merge.
phf "please don'
t be a grotesquely large woman"
trinque: iOS jailbreak has been a thing since forever, yet somehow that doesn'
t translate into "swiss cheese exploitable crapware"
pete_dushenski: BingoBoingo: those
t.o. gurls just wanna hang wif drake. they're wannabe groupies, which is suppose is a type of militantness all its own.
pete_dushenski: BingoBoingo: i also don'
t see mine coming because... not lord atm.
pete_dushenski: isn'
t it incredibru how well-to-do smart people can still hold stupid opinions even within their own areas of expertise! but haooo!!!!
phf: i couldn'
t find keyboard with big enough keys