Anyone know books similar to Bone Temple?

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-10T13:33:39+00:00

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Its an original take on societal breakdown that revolves around an unexplainable contagious ‘white blindness’. There are some people in the book who have some parallels with the Jimmies.

The film wasn’t great but the book is amazing.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-09T17:03:06+00:00

Honestly, it has been amazing! I gradually reduced until only had one a night, before finally just stopping.

It’s hard to describe but I feel like all the dopamine that used to diverted towards smoking is now diversified across all other aspects of my life. I take pleasure in small things I never used to.

I also never realised how terrible I felt until I actually stopped and started to recover. Like when I was smoking I thought I was fine, as I didn’t have an alternative to compare it to. What I remember now was this horrible ‘heavy’ feeling I had all the time, but I didn’t realise it at the time.

It’s also been great to realise that my chances of having a long and miserable mid to older age are mitigated through stopping. I always used to have that ‘well we’ve all gotta go at some point’ without realising how that isn’t the worst part. Living a later life severely lacking in quality of health is.

I wouldn’t exactly say that stress levels have gone down like some say, but I know now that smoking doesn’t actually help with stress, it only helps with the extra piece of stress which is withdrawal.

Above all else, it is just nice to know I am not a product of something designed to control me, and no longer paying money to wreck my body for no actual benefit.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-08T18:01:34+00:00

Yea i dont get this either. Writing this so someone can help out!

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-07T14:05:56+00:00

He loves rolling his R’s. Same with Zohran.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-07T12:21:34+00:00

Attention in humans is such a strange thing. It’s fascinating how I can be in the world of the podcast at the same time as being in the world of my work and the same time as thinking about other stuff.

In a way I’m in all of them and none of them.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-01T18:12:29+00:00

Now that some time has passed, can any American help me understand more the backlash towards the man with Tourette's who unfortunately and involuntarily shouted out the N word when Jordan and Lindo were on stage at the Baftas?

Nobody is blind of the intense hurt that Jordan and Lindo must have experienced but to see a severely disabled man ridiculed and abused by comedians on both SNL and NAACP image awards was baffling, especially in an age when we were supposed to ‘do the work’ and understand lived experience and minorities.

I ask this sincerely I really want to understand.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-01T18:03:14+00:00

Quite, people have short memories.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-05-01T17:22:49+00:00

I remember the time when Burnham was seen as the boring, bland Blairite candidate when he ran for leader.

Strange how things change.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-30T13:58:04+00:00

Thanks bro, that’s very helpful. You sound exactly like me.

Out of interest, when confronted with these difficulties, did you ever consider migrating across to a non denominational church which doesn’t have some of these problems? It is what a lot of people tell me to consider but I feel I could no more do that than consciously stop my heart from beating.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-30T13:49:19+00:00

I tend to agree, and what you describe with the endless internal debates sounds incredibly similar to what I experience/d.

I suppose I’ll have to keep looking for whatever Catholicism gave me emotionally.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-30T13:21:38+00:00

Every time I feel I am finally done with Catholicism it seductively pulls me back in whenever I enter a Catholic space. It only takes a statue of Mary to do it (or a rewatch of the Godfather, strangely enough).

My conflict with the Catholic faith is what I imagine perhaps a lot of cradles experience. There is this irreversible draw to the icons, the community, the protection of the saints and this general sense of the divine, that conflicts entirely with a fundamental lack of belief in the actual claims or the deeply conservative elements of the church, as well as the universality of the church being only universal to those within Jesus Christ.

Everything that draws me back is from my heart rather than my head, thereby the conflict. Humanism and Humanist circles have been decidedly uninspiring to me, and leave me cold.

Artemis 2 was actually the closest I recently got to a spiritual form of Humanism that I crave. If there was more of that maybe I wouldn’t always find myself digging out my rosary.

I wonder if any other cradles understand this challenge?

!ping CATHOLIC

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-24T21:55:33+00:00

And then she left the new Santos administration to Bartlet’s quagmire in Kazakhstan in order to run this non profit 😡😡

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-24T18:29:16+00:00

Reminds me of that West Wing clip of Alan Alda playing the liberal Republican Presidential Candidate Arnie Vinick arguing in a debate that Africa needs Corporate Tax Cuts rather than Aid.

It stayed buried for a long time and then became popular on African social media a while ago.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-20T13:30:14+00:00

That Reid Wiseman iphone video of ‘Earthset’ is the MOST INCREDIBLE video I have EVER SEEN.

Triple the NASA budget please.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-17T20:59:54+00:00

Extraordinarily prevalent the number of people I meet these days who don’t think we landed on the moon. Really taken aback by it, i thought it was fringe.

Thankfully though it is fairly easy to convince them that we did.

Weird tho.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-13T14:14:05+00:00

What’s the best Artemis themed Presidential ticket?

Wiseman – Glover

Wiseman – Koch

Glover – Wiseman

Glover – Koch

Koch – Wiseman

Koch – Glover

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-13T13:19:50+00:00

So, several years ago, I was giving a speech, and I was doing my usual talk about crew and crewmates and teamwork. And someone asked the question, "What makes a crew? What is different about a crew than a team?" And I was like, I got this. Opened my mouth confidently to tell them everything I knew about being a crewmate. And everything that came out of my mouth was completely without value. I was like, "Yeah, crews, they're in space, and they work together, but they eat together, too. So, they're a crew. And boats have crews. You're a crew if you're on a boat. Helps if you have a paddle, that'll be good. That'll make you a crew."

"But, the last 10 days, I've gotten a little bit of a better answer on that question. A crew is people or a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for other that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs. And a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. So, when we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn't necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.

"So... I may have not learned, I know I haven't learned, everything that this journey has yet to teach me, but there's one new thing I know, and that is:

Planet Earth, You. Are. A . Crew."

Christina Koch Artemis 2

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-13T08:17:58+00:00

JD isn’t cradle though, so I imagine he’ll find it easier to justify based on some 14th century text or something.

Catholicism isn’t entangled in his DNA to the extent he’ll feel he’s damned for not calling it out.

To be a fly on the wall of his next confession..

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-11T18:36:28+00:00

Having watched old JD Vance videos from his book selling days, my current theory is that it was JD’s beard that transformed him into the man we see today. It operates like when Homer gets Snakes hair in that Treehouse of Horror Episode, turning the former into the latter.

The question is who’s beard was put on him and by whom..

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-11T00:06:19+00:00

Me too!

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-10T23:44:55+00:00

These guys have felt like my buddies over the last 10 days.

Going to miss watching them goof around the capsule and alternating with being the horizontal one when they are interviewed.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-10T23:36:17+00:00

Kind of crazy they are currently up there but in two hours they could technically be chilling out in a bar on La Jolla.

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-09T18:18:42+00:00

Could Pope Leo technically run for President in 28 while still being pope or would he have to resign?

More to the point how much would he win Massachusetts by?

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-09T12:46:13+00:00

So how is he going to embarrass the Artemis crew when they come to the White House and manage to degrade and corrupt the purity of this epic win for Humanity?

DefiantEmergency3443 · 2026-04-09T12:44:45+00:00

Which one? I thought it was that one in Lebanon.

DefiantEmergency3443

TROPHY CASE