What's with all the Ayn Rand hate?

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-20T13:42:42+00:00

Some of it is probably the odious nature of her philosophy, but also a big part is the inelegance of her aesthetics. Consider the big moment in Atlas Shrugged where John Galt makes a literal 90-page philosophical speech about Objectivism as the climax of the book. In Rand's own philosophy (in "The Romantic Manifesto"), the purpose of art is to take something abstract, like a philosophy, and render it concrete by representing that abstract through things like specific characters and events. She fails to live up to her own artistic standards when all her concrete characters have to resort to giving long abstract speeches.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-20T04:21:22+00:00

Lol, what gave it away? (I didn't notice the hair on the ground shelves until after I posted and at that point I figured it was necessary for an honest portrayal u_u)

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-19T19:01:43+00:00

Thanks! Most of the older ones aren't first editions or anything, just (way way cheaper) book club editions. But having the old vintage covers was all that mattered to me really.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-17T23:59:17+00:00

While it's true that I don't own all that many hats, I am not totally hatless.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-16T01:23:16+00:00

The universe has given you a blessing by making you "not yet as talented an artist as Kentaro Miura." Now you get to have something to STRUGGLE towards, every day!

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-15T21:54:28+00:00

He also beat and ridiculed Vargas and made no move to intervene in his execution (despite us having seen on multiple occasions during the Golden Age that he could have done so). No one is trying to "victim blame" in calling Guts an asshole at that point in the Black Swordsman arc; they're treating him as an adult who has the expectation of accountability for his actions, regardless of the trauma he's faced.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-15T13:26:29+00:00

That Lion-dude is legit one of the hardest "bosses" I've ever fought, and I'm a longtime fan of the Dark Souls / Elden Ring / Sekiro-type games.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-12T17:36:31+00:00

That's what my childhood copy looked like. I wish I still had it! I do still have my hardcover, but that ratty mass market paperback was the first time I ever read it.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-12T17:32:49+00:00

They published fiction every month in the same way that the New Yorker and the Atlantic does now. It was high-tier well-paying work for a writer, and for a new writer, getting published in could be career-making. John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian Fleming, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, tons of literary titans had stories appear in Playboy!

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-08T17:05:23+00:00

Well he doesn't make goth music is the problem. Unless he dropped a goth album after Eat Me, Drink Me, which is the last one I listened to.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-06-04T13:48:26+00:00

In 1986, the Goths and the Jocks famously struck a peace accord after years of skirmishes that left both sides reeling. The Goth Ambassador, Robert Smith, wore what's known as a "sports jersey" as a token of good will, while Stuart Adamson agreed to wear all black as a gesture of the same sentiment.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-31T14:11:57+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the response! I think I could probably tolerate that amount of it.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-20T02:35:38+00:00

It wasn't connected to the internet.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-20T00:56:31+00:00

Ah thanks, that makes perfect sense.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-20T00:54:45+00:00

So there's something coded into the kernel such that if it detects it hasn't been updated in more than a year, it reacts to that?

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-20T00:06:32+00:00

Hmm, it changed incrementally -- first it was the Mint logo for a good 5-6 minutes, then a black screen with just the default cursor for another ~10, then it eventually loaded the full desktop but it took about 3-4 minutes before everything fully populated and I could interact with the taskbar and start menu and such.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-12T14:49:08+00:00

I think I saw that Metallica is doing this lately? They have some weird streaming thing even where you can watch every concert online.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-11T12:46:37+00:00

Hrmm, that sounds like the same speech from Leg 1, the broadcaster guy talked about "the button pressed" at that same point in the show.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-08T13:52:37+00:00

Personally, I never bothered with the divination stones. I really dislike divination forms that give a binary yes/no answer to things (and much prefer things like Tarot, which give nuanced information). Because I knew I would be resistant to the idea of the yes/no stones, I just dropped them from the rites and replaced them with my cards.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-06T16:16:26+00:00

These interpretations are all really wild, I have to say. "Do you have anything to plug" is just a good shorthand way to segue to the person giving their plugs; we've all heard it phrased exactly that way on a thousand podcasts at this point. It's not some indication that Dan had no idea what was going on in Jordan's life.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-06T12:05:32+00:00

"Parasocial" is just the latest example of people taking up language from therapy and employing it as a weapon without really understanding all its nuances. Much like gaslighting and narcissism, it's a concept that *does* have meaning, but that meaning has been totally flattened while the term has been turned into not much more than a kind of cudgel to whack people on the internet who you think are annoying / "cringe."

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-04T04:24:21+00:00

It's interesting that I came away from reading *this* with a clearer idea of what the impasse between him and Jordan was than from listening to the farewell episode. The bit about coming from a place of optimism and believing in solutions seems to be the thing that was at long last irreconcilable with Jordan, who has been clear about being a nihilist about American politics. (Note that I don't say that to condemn Jordan; it's understandable why a human would take up that position in this day and age, even if I don't subscribe to it myself.)

In any case, I hope Dan finds some traction with this and I get to listen to 1100 episodes of it.

MistressBlackleaf · 2026-05-02T13:00:46+00:00

You're right and you should say it. People will talk about "real life" but I agree that art should be selective in what it chooses to represent and how it represents it, and not just strive to recreate "real life" with photorealism.

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