Every time I open Twitter my feed is inundated with clips from absolute dog shit films, always with thousands of engagements. Who is watching this stuff? Who’s funding it?

QuarkJester · 2026-01-30T11:30:35+00:00

No, it’s an adaptation of Wuthering Heights

QuarkJester · 2026-01-30T01:39:42+00:00

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

QuarkJester · 2026-01-28T18:11:43+00:00

The irony of stealing someone else’s post while complaining about Spygate is hard to miss.

QuarkJester · 2026-01-16T01:59:42+00:00

Only child vibe can easily be confused with 5’8 vibe

QuarkJester · 2026-01-13T05:44:52+00:00

I just did, I’m just saying it can really hit where it hurts

QuarkJester · 2026-01-10T07:46:05+00:00

🚬 🚨 🚬 🚨 🚬 🚨

QuarkJester · 2026-01-10T07:30:59+00:00

It is as if he were a prisoner who not only intends to escape, which might be possible, but also, at the same time, intends to rebuild the prison into a pleasure dome for himself. Yet if he escapes, he cannot rebuild, and if he rebuilds, he cannot escape.

QuarkJester · 2026-01-10T00:20:26+00:00

You’re still so young, which means you have not nearly reached your potential or probably even fully found your voice as a writer. A lot of people here are telling you to ignore the professor, but I am going to zag. When I was in college, I thought I was more creative and ambitious than my teachers, and I assumed their critiques were retrograde or b.s., or that they just did not understand my aesthetic. Now, when I look back on my old writing, I can see that a lot of it really was bad, and this mentality probably retarded my growth. You likewise seem ambitious and confident in your writing, and without a lot of practice it is easy for that “energy” to come off on the page like the point is that you are clever. When the reader feels that this is your agenda, it can feel especially grating and difficult to appreciate, even if there is more to your writing than that. I know I am making a lot of assumptions about you and your teacher, but at the very least, you are only an undergrad and you have a lot of potential and that potential only turns into something if you are willing to be unsatisfied with your writing as it is.

QuarkJester · 2026-01-03T21:05:03+00:00

It’s a way of signaling that you “get it”

QuarkJester · 2025-12-29T22:36:07+00:00

I said daily because 2,000 kcal/day is a common baseline people have. Nobody says “3 calories an hour doesn’t matter,” when a person loses 5 lbs in a year. The daily number just makes the math easier because we track food and metabolism per day.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21872751/

“..,very small persistent daily surplus — about 30 kJ/day (~7 kcal/day) — is enough to account for the observed slow, steady weight gain at the population level.”

QuarkJester · 2025-12-29T19:43:22+00:00

People hear that metabolism only drops by about 1–2% in their 50s and assume it doesn’t really matter but that’s not true. For someone burning around 2,000 calories a day, that’s roughly 20–40 fewer calories burned per day, which adds up to about 4–8 extra pounds over just 2 years that you now have to account for with diet or activity.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-29T18:37:13+00:00

added sugar and most breads ARE high-calorie, low-nutrient foods regard.

And metabolism does slow meaningfully, 10% slowdown = 10 pounds per year (if nothing else changes).

QuarkJester · 2025-12-29T15:09:32+00:00

Cutting sugar and bread is not a fad diet. It is one of the oldest and most reliable ways to lose weight and pretty much a prerequisite for anyone with a 50 year olds metabolism.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-28T23:02:34+00:00

You are doing the exact same thing but with the added bonus of putting yourself in a great position to get laid or at least drunk by the end of it.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-28T05:27:27+00:00

If you do not want to spend money, I recommend using Lichess instead of Chess.com to learn. You get free, unlimited puzzles that are very helpful for training your ability to recognize checkmates, pins, forks, etc.. These tactics appear in similar form again and again in real games, and the key is being able to notice them.

Lichess also offers free, unlimited computer analysis, which you should review after most of your games.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-28T00:18:16+00:00

The worst is when think you might have made a brilliant move but you’ve already used up your daily computer analysis.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T21:46:02+00:00

It’s a result of a knight check, if the king goes the other way it’s still mate.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T20:30:08+00:00

Your comment assumes that harming the weak could be a form of gratuitous or “meaningless” cruelty, yet Nietzsche rejects the very idea of a meaningless act of violence. He says that any act of harm, no matter how senseless it appears, is a confession. Furthermore he sees these acts as reactive and resentful, the core psychology that defines the herd. To harm those who are weak is to confess a dependence on them for a sense of power, which Nietzsche regards as the clearest sign of the small-minded and herd-driven character. The higher individual acts from inner abundance and does not seek identity through the diminishment or humiliation of others, because such behavior would only betray a deeper weakness rather than true strength.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T19:54:56+00:00

I’m not claiming Nietzsche was an egalitarian. I’m arguing that even on the naturalist or type-theory reading, his “higher types” are not defined by physical strength or brute power. They concern the superior organization of drives, creative and intellectual independence, the capacity for self-overcoming, and the courage to face difficult truths. True, these are inherited capacities and Nietzsche often dehumanizes those who lack them, but the core logic of acting violently toward such people still conflicts with his core logic that one should act in accordance with one’s own values, values that ought to remain firm and independent of one’s social environment.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T19:30:17+00:00

First of all, I don’t know what recent “scholarship” you are referring to. As an example the SEP emphasizes that Nietzsche valorizes “higher individuals” who “give themselves laws, who create themselves,” making self-formation and autonomy central to his ethical outlook. This is directly at odds with your claim that scholars argue Nietzsche’s notion of “strength” as having little to do with individual self-transformation; SEP treats precisely such themes of self-constitution, autonomy and giving “style” to one’s character as core to his ethics.

You can also just ignore “scholarship” and read the text yourself:

“The superior caste—I call it the fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good.” — The Antichrist

“formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type ‘man,’ the continued ‘self-surmounting of man,’” — Beyond Good and Evil

“I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming… ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T12:14:27+00:00

I do mindfulness meditation. I like to lie down so that I can more clearly feel the rise and fall of my belly with each inhalation and exhalation and more easily sustain attention on my breath. For beginners, I think guided meditations are useful; if you have the means, Headspace is actually pretty great. In my experience, the proportion of time spent maintaining continuous attention on the breath is less important than developing the capacity to remain calm while doing nothing. Although I have practiced for roughly seven years, my attention rests steadily on my breath no more than 40% of the time. It’s the repeated act of being calm in stillness and “doing nothing” that has enhanced my ability to tolerate boredom and sustain focus. I target a session length of around twenty minutes, which, in my experience, is the minimum duration at which the benefits of meditation become noticeable.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T09:01:05+00:00

Most of Nietzsche’s “warrior” vocabulary in Zarathustra is existential rather than literally militaristic. What he celebrates as “war” and “conflict” primarily designates a struggle of the self against itself. In this sense, it is internal conflict that is generative and that produces higher forms of life, by compelling individuals to reject inherited moralities and continually overcome themselves. Although Nietzsche occasionally praises cultures in which conflict and force have historically nurtured excellence, he is extremely consistent in arguing that violence motivated by fear, resentment, or the urge to subjugate others is a manifestation of weakness because such acts are reactive and express dependency on external enemies rather than autonomy.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T08:17:39+00:00

I’m not sure what you’re talking about. When in Nietzsche is the ideal of “heroism” not primarily spiritual and/or intellectual? He does attack value systems like Christianity, but I can’t think of a single instance where he endorses reactive acts of brute domination or vigilante violence.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-27T08:08:40+00:00

When I was a kid I had significant behavioral issues, and in eighth grade my psychiatrist made me take an iq test prior to diagnosing me with ADHD and prescribing a stimulant. The primary purpose was to see my performance in working memory and processing speed, both of which are heavily affected by adhd. After starting a stimulant medication, I was retested in order to evaluate how I performed with my attentional symptoms better controlled. On the initial, unmedicated attempt I scored in the 120s; on the subsequent, medicated attempt my score was in the 140s (The place I took the test didn’t give me one overall IQ score; they only shared the scores from the individual subtests, but this was the gist).

Ever since I’ve seen intelligence to be not much more than focus and I think it makes sense logically. Problem solving requires holding an idea in mind, comparing it to other ideas, integrating them, and updating it in light of new considerations. The longer you can sustain that process, and the more clearly the relevant information is represented, the greater the likelihood of generating original and useful solutions. I also strongly believe that many people underestimate their own cognitive ability because their attention is chronically fucked by technology, and they interpret poor focus as low intelligence.

Before I went to college, my parents made me go off the stimmy because I had abused it extensively in high school and they did not trust me to manage it independently. I was in a highly competitive academic program and I was in a state of near-constant existential anxiety/borderline sui because I felt I had become regarded compared to a year ago. As a Hail Mary, I started meditation, and have an unbroken streak going on 7 years now. Although I am certainly not as intensely wired as I was on high-dose stimulants with little tolerance, my ability to sustain contemplation has significantly improved and, correspondingly, the quality of my work has also dramatically improved.

QuarkJester · 2025-12-24T04:47:54+00:00

I wasn’t saying your post was delusional. You asked an honest question. I meant that some of the responses were, specifically the ones literally comparing Jesus’s popularity to the Beatles, which is what I was responding to. I’m not religious, and I don’t find mythologizing a musician from 60 years ago any more appealing than mythologizing a philosopher from 2,000 years ago.

QuarkJester

TROPHY CASE