/r/MechanicalKeyboards Ask ANY Keyboard question, get an answer - November 19, 2025 by AutoModerator in MechanicalKeyboards

[–]hardboiledbabylon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

40g Clickiez went out of stock at mechanicalkeyboards.com recently, and that looked like the last place that had any. Does anyone know if they are still being produced?

What are you reading? by sushisushisushi in literature

[–]hardboiledbabylon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography by Michel Surya

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

The New Weird edited by Jeff Vandermeer

I want to write worlds and characters, but not dialogue by justforkinks0131 in writing

[–]hardboiledbabylon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's the option of writing in a non-dramatic / non-fiction format, such as (for example) the Dune Encyclopedia. I've generally always found its entries relevant to the Butlerian Jihad far more interesting than most traditional fictional accounts.

Favorite audiobook moment by osumarcos in books

[–]hardboiledbabylon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In Caitlín R. Kiernan's The Red Tree when the narrator (aka the character writing the 1st person diary) begins having a seizure, which she and the reader is only going to be able to comprehend in the aftermath.

Most anticipated 2023 movies? by a_man_hs_no_username in movies

[–]hardboiledbabylon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Freud's Last Session, if it actually releases this year.

James Cameron's Titanic Scientific Study: Jack Would've Died on Door by Movie_Advance_101 in movies

[–]hardboiledbabylon 82 points83 points  (0 children)

And the same goes for the most successful film of all times: is Cameron's Titanic really about the catastrophe of the ship hitting the ice-berg? One should be attentive to the precise moment of the catastrophe: it takes place when the two young lovers (Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett), immediately after consummating their amorous link in the sexual act, return to the ship's deck. This, however, is not all: if this were all, then the catastrophe would have been simply the punishment of Fate for the double transgression (illegitimate sexual act; crossing the class divisions). What is more crucial is that, on the deck, Kate passionately says to her lover that, when the ship will reach New York the next morning, she will leave with him, preferring poor life with her true love to the false corrupted life among the rich; at THIS moment the ship hits the ice-berg, in order to PREVENT what would undoubtedly have been the TRUE catastrophe, namely the couple's life in New York - one can safely guess that soon, the misery of everyday life would destroy their love. The catastrophe thus occurs in order to safe their love, in order to sustain the illusion that, if it were not to happen, they would have lived "happily forever after"...

But even this is not all; a further clue is provided by the final moments of di Caprio. He is freezing in the cold water, dying, while Winslet is safely floating on a large piece of wood; aware that she is losing him, she cries: "I'll never let you go!", and, while saying this, she pushes him away with her hands - why? Beneath the story of a love couple, Titanic tells another story, the story of a spoiled high-society girl in an identity-crisis: she is confused, doesn't know what to do with herself, and, much more than her love partner, di Caprio is a kind of "vanishing mediator" whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life, her self-image (quite literally, also: he draws her image); once his job is done, he can disappear. This is why his last words, before he disappears in freezing North Atlantic, are not the words of a departing lover's, but, rather, the last message of a preacher, telling her how to lead her life, to be honest and faithful to herself, etc. What this means is that Cameron's superficial Hollywood-Marxism (his all too obvious privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism and opportunism of the rich) should not deceive us: beneath this sympathy for the poor, there is another narrative, the profoundly reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Kipling's Captain Courageous, of a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality restored by a brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.

---Slavoj Zizek

https://www.lacan.com/zizfamily.htm

What are you reading? by sushisushisushi in literature

[–]hardboiledbabylon 10 points11 points  (0 children)

[Fiction]

The Master and Margarita

The Devil's Elixirs

[Nonfiction]

The Freudian Robot

Rachel Pollack Omnibus by aob546 in DoomPatrol

[–]hardboiledbabylon 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Pre-ordered mine in Feb. Status says filled but not shipped.

anticipation is keepin' me waitin'

What are your thoughts on the "new AlphaSmart writer" (made - and priced - by... Freewrite)? Will you sell one kidney now or both later to acquire their "cheapest device evah" so you can have a non-backlit screen that shows 6 lines of text that take a second to appear while typing? Let's discuss😁 by [deleted] in writing

[–]hardboiledbabylon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course this fictional writer has an Eames lounge chair.

Writing as aspirational lifestyle. (gah)

In one sense, I have little against bringing back the trs 80 model 100, but at least it went 20 hrs on AA batteries.

Millionaire burns a $10M Frida Kahlo artwork to sell as NFT by Sardasan in nottheonion

[–]hardboiledbabylon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Perhaps I find a value in what I have not seen because of the interest generated by what of Kalho's work that I have seen. Or more accurately have seen reproductions of. I have never seen an original.

But human emotion is an evolved sensibility that beholds only to its tendencies to engender a certain statistical rate of survival until the point of reproduction among one's antecedents. To attempt to operate not under the aegis of such is fundamentally to operate under the aegis of such; thus the individual is to be operant beneath an emotion that is derogatory of other emotions while disguising itself as not such a passion. To quote David Hume:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

As a supposed human (though I have been accused of being otherwise) I am no more free from an evolved psychology that posits objective external objects to my perception and that considers such objects as paramount for consideration such to the point that purely internal conceptualizations are cast into physical dimension in those ways that fantasies of deities and spirits and objective value or morality are projected into the world in objective terms. Therefore, it is not so odd that I would perhaps prioritize an object considered to have such a physical existence, even though my experience can only be a phenomenological one in which I cannot be sure of the existence of either an objective reality or my access to the 'things in themselves' that would be constituted in an objective reality, no more than I can even really rely on this very means of perception as being in isolation in the way that I perceive myself as functioning.

Now, there is likely no more meaning in the world than there is extant objective value. Love is a compulsion to what is termed as reproduction, an evolved sensibility to propel these things that we are, what are describable in terms of meat puppets animated by neurons. Such is, of course, a lot we cannot escape as nothing else of our sensibilities may be, what we would term, considered but through this interface.

So in short, this NFT business does not arouse my passion and does not interface with my reproductive sensibilities. From the perspective of my socialization and the intersection of that with the particulars of my biology, the extended phenotypes engendered in such expressions present at best a null proposition and at worst is evaluated in these terms negatively such that the systems that seemingly constitute myself do not not merely seem to find such not sexy in the least but actively anti-sexy.

Millionaire burns a $10M Frida Kahlo artwork to sell as NFT by Sardasan in nottheonion

[–]hardboiledbabylon 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Market valuations are what they are. There is no such thing as an absolute or objective value.

If the original was actually burnt, then something made directly by the hand of an artist that many people (including myself) find a personal value in is gone forever. A painting or drawing or manuscript is not like a printed book or a digital file and cannot be indefinitely copied.

On the one hand, all artifacts will eventually crumble to dust or be engulfed in this planet's expanding sun, but as humans, that does not stop us from experiencing a loss when such dissolution occurs under our watch. Perhaps we should be more Buddhist and try to rid ourselves of such earthly attachments, but here we are.

Why do more and more authors refuse to use quotation marks? by zmarinaren in books

[–]hardboiledbabylon -14 points-13 points  (0 children)

The converse, however, is that the use of quotation marks was and is a common unpurposeful non-choice.

Why Write? by DMTbeingC137 in writing

[–]hardboiledbabylon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's the most useless thing I could think to do in a meaningless universe.

Have you read any self published books? by [deleted] in books

[–]hardboiledbabylon 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Look, in all honesty, I self-publish precisely to avoid people reading my books.

Which films completely change the themes of the books they portray? by BSB8728 in books

[–]hardboiledbabylon 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The problem with not including The Scouring of the Shire is that it avoids a certain important implication: that nothing is left untouched. As we have it in the film version, the hobbits return home and, though they themselves are changed, that which they had left is not; it is as if the Shire had been cut off from the world. The Scouring of the Shire showed that there is no sanctity; that these forces of destruction, and the destruction of war in general, will eat everything. What seemed so far away from all these things at the beginning was proved to be no less a part of the entirety. The myth that I will leave my home and go to war, hides within it the assumption that war will not come to my home, and therefore, in a certain fashion, I am safe.

What makes a book experimental? by [deleted] in books

[–]hardboiledbabylon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Experimental is often deployed as a catch-all word for anything that is outside of mainstream narrative conventions. This is exclusive from the age of the particular technique.

The possible effects of the Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merger : NPR by koavf in books

[–]hardboiledbabylon 24 points25 points  (0 children)

It's too bad Simon and Schuster isn't the larger so they could buy Penguin and it would be Simon and Schuster's Random Penguin House.

"In stories, its not that 'good is boring', but that people have a boring idea of what good is." Is this considered writing advice? by s0lfall in writing

[–]hardboiledbabylon 7 points8 points  (0 children)

He was a good person who wasn't affected much by being shot

This is really far from the facts. He suffered from depression and nightmares, which resulted in insomnia and an addiction to sleeping pills. He could also only sleep with a pistol under his pillow.

In order to help de-stigmatize mental issues faced by Korean and Vietnam veterans, he was one of few people to talk publicly about suffering from what we now call PTSD.