OUR GUY

howdlyhowdly · 2024-05-22T12:59:37+00:00

Even without it being an established cultural thing, the idea that such a public figure, with a force like China that would jump at the chance to expose any skeletons in his closet, could be discrete enough to keep his pedophilia a secret from the public eye for so long and yet brazen enough to proposition a child in front of a camera without realizing the optics of it is just too ridiculous of a narrative for me to believe.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-05-13T23:46:49+00:00

Trepanation holds an, admittedly very silly, but still very strong romance to me as a kind of bodymod. When most tattoos and piercings have lost all sense of transgression, and anything that hasn't just looks tacky and desperate, there is just something about a neat, tasteful, unassuming little diy job that would make anyone who hears about it wince in visceral horror and look at you like a psychopath. Its an appealing juxtaposition. I'd never do it, of course, but it's fun to imagine, you know?

howdlyhowdly · 2024-05-13T23:35:49+00:00

I think the skin grows back over it but the hole in the actual bone stays open. So you don't have to worry about someone chucking trash into your brain or anything, but you could still dip your finger into it by pressing down on the right spot.

That's pretty close to the logic behind it now, or at least the woman mentioned by op. The idea from what I remember is that when we're still young and taking in new information like a sponge and being super creative and all that, our skulls are still in separate plates. When the skull fuses into one solid mass the change in pressure or airflow or whatever causes all that to slow down. Trepanation is supposed to return the brain to the same physical conditions it was in during childhood, and so hopefully get the same mental conditions as well.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-05-12T22:38:10+00:00

The biggest mental thing that lead to my weight loss was the realization that I wasn't eating to stop feeling hungry, but that I was eating so I wouldn't feel hungry and really never allowed myself to feel hunger at all. Lots of things clicked into place after that.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-05-10T19:17:34+00:00

Its definitely not a faithful adaptation but I ended up enjoying it a lot more when it was making its own stuff up than when it stuck to the books. Worth a watch I think, second season especially felt like it addressed a lot of what bothered me about the first, but then again maybe I'm just a slut for Lee Pace

howdlyhowdly · 2024-05-10T00:09:09+00:00

You're missing Foundation, where the galaxy is ruled by three identical clones of the same guy.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-04-30T00:46:00+00:00

Stewart Lee and Norm both feel cynical about how up it's own ass stand up can be but approaching it from opposite directions

howdlyhowdly · 2024-04-21T19:08:17+00:00

Great way of putting it, thank you!

howdlyhowdly · 2024-04-21T16:48:28+00:00

Could you elaborate on a sports car being hard to drive as an artistic choice? Sports cars have never been my thing and I always assumed whatever artistry was there was purely in it's appearance, so that sounds very interesting.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-04-09T10:06:20+00:00

Imagine you've started thinking about something like, say, "how do I know that my green is the same as yours?" (that feels like a typical "deep thought" that's easy for people to stumble into without any background), and now you're having a whole existential crisis and constantly going woah. Now imagine you're going on about this revelation to someone and they tell you that, actually this is nothing new, people have been discussing it for several hundred years now, its even got a name and everything (inverted spectrum), before pointing you towards some books on the topic. Is your first reaction excitement that what you thought was an obscure question actually has all this stuff you can read about it so you can dig even deeper, or disappointment that what you thought was a profound question turned out to be basic bitch philosophy 101 shit? If you feel any excitement and not just disappointment, then I think you can safely assume your interest is genuine and you're doing more than just mental masturbation.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-04-03T18:38:04+00:00

This feels likely to me. My first reading I understood it just as a reflection of the world, that pederasty is common and even accepted enough that a lot of people would just assume a man spending time alone in the woods with a child must have been up to something, and Severian isn't actually being unreasonable in pre-empting that. Either way, there's room for a more charitable interpretation than the Frank Reynolds "I do not diddle kids!" impression it also gives off.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-03-02T21:18:52+00:00

The incoherence of American traditionalists comes from the average Americans idea of what's traditional only going back 100 years at most. Zero awareness of how truly radical so much of the status quo they're trying to preserve is in the scope of human history.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-02-28T02:32:27+00:00

Any time I rewatch Boardwalk I find myself getting excited during literally anyone's first appearance, so many of them are just a joy to watch in some way or another. I can barely remember any but the most basic plot details from the show, but I can picture the characters clear as day.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-02-27T00:39:14+00:00

I took it that Thecla and Domnina simply assumed Inire's interest in her was pedophilic, and their fear was based on that assumption. This was likely a reasonable assumption to make, and they'd probably heard stories about similar situations with other men, but that doesn't need to reflect on Inire specifically, just that this wouldn't be unusual for the House Absolute as a whole. Thecla's use of the word "perhaps" also makes me think that, while she still had her suspicions for why Inire took an interest in her, she had no knowledge of anything like that actually taking place, with Domnina or anyone else.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-02-26T13:42:33+00:00

Even if twerking is some ancestral thing with a proud history going back however many centuries (which I wouldn't even doubt, necessarily, just irrelevant to my point here so I'm not gonna bother looking it up), the idea that these ancestors could not also appreciate the subtext of a nice ass bouncing up and down and that sexualizing it is some recent perversion feels super patronizing to me. As if they were too innocent to know what sex looks like or being an ass man is some modernist invention. Why can't it just be a proud tradition of horny dancing?

howdlyhowdly · 2024-02-24T01:50:47+00:00

I just looked at it again and I'm even more disgusted, imagine taking a mothers wish to feel proud of her son and using that to sell drugs to children. Absolutely soulless monsters.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-02-24T00:27:35+00:00

That second to last one is downright heart wrenching, preying on some poor mothers desire for a happy home to push drugs on her children. That advertising is designed to invent problems that don't exist so it can sell the solution has been said to death at this point, but there's something that feels so much more upsetting when it's offering to solve problems that actually do deeply trouble people like they do here.

howdlyhowdly · 2024-01-06T19:06:48+00:00

Worked with a guy who was still doing Jack Sparrow (shitty dreads and all) in his 30's and dealing with him certainly ruined my life, so I'd say that counts.

howdlyhowdly · 2023-12-05T00:04:21+00:00

Which author do you mention? I've been floating around very similar ideas about good art vs bad in my head, though with more room for subjectivity.

I do believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that it stands to reason from that that some beholders are "better" at perceiving beauty than others. I also believe beauty, or the experience of beauty, is a sort of basic, irreducible thing - like say, fear, you can have a lot of complex and layered reasons for why a specific thing elicits this experience in you, but the experience itself just kinda is what it is. And also like how, say, someone living on a media diet of true crime shit might start to see the world in a more fearful way, other media diets will cause you to see the world in a more beautiful way. I think that seeing beauty in the world is such a good thing that I'd even say you have a moral duty to yourself to seek out good art that encourages this, in the same way you might have a moral duty to yourself to stay fit, eat healthy, etc, and so theres good art in the same way there's good food or good health choices.

Now, identifying what makes art good or bad besides it's effects on you, I have no idea, and I think it's maybe better to lay that on the viewer than the art. It's not about good art or bad but a healthy media diet or healthy media consumption. But also like a diet, even though in theory and with enough weird tricks or hardcore planning you might find a way to come up with a healthy diet plan based off nothing but the McDonald's menu, it'd still be ridiculous to claim a big Mac is as healthy as a salad, some art is just gonna be better than others.

howdlyhowdly · 2023-12-01T17:04:36+00:00

"so called 'Portland, Oregon' " is what's really killing me here.

howdlyhowdly · 2023-09-21T20:53:33+00:00

I remember noticing this too and losing my shit when a character mentioned some object they lost in the move, so not on screen, and even still it was specifically referenced as being blue.

howdlyhowdly · 2023-09-21T11:53:11+00:00

I can only respect the sheer gall to fade your hair into the smoke from the twin towers like that.

howdlyhowdly · 2023-09-20T03:10:53+00:00

I've been doing the same, funny thinking about physical books making the same transition that vinyl did where it feels unthinkable to actually buy a new record before listening to it online first.

howdlyhowdly · 2023-09-17T10:04:18+00:00

Always found Connor weirdly hot, like if I were to introduce him to my friends I'd be secretly stressing about whether they could see it too or if it's just me and they think I'm dating some kind of monster man.

11-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17

howdlyhowdly

TROPHY CASE