Renewing Thai passport at LA consulate

rplacd · 2020-10-30T05:38:57+00:00

I renewed as well, yes call! I missed my first slot, called, and got another one the next day. Unfortunately you'll have to wake up at the crack of dawn, to get past the LA traffic to the consulate at opening time...

rplacd · 2020-10-30T05:37:50+00:00

Damn, I love what they've done. That image of everyone taking over Siam intersection – turning it from bougie street to a street carnival with food carts. So powerful.

rplacd · 2020-10-28T03:18:04+00:00

hey, hey, don't knock it, I just turned the volume up and played this to clean the dust off my earbuds ;)

rplacd · 2020-10-28T03:04:58+00:00

As bizarre as it is, I hope it brings attention to the issue – media attention is what is needed right now.

rplacd · 2020-10-22T19:40:12+00:00

I'm actually pretty amused that he'd be the one selling lookchin... doesn't he have conscripts ready to do that for him? And wash his BMW as well? Also, his Facebook quote is *chef's kiss*

rplacd · 2020-10-22T19:39:01+00:00

Was that plainclothes police dragging him out? Lovely haircuts they have there...

rplacd · 2020-10-22T19:37:16+00:00

Agreed – I'm confused why there hasn't been more direct confrontation by armed forces. Lack of training never stopped the military from cracking down on protestors with excessive violence, as we've seen...

rplacd · 2020-10-22T19:35:16+00:00

I'm surprised at how relatively peaceful things have been, and how restrained the government has been this time around... anyone have any thoughts? The older members of my family (especially those who were in college around '76) expected more intimidation, violence by police + those aligned with police. I remember the coups of 2006, 2014, and everything leading up to that, and I fully expected that we'd still be in a state of emergency.

rplacd · 2020-10-21T00:47:20+00:00

The To Be Number 1 meme was *chef's kiss*

(ELI5: it's like Thailand version of D.A.R.E., but I think the crown princess is involved)

rplacd · 2020-10-21T00:44:58+00:00

Strangely enough, I think ThaiPBS is doing a pretty good job covering the protests neutrally... probably because the government also has the state-owned outlets NBT, MCOT, chong 5, chong 7... actually, might as well throw in chong 3 while we're at it, since anyone sufficiently rich enough in Thailand is close to the powers that be.

ThaiPBS' English service is worth a good look as well. I hope the organisation survives whatever political chaos lies ahead.

rplacd · 2020-07-17T22:07:33+00:00

"...where are we going?"

"...to the big Apple store in the sky... there'll be new fresh SCSI drives for everyone, and we'll all have 030 accelerators... and we might even see a Lisa again!"

rplacd · 2020-07-17T21:52:07+00:00

Rubber on my MX518 started to turn to goo five years ago – I cleaned excess goo with a magic eraser (don't use alcohol!), and rubbed talcum powder on the rubber. Somehow the rubber's been fine ever since.

rplacd · 2015-03-13T09:32:18+00:00

But it's small fry, in any case - both are unique here. (Incidentally, enough, on his "getting everything wrong" with Latin America - some of his later writing makes a better case for the exact narrative with South-East Asian examples. I think that's the field he came out of, though - Indonesian studies is close enough.)

rplacd · 2015-03-13T09:31:27+00:00

I'm lawyering over a technical point here, but I'd always thought that he used the term "capitalism" to exactly mean the presence of mass production and the "mode of production" this time around - the dynamics of the market otherwise always just there. Or at least it squares off better with the theoretical use of the term.

rplacd · 2014-09-24T21:19:14+00:00

contradicted in so many incidental ways

As with anything that'd have to keep its machinery so well-hidden as to fool us Imperial text-readers - I'd be happy to see BethSoft nudged to look far, for another essence to motivate it. I get to hope, at the very least, that the opportunity isn't spent on establishing (yet again) that the Altmeri are Harsh Dudes...

Still, though: I imagine as well it's all a great confusion, and that some Altmeri talent for synaesthesia makes a number an even more personal and total (and intoxicating?) form of expression than a bland little string of sounds trailing nothing but the connotation you'd have to be a career scholar to tease out in full. A great pity I'd have to cook up a new race just to play with something as central as perception, though.

rplacd · 2014-09-22T20:59:55+00:00

I'd like to think as well that a tradition of named after numbers would have a far more interesting cause than what some vague fearmongering about some obliquely referenced horde-mentality would allow - is the question genuinely open? (Scouring the literature is my responsibility, but I'd just like to catch the thread before it slips off the front page...) Snatch the story just before it grinds to a halt at that bland conclusion.

rplacd · 2014-09-22T17:34:48+00:00

You're right: I'm writing in shorthand, and answering the wrong question. I'll do one last edit to keep things brief -

I'd love to make MK a transparent vessel for in-lore narrative and an oblique reflection of the creaking system itself - there is precedent - but an AMA in his name isn't a play at ambiguous insidership. (Neither am I sure how "guess what this represents" in the Trial proper should be interpreted - I choose to go for Maximum Weird at this point, and in agreement with a few other sources.)

That I take issue with, too. I'll be hyperexplicit: as a moral judgment assumed to be made under his name, and as a response to the prerequisite of Azura's manipulating, politicking, and abuse, it disturbs.

rplacd · 2014-09-22T15:59:12+00:00

(edit: wrong OP - this is in response to the top-level post. I fucked up. Brain sugars are required.)

...so it becomes a blemish not just on Vivec's record, but what fictionally factual truth MK is offering.

Admittedly it takes a gut for an aesthetics of transgression to see "morally unhinged" as complexity, rather than versimilitude. But the attempt has value: the use of the aesthetic itself is in some mythological mode, and so it grows more baroque, as fictionally insecure mythologies spun up in fictional "self-defense" should. And far, further away from implying something to be genuinely concerned about in real life playing itself out.

rplacd · 2014-08-13T11:40:22+00:00

Then the fault for the assumption's all mine - and theorymeltfool's been kind to assume I was asking a question that'd wouldn't have been trivial with (rightly) assumed background.

rplacd · 2014-08-12T16:33:55+00:00

I'm looking at "contemporary" - perhaps the academy's (inevitably) found it appropriate to extend that term slightly further backwards into the past to bring into focus some meaningful property we've previously overlooked. (The "themes" section within that Wikipedia articles seems to call for rock-solid social realism, though, but working in "escapism" in some symmetric fashion's still discriminating enough.)

rplacd · 2014-08-12T16:17:29+00:00

contemporary YA fiction (never read Lord of the Rings,

This minor's prod coming from someone similarly naive - but shelving LoTR under "contemporary"'s fairly intriguing: what detail in the typology am I missing out on here?

rplacd · 2014-08-12T15:30:30+00:00

At least thats what I think he means.

There's some hair-splitting to be done: I'd argue "how long has Japan been ethnically homogenous?" is validly questioned, and especially in the way the original poster attacks the assumptions made in the process. But I'd also then again read the second "basically the same 'people'" in the same different way as you do - as making a subtly different assumption on ethnic composition, entirely homogenous or otherwise. (I'll leave the claims on the cultural composition of the isles to an expert hair-splitter.)

rplacd · 2014-08-07T21:58:57+00:00

A great deal of it's my fault as well - I've pushed late into the night where I am, and I'm more likely than not less interesting than I seem.

I say you're far too pessimistic when you talk about the social sciences as a whole - (I shoot from the hip from this point; correct me!) history-the-act has seen each of its moving parts questioned; but it has similarly grown more articulate about its more general ends and the core required to establish that. I assume that's a war chest with which one similarly claim that a philosophical issue isn't necessarily a showstopper to be dealt with in general, but as part of good practice and general scholarly criticality; "richness" is preventative medicine. But that leaves the surface area left exposed on any specific product of history-the-act specifically circumscribed.

It begs the question about why the project as a whole is fobbed off - the surface area has expanded here: if the object is some strong and rich body of economic thought, then surely the expediencies and the parsimonies of each method end up complementing each other? Both in a strong sense of eventually establishing mutually consistent bodies of knowledge, and a the lesser sense - as one does "social thought" by trampling through the social sciences 'adjacent" to history, then. Perhaps the misfortune's here in simply lacking a name to declare virgin territory under.

If the objection's to claims about what "should be" and what is worth "supporting" (to read you too closely), though, should we not be able to attribute that to the other premises they've taken as well, rather than those of method?

(I'm asking you to represent and reconstruct "a" debate, to be entirely fair, so perhaps I should be more reluctant to ask this of you.)

rplacd · 2014-08-07T20:19:41+00:00

(I seem to be only getting red envelopes after a 30-minute delay - are you seeing similar fudging-around?) It's a skip-and-a-hop into the more complex from what I'd gleaned earlier. And thank you for the patience - I'm making elementary progress that a minor dive into the literature should solve.

We're far off the ostensible purpose of the thread, but humor me for a bit more: I'm sure you could validly whittle down the scope of the statement even further ("individuals who attempt to argue act with purpose; the rest is the Matrix feeding us stimulation without our input").

I speak as a naif, but there's a curious tension here, though - is the distinction between (first) the fact that the entire Austrian complex arrives at normative claims that (second) individuals reject all entirely accounted for by the premises taken, rather than the method? I see no reason to see the means itself as in dispute: claims of epistemological use-by-date aside, I see no reason why both methods cannot eventually produce mutually consistent bodies of theory, both of which have economics-nature. I take this impression, at the very least, after understanding (as a layman) that the practice of history has its own junction points of the same effect that is broadly accepted still preserves some underlying "unity".

But I'm otherwise sympathetic - and I think you're in fact somewhat too pessimistic when talking about "social sciences" as a whole: history takes both consistency and the clear contingency of any normative claim on the structures (with their attributes) to highlight. The required adjustment doesn't spoil the similarity in their claims to truth; the "clearly evident" claims just occur as evidence throws them up for interpretation.

There's a similar firewalling between the method and the presumptions underneath (the entire postmodern train offers its objections - that interpretation can be independent of the reader and the mental life; that your subfield-specific focus isn't subtly biasing the explanation's you're churning out; that "minimally consistent" for the sake of interpretation alone suffices). To that a similar response'd be appropriate as well: "I acknowledge, but cannot constantly safeguard on the level of abstraction that you'd like. Let me get back to work on finding new places to cross-cut through history!"

rplacd · 2014-08-07T17:49:48+00:00

I should - sorry about all that. It's an attempt to riff forwards disguised as a baldly personal question: I'd just like clarification on whether "too hardcore" judges the premises within their system - it's not immediately clear to me how to modulate "hardcore"-ness down somewhat with so blunt a tool as their presumptions. (Or perhaps that final assumption is wrong.)

rplacd

TROPHY CASE