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Cake day: May 26th, 2024

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  • Dude if you care at all about expanding your ideology beyond yourself, it behooves you to not be an insufferable jerk to literally everyone you talk to. Your demeanor completely undermines any effort you might make here to (perhaps even rightly) challenge the societal norms you deem inadequate, unjust, or otherwise bad. People will just assume you sit in a continuous state of masturbatory rage and dismiss anything you might have (even potentially of substance) to offer to the conversation. Frankly I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything in print which so clearly expressed an air of self-righteous smugness, save for perhaps something by Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins.

    Figure out how and when ad hominem is appropriate. Learn how to disagree tactfully. Try to exercise some empathy, at least to the point of being able to connect with folks long enough to rattle off whatever rhetoric you have in the ol’ back pocket.






  • I’m almost hesitant to say as it feels pretentious, but Debussy’s Clair de lune from the Suite bergamasque. I listen to most genres in some capacity. I could probably narrow down to a top five or ten, including Clair de lune, but the other tracks I would struggle to place relative to each other. Cdl is the only one that stands above the others, which I can listen to literally at any time. Lang Lang did a performance in 2022 which is the closest I’ve found to a perfect recording of the piece.

    There are days where I might go for a walk, stop by the river close to my house, sit on a bench on the bank, pop this on my phone and just look out on the water. I’ll watch the birds swooping around, and butterflies on the flowers nearby, the wind blowing the water’s surface, and the clouds over the trees, and just listen. It makes me think of the beauty and impermanence of life and living. Of the complexity and insignificance of our being. Of the individual and the mass. Of my own place in the world, and in spite of my resolutely nihilistic worldview, my own life’s value. Of death and its inevitability, but also its necessity.

    It’s one of very few things which can inspire in me that child-like wonder we were all once so acquainted with. I once listened to it sitting alone on an outcropping overlooking Lake Tahoe. My friends were alarmed when I returned to the group wiping my eyes and waxing poetic about the concept of beauty.

    I will also say the Rammstein’s Du Hast is a fucking banger.