I don't often say this, but fuck this video.

If you're 25, the end of your life is an abstraction and the whole "there's time to change things!" is a nice balm. When you're 55, your death isn't an abstraction, it's a fact of life that dominates more and more of what remaining time you have left. The awareness of impending mortality is insidious once you're passed 50. It creeps into every part of your life and every decision you make.

Let me teach you one of those amazing words the Germans come up with for describing various forms of existential agony: weltschmerz. Loosely, this is a form of sadness when one realizes what is versus what could have been. This is the compound interest of regrets and choices not made, or made poorly. Not only does weltschmerz grow with each year, its very presence amplifies itself because the more you know what could have been, the more you see what the cost of that absence is. Then, if that's not evil enough, that knowledge focuses the mind on the time remaining and how little you can do to negate the harm done, which then re-amplifies the weltschmerz.

You can slap whatever Hallmark bullshit you need on this to get through the day, but weltscmerz never goes away. It's always there. It's there at 3:00am when you wake up in a silent house and look at everything around you as consolation prizes for races not won. It's there when you see your friends succeeding in a million different ways that you didn't. It's there when you look at 6 million lines of text you wrote and realize you're not going to be Hemingway after all.

So fuck this video. I don't need a cutesy animated memento mori, I've already got a wall clock in my death row cell.

Here endth the rant.

(Nick Drake nailed weltschmerz perfectly in "When The Day Is Done". Here's the video to that song:

https://youtu.be/Y2jxjv0HkwM)

I'm not sure that all of Spain considers it ok to be as "masculine" as some proportion of Spanish men (but not all) think they should be.

I mean--what could be more masculine than the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain? Hemingway, the famously macho writer, literally wrote about it.

But--when a WhatsApp group calling themselves the "Wolfpack" harassed and raped an 18 year old girl there in 2016--and received a "sexual assault" but not a rape conviction for their actions---the lighter sentence was not well received. The guys think they they should appeal to go free; the other half of the country is outraged.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/05/spain-court-upholds-wolf-pack-verdict-of-sexual-abuse-rather-than-rape-pamplona


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43915551

Sadly, Hunter S. learned one too many lessons from Hemingway (see minute 13-ish, above).

Hemingway apparently wrote the shortest story in the English language. 6 words.

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Okay, okay. This is Hemingway.

I will upvote Hemingway, NOT jerkface Woody Allen.

I know, right!? Thanks for the assist though! You're the man!
In reply to this comment by enoch:
come ooooooon sift!
this is beautiful.
*promote

I'm very happy you liked it. I almost deleted that post because I was afraid the whole thing was too pompous. But I figured, ultimately, who could argue with the sentiment..."Garfield" really was a horrible film.


In reply to this comment by ChaosEngine:
In reply to this comment by TheFreak:
Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.


My life is better for having read that comment.

In reply to this comment by TheFreak:
Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.


My life is better for having read that comment.

Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^shuac:
To ChaosEngine: I'm unimpressed by ad populum arguments (that because it's popular, it must therefore be true, or good, or whatever). It's a logical fallacy and I don't dig fallacies so much. Also, regarding the case for the value of terse storytelling: well done sir! If only Ebert and I were arguing against terse storytelling, you'd really have us against the ropes. You dropped some straw, man.
I was pointing out that the film has received plenty of critical acclaim. Ebert is welcome to his (increasingly irrelevant) opinion, but my opinion is that he's wrong and I stand by it. I'm not alone either.
My point about Hemingways story wasn't about terseness, it was about inference. There are aspects to The Raids storyline that aren't written down in the script. And even then it wasn't a direct rebuttal to anything Ebert (or you) said, merely a point about how I felt the movie was made. But go ahead and assume everything is related to you.
You don't have to like the Raid, and you're welcome to go watch some tedious pseudo-intellectual bullshit for a few hours if it strokes your ego, but comparing it to "Ass" in Idiocracy is, as @Sarzy pointed out (and somewhat ironically) idiocy.
Sorry for sounding like a condescending prick, but you work to your audience. At least I can actually form my own opinion rather than regurgitate someone else's.


Not directed at me? So you'd have posted what you did even if I never made that first post, is that right? Very good then. So long as we're free to infer what we like to any film bereft of story, I'd like to infer a compelling yarn into the multiple award-winning (and fictional) film called Ass.

In Ass, our protagonist is a subject in a medical trial testing an anti-flagellant. It's a closed study so all the test subjects are sequestered. Despite this, our hero smuggles in some chilli for supper the night before. The twist? He's in the placebo group.

Now wasn't Ass a great film? I see your point now. Well-done again!

Most impressive about this post is that I did it on an iPhone.

Enjoy your day!

>> ^shuac:

To ChaosEngine: I'm unimpressed by ad populum arguments (that because it's popular, it must therefore be true, or good, or whatever). It's a logical fallacy and I don't dig fallacies so much. Also, regarding the case for the value of terse storytelling: well done sir! If only Ebert and I were arguing against terse storytelling, you'd really have us against the ropes. You dropped some straw, man.

I was pointing out that the film has received plenty of critical acclaim. Ebert is welcome to his (increasingly irrelevant) opinion, but my opinion is that he's wrong and I stand by it. I'm not alone either.

My point about Hemingways story wasn't about terseness, it was about inference. There are aspects to The Raids storyline that aren't written down in the script. And even then it wasn't a direct rebuttal to anything Ebert (or you) said, merely a point about how I felt the movie was made. But go ahead and assume everything is related to you.

You don't have to like the Raid, and you're welcome to go watch some tedious pseudo-intellectual bullshit for a few hours if it strokes your ego, but comparing it to "Ass" in Idiocracy is, as @Sarzy pointed out (and somewhat ironically) idiocy.

Sorry for sounding like a condescending prick, but you work to your audience. At least I can actually form my own opinion rather than regurgitate someone else's.

Sorry but Ebert is not only in the minority, he's also just wrong.

The Raid is a terse, well executed action flick. It is phenomenally well paced and shot.

The shortest story in the english language was written by Hemingway. "For sale, baby shoes. Never worn".
On the face of it there are no characters, no plot. But anyone who spends more than a second can see the story behind the story. So it is with the raid.

>> ^aurens:

A short and varied list of Americans educated in public high schools before the creation, in 1980, of the Department of Education:
Steve Jobs
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Ron Paul
Warren Buffett
Toni Morrison
Carl Sagan
Ernest Hemingway
Linus Pauling
Sandra Day O'Connor
John Steinbeck
Bob Dylan
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Milton Friedman
Noam Chomsky
Oprah Winfrey
George Lucas
Jimmy Carter
Paul Newman
Amelia Earhart
Walt Disney
George Carlin
Elvis Presley
Neil Armstrong
Richard Feynman
Aaron Copland
(I could keep going, but I'm sure you get the point.)>> ^ghark:
No public education ... Sounds exciting.



Aye aye, was being sarcastic

A short and varied list of Americans educated in public high schools before the creation, in 1980, of the Department of Education:

Steve Jobs
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Ron Paul
Warren Buffett
Toni Morrison
Carl Sagan
Ernest Hemingway
Linus Pauling
Sandra Day O'Connor
John Steinbeck
Bob Dylan
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Milton Friedman
Noam Chomsky
Oprah Winfrey
George Lucas
Jimmy Carter
Paul Newman
Amelia Earhart
Walt Disney
George Carlin
Elvis Presley
Neil Armstrong
Richard Feynman
Aaron Copland

(I could keep going, but I'm sure you get the point.)>> ^ghark:

No public education ... Sounds exciting.

>> ^viewer_999:
Teach 'em to find pleasure in hurting animals young; gets a jump on the serial killer nurturing process. He likes you!

I'd recommend to you Hemingway's Islands in the Stream, particularly Bimini, Chapter IX.