That'll have to do. I'm going to leave. — thewonder

You keep on promising, but never deliver :wink:

Are you drunk?

There are whole guidebooks for GR — Manuel

I looked at one today, but I approach literature as I do film, knowing as little about it beforehand as possible and certainly avoiding plot spoilers, which this guidebook apparently has.

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow. — Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

This is always quoted, but the thing is: the whole book is like that.

I've been trying to get up the nerve to read "Gormenghast." — T Clark

Titus Groan is ponderous, if you can imagine that as a positive, but Gormenghast I found somewhat lighter and more comedic, in a Dickensian kind of way.

Really odd, but wonderful. — T Clark

:up: :100: :cool:

Thank you for sharing your experience. I appreciate it.

There was a time when I went for big difficult books in the way that young men do: to prove to myself and to others that I was a serious intellectual.

These days, it's more like curiosity and exploration. These books stand in the cultural landscape like mountains to be climbed.

The endnotes thing puts me off, I have to say. Friends of mine have raved about Infinite Jest, but I feel more drawn to Gravity's Rainbow. I can handle books I can't understand so long as it seems like the writer knows what he's writing about, and if it looks like it could be interesting. That's when I know I have to go and do some research of my own.

I first read Moorcock back in the late '70s – The Eternal Champion-Silver Warriors duology and Elric stories mostly, later Behold the Man, von Bek stories and "sampled" quite a few other of his novels. I really fell for Moorcock's pulpish weird fantasy (i.e. sword & sorcery), especially Elric and the Multiverse back in the day (which, along with Conan stories and Lord of the Rings-The Silmarillion, lead me to running & designing tabletop roleplaying games through the mid-80s). Foundational stuff for me. — 180 Proof

:cool:

I was into the Corum and Von Bek stories back in the day. Later on Colonel Pyat.

Ursula LeGuin — 180 Proof

:up: :up: :up:

I've never ventured past Titus Groan, so maybe I'll give Peake's trilogy another chance. — 180 Proof

I definitely recommend the second one, Gormenghast, but the third is non-essential and really not of a piece with the first two. But it's fascinatingly odd.

What do you think of Moorcock's Gloriana with its deliberately Gormenghast-like 'mood'? — 180 Proof

I abandoned it when I tried reading it in my adolescence but I'd be interested to try again. But although Moorcock loved Peake, I don't think he's the same kind of writer at all, so I don't know how he'd succeed with that kind of thing. I could be wrong about that, because there's a lot of Moorcock I haven't read (I've probably only read his Eternal Champion/Multiverse stories, and less than half of those). What did you think of it?

Btw, reading Gene Wolfe rewards patience. — 180 Proof

Glad to get some support for my suspicion that he's not just crap after all!

EDIT: btw, I saw Dune in a beautiful "premium" cinema with big chairs and tables and all that, and only four other people there. It was a very good experience, but I'll say no more.

I also like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 1Q84 — javi2541997

[SPOILERS]

I just read 1Q84 and after the first book of the three, which was compelling and fascinating, it seemed to just fall flat, dominated by (a) mundane activities--which can be described interestingly in fiction but not here--and (b) the dull, bloodless thoughts of the main characters, especially Tengo. I can happily live with a main/point-of-view character who is evil or contradictory (or breast-fixated), but not with a boring one. He's the most boring fictional main character I can remember. In the third book, no sooner does the increasingly likeable and interesting Ushikawa begin to liven things up than he gets caught by Fuka-Eri's gaze and becomes as boring as the others, just before getting killed off.

It was my first Murukami and I've seen people say it shouldn't be the first one you read. And it has indeed put me off reading more.

Currently reading and reading soon:

• The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. I've read it every ten years or so since I was a teenager and it seems to get better each time.
• Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock, another re-read.
• Dune by Frank Herbert. Abandoned it after a few pages a few times for whatever reason, but I've just seen the movie and fancy reading it now.
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I read this supposed classic (UKLG called Wolfe "our Melville" because of it) a long time ago and took its uneven narrative and confusing world-building to be clumsy incompetent writing, but I'm going to give it another go.
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Now that I'm the same age as the character, it's time for a re-read.
• Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh. So far the only book on Toussaint Louverture I've read is the brilliant classic The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James.
• The Volga: A History by Janet Hartley. I've just been on a cruise down the Volga, all the way to the Caspian, and I always for some reason do my research after I get back from my travels.

I also want to try those big difficult American classics, Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow. Until now, just as the thought of being stuck in an upper class manners-infested house for a whole book has put me off Jane Austen, so getting bogged down in anything to do with tennis has put me off Infinite Jest. Maybe it's because I myself was a promising tennis athlete for a short time in my adolescence, before throwing it all away.

Jesus said it best: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

@Waarzin was one of Prishon's many reincarnations, by the way.

Note that @Hanover did send him a message to ask him to change his ways, but the response was a bad one.

Something philosophical for the first time in ages:

Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Welcome to TPF, Hel :smile:

:roll:

My advice is to find better sources of information and advice than this forum.

Dave Stewart the producer is the Dave Stewart formerly of the Eurythmics, I think, but this is the keyboardist.

The synth solo in that Hatfield track rips btw — Noble Dust

Yep! Probably Dave Stewart, not to be confused with Dave Stewart.

That Motohiko Hamase is rather nice.

@hope was banned for low quality.

Listening to music when I should be applying myself entirely to work seems appropriate for a Friday. A selection from today's list, ranging from new or newish stuff to old favourites, in reverse order of release date...

I banned @Trey for low quality. His admiration of Hitler probably didn't help.

I hope the forum adds the posts download feature soon. — TheMadFool

It probably won't happen.

Each page of comments in your profile shows 40 comments. Any programmer should find it easy to write a script to go through the pages and scrape the comments and put them in a text file:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/
https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/40
https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/80

And so on.

We must make a distinction between how language is (ordinary language) and how language should be (ideal language). — TheMadFool

To put differently what has already been said by others: the part of Wittgenstein's philosophy that you're looking at is built on a rejection of the search for an ideal language, so what you're doing is arguing against his whole approach. In principle that's fine, of course, but it's good to be clear about it.

By the way, the idea of a "misuse" in his later work is to show, not that people need to work on improving language--which it seems to me is your own takeaway--but that philosophers have to pay attention to how language actually works.

How do we download our posts? I'd like to download my posts. Thanks — TheMadFool

With this software it can't be done. Yet another reason we should move to something better. It's possible that PlushForums will send me the posts of a single member if I ask them nicely.

I tried this:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/all

But it just shows the first page of posts.

Good times

@Noble Dust

It turns out there's a handy playlist on Spotify called "Georgian restaurant playlist". I guess it's mostly pop music but because it's a different kind of pop that sounds like it's closely tied to traditional music, it's not boring. And you get a flavour of the their famous vocal polyphony.




I'm going to see them play live on Friday. :party:

:cool: :cool:

on the surface at least — Nickolasgaspar

:zip:

:cool:

Welcome :smile:

However, we do have guidelines and we do sometimes moderate comments and members according to what they say, not only how they say it. The forum is not a microcosm of society, and has its own particular rules. For more information, see the guidelines:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines

Virtue signaling, or call it what you will, compensates for the left’s inability (or reluctance) to demand genuine economic change. At the bottom of our current “heresy-hunting frenzies” is a desire for compensation, to feel politically triumphant, even if it is only in ineffectual ways. This ritual of self-celebration — typified by the “heroic” postures struck by campus radicals, cable news hosts, and career activists — has become a major part of the “political subculture of the left.” Burgis believes that this obsessive allegiance to virtue-rooted-in-identity has become pathological, whether it is found on the left or right. The arguments associated with “identity politics” are inevitably rooted in the same source: an embrace of the impregnable power of subjectivity (or to our proclaimed “subject positions,” at least) rather than a call to reason.

Review of "Canceling Comedians While the World Burns"

Banned Windbag, who was a returning banned member.

I don't know who mentioned it but note that you can in fact see who has upvoted a post, by hovering over the number to the left of the heart icon.

EDIT: unless that's just mods and admins.

Nah, you could. I could, at least. — Outlander

This is not self-hosted software, so I don't see how.

That's kind of how I feel about it too.

What are your intentions for TPF - to become like Facebook ? — Amity

People keep going on about Facebook. But there's more to the internet than Facebook et al, and I think there are more relevant comparisons and models. Reputations, upvoting, downvoting and so on are used on other, more interesting websites, sometimes to good effect. There are many social platforms that use something like a reputation system, where it seems to work. Reddit and things like Physics Forums spring to mind, and anything that uses Discourse or Stack Exchange, e.g., the Codecademy Forums or Philosophy Stack Exchange. Of course, that functionality is richer, and the latter is more of a Q&A site, but still.

And the idea, implied by others here, that philosophy, whether on or offline, has hitherto been--or should be--free of accolades, status indicators, social pressure, and so on, strikes me as naive.

Strikes me the question is quite easily resolved. Let it run for another week or so, then take a look at the post history of the folk with the most likes. If they're the kind of posts/posters you want to encourage, the system works: if they're not, the system doesn't work. — Isaac

Sounds good. Then I could drop this pretence of democracy. :wink:

By the way everyone, since this software we're using is basically just Vanilla, it might be worth quoting what they say about their reputation system:

Reputation is an important concept in online communities because it lets community members and moderators know who can be trusted and it allows members, who have invested their time and effort into building the community, accumulate reputation capital which can bring real-world benefits such as influence or employment opportunities.

An engaged community is one where people are creating content and interacting with each other in a meaningful way. [...] — Vanilla

https://blog.vanillaforums.com/product/vanilla-forums-reputation-system

I'm guessing the thinking is that it will act as a psychological nudge, to influence posters to write better quality posts by making them a little more self-conscious? — Kenosha Kid

Yes, I was thinking along those lines. It could stand in for the social pressure that in real life motivates you to behave well and present your best.

However the same mechanism will make posters less apt to post well-written but unpopular content, which would be a net loss imo. Or to make them seem unpopular, less respected, therefore giving their posts less weight. It also favours longevity and frequency over quality. — Kenosha Kid

Good points.

Long-tailed tit, maybe.

I think condors, vultures, and at least one other eagle are bigger.

Great news. Harpy eagle?

I'm glad you asked!

In order of increasing coolness:

• Iridescent plumage
• Mimicry (I have heard them mimicking car alarms and other everyday human noises)
• Their flocking behaviour, which is a sight to behold (I continue to resist the use of the disgustingly twee and entirely unscientific word "murmuration")

EDIT: I've noticed that Americans hate starlings, possibly because they're an invasive non-native species in North America.