Instead of building a forum software from scratch, why not leverage and customize an open source option? Vanilla/Plush seems decent for your purposes, but you could self-host for much cheaper if you are able to provide the technical labor. NodeBB, Vanilla, Misago, Flarum, and Discourse are some of the open source options I looked at. Using NodeBB with the Lavender theme seemed like the best option for a philosophy forum, although Misago is also very clean. — Leontiskos

Yes, it’s the best option. I was only toying with the idea of building my own from scratch because I was getting back into development and wanted a meaty project. NodeBB and Discourse are the two I like the look of most. Vanilla is good too, but I don’t want to get involved with anything PHP (I know everyone says it’s great these days but my experience was traumatic). I’d never heard of Misago. Looks great, and codewise I like it better than NodeBB and Discourse, mainly because I like the combination of Python and JavaScript. I shall try it. Thanks for the tip :up:

On the state of things now and the future, I think you're both right and wrong. It's true that the front-end frameworks are the most visible and fashionable area of web development now—even non-developers I know have heard of React—but (a) people are realizing that on big projects where there's a lot of data involved, frameworks like Rails and Django perform better and are easier to maintain, (b) many are saying that things are moving back to the server frameworks now that the speedy front-end user experience of SPAs can be achieved, and with much less hassle, and (c) most front-end applications depend on an API built with something like Django anyway, so even when React is being used, something like Django is being used too. Some would say that this is for legacy reasons, but I actually think it's because Python is so strong right now, and getting stronger. Even if Django falls out of favour, other Python frameworks like FastAPI and Flask will take over. It's a lively area, though less visible than the front-end stuff.

(In fact, you could say that the existence of the big front-end frameworks is a consequence of legacy as much or more than the continuing presence of Django and Rails: browsers only understand JavaScript and there's no way out of that right now. In software terms, browsers are old technology, in which backwards-compatibility is a big issue.)

the older approach catered to a low barrier to entry, with languages like Ruby and Python being easy to learn — Leontiskos

It's because they're good-quality languages, and because they're powerful. And if Rails and Django seem easy at first, it's because they're well-designed frameworks and have been around a long time. React, Next.js, and Ember can be confusing because their way of working is intrinsically messy. It's painfully obvious that they're immature—although things are much better than when I started using them in 2013. Serious business logic behind the API endpoints is more often implemented in Rails and Django than it is with React and Node.

And the more that asynchronous JavaScript becomes an integral part of Rails and Django development—but without using big front-end frameworks—the more I expect to see them thrive. So I don't agree that robust back-ends are on the way out except where they were never really needed.

What we see is at the level of small-to-medium websites, the server-side frameworks have lost out, and that's probably as it should be. At this level, we have (a) static site generators or primarily static sites and immediate interactivity with asynchronous CRUD to a backend API, and (b) as you mentioned, website builders like Squarespace and Wix.

Yes, and I think this is why static HTML/Javascript is making a small comeback. — Leontiskos

Yes, I started using static site generators about ten years ago, and these days they're the norm for developers' own websites. The challenge was always how to integrate them with content management, but this can be done now, and paid blogging platforms may go in that direction. If we could only get non-devs to start writing everything in Markdown instead of WYSIWYG, life would be better.

There is a greater cognizance of maintenance and updating costs. In general it seems that the magnanimity of the tech boom is behind us. Cost and monetization loom larger than they once did when we were dazzled by the novelty and the low-cost-relative-to-the-past. — Leontiskos

Indeed.

See Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism for more on this. — baker

What does Cal say, and why do you think it's important? Is it something like, stop scrolling through Instagram and go for a walk instead?

And I don't know if it's me being old-fashioned, but there's something offensive about code like this:


It's like doing classic ASP again.

I did not accuse anyone of fascism.

Now that the record is set straight, I'm leaving this discussion. No need for anyone to reply. Just get back to the topic or whatever.

:up:

If I am not wrong, one of the main guidelines of this site is to maintain the quality of the posts. I would rather be banned for being a 'fascist' rather than being ignorant. Agree, dear moderators? — javi2541997

Since all fascists are racist to some extent, being openly fascist is more likely to result in a ban than a lack of quality.

Now please, @javi2541997 and @universeness: enough of your bickering and name-calling.

Thus giving it the excitement of a true story, while we all know it's not true.

:up:

Seems to be saying that although what he writes is true, he can't give it verisimilitude. I don't know if he goes on to conclude that he has to fill in the gaps of memory with his inventions, or it's just Poe's narrative trick of saying "you're not going to believe this but I swear it's true."

I like that one.

Why do humans want to escape their mind and avoid reality? How is it an advantage? — Skalidris

Some things are just a bonus.

Even elephants and monkeys were said to seek out and eat fermented fruit for its intoxicating powers. — Wayfarer

Small point: monkeys are more than just said to enjoy alcohol. It's been observed in wild situations, i.e., not just those monkeys stealing cocktails on the beach.

I didn't know about elephants though. A drunk elephant could do a lot of damage.

It would take a lot of money to persuade me to wait in a queue for someone. I can hardly wait in a queue for myself. I miss so many things owing to my fear of queues.

I should just start saying "line" cos writing "queue" is getting tiresome.

Music for late-night coding. A certain mood.

I’m not super into dance music except on rare occasions. That sounds ok. So…tentative agreement.

I love rainy days — javi2541997

Me too. It's as if time stands still and allows you to contemplate the world unhindered.

Cosmism — Bret Bernhoft

I don’t find the idea of a techno-optimistic religion either realistic or enticing, but I’m glad you started this discussion, because it prompted me to look into Russian cosmism, a weird spiritual-philosophical-scientific movement from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some argue that it was cosmism that influenced the use of cosmonaut instead of astronaut (although there’s no particular reason why they should have chosen astro- anyway).

One cosmist was Alexander Bogdanov, a Bolshevik revolutionary who later formed a breakaway party independent of Lenin’s governing faction in the 1920s. He was a physician who experimented with rejuvenation by means of blood transfusions, hoping to attain eternal life, participated in politics, developed an early version of systems theory, and wrote a science fiction novel about a communist utopia on Mars, Red Star, which heavily influenced Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

The tone of some cosmism seems to be similar to your modern techno-optimism, though of course the technological focus has changed.

I don’t know what you mean ND. What’s digging for info got to do with the varieties of Brit?

EDIT: It’s either that I’m bad at conversation and thus find it hard to follow what you are saying, or you’ve had too much wine and are beginning to spout gibberish. Either way, it’s all cool, as they say.

Are the English people the English people? — Noble Dust

That’s one of the defining characteristics, yes.

British (is that the biggest umbrella? Can't remember) — Noble Dust

Scottish, Welsh, and English people are all British, but only one of the three groups is English.

Ok, I’ll try responding again, this time earnestly: thanks ND and it’s all cool :cool:

What? Oh that. I’d forgotten all about it. Totally haven’t been seething with resentment for the last few fucking months.

Ok ND, I agree to be friends with you again, on condition you never mention my geographical location.

I'm currently reading Ocarle Night by Paul Auster. I seem to remember Jamal being an Auster fan, but not of this one. — Noble Dust

I said I don’t remember it, not that I didn’t like it.

It helps that I live a 20 minute walk from the neighborhood it took place in. — Noble Dust

:zip:

You telling a story, Ballard telling a story, DNA telling a story, me telling the story of not reading the story of the story your story is about; all of these as cracks in the ineffable beauty of the world, as if the perfect story needs no telling. When one relates a story, one relates it to another, and the interaction is also a relatable story. And the moral of that is — that stories have morals, and are relationships that we morally judge. — unenlightened

This is interesting, obscure, and either agreeable or disagreeable. :up:

But read Bateson. He is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Much more important than Ballard, because he moves the whole story of human thought forwards. Like Shakespeare, his writing is littered with cliches of his own invention. — unenlightened

I’m speeding along a different road right now, but Bateson now appears slightly bigger in the distance.

Incidentally, I found many scholarly papers that look at Ballard’s work in terms of Bateson or otherwise somehow combine them.

Speaking of books I haven't read, I just came to this fragment, and thought of this unhappy thread. Make of it what you can — unenlightened

I don’t see what’s unhappy about this thread, and although I keep encountering the name of Bateson and am quite interested, I don’t know what to make of the quotation in the context of this discussion. I’d be interested in reading either an explanation of what you think its relevance is (without worrying that you’re judging Crash without having read it), or a new and exciting thread on Bateson’s Mind and Nature.

If I had to guess, I’d say you kinda want to say something like: Crash seems like a story without a context, a revelling in psychopathy untethered from context and norms; and that if you are going to throw out love, you better make it clear that doing so is not recommended.

But I might be reading too much into your post.

If I am fanatical then so are you. — universeness

I don't think you've shown this to anyone's satisfaction except your own. I'm not saying you're fanatical just because I disagree with you. Having a contrary opinion is not in itself fanatical.

What is important is which of us is more in line with the truth. Do you think being fanatical about truth, is a negative, if what is professed does turn out to be true? — universeness

It's a negative. The point is that fanaticism is a bad approach to the truth, because it doesn't actually care about it.

while staying within Forum guidelines, of course — 0 thru 9

Whether you actually do or not is me to decide, 0 thru 9. :razz:

Your whataboutery doesn't answer the charge of moral untenability. It sidesteps it. You talk as if the mere fact that Israel seeks to justify the killing of civilians makes their opponents' equivalent justifications (and yours) morally tenable.

I think your true believer optimism is pretty brutal, not all that far from bloodthirsty utilitarianism (the ends justify the means). In the end, it just doesn’t matter what people have to go through to reach your Roddenberryesque utopia, so long as we get there. 300 years? Fine! Add more zeros!

This is what I meant in another discussion when I said that I’m inclined these days to “hope without optimism,” for which pain and suffering are essential.

I say all this as someone who once said the things you say. I recognize it now for what it was: fanaticism.

Fair.

Not sure I’d recommend Crash for excitement, but fair enough.

Thank you for your contribution. Next time I start a topic about a book you haven’t read, be sure to join in. :grin:

But I'm guessing on hearsay, because the whole horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene already bores me, so I'm not really concerned to find out either way. — unenlightened

If the horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene bores you, allow me to recommend…Crash.

So crazy shit becomes boring when normalised. Maybe the world needed to be appraised of this. Like how porn in general becomes ever more explicit, and ever more extreme, as the breaking of each taboo becomes normalised. Eventually, megadeath, or the vaginal evisceration of a woman is just as dull as another wank. I remember the good old days when playing doctors and nurses was excitingly transgressive.

It's not an Earth shattering insight: when you're tired of Crash, you're tired of death. That's about how good it can possibly be, I think: a demonstration of the banality of evil. — unenlightened

Internally, Crash normalizes some crazy shit, but the result is to de-normalize what we take to be unremarkable in the real world: the inhuman landscapes of flyovers, car parks, and airport hotels; selfish passionless sex; the love affair with cars; a horrific accident. Ballard wrote about the “death of affect”, referring to the replacement of feeling with mere sensation:

When I wrote about the death of affect in The Atrocity Exhibition in the late ’60s, I was writing against a background of a sensation-hungry media landscape that seized on all the violent imagery emerging from Vietnam, from the Kennedy assassination, from civil wars in Africa—all that atrocity footage that gave The Atrocity Exhibition its name. I was writing about the way in which sensation had usurped the place previously occupied by some kind of sympathetic engagement with the subject. I mean, one saw blowups of the Kennedy motorcade used as backdrops in fashion magazines. Images that should have elicited pity and concern were drained of any kind of human response, in the way that Warhol demonstrated. His art really was dedicated to just that. I don’t think it is quite so blatant nowadays. It is now incorporated into the way we see the world. In the ’60s one would see fashion models flouncing around in front of a backdrop of the Kennedy assassination, or a napalm explosion. You’d think, “My God, what are they doing?” Now, of course, thirty years later, you don’t even notice it.

I think a large part of the furor created here by Crash has been the desperate response of people who’ve seen a number of appalling atrocities on British television—like the massacre of sixteen five-year-olds in Scotland last March—and are looking for an explanation. You know, something must be behind this appalling event, and people think maybe there’s something wrong with the media world itself. — Ballard interview in Artforum magazine

Appraising the world of this is more than just about the banality of evil, I think. It’s a particular kind of banality.

But I want to pull back from the cautionary tale angle somewhat. Crash is an artistic reflection or exaggeration of reality that does not have a clear message, or one that is easy to explicate, but does that mean it’s just an indulgence of depravity?

Reminds me of the Atrocity Exhibition. I think these two works are probably deeply related on a conceptual level. Might have to take a lok again. — Apustimelogist

Forgot to reply to this. Although I haven’t read it, I’ve heard it said that Crash is indeed a development of some of the ideas in that book.

One other thing that lingers, now I'm remembering the impact of 'Crash' on me...The developed world really does fetishize the car in a most peculiar way, and this is very rarely remarked upon. People rationally agree that we've got to cut back on oil use, and yet buy bigger energy-guzzling cars, can only imagine a net zero future with loads of cars, vote for policies that allow cars more rights than pedestrian people. The person with the flag walking in front of a car to keep its speed down in 1900 would have saved thousands of lives: why do we laugh at such an image? The victory of car-drivers over pedestrians for rights over the city streets that gave rise to the term 'jaywalkers' 100 years ago wasn't an inevitable historical victory. The advertisements I see whenever I go to a cinema seem to be a sensual and sometimes quasi-erotic hymn to the car, and few other than Ballard have ever taken up this notion and run with it. I think future eras will look back on this phase of humanity's relationship with cars and wonder at how perverse we were. to so over-value the car, an asset the salaryman/working woman can enjoy and love and work dutifully for and become addicted to. — mcdoodle

Totally agree. In fact, I think jaywalking was pretty much an invention of the car industry. They campaigned hard to entrench the idea that streets are primarily for cars. The land of the free, where you can get arrested for crossing the road.

I live in a city clogged with traffic. When I say to a local person that in the future people will look back on this period in disbelief, they look at me like I’m crazy.

So I’m definitely supportive of Ballard’s effort of outrageous defamiliarization, which shines a new light on the world we live in.

Thanks for the reply, and some nice insights! To be honest I deeply respect the idea of someone who is uncompromising to put their stamp on a goal or vision they want to communicate and explore. Those kind of things really are what stick with me in stories or films. Even if a film or story isn't particularly exciting or enjoyable, if I perceive of it as projecting some kind of well-built underlying concept or vision, I often find myelf returning to it again and again, at least in thought, over more enjoyable alternatives. Sometimes though it takes time for those things to click. There have definitely been examples, in particular of films, where my first viewings I didn't find good at all, but once I can construct a picture I find interesting, whatever I found boring or uninteresting or disagreeable with it doesn't really matter anymore, or even accentuates the new way I am viewing it. — Apustimelogist

I know what you mean, although I’m struggling to think of a film I disliked that I later regarded highly. Maybe Eyes Wide Shut, but I’m still at the dislike stage on that one :grin:

The wikipedia synopsis of Unlimited Dream Company sounds quite interesting actually. — Apustimelogist

Though I did find it a bit irritating, it’s interesting and fun at times. I can imagine myself reading it again. It’s unusual for Ballard in that it feels upbeat and life-affirming—in a psychotic and apocalyptic way.

I was very taken with 'Crash', which I read about thirty years ago. In a way I felt prepared for how inexorable it is. From earlier novels I remembered 'The wind from nowhere', which I'd read before 'Crash', when a cyclonic wind springs up, and blows, and blows, and when any other writer would maybe have it ease up, the wind and the terrors it unleashes are relentless. Perhaps it was that familiarity with how Ballard's mind seemed to work that makes me feel I wasn't as affected as you were by 'Crash': I knew he would take one giant premise, and be inexorable, relentless. 'High rise' is a later, to me failed, version of the same obsessive approach. Maybe I was ready to keep my distance. — mcdoodle

That makes sense. Whereas I was dismayed by the relentless elaboration of a single idea, you were expecting it. It was the first of his novels I've read, after all.

In longer retrospect, 'Empire of the sun' was later an eye-opener to Ballard's imagination, a semi-autobiographical novel of a boy lost in the horrors of the Second World War in 'the far East', forced to confront terrible things before he was old enough to have developed a moral compass. — mcdoodle

I haven't read it. It hadn't occurred to me that it would be possible to trace the disturbing surrealism of his other work back to his real experiences, since I seem to remember him saying that life in the internment camp wasn't all that bad, as if he was trying to downplay the attempts at psychologizing him. But that might have been my misinterpretation.

Last thought: I felt as you did about 'Crash', about the Pinturas Negras, the 'Black Paintings' of Goya when I saw them in Madrid. They are images that still sometimes haunt me. I can see 'Saturn devouring his son' or 'Two old men eating soup' clearly now, without having to look them up, and my gorge rises. They are ghastly, and I'm deeply glad I saw them. — mcdoodle

Yes indeed. I saw them in Madrid as well, and felt something similar. It's not fun to spend a lot of time with those paintings. Aside from Saturn, the two that stay with me are the fight with clubs, which is brutal, and the dog.

Anyway, thanks. It's great to get some insight from someone familiar with Ballard's work.

To add to the reply I posted above…

What might be the case is that in his novels, he is free to let his imagination run wild. That sounds trite, but I think it’s an important fact about Ballard that he is not actually interested in the world except insofar as it shapes the unconscious; what he really likes to do is dredge up dreams and fantasies and develop them in surreality, with little concern to refer back to reality.

So in the novels, we get long descriptions of the surreal, presented—in what seems like a formality or concession—as if they were real. And just like the description of someone else’s dream can be boring, so can Ballard’s imaginings. It is not that the ideas are unengaging, rather that the exhaustive development and description of those ideas wears me down.

This isn’t a problem in the short stories, where the ideas have to take centre stage.

To me an excellent work is engaging — L'éléphant

To me, there wouldn't be a clash of antagonistic judgments if I find a piece of work engaging — L'éléphant

Many people find the book engaging, and not only writers and critics. It’s quite popular and also highly regarded.

What you’re pointing out is that my opinion seems contradictory, and I agree: this is the conundrum.

Do you think it needed to be unenjoyable to be the art it is, in your view? — Apustimelogist

Good question. It needed to be unenjoyable (to me) to be what it was. What it was was unenjoyable in its bones. I don’t think it would have been the same work of fiction, with the same power to haunt me, had Ballard removed, for example, the endless description of the mergings and juxtapositions of mutilated bodies and broken car parts in purely aesthetic terms, repeating ad nauseum words like “stylized,” “formalized,” “junction,” and of course, “engine coolant.”

And I don’t think it would have made much difference to my enjoyment had he just done a bit of light revision to find some more varied vocabulary.

So I suppose the answer is yes. But that’s not to say that it was the merely the unenjoyableness itself that caused me to think it was a substantial work of art.

I do, however, own a collection of Ballard's short stories and find that he is a great short story writer, both very enjoyable as well as insightful and intelligent. So I wonder if you think Crash needs to be unenjoyable to be its art. — Apustimelogist

I recently read his collection The Terminal Beach and found it very enjoyable, but found the novel The Unlimited Dream Company rather irritating and not anywhere near as powerful as Crash. So yeah, in terms of reading enjoyment his short stories seem better.

I haven’t read The Atrocity Exhibition but probably will one day. The next one of his books for me will likely be Vermilion Sands, which I think is a short story collection.

David Cronenburg, who adapted it into a film, had a similar experience to me. He couldn’t finish it the first time he read it, and even after he’d finally gone back and read the whole thing, he didn’t like it. But it stayed with him, and he ultimately felt he had to do something about it (turn it into a film, in his case)—the question of like or dislike was irrelevant.

Something like that. But in my case at least, the dislike was not so much about the distasteful subject matter (and I seriously doubt that was the problem for Cronenburg tbh), but about the tedious pretentiousness, repetitiveness, and so on. Which makes it all the more puzzling that I’m now saying it’s an important work of literature. I think I’ve just changed my mind upon realising how powerful an effect it had on me.