There was a suicide note here. I have taken it down because I'm not suicidal anymore and I don't want to alarm people unnecessarily. If you really insist on seeing it check the Wayback Machine.
If magic9mushroom never posts again, I guess we'll know what happened.
I wonder if there are any organizations devoted to legalizing (or even just decriminalizing) fictional child porn. I've never heard of any. Perry makes a pretty good argument — written in blood — that anti-fictional-child-porn laws harm adults.
The idea that violence in video games causes real-world violence is well and truly discredited; I must have killed a thousand virtual people in Just Cause 3 yesterday (felt a little bad about it, but the game is otherwise quite fun). Why, then, should we expect anything different than "fictional child porn makes pedophiles less likely to offend"?
Similarly I have oft criticized laws against marijuana (even though I am not interested in using marijuana) because it makes it impossible to *even study the question* of whether it is net-harmful, since researchers can't exactly do an RCT with illegal drugs.
The principle: don't make anything illegal without *first* proving harm.
We can't measure benefits from a law like this, but we can certainly see the harms. Anything that drives people to suicide is a major fucking harm!
It sounds like Australian law is roughly as draconian as in the US. One site says "Child pornography laws in Australia state that all sexualised depictions of children under the age of 18...are illegal and it has banned photographs of women with an A breast cup size even in their late 20s as "encouraging pedophilia"... there is a zero-tolerance policy in place, which covers purely fictional children as well as real children.
But Perry, wouldn't you be able to make the case against this law much better as a defendant? Even if you lose the case, we maybe we can make famous the case of an ACX regular who was convicted as a sex offender for writing "fanfiction on a prompt from another and ages of the characters weren't really on my mind".
But also, just because Julien reports you to the police doesn't mean they decide to charge you. You could at least wait and see whether they will lay charges before killing yourself.
Also, fuck Julien and his "axioms". But Perry, don't count on Julien learning his lesson if you kill yourself. Assholes typically stay that way.
Please take a few moments to reconsider to make sure your not acting irrationally. You can always proceed later. You have more to add to our world than you think.
I haven't read the references (I know, typical internet comment-poster ;-), but I just don't understand the pessimism about Omicron. So far, *all* the data on it has been showing it to produce only very mild illness in the vast majority of cases. The strongest evidence of this is of course South Africa. Many have dismissed this, using the argument that South Africa has a very young population, so they're on average much less susceptible to bad outcomes. To this, I answer with data showing overall death rates for South Africa for the pandemic as a whole. Worldometers puts them at 1,500/million, making them #55 on the list of countries, just ahead of Sweden, but almost double the rate of Canada (787/MM). Some European countries have higher rates, some have lower, but it's clearly not the case that South Africa is an outlier in death rates.
The biggest problem I see with Omicron is that it's likely to sideline a lot of health care workers when they have to quarantine after infection. I just don't see anything suggesting mortality anywhere close to earlier strains.
(And yes, I understand that it could have lower mortality but still be a problem due to its much higher infectivity. - But AFAIK, we're just not seeing anything that suggests that the higher infectivity is enough to overcome the mildness of its symptoms.)
Assume for a moment that omicron is *precisely* as dangerous as previous variants, except that it has the new ability to reinfect people who have taken vaccines or who have already had Covid before, *but* (as is the case for previous variants) when it reinfects people, they are much less likely to get less serious illness (edit: than those who are unvaccinated and infected for the first time).
Starting from this assumption, we would expect to see much lower rates of serious illness and death among people with omicron, simply because most of the people who catch it are vaccinated or previously had Covid.
Edit: To show that omicron is less dangerous, you'd need to study outcomes for a population who is unvaccinated and has never before been infected. Good luck with that (Edit 2: actually I was persuaded Omicron is less severe by a NYT piece that didn't do that: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html). In the absence of such a study I would assume that omicron is equally deadly, simply on priors (as I have seen no study of a population without prior immunity who caught omicron). Indeed, I wonder if even the "common cold" might kill people if they managed to reach age 65 without ever getting a cold.
In London, where the Omicron spread is most advanced, hospital admissions for 19-20 Dec were 70% higher than 12-13 Dec. However, *cases* for the same period 5 days earlier than those dates showed a much bigger jump. Specifically, cases on 14-15 Dec were 202% higher than cases on 7-8 Dec.
So cases go 3x as Omicron takes hold but hospital admissions a few days later only go to 1.7x. Sounds like good news to me. And we already might be at the peak in London - the UK data lists all case data in London before 19 Dec as "complete", and we see that cases peaked on the 15th and then dropped over the next 3 days.
[ETA] and even the 1.7x rise takes us to only 35% of the early-2021 peak admissions volume. So still a lot of room even for another doubling+ of Omicron cases.
My mother (70 years old, vaccinated) has covid. She was about to start a regimen of Fluvoxamine, but now that Paxlovid is legalized will seek that out. Should she take both or just Paxlovid?
I don't have any insider information but I would think Paxlovid, even if approved, may not be *immediately* available, so Fluvoxamine might be good to start at least.
Pfizer has said they will ship 10M doses to the US before 2022, I don't know how far that supply might go, and it may not reach your mother in time
How are analyses of current COVID strains taking into effect the population change of already having had the most vulnerable population die over the past two years? The US spent most of February-May 2020 letting COVID run through nursing homes. The people most likely to die already did. The population of survivors is not the same population from alpha strain mortality rates.
If any new strain posts death numbers like 2020 despite vaccination, despite better treatments, and despite having already killed off the most vulnerable half-million people in the US, I am just going into seclusion for a couple of months.
According to the CDC's statistics, excess deaths from the Delta wave in October were only somewhat below excess deaths from previous waves - in other words, the first alpha wave didn't burn through the entire vulnerable population.
I don't know how many times that pattern will hold - does that mean Omicron should be similar but a little lower or is Delta the last gasp? - but it seems like the nursing home thing didn't change the overall course of the pandemic that much. There are lots of 70-year-olds who *aren't* in nursing homes, after all.
Thats a very good point. A lot of people who'd be most susceptible to bad outcomes simply aren't around any more. There's also an unknown but almost certainly significant level of natural immunity out there.
El Gato Malo posted an interesting piece (https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/are-covid-vaccines-reducing-hospitalizations) looking at infection and death rates in the New England stats. Roughly similar climate, currently very similar levels of vaccination. The interesting part is that the three more northern states (Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine) are currently having huge spikes in cases, whereas Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are doing much better. He uses excess all-cause-mortality deaths as a proxy for the actual COVID levels (vs only identified cases), and finds that those numbers in 2020 are pretty strongly negatively correlated with current new-infection rates. He attributes this to natural immunity.
All that said, though, very good point about the winnowing effect of prior mortality.
How would you all go about getting a high-risk person close to the front of the line for pavloxid treatment? I was really heartened to see the news about imminent approval because a very high-risk family member was recently exposed, but I think without hustle he would definitely not get it in time. I plan to call hospitals in his area tomorrow -- anything else?
Given the diversity of bone marrow antigen groups, how many bone marrow donors would be needed to create a marrow bank that had samples matching every possible recipient?
Be the Match says the odds of finding a match range from 29% to 79% depending on ethnicity, so I guess take their registry size and multiply it by 4? But plausibly you could do it with much fewer if you focused your additions on the groups that need the most increase in coverage.
As Omicron appears on track to ravage the US, very few political leaders appear to even be considering lockdowns. Should I take this as evidence that lockdowns (beyond, say, March 2020, when I think the case for lockdowns was strongest) were always a mistake? Or at least, that the vast majority of Americans feel that prolonged lockdowns were a mistake, so it would be political suicide to reimpose them? Even if it's the answer to latter question, my sense is that it says a lot about the former. Yet another data point to add to the pile of underwhelming data on lockdown effectiveness: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more.
I haven't read ACT's article on lockdown effectiveness, but I don't think there has been a whole lot of evidence that they're especially effective. There are a *lot* of confounding factors in trying to compare different countries, states or even locales, but a big one is seasonality - complicated by the fact that "seasonality" in this case relates to how much time people spend in indoor spaces, vs the more usual winter/summer sort of distinction. (Southern states peak in the summer, northern states peak in the winter; I think the common element is just people spending more time in poorly-ventilated spaces.) Seasonality looks to be an order of magnitude stronger effect than lockdowns, so even a minor misalignment in that dimension could completely swamp the signal for lockdown effectiveness.
A lot of people are sick of lockdowns. I live in a red state, but in a blue city so we had municipal lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. We had a mayoral election a few months ago and a red candidate cinched the victory by running on a campaign of stopping all city mandates on COVID. The city council is trying to override him on a mask mandate, but there's definitely a lot of people willing to come out and protest against it.
Interesting. I guess my question is what status we should accord this widespread sentiment. For example, there are plenty of issues (e.g. carbon tax) that I think are a good idea, but are hugely unpopular. So it's in principle possible that renewed lockdowns could be a good idea, despite being hugely unpopular. But I can also think of a few reasons why the analogy would break down in critical ways. For one, lockdowns require compliance to have any hope of being effective, and compliance won't be there (and may not have been there for a long time the last time around). For another, lockdowns demand a very immediate and personal sacrifice, beyond what governments routinely ask of citizens (e.g. all forms of taxation). So their widespread rejection in liberal democracies perhaps needs to be viewed as more dispositive than, say, the rejection of a new tax. And then it's a further question, although not far-fetched in my view, of whether we can extrapolate the current situation backwards in time to the previous lockdown debates.
You're definitely right. When the city council rammed through a mask mandate over the mayors objections, I forgot my mask when I went into a grocery store and started to panic. But then I saw that over half of the people in there didn't have masks, despite the big sign out front saying masks are required by municipal mandate. Since then I often go maskless (I'm very forgetful, and I'm vaccinated so I don't worry too much) and nobody has ever mentioned it. I don't think I've seen a single store around here actually ask someone to leave because they don't have a mask. Without public buy in these kinds of mandates are ineffective. But then again, half the people there did have masks. Maybe they wouldn't have without the mandate.
I'm looking for an old ACT/SSC essay whose thesis it was that a small, constant percentage of public survey results should be discounted because the respondents are either insane or answering nonsensically because they think it is funny. One of the essay's examples was that something like 5% of people said they believed Lizard Men ran the world.
I have a proposal for a silly investment scam and I am curious if it is illegal.
Step 1: Identify an asset held by a lot of skittish investors.
Step 2: Wait for the asset's price to drop 10% due to random market fluctuations.
Step 3: Short the asset.
Step 4: Send out a PR blast to anyone you can reach informing them that the asset has PLUNGED 10%.
Step 5: Investors panic sell.
Step 6: Profit.
Normally this sort of scheme involves lying in step 4 ("I have inside information about how this asset will perform in the future"), is it still securities fraud if all you're doing is reporting public information, without a call to action?
Without Step 2, that's "Short and Distort". It's a mirror-image of the better-known "Pump and Dump" scam, and is probably illegal under more or less the same provisions. I think the legal theory is that even if you aren't overtly lying, it's still deceptive at a legally-actionable level because you're deliberately leading the audience to draw conclusions you know are incorrect.
Step 2 seems like it muddies the waters on the "deceptive intent" front, depending on how easy you make it for regulators/prosecutors to demonstrate you believed the initial drop was really just noise. If you can plausibly argue that you shorted it because you believed that drop was likely to continue in the medium term and you attempted to share that information with others so they could profit from a similar strategy (or for some other benign reason other than market manipulation), then that seems like it would negate the "deceptive intent" element of the crime.
Add "Rubber" to the list of "crops that do well outside of their native land". Not that rubber does badly in South America, but growing it monocrop plantation-style there is basically creating a feast for its pests. Henry Ford had to learn that the hard way in the early 20th century, when he tried to set up a Ford-owned rubber supply in the Amazon.
I hope neither myself nor anyone I care about has to use a hospital in the next month or so. That's not going to be fun if Omicron slams the ICUs again just through sheer number of cases (Utah still has a decent number of people who aren't fully vaccinated).
Not sure if channels like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown tend to be a little elementary for people in this crowd, but I think this recent video is well worth a watch/listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJyKM-7IgAU&t=0s (it's a followup to a previous video, but this is the more interesting one imo). It's a nice discussion on the philosophy of mathematics.
Could someone look at the graph in the post and say how much merit the claim that "masks did nothing" has? (My explanation is that obviously we have no idea what would have happened without masks, so this is a classic correlation != causation example, but I'd like to know more about the context of this if anyone has some. Thanks!)
What's a good condition to judge when an intervention did something? (So I guess we'd need a "natural experiment" - to be free of problems of endogeneity, and then we need to do the usual analysis between the "endpoints"? But maybe there are other valid designs too?)
If the intervention is neither mandatory nor forbidden, you can always randomize trial participants into getting the intervention or not. This gets tricky with something like masks where you have to monitor compliance and you get into some miserable confounder problems around "What if willingness to comply is correlated with the outcome we're studying?" The most common design for dealing with this problem appears to be "Assume they're not correlated."
We've had some great recent interviews on the Futurati Podcast.
Our discussion with Brad Templeton covered the metaverse and VR (he's hopeful about the tech but skeptical that it's ready for the big time), genetic privacy (it's hard), and assorted tech history.
The conversation with Max Galka, the CEO of my Elementus, revolved around ransomware (it sucks) and potential future uses of the blockchain (autonomous vehicles, possibly).
Radhika Iyengar-Emens is an expert in deeptech and had a lot to say about blockchain and healthcare. I'm loathe to link to it because it's sitting at a compelling 69 (nice) views.
It was a real treat speaking with Peter McCormack, Bitcoin OG and host of the biggest Bitcoin podcast in the world. The conversation touched on BTC vs Gold (he's pro-Bitcoin), BTC vs altcoins (he's pro-Bitcoin), and monetary economics (he's pro-Bitcoin).
A personal favorite was my solo chat with astrophysicist Aleksandra Ćiprijanović. She's working on using techniques from my own field (machine learning) to study galactic mergers, cosmology, and the large-scale structure of the universe.
I hope this doesn't count as politics, but I think it doesn't have to. It's more psychology in my mind.
Reading a recent essay from The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/omicron-pandemic-giving-up/621004/) I was struck by a thought. It seems, reading a bit between the lines, that he's asking a very serious question - Why doesn't someone fix COVID? It's been two years, and it's not been fixed, so he is upset that it hasn't been fixed. He can talk about reasons why he thinks it has not been fixed (people not getting vaxxed, not wearing masks, whatever), but his ultimate complaint is that nobody fixed it.
Underlying that line of thought is the assumption that it's *fixable* in the first place. That there are steps that humans can take that will make it go away. I'm reminded of an opposite conversation I had with a volunteer fire chief a year or so ago. He wasn't wearing masks or social distancing, and he was up front about that. He was routinely exposed to dozens or hundreds of people in close physical contact, and vaccinations did not exist. He wasn't exactly fatalistic about it, but he understood that he was almost certainly going to get COVID, no matter what protections he could try. He understood that there was no fix for it, and dealt with it as made sense to him. The alternative - no emergency services - was not a possible consideration, so he dealt with exposure to COVID on a near-constant basis and just moved on mentally.
People that I have known who did not have any options but to be exposed to COVID tend to accept it as a reality to be mitigated, rather than a single problem to be solved. They are much more comfortable with risk management solutions and evaluating tradeoffs. Those who are able to avoid exposure seem to be waiting for a fix, a moment when the problem is solved.
You've hit the nail on the head. There are a host of very immature people who believe that COVID can be solved and that if it's not then someone must be to blame. I think it has to do with a refusal to accept that people generally don't have any control over their own fates.
Well, there's the China example, which at least appears to have "fixed" it to a greater degree than anywhere else. I guess that if you consider lockdowns and such acceptable, and have some evidence that stricter lockdowns could've done the job, then it seems a natural reaction to be upset that people in charge didn't do what had to be done.
Isn't this true in Australia and New Zealand too? Whether or not it's impractical/feasible for the United States to take measures that drastic, it's still an argument against the idea that nothing can be done.
That's if you accept the Chinese explanation that cases and deaths pretty much suddenly and fully stopped happening early in the pandemic. Considering the outbreaks in multiple neighboring countries, I find that difficult to believe. According to official stats back in early 2020, the case count shot up to 80,000 and suddenly stopped, while the virus raged across the world. Maybe that's what happened in a massively populated country with an active virus, but I'm very doubtful.
If it did work, whether fully or partly, it was reportedly a massive infringement on every right imaginable. What I heard was that people were locked in their homes with armed guards outside, and if they didn't have enough food or anything else, tough luck. Maybe that's a "solution" that a government could implement to "fix" a virus, but I think most of us are fully against that. Even the more mild versions of strict lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand are harsher that most countries seem willing to deal with. And they have no off ramp. Eventually COVID will make its way there, and they will have outbreaks as well, and they'll only really have purchased time. If they spend 10 years locked down first, will they really have gained anything?
Well, many think that both what China did is unacceptable (but maybe effective), and most of what the West did and does is unacceptable too, and almost certainly ineffective, maybe even net negative. Of course, one can have an argument about shades of grey and all that, but what's the point? It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close, and nobody has anything resembling a plan of how to get from here to there. I guess what's left is to count ourselves lucky that no actual martial law-worthy crisis is here yet.
> It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close
Slovakia only had 28 deaths (out of 5 million population) during the first 6 months of 2020. Closed schools, mandatory masks, testing at borders, tracking contacts, limits on number of people per m2 in supermarkets, a few more things I don't remember -- but nowhere near China.
In autumn 2020 we gave up, because keeping the schools closed was unsustainable in long term. (Also, strong Russian propaganda that covid is just a hoax invented by evil Americans. Which, given the very low number of victims, ironically seemed more believable.) Until then, it seemed quite plausible that you just need to keep school closed and track contacts for a few months... and then a vaccine will come, the cases will drop to zero, and the schools can open again. But the vaccines came 6 months too late.
I believe that if all countries did the same, we all actually would have a chance. But if you have too many people in democratic countries yelling: "we are doomed anyway, so let's not do anything and just get sick as soon as possible, so that those who survive get immune and can continue with life as usual", this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, maybe except for the part about getting immunity, because if you have millions of people infected, new mutations are going to appear.
I suppose there is the option of rushing out a vaccine with very limited testing (skipping as much of the approval process as possible), but otherwise it seems very unsustainable to shut down the world economy for any virus with less than XX% mortality rate. I don't know what XX% should be, but it has to be a greater number than the people killed, and probably greater than the number impoverished, if you shut everything down.
If we do testing to ensure a vaccine is safe, then we're making tradeoffs of one kind of pain instead of another. No option there is perfect, which is mostly my original point.
Not that China's strategy is even a long-term solution *for China*. Even assuming their numbers are accurate and they indeed stopped the virus temporarily, so what? In that case their population has not had a chance to develop any immunity, while the official Chinese vaccine is sufficiently worse than the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines that one wonders whether it's even worth distributing against the nowadays dominant strains Delta and now Omicron.
And even if China's draconian measures were strong enough to stop the spread of the initial variant, is it plausible that they and their population have so much slack that these measures can be ramped up several-fold to keep Omicron in check, too?
"In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!"
It doesn't sound like that fire chief was treating it as a reality to be mitigated. Wouldn't he wear a mask if he was trying to mitigate it? I could understand not "social distancing" - I'm using scare quotes because it means lots of different things to different people, but some of those things are ones that are incompatible with providing emergency services (surely others *are* compatible though). But not wearing a mask seems to be very much in the fatalist camp, of being equally uncomfortable with tradeoffs and risk management as the people that are doing useless things. He just came down on the other side of not even doing things that are easy and won't interfere with his activities.
If there's a near 100% certainty of getting COVID, then wearing masks or similar is just a matter of delaying the inevitable. That was how he explained it to me, and that makes sense to me as well. He was more interested in getting it over with, and was not willing to pay any cost, even a fairly small one, simply to delay what was going to happen anyway. There is a cost to wearing a mask, and social distancing, and cancelling every event in your life for two years. He decided that those costs were not worthwhile to him, which is what I mean by tradeoffs.
But if you think there's a 100% chance you get it at least once, then you should think it's very likely that you'll get it multiple times. Wouldn't you care about how frequently you get it? And wouldn't you care about not infecting people while you do your emergency work, and at least wear a mask then? (Maybe they already do wear masks 100% of the time while working.)
I'd guess he was thinking in terms of getting it once and then being immune, so it doesn't matter when you get it the one time. That makes sense for people who have never heard the phrase "breakthrough infection". It also makes sense for people who know that breakthrough infections are a thing but also that they are generally milder than the original; for a healthy middle-aged man (fire chief) that's easy to mentally file in the same category as the cold or flu that you expect to get every year anyway.
I would phrase that differently: The body does not want to be ramped up to defcon 4 all the time, so the higher the protection the more quickly it wanes. Repeated exposures can convince the body to keep some excess virus fighting capacity around longer.
The J&J shot still provides a greater duration of protection than two mRNA shots no matter how you phrase it.
Natural immunity also provides fewer initial antibodies, albeit with much broader protection. Natural immunity turns out to be much better than that of vaccines though because it fades at less than 5% per month whereas the vaccines tend to fade by 40% per month or more.
That is not consistent with any of the data I've seen, at all. Here's where I get my best estimate of post-infection immunity compared to mRNA vaccination derived immunity:
5.5x higher risk of being hospitalized with COVID for those who have recovered from infection >90 days as compared to people who have completed a 2 dose mRNA vaccination regimen. Even if recovering from infection <90 prior, still better to have gotten a 2 dose mRNA vaccine. No data in this study on J&J, could you share your source?
The immunity conferred by convalescence is broader and more effective because it increases defense not just against the easily-mutated spike protein that the vaccines are narrowly obsessed with, but also against the nucleocapsid 'body' of the virus. Data from England bears this out: those who get vaccinated before they get infected have fewer n-antibodies than those who get infected then vaccinated.
This is the phenomenon of Original Antigenic Sin in action. It's why we are handicapping our children by vaccinating them.
Bottom left is you, bottom right graph is 3 doses of pfizer. Both have similar levels of neutralizing antibody titer. The geometric mean for J&J-> Pfizer is 1410, while the geometric mean for Pfizer x3 is 1846, and J&J->J&J is 130. J&J itself is around 31, and 2 doses of Pfizer is 88. So, you are much, much, MUCH more protected than before your booster, much more protected than if you boosted with J&J, and a little bit less protected than if you'd gotten 3 mRNA doses- but you are much closer to 3 doses of Pfizer than you are to 2 doses of Pfizer in terms of neutralizing antibodies.
Next: let's see how 3 dose Pfizer works against Omicron.
Pink is Omicron, green is Wuhan strain, light blue is Delta. Left is 2 doses of Pfizer, right is three doses of Pfizer. We can see that three doses of Pfizer gives you about the same neutralizing antibody protection against Omicron as 2 doses gives against Wuhan strain.
Last: what does a neutralizing antibody titer mean in terms of protection?
More neutralizing antibodies are good, and help you prevent any infection, but 40x more antibodies does not mean 40x more protection. These are the easiest part of your immune system to measure, but also the fastest to degrade. There’s really no good data about t-cell immunity from different dosing regimens (there’s barely any t-cell data at all) but there’s no reason to think that your t-cell immunity would be meaningfully lower than an mRNA regimen, and the longer space between doses is likely to help elicit a better t-cell response.
These are rough estimates, and only based on neutralizing antibodies, but they're at least in the right ballpark. Hope that helps!
Measures based solely on neutralizing antibodies are incomplete at best because the vaccines only provide neutralizing antibodies for the 2019 strain of the virus they are based off of. These antibodies are much less effective against omicron no matter how many there are.
Hi James M, thank you for this. A question for you, if I may? It looks from that presentation like the Moderna "booster" was actually a full dose third shot and not the half-dose being used as current booster. Is that right?
The last slide seems to suggest that cross boosting between the mRNA shots is a bit better, unless I'm misunderstanding.
I've had two Pfizer shots and the next scheduled booster I can access is a Moderna half dose, which as far as I can tell hasn't been studied?
I'm trying to decide whether to wait another week to get a third Pfizer instead (their third dose is the same as their booster?), to go ahead and get the Moderna, or ask for a full dose of Moderna based on being mildly immune compromised (not moderately or severely as the CDC requires).
I also don't know if there's no meaningful difference between any of these choices given as you say that the longer-term immune response is much more complicated and there may be no significance at that level.
If you feel comfortable weighing in on any of this, it would be most welcome.
Yes, that presentation used a full 100 ug dose of Moderna, and they have since switched to a 50 ug dose. They have indeed studied the Moderna half dose a lot, just not publicly available data. Pfizer uses a 30 ug dose. If you want to optimize everything for antibody response, Moderna is the way to go, but there is not a big difference. Also, people on average report feeling shittier after a Moderna booster than after a Pfizer booster. FWIW I had two Pfizer doses originally, and just got boosted with Pfizer, but would have been fine doing Moderna too. The original Moderna two-shot regimen was slightly better at preventing hospitalization than Pfizer, but it's unclear how much of that was due to the dosage (which has changed) or the time between first and second dose (which doesn't matter for a booster)
Over the last half year or so, I have been looking into therapy for fixing reoccurring mild depression. I have some thoughts. People who have had more experience (and/or an actual therapist, by "looking into" I mean attempting a gestalt of different techniques and seeing if anything would stick), feel free to chime in.
I'm prefacing this with the fact that the therapy techniques I looked at are more emotionally focused than being analytical, so some of my concerns are the 'play with fire, get burned' variety. Nevertheless, I think therapy techniques as a whole consider emotions to be a big thing to work on, so the comment should still be mildly applicable in general.
1. The mind seems to be incredibly malleable
I didn't realize this when I started, but after going through focusing (and what seemed like extremely revelatory, um, revelations) and IFS (and what seemed to be ideas which had enough cognitive complexity to be qualified to be agents in their own right), it really seems like my mind is willing to adopt any context that I offer-that is, while these sort of ideas seem 'undeniably correct' in the moment, it's mostly because my mind is so eager to fill the latest mold I offer, sort of. I still have to think through the implications of that (does meditation do anything in particular, other than installing a very persistent idea that the mind eventually assimilates enough for it to remain in 'consciousness' without prompting? "if your mind is so malleable, why don't you just manipulate your bad feelings away?") but one thing I've realized is..it probably doesn't matter what therapy you use, if the therapist is competent enough to walk you through whatever problem you have. (A bit of handwaving here: what does 'competent enough' mean? if therapy is just 'theater of the mind', what is a therapist actually doing? questions that I have no answer to, given I've never been to an actual therapist.)
2. Trying to fix emotion-space while being in emotion-space is hard
A little context. Techniques like Focusing and IFS place particular emphasis on trying to access your subconscious and realizing the reason for any resistance you have, because usually the mind has a good reason for that resistance to be there. Afterwards, you have techniques that allow disparate parts of your mind to compromise and come to a consensus.
This...never really worked for me. I'd get to figuring out what the problem is, but working with emotions directly, especially for strong emotions is....imagine elementals who cannot be anything but themselves. A bunch of emotional processing was like that. Admittedly, that was not always true; sometimes I'd get parts of my mind to agree, specifically in terms of attempting to reduce resistance for a task I was putting off. But one way or another, the task would still be left undone.
One thing that a lot of emotion-based therapy techniques seem to imply is that, after solving the internal issue relating to whatever you were having a problem with, it would take you no effort at all to do the external thing. If I was uninterested in literature, but had to study literature for college in either case and had no other option-after I convinced myself of that, I would be able to open up some medieval poetry and go through it without a single ounce of boredom. Now some of that is probably my own misunderstandings about how therapies of this kind work, but more than once I've found myself stuck in a loop where I would ask myself "do I feel okay about doing this?", find a part of my mind disagreeing, try to resolve whatever the issue was, ask myself again "do I feel okay about doing this?" find an issue again...
I call this using therapy as a form of procrastination. It might feel good when doing it, and you certainly feel like you're accomplishing things, but nevertheless external reality remains as it is.
3. Stepping out of emotion-space is useful
I remember reading a post called "developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence", which was a look into Robert Kegan's developmental stages. What I specifically remember from that is the subject-object distinction. When you're a child, your wants are object; you are them and they are you, and your worldview is based on what you want-and, in general, you don't really neglect what you want in favor of anything else, unless that something else is a want that takes higher priority. As you grow older, though, your wants are 'object'-you're not your wants anymore, you have wants, which you can satisfy and neglect at will. They're a part of you, sure, but they are not the whole of who you are.
I've been able to do a similar thing with emotions. It may just be repression, I don't know, but-worrying about a thing that needs to be done, wanting to do something but wanting to play video games instead, being sad about how your life isn't shaping up, etc, etc-you can sort of..take these as object, in terms of 'stepping out' of your emotional context and looking at your emotions as though you're an external observer. mentally, it almost feels like taking a physical step back and creating a sense of distance? I'm not sure if I can explain it better. It's that, with the awareness that emotions are something that you have, not something that you are, and creating the distance required to think about things a little more carefully.
A lot of this possibly reads like I've discovered actual self-control for the first time. Which...maybe. But again, not really, because again-the concept of control itself, of fighting 'against' something-is a part of the emotional context, and thinking within the context to fix the context is hard. It's more like just dropping the link between feeling and behavior? and having something sitting in the middle. (I'm sorry this all sounds somewhat handwavey. Mind stuff is hard.)
either way, I'm not deriding therapy in general-far from it. Clearly it seems to work for a whoe lot of people. It just seems to me that, for people like me, trying to handle emotional content while within that emotional content is hard. And again, for people like me, it may be useful to try to discover the mental move that lets you 'step out' and take your context as object, so you can think a little more clearly.
Personally, I found that the mind is shaped almost exclusively by what we do, not what we think - behavioral activation therapies are on the right track. 5th year of remission of my atypical depression right now, life's good.
The "stepping out" phenomenon you describe is also important, ideally followed with "I don't want to do stuff but I'm gonna do stuff anyway instead of staring at the wall/doomscrolling on the phone".
This seems right, too. I remember Lukeprog writing about things like success spirals and things like that, which do definitely work. It just seems like doing stuff when you're hopeless and see no meaning in anything-well, doing anything at all seems pointless. (It's a trap, but I always forget it's a trap.) I've almost been tempted to write protocols for myself: "whenever you feel like there is no meaning to life and everything is worthless, stop and immediately fix sun availiability/sleep schedule/do things, even if you don't feel like doing them, even if your entire brain yells at you about how pointless it is."
Can you go into a little more detail about what sort of things you did with regards to fixing your atypical depression, if it's not too personal? is it something specific, or more in the sense of "do stuff as though the depression didn't exist, regardless of what your feelings tell you"?
Not familiar with behavioral activation therapy, will look into it.
My recovery has been very much a "two steps forward, one step back" thing.
I bought a bike and loved it as a way of commuting (I've been living carless at the time, in a European city), which spilled over into recreational rides and exploring my surroundings. I said yes to pretty much every social invitation even if I weren't feeling like attending, and almost always it was a good idea that pulled me further out of depression (despite needing to recharge afterwards, as an introvert). A friend got me started with bouldering, which is an amazing sport for someone living way too much inside one's head and not enough within the body.
Perhaps the most significant therapeutic intervention was a friend extending an offer to go to the other side of the globe for a two week backpacking trip. Our destination was... not exactly known for safety, but as a still relatively depressed person "fuck it what do I have to lose" convinced me. The context switch, actually hazardous situations and a huge load of new experiences reset something in my brain, and somehow the progress I've made over the previous year solidified into a more confident and upbeat personality. I've started taking risks, started _dating_ which wasn't really on the table for quite a while, found my SO who stabilizes me to this day whenever I'm feeling like relapsing.
As you can see I've been lucky to have a support network, but the thing with depression is, it makes you isolate yourself from any supporting people you have and not seek out any new ones. This is a literal death spiral and should be resisted at all costs - contact with people who are relatively stable will stabilize you as well.
Ah, this makes a lot of sense. I was actually hoping for a reset-like experience when starting college earlier previous year, but covid means online classes which means that didn't really...happen.
The funny/sad thing about a support network is the fact that, even when I have it, I use it the least when I need it the most ("people are dealing with their own problems, I'll just add on to that", even when most of that could just be circumvented by asking if they have time etc). Brains are weird.
FWIW, a friend wanted to kick my ass for not telling him when I mentioned I was suicidal some time ago.
Perhaps you shouldn't bring everyone down with your depressive rumination on a party, but from what I've noticed (being on both sides of this, at different times) one on one people are very eager to help.
You are being more of a bother by isolating yourself and making your friends wonder wtf is wrong.
Hah, yeah, fair enough. The algorithm in my head is just-a bunch of people have asked me for help, and sometimes I don't really have the mental bandwidth to help them, but I almost feel obligated to help because it's just...something I do. It's possible that the same thing would be true for someone else I ask for help, in which case I don't want to obligate them to help me.
A lot of that seems to be mental contortion, though, and in general when I've asked help from people they haven't really been very unhappy about it. (So much of figuring out this sort of stuff seems to be learning how to ignore motivated reasoning.)
Right, completely agree about the reactions thing-even when you know what you ought to do to escape a bad emotional state, it just doesn't seem..worth it. (Some sort of local maximum? shrug)
I've tried setting up systems etc-but i've generally been pretty averse to doing things with other people, due to a bunch of reasons, and as you said it's hard to maintain reoccurring activities by yourself. I'm also not Conscientious, so sticking to schedules etc (or weekly things) never consistently worked for me. Probably need to either improve on pulling more people in, or increasing Conscientiousness.
Meditation is something that I've been trying on and off for quite a while, actually. A lot of the benefit from it really seems to be if you do it consistently, so in general it didn't seem very worthwhile. (That's also just gut feeling, though, and it seems like instincts have a hard time with judging things which are effective over a fe wmonths vs. effective over a week etc.) I think the distancing thing I talked about is somewhat similar to meditation? they give me similar clarity, at least.
Huh. Interesting! I'm not necessarily very neurotic, but that seems a good way to think about it. Probably another way to look at the emotional context as a context, rather than 'all that is'? curious, in either case.
Do you have the original source you got this from? I'd like to take a look.
How much has our understanding of neuroscience changed in the last 15 years? I have a textbook "Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 3rd Edition", published in 2006, which I was planning on reading in order to get a basic understanding of neuroscience. Would it be alright for me to do this, or would the information be too outdated and I should get a more up-to-date book?
I got my PhD in neuroscience in 2017, I believe I used that textbook (2nd edition) as an undergrad and it's quite good.
Things that should be the same: almost all of the neuroanatomy, most of the information on development, all the basic principals around electrophysiology
Things that have been updated: Almost everything related to genetics, a lot of pharmacokinetics, anything related to fMRI correlates with psychiatric disorders
So it depends on what exactly you're interested in, but as a general overview of the whole field I think it's a great starting point
Epistemic status: I'm an engineer and only read neuroscience as a hobby. I did read the 2005 book "the brain: a very short introduction" (highly recommended as an entry point) and followed this up with a deep dive into predictive processing (emerged 2005-10 so you'll miss that) plus the excellent free textbook at https://psywww.com/intropsych/index.html (updated 2018). For a broad overview you should be good but you may want to at least check a few newer ressources. Mostly pick a book that suits your preferred reading style.
Does anyone else see two versions of comments occasionally? They look like the might be pre and post edited versions existing for a while in an odd Schoedingers Cat indefinite form.
It often happens that after I press post, I see two comments. I once tried deleting one, 'both' were gone. I think it's a bug? Fits my general prior that the Substack comment system sucks
Do we know that we have "flattened the curve" in the past? Asking because that will be the purpose of coming lockdowns, and from a naive glance (and my memory of the first two huge rises in cases) it doesn't seem like we have ever flattened it. It seems like Covid case counts rise and fall for poorly understood reasons.
Yes, for sure. The first lockdown clearly flattened the curve. Collapsed the curve actually. Then summer was quiet enough for covid with increases in winter.
The summer was quiet enough for Covid? We hit new case count highs in July 2020, although that could've been a result of bad March testing, and deaths did go down after the initial surge. Do you just mean it could've been worse because we now know it got worse? How do we not know that wasn't just seasonality?
Well I was thinking about most of the rest of the world. Where I am cases fell to less than 10 a day in summer 2020. By contrast they are at 4000 now.
In any case the curve was flattened because it stopped being exponential. If the original trajectory for the virus from Feb to March 2020 had continued into the summer the numbers infected would have grown to herd immunity - depending on the R value that would be 50-80% of the population in any country. Omnicron could possibly do that too without restrictions or boosters, social distancing and mask wearing. But because we have all that it won’t.
A year ago we wrote on how Ross Perot could have won the 1994 Electoral College, and then a spoof where he did just that. Perot was famously against NAFTA ("you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country"), and in honour of one of our more adventurous models and fictions, we've whipped up a mini-post on how he got it wrong. Because NAFTA had no impact on American manufacturing jobs at all. https://armariuminterreta.com/2021/12/20/who-suckered-jobs-from-whom/
This is a (slightly edited) post I made on Facebook, which I think could spark more interesting discussion here.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was amazing. Easily the best MCU film I've seen to date, and, reluctantly, the best Spider-Man movie on my list (edging out TASM 2).
I have more to say about the movie itself, but some more general musings first.
The MCU is by far the most impressive media project in the world by now. It's huge, it's interconnected, it's media-spanning - frankly, I'm in awe of Marvel, and Kevin Feige, for even attempting this.
I feel almost privileged to see this thing unfold before my eyes (and I haven't watched any of the TV shows, so it's definitely even bigger than I think).
It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible. Only history will tell if it succeeds - some bad choices can have it go the GoT way in a year or two (is it still fashionable to talk about how nobody talks about GoT anymore?). But for now it feels huge and epic, as it well should.
One thing annoys me immensely, though.
The MCU (and superhero movies in general, with the DCEU keeping well in the race) features dozens of characters in dozens of stories. We have aliens, robots, magic, mythical creatures, gods, monsters and sometimes even the occasional friendly spiderhood neighborman. They usually save the world, but sometimes they just save their friends, loved ones and themselves (although we need more stories like that). They go against organizations, aliens, monsters and human criminals.
And they are forced to learn different morals, of course: "With great power etc.", "Everybody deserves a second chance", "Don't give in to your anger", "Learn to forgive", "Don't pick the easy way out", "Sacrifice yourself for the greater good" and the ubiquitous "Do the right thing" (I don't know why this one is not engraved by now on every square inch of the USA, with how many times it's been said in movies).
All those different stories, different heroes, different problems they have to face.
All those same Christian morals of forgiveness and self-sacrifice and kindness they have to learn.
And still, EVERY - SINGLE - TIME -
The end goal is violence. No matter who the hero is, and what they're saving the world from, and what platitude about kindness and forgiveness their dying mentor figure told them on their deathbed, THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
The emotional climax may come later, when the hero needs to sacrifice themselves to undo the villain's plan, but the primary goal is always violence: "I'm gonna find them and kick their ass". The villain can never be talked down. Never stopped nonviolently. Never reasoned or pleaded with. There is always a fight, and worse - always the ASSUMPTION OF FIGHT. I hate it.
I know the audience expects a spectacle, and a big, destructive fight is the easiest way to get one, but I think it just means... we're not evolved enough yet. As a species, as a culture. It saddens me.
I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick.
A great way to get there would be to make more movies like The Martian, where the heroes face not a foe, but a hostile environment. This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
commenter John Lawrence Aspden mentioned in passing already the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It presents an interesting case related to your point. Subtle spoilers below.
TBOEM is essentially about a good woman who seeks justice and doesn't get it. However, in the process, she kind of unintentionally becomes the vehicle for another man's redemption journey from the archetypal Fool to something closer to Hero. In this way her desire for retribution is sacrificed / deferred / transformed, rather than plainly satisfied.
This presented a brilliant opportunity for the kind of resolution you hope for in your comic book films. Except instead of exploring that idea, the writers decided it would be better if the film ended with the protagonist woman and her new fool-turned-hero friend setting out on a vigilante mission of mindless violence, and driving off into the sunset.
The new Netflix show Arcane obliquely addresses your wishes. Most of the characters are tempted by circumstance and through their youth/naïveté to view violence as the only solution to their woes, and a large part of the tension of the story is if/how this is deconstructed. Although it sounds like you want a story that ignores violent solutions by default, you may enjoy Arcane’s more nuanced take where characters with both high and low levels of faith in violent action are forced to grapple with the opposing viewpoint.
I hadn't heard of The Kalevala before. Thanks for mentioning it. I used to go to union meetings in a building name Kaleva Hall in the pre-internet days. I knew it was owned by a Finnish society of some sort, but I poked around a bit and it is named after The Kalevala. The things I'm learning about my old neighbors...
Watchmen has lots of violence, but it's basically portrayed as mostly counterproductive, and in the end the antagonist who kills millions as part of his convoluted plan for <spoiler> walks away more or less scot free -- the punching certainly never solves anything.
Of course the reviews on that are mixed -- maybe moviegoers prefer punching?
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick. "
I think the main obstacles to what you're looking for are the following:
1. Conflict is inherently interesting, because it features two intelligences working to out-maneuver each other, each with their own agency. It's a lot harder to tell a story if everyone involved agrees on what to do. Conflict doesn't need to be violent conflict. A sports story is a story of conflict; both sides want to win the game, but only one can succeed.
2. Action movies almost certainly require the protagonist to be at risk; this requires physical danger. The two traditional ways this is accomplished are fights (conflict) or disasters. The problem with disaster is that there's only so many stories you can tell where a rag-tag band of misfits is sent into space to blow up a meteor before it blows up too many landmarks rendered in CGI, mostly because the meteor doesn't have characterization or agency. Combining 'risk' with 'conflict' gets you violence.
3. There's only a few things you can spend a special-effects budget on that will bring people to the theaters. I can think of three: elaborate historical set-pieces, breathtaking fantastic worlds (including sci-fi), and wide-scale destruction. Destruction is almost certainly either disaster or war, which will give you a story to tell. The other two require a story, and most stories involve conflict and/or risk.
If you want to make a non-violent big budget movie, a fantasy sports story might be the killer app. All you need to do is the 'relatively easy' part: build the fantasy world with the sport in it, then craft the characters and write the story. Meanwhile, Marvel already has the characters and the world already built with the stories already written and tested in comic book form and with at least some name recognition.
I think Game of Thrones had the potential to be a really interesting example of conflict, not *without* violence, but at least where it's clear that the violence is the *symptom* of the conflict, rather than an attempt at a cure. Throughout the first several books, you are set up to sympathize with Daenerys, Jon, Arya, Tyrion, even though they're clearly on at least two or three different sides in the major conflicts that are brewing, and there are hints that each one (except maybe Jon) will become a source of death and destruction as bad as anything that they've faced so far.
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick."
Also, if your conflict does require defeating someone in a fight, note that the go-to way for decisively winning fights for the past five hundred years or so has been to shoot the other guy with some sort of gun, and there are really good reasons for that.
Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly.
Of course, it's hard to have witty banter in the middle of a gun battle, and witty banter is important to the comic-book tradition. But it's hard for me to care about the wittiness of anyone's words, once their actions mark them as irredeemably silly.
"Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly."
This indirectly exposes another problem with the original poster's desire for less problem solving through violence. In order to meet the needs of enough movie-goers to make your blockbuster profitable, the story has to balance the following:
1. The antagonist needs to be a credible threat, if not directly to the protagonist, then to something greater. Home Alone can get away with a couple of burglars as a threat, because the protagonist is a kid. Once your protagonist hits the 'police officer' level as in Die Hard, you need a lot of lethally-armed bad guys to be a threat. At 'super hero' level, the threat needs to be proportionately greater. A story that is John McClane vs the Home Alone crooks or even Captain America or Batman vs Hans Gruber and company is over in five minutes.
2. In contemporary fiction, most heroes don't want to kill, or at least don't want to kill anything that isn't necessary. The protagonist wants to reason with the enemy if at all possible to make it not necessary to kill them. Obviously, things that can't be reasoned with (monsters, undead, non-sentient robots, hostile aliens, etc.) can be killed. On the other hand, almost anything the hero can exchange dialog with counts as something that can be reasoned with, at least until they've demonstrated a willingness and ability to kill, are an immediate threat and have the upper hand. This conflicts with the 'just shoot the main villain' plan for anyone other than the hardened borderline sociopath (James Bond). The hero wants to win by reason, but if the villain was open to reason while still being a threat, they wouldn't be a villain. In cases where a villain can be persuaded, it helps to smack some sense into them as an adjunct to get them to listen to reason.
3. In most cases, for blockbuster mass market movies, the good guys need to win if you want the audience to go home feeling like they enjoyed your movie. This can be a bittersweet ending if the protagonist dies to save something greater. You can also get away with downer ending if it leaves the audience hyped for the sequel. The win also needs to be satisfactory; if it's handed to them via Deus Ex Machina, it's not a win. Having the story ended in seconds because the hero fired first isn't satisfactory in and of itself (though it can be if it took effort and risk to get to that point); it's easier to make a fist fight, where who's winning can change multiple times, feel satisfactory. There are ways for winning by talking the villain down or winning by trickery to be satisfactory, but likewise it requires showing effort on the part of the hero and it needs to be at least as difficult as fighting would be.
4. Likewise, the bad guys need to lose. Your bad guy had a diabolical plan. Perhaps he's responsible for the deaths of scores of people; perhaps he planned the deaths of millions or more. For the ending to be satisfactory, the audience needs to feel like justice or karma has been served. For a powerful villain, there might not be a way to realistically imprison the villain in a way that feels satisfactory. Killing the villain that is already responsible for a significant body count is the simplest way to handle it. You don't necessarily need to have the hero do the deed; a common story involves persuading the villain that he's wrong and has become what he hates and having the villain sacrifice themselves to end things. Another way to handle this is have the villain accidentally off themself in an effort to kill the hero when the hero refuses to kill the villain (perhaps even when the hero is attempting to save the villain).
You'll have to skip the banter, but you can have an incredible gunfight with a "boss enemy" as a movie finale - 1995 Ghost in the Shell being the most iconic example.
I'm thinking more "Heat", which has incredible dialogue between De Niro and Pacino, and also one of the best fight scenes ever put on film, because they didn't insist on doing them *at the same time*. Ideally, talk first and then fight; that way maybe you don't have to fight at all. But commit, if you want me to take you seriously.
The comic-book format really encourages layering the dialogue in small chunks intermingled with the action, which works well in that medium but not so much on film. In a live-action fight you usually can't follow dialogue that's literally simultaneous with the action, and pausing the fight just to trade insults or whatever looks silly for reasons Tuco the Ugly will be happy to explain.
I think Loki came the closest to breaking this trope. While violence was used in the end, it was clearly wrong and the main protagonist (Loki) realized that.
Were there really ever any superhero comics that were not about punching bad guys in the face? I honestly don't know because I was never really into the comics or the movies, to be honest, this complaint sounds a bit to me like picking up a Lee Child novel and being irked that the plot involves some guy named Jack Reacher busting up yet another criminal conspiracy. Isn't that kiiiinda what you signed up for?
I'm defining super hero really loosely here, but Constantine is a trickster. Sandman and Lucifer are similarly not about the violence, though again, very loose definition of superhero. Among the more traditional superheroes, there are several comic book versions of Batman where he's portrayed more as the detective, where preparedness, knowledge, deduction are his primary tools and not violence
There are a decent number of plotlines in modern comics which are not resolved by violence. For instance in Jonathan Hickman's Avengers, there is storyline in which the heroes gather the infinity stones in order to push away an alternate Earth/universe which is on a collision course for their universe.
Superhero comics have a fairly narrow format that, yes, pretty much always involves punching people in the face while trading witty banter. And wearing flashy costumes while maintaining a secret identity in civilian life, and exercising unique superpowers that mostly come down to different flavors of nonlethal kinetic violence at witty-banter range (i.e. "punching them in the face"), and matching themselves against equal and opposite costumed face-punchers, etc. You can get away with occasional deviations from one or two parts of the formula, e.g. Tony Stark outing himself as Iron Man at the end of his first movie, but it's pretty restrictive.
Generic action/adventure movies, yeah, I get the appeal of and market for basically light entertainment centered on violence against bad guys. But that still leaves a broad range of possibilities, from Die Hard to Jurassic Park to James Bond to, yes, The Avengers. When "action/adventure movies" contracts to "comic-book superhero movies plus a few dying franchises", the restrictiveness of the format becomes a problem in the same way it would if all action movies were Jack Reacher movies. Too repetitive, too predictable, and too many good ideas squandered because they don't fit the format.
I think the problem then is less the specific superhero issue than the problem that the studios are too tied in to formulaic blockbusters to get bodies into the seats. Superhero films are just the current winning formula, and that means being tied into the genre conventions (though even the MCU has exceptions such as Guardians of the Galaxy, which really doesn't fit the superhero genre). If it's not superheros it's dystopian YA novels, Harry Potter retreads, Star Wars, giant meteors, or some other flavor-of-the-year.
On the one hand, this is probably partially the fault of audiences that don't turn up for well-made movies that aren't part of the current flavor-of-the-year.
On the other hand, there is obviously something broken with the movie pipeline. Studios are stuck on producing reboots of classic properties even when those films are obviously going to underwhelm at the box office. I don't know if the problem is on the creative side, the IP side, the finance side, or the marketing side, but something is not working right.
True; and actually I'm not really that into superheroes (Worm exempted). But the fact remains that, judging by Marvel's profits, most people ARE into superheroes, and that's where most of the money goes into. Actually scratch that - even if we don't look at superheroes specifically, the most budgeted and advertised and popular movies are ones where the hero (super- or not) needs to punch the villain in the face, really hard.
Sure, there are lots of non-action movies, but somehow they don't get billion-dollar budgets, or bring in billions in the box office.
I hear you loud and clear. I too wish there were bigger budget movies out there that catered to somewhat more sophisticated tastes than the smash-bang-boom stuff, as in the days of yore.
As an aside to my other post: I find it interesting that someone who doesn't like superheroes would be into Worm, especially if you have the complaints above, given that the majority of Worm's story conflict involves people beating the hell out of each other, but very strategically. Maybe this is an aesthetic issue for you? Or maybe you just like Worm because it attempts to have moral complexity (IMO it ends up failing at this at several key points, but that's another thing).
I liked the complexity, and I liked the strategy. More than the action itself, I liked seeing the different powers used in complex and unexpected ways.
Also, now that I'm thinking about it, at least part of my aversion to superhero stories comes from my strict Soviet upbringing: "comic books are for stupid Amerikantsy, freaks with capes are kiddy stuff" and so forth. I'm doing my best to, uh, punch this clearly mistaken worldview in the face, really hard, but it keeps escaping to fight another day :)
The closest big-name thing to this is probably shonen manga/anime. Many shonen series have a pattern that goes like this:
1. The power system allows each character to have an individual, specific power - Quirks in MHA, Stands in JoJo, the unique demon powers in Demon Slayer, etc.
2. Each antagonist introduced has a new power in this system, whose gimmick determines the nature of the fight.
3. The fight ends when the hero understands their opponent's gimmick, and figures out a way to counter it. Usually this is also a character moment - the smart hero counters it by setting up a clever trap, the gutsy hero counters it by taking a risky gamble, the friendship hero counters it by trusting an ally to help, etc.
4. Long-running antagonists do the same thing, but their powers are more flexible and have more details to reveal, meaning that they can counter the hero's counterattack by revealing another secret that escalates the fight to a new level.
A lot of Worm fights have this same pattern where figuring out exactly what the opponent's limits are is the key to winning. Bakuda has a huge arsenal of bombs that can do anything... but they're triggered by her toe rings, and if you cut those off she's powerless. Alexandria is invincible and superhumanly strong... but she still needs to breathe. Dragon has suits designed to counter all the Undersiders... but she's a machine, and can't violate her directives. You get the idea.
Most people don't go to films for deep moral lessons- they go for escapism. Simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie sell very well to the masses BECAUSE they're simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie, because in real life the overwhelming majority of problems can't be solved like this and also (to many people) it feels like the baddies usually win in real life. If you find human nature disappointing, I feel for you, but I will also point out that much of any given cultural mythos is goodies v. baddies, often with the goodies killing the baddies at the end. Trickster-hero stories stand out because they're an exception to the norm.
What makes me sad is exactly that it's the same old thing. For all our scientific progress, and even with all our undeniable cultural progress, we still most prefer watching Good Guy hit Bad Guy. Myself included, let's be fair.
Be fair; sometimes the hero's *goal* is to do something clever and non-violent (e.g. sneakily steal five stones using a time machine), but somehow that will become complicated by the presence of a villain who will insist on stopping them but conveniently in a way that can be thwarted by punching him in the face real hard, the end.
The perfect example, and the one that convinced me to basically give up on comic-book superhero movies, was Wonder Woman.
80% of that movie would have been a *great* origin story. Diana is raised in the tradition of heroic combat out of Greek myth and legend, Hector v Achilles, Seven against Thebes, Xena against historical continuity (OK, OK...). Great champions of good and evil battle in single combat and open-field battles, where Good usually triumphs and it is glorious and *no innocent bystanders get hurt*. She desperately wants to be a part of that.
Instead, she gets an introduction to the horrors of mechanized, industrial-age warfare, with millions of innocents senselessly slaughtered, and because they changed the setting from WWII to WWI, there isn't even a real sense of Good vs Evil here, just stupid senseless war. To Diana, this is *wrong*, and the only possible explanation is that a particularly Evil Villain, a Super Villain, must be secretly responsible for this.
She appoints herself Champion of Good and sets out to right this wrong. Buckles on her swash and schemes and spies and fights her way across Europe with her faithful companions, tracking down the most-plausible candidate for the Super Villain responsible for this atrocity. And that part is indeed glorious. A particular shout-out to Diana going "over the top" in Belgium, cinematically superb but note that Diana's role is mostly to distract the enemy and inspire her allies, rather than single-handedly winning the fight.
Then she finds the Probable Supervillain, brutally killing him by pinning him to the roof of a building with her sword. Conduct unbecoming a superhero, by the usual rules. And the *fighting doesn't stop*. The Germans are still killing the British, the British are still killing the Germans, not because an Evil Supervillain is making them do it, but because that's what humans do. Kill each other in stupid senseless wars, accomplishing nothing. And that's what Diana herself just did.
It breaks her, at least for the moment. Her lesser, mortal allies have to sacrifice their lives truly ending the fight, and she's going to have to reinvent herself as the sort of hero who inspires people, the sort of hero she was back in the trenches of Belgium, rather than the sort of hero who just kills the bad guy. I would really like to have seen that story, and the career of the superhero for whom that was the origin.
Instead, they might as well have had the executive producer walk out on stage and say "We're sorry, we just realized this is a Superhero Movie(tm), and we are contractually obligated to resolve everything by having a Super Hero punch a Super Villain in the face, really hard. So, hmm, this guy here that we met a few scenes ago, let's say he was really the Secret Super Villain, and exactly and only when Wonder Woman punches him in the face hard enough the battle will be won. Cue the special effects and fight choreography, and make it so!"
Make it stop, says I. And make it stop I can, by not watching any more of these silly stupid movies. I may occasionally make an exception, but it's going to take something extraordinary to make that happen. And, yeah, I'll occasionally cue up just the scene of Diana going over the top in Belgium.
Oh Man, that's like seeing someone else writing down my thoughts! I was on the verge of tears when innocent Diana first saw the horror in Flanders. And I think it was on track to be one of the best films of all time at that point. I was expecting it to develop in roughly the way you describe.
And then suddenly there was this massive special effects lightning battle, let's blow the whole budget on completely spoiling the film. It was boring and silly. And it's not like I was ever that into superhero movies, but at that point I thought "Never again." No matter how good the reviews, just don't. This stuff is for children and morons.
On the other hand, Watchmen was a great comic, and the film was pretty faithful to it, but how to sieve out the occasional thing like that from the tidal wave of crap? You can't do it on audience reviews, or even on critics' reviews, because they seem to like this tripe too.
People who'd absolutely slate an art film that was that lazy raved about Wonder Woman. And I just don't understand why.
The Star Wars films are the same. I loved Star Wars when I was seven, and I still do, it's a great work. But you don't get to keep extracting £10 from me every year for your endless crap on the basis that that there was a good film forty years ago. And yet it always gets well reviewed. Do they bribe the reviewers?
Don't get me started on James bloody Bond, even the early ones are rubbish.
On the other hand, I saw Live Die Repeat on a laptop a while ago, and that's kind of a superhero movie and it's a wonder.
I would have liked to have seen that, and Watchmen, in a cinema rather than on someone's laptop. How to tell without waiting until the cinematic release is over and you get recommendations from people you trust?
Hey, someone else who saw Live Die Repeat! I feel like I'll never get another opportunity to discuss it, so I must share my complaints about the movie despite being overall positive on it. Time loops are cool and we should have more time loop media.
The premise of Tom Cruise being pressganged into the fight like that is incredibly stupid. They're dropping him onto the front lines of a war with a bunch of equipment he doesn't know how to use, causing him to literally fall on his face and die. It's an execution with extremely expensive extra steps. And that could work if the plot treated it as "Yes, they are intentionally executing him" but instead it's just presented as though it's a sane tactic for fighting a war. I understand the narrative function of this premise, they wanted his first few loops to be the same thing over and over and any character is going to try to do something different if they're free to act, but there has to be a better way to get there.
The ending would be much better if he died and it simply continued without the last reset. It feels like some moron forced the plot to have a happy ending because audiences like happy endings. Intuitively he shouldn't be able to get reset because he destroyed the source of the loop, and the point that he gets reset to is arbitrarily changed from his old reset point which makes it even more of a dumb magical handwave. But also just thematically, it was a suicide mission that he ended with the classic suicide grenade, it's undoing a bunch of cool moments to call takebacks on that.
Also, something that's clearly nonsense but didn't bother me that much, where the hell was all that anti-aircraft fire coming from? The mimics don't seem like big tool users, is this the one piece of military hardware they captured and turned against the humans?
So, as I remember what they try to do to Cruise is to send him into the fight as an embedded reporter, and he tries to get out of it by blackmailing his commanding officer.
So the commander reacts to that by setting him up for certain death.
I rather liked the happy ending, but I agree it doesn't make much sense. That's kind of OK, I think, even Euripedes ends his plays with a deus ex machina and leaves you do the fridge logic for what really happens! (SPOILER: Iphigenia was not really saved at the last minute by Artemis, and that delayed gut punch is part of what makes it a great play)
I didn't even notice the stuff about the anti aircraft fire! Do the mimics use weapons in other places? All I can remember is them rolling around intimidatingly, which doesn't seem like great tactics.
It's been a while but I remember the movie framing it more like a punishment than an execution: the way all the other military figures handle it feels less like they're knowingly killing Cruise and more like they think sending a completely untrained dude into battle will somehow not end the way it does. It'd make things a bit darker if the whole chain of command were complicit with the execution, but having not gotten that impression it really bothered me how stupid they were being throughout the first act of the movie.
I think you could keep the ending upbeat by letting him die and cutting to humanity triumphant with a focus on "it's over, we won." Maybe throw in a statue of the war hero who killed the mimic brain.
As far as I remember there's no evidence (really!) of the mimics using any tools at all, except for the AA which must be coming from somewhere (we never see where). It ties in with an overall feeling that the mimics are basically animals, which worked well enough that I was willing to play along and not think too hard about how they were shooting.
It's hard to think of it as extraordinary punishment when you're expecting mass casualties from the rank and file troops. It's the exaggerated version of 'being sent to the Russian front'; yes, it's effectively a death sentence, but given the nature of the war, as things are going all your troops are under a death sentence anyways.
I'm not quite as discerning as you, I'm totally fine with a mindless spectacle from time to time. But I think I share your appreciation for movies that try to go a little deeper.
I would recommend Arrival, Ex Machina, Moon (2009 film), Interstellar, Contact (I did not enjoy this as a child, but I'm pretty sure I would love it now). On a slightly lower tier I would put Primer and maybe Gravity, they are both ambitious if flawed. And I'd rather have that than bland mediocrity.
I've seen all of those except Primer, and agree they're all great. I'll watch Primer. Thank you. But they're science fiction rather than superhero films. I really haven't seen many superhero/action films, and the few I have seen have been trash (exceptions above!).
If you just want my general recommendations, then in recent years I've enjoyed the following films enough to go and see them at the cinema twice (not exhaustive, just the ones that spring to mind): High Rise; The Handmaid; Three BillBoards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Gone Girl; The Lighthouse; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Knives Out; Le Mans 66; Blade Runner 2???; Ex Machina; The Last Duel; and Last Night in Soho.
Of course, she got like 1 battalion over the top and forward a few miles. I suppose an after credits scene showing how they all get horribly wiped out by german artillery fire the next morning would have been excessively grim...
I haven't actually seen Wonder Woman, but I completely agree with everything you said.
From the MCU, the only counterexample I can think of is Doctor Strange, who basically defeated Dormammu with strategic nagging. That's definitely one of the reasons I love this movie :)
Agreed, Dr. Strange was not a film I expected to enjoy and is one of the few newer Marvel movies that I've seen.
Years ago the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, had an exhibit on Native American cosmology. There was one tribe from the northern California coast somewhere that had this dance that was designed to be as tedious and boring as possible and would drag on for long, long periods of time. The point of the dance was to bore evil spirits into leaving. That is still a top five moment of being utterly delighted for me. It was such a nontraditional mythical take on 'good vs evil'. I think the end of Dr. Strange felt like it tapped into that kind of creativity and if more superhero movies had those elements I'd happily sit through all the caped slapfights to get those moments of surprise.
There are some movies I've seen a hundred times (often really dumb ones), so I get the urge to just kick back and enjoy a comfortable storyline - but most of these superhero movies just feel like mix and match video game elements that have zero surprises and there's nothing comfortable about being bored for two hours.
Yes, and it's one of the reasons a full-on Dr. Strange sequel might make me come out of my shell and see another superhero movie. But not on opening night; I'll wait on the reviews.
Also possibly Natalie Portman's take on Thor. I'm pretty sure she'll wind up solving the problem by punching someone in the face real hard (with a magic hammer), but she'll probably make it more interesting than usual particularly in the build-up to the face-hammering.
Natalie, Benedict, if you're lurking here, please insist on the writers giving you a no-facepunch climax. You've got the clout, and I think the taste, to make it happen.
Re Dr Strange movie. I read the comics as a kid. I was amazed to see some of the weird astral purples from the pulpy comic book coloring recreated in hi def. That alone was worth the price of admission for me.
I heartily agree, and this was a huge part of what made Star Trek so great back in the day and something the reboot movies didn't seem to understand. The vision of Trek was that we would always try to look for a peaceful solution, without being so naïve as to think that would *always* work, but even when wars occur the Federation still tries for peace and over the course of the many series often finds itself allies with the enemies of old.
Star Trek is one of the few examples of utopian futurism in popular media. The only other example I can think of is the movie "Her", from 2013, where Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with his artificially intelligent phone operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). It also features very little conflict in the story too, but still plenty of emotional heartache.
Counterpoint - Star Trek The Motion Picture was dull and long, and is rarely considered the best Trek movies. Wrath of Khan, generally considered the best, has a violent climax and resolution.
Though I will heartily say that the end of Wrath of Khan wasn't based on punching people in the face, and was much more thoughtful and intellectual than most super hero movies.
Star Trek works best as a TV series, like it was meant to be. And "Wrath of Khan" wasn't the best Star Trek movie, it was just the best movie made under the Star Trek name - a guilty pleasure that didn't fit the theme, but after about eighty episodes of these characters dealing with complex problems in a mature and professional way, they'd earned the right to kick back and relax with a nice clean fight.
J.J. Abrams never earned that, and so "Star Trek: Into Darkness" was utter crap.
IV is our favorite, so no disagreement there. First Contact is also our favorite TNG movie.
The theme is not that fighting makes movies good or bad, but that good movies can be either. Super Hero movies resolving everything through punching is built into the genre and expected, but doesn't necessarily make a movie good or bad. John Schilling's take on WW is spot on to me for that reason. It was a great movie with a moderate amount of action, and then a really stupid end fight tacked on that came close to ruining the movie for me. I don't have any interest in re-watching it, and I know it's because of that stupid ending. A better movie with less fighting can still be a good hero movie.
I tried playing D&D a couple of weeks back. Didn't finish the campaign 'cause I had to leave town, but I'm pretty proud of my party that we didn't see combat at all. Just... didn't seem to make sense to go and fight people.
As a long-time RPG hobbyist, I must say that playing D&D like this baffles me. Of course, that can depend on what edition and what "not seeing combat at all" means (as earlier editions encouraged the use of underhanded and indirect tactics), but from context it sounds more like you tried to avoid combat through avoidance and diplomacy, which D&D is absolutely NOT designed for. It's a dungeon-crawler down in its very DNA, and trying to make it something it's not seems inelegant to me.
Is it the D&D specifically, or role-playing as a not-murderhobo generally, that baffles you?
Because the latter is IMO a much more enjoyable experience for adults, and I think I'd have preferred it even as a teenager if someone had introduced me to the possibility. As for D&D specifically, Theo is right - everyone in your gaming group knows how to play D&D and no other game in common, and it's probably easier to kludge 3.5e/Pathfinder/5e to fit than it is to get everyone to agree to learn a new system.
The former. As for other systems, I've never personally encountered an issue with getting play-groups to try other systems, but of course that's merely anecdotal.
The solution would be to play a different RPG, but D&D has enough mindshare that that's a hard first step. Also D&D is flexible enough to be 70% okay at this (maybe 50%), but it's "good enough" that trying to get everyone to hop is hard.
I wish everyone was like me and just read sourcebooks for fun, but it's hard enough to get players to read their class and spells, let alone starting from scratch on a new rpg.
> I feel almost privileged (...) It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible.
Really? It is like reading review of readable fanfiction describing it as one of a greatest works of literature.
I am fan of some modern literature but I am not sure is even LOTR going to be remembered in 200 or 400 years. MCU? Seems really dubious.
> THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
They fail even at making fight scenes that make sense given established powers.
> This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
> Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
When discussing successful invasive species, let’s not forget the hippopotamus infestation occurring in Columbia. It’s Hippo heaven, no natural predators, lots of water (very few droughts), lots of food, and a judicial ruling making it illegal to kill them. They’re breeding earlier and more often than ever. In 50-100 years there could be thousands spread across Central and South America.
That’s the weird part, it seemed to be inspired by a popular backlash after photos surfaced showing soldiers gloating over the dead body of one of the hippos. Other than that I can’t fathom why they would possibly outlaw eliminating them. They are the worlds largest invasive species and are wrecking havoc on the ecosystem.
Yes actually. A large swath of modern biology and medicine came either directly from nature or it was developed using reagents found in nature. Loss of biodiversity reduces the total number of future advances of biomedical science.
Heard this argument a few times and it always strikes me as a big stretch. Whatever there is right now, you can document it. Then sure, there is a chance you will lose something, but it's not obvious to me at all that the expected utility from advances in science exceeds that of the coolness of hippos.
Even if you could document the genome of every living thing and hand wave away bringing them back from extinction* - it would be far beyond the means of most scientists to do this and those discoveries would happen much slower.
And when I say research, direct applications like the ones you listed are one aspect, but there is a more subtle point that biological reagents permeate all of biological research. For a given recently developed medicine, it may have required 10 research labs who may have used 20 different biological reagents to develop the necessary technology. If 3 of those reagents didn't exist because their organisms were extinct or hard to source, that research would have just not happened. For example there is an immune adjuvant that comes from the Chilean soapbark tree, Western blot uses horseradish peroxidase, PCR was invented using taq polymerase from a microbe in the Yellowstone hot springs. Cell culture depends heavily on fetal bovine serum. Macaques (many of which are vulnerable or endangered) are a important model organism. CRISPR comes from certain bacteria.
*Which is an enormous hand wave. Even in principle, a genome does not encode an organism completely without also having information about it's epigenetics and development. And even an infantile organism may not be sufficient to produce an adult specimen without recreating the specific environment and biological niche the organism occupies. And of course, as another commenter pointed out, we don't know every species that currently exists.
They discover thousands of species every year. The task of documenting everything out there is nowhere near complete, and lots of them are probably going extinct before discovery.
I had to look that one up and golly. From an initial population of only four hippos, part of Pablo Escobar's private menagerie, they started breeding. Four became sixteen became forty became somewhere around a hundred or so.
It seems like the great male renunciation went beyond clothing. It seems like men renounced enthusiastic vocalizations. At some point those became the province of women, gay men, and German dictators with only one ball. Even Howard dean’s 150 milliOprah yelp was widely considered too much. But I know from reading Shakespeare etc that men weren’t always curbing their enthusiasm like they do now.
Had to check what wikipedia says about ululation - seems to be more common with females (matches my experience), but nothing said about historical trends. Impressive how culturally widespread it is, and how ancient.
Have you read Julius Caesar? It's been a while since I did, but I remember the scene where Brutus finds out his wife has been murdered. He's pretty upset. But then he arranges to have someone bring him the same news again, ten minutes later, while he's in a meeting, so that he can make a show of his stony-faced stoicism in front of his colleagues. They are duly impressed.
Anyway, that's just an Elizabethan-era view of what Ancient Romans might have been like, but "stiff upper lip" has definitely had its ups and downs over the years.
In the Tale of Genji, men frequently cry, recite poetry at each other, retreat to their estates for days on end from emotional turmoil, etc. This may or may not have been how aristocrats in Heian Japan actually behaved, but that’s almost not important: Genji is a romanticization/idealization of a previous supposed Golden Age of court life, and that was how men were in the author’s fictional utopia (with the implication that this was behavior to aspire to)
Eh, they were also incredible snobs and useless people who nobody should emulate.
What's notable to me is that the people who replaced them, the supposedly stoic badass samurai, also showed emotion. Tokugawa Ieyasu supposedly wept on the anniversary of one of his friends death for the rest of his life. Nobody considered this unmanly. The last soldiers of Shu supposedly wept and tore their hair out and broke their swords when their state ended and this was considered honorable behavior. King Stephen showed clear grief at his son's death and his idealism was considered a good quality in the depths of dark ages Europe. Enough he was elected king rather than inheriting the throne. George Washington stuttered and dropped his glasses so overcome with emotion at a speech which induced several of his officers to weep.
The masculine ideal has always had an idea of you need to get things done. None of these men shirked their duty because of their emotions. The famous example was a Chinese warlord who lost because he couldn't get over his son having a toothache. He's been mocked for two thousand years. But these men also had the emotions and their expression was not considered unmanly. The idea that real men don't cry is toxic and, as far as I can tell, alien to most cultures.
The most normal historical norm, afaict, is: Real men don't let grief prevent them from doing what needs to be done. But real men weep manly tears.
"It is one of my lifelong weaknesses that I never could endure the embrace or kiss of my own sex. (An unmanly weakness, by the way; Aeneas, Beowulf, Roland, Launcelot, Johnson, and Nelson knew nothing of it.)"
People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. (This is the time to half-jokingly invoke "no evidence" and ask for some scientific studies.)
What I do recall seeing is a fiction told to kids. Be a grown-up, don't cry. It is obvious why you'd tell them that, kids crying is a bother and, once they can speak coherently, essentially useless, you want them to aspire to be tough and independent like their role models - but, just like you say, it's not that their role models don't cry at all, it's just that they take the life's adversity head-on, go through everyday situations without calling for mommy. Once they can do that, everything they do, including crying, is "manly" by definition.
What I'm getting at, if the perpetuation of those "no crying" sentiments and norms into adulthood is real, it (counterintuitively?) speaks to the ongoing infantilization of society. (Does this reasoning circle back to clothing? People dress plainly because they assume masks - The Culture of Narcissism?)
As a dad of 3 boys 6 and under, I can confirm that I regularly tell them (especially the younger two) they should stop crying. Not because they're boys, and not because it's a bother, but because breaking down into tears for minor things is a poor strategy. Especially when you have two parents who would happily resolve the issue if you controlled your emotions enough to use words and ask for whatever it is you want.
Teaching children to not cry and not throw fits, etc. is the first step on teaching them to control their emotions in general. It's Elephant Riding 101. And that's an absolutely critical life skill.
"People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. "
There definitely is some kind of norm of "boys don't cry"
But I don't think it's a bad thing to encourage people, both men and women, towards a touch of Stoicism. It's important that people be able to look for emotional support when they need it, when they actually need it, but it's also important people to learn to try to cope with mundane stressors.
I have a question: my daughter originally got vaccinated in WY, and promptly lost her vaccine card (and didn’t take a picture of it🙄). She has since moved to the Seattle area and has been unsuccessful in tracking down a replacement card. Is there a health related reason (besides existing potential side effects) to simply repeating the vaccine course a second time to get both her booster (the fist shot) and a new vaccine card after the second? Thanks.
I forgot to bring my card to the booster appointment and when I explained that the pharmacist just wrote "third dose" on a new card. I didn't have to prove I'd gotten my first two doses or anything.
And since most sane places use pen (instead of oversized stickers that take up multiple lines and cover up other writing...), we can just fill in however much of the rest we remember.
The doses may not be the same. I think (can’t find source) in the UK the booster dose is a smaller than the first or second dose of both Pfizer and Moderna.
I’ve no idea why the dose is smaller (might just be less is needed and therefore cheaper) but something to be aware of
I can't find any actual data on breakthrough infections in people with prior Covid but were, and remain, unvaccinated. Anybody have any citations?
There was a suicide note here. I have taken it down because I'm not suicidal anymore and I don't want to alarm people unnecessarily. If you really insist on seeing it check the Wayback Machine.
-m9m
Short version: it wasn't a hoax, but I got stopped. My life is currently a mess but not quite enough of a mess to try again.
Thanks so much for letting us know, that's great news! All the best for the future.
Hooray!
I hope somehow we can help you out in the future.
I hope you are okay.
Holy shit.
If magic9mushroom never posts again, I guess we'll know what happened.
I wonder if there are any organizations devoted to legalizing (or even just decriminalizing) fictional child porn. I've never heard of any. Perry makes a pretty good argument — written in blood — that anti-fictional-child-porn laws harm adults.
The idea that violence in video games causes real-world violence is well and truly discredited; I must have killed a thousand virtual people in Just Cause 3 yesterday (felt a little bad about it, but the game is otherwise quite fun). Why, then, should we expect anything different than "fictional child porn makes pedophiles less likely to offend"?
Similarly I have oft criticized laws against marijuana (even though I am not interested in using marijuana) because it makes it impossible to *even study the question* of whether it is net-harmful, since researchers can't exactly do an RCT with illegal drugs.
The principle: don't make anything illegal without *first* proving harm.
We can't measure benefits from a law like this, but we can certainly see the harms. Anything that drives people to suicide is a major fucking harm!
It sounds like Australian law is roughly as draconian as in the US. One site says "Child pornography laws in Australia state that all sexualised depictions of children under the age of 18...are illegal and it has banned photographs of women with an A breast cup size even in their late 20s as "encouraging pedophilia"... there is a zero-tolerance policy in place, which covers purely fictional children as well as real children.
But Perry, wouldn't you be able to make the case against this law much better as a defendant? Even if you lose the case, we maybe we can make famous the case of an ACX regular who was convicted as a sex offender for writing "fanfiction on a prompt from another and ages of the characters weren't really on my mind".
But also, just because Julien reports you to the police doesn't mean they decide to charge you. You could at least wait and see whether they will lay charges before killing yourself.
Also, fuck Julien and his "axioms". But Perry, don't count on Julien learning his lesson if you kill yourself. Assholes typically stay that way.
Please take a few moments to reconsider to make sure your not acting irrationally. You can always proceed later. You have more to add to our world than you think.
I've emailed your residence.
Hey, if you're still with us, please just call Lifeline first at 13 11 14
Hey, lawyers can often get people out of things. You probably wouldn't be convicted of whatever the police try to do.
Oh my god oh my god!! I can edit this comment??!!?
Edit: I totally can! It's glorious! Cute how it's all by itself in a one-item submenu!
I haven't read the references (I know, typical internet comment-poster ;-), but I just don't understand the pessimism about Omicron. So far, *all* the data on it has been showing it to produce only very mild illness in the vast majority of cases. The strongest evidence of this is of course South Africa. Many have dismissed this, using the argument that South Africa has a very young population, so they're on average much less susceptible to bad outcomes. To this, I answer with data showing overall death rates for South Africa for the pandemic as a whole. Worldometers puts them at 1,500/million, making them #55 on the list of countries, just ahead of Sweden, but almost double the rate of Canada (787/MM). Some European countries have higher rates, some have lower, but it's clearly not the case that South Africa is an outlier in death rates.
The biggest problem I see with Omicron is that it's likely to sideline a lot of health care workers when they have to quarantine after infection. I just don't see anything suggesting mortality anywhere close to earlier strains.
(And yes, I understand that it could have lower mortality but still be a problem due to its much higher infectivity. - But AFAIK, we're just not seeing anything that suggests that the higher infectivity is enough to overcome the mildness of its symptoms.)
Assume for a moment that omicron is *precisely* as dangerous as previous variants, except that it has the new ability to reinfect people who have taken vaccines or who have already had Covid before, *but* (as is the case for previous variants) when it reinfects people, they are much less likely to get less serious illness (edit: than those who are unvaccinated and infected for the first time).
Starting from this assumption, we would expect to see much lower rates of serious illness and death among people with omicron, simply because most of the people who catch it are vaccinated or previously had Covid.
Edit: To show that omicron is less dangerous, you'd need to study outcomes for a population who is unvaccinated and has never before been infected. Good luck with that (Edit 2: actually I was persuaded Omicron is less severe by a NYT piece that didn't do that: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html). In the absence of such a study I would assume that omicron is equally deadly, simply on priors (as I have seen no study of a population without prior immunity who caught omicron). Indeed, I wonder if even the "common cold" might kill people if they managed to reach age 65 without ever getting a cold.
In London, where the Omicron spread is most advanced, hospital admissions for 19-20 Dec were 70% higher than 12-13 Dec. However, *cases* for the same period 5 days earlier than those dates showed a much bigger jump. Specifically, cases on 14-15 Dec were 202% higher than cases on 7-8 Dec.
So cases go 3x as Omicron takes hold but hospital admissions a few days later only go to 1.7x. Sounds like good news to me. And we already might be at the peak in London - the UK data lists all case data in London before 19 Dec as "complete", and we see that cases peaked on the 15th and then dropped over the next 3 days.
[ETA] and even the 1.7x rise takes us to only 35% of the early-2021 peak admissions volume. So still a lot of room even for another doubling+ of Omicron cases.
So uh, what paper percentage of posters here, or the people at the meet up were secretly space lizards?
Studies suggest 2-5%
My mother (70 years old, vaccinated) has covid. She was about to start a regimen of Fluvoxamine, but now that Paxlovid is legalized will seek that out. Should she take both or just Paxlovid?
I don't have any insider information but I would think Paxlovid, even if approved, may not be *immediately* available, so Fluvoxamine might be good to start at least.
Pfizer has said they will ship 10M doses to the US before 2022, I don't know how far that supply might go, and it may not reach your mother in time
Yea, seems like she won't be able to access Paxlovid quickly, at least for today
How are analyses of current COVID strains taking into effect the population change of already having had the most vulnerable population die over the past two years? The US spent most of February-May 2020 letting COVID run through nursing homes. The people most likely to die already did. The population of survivors is not the same population from alpha strain mortality rates.
If any new strain posts death numbers like 2020 despite vaccination, despite better treatments, and despite having already killed off the most vulnerable half-million people in the US, I am just going into seclusion for a couple of months.
According to the CDC's statistics, excess deaths from the Delta wave in October were only somewhat below excess deaths from previous waves - in other words, the first alpha wave didn't burn through the entire vulnerable population.
I don't know how many times that pattern will hold - does that mean Omicron should be similar but a little lower or is Delta the last gasp? - but it seems like the nursing home thing didn't change the overall course of the pandemic that much. There are lots of 70-year-olds who *aren't* in nursing homes, after all.
Thats a very good point. A lot of people who'd be most susceptible to bad outcomes simply aren't around any more. There's also an unknown but almost certainly significant level of natural immunity out there.
El Gato Malo posted an interesting piece (https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/are-covid-vaccines-reducing-hospitalizations) looking at infection and death rates in the New England stats. Roughly similar climate, currently very similar levels of vaccination. The interesting part is that the three more northern states (Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine) are currently having huge spikes in cases, whereas Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are doing much better. He uses excess all-cause-mortality deaths as a proxy for the actual COVID levels (vs only identified cases), and finds that those numbers in 2020 are pretty strongly negatively correlated with current new-infection rates. He attributes this to natural immunity.
All that said, though, very good point about the winnowing effect of prior mortality.
How would you all go about getting a high-risk person close to the front of the line for pavloxid treatment? I was really heartened to see the news about imminent approval because a very high-risk family member was recently exposed, but I think without hustle he would definitely not get it in time. I plan to call hospitals in his area tomorrow -- anything else?
Thanks for your response!
Given the diversity of bone marrow antigen groups, how many bone marrow donors would be needed to create a marrow bank that had samples matching every possible recipient?
I've heard 1:25,000 as the rough chance of two random people having compatible marrow.
Be the Match says the odds of finding a match range from 29% to 79% depending on ethnicity, so I guess take their registry size and multiply it by 4? But plausibly you could do it with much fewer if you focused your additions on the groups that need the most increase in coverage.
(Source: https://bethematch.org/transplant-basics/matching-patients-with-donors/how-does-a-patients-ethnic-background-affect-matching/)
As Omicron appears on track to ravage the US, very few political leaders appear to even be considering lockdowns. Should I take this as evidence that lockdowns (beyond, say, March 2020, when I think the case for lockdowns was strongest) were always a mistake? Or at least, that the vast majority of Americans feel that prolonged lockdowns were a mistake, so it would be political suicide to reimpose them? Even if it's the answer to latter question, my sense is that it says a lot about the former. Yet another data point to add to the pile of underwhelming data on lockdown effectiveness: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more.
I haven't read ACT's article on lockdown effectiveness, but I don't think there has been a whole lot of evidence that they're especially effective. There are a *lot* of confounding factors in trying to compare different countries, states or even locales, but a big one is seasonality - complicated by the fact that "seasonality" in this case relates to how much time people spend in indoor spaces, vs the more usual winter/summer sort of distinction. (Southern states peak in the summer, northern states peak in the winter; I think the common element is just people spending more time in poorly-ventilated spaces.) Seasonality looks to be an order of magnitude stronger effect than lockdowns, so even a minor misalignment in that dimension could completely swamp the signal for lockdown effectiveness.
A lot of people are sick of lockdowns. I live in a red state, but in a blue city so we had municipal lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. We had a mayoral election a few months ago and a red candidate cinched the victory by running on a campaign of stopping all city mandates on COVID. The city council is trying to override him on a mask mandate, but there's definitely a lot of people willing to come out and protest against it.
Interesting. I guess my question is what status we should accord this widespread sentiment. For example, there are plenty of issues (e.g. carbon tax) that I think are a good idea, but are hugely unpopular. So it's in principle possible that renewed lockdowns could be a good idea, despite being hugely unpopular. But I can also think of a few reasons why the analogy would break down in critical ways. For one, lockdowns require compliance to have any hope of being effective, and compliance won't be there (and may not have been there for a long time the last time around). For another, lockdowns demand a very immediate and personal sacrifice, beyond what governments routinely ask of citizens (e.g. all forms of taxation). So their widespread rejection in liberal democracies perhaps needs to be viewed as more dispositive than, say, the rejection of a new tax. And then it's a further question, although not far-fetched in my view, of whether we can extrapolate the current situation backwards in time to the previous lockdown debates.
You're definitely right. When the city council rammed through a mask mandate over the mayors objections, I forgot my mask when I went into a grocery store and started to panic. But then I saw that over half of the people in there didn't have masks, despite the big sign out front saying masks are required by municipal mandate. Since then I often go maskless (I'm very forgetful, and I'm vaccinated so I don't worry too much) and nobody has ever mentioned it. I don't think I've seen a single store around here actually ask someone to leave because they don't have a mask. Without public buy in these kinds of mandates are ineffective. But then again, half the people there did have masks. Maybe they wouldn't have without the mandate.
I'm looking for an old ACT/SSC essay whose thesis it was that a small, constant percentage of public survey results should be discounted because the respondents are either insane or answering nonsensically because they think it is funny. One of the essay's examples was that something like 5% of people said they believed Lizard Men ran the world.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
That's it!
also https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/ is very related
Yes, actually I thought the same. The term "arrogant bluffing" begs to be mentioned when discussing these related topics.
I have a proposal for a silly investment scam and I am curious if it is illegal.
Step 1: Identify an asset held by a lot of skittish investors.
Step 2: Wait for the asset's price to drop 10% due to random market fluctuations.
Step 3: Short the asset.
Step 4: Send out a PR blast to anyone you can reach informing them that the asset has PLUNGED 10%.
Step 5: Investors panic sell.
Step 6: Profit.
Normally this sort of scheme involves lying in step 4 ("I have inside information about how this asset will perform in the future"), is it still securities fraud if all you're doing is reporting public information, without a call to action?
Without Step 2, that's "Short and Distort". It's a mirror-image of the better-known "Pump and Dump" scam, and is probably illegal under more or less the same provisions. I think the legal theory is that even if you aren't overtly lying, it's still deceptive at a legally-actionable level because you're deliberately leading the audience to draw conclusions you know are incorrect.
https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2018/10/sec-fires-warning-shot-against/
Step 2 seems like it muddies the waters on the "deceptive intent" front, depending on how easy you make it for regulators/prosecutors to demonstrate you believed the initial drop was really just noise. If you can plausibly argue that you shorted it because you believed that drop was likely to continue in the medium term and you attempted to share that information with others so they could profit from a similar strategy (or for some other benign reason other than market manipulation), then that seems like it would negate the "deceptive intent" element of the crime.
Add "Rubber" to the list of "crops that do well outside of their native land". Not that rubber does badly in South America, but growing it monocrop plantation-style there is basically creating a feast for its pests. Henry Ford had to learn that the hard way in the early 20th century, when he tried to set up a Ford-owned rubber supply in the Amazon.
I hope neither myself nor anyone I care about has to use a hospital in the next month or so. That's not going to be fun if Omicron slams the ICUs again just through sheer number of cases (Utah still has a decent number of people who aren't fully vaccinated).
Not sure if channels like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown tend to be a little elementary for people in this crowd, but I think this recent video is well worth a watch/listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJyKM-7IgAU&t=0s (it's a followup to a previous video, but this is the more interesting one imo). It's a nice discussion on the philosophy of mathematics.
Could someone look at the graph in the post and say how much merit the claim that "masks did nothing" has? (My explanation is that obviously we have no idea what would have happened without masks, so this is a classic correlation != causation example, but I'd like to know more about the context of this if anyone has some. Thanks!)
direct link to the graph: https://empathyguru.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/https-bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com-public-images-455d6148-8746-4380-ac4f-5709059dcdf9_4096x2309.jpeg
(via https://empathy.guru/2021/07/19/the-structural-memetics-of-masks/ via twitter noise)
The graph is insufficient to merit the claim that "masks did nothing".
The graph is also insufficient to merit the claim that "masks did something".
So, if your prior is that "masks do nothing", then maybe you look at this and conclude "masks did nothing".
Thanks!
What's a good condition to judge when an intervention did something? (So I guess we'd need a "natural experiment" - to be free of problems of endogeneity, and then we need to do the usual analysis between the "endpoints"? But maybe there are other valid designs too?)
If the intervention is neither mandatory nor forbidden, you can always randomize trial participants into getting the intervention or not. This gets tricky with something like masks where you have to monitor compliance and you get into some miserable confounder problems around "What if willingness to comply is correlated with the outcome we're studying?" The most common design for dealing with this problem appears to be "Assume they're not correlated."
We've had some great recent interviews on the Futurati Podcast.
Our discussion with Brad Templeton covered the metaverse and VR (he's hopeful about the tech but skeptical that it's ready for the big time), genetic privacy (it's hard), and assorted tech history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k29UKs8Ljzg
The conversation with Max Galka, the CEO of my Elementus, revolved around ransomware (it sucks) and potential future uses of the blockchain (autonomous vehicles, possibly).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NdNwxd--M
Radhika Iyengar-Emens is an expert in deeptech and had a lot to say about blockchain and healthcare. I'm loathe to link to it because it's sitting at a compelling 69 (nice) views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yZZ3pi5PZY
It was a real treat speaking with Peter McCormack, Bitcoin OG and host of the biggest Bitcoin podcast in the world. The conversation touched on BTC vs Gold (he's pro-Bitcoin), BTC vs altcoins (he's pro-Bitcoin), and monetary economics (he's pro-Bitcoin).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLHPzPbu5JU
A personal favorite was my solo chat with astrophysicist Aleksandra Ćiprijanović. She's working on using techniques from my own field (machine learning) to study galactic mergers, cosmology, and the large-scale structure of the universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZcCuViQPzQ
Check 'em out!
Has anyone tried to get the people calling constantly to buy the house fined $500 for violating the do-not-call list regulations?
I occasionally report spam callers to the FTC, but I'm not optimistic of it doing anything.
Are they the same people? If yes, could you try telling them 2× the current market price?
I am not an American, but it seems like you should start here: https://www.donotcall.gov/report.html
> Are they the same people?
Yes, sometimes the exact same people. Sophia has specifically called me several times and I recognize her voice now.
I hope this doesn't count as politics, but I think it doesn't have to. It's more psychology in my mind.
Reading a recent essay from The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/omicron-pandemic-giving-up/621004/) I was struck by a thought. It seems, reading a bit between the lines, that he's asking a very serious question - Why doesn't someone fix COVID? It's been two years, and it's not been fixed, so he is upset that it hasn't been fixed. He can talk about reasons why he thinks it has not been fixed (people not getting vaxxed, not wearing masks, whatever), but his ultimate complaint is that nobody fixed it.
Underlying that line of thought is the assumption that it's *fixable* in the first place. That there are steps that humans can take that will make it go away. I'm reminded of an opposite conversation I had with a volunteer fire chief a year or so ago. He wasn't wearing masks or social distancing, and he was up front about that. He was routinely exposed to dozens or hundreds of people in close physical contact, and vaccinations did not exist. He wasn't exactly fatalistic about it, but he understood that he was almost certainly going to get COVID, no matter what protections he could try. He understood that there was no fix for it, and dealt with it as made sense to him. The alternative - no emergency services - was not a possible consideration, so he dealt with exposure to COVID on a near-constant basis and just moved on mentally.
People that I have known who did not have any options but to be exposed to COVID tend to accept it as a reality to be mitigated, rather than a single problem to be solved. They are much more comfortable with risk management solutions and evaluating tradeoffs. Those who are able to avoid exposure seem to be waiting for a fix, a moment when the problem is solved.
Thoughts?
You've hit the nail on the head. There are a host of very immature people who believe that COVID can be solved and that if it's not then someone must be to blame. I think it has to do with a refusal to accept that people generally don't have any control over their own fates.
Well, there's the China example, which at least appears to have "fixed" it to a greater degree than anywhere else. I guess that if you consider lockdowns and such acceptable, and have some evidence that stricter lockdowns could've done the job, then it seems a natural reaction to be upset that people in charge didn't do what had to be done.
Isn't this true in Australia and New Zealand too? Whether or not it's impractical/feasible for the United States to take measures that drastic, it's still an argument against the idea that nothing can be done.
That's if you accept the Chinese explanation that cases and deaths pretty much suddenly and fully stopped happening early in the pandemic. Considering the outbreaks in multiple neighboring countries, I find that difficult to believe. According to official stats back in early 2020, the case count shot up to 80,000 and suddenly stopped, while the virus raged across the world. Maybe that's what happened in a massively populated country with an active virus, but I'm very doubtful.
If it did work, whether fully or partly, it was reportedly a massive infringement on every right imaginable. What I heard was that people were locked in their homes with armed guards outside, and if they didn't have enough food or anything else, tough luck. Maybe that's a "solution" that a government could implement to "fix" a virus, but I think most of us are fully against that. Even the more mild versions of strict lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand are harsher that most countries seem willing to deal with. And they have no off ramp. Eventually COVID will make its way there, and they will have outbreaks as well, and they'll only really have purchased time. If they spend 10 years locked down first, will they really have gained anything?
Yeah. China stopped testing heavily and stopped reporting cases diligently. They didn't solve COVID.
Well, many think that both what China did is unacceptable (but maybe effective), and most of what the West did and does is unacceptable too, and almost certainly ineffective, maybe even net negative. Of course, one can have an argument about shades of grey and all that, but what's the point? It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close, and nobody has anything resembling a plan of how to get from here to there. I guess what's left is to count ourselves lucky that no actual martial law-worthy crisis is here yet.
> It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close
Slovakia only had 28 deaths (out of 5 million population) during the first 6 months of 2020. Closed schools, mandatory masks, testing at borders, tracking contacts, limits on number of people per m2 in supermarkets, a few more things I don't remember -- but nowhere near China.
In autumn 2020 we gave up, because keeping the schools closed was unsustainable in long term. (Also, strong Russian propaganda that covid is just a hoax invented by evil Americans. Which, given the very low number of victims, ironically seemed more believable.) Until then, it seemed quite plausible that you just need to keep school closed and track contacts for a few months... and then a vaccine will come, the cases will drop to zero, and the schools can open again. But the vaccines came 6 months too late.
I believe that if all countries did the same, we all actually would have a chance. But if you have too many people in democratic countries yelling: "we are doomed anyway, so let's not do anything and just get sick as soon as possible, so that those who survive get immune and can continue with life as usual", this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, maybe except for the part about getting immunity, because if you have millions of people infected, new mutations are going to appear.
I suppose there is the option of rushing out a vaccine with very limited testing (skipping as much of the approval process as possible), but otherwise it seems very unsustainable to shut down the world economy for any virus with less than XX% mortality rate. I don't know what XX% should be, but it has to be a greater number than the people killed, and probably greater than the number impoverished, if you shut everything down.
If we do testing to ensure a vaccine is safe, then we're making tradeoffs of one kind of pain instead of another. No option there is perfect, which is mostly my original point.
Not that China's strategy is even a long-term solution *for China*. Even assuming their numbers are accurate and they indeed stopped the virus temporarily, so what? In that case their population has not had a chance to develop any immunity, while the official Chinese vaccine is sufficiently worse than the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines that one wonders whether it's even worth distributing against the nowadays dominant strains Delta and now Omicron.
And even if China's draconian measures were strong enough to stop the spread of the initial variant, is it plausible that they and their population have so much slack that these measures can be ramped up several-fold to keep Omicron in check, too?
Sinovac is just as protective against severe disease as our fancy expensive vaccines, and that's what matters.
Reminds me of Scott's review of "The Revolt of the Public".
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public
"In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!"
It doesn't sound like that fire chief was treating it as a reality to be mitigated. Wouldn't he wear a mask if he was trying to mitigate it? I could understand not "social distancing" - I'm using scare quotes because it means lots of different things to different people, but some of those things are ones that are incompatible with providing emergency services (surely others *are* compatible though). But not wearing a mask seems to be very much in the fatalist camp, of being equally uncomfortable with tradeoffs and risk management as the people that are doing useless things. He just came down on the other side of not even doing things that are easy and won't interfere with his activities.
Masks don't really do anything against COVID tho so if he understands that fact it's hardly fatalism.
If there's a near 100% certainty of getting COVID, then wearing masks or similar is just a matter of delaying the inevitable. That was how he explained it to me, and that makes sense to me as well. He was more interested in getting it over with, and was not willing to pay any cost, even a fairly small one, simply to delay what was going to happen anyway. There is a cost to wearing a mask, and social distancing, and cancelling every event in your life for two years. He decided that those costs were not worthwhile to him, which is what I mean by tradeoffs.
But if you think there's a 100% chance you get it at least once, then you should think it's very likely that you'll get it multiple times. Wouldn't you care about how frequently you get it? And wouldn't you care about not infecting people while you do your emergency work, and at least wear a mask then? (Maybe they already do wear masks 100% of the time while working.)
I'd guess he was thinking in terms of getting it once and then being immune, so it doesn't matter when you get it the one time. That makes sense for people who have never heard the phrase "breakthrough infection". It also makes sense for people who know that breakthrough infections are a thing but also that they are generally milder than the original; for a healthy middle-aged man (fire chief) that's easy to mentally file in the same category as the cold or flu that you expect to get every year anyway.
Any thoughts on how a person who received the J & J vaccine initially and a Pfizer booster will fare against omicron?
Not asking for a friend.
14 million received the J & J - I know, a small part of 330 million. - They get frustrated when told to get their third shot though.
Beats the hell out of zero doses, I suppose.
The single J&J shot seems to have greater duration of protection than the mRNA vaccines. It fades more slowly.
I would phrase that differently: The body does not want to be ramped up to defcon 4 all the time, so the higher the protection the more quickly it wanes. Repeated exposures can convince the body to keep some excess virus fighting capacity around longer.
The J&J shot still provides a greater duration of protection than two mRNA shots no matter how you phrase it.
Natural immunity also provides fewer initial antibodies, albeit with much broader protection. Natural immunity turns out to be much better than that of vaccines though because it fades at less than 5% per month whereas the vaccines tend to fade by 40% per month or more.
That is not consistent with any of the data I've seen, at all. Here's where I get my best estimate of post-infection immunity compared to mRNA vaccination derived immunity:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7044e1-H.pdf
5.5x higher risk of being hospitalized with COVID for those who have recovered from infection >90 days as compared to people who have completed a 2 dose mRNA vaccination regimen. Even if recovering from infection <90 prior, still better to have gotten a 2 dose mRNA vaccine. No data in this study on J&J, could you share your source?
Over 100 studies showing the power of natural immunity: https://brownstone.org/articles/79-research-studies-affirm-naturally-acquired-immunity-to-covid-19-documented-linked-and-quoted/
Re J&J: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/620863/
The immunity conferred by convalescence is broader and more effective because it increases defense not just against the easily-mutated spike protein that the vaccines are narrowly obsessed with, but also against the nucleocapsid 'body' of the virus. Data from England bears this out: those who get vaccinated before they get infected have fewer n-antibodies than those who get infected then vaccinated.
This is the phenomenon of Original Antigenic Sin in action. It's why we are handicapping our children by vaccinating them.
I'm a grad student in Epidemiology, I’ve been asked this question a few times by friends and family. Here’s what I got:
First: Let's compare someone who, like you, got J&J then boosted with Pfizer to someone who got two Pfizer shots, then boosted with another Pfizer:
https://www.fda.gov/media/153128/download Slide 22
Bottom left is you, bottom right graph is 3 doses of pfizer. Both have similar levels of neutralizing antibody titer. The geometric mean for J&J-> Pfizer is 1410, while the geometric mean for Pfizer x3 is 1846, and J&J->J&J is 130. J&J itself is around 31, and 2 doses of Pfizer is 88. So, you are much, much, MUCH more protected than before your booster, much more protected than if you boosted with J&J, and a little bit less protected than if you'd gotten 3 mRNA doses- but you are much closer to 3 doses of Pfizer than you are to 2 doses of Pfizer in terms of neutralizing antibodies.
Next: let's see how 3 dose Pfizer works against Omicron.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1468941317724000257
Pink is Omicron, green is Wuhan strain, light blue is Delta. Left is 2 doses of Pfizer, right is three doses of Pfizer. We can see that three doses of Pfizer gives you about the same neutralizing antibody protection against Omicron as 2 doses gives against Wuhan strain.
Last: what does a neutralizing antibody titer mean in terms of protection?
More neutralizing antibodies are good, and help you prevent any infection, but 40x more antibodies does not mean 40x more protection. These are the easiest part of your immune system to measure, but also the fastest to degrade. There’s really no good data about t-cell immunity from different dosing regimens (there’s barely any t-cell data at all) but there’s no reason to think that your t-cell immunity would be meaningfully lower than an mRNA regimen, and the longer space between doses is likely to help elicit a better t-cell response.
These are rough estimates, and only based on neutralizing antibodies, but they're at least in the right ballpark. Hope that helps!
Measures based solely on neutralizing antibodies are incomplete at best because the vaccines only provide neutralizing antibodies for the 2019 strain of the virus they are based off of. These antibodies are much less effective against omicron no matter how many there are.
Yeah, I literally said they're incomplete, and the second source is to a comparison of neutralizing ability against Omicron
Hi James M, thank you for this. A question for you, if I may? It looks from that presentation like the Moderna "booster" was actually a full dose third shot and not the half-dose being used as current booster. Is that right?
The last slide seems to suggest that cross boosting between the mRNA shots is a bit better, unless I'm misunderstanding.
I've had two Pfizer shots and the next scheduled booster I can access is a Moderna half dose, which as far as I can tell hasn't been studied?
I'm trying to decide whether to wait another week to get a third Pfizer instead (their third dose is the same as their booster?), to go ahead and get the Moderna, or ask for a full dose of Moderna based on being mildly immune compromised (not moderately or severely as the CDC requires).
I also don't know if there's no meaningful difference between any of these choices given as you say that the longer-term immune response is much more complicated and there may be no significance at that level.
If you feel comfortable weighing in on any of this, it would be most welcome.
Yes, that presentation used a full 100 ug dose of Moderna, and they have since switched to a 50 ug dose. They have indeed studied the Moderna half dose a lot, just not publicly available data. Pfizer uses a 30 ug dose. If you want to optimize everything for antibody response, Moderna is the way to go, but there is not a big difference. Also, people on average report feeling shittier after a Moderna booster than after a Pfizer booster. FWIW I had two Pfizer doses originally, and just got boosted with Pfizer, but would have been fine doing Moderna too. The original Moderna two-shot regimen was slightly better at preventing hospitalization than Pfizer, but it's unclear how much of that was due to the dosage (which has changed) or the time between first and second dose (which doesn't matter for a booster)
Thanks so much for this! I will head to my Moderna boost with an easy mind and hope for not too bad a reaction. Much appreciated!
Tylenol 30 min post shot with lots of rest and water, friend :)
Yeah, it does help. Thank you.
I'm in the same boat as you.
https://twitter.com/Super70sSports/status/1472405661719879682?s=20
That’s pretty funny
Over the last half year or so, I have been looking into therapy for fixing reoccurring mild depression. I have some thoughts. People who have had more experience (and/or an actual therapist, by "looking into" I mean attempting a gestalt of different techniques and seeing if anything would stick), feel free to chime in.
I'm prefacing this with the fact that the therapy techniques I looked at are more emotionally focused than being analytical, so some of my concerns are the 'play with fire, get burned' variety. Nevertheless, I think therapy techniques as a whole consider emotions to be a big thing to work on, so the comment should still be mildly applicable in general.
1. The mind seems to be incredibly malleable
I didn't realize this when I started, but after going through focusing (and what seemed like extremely revelatory, um, revelations) and IFS (and what seemed to be ideas which had enough cognitive complexity to be qualified to be agents in their own right), it really seems like my mind is willing to adopt any context that I offer-that is, while these sort of ideas seem 'undeniably correct' in the moment, it's mostly because my mind is so eager to fill the latest mold I offer, sort of. I still have to think through the implications of that (does meditation do anything in particular, other than installing a very persistent idea that the mind eventually assimilates enough for it to remain in 'consciousness' without prompting? "if your mind is so malleable, why don't you just manipulate your bad feelings away?") but one thing I've realized is..it probably doesn't matter what therapy you use, if the therapist is competent enough to walk you through whatever problem you have. (A bit of handwaving here: what does 'competent enough' mean? if therapy is just 'theater of the mind', what is a therapist actually doing? questions that I have no answer to, given I've never been to an actual therapist.)
2. Trying to fix emotion-space while being in emotion-space is hard
A little context. Techniques like Focusing and IFS place particular emphasis on trying to access your subconscious and realizing the reason for any resistance you have, because usually the mind has a good reason for that resistance to be there. Afterwards, you have techniques that allow disparate parts of your mind to compromise and come to a consensus.
This...never really worked for me. I'd get to figuring out what the problem is, but working with emotions directly, especially for strong emotions is....imagine elementals who cannot be anything but themselves. A bunch of emotional processing was like that. Admittedly, that was not always true; sometimes I'd get parts of my mind to agree, specifically in terms of attempting to reduce resistance for a task I was putting off. But one way or another, the task would still be left undone.
One thing that a lot of emotion-based therapy techniques seem to imply is that, after solving the internal issue relating to whatever you were having a problem with, it would take you no effort at all to do the external thing. If I was uninterested in literature, but had to study literature for college in either case and had no other option-after I convinced myself of that, I would be able to open up some medieval poetry and go through it without a single ounce of boredom. Now some of that is probably my own misunderstandings about how therapies of this kind work, but more than once I've found myself stuck in a loop where I would ask myself "do I feel okay about doing this?", find a part of my mind disagreeing, try to resolve whatever the issue was, ask myself again "do I feel okay about doing this?" find an issue again...
I call this using therapy as a form of procrastination. It might feel good when doing it, and you certainly feel like you're accomplishing things, but nevertheless external reality remains as it is.
3. Stepping out of emotion-space is useful
I remember reading a post called "developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence", which was a look into Robert Kegan's developmental stages. What I specifically remember from that is the subject-object distinction. When you're a child, your wants are object; you are them and they are you, and your worldview is based on what you want-and, in general, you don't really neglect what you want in favor of anything else, unless that something else is a want that takes higher priority. As you grow older, though, your wants are 'object'-you're not your wants anymore, you have wants, which you can satisfy and neglect at will. They're a part of you, sure, but they are not the whole of who you are.
I've been able to do a similar thing with emotions. It may just be repression, I don't know, but-worrying about a thing that needs to be done, wanting to do something but wanting to play video games instead, being sad about how your life isn't shaping up, etc, etc-you can sort of..take these as object, in terms of 'stepping out' of your emotional context and looking at your emotions as though you're an external observer. mentally, it almost feels like taking a physical step back and creating a sense of distance? I'm not sure if I can explain it better. It's that, with the awareness that emotions are something that you have, not something that you are, and creating the distance required to think about things a little more carefully.
A lot of this possibly reads like I've discovered actual self-control for the first time. Which...maybe. But again, not really, because again-the concept of control itself, of fighting 'against' something-is a part of the emotional context, and thinking within the context to fix the context is hard. It's more like just dropping the link between feeling and behavior? and having something sitting in the middle. (I'm sorry this all sounds somewhat handwavey. Mind stuff is hard.)
either way, I'm not deriding therapy in general-far from it. Clearly it seems to work for a whoe lot of people. It just seems to me that, for people like me, trying to handle emotional content while within that emotional content is hard. And again, for people like me, it may be useful to try to discover the mental move that lets you 'step out' and take your context as object, so you can think a little more clearly.
Personally, I found that the mind is shaped almost exclusively by what we do, not what we think - behavioral activation therapies are on the right track. 5th year of remission of my atypical depression right now, life's good.
The "stepping out" phenomenon you describe is also important, ideally followed with "I don't want to do stuff but I'm gonna do stuff anyway instead of staring at the wall/doomscrolling on the phone".
This seems right, too. I remember Lukeprog writing about things like success spirals and things like that, which do definitely work. It just seems like doing stuff when you're hopeless and see no meaning in anything-well, doing anything at all seems pointless. (It's a trap, but I always forget it's a trap.) I've almost been tempted to write protocols for myself: "whenever you feel like there is no meaning to life and everything is worthless, stop and immediately fix sun availiability/sleep schedule/do things, even if you don't feel like doing them, even if your entire brain yells at you about how pointless it is."
Can you go into a little more detail about what sort of things you did with regards to fixing your atypical depression, if it's not too personal? is it something specific, or more in the sense of "do stuff as though the depression didn't exist, regardless of what your feelings tell you"?
Not familiar with behavioral activation therapy, will look into it.
My recovery has been very much a "two steps forward, one step back" thing.
I bought a bike and loved it as a way of commuting (I've been living carless at the time, in a European city), which spilled over into recreational rides and exploring my surroundings. I said yes to pretty much every social invitation even if I weren't feeling like attending, and almost always it was a good idea that pulled me further out of depression (despite needing to recharge afterwards, as an introvert). A friend got me started with bouldering, which is an amazing sport for someone living way too much inside one's head and not enough within the body.
Perhaps the most significant therapeutic intervention was a friend extending an offer to go to the other side of the globe for a two week backpacking trip. Our destination was... not exactly known for safety, but as a still relatively depressed person "fuck it what do I have to lose" convinced me. The context switch, actually hazardous situations and a huge load of new experiences reset something in my brain, and somehow the progress I've made over the previous year solidified into a more confident and upbeat personality. I've started taking risks, started _dating_ which wasn't really on the table for quite a while, found my SO who stabilizes me to this day whenever I'm feeling like relapsing.
As you can see I've been lucky to have a support network, but the thing with depression is, it makes you isolate yourself from any supporting people you have and not seek out any new ones. This is a literal death spiral and should be resisted at all costs - contact with people who are relatively stable will stabilize you as well.
Ah, this makes a lot of sense. I was actually hoping for a reset-like experience when starting college earlier previous year, but covid means online classes which means that didn't really...happen.
The funny/sad thing about a support network is the fact that, even when I have it, I use it the least when I need it the most ("people are dealing with their own problems, I'll just add on to that", even when most of that could just be circumvented by asking if they have time etc). Brains are weird.
FWIW, a friend wanted to kick my ass for not telling him when I mentioned I was suicidal some time ago.
Perhaps you shouldn't bring everyone down with your depressive rumination on a party, but from what I've noticed (being on both sides of this, at different times) one on one people are very eager to help.
You are being more of a bother by isolating yourself and making your friends wonder wtf is wrong.
Hah, yeah, fair enough. The algorithm in my head is just-a bunch of people have asked me for help, and sometimes I don't really have the mental bandwidth to help them, but I almost feel obligated to help because it's just...something I do. It's possible that the same thing would be true for someone else I ask for help, in which case I don't want to obligate them to help me.
A lot of that seems to be mental contortion, though, and in general when I've asked help from people they haven't really been very unhappy about it. (So much of figuring out this sort of stuff seems to be learning how to ignore motivated reasoning.)
Right, completely agree about the reactions thing-even when you know what you ought to do to escape a bad emotional state, it just doesn't seem..worth it. (Some sort of local maximum? shrug)
I've tried setting up systems etc-but i've generally been pretty averse to doing things with other people, due to a bunch of reasons, and as you said it's hard to maintain reoccurring activities by yourself. I'm also not Conscientious, so sticking to schedules etc (or weekly things) never consistently worked for me. Probably need to either improve on pulling more people in, or increasing Conscientiousness.
Meditation is something that I've been trying on and off for quite a while, actually. A lot of the benefit from it really seems to be if you do it consistently, so in general it didn't seem very worthwhile. (That's also just gut feeling, though, and it seems like instincts have a hard time with judging things which are effective over a fe wmonths vs. effective over a week etc.) I think the distancing thing I talked about is somewhat similar to meditation? they give me similar clarity, at least.
Huh. Interesting! I'm not necessarily very neurotic, but that seems a good way to think about it. Probably another way to look at the emotional context as a context, rather than 'all that is'? curious, in either case.
Do you have the original source you got this from? I'd like to take a look.
How much has our understanding of neuroscience changed in the last 15 years? I have a textbook "Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 3rd Edition", published in 2006, which I was planning on reading in order to get a basic understanding of neuroscience. Would it be alright for me to do this, or would the information be too outdated and I should get a more up-to-date book?
I got my PhD in neuroscience in 2017, I believe I used that textbook (2nd edition) as an undergrad and it's quite good.
Things that should be the same: almost all of the neuroanatomy, most of the information on development, all the basic principals around electrophysiology
Things that have been updated: Almost everything related to genetics, a lot of pharmacokinetics, anything related to fMRI correlates with psychiatric disorders
So it depends on what exactly you're interested in, but as a general overview of the whole field I think it's a great starting point
Epistemic status: I'm an engineer and only read neuroscience as a hobby. I did read the 2005 book "the brain: a very short introduction" (highly recommended as an entry point) and followed this up with a deep dive into predictive processing (emerged 2005-10 so you'll miss that) plus the excellent free textbook at https://psywww.com/intropsych/index.html (updated 2018). For a broad overview you should be good but you may want to at least check a few newer ressources. Mostly pick a book that suits your preferred reading style.
Does anyone else see two versions of comments occasionally? They look like the might be pre and post edited versions existing for a while in an odd Schoedingers Cat indefinite form.
It often happens that after I press post, I see two comments. I once tried deleting one, 'both' were gone. I think it's a bug? Fits my general prior that the Substack comment system sucks
Probably the Mandella effect
I think I saw that before they added the edit feature.
Yes
No
Oh, a wise guy. Nyuk nyuk nyuk...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtwlHV1-O8
:)
Do we know that we have "flattened the curve" in the past? Asking because that will be the purpose of coming lockdowns, and from a naive glance (and my memory of the first two huge rises in cases) it doesn't seem like we have ever flattened it. It seems like Covid case counts rise and fall for poorly understood reasons.
Yes, for sure. The first lockdown clearly flattened the curve. Collapsed the curve actually. Then summer was quiet enough for covid with increases in winter.
The summer was quiet enough for Covid? We hit new case count highs in July 2020, although that could've been a result of bad March testing, and deaths did go down after the initial surge. Do you just mean it could've been worse because we now know it got worse? How do we not know that wasn't just seasonality?
Well I was thinking about most of the rest of the world. Where I am cases fell to less than 10 a day in summer 2020. By contrast they are at 4000 now.
In any case the curve was flattened because it stopped being exponential. If the original trajectory for the virus from Feb to March 2020 had continued into the summer the numbers infected would have grown to herd immunity - depending on the R value that would be 50-80% of the population in any country. Omnicron could possibly do that too without restrictions or boosters, social distancing and mask wearing. But because we have all that it won’t.
A year ago we wrote on how Ross Perot could have won the 1994 Electoral College, and then a spoof where he did just that. Perot was famously against NAFTA ("you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country"), and in honour of one of our more adventurous models and fictions, we've whipped up a mini-post on how he got it wrong. Because NAFTA had no impact on American manufacturing jobs at all. https://armariuminterreta.com/2021/12/20/who-suckered-jobs-from-whom/
Kind of relevant/interesting, a new NBER working paper arguing that NAFTA pushed folks toward the Republican party:
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/r9rxkm/nafta_signed_by_bill_clinton_led_to_large_job/
This is a (slightly edited) post I made on Facebook, which I think could spark more interesting discussion here.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was amazing. Easily the best MCU film I've seen to date, and, reluctantly, the best Spider-Man movie on my list (edging out TASM 2).
I have more to say about the movie itself, but some more general musings first.
The MCU is by far the most impressive media project in the world by now. It's huge, it's interconnected, it's media-spanning - frankly, I'm in awe of Marvel, and Kevin Feige, for even attempting this.
I feel almost privileged to see this thing unfold before my eyes (and I haven't watched any of the TV shows, so it's definitely even bigger than I think).
It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible. Only history will tell if it succeeds - some bad choices can have it go the GoT way in a year or two (is it still fashionable to talk about how nobody talks about GoT anymore?). But for now it feels huge and epic, as it well should.
One thing annoys me immensely, though.
The MCU (and superhero movies in general, with the DCEU keeping well in the race) features dozens of characters in dozens of stories. We have aliens, robots, magic, mythical creatures, gods, monsters and sometimes even the occasional friendly spiderhood neighborman. They usually save the world, but sometimes they just save their friends, loved ones and themselves (although we need more stories like that). They go against organizations, aliens, monsters and human criminals.
And they are forced to learn different morals, of course: "With great power etc.", "Everybody deserves a second chance", "Don't give in to your anger", "Learn to forgive", "Don't pick the easy way out", "Sacrifice yourself for the greater good" and the ubiquitous "Do the right thing" (I don't know why this one is not engraved by now on every square inch of the USA, with how many times it's been said in movies).
All those different stories, different heroes, different problems they have to face.
All those same Christian morals of forgiveness and self-sacrifice and kindness they have to learn.
And still, EVERY - SINGLE - TIME -
The end goal is violence. No matter who the hero is, and what they're saving the world from, and what platitude about kindness and forgiveness their dying mentor figure told them on their deathbed, THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
The emotional climax may come later, when the hero needs to sacrifice themselves to undo the villain's plan, but the primary goal is always violence: "I'm gonna find them and kick their ass". The villain can never be talked down. Never stopped nonviolently. Never reasoned or pleaded with. There is always a fight, and worse - always the ASSUMPTION OF FIGHT. I hate it.
I know the audience expects a spectacle, and a big, destructive fight is the easiest way to get one, but I think it just means... we're not evolved enough yet. As a species, as a culture. It saddens me.
I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick.
A great way to get there would be to make more movies like The Martian, where the heroes face not a foe, but a hostile environment. This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
commenter John Lawrence Aspden mentioned in passing already the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It presents an interesting case related to your point. Subtle spoilers below.
TBOEM is essentially about a good woman who seeks justice and doesn't get it. However, in the process, she kind of unintentionally becomes the vehicle for another man's redemption journey from the archetypal Fool to something closer to Hero. In this way her desire for retribution is sacrificed / deferred / transformed, rather than plainly satisfied.
This presented a brilliant opportunity for the kind of resolution you hope for in your comic book films. Except instead of exploring that idea, the writers decided it would be better if the film ended with the protagonist woman and her new fool-turned-hero friend setting out on a vigilante mission of mindless violence, and driving off into the sunset.
It was so close to being a great film.
.
The new Netflix show Arcane obliquely addresses your wishes. Most of the characters are tempted by circumstance and through their youth/naïveté to view violence as the only solution to their woes, and a large part of the tension of the story is if/how this is deconstructed. Although it sounds like you want a story that ignores violent solutions by default, you may enjoy Arcane’s more nuanced take where characters with both high and low levels of faith in violent action are forced to grapple with the opposing viewpoint.
I hadn't heard of The Kalevala before. Thanks for mentioning it. I used to go to union meetings in a building name Kaleva Hall in the pre-internet days. I knew it was owned by a Finnish society of some sort, but I poked around a bit and it is named after The Kalevala. The things I'm learning about my old neighbors...
Watchmen has lots of violence, but it's basically portrayed as mostly counterproductive, and in the end the antagonist who kills millions as part of his convoluted plan for <spoiler> walks away more or less scot free -- the punching certainly never solves anything.
Of course the reviews on that are mixed -- maybe moviegoers prefer punching?
You guys realise there are whole genres with no pinching at all that aren’t comic book movies.
Indeed; those genres do not seem to be the topic under discussion ATM though?
I don't mind punching, but do find comic movies kind of vapid most of the time.
Now that you’ve conceptualized this, some of my favorite movies have an ending that is something other than good guy beats up bad guy.
My all time favorite movie by a large margin is Arrival, and I won’t say more for the sake of anyone who hasn’t seen it.
Other examples - Interstellar (villain was merely incidental), Moon (2009) which is an incredibly under appreciated film, and Ex Machina.
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick. "
I think the main obstacles to what you're looking for are the following:
1. Conflict is inherently interesting, because it features two intelligences working to out-maneuver each other, each with their own agency. It's a lot harder to tell a story if everyone involved agrees on what to do. Conflict doesn't need to be violent conflict. A sports story is a story of conflict; both sides want to win the game, but only one can succeed.
2. Action movies almost certainly require the protagonist to be at risk; this requires physical danger. The two traditional ways this is accomplished are fights (conflict) or disasters. The problem with disaster is that there's only so many stories you can tell where a rag-tag band of misfits is sent into space to blow up a meteor before it blows up too many landmarks rendered in CGI, mostly because the meteor doesn't have characterization or agency. Combining 'risk' with 'conflict' gets you violence.
3. There's only a few things you can spend a special-effects budget on that will bring people to the theaters. I can think of three: elaborate historical set-pieces, breathtaking fantastic worlds (including sci-fi), and wide-scale destruction. Destruction is almost certainly either disaster or war, which will give you a story to tell. The other two require a story, and most stories involve conflict and/or risk.
If you want to make a non-violent big budget movie, a fantasy sports story might be the killer app. All you need to do is the 'relatively easy' part: build the fantasy world with the sport in it, then craft the characters and write the story. Meanwhile, Marvel already has the characters and the world already built with the stories already written and tested in comic book form and with at least some name recognition.
I think Game of Thrones had the potential to be a really interesting example of conflict, not *without* violence, but at least where it's clear that the violence is the *symptom* of the conflict, rather than an attempt at a cure. Throughout the first several books, you are set up to sympathize with Daenerys, Jon, Arya, Tyrion, even though they're clearly on at least two or three different sides in the major conflicts that are brewing, and there are hints that each one (except maybe Jon) will become a source of death and destruction as bad as anything that they've faced so far.
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick."
Also, if your conflict does require defeating someone in a fight, note that the go-to way for decisively winning fights for the past five hundred years or so has been to shoot the other guy with some sort of gun, and there are really good reasons for that.
Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly.
Of course, it's hard to have witty banter in the middle of a gun battle, and witty banter is important to the comic-book tradition. But it's hard for me to care about the wittiness of anyone's words, once their actions mark them as irredeemably silly.
"Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly."
This indirectly exposes another problem with the original poster's desire for less problem solving through violence. In order to meet the needs of enough movie-goers to make your blockbuster profitable, the story has to balance the following:
1. The antagonist needs to be a credible threat, if not directly to the protagonist, then to something greater. Home Alone can get away with a couple of burglars as a threat, because the protagonist is a kid. Once your protagonist hits the 'police officer' level as in Die Hard, you need a lot of lethally-armed bad guys to be a threat. At 'super hero' level, the threat needs to be proportionately greater. A story that is John McClane vs the Home Alone crooks or even Captain America or Batman vs Hans Gruber and company is over in five minutes.
2. In contemporary fiction, most heroes don't want to kill, or at least don't want to kill anything that isn't necessary. The protagonist wants to reason with the enemy if at all possible to make it not necessary to kill them. Obviously, things that can't be reasoned with (monsters, undead, non-sentient robots, hostile aliens, etc.) can be killed. On the other hand, almost anything the hero can exchange dialog with counts as something that can be reasoned with, at least until they've demonstrated a willingness and ability to kill, are an immediate threat and have the upper hand. This conflicts with the 'just shoot the main villain' plan for anyone other than the hardened borderline sociopath (James Bond). The hero wants to win by reason, but if the villain was open to reason while still being a threat, they wouldn't be a villain. In cases where a villain can be persuaded, it helps to smack some sense into them as an adjunct to get them to listen to reason.
3. In most cases, for blockbuster mass market movies, the good guys need to win if you want the audience to go home feeling like they enjoyed your movie. This can be a bittersweet ending if the protagonist dies to save something greater. You can also get away with downer ending if it leaves the audience hyped for the sequel. The win also needs to be satisfactory; if it's handed to them via Deus Ex Machina, it's not a win. Having the story ended in seconds because the hero fired first isn't satisfactory in and of itself (though it can be if it took effort and risk to get to that point); it's easier to make a fist fight, where who's winning can change multiple times, feel satisfactory. There are ways for winning by talking the villain down or winning by trickery to be satisfactory, but likewise it requires showing effort on the part of the hero and it needs to be at least as difficult as fighting would be.
4. Likewise, the bad guys need to lose. Your bad guy had a diabolical plan. Perhaps he's responsible for the deaths of scores of people; perhaps he planned the deaths of millions or more. For the ending to be satisfactory, the audience needs to feel like justice or karma has been served. For a powerful villain, there might not be a way to realistically imprison the villain in a way that feels satisfactory. Killing the villain that is already responsible for a significant body count is the simplest way to handle it. You don't necessarily need to have the hero do the deed; a common story involves persuading the villain that he's wrong and has become what he hates and having the villain sacrifice themselves to end things. Another way to handle this is have the villain accidentally off themself in an effort to kill the hero when the hero refuses to kill the villain (perhaps even when the hero is attempting to save the villain).
You'll have to skip the banter, but you can have an incredible gunfight with a "boss enemy" as a movie finale - 1995 Ghost in the Shell being the most iconic example.
I'm thinking more "Heat", which has incredible dialogue between De Niro and Pacino, and also one of the best fight scenes ever put on film, because they didn't insist on doing them *at the same time*. Ideally, talk first and then fight; that way maybe you don't have to fight at all. But commit, if you want me to take you seriously.
The comic-book format really encourages layering the dialogue in small chunks intermingled with the action, which works well in that medium but not so much on film. In a live-action fight you usually can't follow dialogue that's literally simultaneous with the action, and pausing the fight just to trade insults or whatever looks silly for reasons Tuco the Ugly will be happy to explain.
I think Loki came the closest to breaking this trope. While violence was used in the end, it was clearly wrong and the main protagonist (Loki) realized that.
Were there really ever any superhero comics that were not about punching bad guys in the face? I honestly don't know because I was never really into the comics or the movies, to be honest, this complaint sounds a bit to me like picking up a Lee Child novel and being irked that the plot involves some guy named Jack Reacher busting up yet another criminal conspiracy. Isn't that kiiiinda what you signed up for?
I'm defining super hero really loosely here, but Constantine is a trickster. Sandman and Lucifer are similarly not about the violence, though again, very loose definition of superhero. Among the more traditional superheroes, there are several comic book versions of Batman where he's portrayed more as the detective, where preparedness, knowledge, deduction are his primary tools and not violence
There are a decent number of plotlines in modern comics which are not resolved by violence. For instance in Jonathan Hickman's Avengers, there is storyline in which the heroes gather the infinity stones in order to push away an alternate Earth/universe which is on a collision course for their universe.
Superhero comics have a fairly narrow format that, yes, pretty much always involves punching people in the face while trading witty banter. And wearing flashy costumes while maintaining a secret identity in civilian life, and exercising unique superpowers that mostly come down to different flavors of nonlethal kinetic violence at witty-banter range (i.e. "punching them in the face"), and matching themselves against equal and opposite costumed face-punchers, etc. You can get away with occasional deviations from one or two parts of the formula, e.g. Tony Stark outing himself as Iron Man at the end of his first movie, but it's pretty restrictive.
Generic action/adventure movies, yeah, I get the appeal of and market for basically light entertainment centered on violence against bad guys. But that still leaves a broad range of possibilities, from Die Hard to Jurassic Park to James Bond to, yes, The Avengers. When "action/adventure movies" contracts to "comic-book superhero movies plus a few dying franchises", the restrictiveness of the format becomes a problem in the same way it would if all action movies were Jack Reacher movies. Too repetitive, too predictable, and too many good ideas squandered because they don't fit the format.
I think the problem then is less the specific superhero issue than the problem that the studios are too tied in to formulaic blockbusters to get bodies into the seats. Superhero films are just the current winning formula, and that means being tied into the genre conventions (though even the MCU has exceptions such as Guardians of the Galaxy, which really doesn't fit the superhero genre). If it's not superheros it's dystopian YA novels, Harry Potter retreads, Star Wars, giant meteors, or some other flavor-of-the-year.
On the one hand, this is probably partially the fault of audiences that don't turn up for well-made movies that aren't part of the current flavor-of-the-year.
On the other hand, there is obviously something broken with the movie pipeline. Studios are stuck on producing reboots of classic properties even when those films are obviously going to underwhelm at the box office. I don't know if the problem is on the creative side, the IP side, the finance side, or the marketing side, but something is not working right.
True; and actually I'm not really that into superheroes (Worm exempted). But the fact remains that, judging by Marvel's profits, most people ARE into superheroes, and that's where most of the money goes into. Actually scratch that - even if we don't look at superheroes specifically, the most budgeted and advertised and popular movies are ones where the hero (super- or not) needs to punch the villain in the face, really hard.
Sure, there are lots of non-action movies, but somehow they don't get billion-dollar budgets, or bring in billions in the box office.
This saddens me a lot.
I hear you loud and clear. I too wish there were bigger budget movies out there that catered to somewhat more sophisticated tastes than the smash-bang-boom stuff, as in the days of yore.
As an aside to my other post: I find it interesting that someone who doesn't like superheroes would be into Worm, especially if you have the complaints above, given that the majority of Worm's story conflict involves people beating the hell out of each other, but very strategically. Maybe this is an aesthetic issue for you? Or maybe you just like Worm because it attempts to have moral complexity (IMO it ends up failing at this at several key points, but that's another thing).
I liked the complexity, and I liked the strategy. More than the action itself, I liked seeing the different powers used in complex and unexpected ways.
Also, now that I'm thinking about it, at least part of my aversion to superhero stories comes from my strict Soviet upbringing: "comic books are for stupid Amerikantsy, freaks with capes are kiddy stuff" and so forth. I'm doing my best to, uh, punch this clearly mistaken worldview in the face, really hard, but it keeps escaping to fight another day :)
The closest big-name thing to this is probably shonen manga/anime. Many shonen series have a pattern that goes like this:
1. The power system allows each character to have an individual, specific power - Quirks in MHA, Stands in JoJo, the unique demon powers in Demon Slayer, etc.
2. Each antagonist introduced has a new power in this system, whose gimmick determines the nature of the fight.
3. The fight ends when the hero understands their opponent's gimmick, and figures out a way to counter it. Usually this is also a character moment - the smart hero counters it by setting up a clever trap, the gutsy hero counters it by taking a risky gamble, the friendship hero counters it by trusting an ally to help, etc.
4. Long-running antagonists do the same thing, but their powers are more flexible and have more details to reveal, meaning that they can counter the hero's counterattack by revealing another secret that escalates the fight to a new level.
A lot of Worm fights have this same pattern where figuring out exactly what the opponent's limits are is the key to winning. Bakuda has a huge arsenal of bombs that can do anything... but they're triggered by her toe rings, and if you cut those off she's powerless. Alexandria is invincible and superhumanly strong... but she still needs to breathe. Dragon has suits designed to counter all the Undersiders... but she's a machine, and can't violate her directives. You get the idea.
Most people don't go to films for deep moral lessons- they go for escapism. Simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie sell very well to the masses BECAUSE they're simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie, because in real life the overwhelming majority of problems can't be solved like this and also (to many people) it feels like the baddies usually win in real life. If you find human nature disappointing, I feel for you, but I will also point out that much of any given cultural mythos is goodies v. baddies, often with the goodies killing the baddies at the end. Trickster-hero stories stand out because they're an exception to the norm.
Oh sure, I'm not saying this is new.
What makes me sad is exactly that it's the same old thing. For all our scientific progress, and even with all our undeniable cultural progress, we still most prefer watching Good Guy hit Bad Guy. Myself included, let's be fair.
I wish to be better.
Be fair; sometimes the hero's *goal* is to do something clever and non-violent (e.g. sneakily steal five stones using a time machine), but somehow that will become complicated by the presence of a villain who will insist on stopping them but conveniently in a way that can be thwarted by punching him in the face real hard, the end.
The perfect example, and the one that convinced me to basically give up on comic-book superhero movies, was Wonder Woman.
80% of that movie would have been a *great* origin story. Diana is raised in the tradition of heroic combat out of Greek myth and legend, Hector v Achilles, Seven against Thebes, Xena against historical continuity (OK, OK...). Great champions of good and evil battle in single combat and open-field battles, where Good usually triumphs and it is glorious and *no innocent bystanders get hurt*. She desperately wants to be a part of that.
Instead, she gets an introduction to the horrors of mechanized, industrial-age warfare, with millions of innocents senselessly slaughtered, and because they changed the setting from WWII to WWI, there isn't even a real sense of Good vs Evil here, just stupid senseless war. To Diana, this is *wrong*, and the only possible explanation is that a particularly Evil Villain, a Super Villain, must be secretly responsible for this.
She appoints herself Champion of Good and sets out to right this wrong. Buckles on her swash and schemes and spies and fights her way across Europe with her faithful companions, tracking down the most-plausible candidate for the Super Villain responsible for this atrocity. And that part is indeed glorious. A particular shout-out to Diana going "over the top" in Belgium, cinematically superb but note that Diana's role is mostly to distract the enemy and inspire her allies, rather than single-handedly winning the fight.
Then she finds the Probable Supervillain, brutally killing him by pinning him to the roof of a building with her sword. Conduct unbecoming a superhero, by the usual rules. And the *fighting doesn't stop*. The Germans are still killing the British, the British are still killing the Germans, not because an Evil Supervillain is making them do it, but because that's what humans do. Kill each other in stupid senseless wars, accomplishing nothing. And that's what Diana herself just did.
It breaks her, at least for the moment. Her lesser, mortal allies have to sacrifice their lives truly ending the fight, and she's going to have to reinvent herself as the sort of hero who inspires people, the sort of hero she was back in the trenches of Belgium, rather than the sort of hero who just kills the bad guy. I would really like to have seen that story, and the career of the superhero for whom that was the origin.
Instead, they might as well have had the executive producer walk out on stage and say "We're sorry, we just realized this is a Superhero Movie(tm), and we are contractually obligated to resolve everything by having a Super Hero punch a Super Villain in the face, really hard. So, hmm, this guy here that we met a few scenes ago, let's say he was really the Secret Super Villain, and exactly and only when Wonder Woman punches him in the face hard enough the battle will be won. Cue the special effects and fight choreography, and make it so!"
Make it stop, says I. And make it stop I can, by not watching any more of these silly stupid movies. I may occasionally make an exception, but it's going to take something extraordinary to make that happen. And, yeah, I'll occasionally cue up just the scene of Diana going over the top in Belgium.
Oh Man, that's like seeing someone else writing down my thoughts! I was on the verge of tears when innocent Diana first saw the horror in Flanders. And I think it was on track to be one of the best films of all time at that point. I was expecting it to develop in roughly the way you describe.
And then suddenly there was this massive special effects lightning battle, let's blow the whole budget on completely spoiling the film. It was boring and silly. And it's not like I was ever that into superhero movies, but at that point I thought "Never again." No matter how good the reviews, just don't. This stuff is for children and morons.
On the other hand, Watchmen was a great comic, and the film was pretty faithful to it, but how to sieve out the occasional thing like that from the tidal wave of crap? You can't do it on audience reviews, or even on critics' reviews, because they seem to like this tripe too.
People who'd absolutely slate an art film that was that lazy raved about Wonder Woman. And I just don't understand why.
The Star Wars films are the same. I loved Star Wars when I was seven, and I still do, it's a great work. But you don't get to keep extracting £10 from me every year for your endless crap on the basis that that there was a good film forty years ago. And yet it always gets well reviewed. Do they bribe the reviewers?
Don't get me started on James bloody Bond, even the early ones are rubbish.
On the other hand, I saw Live Die Repeat on a laptop a while ago, and that's kind of a superhero movie and it's a wonder.
I would have liked to have seen that, and Watchmen, in a cinema rather than on someone's laptop. How to tell without waiting until the cinematic release is over and you get recommendations from people you trust?
Hey, someone else who saw Live Die Repeat! I feel like I'll never get another opportunity to discuss it, so I must share my complaints about the movie despite being overall positive on it. Time loops are cool and we should have more time loop media.
The premise of Tom Cruise being pressganged into the fight like that is incredibly stupid. They're dropping him onto the front lines of a war with a bunch of equipment he doesn't know how to use, causing him to literally fall on his face and die. It's an execution with extremely expensive extra steps. And that could work if the plot treated it as "Yes, they are intentionally executing him" but instead it's just presented as though it's a sane tactic for fighting a war. I understand the narrative function of this premise, they wanted his first few loops to be the same thing over and over and any character is going to try to do something different if they're free to act, but there has to be a better way to get there.
The ending would be much better if he died and it simply continued without the last reset. It feels like some moron forced the plot to have a happy ending because audiences like happy endings. Intuitively he shouldn't be able to get reset because he destroyed the source of the loop, and the point that he gets reset to is arbitrarily changed from his old reset point which makes it even more of a dumb magical handwave. But also just thematically, it was a suicide mission that he ended with the classic suicide grenade, it's undoing a bunch of cool moments to call takebacks on that.
Also, something that's clearly nonsense but didn't bother me that much, where the hell was all that anti-aircraft fire coming from? The mimics don't seem like big tool users, is this the one piece of military hardware they captured and turned against the humans?
So, as I remember what they try to do to Cruise is to send him into the fight as an embedded reporter, and he tries to get out of it by blackmailing his commanding officer.
So the commander reacts to that by setting him up for certain death.
I rather liked the happy ending, but I agree it doesn't make much sense. That's kind of OK, I think, even Euripedes ends his plays with a deus ex machina and leaves you do the fridge logic for what really happens! (SPOILER: Iphigenia was not really saved at the last minute by Artemis, and that delayed gut punch is part of what makes it a great play)
I didn't even notice the stuff about the anti aircraft fire! Do the mimics use weapons in other places? All I can remember is them rolling around intimidatingly, which doesn't seem like great tactics.
It's been a while but I remember the movie framing it more like a punishment than an execution: the way all the other military figures handle it feels less like they're knowingly killing Cruise and more like they think sending a completely untrained dude into battle will somehow not end the way it does. It'd make things a bit darker if the whole chain of command were complicit with the execution, but having not gotten that impression it really bothered me how stupid they were being throughout the first act of the movie.
I think you could keep the ending upbeat by letting him die and cutting to humanity triumphant with a focus on "it's over, we won." Maybe throw in a statue of the war hero who killed the mimic brain.
As far as I remember there's no evidence (really!) of the mimics using any tools at all, except for the AA which must be coming from somewhere (we never see where). It ties in with an overall feeling that the mimics are basically animals, which worked well enough that I was willing to play along and not think too hard about how they were shooting.
It's hard to think of it as extraordinary punishment when you're expecting mass casualties from the rank and file troops. It's the exaggerated version of 'being sent to the Russian front'; yes, it's effectively a death sentence, but given the nature of the war, as things are going all your troops are under a death sentence anyways.
I'm not quite as discerning as you, I'm totally fine with a mindless spectacle from time to time. But I think I share your appreciation for movies that try to go a little deeper.
I would recommend Arrival, Ex Machina, Moon (2009 film), Interstellar, Contact (I did not enjoy this as a child, but I'm pretty sure I would love it now). On a slightly lower tier I would put Primer and maybe Gravity, they are both ambitious if flawed. And I'd rather have that than bland mediocrity.
I'm curious if you have any movie suggestions?
I've seen all of those except Primer, and agree they're all great. I'll watch Primer. Thank you. But they're science fiction rather than superhero films. I really haven't seen many superhero/action films, and the few I have seen have been trash (exceptions above!).
If you just want my general recommendations, then in recent years I've enjoyed the following films enough to go and see them at the cinema twice (not exhaustive, just the ones that spring to mind): High Rise; The Handmaid; Three BillBoards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Gone Girl; The Lighthouse; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Knives Out; Le Mans 66; Blade Runner 2???; Ex Machina; The Last Duel; and Last Night in Soho.
Of course, she got like 1 battalion over the top and forward a few miles. I suppose an after credits scene showing how they all get horribly wiped out by german artillery fire the next morning would have been excessively grim...
They survived by being conveniently off camera until Wonder Woman magically ended the war by punching some guy in the face really hard.
But, yeah, this is the fantasy version of WWI trench warfare; see Brett Devereaux for the reality.
I haven't actually seen Wonder Woman, but I completely agree with everything you said.
From the MCU, the only counterexample I can think of is Doctor Strange, who basically defeated Dormammu with strategic nagging. That's definitely one of the reasons I love this movie :)
Agreed, Dr. Strange was not a film I expected to enjoy and is one of the few newer Marvel movies that I've seen.
Years ago the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, had an exhibit on Native American cosmology. There was one tribe from the northern California coast somewhere that had this dance that was designed to be as tedious and boring as possible and would drag on for long, long periods of time. The point of the dance was to bore evil spirits into leaving. That is still a top five moment of being utterly delighted for me. It was such a nontraditional mythical take on 'good vs evil'. I think the end of Dr. Strange felt like it tapped into that kind of creativity and if more superhero movies had those elements I'd happily sit through all the caped slapfights to get those moments of surprise.
There are some movies I've seen a hundred times (often really dumb ones), so I get the urge to just kick back and enjoy a comfortable storyline - but most of these superhero movies just feel like mix and match video game elements that have zero surprises and there's nothing comfortable about being bored for two hours.
Yes, and it's one of the reasons a full-on Dr. Strange sequel might make me come out of my shell and see another superhero movie. But not on opening night; I'll wait on the reviews.
Also possibly Natalie Portman's take on Thor. I'm pretty sure she'll wind up solving the problem by punching someone in the face real hard (with a magic hammer), but she'll probably make it more interesting than usual particularly in the build-up to the face-hammering.
Natalie, Benedict, if you're lurking here, please insist on the writers giving you a no-facepunch climax. You've got the clout, and I think the taste, to make it happen.
Re Dr Strange movie. I read the comics as a kid. I was amazed to see some of the weird astral purples from the pulpy comic book coloring recreated in hi def. That alone was worth the price of admission for me.
Steve Ditko drew Dr Strange, No?
https://www.inverse.com/article/22656-doctor-strange-reviews-marvel-ditko-trippy-acid
I heartily agree, and this was a huge part of what made Star Trek so great back in the day and something the reboot movies didn't seem to understand. The vision of Trek was that we would always try to look for a peaceful solution, without being so naïve as to think that would *always* work, but even when wars occur the Federation still tries for peace and over the course of the many series often finds itself allies with the enemies of old.
Star Trek is one of the few examples of utopian futurism in popular media. The only other example I can think of is the movie "Her", from 2013, where Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with his artificially intelligent phone operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). It also features very little conflict in the story too, but still plenty of emotional heartache.
Counterpoint - Star Trek The Motion Picture was dull and long, and is rarely considered the best Trek movies. Wrath of Khan, generally considered the best, has a violent climax and resolution.
Though I will heartily say that the end of Wrath of Khan wasn't based on punching people in the face, and was much more thoughtful and intellectual than most super hero movies.
Star Trek works best as a TV series, like it was meant to be. And "Wrath of Khan" wasn't the best Star Trek movie, it was just the best movie made under the Star Trek name - a guilty pleasure that didn't fit the theme, but after about eighty episodes of these characters dealing with complex problems in a mature and professional way, they'd earned the right to kick back and relax with a nice clean fight.
J.J. Abrams never earned that, and so "Star Trek: Into Darkness" was utter crap.
I'll agree with that, especially the new ones being crap. Although TOS had its ridiculous fights as well, like Kirk versus the Gorn.
That was some pretty sloppy chemistry making the gunpowder. Uh... let's see... one handful of sulfur, Uh... I know I'm going to need some carbon...
Well, the next best of the TOS movies is Star Trek IV, which featured very little punching and was resolved by whales singing.
That being said, the best TNG movie (First Contact) had tons of fighting.
Of course, a big part of First Contact was Picard realizing that he needed to stop fighting.
"Jean-Luc, blow up the damn ship!"
IV is our favorite, so no disagreement there. First Contact is also our favorite TNG movie.
The theme is not that fighting makes movies good or bad, but that good movies can be either. Super Hero movies resolving everything through punching is built into the genre and expected, but doesn't necessarily make a movie good or bad. John Schilling's take on WW is spot on to me for that reason. It was a great movie with a moderate amount of action, and then a really stupid end fight tacked on that came close to ruining the movie for me. I don't have any interest in re-watching it, and I know it's because of that stupid ending. A better movie with less fighting can still be a good hero movie.
I actually agree with you about ST IV being better ST II and with you and John about WW.
I tried playing D&D a couple of weeks back. Didn't finish the campaign 'cause I had to leave town, but I'm pretty proud of my party that we didn't see combat at all. Just... didn't seem to make sense to go and fight people.
As a long-time RPG hobbyist, I must say that playing D&D like this baffles me. Of course, that can depend on what edition and what "not seeing combat at all" means (as earlier editions encouraged the use of underhanded and indirect tactics), but from context it sounds more like you tried to avoid combat through avoidance and diplomacy, which D&D is absolutely NOT designed for. It's a dungeon-crawler down in its very DNA, and trying to make it something it's not seems inelegant to me.
Is it the D&D specifically, or role-playing as a not-murderhobo generally, that baffles you?
Because the latter is IMO a much more enjoyable experience for adults, and I think I'd have preferred it even as a teenager if someone had introduced me to the possibility. As for D&D specifically, Theo is right - everyone in your gaming group knows how to play D&D and no other game in common, and it's probably easier to kludge 3.5e/Pathfinder/5e to fit than it is to get everyone to agree to learn a new system.
The former. As for other systems, I've never personally encountered an issue with getting play-groups to try other systems, but of course that's merely anecdotal.
The solution would be to play a different RPG, but D&D has enough mindshare that that's a hard first step. Also D&D is flexible enough to be 70% okay at this (maybe 50%), but it's "good enough" that trying to get everyone to hop is hard.
I wish everyone was like me and just read sourcebooks for fun, but it's hard enough to get players to read their class and spells, let alone starting from scratch on a new rpg.
I used to read GURPS sourcebooks for fun :)
Then I tried playing (both GURPS and Pathfinder) and didn't enjoy it one bit. But the books, and game rulebooks in general, are still very fun.
> I feel almost privileged (...) It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible.
Really? It is like reading review of readable fanfiction describing it as one of a greatest works of literature.
I am fan of some modern literature but I am not sure is even LOTR going to be remembered in 200 or 400 years. MCU? Seems really dubious.
> THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
They fail even at making fight scenes that make sense given established powers.
> This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
> Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
Oh I really support this.
When discussing successful invasive species, let’s not forget the hippopotamus infestation occurring in Columbia. It’s Hippo heaven, no natural predators, lots of water (very few droughts), lots of food, and a judicial ruling making it illegal to kill them. They’re breeding earlier and more often than ever. In 50-100 years there could be thousands spread across Central and South America.
Get rid of the ruling and you can have a new agricultural product. https://magazine.atavist.com/american-hippopotamus/
judicial ruling making it illegal to kill them? Why?
That’s the weird part, it seemed to be inspired by a popular backlash after photos surfaced showing soldiers gloating over the dead body of one of the hippos. Other than that I can’t fathom why they would possibly outlaw eliminating them. They are the worlds largest invasive species and are wrecking havoc on the ecosystem.
Is protecting the ecosystem about much else than keeping cool wild animals alive? If no, then hippos are pretty cool
Yes actually. A large swath of modern biology and medicine came either directly from nature or it was developed using reagents found in nature. Loss of biodiversity reduces the total number of future advances of biomedical science.
Heard this argument a few times and it always strikes me as a big stretch. Whatever there is right now, you can document it. Then sure, there is a chance you will lose something, but it's not obvious to me at all that the expected utility from advances in science exceeds that of the coolness of hippos.
Even if you could document the genome of every living thing and hand wave away bringing them back from extinction* - it would be far beyond the means of most scientists to do this and those discoveries would happen much slower.
And when I say research, direct applications like the ones you listed are one aspect, but there is a more subtle point that biological reagents permeate all of biological research. For a given recently developed medicine, it may have required 10 research labs who may have used 20 different biological reagents to develop the necessary technology. If 3 of those reagents didn't exist because their organisms were extinct or hard to source, that research would have just not happened. For example there is an immune adjuvant that comes from the Chilean soapbark tree, Western blot uses horseradish peroxidase, PCR was invented using taq polymerase from a microbe in the Yellowstone hot springs. Cell culture depends heavily on fetal bovine serum. Macaques (many of which are vulnerable or endangered) are a important model organism. CRISPR comes from certain bacteria.
*Which is an enormous hand wave. Even in principle, a genome does not encode an organism completely without also having information about it's epigenetics and development. And even an infantile organism may not be sufficient to produce an adult specimen without recreating the specific environment and biological niche the organism occupies. And of course, as another commenter pointed out, we don't know every species that currently exists.
They discover thousands of species every year. The task of documenting everything out there is nowhere near complete, and lots of them are probably going extinct before discovery.
Hippos are very much alive in other parts of the world. The local Colombian ecosystem isn't.
I had to look that one up and golly. From an initial population of only four hippos, part of Pablo Escobar's private menagerie, they started breeding. Four became sixteen became forty became somewhere around a hundred or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamus_in_Colombia
It seems like the great male renunciation went beyond clothing. It seems like men renounced enthusiastic vocalizations. At some point those became the province of women, gay men, and German dictators with only one ball. Even Howard dean’s 150 milliOprah yelp was widely considered too much. But I know from reading Shakespeare etc that men weren’t always curbing their enthusiasm like they do now.
Had to check what wikipedia says about ululation - seems to be more common with females (matches my experience), but nothing said about historical trends. Impressive how culturally widespread it is, and how ancient.
Is this one of those Trial of Oscar Wilde things where men suddenly don't want to be perceived as gay?
> But I know from reading Shakespeare etc
Have you read Julius Caesar? It's been a while since I did, but I remember the scene where Brutus finds out his wife has been murdered. He's pretty upset. But then he arranges to have someone bring him the same news again, ten minutes later, while he's in a meeting, so that he can make a show of his stony-faced stoicism in front of his colleagues. They are duly impressed.
Anyway, that's just an Elizabethan-era view of what Ancient Romans might have been like, but "stiff upper lip" has definitely had its ups and downs over the years.
They tore their breasts! Wept openly! Threw themselves from cliffs over a slight! Being human used to be, like, REAL, or something!
Whatever, please upvote.
In the Tale of Genji, men frequently cry, recite poetry at each other, retreat to their estates for days on end from emotional turmoil, etc. This may or may not have been how aristocrats in Heian Japan actually behaved, but that’s almost not important: Genji is a romanticization/idealization of a previous supposed Golden Age of court life, and that was how men were in the author’s fictional utopia (with the implication that this was behavior to aspire to)
Eh, they were also incredible snobs and useless people who nobody should emulate.
What's notable to me is that the people who replaced them, the supposedly stoic badass samurai, also showed emotion. Tokugawa Ieyasu supposedly wept on the anniversary of one of his friends death for the rest of his life. Nobody considered this unmanly. The last soldiers of Shu supposedly wept and tore their hair out and broke their swords when their state ended and this was considered honorable behavior. King Stephen showed clear grief at his son's death and his idealism was considered a good quality in the depths of dark ages Europe. Enough he was elected king rather than inheriting the throne. George Washington stuttered and dropped his glasses so overcome with emotion at a speech which induced several of his officers to weep.
The masculine ideal has always had an idea of you need to get things done. None of these men shirked their duty because of their emotions. The famous example was a Chinese warlord who lost because he couldn't get over his son having a toothache. He's been mocked for two thousand years. But these men also had the emotions and their expression was not considered unmanly. The idea that real men don't cry is toxic and, as far as I can tell, alien to most cultures.
The most normal historical norm, afaict, is: Real men don't let grief prevent them from doing what needs to be done. But real men weep manly tears.
As C. S. Lewis put it in his autobiography:
"It is one of my lifelong weaknesses that I never could endure the embrace or kiss of my own sex. (An unmanly weakness, by the way; Aeneas, Beowulf, Roland, Launcelot, Johnson, and Nelson knew nothing of it.)"
People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. (This is the time to half-jokingly invoke "no evidence" and ask for some scientific studies.)
What I do recall seeing is a fiction told to kids. Be a grown-up, don't cry. It is obvious why you'd tell them that, kids crying is a bother and, once they can speak coherently, essentially useless, you want them to aspire to be tough and independent like their role models - but, just like you say, it's not that their role models don't cry at all, it's just that they take the life's adversity head-on, go through everyday situations without calling for mommy. Once they can do that, everything they do, including crying, is "manly" by definition.
What I'm getting at, if the perpetuation of those "no crying" sentiments and norms into adulthood is real, it (counterintuitively?) speaks to the ongoing infantilization of society. (Does this reasoning circle back to clothing? People dress plainly because they assume masks - The Culture of Narcissism?)
As a dad of 3 boys 6 and under, I can confirm that I regularly tell them (especially the younger two) they should stop crying. Not because they're boys, and not because it's a bother, but because breaking down into tears for minor things is a poor strategy. Especially when you have two parents who would happily resolve the issue if you controlled your emotions enough to use words and ask for whatever it is you want.
Teaching children to not cry and not throw fits, etc. is the first step on teaching them to control their emotions in general. It's Elephant Riding 101. And that's an absolutely critical life skill.
"People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. "
There definitely is some kind of norm of "boys don't cry"
But I don't think it's a bad thing to encourage people, both men and women, towards a touch of Stoicism. It's important that people be able to look for emotional support when they need it, when they actually need it, but it's also important people to learn to try to cope with mundane stressors.
I have a question: my daughter originally got vaccinated in WY, and promptly lost her vaccine card (and didn’t take a picture of it🙄). She has since moved to the Seattle area and has been unsuccessful in tracking down a replacement card. Is there a health related reason (besides existing potential side effects) to simply repeating the vaccine course a second time to get both her booster (the fist shot) and a new vaccine card after the second? Thanks.
I forgot to bring my card to the booster appointment and when I explained that the pharmacist just wrote "third dose" on a new card. I didn't have to prove I'd gotten my first two doses or anything.
This.
And since most sane places use pen (instead of oversized stickers that take up multiple lines and cover up other writing...), we can just fill in however much of the rest we remember.
The doses may not be the same. I think (can’t find source) in the UK the booster dose is a smaller than the first or second dose of both Pfizer and Moderna.
I’ve no idea why the dose is smaller (might just be less is needed and therefore cheaper) but something to be aware of