PrismCrystal

9 ms·

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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
[flagged]
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but I haven’
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
[flagged]
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror , his most avant-garde film. On one hand, you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded cinephile friends, and even they might reject i
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Exactly. Those churning out such posts on LinkedIn, would very much prefer if other people did not even carefully read the actual content, but rather simply assumed “Wow, this person is capable of generating a wall of text day in and day ou
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
I wonder if that means that lower sex drive does not necessarily mean lower testosterone? This is not a purely theoretical question. I spend half the year traveling the world in ways that let me talk a lot with local people, and I am astoun
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Taping your camera doesn't necessarily look like anything. I have a small piece of electrical tape over my webcam, and it blends in so perfectly with the background that other people probably wouldn't see it unless they were speci
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
I don't think you realize how powerful OpenWRT is. It's a whole Linux environment where you can write your own shell scripts and schedule jobs, etc. If you have created a set of your own personal customizations over the years, the
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
I did some FOSS hacking as a teenager a quarter-century ago, so learned Emacs, but then ultimately chose a career unrelated to software development. I still use Emacs for anything and everything text-related: email (Gnus), RSS feeds (elfeed
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
The Nordic countries have a longstanding tradition of state-run “folk high schools”. In fact, in modern economies where it is harder for unemployed middle-age people to find new work, and AI might cause unemployment in more sectors, this ki
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> It would have been much more useful if you could just mount it like a hard drive without special library management software. When I got my first iPod in 2006, I immediately put Rockbox on it, where the iPod indeed mounted like a hard
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more widespread in the Muslim
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe that proved victoriou
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed." Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
The US is frequently called late to ending African chattel slavery because it already happened in France and England decades before, and even English conservatives were calling for an end (of various degrees of gradualness) to slavery lon
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of l'arbitraire du signe . Semiotics a
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> no consensus that Jesus is divine, or about the nature of the divinity ascribed to him, even after the declaration in 325 of the Nicene Creed Which shouldn’t be surprising, because by 325 CE (and really, by 100 CE) Christianity had bee
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
People often consider the 2000 X-Men film to kick off the explosion of superhero films in the new millennium, and that was pre-September 11, so I’m not sure that correlation is causation here. Moreover, a lot of European artists in the ea
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"I've almost never heard of Hi Res with a totally new master that wouldn't have been previously available as CD, to be honest. This isn't common, right?" It has been a few years now since I did all this collecting,
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations" Of course it has. That notions like “Napoleon complex” circulate in pop culture, suggests that society broadly considers short-statured p
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Not if all the Muslims around you also don't believe in the Hajj. Orthodox Muslim belief is highly rigid today, but the medieval era there was a time and region when Muslim concepts could be questioned and given some mystical revision
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Romania dropped several zeros in 2005, so 1,000,000 became 100. As someone who was around at that time, I still tend to think of prices in the old system, which makes me look ridiculous to younger people and even most of my same-age peers.
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"the whole fucking point of leisure activities is to escape from the hellscape that is life and reality" I get that you don’t like woke, but that is too blanket a claim. There has just been too much popular literature across Ameri
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
It has been years since I read the Sea of Fertility, but I remember one Western scholar of Japan claiming that the fourth volume was a shoddy work compared to the previous three, written hastily as Mishima was preparing for his death. Since
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
The primary complaint I have seen about Murakami in internet books forums, is how repetitive his writing ultimately became. His treatment of women that strikes many as problematic, is just one of the things that get repeated.
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
The man's experiences with constantly being moved on reminded me, as a foreign tourist, of how distinct America is in this regard. I flew into California and did a few weeks of bikepacking there before crossing into Mexico. In spite of
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
This reminds me of the practice in Egypt where men would intentionally press their heads into the ground when praying in order to develop a callous, colloquially called a zebiba , showing off their piety. Is this still fashionable? When I
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Practices in Orthodox services can differ. For example, in some Romanian parishes everyone has knelt while the Gospel was being read, but I have never seen this elsewhere. And as the other poster mentions, full prostrations are done (and wi

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