Soooo, I watched that new CJ the X video too. Mind blown.

Busy day, huh?

Aaanyway, one thing I miss about recommendations is passion.

No I'm not watching Ladybug & Mandrake or whatever, but I'm now waaaay more into art-as-metaphysical-god than before, and creating, consuming, participating in art is now my religion, and ... and ...

Yeah it's long, but watch it. Or not. If I'm not passionate enough for you, I understand it completely. I want to be a more in your face about what's good, what's reeeeeeeally good. Next time!

I'm a bit lucky and glad that I managed to stay focused on the previous post enough to declare it finished, before watching this new 200% John Green video, where John out Johns himself. (Okay, that's already one too much mention of johns to stay clear of the negative connotation of clients of prostitutes, sorry! Also now that it's possible to john, I guess there exists johning too. Oh, and I just realized, that John and Kohn are, you know. Related names. Graced by Yahweh, Yohanan; Yahweh has given, Jonathan, etc. Cohen means priest.)

Pattern matching. Nice nice.

... you mentioned some video?

Oh right. The video.

Well, there's a great quote from it that I want to share, but otherwise it's just the regular reanalyzation of how attentive reflexion recreates meaning, you know, otherwise unremarkable. After all life is just an optimization problem. Everything is an optimization problem.

"... follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century high-society France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world."

Thanks Wiki.

I shit you not, I just picked the title at random, but wanted to fuck with the French version, because folks who know French looove to stick to the French naming of things, even though no one knows French. No one. (French is reserved for sick ass rap songs, not serious memes.)

Anyway, it turns out everything is about meaning nowadays. Even the lack of meaning.

So Rick and Morty S6E6. Am I right? Yeah.

The monomyth (more accurately, of course, the monomeme!) Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. God as a yet another 40m episode (#953)

So what keeps me up at night? Besides the obviously criminal mislabeling of "funny images" (usually image macros) memes? (Which is technically correct, so it's a literal exoneration via technicality!) Besides the entirely too much screen time and the creeping generalized anxiety of the washed out grey episodicity of the universal tomorrow?

What keeps me up at night is a lack of thing to keep me up at night!

Where are the universal recommendations of things to do that are so good that you must?

Of course we can lament on the lack of shared meaning. (Point out the shared categories. Promptly discredit them as things in need of interpretation, mere cognitive tools without purpose, reptilian-brain-farts that outlived their usefulness. And, oh, you know, just the arts, and meaningless things like that kind of music - again the French! ^.^)

Okay, obviously I'm not expecting things as powerful as the joke of 1969 that claimed multiple lives. Not expecting that the intro of Smoke on the Water or Johnny B Goode to immediately fire up everyone on whichever hemisphere. (Is not expecting universal memes cultural relativism? Oh noes!?)

I'm not even surprised (anymore) that progress is controversial.

But I'm really surprised that somehow we really don't have society-wide strong consensus-like recommendations about what content to consume.

Sure we have gwern's endless essay on esthetics, which makes the point that ranking content (art?) makes (at least some) sense, because we have so much of it that picking things randomly will not give us the best time of all possible times.

We have IMDB top lists, yet we don't force people to watch them.

Mostly because most of the top 250 is crap. The Shawnshank Redemption is truly a must-watch, and compared to that the Godfather is meh. I don't like it. And who would force people to watch Schindler's List? Oh, yeah, leftist totalitarians French culture-nazis, that's who! ... what, even they wouldn't!?

Damn this shit is hard.

I think Pulp Fiction is absolutely super-best, but at least I can understand why some people don't like it.

So what now? Maybe I should watch this CJ-the-X video about Subjectivity!?

Or maybe the problem is between the keyboard and the chair!? Am I just too thick to understand that the usual richness of structurness that we like is bound to be not sufficiently universal? (Otherwise it'd be just boring as the default backgrounds?)

Or maybe the canonical answer to what ought to be mandatory, is right in front of me: listen to Ed Sheeran 3.239 billion times! At least that's what people did, and that's very likely because that's what Spotify recommended them. Plus I might have to accept the slightly probable factoid that I might be not entirely average. Atypical, one might say. Yeah, no, that can't be, it's the general pop that's mistaken.

... anyway, I remember threads on Reddit and HN about people lamenting something similar. How back then we had well defined periods of this or that, and now a million things happen at once. But that's probably recency bias, more people alive doing more shit, the Internet filtering out the interesting things, and more fucking progress allowing us to sit here and look for, make, share and notice interesting things.

Maybe the lesson is that some people - ie. me - want more explicit recommendations, but want them to be very good. Or else!

Also I'm sorry I still haven't started watching Succession, and the Night Of, both very explicitly recommended to me by a dear friend.

insert men will literally X instead of Y meme

don't cross the streams? sure, sure, in the grand scheme of things it's not that surprising that popular writer-youtuber is reading a book by popular nerdwriter-youtuber.

Hm, I had no idea Gwern was above 50 (and that was already written in ~2017). But that's not the point. I don't know what's the point, it's half past 2 in the night, and I had a long and headache-y day.

Culture is what we have too much of, not time, yet we subsidize artists to make more of it. We should subsidize watchmakers maybe, so people will be late less wasting others' time less. (I was also late yesterday. And from time to time actively and passively too. Yeah.)

Hm, great advice about keeping your body healthy for future you. And about keeping a memoir! And happy murmurations.

I'm watching the Sandman series, and .. yeah, it's an amazing celebration of life. (Maybe? I'm at episode 6 only, a bit too afraid to continue watching before it turns dark and cliffhangery, or just regresses to the mean.) And life is mean on average, and I have an obscure taste liking that one particular happy filler episodes of Bleach and DragonBall Z where things just go well.

Fukuyama megalothymia from 2019.

"You look at a country like Poland, which was the fastest growing EU country in the ten years prior to the rise of the Law and Justice Party, and you ask: What do they have to be upset about?

Part of my book’s point was that there are plenty of sources of discontent other than serious insecurity or serious material privation, which really have to do with people’s feelings of dignity. People will not be satisfied with endless consumerism and buying the new iPhone every 18 months, because they actually want to be recognized for something."