stupidiamaxima replied to your post: It’s fun reading the TVTropes page for “A Song of Ice and Fire”
My mother likes to say that so many of my classmates from my graduating class in Jakarta have “taken a long time to find themselves.” What she means by that is that very few of them have had linear career paths. They’ve taken gap years, worked intermittently, changed careers, moved cities, moved countries, dropped out of school, come back to school… and so on.
I just caught up with one, who told me that he’d made all the wrong choices and was building himself up again. This is exactly how I feel about these same 8 years since we were in school together.
I have learned and grown and experienced a lot… but it would have been nice for the lessons to be less painful, and to be less costly in time and money.
It’s just nice to catch up with someone who feels the same way. I’m not sure if it’s a TCK thing or not, but in multiple cases our troubles have led us to move with every change we make.
Yes that’s a common feeling with TCKs. But what do you mean by ” in multiple cases our troubles have led us to move with every change we make.”?
I’ve found that with my normal friends, if they make a life change it tends to be a localized one. It’s simple geography really. If I have a friend in Miami, and she quits her job and says “I’m doing something different!” 6 times out of 10 she stays in Miami, 8/10 she stays at least within the country or the state.
That’s not all the cases, of course. I particularly admired one friend in the US who planned, with her boyfriend, to move to Panama and did so. They’re still there, to my knowledge. So good for them.
But when TCKs make a life change, they tend to move further. Just because they know how, or they know people, or they have a broader scope of their options. My friend, trying to reboot his career, moved from South Africa to Scotland. I moved from the US to Switzerland (again). And even then I also spent time in Asia and sent out a bunch of applications there too. It was all optional to me in a way it isn’t for most people who have lived in the same place their whole lives.
stupidiamaxima replied to your post: It’s fun reading the TVTropes page for “A Song of Ice and Fire”
Love tvtropes XD
In some ways it’s as good as Wikipedia. Or better, because the writing is less dry.
Read the World War One section, and you’ll get a detailed, balanced and thorough elaboration of the causes and events. I even learned a few new things, and I pride myself on my knowledge.
So hey, it’s really cool.
But it says a lot about this series that the “Complete Monster” category has its own page.
And deservedly so.
When I first started seriously learning history, one of the first topics they taught me in school, and I assume this is common in the Western world, is about Neville Chamberlain and the policy of Appeasement. History has mostly judged him in a poor light.
This is interesting because the lesson is one made entirely in hindsight. It’s easy for us to say it was a mistake and that you couldn’t trust Hitler, because we all know now that he would provoke a war with the most mass slaughter in the world. We know now that he was not only violently persecuting Jews, later to mass murder them, but also to go back on his diplomatic word multiple times in aggressive expansion.
The lesson that we are supposed to learn from this is that it might have been better to fight in 1937 than 1939, or at least that you can’t trust dictators or similar folk.
But the way I see it is that you can’t fault the man for hoping for a peaceful solution. No one should ever actively want war. Even Hitler was kind of hoping that Britain and France would chicken out again in 1939.
There is no shame and no harm in trying to find a peaceful compromise. Collaborators also get a bad stigma for this same reason. Some grab power by joining with their oppressors, but some just accept their conquest as a fait accompli and try to make things easier by finding common ground and compromise. After all, they’re humans too.
This is illustrated rather well in a minor scene in Das Boot, when a young German sailor parts from his French girlfriend. She’s pregnant, and they’re both concerned that the Resistance will find out. The French Resistance is generally rightly portrayed in a positive light, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it took a brutish response to a half-German baby and its mother.
This has modern relevance because of what happened to Qaddafi. Since the uprising began in Libya, people have been calling out Western leaders for their previous conciliatory stances regarding Libya. They let them back into the UN, Sarkozy invited him to Paris and gave him a happy speech, and Western (and notably Chinese) companies started investing in the country and tapping into its oil.
Basically what happened was that all these Western leaders began to see Qaddafi as a fact of reality. They don’t like him, but he has some things they want or need, and he didn’t seem likely to go anywhere anytime soon. They even had long term hopes: his son appeared to be a reformer, and presuming that the mantle would pass to him, there would be some change. All without resorting to destabilizing violence, and maybe if they dealt with the family they could get in early on investment and better relations.
People criticize them for “dealing with dictators” and similar lines of complaint… but while it looks bad, it’s pragmatic diplomacy. It would not have been a major problem had the revolution never happened in Libya. We’re only able to complain now because it became a situation where Western leaders were forced to choose between the protesters and the dictator… and they did all make the right choice in the end.
In my view, it’s never a bad thing to hope for a peaceful negotiated resolution. Because as Libya and Syria stand as evidence, revolutions are messy and not easy. Frankly speaking, Hitler was the exception, not the rule. You just have to know when to call the bluff and when to deal.
I’m rather happy they found the budget to do a battle scene. Though they made the mistake that many Hollywood battles do: use of fire arrows at night.
Fire arrows actually are not useful for anything but setting things on fire. They’re less aerodynamic, have shorter range and don’t, you know, pierce armour. They don’t set people on fire either, because it’s not that easy to set people on fire. But they just look a lot prettier on screen.
Overall this episode is good to the book. Some small deviations though:
In the book, Joffrey was having fun launching wildfire, and didn’t really want to retreat. Tyrion thought he’d be happy there burning people from afar. But the show has Joffrey noticeably fearful of the battle… though this is also because Joffrey is on the wall in the show, and much closer to battle than in the book.
Bronn and Sandor butting heads was fun, if not in the book. Similarly, Tyrion admitting to Bronn being a friend wasn’t in the book, but it was endearing on both of them anyway.
Cersei’s drunk speech was perfect.
No sign of Tyrion’s chain… but at least everyone considers the wildfire to be his plan.
I expected Sandor to be a little more… panicked by the fire. Instead he rather seems disturbed. But it was still warming to watch.
In the books, Tyrion takes an axe to his face. He’s also uglier in the book, so it doesn’t faze him too much that his nose is split in half (though he thinks about it a lot, so maybe it bothers him more than he shows). I’ve wondered if they would spend the following seasons with Peter Dinklage in half-nose makeup, but they probably don’t have to.
The Nightshade and Tommen was… not in the book (I think?). Still, it’s nice to see Tommen at all.
A good episode, all in all. I note with wry cynicism that the naked lady for this episode had a long camera pan over her assets. Oh welll…
Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, that was Loras who came to the rescue in Renly’s armor.
Still thinking about terrorism.
Back after 9/11 happened, Putin saw a wild opportunity to finally find something in common with Bush. He took the chance to welcome him with open arms and say “See? You were bombed by Islamic terrorists, and we’ve had to deal with that for years in Chechnya! Now you see what we mean about these problems with Islamists, right?”
The problem is, of course, that the independence movement in Chechnya is wildly different from, say, Al-Qaeda or the problems that America was facing at the time. The fact that the Chechens happen to be Muslim and took motivation from their faith is mostly circumstantial. If they took some money and support from Al-Qaeda, well, that’s not surprising considering how desperate they were.
Basically, it was really cheap diplomatic move. Putin was hoping for American support in their war, diplomatically anyway. If America were to endorse their war, that would say something important.
It’s one of Bush’s better moments that he didn’t quite dance to Putin’s fiddle.
Way back when I was still studying Hospitality, we all had a final project. An Egyptian friend of mine was interested in the correlation between Terrorism and Tourism, due to personal experience in Sharm-el-Sheik in Egypt. He joked “Well, I can’t do an experiment. It’s not like I can set a bomb and see what happens.”
But it’s still an interesting area, even if he found it ultimately wasn’t worth his effort to research it and he chose a simpler topic.
In Indonesia in particular, with its multiple bombings which specifically targeted Western tourists in Bali and Jakarta, the point was economic damage. By creating an aura of fear, and an outward appearance of danger to Westerners investing in the country, and also by damaging the tourism industry (which in Bali is the local lifeblood) the extremists in Jema Islamiah hoped to damage the economy enough that people would increasingly look to extreme solutions and gain support that way.
The thing is that after a while a population does become resilient to terrorism. Bali took a huge hit to its economy after the first bombing, but it’s been bombed at least twice more since then and hasn’t taken a similar hit. In Jakarta they bombed the JW Marriott Hotel twice, the Australian Embassy once, and the Jakarta Stock Exchange once. It had some effect at the time, but nothing long lasting.
In a way it probably helped that the country was technically fighting two major insurgencies in East Timor and in Aceh for about 25 years, and was more subtly suppressing unrest and smaller independence movements in Papua and elsewhere. There were also the religious riots in Maluku, and the Dayak uprising in Kalimantan. The point is that violence was happening in a lot of places in the country, and beyond the initial shock of specifically-terrorist bombings the public fear effect was quite small.
I don’t know the full details of when Sharm-el-Sheik was bombed, but I do know that it didn’t take that long for them to get back on their feet. It seemed to me that the world overall got over the initial shock of the first few years after 9-11, when it seemed like all the Islamic terrorists got some motivation to do something dramatic and people responded with what they wanted: fear. But after enough bombings, the world gets used to it.
I don’t think this is the case in America, though. They got bombed once in a very big way, and never quite got over that initial fear. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t have the same effect that Aceh and Timor l’Este did on Indonesia, because those were American-inflicted and far away.
To take a similar example, the British experience in Northern Ireland reflects Indonesia’s. Despite a long period of violence in Ireland and bombings in England, people endured. Bombs happened, and then people got on with things. And importantly, the government never compromised and stuck with their policy, even though it was somewhat oppressive. The idea that nothing would change the situation no matter what fear tactics they would try was a huge factor into the IRA surrender.
I wonder if one can link such study in regards to non-terrorism related areas. Consider shootings at schools in America. There was that one guy at Virginia Tech who shot a lot of students… would that affect how many people would apply there? It is surely a one-off incident and unlikely to happen again… but people would still worry.
My cousin, who’s going into university later this year, didn’t get into her university of choice, Stanford. My parents, always looking for an excuse (out of love) to suggest that it wasn’t my cousin’s fault or that she might have just had too much good competition, figured that it might have been because her high school had a scandal of some cheating students which apparently hit national news.
Would that really have an effect on her admission process? I am personally doubtful because that kind of scandal suggests nothing about the quality of students, but I am also rather cynical about the wisdom of collective human decisions in organizations.
I’ve been doing this for a while. This is even aside from bunking at friends’ places or while travelling.
When I was in Florida, one of my favourite spots was on our immensely comfortable sofa, plop my laptop on the coffee table and watch something. Or fall asleep watching something.
The same goes for when I went to Malaysia. I got really comfortable in my friend’s flat and for the 6 months I lived there it did start to feel homely. His couch was a bit annoying, but I did sleep there on multiple occasions, again with the laptop on the coffee table.
I’m doing it now, since my parents aren’t home. What I like about my room is privacy, and I don’t need that now. When I was living in other places, I didn’t worry about that so much because my friends always respected my space in a way that my parents don’t.
Still, in both Florida and Malaysia our dining table was my desk. I like having a roommate. They keep me out of being a hermit, and become good friends. Hanging out in the living room is my way of guaranteeing that I don’t just hole up in my room. The only time I did hole up in my room was for long distance phone calls from my now-ex, and when I was in Malaysia, to hide from my roommate’s promiscuity. He was usually okay, but on a few occasions they were… loud.
I miss it. I felt really comfortable in those places. It’s just something about your own place, with a good friend as a roommate. Especially when they’re the kind of friend you can hang out with for hours and talk about anything with.
That’s a good life. With my parents gone I feel pretty relaxed, but there’s always a low level concern that this is their place, not mine. If I’m concerned to look out for it, it’s out of worry about how they would hassle me, not because I want to.
Just the little things I miss about living independently. It gets symbolized to me by sleeping on the sofa instead of in a room.
stupidiamaxima replied to your post: Just an idle thought. I really liked Mark…
I love them both. I like Edward a little more as an actor whos movie choices I like and who is fascinating and Ruffalo…let’s just say I dig big brown eyes. God he is aaaaadorable
^^;;
I can’t speak for good looks, but Ruffalo’s toned down, low level intensity sold me on him for Banner.
But Ed Norton is just awesome in everything he’s in. I’d have liked to see how he would interact with the other stars.
Just an idle thought.
I really liked Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner in the Avengers movie, but honestly I was previously really looking forward to seeing Edward Norton in it. It’s just that I’m a huge Ed Norton fan.
meiran replied to your post: Seriously
I’m constantly getting added by people I’ve never met, talked to, or even been in the same city with. We’re just in the same industry so they add me.
Do you accept them? Someone who just started working where I used to work added me. I told her I’d be happy to correspond through Facebook, just not through LinkedIn.
balalaikaboss replied to your post: So I watched “Iron Sky”
that’s…a really good ending, actually.
I was surprised too. I was enjoying all the campiness (and also, I’m serious, the Nazi schoolteacher is so very pretty) and then that ending happened and it rather blew me away.
It wasn’t entirely as campy as I thought. There were genuine LOL moments, but the ending, and a few other moments about the general destructiveness of humanity, got to me.
And actually the ending was a small surprise.
Sometimes I really see my mom’s point about some of my dad’s habits. Some of them are “Eh, you can’t help it” which I’m fine with, but some…
He has this tendency to go nuts shopping for food. And then he says “oh, we better eat those or else they’ll go bad.”
After my mom flew out, he bought all this stuff, most of which to cook himself, which was fine. But he was in such a hurry to use it all up, and then we couldn’t eat it all, so he said “Better eat those before they go bad.” Yeah, but you didn’t have to buy them, if all we were going to do was rush to eat them.
In Switzerland it’s really easy to buy as you eat. You don’t need to go and stock up for a month like you do in America. The vegetables typically have fewer preservatives so they won’t last as long as they do in America, so it’s actually better to do so.
*facepalm*
Oh, my dad. He’s been gone a week now and I haven’t made a sizeable dent in the things he bought and made.
creativelybored replied to your post: creativelybored replied to your post:…
Yeah. Don’t know so much about those, but a bit about Heinlein. Naturally, aside from the stretch needed for the science fiction to be fiction, that’s true, but what with many of them coming from a scientific background, it makes sense.
There’s a practical reason too. You can afford to be detailed in a book, but movies have to be exciting and do everything to make just enough sense for a couple of hours. Games also work with gameplay > realism. It’s just not practical to follow all the rules of physics.
Plus, people like Jules Verne were seriously calculating what it would take to send a submarine to the bottom of the ocean, or fire a bullet to the moon. So they took time to try and do the maths.