Hey, thanks.

Too much fun not to.

Also, I could make out the drop and I didn't even fullscreen it.

My point is, some kind of movies offer instant gratification. Lasers, space-battles, non-stop action. They are fine for what they are.

Others are a slow burn, they demand close attention, they save their impact for later, once you understand the characters and the world they live in. They engage your intelligence, they challenge your sympathies and make you think about who you are, about morality, loyalty, and difficult choices people have to make. They have things to say about what it means to be human, to be a son, to be a father. It's the difference between forgettable pop-culture schlock and high art that sticks with you forever.

The first kind are childish, because children don't know how to delay gratification. They want the candy NOW, they want the toy NOW. Grown-ups should have learned that delaying gratification results in a better reward, and that the best things in life require some patience.

I don't have a superiority complex. Art is available to anyone who takes a moment to appreciate it. If you decide to miss out on it, it's nobody's fault but yours.

>I also never said I didn't like the movie, I said I don't understand it.

How can you understand a movie if you have only seen 30 minutes of it? It's a piece of art. You cannot say you know all about it by hearing about it second hand.

I didn't watch the movie until I was 30. I "knew" parts of it from references people made, but I had no idea what the movie was about until I actually watched the damned thing. The whole thing. It absolutely deserves its reputation as one of "the best movies ever made." There is no such thing as enjoying a complicated piece of art by proxy. But you'd have no idea why unless you watched it, and part 2 (but not part 3, which sucks).

Well the movie doesn't have any aliens or laser-beams, so I suppose it has that working against it. That's often an insurmountable flaw for people who are/act like they are twelve years old.

By the way, your original comment doesn't just say you didn't like the movie. You say you don't understand why it's so highly regarded.

How would you even know? Watch the fucking thing.

You didn't even watch the goddamned movie but you still talk shit about it. You're being ignorant. You don't even know what you're dismissing out of hand.

You're entitled to your opinion but that doesn't mean your opinion has any merit.

Nobody cares.

1 and 2 are one long movie. It's the story of Michael Corleone trading his soul for power. He has his reasons-- very compelling ones. But nonetheless by the end of part 2, he has gone from tragic hero and prodigal son, to antihero, and finally to villain. To make that clear, you need part 2.

It's closer to Shakespeare or Greek Tragedy than the usual gangster flick.

Ah yes, because you have a tiny attention-span, this universally-treasured movie must actually suck. You're a genius.

People who like Joyce get a huge amount of fun from reading him, but the Wake in particular is like learning a new language-- or, more accurately, it's like regressing to a more primitive form of language, where words and sounds intuitively invoke feelings and images.

You can "snap into" the language of the Wake, and you find that you're "getting it", getting the meanings that Joyce was intending, without "reading" the words like you normally would. It's emphatically not some kind of high-brow intellectual thing, like reading Continental philosophy, Hegel or Kant or whatever. It's more like a those "magic eye" pictures that were big in the 90s. If you cross your eyes the right way, the image snaps into focus-- until you look away for a second and then it's all a fuzzy mess again.

It's really an amazing achievement in writing, but it's so weird and impenetrable that many people can't make heads or tails of it, and it just seems like nonsense. That's not because the reader is less intelligent or clever. There's just a perceptual 'trick' to it.

Joyce intended it to be an amalgamation of the whole history of European society and literature, but the chronology and the logical/narrative structure is blended, stretched, fractaled, and loops back on itself. It has "the logic of a dream". Look at something, it's one thing. Look away for a second and look back, it's another. You slip through the layers of history, of words/ideas/events/people without any sign-posts or a stable point of view. One character or object or event bleeds back into others of the same kind, of their opposites.

This is why people either love or hate it. If you can slip into Joyce's stream of consciousness, you get a wild and wonderful trip. If you can't, you just get spun around until you're sick with dizziness and you don't catch any of it.

People who like Joyce get a huge amount of fun from reading him, but the Wake in particular is like learning a new language-- or, more accurately, it's like regressing to a more primitive form of language, where words and sounds intuitively invoke feelings and images.

You can "snap into" the language of the Wake, and you find that you're "getting it", getting the meanings that Joyce was intending, without "reading" the words like you normally would. It's emphatically not some kind of high-brow intellectual thing, like reading Continental philosophy, Hegel or Kant or whatever. It's more like a those "magic eye" pictures that were big in the 90s. If you cross your eyes the right way, the image snaps into focus-- until you look away for a second and then it's all a fuzzy mess again.

It's really an amazing achievement in writing, but it's so weird and impenetrable that many people can't make heads or tails of it, and it just seems like nonsense. That's not because the reader is less intelligent or clever. There's just a perceptual 'trick' to it.

Joyce intended it to be an amalgamation of the whole history of European society and literature, but the chronology and the logical/narrative structure is blended, stretched, fractaled, and loops back on itself. It has "the logic of a dream". Look at something, it's one thing. Look away for a second and look back, it's another. You slip through the layers of history, of words/ideas/events/people without any sign-posts or a stable point of view. One character, or object, or event bleeds back into others of the same kind-- or of their opposites.

This is why people find it so frustrating. You can't stop and regain your bearings, you either slip into the stream of consciousness and flow with it, or you're just spun around into you're dizzy and you catch nothing of it.

Plenty of people have made sense of it. It's not literature in the traditional sense, it's meant to have shifting meanings. It's not a traditional narrative. You're supposed to 'read' by getting impressions of the words, because their amalgamations of other words, it's like a psychedelic trip or a fever-dream. It's like a fractal, in that you can dive into single 'words' or phrases and find varieties of ideas and meanings in several languages and eras.

You supposed to lose track of characters, settings, events. That's all deliberate. There's a method to the madness. If you don't like it, that's perfectly legitimate. But it's not nonsense. It's a work of art, a brilliant one, but Joyce is like a comedian with an extremely specific and absurd sense of humour who doesn't care if anyone else gets the joke.

Coward.

Wow, they're total cowards.

There was no part 3.

This is how we are remembering it.

It wasn't harsh enough. Germany should have been occupied and de-militarized.

You should be very sad about the kind of person you have chosen to be.

Addendum: A dog is a living thing. It's not an animated stuffed animal.

Before getting a dog, consider whether you are able to give it everything it needs, provide a secure home, pay for vet bills, for its entire natural life. If you're not sure about these things, don't get a dog.

Luftwaffe was built to support the ground troops, not conduct strategic bombing campaigns. Hitler demanded it do both, and it cost them dearly.

Psychedelics certainly influenced me to stop smoking. I personally know several people who had the same experience. Setting aside actual physiological impact, psychedelics are very powerful tools of self-reflection. The idea that cigarettes are essentially slow suicide is extremely impactful when considered while high on psychedelics.

They need them right away.

1. Do you know how ****ing expensive it is to launch anything into space? Anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per kilogram.
2. It's also inherently risky. Failure rates for space-launch rockets is a few %. By those numbers, within a few decades, you'd have a rocket laden with nuclear waste explode in mid-air. No bueno.
3. It's unnecessary. Storing nuclear waste once it has cooled down is not all that problematic.
4. The whole point of nuclear power is to generate power, ie, as an alternative to burning fossil fuel. Taking spent nuclear fuel and burning huge amounts of fuel launching it into space is defeating the point.

Expensive, dangerous, impractical, and unnecessary. But otherwise, great idea.

Politics is one big ass-blast.