I remember driving through that whole area about 10 years ago. It is a very weird, almost alien place. The desert is one thing, but there is a post-industrial, post-apocalyptic eeriness to it. Like something bad happened here a long time ago. I can’t imagine that being my home.
nikt
joined 2 years ago
Does something like mindfulness help at all with this?
I’ve found that — with my ostensibly“normal” brain, at least — regularly practicing mindfulness meditation can be really helpful in getting through physically, emotionally, or perceptually difficult moments. It’s a practiced skill that helps take the edge off what would otherwise be overwhelming experiences.
I wonder if this is a practice that could also be helpful for people like yourself?
Other than fruit (a seed dispersal mechanism), most “food” doesn’t actually want to be eaten.
A good way to protect yourself from being eaten is to become poisonous.
We’ve evolved ways to become immune to some of those poisons, or more recently, we’ve bred plants to be less poisonous.
I don’t understand how these people get to and from their homes.
The show was not great, but the epic premise is awesome. So I thought I’d just go read the books, assuming the source material was the good stuff.
But wow, turns out Asimov can’t write a decent paragraph. The story and ideas are buried under page after page of cringeworthy dialogue and pointless descriptions of gee whiz gadgets.
Having to rely on people to do things for you, even if you’re super rich, can be annoying. People that work for you take time off, get sick, so now you need other people to manage the other people to ensure that someone is always available, then you start to dislike some of those people, but managing who is around you all the time also takes effort, etc. etc. You can’t pay your way out of everything. Plus sometimes you just want to do things for yourself, and sometimes you just want to be alone.
I’m reading Hyperion right now. The writing is way better, at least.
Chances are those 1,700 were some of our best and the 30,000 incoming are mostly junior / helpdesk / support people.
I couldn’t disagree more. The writing is absolute cringe.
For some reason I assumed Asimov would be a good writer, maybe because I read his “Last Question” short story a long time ago and thought it was brilliant.
But Foundation reads like it was written by a teenager. He’s obsessed with describing ghee whiz gadgets and doodads that I couldn’t care less about, the prose is plain and boring, and the themes and characters have not aged well. It feels like I’m watching the Jetsons, except it’s not at all quaint.
I was hoping to be able to look past all this and get lost in the epic scale of the story and universe he purportedly builds, but it just wasn’t there for me.
Money on its own doesn’t make you happy, but it certainly makes it easier to avoid many of the things that make people unhappy (hunger, lack of security, inability to care for your kids/loved ones, etc).
That’s a pretty good reason to seek it and hold on to it, even if the bare notion that “money doesn’t make you happy” is true.
Then there’s the fact that we’re innately and/or culturally programmed to get satisfaction from feeling richer than our peers. There are genuinely few people who don’t have this impulse in them somewhere. Good luck coming up with a functioning political system that doesn’t acknowledge this.
I haven’t played this one, but I wish someone would do another “Inindo, way of the ninja” game. I have really fond memories of that one. I think it was a spinoff in the Nobunaga’s Ambition series. Looking at the screenshots now (from 30 years ago!!) it has.. uhh.. aged, a lot.