Humanoid's recent activity
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Comment on AlbumLove recommendations thread: July 2023 in ~music
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Comment on Do you spend more time creating a Tildes reply than on other platforms? in ~tildes
Humanoid Link ParentWell... yes! The reward, ironically, is the non-reward—a turn away from post-Skinner digital behavioralism wherein social media engagement becomes a pigeon experiment. The social internet seems to...So, is the reward an environment where thoughtful discussion is reciprocated with thoughtful responses, rather than threads where the top-rated response to a serious inquiry or prompt is a one-line pun?
Well... yes! The reward, ironically, is the non-reward—a turn away from post-Skinner digital behavioralism wherein social media engagement becomes a pigeon experiment. The social internet seems to have become a place where a loud majority of internet commentators have been environmentally trained like Skinner's pigeons, developing rituals (quips and memes) in an effort to activate food dispensation (upvotes, likes).
Tildes' sleek, minimal design and cultural focus on quality strikes me as a radical de-emphasis of these types of behavioral mechanisms, and turns instead towards a hopeful appeal to a more natural discursive style. To extend the Skinner metaphor, perhaps we are better with tools that embrace our natural "pigeonness", so our exchanges may more closely resemble old discussion forums or historical letter-writing.
In this way, Tildes may avoid the flood of nonsense and bloat that seems to overtake most websites in 2023, by eliminating many of the factors that allow low-effort dialogue to spin out of control. I view it similar to an economic intervention aimed at preventing a financial bubble—remove the incentives for a boom/bust cycle, and set infrastructure in place for organic, sustainable growth.
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Comment on Does anyone here enjoy poetry? If yes, what are your gateway drug poems and what are your hidden gems? in ~books
Humanoid LinkI agree with all your sentiments about sharing poetry, but my solution has always been to focus on particularly good poems vs. universally good ones. My best results in sharing the love of poetry...I agree with all your sentiments about sharing poetry, but my solution has always been to focus on particularly good poems vs. universally good ones. My best results in sharing the love of poetry has been by tailoring my offerings to the specific tastes or personality of the person I'm engaged with. Naturally, this is impossible to do in this context, but I'll share a few examples of my touch-stone poets.
One of my favorite go-to poets is Arthur Rimbaud. I've noticed that people who are unfamiliar with Rimbaud are less likely to get caught up in his mythos and, ironically, tend to read his poems closer to the way they were intended. Rimbaud's words and imagery are raw, and he appeals directly to those nonconformists with a lust for life.
Evening Prayer by Arthur Rimbaud
I live my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,
A big fluted beer mug in my hand, neck and hypogastrus
Arched, a cheap Gambier pipe between my teeth,
And the air above me swollen with sails of smoke.Like steaming droppings in an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me gently burn:
And at times my sad heart is like sapwood
Bleeding dark yellow gold where a branch is torn.Then, when I've methodically drowned my dreams
With thirty or forty beers, I pull myself together
And release my bitter need:Sweet as the Lord of Hyssop and Cedar,
I piss into the brown sky, far and wide,
Heliotropes blessing me below.Another favorite is Sylvia Plath—her contribution to the confessional style of poetry cannot be overstated and, hence, her poems still feel radically personal to the modern ear. Her voice and instincts for rhyme and sound is as it good as it gets in the English language.
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco sealAnd a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friendSays there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obsceneAn engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man whoBit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf lookAnd a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.One of the great tragedies of poetry, in my opinion, is that the great bulk of Sappho's poems have been lost to history. All we have are fragments preserved on things like recovered pottery, but Sappho still stands as a world-class poet. Her love poems are some of the best ever written.
‘He’s equal with the Gods, that man’ by Sappho
He’s equal with the Gods, that man
Who sits across from you,
Face to face, close enough, to sip
Your voice’s sweetness,And what excites my mind,
Your laughter, glittering. So,
When I see you, for a moment,
My voice goes,My tongue freezes. Fire,
Delicate fire, in the flesh.
Blind, stunned, the sound
Of thunder, in my ears.Shivering with sweat, cold
Tremors over the skin,
I turn the colour of dead grass,
And I’m an inch from dying.For a modern American poetry novitiate, Allen Ginsberg is surely a poet one must traverse sooner rather than later. The Beat Generation helped blow open poetry access to the masses in the age of prime-time television and golden-age cinema. Ginsberg remained relevant for decades thereafter, but few poems speaks to mental illness and creative vision better than his most famous work, Howl. This poem works best if you read it straight through, following the jazz-improvisation stream-of-consciousness style with an appropriate internal narrative. Sitting and pondering lines is best for a second or third read.
Disclaimer: This is a long read, and if you don't get into it in the first several stanzas, I wouldn't bother following it to the end unless you have time.
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western nightSan Francisco, 1955—1956
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Comment on What are you all drinking tonight? in ~food
Humanoid Link ParentOh, good idea! Next time I have some money in the bank, I'll grab a couple bottles of La Fin du Monde and put them away for a year or two. I'm totally in love with trippels, they've been great at...Oh, good idea! Next time I have some money in the bank, I'll grab a couple bottles of La Fin du Monde and put them away for a year or two.
I'm totally in love with trippels, they've been great at helping me wean off IPAs. I still get all the features I love in a good, strong ale, but with delightfully complex flavors that don't hurt my stomach.
Don De Dieu sounds delicious! I already love Westmalle, I tried the Dubbel instead of the Trippel so I could get a taste for the difference, but I'll absolutely be trying the Trippel soon. I'll also keep an eye out for the Tripel Van De Garre! I've got all these on my list now, thank you for the recommendations!
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Comment on What are you all drinking tonight? in ~food
Humanoid Link ParentMaudite sounds delicious, I'd try anything from Unibroue after La Fin du Monde. I'll keep an eye out for Troegs too, their ales look right up my alley. Thank you for the recommendations!Maudite sounds delicious, I'd try anything from Unibroue after La Fin du Monde. I'll keep an eye out for Troegs too, their ales look right up my alley. Thank you for the recommendations!
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Comment on What are you all drinking tonight? in ~food
Humanoid LinkWeihenstephaner Original Premium and New Belgium Trippel Ale. Both are part of my one-two punch to escape from IPAs, which I've drank almost exclusively for most of my prime beer-drinking years....Weihenstephaner Original Premium and New Belgium Trippel Ale.
Both are part of my one-two punch to escape from IPAs, which I've drank almost exclusively for most of my prime beer-drinking years. I'm an old man now and IPAs give me a tummy-ache, so I've been looking for lighter offerings.
Weihenstephaner Original Premium is a tasty lager; I could never stand American Adjunct "dad beers", but I've decided not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and find lagers that I can genuinely enjoy—this has turned out to be one of them. Light, clean, and refreshing! It's been 90+ degrees where I live, and this has been a good summer drink.
New Belgium Trippel Ale is good and solid. I picked up a bottle of La Fin du Monde a few weeks ago and was totally blown away by it—complex, delightful flavor and sneaky 9% ABV, maybe the best beer I've ever had, actually—and have been on a Belgian kick since. Loved Orval Trappist Ale and Westmalle Dubbel. I picked up a six-pack of New Belgium Trippel in search of a more economical Belgian-style Ale, and it seems perfectly serviceable in that role. I'll probably pick these up for parties when I can't afford to burn through all the good stuff in one night.
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Comment on Do you spend more time creating a Tildes reply than on other platforms? in ~tildes
Humanoid LinkUnless the topic is explicitly casual, absolutely yes. Tildes is ideologically designed to reward quality and thoughtfulness in discussion, and I do my best to organize my thoughts and engage in...Unless the topic is explicitly casual, absolutely yes. Tildes is ideologically designed to reward quality and thoughtfulness in discussion, and I do my best to organize my thoughts and engage in good faith when a conversation attracts my interest. Mainstream social media sites inherently discourage genuine engagement and effort, so it's been a breath of fresh air to find a space where long-form commentary is still rewarded.
On the flipside, if I can't contribute beyond re-stating what's already been said, then I don't feel the impulse to comment just for the sake of commenting. I'm happy to read through threads, vote for good posts, and chime in here and there only if I genuinely have something to say. There's plenty of noise on the internet and, to me, the key to a good Tildes experience is simply being thoughtful when you reach that comment box at the bottom of a thread.
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Comment on Reddit is Fun, Apollo, BaconReader, and other third-party Reddit apps have officially shut down in ~tech
Humanoid LinkRIP RIF! I haven't been on Reddit much this past month, but I hopped on today to use RIF one more time before deleting my account. These last five or so years of Reddit have been delivering...RIP RIF!
I haven't been on Reddit much this past month, but I hopped on today to use RIF one more time before deleting my account. These last five or so years of Reddit have been delivering increasingly diminishing returns for me, so I'm grateful to have this fire lit under me to migrate off the platform.
Tildes has been a revelation for me and helped me reconceptualize the way I engage with social media and bring my internet usage better in line with my values. For more niche interests, I've found myself returning to more traditional subject-focused discussion forums. When I get the impulse to doomscroll, I open up an ebook now instead.
RIF was always Reddit for me, and now that it's gone, I am too. The comfortable, minimalist design was the last thing keeping me there. Thank you for embodying a decade+ of Reddit for me and many others with RIF, @talklittle!
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Comment on What have you been listening to this week? in ~music
Humanoid Link ParentYes, of course! KGLW has such a great track record, in my opinion, that a new release is always something to be excited about. Gila Monster is a banger!Yes, of course! KGLW has such a great track record, in my opinion, that a new release is always something to be excited about. Gila Monster is a banger!
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Comment on What have you been listening to this week? in ~music
Humanoid LinkKing Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King I always find myself coming back to this album—a landmark one, some early 1969 prog-rock—because its weird jazzy-psyche-rock musical aesthetic is...King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King
I always find myself coming back to this album—a landmark one, some early 1969 prog-rock—because its weird jazzy-psyche-rock musical aesthetic is such a compelling time capsule of a transformative year in rock music. Also, 21st Century Schizoid Man is a banger.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - I'm In Your Mind Fuzz
Gizz is in my mind fuzz.
The Courettes - Boom! Dynamite
Boom! Dynamite is a really fun, fast-paced album; it has a throwback 60s garage rock feel with a punk-girl-group veneer. Standout tracks for me are Want You! Like a Cigarette and Voodoo Doll.
I haven't had time to sit down with the whole album, but this track is a real gem that I've had on repeat for the past week. Come for the world-class exhibition of 70s soul, but stay for the phenomenal hook that rolls in halfway through—it's better known today as the iconic sample from Eminem's My Name Is!
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Comment on Are there any wrestling fans here? in ~sports
Humanoid Link ParentI'm a fan but I watch old school stuff almost exclusively; I do catch Mania every year, though, and once in a while I'll watch a big show that captures my interest.I'm a fan but I watch old school stuff almost exclusively; I do catch Mania every year, though, and once in a while I'll watch a big show that captures my interest.
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Comment on Haunting covers, or something like that in ~music
Humanoid Link ParentPhenomenal recommendation! I was even actively waiting for it and the vocal transition waffled me anyway. I'll have to throw her into my rotation, thank you for giving Findlay a shout here.Phenomenal recommendation! I was even actively waiting for it and the vocal transition waffled me anyway. I'll have to throw her into my rotation, thank you for giving Findlay a shout here.
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Comment on Music Discovery Thread: Share the Top 3 songs you’re currently obsessed with! in ~music
Humanoid Link ParentI don't think I've ever seen another La Femme fan in the wild before! Saisis la corde has been a go-to of mine for years.I don't think I've ever seen another La Femme fan in the wild before! Saisis la corde has been a go-to of mine for years.
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Comment on Haunting covers, or something like that in ~music
Humanoid LinkI waited 'til dreams Like my heart, were all broken The flowers were all dead And the words were unspoken The grief that I knew Was beyond all consoling The beat of my heart Was a bell that was...I waited 'til dreams
Like my heart, were all broken
The flowers were all dead
And the words were unspoken
The grief that I knew
Was beyond all consoling
The beat of my heart
Was a bell that was tolling—Saddest of Sundays
Gloomy Sunday by Diamanda Galás
This version of Gloomy Sunday scratches that "haunting" itch for me every single time. Galás in general is a master of that chilled-out Gothic vibe you're looking for!
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Comment on Please post your podcast preferences in ~hobbies
Humanoid Link ParentSecond Darknet Diaries, thank you for reminding me to get caught up! I didn't used to have any particular interest in cybercrime, but I binged the hell out of this podcast. The pentester stories...Second Darknet Diaries, thank you for reminding me to get caught up! I didn't used to have any particular interest in cybercrime, but I binged the hell out of this podcast. The pentester stories are my favorite episodes.
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Comment on Please post your podcast preferences in ~hobbies
Humanoid Link ParentGreat question, there's a lot of content! Dr. Honda has a long-running "The Psychology of..." series where he spends anywhere from 90 mins to 3 hours breaking down the psychology behind a...Great question, there's a lot of content! Dr. Honda has a long-running "The Psychology of..." series where he spends anywhere from 90 mins to 3 hours breaking down the psychology behind a particular person, character, or concept. I think one of these episodes would give you a good taste of how he thinks about things; I would recommend finding a topic that interests you and starting there.
Offhand, a few episodes from this series that I remember enjoying are:
The Psychology of Bill Cosby
The Psychology of John Lennon
The Psychology of Tony Soprano
The Psychology of Elliot RodgerAnother good one that comes to mind is "Chris Watts and the Seven Types of Family Annihilators". Also "Borderline, Narcissism, Avoidant, and Dependent Personality Disorders". They also do frequent Q&A episodes that tend to cover a lot of ground.
One of my personal favorite episodes is Psychology in Seattle's 2018 interview with the great existential therapist Irvin Yalom.
If you pick up this podcast and find yourself enjoying Bob as a co-host, I found his episode "A Therapist with Disorganized Attachment" to be very revealing and a profound reflection on his attachment style.
I hope some of these recommendations help!
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Comment on Please post your podcast preferences in ~hobbies
Humanoid LinkPsychology in Seattle is a real treasure of a podcast, in my opinion. It's hosted by Antioch University professor Kirk Honda, along with some excellent co-hosts, and Dr. Honda does an incredible...Psychology in Seattle is a real treasure of a podcast, in my opinion. It's hosted by Antioch University professor Kirk Honda, along with some excellent co-hosts, and Dr. Honda does an incredible job of explaining a wide variety of psychological principles and theories using both pop culture analysis and thoughtful, well-written deep dives. He is particularly deliberate in the way he explains oft-maligned personality disorders, and his podcast has helped me build a much more compassionate conceptualization of the society around me. I would highly recommend PiS to anybody even remotely interested in the subject!
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Comment on Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps in ~tech
Humanoid LinkI support the blackout and I'm happy to see some of the bigger subreddits start to take a public stance, but I'd be very surprised if the Reddit administration isn't prepared to hunker down in the...I support the blackout and I'm happy to see some of the bigger subreddits start to take a public stance, but I'd be very surprised if the Reddit administration isn't prepared to hunker down in the face of this backlash. I don't think they would make such an aggressive move against third-party applications unless they were committing to it as part of their corporate strategy. It's unfortunately common for businesses to alienate big segments of their clientele if it means that they can maximize profits against the ones who remain. Regardless of how this plays out, I plan on staying on Tildes as it matches my values much closer than Reddit maybe ever did.
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Comment on What did you do this week (and weekend)? in ~talk
Humanoid LinkI had a quiet weekend with my wife, finished up Ted Lasso and (UK) Ghosts, ate some delicious smoked pork belly, and got caught up on chores. Today's the last day of a week-long home vacation, so...I had a quiet weekend with my wife, finished up Ted Lasso and (UK) Ghosts, ate some delicious smoked pork belly, and got caught up on chores. Today's the last day of a week-long home vacation, so I'm feeling a little bittersweet about going back to work tomorrow despite getting plenty of time to rest and relax.
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Comment on Any recommendations that are on audiobooks.com? in ~books
Humanoid LinkIt looks like audiobooks.com has Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings) on there! I'm not sure that it's everyone's cup of tea,...It looks like audiobooks.com has Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings) on there! I'm not sure that it's everyone's cup of tea, but I would highly recommend all three audiobooks if you fancy a gritty fantasy series that doesn't shy away from violence and shades-of-gray morality. Inquisitor Glokta is my favorite character, some of his dialogue throughout the series had me cackling out loud.
Berlin (1973) by Lou Reed
Spotify
YouTube
I have a major bias here—Lou Reed is my favorite songwriter of all time. When I listened to The Velvet Underground & Nico for the first time as a teenager, it absolutely changed the way I consumed and appreciated music. The Velvet Underground, with their viola and S&M, were unlike anything I had heard before—but I immediately recognized them as a group taking rock 'n' roll to its logical conclusion. Lou Reed, to me, was a 20th-century rock Baudelaire or Rimbaud, mapping out the limits of human experience in a post-modern age, drinking the poison and keeping its quintessence, pushing the subject matter of popular music in a genuinely exciting and literary way.
This brings me to July's AlbumLove recommendation: 1973's Berlin. Berlin is, to my mind, Lou Reed's magnum opus—the apotheosis of his elegaic travels through New York City's underbelly, a genuine cry of despair from an artist in crisis, and a masterpiece rock opera that could just as easily be written either broadly for a rock audience or personally to Reed's exhausted psychoanalyst.
Berlin was Lou Reed's follow-up to 1972's Transformer, a widely-acclaimed glam-pop record made famous by its hit single, Walk on the Wild Side; much of the rock world was horrified, in contrast, at the dark and depressive tone of Berlin. (RCA had promoted Berlin, hilariously, as "the Sgt. Pepper of the Seventies") Reed's own record label took him to court, claiming in a lawsuit that Lou was sabotaging his own market appeal.
The commercial and critical failure of Berlin at the time of release was a massive setback for Lou Reed, who was utterly rejected as an artist by audiences and his label; this rejection would result in Reed's Metal Machine Music in 1975, when Reed standoffishly released an unsellable album to finish up his recording contract (thus doing the very thing RCA had previously litigated him over). One might argue that Lou Reed was castrated at the height of his artistic powers, and his career never really recovered from it.
Berlin, the album, is an expansion of Lou's earlier song of the same name. The characters in this song are further developed, and the album reads as a narrative centered around two lovers, Jim and Caroline, as their relationship burns up and their lives fall apart around them. This is an abuse-heavy, drug-fuelled narrative that serves to describe a highly toxic relationship in a very straightforward, often stomach-turning way. Caroline, in particular, shines as an incredibly powerful and complex character, a victim of intimate partner violence struggling to navigate a traumatic life stuck with an abuser that she can't fully escape.
Trigger warning: Berlin vividly describes scenes of domestic violence, drug abuse, and suicide. This is a bleak album.
1. Berlin
In Berlin, by the wall,
You were five-foot, ten-inches tall
It was very nice
Candlelight and Dubonnet on ice
The album opens with a snippet of the aforementioned song, Berlin, serving as prologue and setting the scene for the album—a glimpse of two lovers in the city of Berlin, enjoying a lovely date together at a charming European café.
2. Lady Day
... and I said no, no, no
Oh, Lady Day
Lady Day is a song about Caroline from Jim's perspective. Lou Reed evokes the tragic figure of Billie Holliday as he describes Caroline insecurely wandering the streets until she happens upon a bar, wherein she desperately seeks the validation missing from her life by performing as a singer on the stage. Jim is jealous and resents this about Caroline, pleading with her in the chorus to stop.
3. Men of Good Fortune
Men of good fortune
Often cause empires to fall
While men of poor beginnings
Often can't do anything at all
Lou Reed takes a step back here to continue painting the landscape of Berlin—wealth inequality is not just an economic reality, but a personal one that ruins peoples' lives before they even get a chance. Lou tends to avoid these kinds of on-the-nose political statements, so this song is something of a treat in that he discusses economic factors very explicitly here. His other scattered attempts at sociopolitical songwriting are fairly clumsy, but Men of Good Fortune shows that he can do this really well when he locates the subject with his own voice.
4. Caroline Says I
Just like poison in a vial
Hey, she was often very vile
But, of course, I thought I could take it all
Caroline Says I is an excellent example of Lou's observational brilliance at work. We know from decades of psychological observation, particularly in Couples and Family Therapy, that abusive partners will often justify their behavior as a response to the perceived "crimes" or abuses of their victim. Lou Reed nails that perfectly here. In Caroline Says I, Jim is providing his distorted perspective as he describes Caroline's cruelty and slights. Nonetheless, Jim, the long-suffering "hero", declares that "still, she is my Germanic queen". Jim is trying to gaslight us and control the narrative.
5. How Do You Think It Feels
How do you think it feels
To feel like a wolf and foxy
How do you think it feels
To always make love by proxy
This song could be coming from Jim, Caroline, Lou Reed, or any combination of narrators. Jim and Caroline are deep in the throes of methamphetamine addiction, Caroline is prostituting herself to support their habit ("If only I had some change—come here, baby"), and the song wheels around to address the listener directly: "How do you think it feels, when you're speeding and lonely?" Lou challenges us to check our moralizing instinct at the door, and show some compassion for two sick, dysfunctional people.
6. Oh, Jim
And when you're filled up to here with hate
Don't you know you gotta get it straight
Filled up to here with hate
Beat her black and blue and get it straight
Jim's insecurities, paranoia, and aggression towards Caroline coalesce into hatred as Jim unleashes explosive violence on his partner. Jim has become full of resentment towards Caroline and all of her "two-bit friends", finding himself completely isolated and lashing out abusively in a desperate attempt at maintaining control in their relationship. In the aftermath, Caroline resorts to a shocked chastisement and plea: "Oh Jim, how could you treat me this way?"
7. Caroline Says II
Caroline says
As she gets up from the floor
"You can hit me all you want to,
but I don't love you anymore"
Caroline Says II is the peak of the Berlin narrative: Caroline has gathered herself together after suffering a life-altering act of intimate partner violence, puts on her makeup to hide the bruises, and leaves Jim. To my sensibilities, this is an incredibly powerful song about survival. Caroline is deeply troubled and injured by Jim's abuse, but she knows "life is meant to be more than this" so she puts on a stoic face to get herself out of a dangerous situation. Yet we know she's still deeply traumatized when, at the end, "she put her fist through the window pane".
8. The Kids
They're taking her children away
Because they said she was not a good mother
Time has passed since Caroline has left Jim, but the aftershocks of drug addiction and abuse continue to rip Caroline's life apart. Jim takes a mostly-impersonal tone as he learns that the state has seized custody of Caroline's children. Jim feels validated in his jealousy as he's certain that she lost the kids "because she was making it with sisters and brothers", smugly recounting Caroline's sexual activities as a prostitute, and hypocritically blaming Caroline's problems on her drug dependency. Jim never stops to consider his own contribution to Caroline's post-traumatic stress and, indeed, even admits selfishly that he is "much happier this way". This is a truly haunting song that still gives me goosebumps after hundreds of listens.
9. The Bed
And this is the room where she took the razor
And cut her wrists that strange and fateful night
And I said oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling
Caroline's children have been taken away, and she's descended further into misery and depression. It seems that Caroline and Jim got back together since then. Caroline committed suicide and now Jim is reflecting coldly on their bedroom as he stands alone in their home. Though Jim rues that "I never would have started if I'd known that it would end this way", he admits that the "funny thing" is "I'm not at all sad that it stopped this way". Jim secretly relishes his final victory over Caroline, as her suicide means that she belongs to him forever. He just can't bring himself to actually grieve the death of Caroline.
10. Sad Song
Staring at my picture book
She looks like Mary, Queen of Scots
She seemed very regal to me
Just goes to show how wrong you can be
More time has passed, and Jim is reflecting on the relationship he had with Caroline. He has learned nothing. Like in Lady Day, Jim's gaslighting is in full effect again as he assures himself that he tried his best to love a difficult, cruel person. Jim reveals himself with the "comforting" thought that "somebody else would have broken both of her arms". In the end, Jim has won control of the narrative and, presumably, will go on to terrorize future partners. Sad song, indeed.