I am generally open to him and his views. I get tired of hearing things that only confirm my own worldview. While I agree with him sometimes, he is just as often challenging to me.

That said, I’ve been finding his whole recent “kids these days are awful” schtick really tiresome. It feels like an old man shaking a fist at the sky. I have lots to complain about Gen Zs and Millennials but I feel like he is really out of his depth. Every generation thinks their kids are awful.

But when he is on point, he is really on point.

I’ve listened to their podcast since the beginning and I’m a proud supporter on Patreon.

They have made it a point to interview people and I don’t get the impression that they agree with all of their interview subjects. I also don’t agree with them on everything. But that’s what an intellectual debate is. Just because they talk about an idea does not mean that they endorse it. Just because you hear about it does not mean that you must go out and buy crypto.

If you are going to look at a movement as diverse and amorphous as Solarpunk, you can interact with multiple ideas and learn more. But just because you learn about something, it does not mean that you must accept it or integrate it into your worldview. As I see it, understand where people are coming from - even if you disagree with it. Understanding does not equal acceptance.

(For full disclosure, I think that crypto makes very little sense. I’ve tried understanding what it is and why it is important but I just feel like it is a solution looking for a problem.)

I think it might be partially prettiness but I think it is mostly practicality. If the makeup is that difficult, it will take hours every day to put on. It can be hell on the actors. I remember reading about Peter Ustinov who played Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” but refused to do it for “Death on the Nile” because he did not want to have to wear that makeup in Egypt.

You have to make sure complicated makeup always looks consistent. It would have been really hard to do that in a series over multiple years.

One other example I can think of is Katniss in The Hunger Games. If you read the novel, her body was REALLY broken. I think her entire body was covered in burn scars. It would have been very hard to do that in the film consistently (though I will note that in the novels, the scars are not on her face. I saw it as symbolic of the inner scars of the Games).

So I think it is partially aesthetic but mostly practical.

I really love this. I think it captures a deep truth about how we actually live in the world. And balancing both is what solarpunk strives to achieve. Thanks for sharing!

Anytime I mention something vaguely positive about religion. I’m a former religious studies scholar who studied comparative religions. I have two degrees in the subject. I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial: the main thing I usually write is that you cannot usually say that a religion is a monolith - they are pretty complex phenomenon with many variations within them. You can say that Salafis are the totality of Islam. You can’t say that evangelicals are the totality of Christianity. You can’t say 969 in Burma is the totality of Buddhism. You can’t say Hindutva is Hinduism. You can’t say that the Settlers on the West Bank are the totality of Judaism. Religions without any variation or complexity usually die after a generation or two. I don’t just have these arguments online, I am used to have them with students and with friends. But nuance has few safe harbors on the internet…

I still have to use WhatsApp for my international family. That is what they use. My mom also still uses Facebook Messenger and won’t move to something else. I think it is because she uses it on her tablet and WhatsApp won’t work on it. I tried getting everyone to move to Signal but I was very lonely on that hill. I have FB account but I rarely every check it (once in every six months or so). I got off in 2018 after I felt so angry over something political in the US and realized that FB was making me angry on purpose to get clicks. I never had Instagram. Got into Pixelfed and I’m enjoying it a lot (perhaps because I have no prior benchmark with Instagram).

I’ve been quite concerned with Meta since I read “The Chaos Machine” by Max Fischer which goes into detail about how FB was heavily responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Rohyinga in Burma.

I once read a series of articles where someone gave up using one of the big five tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) for one week each. It was interesting how hard it was do with some. Facebook and Apple were the easiest but Amazon was nearly impossible because of AWS. I’ve concluded that for me, I can minimize my Facebook, Google, and Amazon use as much possible but in the end, just have to live with Microsoft and to a much lesser extent Apple for time being. But to each their own.

Funny you ask. Most of the time I dream in the first person but I recently had one where it was in the third person. It was strange - almost felt like watching a movie. I tried to analyze or read more deeply into the dream to think if I could connect myself to it but nope. Just a random mind-movie.

I liked the Apple TV show, too. The podcast was one of my absolute go-to’s every week, even if I was not that interested in the topic. He said something in one of them similar to the idea he had at the end of Monday’s TDS where he said that if you want to do change, it takes hard work on the local level. If you want to get out of the mind-fuck that is national politics in the US (and I’d argue in most places), you need to actually pay attention to what is happening in your own neighborhood and try to fix that.

Here is this article in Gastro obscura about many of these pizzas:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/most-unusual-pizza-styles

Really enjoyed this thread, BTW.

Hi everyone!

I live in Chicago on the North Side and work in higher education. Been in the city on and off for about 10 years with a gap in the middle when I lived in Asia. I came to Chicago for grad school and really liked the city and the Midwest more generally.

I have been pretty active in the Fediverse for the past year on Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bookwyrm and decided to give this a try! I’m also trying Kbin as well but really am not understanding the whole Threads + Microblogging. Feels kind of like a having a phone taped to a toaster. Am I the only one who feels that way?

Any good, active communities you might recommend? Any tips to make the most out of Lemmy?

I like reading a lot. I’m into fantasy, sci-fi, philosophy, and religion. I’m really interested in environment, ecology, and climate issues. Always looking for new things to explore in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.