Crocefisso

At present I eat fruit for breakfast and have a late, large lunch at a restaurant for just over £10. I then don't eat again until breakfast the next day (the exception is Sundays, where I don't have lunch because I'm cycling and instead have dinner at a restaurant). Would cooking lunch and dinner really be cheaper than this (good UK supermarkets are v. expensive)?

A readable essay about anti-capitalist motifs in Spirited Away, for any fans (ie, everyone who's seen the film): http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/SpiritedAway/index.html

@decebal: Very true, which is exactly why vlogs should be avoided at all costs. Most of the ones I've seen say in several minutes what could be said in a sentence such as this one.

^ Perhaps so, but as far as we can tell these were not societies where one could admit to fearing death itself. And given that as recently as the 1940s we had Japanese soldiers fighting to the death rather than face the shame of capture, that these attitudes filter down and presumably reflected the overriding themes of their literature is a reasonable assumption.

Triathlon. Given that I already run 5-10 miles 3 times a week and do a c.60-80 mile cycle every Sunday it's not much of a step up, but I hate chlorinated water and live quite a way inland. Also need to step eating at restaurants all the time and either learn to cook or put up with McDonald's.

I think it was Taleb who pointed out that the ancients feared inglorious death while modern man fears merely death. You only have to look at the difference between Greek heroes and Ray Kurzweil, who lives off pills and wine in the vainglorious belief that he can and should live forever, to see that he was right.

Pretty self explanatory title. I've searched for a thread about best/favourite movies and haven't found one, so do lock this if there's an old one floating about in the ether. I was wondering essentially what people's favourite movies are, and whether Tip.It users lean towards certain genres/directors/actors over others? For my part, I would probably list The Godfather as my favourite film of all time, closely followed in joint second by Once Upon a Time in the West and Tokyo Story, with a lot of other good films a little way behind in no particular order (The Usual Suspects, The Last Emperor, Live Flesh, La Dolce Vita etc.)

I remember a while ago I was on a boat trip down the Nile. The scenery was incredible and yet people only stopped dozing under their sun hats or gossiping about people they knew back home when hippos were spotted. There's nothing wrong with hippos, but if they can't appreciate anything else they might as well just go to the zoo.

Cheapskates can't also expect quicker shipping. :wink:

The NY Times posted a fairly interesting pair of articles about the way the games industry is changing. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/arts/video-games/downloadable-games-take-place-beside-big-budget-counterparts.html?ref=video-games http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/technology/nintendos-wii-u-takes-aim-at-a-changed-video-game-world.html?ref=video-games&_r=0 For my part, I don't like these downloadable games because they tend to lack the immersion available in good big-budget titles. Angry Birds has far less replay value than Skyrim, for example, and is less interesting in the first instance.

They do, they just dismiss whatever isn't contrarian by labelling it 'mainstream'. Perhaps not as strong as hate, but they certainly look down on those who don't desperately absorb every cultural phenomenon that looks different. On a different note, people who simply claim that 'manga/anime' are things they like annoy me - not because manga/anime can't be good (Spirited Away kicks everything Pixar has ever done into the dirt, for example) but because liking everything that's Japanese and animated, without much discernment, is, like a hipster, merely striving to be different for the sake of difference. And was it not a Japanese priest who wrote that "a craving for novelity in all things is a sign of a person of superficial knowledge"? I think it was. Pretty sure that was Lincoln, buddy. Or maybe Morgan Freeman It was the priest Yoshida Kenko in Tsurezuregusa. I only wish I could remember which of the 243 essays it comes from.

They do, they just dismiss whatever isn't contrarian by labelling it 'mainstream'. Perhaps not as strong as hate, but they certainly look down on those who don't desperately absorb every cultural phenomenon that looks different. On a different note, people who simply claim that 'manga/anime' are things they like annoy me - not because manga/anime can't be good (Spirited Away kicks everything Pixar has ever done into the dirt, for example) but because liking everything that's Japanese and animated, without much discernment, is, like a hipster, merely striving to be different for the sake of difference. And was it not a Japanese priest who wrote that "a craving for novelity in all things is a sign of a person of superficial knowledge"? I think it was.

Recently I've watched: -Tokyo Story - I watched this last night and, I admit, cried at the end. They just don't make films like this anymore - calm, careful expositions of a particular issue without any clichéd happy endings or special effects. Unreservedly, I would give it 10/10. -The Hobbit - I found this film very middle of the road. It was well animated and some of the visuals were stunning, but it was also slow (not in a good way - ie, in terms of pacing - but because scenes just went on and on) and too much like every other fantasy film. Overall, 5/10. -Life of Pi - this was a good adaptation of a fairly good novel, but like most films today it was overreliant on wonderful special effects as a means of creating an impression and was totally lacking in subtlety. A solid 7/10. -Pan's Labyrinth - the premise was interesting and it was solidly written, but I wasn't convinced that the two 'halves' meshed together very well. Another 7/10. -Meetings with Remarkable Men - absolutely useless, one of the few time I've been unable to even finish a film. 2/10.

Everyone and everything that identifies as 'hipster' should be cast into the abyss.

Recently finished Mishima Yukio's The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I'd recommend it to anyone, regardless of their tastes, because though short it's an incredibly powerful, striking book. Also read Donald Keene's autobiography - I was glad to know a little better the man whose translations and books I have enjoyed for so long. I'll probably read Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History next.

Very well done Kaida. I expect the shade of green on your name will darken in the next few months. :wink:

Using the US as an analogy isn't a good idea, however, given that they invade countries without so much as needing to be provoked anyway. I've always viewed Bibi as a low-calibre PM fond of sabre-rattling and using the IDF. One need only look at the speech he made to the UNGA this September to see that he is itching for a conflict somewhere. As far as I am concerned, that the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 100 and Israel looks ready to invade, given the relative scale of Hamas' provocation, he has stepped far, far over the line of restraint and acceptable, legal self-defence.

The way Netanyahu overreacts to everything. I blame Hamas for starting the current crisis, and Israel for escalating it to the needless number of lives now lost in Palestine.

I'm surprised there's no 'OMG Kate Middleton pics' thread yet, with intense debates about privacy and the press. Seems like the sort of thing that goes on here.

Of course my feedback was going to have to be generic, because I've neither the time nor the inclination to cross-analyse every last sentence in the story. I agree with one of your earlier posts stating that dialogue is your forté, however, the rest of your prose is lacking. By saying that it is dull and merely sequential, I mean that it is lacking in any significant or noteworthy presence of the qualities that make literature more than a simple matter of recounting events in a prosaic manner. Other such examples include: This first sentence is uninspired, grammatically lacking, and the sense of place is unsuccessfully recreated as a result of the clumsy admixture of two seemingly incongrous elements - a sparse physical description immediately and randomly followed by a more general description of what sometimes happens at the inn - followed immediately by a list-like presentation of more of the first type of description. Owing again to grammatical errors and repetetive structure, the presentation of the inn feels more like a shopping list than an evocation of a bustling setting. Three steps I would therefore advise you to take are: 1. Always employ correct grammatical structures, even in drafts, because ultimately by using grammar correctly the myriad opportunities to enrich your writing can only be built on solid grammatical foundations. 2. Vary sentence structure and present things differently each time you use them in a narrative, to prevent the reader feeling as though this are being repeated. 3. Keep focussed - do not begin to describe the setting, only to drift off to something else and then return to the setting, for example; such things are likely to befuddle and irritate, and this is perhaps the only way not to vary your writing. As for the sentence I initally quoted being a "fragment in my draft", I find your drafting process a little odd - is it not just easier to write a draft with properly conjugated sentences? If this is part of your individual creative process, then I would either preface this information or post here only when the story is grammatically sound, which saves me time and effort crititquing an unfinished sentence. You rightly point out that my criticisms, like all others, are based on my own value judgements. This is true, and so to aid you in deciding whether or not I am worth listening to I am going to copy out for your what I consider the best piece of writing I've ever read. Obviously, as it is an essay by a Buddhist monk, I do not expect you to include Buddhist themes in a fantasy piece. I simply feel that it demonstrates better than I can aptly explain the merits of literary structures, as opposed to simply filling a piece of writing with excessive vocabulary (a crime I am guilty of in most of my articles, for example), and how refreshing this can be. The essay also shows how these complex grammatical structures can be used without alienating the reader, as layering subordinate clauses (as Victorians often did) does. The most important features are the hysteron protoron - reversing the natural order - and the use of parallelisms, with the former being in my opinion the best way of emphasising something, without resorting to bold text or exclamation marks. Anyway, this is the desevedly renowned opening of the essay: The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings. It might be imagined that the houses great and small, that vie roof against proud roof in the capital, remain unchanged from one generation to the next, but when we examine whether or not this is true, how few are the houses that were there of old. Some were burnt last year and only since rebuilt. Great houses have crumbled into hovels, and those who dwell in them have fallen no less. The city is the same, the people as numerous as ever, but of those I used to know, a bare one or two in twenty remain. They die in the morning, they are born in the evening, like foam on the water. Whence does he come, where does he go, man that is born and dies? We know not. For whose benefit does he torment himself building house that last but a moment, for what reason is his eye delighted by them? This too we do not know. Which will be first to go, the master or his dwelling? One might just as well ask this of the dew on the morning-glory. Perhaps the dew may fall and the flower remain--remain only to be withered by the morning sun. Or the flower may fade before the dew evaporates, but even if the dew does not evaporate, it never waits until evening. To conclude: I hope this has been helpful.

This isn't me trying to judge or anything, but what does a spiritual morality entail? Spirituality to me always appears so esoteric that I can never quite see how it applies too directly to ethical questions, excepting the spiritual morality decreed by the simplistic Abrahamic God.

The problem with Randox's reasoning is that it doesn't matter what foreign policy an American President pursues, really, and especially not from a warmongering perspective. Large scale invasions are not going to be politically acceptable in the USA for quite some years, thanks to Bush and his love of adventurism, though successes like Libya might quickly make them more acceptable again. Romney would likely do no more than assist/sanction an Israeli strike on Iran - for which he would not try and get any allies involved, lest he wanted to lose them (Israel is too unpopular for support in European countries to be politically viable) - and even this has become less likely ever since Netanyahu formed a coalition with the Likud party. So this is not a risk either way. In addition to this, I might add that being a US ally does not make one subject to every whim of the American presidents. In the 1960s, when the USA was still at its prime and had more clout, France under de Gaulle openly flaunted NATO (and even left, I believe) and pursued a very independent minded foreign policy, but the US did not alienate or give up on them. Similarly, in the 1960s the British opted out of the Vietnam War. For you lot in Canada, it is up to the foreign policy of your the Harper government whether or not to support America in the unlikely event that there were to be a war, and isn't a consideration that should be made when forming opinions on the American electoral process. Today more than ever, with China on the rise and becoming territorially assertive (to say the least) in Asia-Pacific, all American leaders are going to be more cautious about not alienating their allies in the way Bush did. This is how foreign policy works.

You've clearly never been to school in 3rd world Sicily, you lucky, lucky person.

"Children have hobbies; adults have interests." - someone wrote that in The Spectator recently. My interests are largely reading (philosophy and history mainly, as well as magazines like the Economist and the Spectator), cycling between 50 and 100 miles at least once a week, and if I've the time writing something for Tip.It. I also keep a sort of diary, consisting largely of observations and opinions rather than chronological events (it's all undated), but these days I'm an infrequent diarist.

An Ottoman Traveller by Evliya Celebi. Very interesting insight into the 17th century Muslim world.