NomDeSpite

Two reasons to be against "selfies", as they're called: 1. Life is meant to be lived and experienced. It's not a series of photography sessions starring you in the title role, taken for the purpose of gaining attention and admiration from others. It's time to get over yourself. 2. Supply and demand. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube have exponentially multiplied the amount of video and photographs in the world without increasing the demand exponentially. Which has made film and photography increasingly worthless. One big solution to this problem is to accept that some images just are not supposed to go on the internet. As Don Hertzfeldt of "Rejected" fame commented: "If you've only seen a film downgraded on the Internet or some strange miniature device, in many ways you haven't really seen it yet. Youtube is great for home videos of your cat falling off the roof, but it is not really the proper setting for "cinema"… Movies are meant to be seen in the dark, hopefully with an audience, and with your undivided attention; this last one is non-negotiable."

"Yes, I have a license and a car". My car is a 2004 Nissan Sentra. It's black, because I'm cool like that. Has around 80-90,000 miles on it. I don't use it for races, off-roading or anything like that. It's just a regular old sedan. It drives me from place A to place B. It does a great job at that goal too, and I like it alot. I should do something to take really good care of it. It's also comfy and compact. Cars made during the last decade seem alarmingly bulky to me.

I actually just played through Ico a few days ago. If there's only one game that can qualify as "high art", I nominate that one. If Andrei Tarkovsky were alive, he could have done a movie adaptation of it.

"Don't Look Back In Anger" by Oasis "In My Place" and "Talk" by Coldplay (the latter being a direct ripoff of Kraftwerk) "Dream On" by Aerosmith

My favorite movie is Battle Royale. I saw it when I was a freshman in high school and it's impact on me was overwhelming, possibly because the film's characters are that same age. It is utterly convincing and compelling in every way. It's one of those movies that "has it all". If you haven't seen it yet, make it your next viewing. The Hunger Games deserves props for raising BR's profile. My least favorite movie is Birdemic: Shock And Terror. Look, I like laughing at bad movies too. I laughed at Troll 2, The Room and To Catch A Yeti (that last one in particular is the shizz). But I cannot laugh at Birdemic. There is nothing to laugh at. It is one excruciating cringe scene after another. Watching it felt like how I imagine being molested would feel. It is an all-out raping of the filmic medium of storytelling. Don't see it, no matter what anyone tells you.

For the first time in years, I'm actually excited about a video game. Details are forthcoming regarding "The Last Guardian", from those who made Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus.

Ask her if she would like to join a band. If so, give her a woodwind, string or brass instrument of her choice (or a piano) and put her in a somewhere (school band, local marching bands, etc.) that will expose her to non-contemporary music. Baroque, classical, romantic, modern composition, and so on. Also, novels that were written before 1900. They are your friend. They are awesome.

Russia's population is not declining. It was declining rapidly from 1991 to 2008 but has since 2008 has grown larger every year. Fertility rates in Russia have also increased significantly since bottoming out in 1999. Death rates peaked in 2003 and have declined noticably since then. All of this info comes from statistics posted at the Demographics Of Russia page on Wikipedia. "The West" is not spreading their influence to the Former Soviet Union, which views Western Culture as irreverent, emasculated and addicted to pleasure, comfort and convenience. Maybe in the 1990s Russia looked more favorably on the West but not now.

What language is it, exactly?

Given the extremely hetreogenous nature of the current American population, the continutation of the United States Of America isn't really possible. Americans used to be united by ethnic heritage from the British Isles and Protestant religion. The only thing that the American people today have in common is that they all reside in the 50 states of the Union. The people living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan don't share the lifestyle, language, food, music, kinship structure or ideology as the people living in Detroit, and neither of them share what people in Provo, Utah live by. This is obvious. People prefer the company of their own groups. It's just a fact of human nature. And it is reasonable to think that the United States will dissolve into countless smaller areas, each controlled by groups very much unlike the groups that control other areas. Millennials in America (and the West in general) have been conditioned by their "education" and by the media to think that "diversity is our greatest strength as a nation". Nothing could be further from the truth. If diversity were a national strength, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would not have broken apart. The Balkanization may not involve the creation of new states but it will involve the silent realization that the people living in America are irreconcilably different.

My big complaint about work? I haven't been doing enough of it. That changes on Thursday. Have an awesome new job.

It's called Friendship Is Magic, not "The Class Struggle Is Magic". Good riddance.

I hear ya. I'm American and I cannot stand our television advertisements, in the large majority of cases. There are exceptions (some Super Bowl ads, for example) but exceptions is all they are. I hear that in other countries it's illegal to advertize pharmaceutical drugs on television. I don't support "banning it" but have the good sense to refrain from doing it. Drugs are bad, mmkay?

Sir Wulfington shivers in terror as he realizes that equal outcomes simply don't happen in Ponyville. They don't happen in real life either. Are you going to give up on life because of that? Look, I'm a cultural traditionalist. I don't like multiculturalism, feminism or gay marriage. And it is annoying when people in this fandom attack traditionalism. But I can still be friends with you anyways because friendship isn't always about shared values. It's about caring for another's well being because they have value as a person. It's depressing that you'd stop enjoying a work of art that helped you, for such an insubstantial reason.