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 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.

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 agree with you that climate change > nuclear waste. It is the poly-crisis that touches everything. And I agree that nuclear stuff can be overblown. Most of the time it is fine. But when it goes wrong, it REALLY goes wrong with long term consequences that stretch into tens of thousands of years. It will be dangerous longer than we have had writing or civilization. We will need to signal its danger beyond the current confines of human speech. I feel similarly about the idea of some forms of pollution which will affect places for thousands of years. The thing that gets me is the timescale.

I was watching a post-apocalyptic show the other day and started wondering: if society suddenly collapsed, what would happen to the nuclear power plants? I mean, I know that there are procedures to ramp them down but what then? How would you decommission a nuclear power plant without electricity? Without expertise? What would happen to all the nuclear weapons? I have always wondered if there are catastrophic scenario SOPs for these things.

Now, I have thought that if society does collapse, it will happen more gradually than suddenly. But this little thought exercise made me think that nuclear waste / nuclear energy is one thing that necessitates a certain level of knowledge, expertise, and energy to maintain. A certain level of civilization or modernization.

Again, I could be wrong and I’m willing to change my mind, but that is where I stand at the moment.

Many good things have been said. I would add that what give me comfort is that in the present moment, it is really, really hard to tell signal from noise. You often don’t know the impact of people or events until many years out. We often said in grad school that you can’t write history until at least 30 years have passed from the event. So, it seems chaotic and confusing because it is hard to for us to understand what it important and what is not.

The other thing is that every generation often sees the sky as falling in. An ancient Greek philosophy lamented about his parents had it all figured out and his children where going to ruin everything. That same sense of doom is pretty pervasive.

That is not to dismiss any of the real terrible things out there. Climate change is the big problem on the horizon. Nuclear waste is another. But I think on the balance, we are going to muddle through fine. The great blessing of humanity is that we are adaptable. The curse of humanity is that we are adaptable.

You kind of stole most of my answer! Thanks for sharing.

REALLY tried to like it. Watched the whole thing but then afterwards, I felt like I had watched nothing. The farther away I get from the show, the more I dislike it. All of the acting was great. And when they got away from the video game, the story was wonderful. But I felt like I was watching a video game - which I was in a way. And I felt like it was trying way to hard to be profound. It’s sad because I thought that “Chernobyl” was one of the best things I’ve ever watched on television.

Edit: Completely realize that this post was not about TLoU but just needed to get this off my chest. When everyone raves about it, I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills. On the subject of the post, yes, streaming services are getting way too expensive and I think we’ll reach an inflection point soon where they will all start collapsing at once.