Give them living eulogies

Sunday, February 4th, 2018

Megan McArdle offers her own 12 rules for life:

Be kind. Mean is easy; kind is hard.
Politics is not the most important thing in the world. It’s just the one people talk about the most.
Always order one extra dish at a restaurant, an unfamiliar one.
Give yourself permission to be bad.
Go to the party even when you don’t want to.
Save 25 percent of your income.
Don’t just pay people compliments; give them living eulogies.
That thing you kinda want to do someday? Do it now.
Human beings are often splendid, the world is often glorious, and nature, red in tooth and claw, also invented kindness, charity and love. Believe in that.
Don’t try to resolve fundamental conflicts with your spouse or roommates.
Be grateful. No matter how awful your life seems at the moment, you have something to be grateful for.
Always make more dinner rolls than you think you can eat.

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T. Beholder: Gaikokumaniakku says: Here is a crazy idea. Give every member of society a simple rank. Military ranks go from E0 to E9 or whatever, then O1 to O15 or whatever. They could invent a similar system of ranks for civilians Unified ranks for non-military officials were done in Russian Empire when it was rolling downhill. Presumably it satisfied some vanities, but not clear whether this had much real effect at all, one way or another.
Jim: Gaikokumaniakku: “Here is a crazy idea. Give every member of society a simple rank. Military ranks go from E0 to E9 or whatever, then O1 to O15 or whatever. They could invent a similar system of ranks for civilians, and then society could operate with customs and courtesies appropriate to rank.” Chinese.
T. Beholder: Phileas Frogg says: So let me get this straight, if I have an expansive vocabulary THAT is the nominal representation of my intelligence, but the piece of paper with my intelligence abstracted into numerical form is somehow the REAL form of my intelligence? Well, the people who can perform well on tests and make up similar tests say so. See also Offshore Comic #360 and #324. http://offshorecomic.com /images/S324.jpg
T. Beholder: TRX says: Van Vogt’s imagination far outstripped his writing ability, which is why so many of his stories started off with a bang, then trailed off into mediocrity. Many such cases. Some worse. Salvatore can do a good scene, but then he buries it under a hundred pages of hackity-hack and herpity-derp. He also would struggle to make up as much as 3 non-ridiculous names in a row even if his life depended on it. What he really needed was an editor with a chair and a whip, to keep him focused on...
Gaikokumaniakku: Here is a crazy idea. Give every member of society a simple rank. Military ranks go from E0 to E9 or whatever, then O1 to O15 or whatever. They could invent a similar system of ranks for civilians, and then society could operate with customs and courtesies appropriate to rank.
Curtis: When it happens it usually turns out that there is no one available to fight for peace. Peace does not have any constituencies and its adherents are mostly professing religious types with no skin in the game.
Phileas Frogg: So let me get this straight, if I have an expansive vocabulary THAT is the nominal representation of my intelligence, but the piece of paper with my intelligence abstracted into numerical form is somehow the REAL form of my intelligence? And athletically…dunki ng on you in a game of 1 v 1 in a complete blowout is merely representational, but if I have great health markers from my doctors office, then I’m the superior athlete? This nerd thinks showing is telling, and telling is...
Michael van der Riet: Way back when we used to call this “status symbols.” In the drawing office for example only the senior had a high chair and the other draughtsmen had to stand. Like many other animals, humans have always competed for position in the social hierarchy. Publishing your tax return sounds like a rather bloodless way of getting one up on the rest. And there’s a practical objection. A guy can’t walk up to a strange girl at a bar and say,”Here’s my tax...
McChuck: The person proposing this has never met actual people, has he?
Jim: This is more embarrassing than bukkake.
TRX: Van Vogt’s imagination far outstripped his writing ability, which is why so many of his stories started off with a bang, then trailed off into mediocrity. The fix-up thing became very annoying when I went through a van Vogt phase, as I kept finding previously read short stories (or pieces of them) in later novels. And later editions of the same book might get revised without any mention on the cover or copyright page, leading to some head-scratching as a re-read fails to match the original....
Jim: Gaikokumaniakku: “I have half-a-dozen friends who would make time for this even though their schedules are packed.” I’m with you, six million percent.
Jim: McChuck: “And he never even imagined the folly of overly educating women.” You cut to the quick like a dagger to the heart. https://i.ibb.co/Cwy07jx /goodevening.jpg
Isegoria: A.E. van Vogt coined the term fix-up: He followed a strategy of introducing a new twist or complication every 800 words — a method SF author and critic James Blish called recomplication, and which Damon Knight derided as the “Kitchen Sink Technique.” This approach is both exhilarating and frustrating, and has contributed to the sharply polarized critical response to van Vogt. In the words of Brian W. Aldiss, he was a “genuinely inspired madman.” Philip K. Dick, who...
Isegoria: PKD is an odd character and not necessarily one I’d expect to value the language of clear thinking.
Isegoria: I’m afraid I sensed exactly where Dan’s anecdote was headed, when he said that Uncle Alfred sent them a copy of every book. Sigh.
Phileas Frogg: “…NO ONE in the family ever read any of his novels.” The true pain of those who write is the realization that, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.”
Bruce: In Dream Makers Charles Platt said Van Vogt’s stories were ‘utterances’ , not just stories.
Dan Kurt: By chance I met a woman and her pre-teenage son circa early 80s whose name was Vogt. She was divorced and used her maiden name. I mentioned that a favorite author mine was A.E. van Vogt. She replied that that was her uncle Alfred, and she said that he sent their family a copy of every novel he published. I asked her if she enjoyed any of them and she said that NO ONE in the family ever read any of his novels. Another point about A.E. van Vogt is that he was dyslexic and writing was an ordeal...
Gaikokumaniakku: Around 1990 I was reading biographies and gossip about Phil K. Dick. PKD once said (perhaps very seriously, perhaps insincerely) that A. E. van Vogt had done more to create the field of sci-fi than anyone else. From the moment I read that endorsement, I sought out van Vogt’s work assiduously.

Isegoria

Give them living eulogies

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