• 0 Posts
  • 169 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 5th, 2024
  • derekto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•Satire ruleEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    Possibly! A lot is left to interpretation in the film. I agree with your take though. More or less. I feel there’s enough presented after the initial twist (was he just imagining it all?!) to suggest an additional turn. That being the horror of a society built on such incredible self-absorbtion (and cocaine) is the real bogeyman.

    The lack of comprehension from some reminds me of a certain type of Fight Club fan on whom the film is wasted entirely.

    My framing in the previous comment is meant to highlight how Bateman’s story seems to resonate with the disaffected and media illiterate as I understand them. It seems much of the subtext intended to catch the viewer’s attention and request a critical eye fails to register with that crowd. My aim was answering the implied question “How could take seriously Bateman as peak masculinity?” of the comment I initially responded to.

    I could have made that more clear in the perspective I used to convey the point. Note taken. 🙂

  • derekto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•Satire ruleEnglish
    31·
    7 days ago

    I honestly think that’s part of the appeal for those who idolize Bateman. He’s particular and vane and envious. We are led to see his flaws as he sees them: extensions of justified righteous indignation at the world’s resistance to his perfection, all. His narcissism fueling disgust for the world and everyone in it.

    The jilted pampered white boy is exactly what they identify with.

    Evaluate the comparison drawn in the final scene of the film. Bateman confesses again, in-person this time, to his lawyer who blows him off for reasons that could be debated within the narrative. The important bit for our discussion is that, regardless of the reasons for dismissal, the lawyer simply doesn’t believe Bateman is capable of the crimes he confesses to.

    Not even recognizing Bateman and mistaking Bateman for someone else the lawyer says: “Bateman’s such a dork, such a boring, spineless lightweight…” “…Oh Christ. He can barely pick up an escort girl, let alone… What was it you said he did to her?”

    After some more back and forth Bateman returns to his friend’s table and finds his friends discussing Ronald Reagan’s address regarding the Iran-Contra scandal. The sentiment is how unbelievable it is that someone so unassuming could do something so vile, brazenly lie about it, and almost get away with it.

    To be dismissed as incapable while believing oneself cunning and depraved and wholly underestimated. To act on that depravity and take by brutal force. To confess vile crimes that go unpunished because no believes you capable of them… It’s a twisted diamond in the rough story.

    That’s not the gritty visual masculinity we normally think of, as you say, but Bateman is rape culture personified and adorned in every tropey “high-class” commecialization of masculinity at the time. Couple that with anemoia for the eighties in a generation raised on algorithmically tuned psychological traps which weaponized toxic masculinity for profit and… Tada!

    We strike resonance with a certain brand both of internet-raised narcissist and naive, disaffected, emotionally-immature manchild. Especially young men who’ve been emotionally manipulated into believing alt-right propaganda makes sense of a world they’ve been stymied from understanding.

  • derektoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•How do you deal with grief?
    2·
    13 days ago

    This can be true and the example you’ve provided demonstrates the point well enough. There are certainly unhelpful emotions though. I have a panic disorder which can be triggered by a few things. I’m already aware of why this happens and understand that my fear, paranoia, and sense of impending doom are byproducts of chemical imbalance. I know they’re trying to help me survive an expected threat that doesn’t exist. Those experiences offer no actionable insight. Only disruption.

    It helps if I’m able to recognize that emotional reactivity as bad and worth breathing through instead of addressing or intellectualizing. They’re just bad and need to pass so I can get back to being me.

    This is an edge case and most emotional processing is trying to tell us something helpful. Not always though!

  • derektoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.works•What the fuck
    10·
    1 month ago

    If you close your eyes tightly you can induce the perception of color. If you stand in a doorway and lift your arms to the side so that the backs of your hands are pressing against the inside of the door frame, keep pressing for 60 seconds, then step out of the doorway and relax your arms: it’ll feel like your arms are floating.

    The body’s systems are complex and part of reliably filtering signal from noise in such systems is establishing a baseline while in a steady state. Our brains are pretty good at filtering out noise but the pressures or degradations which lead to tinnitus seem to trick the brain into accepting some noise as signal.

    If you’re looking for a deep dive then the following paper does an excellent job of outling what we know and what our best guesses are so far: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987724002718

    It’s jargon-laden but nothing someone armed with a dictionary can’t handle. 🙂

  • derektoLinux Crack Tips@lemmy.world•Aw man.....I misunderstood the point of this community.English
    51·
    1 month ago

    With one hand you describe your desire to explore and tinker with the inner mechanics of operating systems (or at least your desktop environment). With the other your need for an OS to work just so without your configuration.

    You can’t have it both ways.

    Three facts which may help you if you’re able to accept yourself as the limiting factor:

    1. GNU/Linux freedom means, among other things, the freedom to modify. This is why distributions exist. Someone had a strong enough preference to take on the burden of constructing an alternative which met those preferences “out of the box”.
    2. Everything you do in any GUI is executing commands for you.
    3. Everything in Linux is a file descriptor. Differing design philosophies are one of the reasons (among many) that Microsoft created the Registry for Windows. Warren Young’s response to a question about this topic on Stack Exchange is nigh exhaustive and well written. This might be the lightbulb you’re looking for?

    My point isn’t to discourage you. I think almost everyone interested in exercising their agency in computing ought to be empowered to do so. That isn’t without friction and hurdles though and, at least as far as I can see, never will be.

    Graphical Applications have to be built by people. Those people have to understand programming and the CLI/terminal because, again, every GUI interaction is issuing a command to the system it runs on. Not everyone knows how to do that well and those that do cannot program those applications for every concievable use-case. This is why you’re often instructed to fiddle with things via commands in a terminal. No one has built a GUI tool to help you with xyz yet so users have to issue the commands directly if they want xyz.

    If you want that tool to exist then you’ll either have to build it yourself and share it with the world or pay someone to do that for you. This would likely be a pull request to add a feature to a program.

    There is no world in which an operating system exists without a terminal, however; you might be able to help build one within which the average user never has to open one. That’d take a lot of education, hard work, and use of the terminal to accomplish and maintain.

    To know what you’re doing: read the manual. To take control: exercise what you learn from reading the manual.

    If RTFM is too daunting a recommendation to start off with (no judgement! I get it) then start here instead: https://tldp.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/index.html

    The Linux Documentation Project predates the Arch wiki (and it shows) but that has zero bearing on its utility for beginners.

    I hope this helps!