#abalienataecogitationes

[terpsikeraunos]

abalienataecogitationes said: I googled “erotic magic” and was lead to a really creepy S&My youtube video. I blame you for this.

oops...but now we know that creepy youtube videos are also included in this genre!

[newfavething]

Favourite thing about your new job?

oh, this is a lovely question!

in fact it’s not a new job - it’s a return to the place where i did work exp this time last summer, which has employed me on intermittent projects since.

it’s a little Catholic newspaper, so perhaps the best thing about it is that i really care about most of the stuff i’m researching and writing about. in all honesty, it hasn’t deepened my love for the Church (the stuff i come across, the people, the opinions, my God - when Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem He tells them not to weep for Him, but for themselves and their children; i look at the state of the Church and i see why) but i do care, and i get to speak to some fascinating people. it’s amazing how much someone will tell a complete stranger who telephones them and asks nicely about their life. today i spoke to a woman who runs a charity educating and empowering women and orphans of the AIDS crisis in Kenya, and who is in charge of spirituality across her home diocese. amazing.

i do also love the people i work with. we’re overwhelmingly female - our world news editor, sometimes the only man in the office, walks into news meetings saying ‘blessed am i amongst women’ - and everyone is so engaged and talented and interesting and generous.

and so opinionated. this world news editor is a pretty traddy, right-of-centre, middle-aged man while the reporter diagonally across from him is a hard-left feminist vegan with cropped hair and tattoos, and they have the most ferocious arguments, day in day out. and yet each has enormous respect for the other: when they’re not shouting they laugh together, they joke about, and each has independently and unprompted given me a lengthy encomium of the other. God bless them all; it’s such a privilege to work there.

[terpsikeraunos]

autobeguiled said: I prefer it to the iliad and the odyssey oops

abalienataecogitationes said:Spoiler: It’s not as good as the Iliad.

thoodleoo said: tbh it’s been years since i’ve read the whole thing. i’ve been assigned to read it like three or four times since the first time but i have never bothered. also i think i skipped like half of books three and five…whoops

gaius-marius-popularis said: Sin

oops most of us are nefas

[new-xkit-extension]

The joy I feel in knowing that someone has taken up the duty of maintaining xkit is immense. Best of luck to you all. Right, with that said, the header options is a little buggy, the search bar moves into awkward positions and the show blogs in the header isn't working. Again, much thanks.

Thanks for the report. If you manually update header options in the extension manager, things should work now.

[argonauticae]

I'm certain you did better than you believe. Best of luck on your coming exams!

aw thank you! and that’s what i’m hoping - i just tend to get a bit paranoid after the fact 

[terpsikeraunos]

abalienataecogitationes said:Aratus’ Phaenomena?

That is definitely on the list.

anastrophic said: 'helen of sparta' YES

Always!

[antoine-roquentin]

slowesthand said: I know you mean this ironically but this was the best outcome for best picture and you know it. I still don’t get why Kermit from les miserables won best actor though. And i still don’t get why antonio Sánchez wasn’t nominated for best soundtrack.

it probably was the best outcome. out of the ten, i only saw birdman, the imitation game, and the theory of everything, and birdman was head and shoulders above the other two. imitation game would have been a film that i would've felt was barely not a waste of 2 hours of my life if i also wasn't a big fan of that era of history and knew that that film was historical revisionism of the highest level. pretty sure that was a whole different fictional script that somebody wrote and then somebody else just decided to paste the names of a couple people who existed during the 40s in the united kingdom on. and the money i spent to go to the premiere of the theory of everything at tiff was some of the worst i've ever spent. it was a generic disneyfied clichefest with not a single moment of competence, much less innovation. i think redmayne was the least deserving of best actor, not even having seen the rest of the films.

birdman, as it was, was one of the two films i saw this year where i felt that i had gotten what i paid for (the other being the film i would have picked for best picture, citizenfour). it was competent in all the ways a film should be competent, but i never felt it did anything special, anything that should merit an award, much less a "best" award.

abalienataecogitationes said: I actually liked “The King’s Speech”, yes it was overtly sentimental and pandering, but in a charming sort of way.

i've liked most of the best picture winners i've seen, including all of the ones i listed on that post that i've seen. i can still guarantee that out of the thousands of films made in a year though, they're the ones that pandered the best, not were the best in any fashion. hollywood can't judge itself any more than a cop can investigate another cop. it will never understand why some movies are good and some movies aren't, and that's pretty fucking amazing for a group of people who have making movies as their job. 

the post wasn't meant to insult those films, it was meant to insult the academy and what they stand for.

[antoine-roquentin]

abalienataecogitationes said: I sincerely doubt nazism would have moderated just for this fact alone: the second generation of nazis brought up under fanatical indoctrination, if anything, was more zealous than the first. To say nothing of the structural problems.

people always like to imagine the dudes who carried out the july 20 plot as their example of a nazi germany after hitler, but like, the youthful rising stars in the party were people like reinhardt heydrich and adolf eichmann, the guys who actually planned and started the holocaust because their superiors were too afraid to do it.