I am as uninterested in the liberal utopia as I am the right-wing one. I think this conception of the ideal end state is ultimately what separates from me from both groups.

Both of their teloi sound like an abominable dystopia to me.

If you had all the resources readily available to you to be healthy whilst eating tasty food and all the while reduce your ecological footprint – without consuming animals – why wouldn't you?

Asking for a friend.

— Emily Painter (@cosimia_) April 14, 2019

Because a vegetarian diet’s health benefits are vastly overstated, and working out heavily on a purely plant-based diet is generally a bad idea. Also, when I eat mostly plants, my energy flags and my health suffers.

Not everyone is physiologically the same. Also, I like meat and won’t give it up unless it becomes illegal to eat. And even then, I probably still won’t.

On the first of December, 2018, I could do a grand total of 1 pull-up.

Tonight I did 11 in one go. Will be time to start doing weighted pull-ups soon.

Anyone who thinks bland centrism is going to get a Democrat elected in 2020: welcome to 2016, we didn’t miss you, and aren’t glad you’re back!

In the history of incredibly bad Democrat ideas, that is the worst one. Check this out: if the Democrats do that, they absolutely will lose in 2020.

Being smart also gave me the epistemology to think success in abandoning social projects is probably outliers. It’s not really reasonable to be a *kid* and assume that basically all the responsible adults’ advice is bad.

Twitter makes this so, so different.

— Matt Guttman (@RealtimeAI) April 12, 2019

I realized that nearly all adults were repositories of bad advice and lies when I was about 10, and then started doing what I wanted to do. My first experience of ignoring “experts!”

It caused me no end of trouble, but I was much happier once I started rejecting what I was supposed to do and concentrating on what would make me actually smarter and better.

I was in the gym today for 30 minutes. During that time, a young overweight woman did about 3-4 sets of triceps raises and overhead press with light dumbbells, looking at her phone between sets.

She'll quit soon, swearing that resistance training doesn't work.

— P. D. Mangan 🇺🇸 (@Mangan150) April 12, 2019

Yep. You don’t have to work long to see results, but you do have to work hard. If you’re not lifting enough where at the end you are thinking, I can’t lift this anymore, you’re not doing much good.

Doing 10 minutes of low-rep, high-weight sets to failure is better than an hour of goofing around with low weight where you never feel anything.

Example: I work out a lot, but it’s not like I spend hours a day doing it. When I work out alone, I spend 30-60 minutes a day. Rarely longer than that. And in just a bit more than six months, I’ve gotten twice as strong, my endurance has increased dramatically, and I look and feel a lot better.

But that’s because every workout, I go hard and push myself. Otherwise, why waste the time?

I’d sacrifice my soul to be able to play Boogie Woogie piano like that.

Those fluid key changes. Damn.

I do not care for the new Amazon series adaptation of the 2011 movie Hanna.

While the 2011 movie with Saoirse Ronan was excellent, this new version manages to miss every beat the movie hit with panache, and the actors are all much worse — with the exception of a chilling and understatedly fiendish Mireille Enos.

Nearly everything in the series is lukewarm or just plain senseless. I’ve never seen Esme Creed-Miles in any other work before, and a lot of times bad acting is really bad directorship, but she’s as passive as a frozen fish most of the time. Ronan’s Hanna could be cold and calculating, but she was also animated and sometimes-ebullient, excitable and passionate, while also full of doubt and fury. I am not sure exactly what the Creed-Miles’ Hanna is. She’s a cipher who reveals nothing, seems to want nothing (despite what her mouth says), and moons through the world making absurd mistakes that don’t make any sense when considering her training and capabilities. Yes, she’s a teenage girl, but the whole point of Hanna is that she’s just young, not a dunce. Ronan’s Hanna made errors due to her inexperience, but she never made dunce-level mistakes as Creed-Miles’ Hanna does constantly. It detracts from the work and it does not accord with the training she’s had or her innate capabilities. It seems inserted just to drive the plot when it could be driven so many other ways. Ronan’s Hanna was a pale-eyed Valkyrie who, though being a little scary, you could identify with, that if you were at all normal and met her in the real world, you’d empathize with her and want to help and protect her. The Hanna in the new series, though, who can tell what she wants or thinks because she never acts enough to even hazard a guess.

As I said, I don’t intend to attack Creed-Miles. In Star Wars, despite being a quite capable actor, Natalie Portman seemed as wooden as a redwood tree. Thus, I don’t know what the true story is here, and her performance is not nearly the only flaw of the series.

Examining it from a larger perspective, they’ve expanded a two hour movie into about seven hours of screen time without really adding anything at all of consequence. It seems there is more content present just to pad the series out rather than to allow us to deeply inhabit Hanna’s world. We could’ve learned what it’s like for a young girl to grow up in the woods, dozens of miles from anyone else, essentially alone, but we don’t. We could learn what caused Marissa Wiegler to become so diabolical and merciless, and to be such a hypocrite, but we don’t. Or if we do I haven’t seen it, because I could not yet make it all the way through the series due to my frustrations.

I don’t know if I’ll finish the series. Probably not. I am getting very little from it. Even the fight scenes aren’t well-choreographed, because even though Hanna is augmented and far stronger than a normal person, she’s not using techniques that would be particularly successful against those who mass much more than she does.

The series, as noted, has a lot of problems, not least of which is that you could watch the 2011 movie and get far more enjoyment and genuine thrills in far less time.

To finally throw off the yoke of simulation, we must retreat deeper into the simulation until reality and its simulation are an indistinguishable machine-mediated amalgam.