The air was stifling. The kind of air that sits on you, like a hot blanket made of water. The kind of air that makes you understand that the atmosphere is heavy, in a way your high school science teacher never really conveyed. Big, heavy, hot, wet air.

It engulfed ArcticPrincess, squeezed him from all directions with it’s sticky wetness. He curled up tighter in the strange hexagonal hole he’d found in one of the walls of the airport basement. There was work to do, but he wasn’t going to do it. At least today, the world could keep spiraling towards its populist, capitalist collapse without him.

The Fiji Airways Lounge at Nadi airport, incomplete and abandoned. Once, someone had a dream of what this place could be. An architect somewhere, a vision of this space filled with wealthy travellers, the sub-elites, the smaller masses who could afford slightly better treatment while the larger masses endured the gate-surrounded food court upstairs.

Something had gone wrong. Maybe it had been corruption. Maybe the fickle will of the shareholders. Maybe it had been a boondoggle all along, a scheme for furthering the career of a junior executive who’d already moved on to their next, higher paying position. Whatever the cause, the architect’s dream sat half-built. One half elegant workstations, elegantly curving divisions between contrasting flooring styles, elegant chairs and elegant partitions. One half abandoned construction materials, unassembled couches and unfinished, purposeless rooms.

The place felt like ArcticPrincess’s life, like the lives of all the old friends he’d seen on this trip. Grand dreams in the middle of a slow motion collision with reality. In the centre of it all, a weird hexagon cut into the wall in which you could momentarily try to hide. A retreat for writing fiction in style that had also bloomed and died, for a platform whose dream of freeing social media from corporate dominance was also wilting as quickly as it had blossomed.

ArcticPrincess’s phone rang. It looked like he was going to have to help the world collapse today after all.

The claim and evidence here are not logically consistent.

It’s like saying “cyanide won’t make you dead” because, look “people still get dead from falling and crocodiles, even if there’s no cyanide around”.

Pretty sure it’s Dinosaurs, Nucleaics & Acid.

Knowing the distribution of what entire households watch is very useful. It’s not about spying on you personally.

[citation needed]

Thanks! Appreciate learning something new!

Sounds like a great way to evolve vaccine-resistant rabies

Your and his age are gonna be major variables here. Conversations and relationships work very differently at different life stages.

You sound like you’re maybe a teenager? Try asking interesting questions that require some thought to answer, but still leave room for your friend to give an easy thoughtless answer if they want to. Where do you think we’ll be in X years? What’s something you thought you wanted but as you’ve gotten okay have realised you actually don’t? What do you think we do now thar future generations will think is crazy? Listen to his answers and ask followup questions.

Personally, I’ve always been most impressed by directness, honesty, intelligence and courage.

I very much agree with your take. I wish mature-thinkers had more influence on contemporary politics, instead of the populism and black-and-white moralising that seems to be dominating our world.

Also, the quality of discussion on lemmy is surprisingly good!

Yeah, the point that the musicians seem to be making, from the very brief quotes he shares (I haven’t been following this independently), is about the efficacy of music boycotts as a tool for political change. You can object to a nation’s political actions and still think that performing music for your fans in that country will make things better.

The author just insists that Israeli government genocide is bad and that the ordinary citizens are complicit. I think the implicit logic must be: bad people should be punished, depriving them of music punishes them. While it might satisfy a craving to hurt the bad guys, I think it’s much harder to claim that this would help stop the genocide.

I think the musicians have a stronger case that actually performing would be more likely to change people’s minds and improve the situation. Plus the broader benefits of keeping music and art apolitical, rather than trying to make everything in life a tool for political manipulation. I’d have actually been really interested to hear some substantive arguments about those points, but was disappointed to discover that, as you say, it was just a hit piece.

Wow, what a terrible article. The author doesn’t engage with any of the substantive points Radiohead and Nick Cave are making, he just disparages them and insists on his obvious moral superiority. It’s dressed up in some, admittedly, very nice writing, but this is just childish name calling.

Still, interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?

The actual results are in the text. 56% personifiers among autists vs 33% among not autists, p<0.05. Self report is p=0.06.

Scientific papers are often titled “What it’s actually about: something witty.” This one is about object personification and so after the colon they personify the paper itself by giving it an emotion.