It seems valuable to blog when an art really jumps out at me

In this case, it's Annihilation.

Sci fi/horror movie about an area in Florida that has become kind of shimmery, and nobody who goes in comes back out.

So good! Tense, disturbing, thoughtful (though, many questions and few answers), trippy, beautiful sound/music, wonderfully monstrous creatures. Soft sci fi about "what if mutation got cranked up to 1000?", and a soft psychological thriller about "why do people self destruct?", all in one.

Riyl: mother!, Sunshine, Ex Machina (same writer/director), Alien, Black Swan

Also, video game that continues to stick with me: Crypt of the Necrodancer, in which I finally finished an All Zones run with every character except Aria (f that) and of course Coda. Jeez, I can't imagine an All Characters run; it'd take hours of perfection.

I oughtn't even *blog* about Terry Gilliam

Like, I sweat Gilliam's movies pretty hard. Ask Tati about Brazil. I like it much more than I should. I'll go out of my way to tell you how good The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus was. So the news that he's being a jerk about women and #metoo is pretty sad. I was gonna write a clever tweet, and then realized, nope, tweeting is really the worst response to something like this. So I spent more time to write more of a blog? *sigh* I guess it's just that, because I sweat his movies, I feel a need to say something, when I don't need to say anything about, say, Woody Allen.

I can't find the full interview. Here's the best subset I could get.

"the #MeToo movement has morphed into "mob rule"" - no, stop. mob rule is when people get killed, not when people say mean things about überfamous Gilliam and Damon for a couple days, and Gilliam and Damon go on with their übersuccessful lives.

"Weinstein "is a monster" and that there are "plenty of monsters out there... There are other people (still) behaving like Harvey" in the film industry, abusing their power for sex." - I am confident this is true!

"But Gilliam said the reaction against the wave of sexual abuse and harassment revelations had become ugly and "simplistic... people are frightened to say things, to think things." - uhh - like, this statement is true, but tarnished by the fact that most people saying it are being assholes.

"It is a world of victims. I think some people did very well out of meeting with Harvey and others didn't. The ones who did knew what they were doing. These are adults, we are talking about adults with a lot of ambition.
"Harvey opened the door for a few people, a night with Harvey -- that's the price you pay,"" - are you insane? justifying sexual-favors-for-success?

"the atmosphere around #MeToo has "got silly, people are being described in ridiculous terms as if there is no real humanity left anymore.
"I feel sorry for someone like Matt Damon who is a decent human being. He came out and said all men are not rapists, and he got beaten to death. Come on, this is crazy!"" ... uh oh, I think you're either straw-manning Damon's critics, or motte-and-baileying.
(side note: Matt Damon said some things that I agree with and some things that I don't. He looks a lot better than Gilliam in this situation.)

"I know enough girls who were in Harvey's suites who were not victims and walked out." - yeah, and Jeffrey Dahmer didn't murder everyone he knew.

"It's crazy how simplified things are becoming. There is no intelligence anymore and people seem to be frightened to say what they really think. Now I am told even by my wife to keep my head a bit low" - well... I guess your old beliefs are becoming unacceptable? And given how crummy they are, I'm ok with that? I agree with your point that everything is just knee-jerk good-or-bad these days. But we need a better arguer against this tendency.

"It's like when mob rule takes over, the mob is out there they are carrying their torches and they are going to burn down Frankenstein's castle" - no, it's like if the mob got real mad at Frankenstein for a couple days and, like, didn't buy his movies on Amazon or something.

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And why the hell am I blogging about this? Why did I let you take an hour (or more?) of my day, you old goat with crummy old goat beliefs? And why is everyone who's saying "let's stop the witch hunt" acting so much like a witch?

I guess it's just another point in favor of the idea that you can argue difficult things publicly, but you gotta be superjesus. Gilliam, you have some points, but you also have a lot of antiquated and/or otherwise shitty beliefs; so as a whole, best to keep them to yourself.

Also, forget David Benatar

I heard him on Sam Harris's podcast (who I also have mixed feelings about but often agree with) and Harris had basically the same issue that I did: "you're kinda just proclaiming The Asymmetry."

Refresher: Benatar's big "asymmetry" is like this: good experiences are good, and bad ones are bad. The absence of bad things (if a person didn't exist) is good, but the absence of good things (if a person didn't exist) isn't bad because there's nobody who's around to miss the good things.

My and Sam's response: what the hell! You're just saying that. We can just as easily say "the absence of bad things isn't good, because there's nobody around who's not experiencing bad things."

If you don't accept The Asymmetry, most of the rest of his book doesn't add up. (You could instead be all Buddhist-ish and say "life is always just negative things; the best you can do is have no negative things", which neatly solves some population ethics problems still, but I don't think I believe that either.)

Also apparently he wrote this too, so, uh, that's embarrassing.

A hierarchy of hard problems as a human

Being an adult has a lot more upsides than being a kid. It's kinda harder too, and in different dimensions than being a kid was hard. Like, it's not like "do some math or something, but better" - it's like the qualitative shift when you realize that being very good at math won't help you with your relationships.

Unfortunately, it seems very hard to even understand what any class of problems is about, until you get there. For that reason, I feel pretty confident about the early ones and not at all confident about the later ones.

Class A1: Requires work or IQ. Example: grade school
Class A2: Requires work and IQ. Examples: college, some jobs
Class A3: Requires work, IQ, and some kind of skill at defining problems. Examples: grad school, some other jobs
Class B2: Requires work and emotional intelligence/EQ. Examples: normal human relationships (easy friendships, say), some other jobs, being a happy and sane human if all's going well.
Class B3: Requires work, a lot of EQ and/or self-knowledge. Examples: more intense relationships, being a mental health professional, being a happy and sane human if all's not going well.
Class C2: Requires work, EQ, and IQ. Example: managing people at a job.

And then there are some others farther down the list (C3? D3?):
- being fulfilled/flourishing
- being a parent?
- some kind of enlightenment/awakening

Anyway, who knows if this kind of framework is useful at all. I guess I'm just trying to justify why things are still seem difficult, even though I've had a decent amount of practice at a lot of things, and hopefully built up some skills by now!