Star Wars Speeder bikes
Mic drop
Perfect calligrapher?
Smartphones + social media = generation plagued by unhappiness?
A psychologist with decades of research behind him is seeing trends like never before. I personally am now limiting my social media time on Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/etc – and am also feeling much happier, balanced, and able to think more nuanced. I still continue to believe that too much social media and mindless web surfing actually hinders our ability to form meaningful bonds/relationships and makes us less happy. Japan has a trend called the hikikomori and there is some evidence this trend is also partly due to the reasons cited by this psychologist.
I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
…
Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.
The Oregon Trail Game by Travel Oregon
Travel Oregon has released an update to the Oregon trail. Travel around Oregon’s major sites drinking Kombucha and even buying a local fisherman to join your party. Crazy fun.
The Cross Bearer
Joe Eszterhas was the screenwriter for the movies Basic Instinct, Flashdance, Showgirls. He also authored Hollywood Animal and American Rhapsody. Before that, he worked as a police reporter, racing the cops to robberies and shootings. He interviewed and wrote about mass murders and serial killers. Eszterhas knew a lot about darkness. Then, on a hellishly hot day in 2001, desperately battling to survive throat cancer because of his addictions to alcohol and cigarettes, Joe Eszterhas found God. Or God found him.
His first prayer in over 40 years led him back to faith and the Catholic Church. Ironically, the priest he met was actually inspired to follow his path to the priesthood by the line from Flashdance: “to follow your dream”. Eszterhas wrote his autobiography in the book ‘The Cross Bearer’ which tells his story of how this author of The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood into the arms of a loving God.
He even gave a talk at Mt Angel Seminary about his journey. You can read it here in his book titled The Cross Bearer
Stand By Me filming locations
I recently took a trip to the Steens Mountains and Alvord Desert in the extreme southeast corner Oregon for a week. On my way, I took a little side trip and stopped by Brownsville, OR. The reason I stopped? Major scenes of the movie Stand By Me were filmed there.
Despite the movie being 31 years old, this movie is an icon of my childhood. It hearkened me back to a time when I wasn’t absorbed in digital entertainment and still had adventures in real life with real friends with real tree forts and camping adventures.
The city still has a majority of the locations easily spotted right on the main drag. The town is very tiny – only 1 or 2 main streets really and a central core that’s about 1000 feet square. Spotting all the sites can be done in just a small 20 minute stroll. Seeing all the sites in town can easily be done in a couple of hours (depending on how long you want to stroll around).
Here’s a really good guide if you’re planning on making a trip.
http://www.thennowmovielocations.com/2012/10/stand-by-me.html
Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol
It’s Fall – my favorite season. Which means Halloween is just around the corner.
I’m heading to Europe here for a business trip that will take me through Paris. While looking into things to do, I found out about this theater. It was located in the Pigalle area of Paris (20 bis, rue Chaptal). From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, and specialized in naturalistic horror shows. Its had live staged graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (other examples include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil). Today, we might call them splatter films. While it was always staged horror, the “special effects” would sometimes be too realistic and it was reported audience member would faint or vomit during performances. It was said the ‘success’ of the show was rated by how many people fainted.
It didn’t help that the building was an old chapel. The Gothic interior added to the ambiance. Here were some of the plays for example:
- Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, by André de Lorde: When a doctor finds his wife’s lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery, rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor’s brain
- Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, by André de Lorde: Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a pretty, young fellow inmate out of jealousy
- L’Horrible Passion, by André de Lorde: A nanny strangles the children in her care
- Le Baiser dans la Nuit, by Maurice Level: A young woman visits the man whose face she horribly disfigured with acid, where he obtains his revenge
It’s interesting that it waned in the years following World War II then closed in 1962. Management attributed the closure in part to the fact that the theater’s faux horrors had been eclipsed by the actual events of WW II two decades earlier. Apparently people had their fill of realistic horrors.
Read more about it here:
http://www.grandguignol.com
Perverting Education to just be rationalization
Barrett nodded. “Education?”
“New York. London. Berlin. Paris. Vienna. No specific course of study. Logic, ethics, religion, philosophy.”
“Just enough with which to rationalize his actions, I imagine,”
– From the description of the depraved Emeric Belasco. Hell House by Richard Matheson
If your philosophy, religion, ethics, or logic come from popular authors or coffee table/internet level articles – do yourself a favor and stop. You’re far more likely to end up justifying your own beliefs instead of being challenged to find real truth. The kind you can base your life on.
Pro-tip: it doesn’t exist in any soundbite. Instead, it teaches you to think critically, to see the nuances of arguments, to realize NONE of them are completely correct, AND to see both sides. If your education isn’t doing this, then you’re just being spoon-fed what you want to hear. Your education should challenge you, make you angry, confirm and refute what you believe. Education is what allows you to experience that without having to lash out against others – and just deal with the ideas.
VNC on Ubuntu 16 and 17
Works on 17.04 as well.
The biggest pain about Ubuntu is changes they made to vnc setup. Often, once you think you have it set up, you connect and get nothing but the ancient X windows grey screen with no way to interact with the UI.
This method works for 17.04 and 16.04. It’s also faster performance that other approaches.
Ubuntu 16.04 – Configure your system to have x11vnc running at startup
Summary:
sudo apt-get install x11vnc -y sudo x11vnc -storepasswd /etc/x11vnc.pass Edit /lib/systemd/system/x11vnc.service
[Unit]
Description=Start x11vnc at startup.
After=multi-user.target
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/x11vnc -auth guess -forever -loop -noxdamage -repeat -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.pass -rfbport 5900 -shared
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
sudo systemctl enable x11vnc.service sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo shutdown -r now
On reboot run the script:
sudo ./vnc-startup.sh
Or, just manually start it:
x11vnc -usepw -forever
Use your vnc client to connect to the system’s ip address at port :5900
Missing Million
I’ve mentioned this phenomenon before – but the BBC did a small documentary on it.
Hundreds of thousands of young men are turning their backs entirely on society and real life. They are choosing instead to lock themselves away, usually in their bedrooms, for years. They literally enter their rooms and refuse to leave. The phenomenon is called hikikomori in Japanese and it literally means ‘to withdraw from society’.
Most of the sufferers of this condition live in the suburbs that surround Japan’s major cities. Recent surveys show that the majority are male and usually the first-born child. There are many stories of young men who give up on society. Some seem to be unable to handle academic or job pressure, others simply got fed up of people and still others do it out of fear of not being good enough and anxiety about their future.
Japanese teens are growing up under an overwhelming amount of technology, which seems to have replaced the inherent human experience, making teens handicapped when it comes to communicating honestly and openly with other people.
After a few years, some hikikomori victims recover enough to re-enter society. Another young man who spent three years as a recluse is now a counselor working with a support group for parents. In Japan it takes parents up to four years of not seeing their child before they seek outside help.