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aww great collection's man .

Happy birthday!

ill follow that order then
ill keep you updated, too. i have a few short things im reading thru first but i like everything you said and have been interested for a few years now so no time like the present

i bought one, was given one as a gift, and randomly stumbled on the third. im not crazy i promise

Oh no problem dude! Take care of yourself.

.. just want to say your set is appreciated.. i get happy every time i see your yotsuba 🤣 bye bye have a nice day. ✨🐸✨

i've not seen drive my car yet though i have a few friends who are really into it. i'll take this as another endorsement lol

i use necessary liberally for art ig, mainly because i find so much of it necessary. or, rather, the opportunity for a viewer/reader/listener to respond with their own subjectivity is the necessary part. and i think it gives a lot of room for that

i've not read any dostoevsky, though ive been meaning to. would brothers karamazov be your rec for a first dive? i like the way you described their work

that is poetic. i love catcher in the rye, haven't revisited in perhaps a decade though. weirdly i own three copies of the book lol

the traits correlated to forming beliefs shouldnt necessarily be surprising. conspiracist ideation/narcissism/schizotypal for conspiracy related things, for example. conscientiousness for religious. but finding what correlates to changing belief is more difficult ig. it is interesting that the traits involved in forming differ from those involved in changing beliefs. i'm doing research on accurate pattern formation to see if there can be a connection drawn between how we develop cohesive mental models and our willingness/ability to shift views. but it's obviously difficult to really research lol.

i have heard of tao of pooh, haven't read it though. i take this as a rec, so ill try it soon!
hmm i really enjoy short story collections the most maybe.

krzhizhanovsky's autobiography of a corpse is a fav. one story involves a play on capturing your love in your eyes, quite literally. just a lot of playful(ly morbid) shorts, but with beautiful prose i think

yoon ha lee's conservation of shadows rules, too. i appreciate how every story is structured. youre presented the thesis upfront and walked through the formation like a mathematical proof. i really neat

for full narratives, im a huge fan of john darnielle's work with the mountain goats and his novels are no different. wolf in white van is perhaps my fav book, but this changes often. it just feels so necessary, and it borrows his blue collar/high concept fusion that i adore. universal harvester is also great

wbu?

i'm definitely trying to get into a program to train as a therapist yeah, is the goal to get a phd in psychology and research/practice. long road ahead, though. my research is more focused on cognitive processes around belief, how it is formed and how it can be changed (what traits and states lead to this, what sort of variables contribute, etc). rly fun stuff

leaps of faith are important i think. definitely listen to kierkegaard.
not to sound the taoist, but i think living in the moment is really the best thing, being aware of being aware. beng surrounded my nature and animals helps with that.
fav narrative or philosophical works? (not that they are exclusive to each other, just clarifying the broadness of the q lol)

psych rules. also doing research on the psych of belief. really fun stuff i think
going back into studying is exciting! happy to hear.
i got really into philosophy, helped me a lot with finding myself/calmness. not sure if its a prescriptive, but i really think it helped me

great, actually. back in uni for clinical psych and overall pretty comfortable

wbuuu

hi

First, I'm sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I've been coming back from work later and been trying to go to bed earlier. I likewise appreciate the length and care you put into your response though.

And I understand that feeling. I've always had a tendency to get stuck in my own head since I was a kid, which was great when I was younger and could just dream about doing anything I wanted without worrying about reality but it's only really manifested now as overthinking and catastrophizing. Regardless, I'm also sorry to hear about those feelings of yours. It sounds hard but I'm incredibly glad you're still here.

And that Green Day song's still super personal to me. It's one I only listen to very sparingly so it doesn't lose its significance and weight. Btw, I'm actually gonna be seeing the band next year! They're coming to South Africa in January with The Offspring and I booked a ticket. My 11-year-old self wouldn't forgive me if I didn't!

I'll be perfectly honest, when the trailer for Maverick dropped, I kinda rolled my eyes thinking it'd be yet another cynical post-Force Awakens attempt at cashing in on boomer/Gen X nostalgia. And while that may have been at least part of the motivation for its creation, it had so much more heart than I imagined it would. It was actually better than the original in virtually every way as far as I was concerned. And I've yet to see either Cobra Kai or The Place Beyond the Pines. I've definitely been meaning to see the latter since I am a pretty big fan of Ryan Gosling. And I've been seeing that interpretation about The Karate Kid floating around online for the longest time. I haven't seen the film in the longest time so I'm not sure whether it's one I'd personally agree with. Regardless, that kid sounds great! It's pretty funny how that works out since Martin Kove, the actor who played John Kreese, would always have kids come up to him and tell him how evil he was lol.

And, honestly, I understand why you'd feel that way about Kubrick. He was a very cold and impersonal guy, which comes through in his films. The beloved film critic Pauline Kael in particular hated his work because she felt like he had more interest in things than people and Stephen King, who still hasn't come around to Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, said he was a man who thought too much and felt too little. I don't agree with Kael's assessment, but King's not wrong at all. I feel like he was deeply interested in people, but from a distant, observational perspective as opposed to a warm or empathetic one. And you should definitely give Anno's live action material a go. Ritual's my favourite but I'd also recommend Love and Pop as well as his live action take on Cutie Honey, which is just plain fun and honestly feels more like something Hiroyuki Imaishi would have directed instead. Did you end up seeing 3.0+1.0 by the way?

And you've described a huge part of why I loved Crumb. It's as candid a portrait of someone as you could ask for. The film makes no pretenses about who he is and doesn't frame him as an aspirational hero, but it doesn't judge him in spite of his worst traits and impulses either. It presents him as he is, a person with multitudes.

On The Silver Globe was an odd one. I very much felt in the dark as I was watching it, but it's a film I couldn't stop thinking about when I finished. It's just such a uniquely articulated case study of what it means to create a civilization and coexist as people with our own clashing idiosyncrasies, and the portent afforded to it by the bizarre, otherworldly filmmaking only made it stick in my memory even more. And the film's relationship with gender is interesting, now that you mention it, because the director had gone through a painfully messy divorce a few years prior that was clearly still weighing on him. You can also see him working through those feelings in the surreal horror film Possession, which I liked even more. Helped me process a lot of my own feelings during my big breakup.

And where would you recommend I start with Malick? I've been thinking of starting off with either Badlands or The Thin Red Line. His affinity for nature and poetic approach in general sound like something that'd be really appealing to me, especially as someone who's getting weary of all the attention-span killing short form content that's weaseled its way into all of our lives and made us all miserable.

I actually reread that old Eva review, and was honestly pretty astonished that I'd written it. I'm a humble person by nature, but I think I did a great job with that review for a terminally online 17-year-old with above-average grades, though there are parts of it that make me cringe lmao. And I felt like a rebel for writing it too. It was me getting annoyed at a spammer who had gone and upvoted a bunch of old negative reviews of the show. I miss when that was something worth getting fired up about lmao. And I definitely relate to that sense of belonging. People like you, ezocon, LucasRTS and others felt like kindred spirits at a time when I felt like a loner and an outcast. Thinking about the bullshit we used to get up to on Forum Games and the clubs we were all in together is very nostalgic and one of the first times I honestly felt a real sense of community. And I still need to finish Punpun. I stopped reading it since it was hitting a little too hard at a time when I was already stressed about school stuff but it's one I do intend on picking back up soon, though I'll probably have to read it from the start again since it's been a long time and don't remember a whole lot. It's a beautiful story told magnificently.

Working with kids filled me with so much joy and, in the best moments, I honestly felt like I was a kid again. There was a 7-year-old boy named Camden who wanted to re-enact the 2012 Amazing Spider-Man movie with me and it felt like something I would have done at his age lol. And that story of the boy with the anger issues was a genuinely touching one and it sounds like you handled it brilliantly. You're one hell of a great guy. It reminds me of a kid I had in my cabin early on in the Summer. He was the youngest at the camp (only 6 years old) and didn't get on well with the other kids in the cabin. I didn't know why he'd have such a chip on his shoulder for someone so young but one day he just stormed off into the nearby forest and I went to try and bring him back. When I did, I asked what was wrong and he told me that his parents were on the brink of an acrimonious divorce and that he'd only been sent to the camp so his parents could hash it out without him having to see all of it. It put his behaviour into context and I ended up talking to the office about it in case he needed any special attention or care. The rest of his stay was still pretty rocky with the odd emotional outburst, but he definitely had a better time than he was initially having. And I'd definitely consider working with kids as a career path. My fondest memories were telling spooky Japanese and South African folktales to kids before bed, since I could tell they loved them and doing something like that for the rest of my life would honestly be pretty satisfying, come to think of it.

New York was fantastic, though I don't think I took full advantage of my time there. There were things I wished I'd gone to see in retrospect but I had a limited amount of time and a limited amount of money. Plus I also tended to get lost a lot lol. Regardless, seeing things and places like the Empire State Building, The World Trade Center, Central Park, Little Italy, Joe's Pizza (the pizzeria from Spider-Man 2) and Times Square in real life was honestly pretty surreal. It was like I'd been transported into the world of the films I'd grown up on as a kid. But my favourite experience with the city happened on my last night there. I went on Gametime (an app which helps you find cheap last-minute tickets to events) and was thinking of going to see either a baseball game or a Broadway show. But the first thing I saw when I opened the app made my heart skip a beat. My Chemical Romance were playing a gig at a stadium only twenty minutes away from where I was staying. They're one of my favourite bands so I naturally bought a ticket. My seat wasn't the best but I nevertheless had an absolute blast, and hearing an entire stadium chant I am not afraid to keep on living was cathartic enough to bring me to tears.

Mandela being seen as a Christ-like figure is an apt way of putting it. He was a truly great man and we'd probably be in an even worse situation if it weren't for him. There more than likely would have been some kid of civil war. There are militant activists who claim he was a sellout and I understand and even sympathize with their position to a degree, but he had to make compromises in order to ensure the wellbeing and growth of the country. And the 2010 World Cup also felt like a small glimmer of hope in our history. I was only 12 but I couldn't help but feel a collective sense of pride in the air I haven't felt in the country since. And I have visited the Peninsula, though it's been a very long time. I was 14 and it felt almost mythic because of just how beautiful it was. The rocky terrain and the smell of the ocean made me feel like I was at the edge of the world. And come to think of it, I can't say I know too much about Germany beyond its history and some of its culture. What's it like actually living there?

Braais are basically the South African equivalent to a barbecue but we use coal instead of gas and have meats like boerewors that're very much specific to us. It's always a communal thing and families will usually come together on Heritage Day (the 24th of September) and have a braai for dinner. And I've always dreamt about moving elsewhere. The obvious ones were America due to my dreams of working in Hollywood as a kid and Japan because I'm weeaboo trash, but these days that longing hasn't really been as wistful and idealistic as it has been pragmatic. I don't want to live here if it's only going to keep falling apart. If things don't get better I will genuinely consider moving, especially if I do end up getting married and starting a family myself (also not exactly sure if that's something that'll happen tbh), since I don't want my kids growing up somewhere where they'll have to worry about crime or feel unsafe. And living on the countryside sounds amazing. My father had friends who live on a sheep farm and we used to visit them every so often when we lived in Durban. I loved the pastoral vibe there and one of my fondest memories of experiencing a story was reading The Fellowship of the Ring there. The Shire chapters felt all the more real.

My brother and his girlfriend are in the apartment a lot, which honestly wouldn't bother me much if it weren't for the fact that there are things about her I don't particularly like. I don't hate her, and am glad she makes my brother happy, but she has tendencies and habits that get under my skin. It's all petty stuff though so I can't complain too much. And being stuck behind a desk for the rest of my life's definitely not for me. I feel like a hamster on a wheel or like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill. I know that those can be seen as apt ways to describe life as a whole, but I feel like I'm on the wrong wheel and rolling the wrong boulder up the wrong hill.

I was honestly caught off guard by just how much I loved Pluto. I went in expecting it to be at the very least good but it blew me away. It had so much of what I've always loved about classic anime and specifically its approach to science fiction. It combined Tezuka's warmth and love for people with Urasawa's uncanny ability to masterfully weave intriguing mysteries. I actually wrote a review for it a while back.

I remember those poems! And I'm glad I was able to help you find your footing in that regard. It means a lot to know you value my opinions and feedback that strongly. And yeah, it's the same ex. She and I still do talk in spite of everything. She was genuinely remorseful and took a lot of steps in order to try and take accountability, and we ended up having a year-long situationship (for lack of a better term) a few months after the breakup but that got too intense since I was still struggling to forgive her so we stopped that and just settled on being friends. Reminds me of Misato and Ristuko's conversation about Shinji early on tbh.

"Even though a hedgehog may want to become close with another hedgehog. The closer they get the more they injure each other with their spines"
"Part of growing up means finding a way to interact with others while distancing pain"

I have an odd relationship with Shinji Ikari in that I related to him as a teenager, but now relate more to Misato in certain ways, but also find myself identifying very strongly with him by the end whenever I'm at my lowest. The show's been a part of my life since I was his age, after all. And I also really enjoyed the Evangelion manga ending. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as the TV ending, but it felt so immediately satisfying in a way that was honestly beautiful.

And I loved Vinland Saga's second season even more than the first. Thorfinn reflecting on having taken a path that hurt other people and himself while finally discovering his calling was honestly something that hit close to home and felt incredibly real. And the other characters were similarly layered and complex. Einer being a man who could very easily succumb to the same violent impulses Thorfinn did due to his trauma was particularly compelling to watch. And Ketil being shown to be a pathetic bastard who takes his anger out on defenseless women was a particularly strong indictment of the kinds of insecure men who externalize their trauma onto others because violence is the only way they know how to express themselves.

And your writing here is definitely not a little off. It was fantastic and a real pleasure to read.

I feel like every time either of us starts a convo we always go "idk if you remember me" lmao. of course I remember you. how's life?

you seem hella peaceful wanna be friends (on mal)?