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Author Topic: Things that made you sad today thread.  (Read 9699209 times)

Tack

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70230 on: February 16, 2014, 01:52:05 am »

Don't worry about it.
This discussion is actually rather interesting.

In my experience, being annoying, or being a dick is like alcoholism. You can say 'I should quit' as much as you like, and people will nod and smile at eachother because he's figured it out. But after the sixth or seventh time, people realize you don't really intend to quit, you're just saying it to get them off your back.

So every time I chuckle deprecatingly and say 'Man, I'm a bad person', It feels like a cop-out.
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hector13

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70231 on: February 16, 2014, 03:04:19 am »

Depends how you look at it.

I don't know if you've been told by other people you're a dick or are annoying, at least beyond the Rust thing, or if you just think that other people feel that way about you. If it's the latter, that's a dangerous way to go about things, since your mind can go wild postulating about things you don't know everything about. ("that person must think I'm annoying so doesn't like me, if I keep being a dick they're going to hate me and tell everyone that I'm a really horrible person and then everyone'll hate me and not want to talk to me" kind-of-thing)

I can't really give advice beyond warning where you're motivations are coming from. You need to be comfortable in your own skin, else it could lead to unpleasantness like depression. Like I say, not everyone is going to like you, whether it's because they have different values, they aren't very tolerant or are just dicks themselves, so if you objectively believe you're a dick (ask a friend you trust) then you can modify your behaviour to accomodate that. Whether it's just supressing aspects of your personality around certain people or completely changing some of the ways you interact with others, it needs to come from you, and your belief that this will make you happier and more comfortable being you.

My wife, for example, doesn't like aspects of my sense of humour, or the fact I swear like a sailor with Tourette's, so I tone it down a bit (a lot) when I'm with her because I respect that she doesn't like me saying unsavoury things, even in jest. My friends, on the other hand, don't mind that. Indeed they've told me that my blunt sense of humour is one of the reasons they like having me around.

I also want to say something about perspective, but I feel I'm being too preachy as it is. Bear in mind that you can completely ignore what I say, or cherry pick whatever you feel is good. At least take away this:

TL;DR Everyone is different, the one person you should make an effort to change for is you. Because you're awesome.
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the way your fingertips plant meaningless soliloquies makes me think you are the true evil among us.

FearfulJesuit

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70232 on: February 16, 2014, 05:01:52 am »

<rant>

I don't know how many people we have on the board who have studied Latin or (Ancient) Greek, and I suspect I'm probably the only person who's a Classics major (I think RedKing's done archaeology IIRC, though).

I'm proficient in reading Latin, have done some Greek in the past, and am now learning Sanskrit (I'm just now getting to the hard part...). Those are the three major classical Indo-European languages; they're all relatively conservative and have a large literary heritage to their name.

Here's something I didn't know until tonight, though: while Greek and especially Latin have large literary corpuses, Sanskrit's corpus is massive. It's a thousand times bigger than Greek's, at a conservative estimate. And Greek's is pretty large: it would take a very long and bored lifetime to read what Greek's got (I've seen it estimated at 91 million words. For comparison, Marcel Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is 1.5 million words). And now imagine a corpus of almost 100 billion words. You couldn't even begin to get into that. Heck, just the Mahabharata is 200,000 verses and would take you almost a decade and a half if you tried to read forty of those a day (which in Sanskrit is harder than it sounds). And then there's everything else: the Vedas, the Upanishads, the plays of Kalidasa, the Ramayana (a quarter of the length of the Mahabharata, and still as long as twice the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey put together, just to give everyone a sense of scale), the Pañcatantra, even the Kāmasutra for the salacious...And that's just the major stuff! There's philosophy, there's mathematics, there's poetry...you could probably be the most well-read (if not widely-read) person in the world without ever leaving what's been written in Sanskrit.

But here's the problem...outside of India (and even in India the scholarship tends to be religious and quite biased), almost nobody reads this stuff. The Mahabharata is the primal, cultural epic poem for as many people on this planet as the Odyssey is. There's been one translation into English made, and nobody is publishing it on dead leaves. Almost nobody wants to study Sanskrit in the first place, and half the people that do are New Agey bobos trying to get in touch with the Wisdom of the Mystic Orient. Heck, the guy who wrote the textbook I use- this is one used at Ivy Leagues!- is an associate professor at the "Maharishi School of Management" in Fairfield, Iowa. There's been one attempt to publish a line of facing-page translations of Sanskrit literature, the Clay Sanskrit Library (similar to the Loeb Library if that rings a bell). They published half the Mahabharata and a few plays before having to fold from bankruptcy. And it's nigh-impossible to get even original Sanskrit editions sans translation in the West.

I kind of wonder if part of it is the fact that nobody does this for fun anymore. I mean, the British did a lot of damage when they took over India, lots and lots of atrocities...but they also preserved and analyzed a lot of the cultural heritage. If you were an Englishman of a certain station in the Victorian era, you knew Greek and Latin, you knew your Plato and your Virgil and your Cicero. That was just a given. You might be given to study and translate Sanskrit in your spare time, especially if you were stationed in India. I mean, I'm not saying that all of them did that or even many of them, but philology and autodidacticism were highly respected. And there just isn't anything like that anymore. If you're moneyed and ambitious and intelligent you go work on Wall Street, and leave Sanskrit to a few impoverished professors and their overworked grad students. I mean, sure, Sanskrit literature isn't the most useful thing in the world, but doesn't that make it more beautiful even so?

It's also, I think, a searing indictment of the idea that academia, especially the humanities, has run out of things to talk about and is now just a bunch of stuffed shirts engaging in mental masturbation. It has work to do and lots of work to do. But it's stuck producing its twentieth English major looking at Hamlet through the postmodernist lens du jour.

</rant>
« Last Edit: February 16, 2014, 01:44:17 pm by FearfulJesuit »
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Helgoland

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70233 on: February 16, 2014, 07:14:59 am »

How close are Sanskrit and ancient Greek? I heard that they're like German and Dutch, and always found that hard to believe...

Also, what percentage of theSanskrit corpus is religious literature? I'd imagine a Hebrew student wouldn't want to read the more boring/geneological parts of the Old Testament.
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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70234 on: February 16, 2014, 09:31:43 am »

How close are Sanskrit and ancient Greek? I heard that they're like German and Dutch, and always found that hard to believe...
No, AFAIK Sanskrit and ancient Greek aren't that close. It's more like German and French, similar words and structures like in all Indo-European languages, but not as close as German and Dutch.

But here's the problem...outside of India (and even in India the scholarship tends to be religious and quite biased), almost nobody reads this stuff.
I guess the lack of non-specialist interest in Sanskrit has to do with cultural relevance. For the "West", ancient Greek and Latin are the most relevant dead languages. Everything else comes and goes in trends, like in recent decades the interest in Eastern Asian languages due to increased economic and cultural importance of Japan and China. Even ancient Greek and Latin aren't taught widely anymore these days. Latin used to be part of any higher school curriculum, but today it's become rare outside of universities.
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Aqizzar

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70235 on: February 16, 2014, 12:53:29 pm »

All I have to say is, fuck holidays.  Especially Valentine.

And back to being lazy.
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hector13

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70236 on: February 16, 2014, 01:36:34 pm »

Discovered that the PS4 version of MLB The Show doesn't come out until May, and also that the MGSV game released next month is only two hours long, and being priced at £30 for a physical copy.

I'm not sure how upset I should be about the latter, especially considering my dislike of all things EA and Activision.
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Look, we need to raise a psychopath who will murder God, we have no time to be spending on cooking.

the way your fingertips plant meaningless soliloquies makes me think you are the true evil among us.

FearfulJesuit

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70237 on: February 16, 2014, 01:51:07 pm »

How close are Sanskrit and ancient Greek? I heard that they're like German and Dutch, and always found that hard to believe...
No, AFAIK Sanskrit and ancient Greek aren't that close. It's more like German and French, similar words and structures like in all Indo-European languages, but not as close as German and Dutch.

They're not that far apart. They're older (we have texts in both of them from 1500 BC, although there's much more in Vedic Sanskrit [lots of hymns and religious tales] than in Mycenean Greek [mostly tax documents; we don't get a real corpus until about 800 BC or so]), so the differentiation that comes with time wasn't as great, and they share a large number of features that aren't really found anywhere else in the family (except, in many cases, Old Armenian). Still farther apart than German and Dutch or any two Romance languages, though.
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Vector

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70238 on: February 16, 2014, 02:11:55 pm »

I ended up having to move home with my parents.  They were supposed to take a trip out of town for the next couple days, and they decided they didn't want to.
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Sirus

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70239 on: February 16, 2014, 04:00:08 pm »

Clearly, the solution is to CONTINUE IT :D
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Sirus

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70240 on: February 16, 2014, 04:04:23 pm »

Clearly, the solution is to CONTINUE IT :D
Annoyingly, I can't find the inspiration to do so.
Understandable.
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Descan

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70241 on: February 16, 2014, 04:46:12 pm »

I got over that by giving up on doing anything on the forum except hit on people, make terrible puns, rail against the Americans/English depending on if I'm feeling more Canadian or Scottish that moment, and PMing cute people randomly to tell them their cute.
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Korbac

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70242 on: February 16, 2014, 04:57:13 pm »

Clearly, the solution is to CONTINUE IT :D
Annoyingly, I can't find the inspiration to do so.
Understandable.

Keep it in the back of your mind. Then one day, when you are refreshed, you can return. :)
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Tiruin

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70243 on: February 16, 2014, 05:42:47 pm »

Away for ~week and yet everything I still fail to do.
*explodes*
Hello sad spiral cascade of life.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2014, 05:45:01 pm by Tiruin »
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Pnx

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Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« Reply #70244 on: February 16, 2014, 10:09:02 pm »

I'm feeling crazy depressed right now, I've been brooding a lot about what I'm going to do with my life and such... and I need to pick out an article to do a paper on by tomorrow...

This sucks.
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