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In this thread you talk to others or just yourself.
Anything that's on your mind is okay as a topic.
Have fun & don't shit up this thread! ヽ(´ー｀)ノ
http://www.shii.org/ is back. I like that.
I hope this time there will be less drama and more delicious wotaku stuff.
Some day I'll have some good reply for this thread.
School starts tomorrow.
The summer is gone so quickly.
I remember last spring, when I was writing this to world4ch.
In passing, we are reminded that things don't last forever
and realize why they are precious.
Of course, that can sometimes be a good thing.
I am pretty relieved my hangover from the weekend is fading away...
I had a great day today. Good food, good company, and everything just went perfectly, even when I was expecting it not to. Ahhh.... bliss.
I'm so angry that I wasted all of my summer away. The fun stops here; or rather, it didn't even start. I am angry at the world!
Suddenly, I realize.
All I do is play on the computer anyway.
It doesn't matter whether it's summer or winter.
I feel depressed, but what else can I do with my life?
Whenever I go outside, I get bored quickly.
>>9
Go to a developing country and help building up an infrastructure!
>>9 go postal.... then go jump off a roof of a tall building with a bunch of 'nades strapped to all the pins and you pull that shit out moments before you face plant in full bloody glory... then your corpse explodes, taking everyone with you to the next world
I think it was the cat that did it. Flying around in the look staring at the moon, terrifying the hell out of me. What made me wonder was the way it flew. It was not like a bat but like a cow jumping over the moon trying not to block the light while not being able to and being too small while tring to be a cat in a bat's body jumping over the moon. The moon is so bright.
>I think it was the cat that did it. Flying around in the look staring at the moon, terrifying the hell out of me. What made me wonder was the way it flew. It was not like a bat but like a cow jumping over the moon trying not to block the light while not being able to and being too small while tring to be a cat in a bat's body jumping over the moon. The moon is so bright.
There is no reason.
I slept on my arm, it was completely limb and just hung from my body, I couldn't move it for the first few seconds, it was funny.
I did that once too (arm under the head). I was 15 at the time.
When I woke up I couldn't feel a thing. Needless to say, that was a scary few seconds. I thought I'd killed it or something.
Sometimes, when I am really tired, I lose my sense of perspective. Literally. I no longer have any idea how big things are. I'll be browsing the internet on my two-meter monitor that's sitting across the room, using my two-milliter mouse with my five-meter long arm.
It's great fun, I wish it would happen more often.
Something similiar used to happen to me when I was younger.
Sometimes, when I'd close my eyes at night and was just starting to dream, the visions would unexpectedly become very large, as if they were shoved into my inner eye.
> my arm, it was completely limb
tee hee.
I'm not a native speaker! I meant "numb"!
I didn't really mean to mock the mistake, it was just an interesting substitution. A limb that was limp and numb?
I suck with names and faces.
I'm the kind of guy who wouldn't recognize one of my teachers if I bumped into them outside of class.
Me too. I forgot your name already.
Well i have a habbit of messing up anems, don't know why, but people take real offense to that.
>>23
Well, it should be fine as long as you don't call your girlfriend by another name during sex ^^; or anywhere else, for that matter
>>24
I did call an ex of mine the name of another ex several times.
Boy, I'll never hear the end of that, even now.
Last night I watched a documentary about the psychological/philosophical/semiotical differences between the west and the far east.
One hypothesis that some scholars from both hemispheres proposed was that westerners were more likely to clearly seperate different parts of reality (most notably evil & good) and were more affirmative of light, hope, etc.; while the Japanese were more likely to accept the yin (the dark part of yin/yang duality) and to perceive reality as something that has to be unified somehow.
Also, they interviewed some convicted Japanese canibal who was released from jail but who expressed his wish to die, as him being alive forced him to constantly be reminded of his guilt of killing (the woman he ate). He was also filmed meeting a young (and really pretty) woman who had a sadism/torture/death fetish. She told a story about how she dug out an animal corpse she had buried with a friend a few days before (when she was very little), then sticking her hand in the warm, decaying and maggot infested body and how she felt total ecstasy from that. She also said that inflicting pain on men, cutting them with razors, drinking their blood, etc. were giving her exceeding levels of lust.
Later, both of them were filmed in an apparment, talking about cannibalism. The canibal said he'd like to be eaten by the girl, and how he dreamt of that. The girl said she thought eating the one you love and be eaten by the one you love would be a very intimate experience and that she'd like to die that way.
Another notable thing was the Ajase complex, as proposed by Kosawa, a Japanese student of Freud. They talked a lot about different conceptions of motherhood in east & west.
I also liked the part where somebody mentioned that males were mostly striving for "small perfections" by excluding everything perceived as imperfect and how that limits males typically, while females are more capable of accepting and incorporating more parts of reality, but as they are also able to fail, they usually end up in much bigger heaps of confusion if they do.
Did they say anything about those who divide people into groups and make sweeping generalizations about them?
>>27
I was waiting for that comment. It's a typical fallacy, as saying you cannot make general statements about hypothetical groups of people essentially implies that you cannot say anything about any kind of people, as people are already a generalized group (which means that generalized statements about them are not automatically incorrect) - so the only way to weasel yourself out of that would be to say that groups of people (e.g. "the Japanese", etc.) don't exist.
While that could be a legitimate statement in some sorts of discourse, it's very impractical.
> One hypothesis that some scholars from both hemispheres proposed was that westerners were more likely to clearly seperate different parts of reality (most notably evil & good) and were more affirmative of light, hope, etc.; while the Japanese were more likely to accept the yin (the dark part of yin/yang duality) and to perceive reality as something that has to be unified somehow.
This is not the stupidest thing I've ever heard a psychologist say, but goddamn is it up there.
Um, it's based totally in fantasy and connects vague "Oriental" mysticism to individual Japanese people with barely even the pretense of a post hoc ergo propter hoc. Do psychologists have a license to make up unadulterated bullshit these days?
I'm so dismayed. Every year, it is the same routine. I say to myself, "This year, I will not procrastinate! I will take my subjects and my teachers seriously!". I think the real problem with the Ontario Public School system is that the teachers are lax, lazy, and generally uncaring, whilst the subject material is redundant and sometimes irrelevant.
Have you ever been to summer school? In there, they pack ~4 months of regular work into just 2-3 weeks! I was able to learn all the topics while my work habits were still good. In the semester system, it takes 1~2 months for them to deteriorate and for me to begin to hate the teacher, the course, the world.
>I'm so dismayed. Every year, it is the same routine. I say to myself, "This year, I will not procrastinate! I will take my subjects and my teachers seriously!"
I've been singing that tune for years. I should actually be studying right now, I have a test tomorrow.
>>29,31 said pretty much what I was thinking, without feeling the need to be a smartass about it like me. It's not that you can't make statements about groups (I'm not going to argue against "on average, women bear children more often than men"), it's that all such statements are not created equal, and these particular ones were pretty lacking in any sort of insight not based in silly predjudices.
>>31
Fantasy shmantasy. It sounds reasonable to me, what with Judeo-christianity influencing the west for thousands of years and Buddhism-shintoism influencing the east for thousands of years. Two very different philosophies, making for different mindsets over the ages with the people going through their individual assimilation processes. While the religions mentioned were never too homogenous, I think it's ignorant to dismiss any reference to their influence as "vague".
And that's just one (possible) explanation for the correctness of the hypothesis (which of course may be wrong for some individual cases).
I also hold the belief that the general, very un-individual developments dozens of generations before us have gone through have a huge impact on our individual existence, whether we like it or not. There's been some arguments for that in this thread: http://4-ch.net/general/kareha.pl/1124958215
>>34
What do you mean with "all such statements are not created equal"?
Number 1 is pretty easy to confirm as holding true, and is even useful for extrapolating from groups down to individuals. Number 2 is vague and actually makes no statements that are supported by any kind of evidence, or testable any meaningful way. It also smacks of the "orientals are mystical beings living in harmony with the world" new-age fallacy. All it does is to play into our preconceptions, and glorifies the Other, letting us feel good about ourself as modern world citizens who appreciate the wisdom of Other Cultures.
All this while in actuality, you can take an average Japanese person and an average Westerner, and find that beyond language and some social mores, there's hardly any difference. The difference between any two individuals picked out of either group is likely to be far, far larger.
So while there is some difference in outlook, on average, it's most likely far less than people who talk about unifying yin and yang would think, and even that difference is largely overwhelmed by the difference between indivduals, making any insights you gain this way largely useless.
>>35
I'm getting a whiff of a troll, but for now I'll assume good faith.
Shintoism is only part of Japan. Buddhism is from India which is not part of that amorphous CJK blob you refer to as "the East". Neither religion has anything to do with a yin-yang, which is a concept native to Chinese traditional religion and is known in Japan only in the context of martial arts. See also >>36
> Shintoism is only part of Japan. Buddhism is from India which is not part of that amorphous CJK blob you refer to as "the East".
Religions:
observe both Shinto and Buddhist 84%,
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ja.html
And yes, India is part of the eastern hemisphere commonly refered to as "the East", whether you like that or not.
Also, yin-yang is not "a concept native to Chinese traditional religion" but an integral part of Taoism, a philosophy that originated in China thousands of years ago but since then has transmutated throughout all of Asia.
> statements that are supported by any kind of evidence, or testable any meaningful way
I think you are missing the point. This wasn't about some wapanese making up facts as they see fit but studied people from both Japan and western countries coming to the same conclusions as they were trying to describe and explain the differences in different mindsets, the latter working slightly different than looking for evidence of ovaries or what have you.
I understand that trying to do that will lead to generalized assertions and assumptions. That does not, however, make them neccessarily untrue, it doesn't even make them likely to be untrue. And extrapoling from historically factual ideologies like religions and philosophies seems a better course than extrapoling from climate & geography, as was usual code of discourse when talking about the mindsets of foreign countries in 17-18th century western humanities.
This isn't about gloryfying anything or some dweebs paraphrasing popular prejudices for the hell of it. The people who were interviewed had decades of scholarly as well as practical experience with lots and lots of actual people.
> All this while in actuality, you can take an average Japanese person and an average Westerner, and find that beyond language and some social mores, there's hardly any difference.
Perhaps, I'd still assert that these little differences can be subsumed under "general differences between generally different mindsets" which is what I've been trying to say all along, though.
> The difference between any two individuals picked out of either group is likely to be far, far larger.
That kind of depends on what you are taking into your observation, doesn't it? Which would be a prejudice in method, but meh...
The difference between any two individuals picked out of either group is likely to be far, far larger.
> The people who were interviewed had decades of scholarly as well as practical experience with lots and lots of actual people.
Ever heard of argument from authority?
> Perhaps, I'd still assert that these little differences can be subsumed under "general differences between generally different mindsets" which is what I've been trying to say all along, though.
"Differences between mindsets" are things like not bothering deliquent hikikomori kids who stay in their rooms, or making a bigger deal about the suicide rate than about violence and sex on TV. These are the sorts of decisions which make up a culture. You may note that none of this has to do with "yin-yang" gibberish which can be read into any damn thing and which I still assert has never been popular in Japan.
Furthermore, "mindsets" do not determine a higher rate of cannibalism, which has probably never been sanctioned in any society. That makes your TV doctor even more outrageous.
> Ever heard of argument from authority?
Did, but I don't hold the belief that arguing from authority automatically provides falsity or correctness of an assertion. Also, it's not the case here. I merely wanted to point out that there weren't just your average idiots. But I guess it doesn't matter anyway.
And the cannibalism bit wasn't directly connected to anything the "TV doctor" (what) said. It was more of a correlating piece of documentary in the bigger picture (about the different mindsets which included questions like "Why don't Japanese moms kiss their children?" (<- WARNING! GENERALIZED STATEMENT) or "Why are Japanese people so obsessed with cleanliness?").
They also had various bits of Soviet spionage & encryption business, western dominatrix stuff and some Roland Barthes for good measure.
Reminds me of the Reader's Digest article circa 1950, answering questions like "Why are women so obsessed with cleanliness?"
I guess they never met my mom.
I hate these people that are messing up this thread with their ranty non-rants! Grr! They really grind my gears! On the internet no one ever follows the rules or guidelines!