Place to share relaxing and thought-provoking videos

Possibly not, though some might disagree.

Yep, no, I agree. But that raises question about why we think it is “draconian.” But I’m possibly in the wrong thread

Painting is animal abuse? Since when? Now that IS thought-provoking. :thinking:

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Less than a year before his death, in an introduction to his last finished novel, Michael, Brother of Jerry, Jack London wrote an impassioned warning about the training of performing animals. He was, of course, very far from what we would call a “snowflake,” and he leveraged his tough-guy reputation to make his plea even more impressive. In truth, he had a great heart for animals, especially dogs. It is worth quoting a bit of it. He explains how he lost his taste for animal acts because when he sought the secrets of how it was accomplished, he discovered “a body of cruelty so horrible that I am confident no normal person exists, who, once aware of it, could ever enjoy looking on at any trained-animal turn.” He continues:

“Now I am not a namby pamby…. I am esteemed a sort of primitive beast that delights in the spilled blood of violence and horror. Without arguing this…I have indeed lived life in a very rough school and have seen more than the average man’s share of inhumanity and cruelty, from the forecastle and the prison, the slum and the desert…to the battlefield and the military hospital. I have seen horrible deaths and mutilations…imbeciles hanged…the hearts and stamina of strong men broken…other men by ill-treatment, driven to permanent and howling madness…the deaths of old and young, and even infants, from sheer starvation. … But what turns my head and makes my gorge rise, is the cold-blooded, conscious, deliberate cruelty and torment that is manifest behind ninety-nine of every one hundred trained-animal turns.”

He recommended that patrons at circuses walk out for a smoke during the animal acts. He was quite ahead of his time in this.

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I will agree on that and I’ve never been in a circus in my life because I do not like what goes on there, but this one is different. It is not a trick or a gimmick. It is an intelligent creature doing something creative.

A lot of people like to think that we are the only creative, intelligent and magnificent species on this planet, but that is not the truth.

Is that human abuse? :stuck_out_tongue:
It is hard and strenuous, after all, to learn how to play an instrument.

Not everything should be cause for outrage. Sometimes we should just enjoy the wonder of life that is all around is.

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Opera based on children’s rhyme. Actually a parody on cartoon opera of a children’s rhyme.

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Amazing video. Specifically it’s amazing how people go through tons of trouble to keep in place systems that don’t even make sense to begin with.

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One of mine, I came up with similar solutions to some of the problems described in your vid:

Travelling on Africa’s first (and only as of yet) high speed train, in Morocco.

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Well worth the entire watch:

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Seems like an amazing effort to build a mediocre game frankly. It didn’t even strike me that when everything is optimized for building 3d scenes forcing in 4d scene would be a giant pain. I wonder how much more resources the game is gonna eat. Thinking about it, 4d space is much more vast and spacious than 3d.

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Here we are:

1 hour per day sounds like the best advice ever :slight_smile:

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Does any smartphone user spend 1 hour a day doing what he says?

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This is what reading so often stimulates: thoughtfulness and contemplation. I suspect that reading speed declines, not just in old age but in the 30s and 40s, because one takes more time along the way thinking about the content. That’s certainly true for me.

My great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran and later a Methodist minister, was losing his sight in old age and could no longer read. He told his son, as handed down through the family, that “I have read a great deal throughout my life, and now I will just think about it all.”

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Oh my god, it’s so adorable

cc @_KoBa

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If they are a bit older, there is a possibility for that.
Younger users that grew up with them? I will admit that in this case it is less likely.
Still that doesn’t mean that it is not a good piece of advice.

In one of his specials, for comedic effect, years later, Carlin wandered along the same lines “when does a kid get to sit alone in a yard with a stick? Do today’s children even know what a stick is?”

Carlin got older, but the society around him didn’t seem to get any wiser.
If you really think about it, I guess you could say that this is one of the greatest woes of getting older.
Just as things are out of your control, you finally see what was wrong with a lot of those things and now not only you cannot fix them, but noone listens to you anymore and just nod and say “yeah, sure gramps, whatever you say” :thinking:

This is true, but oftentimes with books you get to embark on a trip of other people’s imaginations, not yours.
When I was younger I used to sit and daydream looking out the window even when I was at school (or ESPECIALLY when I was at school :stuck_out_tongue: ). I love books, but reading a book it is different from being alone with your imagination and just coming up with adventures, thoughts or goofy stuff.

Once you get older this is harder to accomplish since a lot of worries, problems and people interject with the process of letting go and letting your brain enjoy the day without you spoiling the fun.

In any case, once that kind of “empty time” (now labeled “boredom”) was a part of every-day life for a kid. Now it is something that should be actively avoided and parents seem to be especially afraid of their kids having “empty time”.

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Quite a nostalgia-inspiring video. A large part of my childhood was spent “messing around in the woods,” climbing trees, throwing rocks, chasing squirrels, and learning about the vegetation from observation. Several of us in the neighborhood had a “stick collection.” It was a great pleasure to find an oak or hickory stick that could be cleaned up (strip the bark and break off the rotted ends) to make a nice staff, with which to pretend to be Little John. Or a straight, light stick with a good point that could be used as a spear. We couldn’t bring the sticks home, so we each had a special hiding place in the woods to secrete them.

My best friend was a great one for messing around in the rain. We had no plan; we just went out to see what we could find. Maybe stir up an ant mound to see how the ants would react to the rain, or watch the rivulets of water flowing down a hill and maybe dam them up, or floating leaves down the hill in the gutters of a street.

That was one of the knocks against SF, but I never treated it as mere escapism (vicarious adventure). For me it was a great stimulus to my scientifically inclined imagination. What about FTL travel, what would aliens really be like, could I survive on Mars (while reading Rex Gordon’s classic First on Mars)? As I got older, my thoughts inclined toward thinking about the narrative technique and English style in fiction, and things like contingencies in historical nonfiction.

Being alone with our imagination was what all that messing around in the woods or in the rain was about. Most of us had few store-bought toys. Even our balls for “baseball” were old tennis balls that we had found here or there.

Being alone is, of course, one of the great appeals of hiking, admonitions about hiking with a friend notwithstanding. I did do my winter hikes, off-trail and sometimes in the snow, with a close friend (who died in 2014), because that activity could be seriously dangerous, but most of my backpacking hikes (usually 4 or 5 days) were alone. Being “locked” in the forest for the night is an adventure in self-discovery the first time you do it, and all hiking is one long meditation—you never know what you will see in the outdoors.

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So scripted yet so fresh!
I don’t know if that’s independent journalism, but it’s definitely entertaining.
Thank you!

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