Oh sweet I get to vent about The August Few: Amygdala by Sam Fennah.

So Sam is primarily a youtuber, he makes animations with these very unique and somewhat disturbing characters and over time he made a bit of a narrative using them, eventually he made it into a 1000 page book. As one might expect looking at his animations this book is very weird, it’s got some extremely interesting and alien worldbuilding which challenges the reader a lot. As a piece of art this book is incredibly effective in that it makes the reader reflect on it’s far reaching themes, but as a book I really kinda hate it.

At the core of the book is the question of what the ideal society is, but only one option is ever really presented, what I can only describe as anarcho-dawinism. When one character opposes this state and proposes the possibility of a kinder and more inclusive society she is betrayed, hung from a balcony over a crowd, she orgasms while choking to death, and “When the body was lowered, it was groped, defiled, spat upon, split.” This is not presented as a bad thing, simply as the people rejecting her idea, the language used is very “marketplace of ideas.”

At the start of the book Sam tries to disavow himself of what he wrote in an author’s note, part of which reads: “The views of the characters are not the views of the author. This book is not a promotion of ideas, but an exploration of ideas.” Sam did not need to make the characters orgasm when they died, he did not need to make them reproduce via necrophilic rape, he did not need to make every characters a literal baby eating cannibal, and he did not need to present social-darwinism as an ideal society, but he did, he choose to write these things.

I hate this book, I read it over a year ago and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, it is a great piece of art.

Here is India’s population pyramid.

There is a clear swell in the population aged around 20 years old which will be fantastic for the country in the next few decades as they will have a surplus of people in the most productive years of their lives, growing the economy massively. However, right after this glut of workers there is a rather sharp decline in population which means that once these boom time people start retiring, and therefore no longer producing economic output, they will then have to be supported by the suddenly much less numerous younger generation. Meaning there will be more people living off of the work of fewer, that won’t be comfortable.

That’s why they want more babies, to lessen the blow of an aging population.

The ship already is effectively detained. For the last week it’s been anchored in Danish waters surrounded by military vessels, at this very moment I count 5 German and 1 danish military/coast guard ships within a few km of of the Chinese Yi Peng 3. This article is basically just Sweden asking for the ship to be moved to their own waters so they can more easily investigate, the motivation being that the cable was damaged within Swedish maritime borders so they should be the ones leading the investigation.

That’s a rather odd change of tone since the statement not only definitively states that Ukraine is a sovereign nation but it also outright encourages EU membership for Ukraine which comes with a similar military defense guaranty to NATO, though importantly it of course does not come with US backing. At a guess I would say that they are trying to preemptively position themselves as the “reasonable” party in the upcoming (on-going?) negotiations.

An inability to empathize is not an artistic preference, it’s a medical condition.

It does and the actual wording is in my opinion a bit stronger in the EU guarantee, but I believe politically it’s viewed as much weaker since the EU is fundamentally a economic/trade union and not a military one like NATO. That is to say, the EU could still exist without such a clause, but for NATO it’s the entire reason for the organization to be.

My dude you are Dutch, if the russians make it to the Netherlands for you to shoot at then the west will already be ashes.

Refrigerating bananas pretty much stops them ripening, so if you have some fully yellow bananas you can pop then in the fridge and it will stop them from over ripening for a few days. The peel will still go brown but the flesh remains as it was when you put them in. You definitely shouldn’t put green bananas in the fridge, but with yellows it buys you some time.

While ideally you’d want a column for serving size, package size, and per 100g, if you’re only gonna have one it should definitely be the per 100g since that’s the only one that allows you to easily compare between different brands and products.

In any other country this would result in rapid SWAT equivalent or even military deployment.