He's not good, but I don't think he really needs to be all that great, honestly; the script seems to be written with his limitations in mind, at least. The kid playing MK, on the other hand … yiiiiikes.

That is so, so much better than an ad for Bleacher Report has any right to be.

Her?

LaRouchites are the best! I went to a conference on Leo Strauss at the New School, and LaRouchites were outside protesting! One guy even interrupted one of the keynotes with some crazy rant. This was the mid-aughts, so there was still some lingering 'A Straussian cabal caused the Iraq War' hysteria in the air, but it…

I end up reading Red Harvest every year. At least. Goddamn love that one

I just read the first one of the series this year; really looking forward to continuing.

I once started reading Quicksilver, and despite the setting and subject matter being very much up my alley, I put it down after 50 pages or so. Life is too short to read prose that lifeless in such quantity.

It's like we can't have a reasonable discussion without going off on a tangent.

I'd love to hear Always Sunny-Frank deliver some of TD-Frank's lines.

Tyrone Slothrop would like a word.

Gluten.

Wait, the Germans aren't sexy?

… yet.

Hey, I'm a philosophy grad, too! I'm even a philosophy grad school drop-out. And you know what? I've literally never heard of Absurdism as a distinct philosophical position. But then again, neither Camus nor Sartre, nor existentialism (broadly or narrowly construed) are particularly live topics in academic philosophy…

I'm not familiar with that definition of existentialism, and it doesn't strike me as either necessary or sufficient to the views I think of as falling under the umbrella of existentialism, but I admit this isn't an area I've done a lot of reading.

And that's fine. But I get the sense that by Absurdism, you mean "the things Camus believed," and by Existentialism, you mean, "the things Sartre believed."

I don't know, man, they're gonna need to replace Greinke somehow.

Confronting the absurd and the groundlessness of human existence is a fairly common topos in existentialist philosophy. While I don't think Camus wanted to be associated with 'existentialism', however he understood it (which was probably first and foremost "that shit Sartre's doing"), I'm not sure your distinction…

Really enjoying it so far, both for Heather's style and learning more about a period of Roman history that I'd paid little attention to up till now.

Peter Heather's Fall of the Roman Empire, which I've had on my shelf forever, as a run-up to Mary Beard's SPQR, which I'll pick up with the post-Christmas glut of Amazon gift cards. I know, I know, I've got the order backwards.