#but again that's a british thing i don't know what american taxi drivers are like

[magiefish]

Love how taxis function like a fast travel system in Malevolent. Arthur hails a taxi and gets in and it dematerialises and rematerialises like the Sheika slate from Breath of the Wild. And then he just chucks money at them at the end and they don't even say anything about it they just take it.

[gonna-need-you-to-not]

Spn Episode Categories

Today in "Is it Autism or ADHD?", I put all the Supernatural episodes into categories by episode name.

ALLITERATION Dark Dynasty Monster Movie Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie Soul Survivor Tall Tales Twigs & Twine & Tasha Banes Various and Sundry Villains War of the Worlds

BELIEVE Clap Your Hands if You Believe Do You Believe in Miracles

BIBLICAL Exodus In the Beginning Inherit the Earth Lazarus Rising Lucifer Rising Moriah Proverbs 17:3

BLOOD Blood Brother Bloodlines Bloodlust Bloody Mary Dead Man’s Blood First Blood Fresh Blood Let It Bleed My Bloody Valentine There Will Be Blood

BOOKS Bedtime Stories Book of the Damned Fan Fiction Meta Fiction Reading is Fundamental Slash Fiction The Monster at the End of this Book

CHILDREN Adventures in Babysitting Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things Destiny’s Child I Believe the Children are Our Future Pacman Fever Playthings Slumber Party The Kids are Alright

COLOURS Black Crossroad Blues Paint it Black Red Meat Red Sky at Morning Yellow Fever

DEAD or ALIVE Advanced Thanatology Bring Em Back Alive Dead in the Water Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid Death Takes a Holiday Death’s Door Defending Your Life In My Time of Dying It’s a Terrible Life Live Free or Twihard Rock Never Dies

DEVIL Beat the Devil Devil in the Detail Devil May Care Devil’s Bargain Devil’s Trap Sympathy for the Devil The Devil You Know

EMOTIONS Everybody Hates Hitler Everybody Loves a Clown Love Hurts Optimism We Happy Few

FAMILY All in the Family Family Feud Family Matters Family Remains

FIRE/HEAT Caged Heat Halt and Catch Fire Out of the Darkness Into the Fire

FIRST/LAST/NEW/OLD First Born Last Call Last Holiday Meet the New Boss Out With the Old

GIRLS/BOYS/MEN/LADIES A Most Holy Man About a Boy Bad Boys Girl Next Door Girl With the Dungeons & Dragons Tattoo Girls Girls Girls Hook Man Inside Man Ladies Drink Free LARP and the Real Girl Man Who Knew Too Much Man Who Would Be King Mans Best Friend with Benefits Repo Man Slice Girls

GODS & MONSTERS Atomic Monsters Good God Yall Hammer of the Gods How to Win Friends and Influence Monster Remember the Titans

GOING SOMEWHERE? Appointment in Samarra Beyond the Mat Carry On Dark Side of the Moon Don't Go in the Woods Exile on Main Street Frontierland Heroes’ Journey Hollywood Babylon Into the Mystic Lebanon Long Distance Call Mystery Spot No Exit Our Little World Phantom Traveller Point of No Return Road Kill Road Trip Sin City Stranger in a Strange Land

GOOD/BAD Bad Day at Black Rock Bad Place Bad Seed Born Under a Bad Sign Damaged Goods Good Intentions Let the Good Times Roll

HEART Angel Heart Heart Heartache My Heart Will Go On

HEAVEN & HELL All Dogs Go to Heaven All Hell Breaks Loose (Part 1 and 2) Heaven Can’t Wait Hell’s Angel Holy Terror I’m No Angel King of the Damned Raising Hell Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell Stairway to Heaven

HELLO/GOODBYE Hello Cruel World Goodbye Stranger

HOUSE & HOME Hell House Home Houses of the Holy Safe House

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD Don’t You Forget About Me Galaxy Brain Just My Imagination Memory Remains Peace of Mind Wishful Thinking

LATIN/OTHER LANGUAGE Hunteri Heroici Jus in Bello Malleus Maleficarum Reichenbach

MOVIE TITLES/REFERENCES Back to the Future Blade Runners Born Again Identity Hunter Games I Know What You Did Last Summer Real Ghostbusters Taxi Driver The Usual Suspects There’s No Place Like Home Tombstone You Can’t Handle the Truth

NAME A Little Slice of Kevin Alex Annie Alexis Ann Are You There God It’s Me Dean Winchester Ask Jeeves Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox Criss Angel is a Douchebag Curious Case of Dean Winchester Dog Dean Afternoon Don’t Call Me Shurley It’s the Great Pumpkin Sam Winchester Jack in the Box Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets Party On Garth Patience Sam Interrupted Shut Up Dr Phil Simon Says There’s Something about Mary Thin Lizzie We Need to Talk About Kevin Weekend at Bobby’s

NATIONALITIES American Nightmare British Invasion French Mistake

NIGHT Game Night Night Shifter Nightmare Nightmare Logic Nightshifter

NUMBERS 99 Problems Hibbing 911 Magnificent Seven Mannequin 3: the Reckoning Route 666 Season 7 Time For a Wedding The One You’ve Been Waiting For The Third Man Two and a Half Men Two Minutes to Midnight

PAIRS Alpha and Omega Form and Void Freaks and Geeks Gods and Monsters Heaven and Hell Lost and Found Prophet and Loss Scorpion and the Frog Sex and Violence Torn and Frayed Trial and Error

RELATIVES Brother’s Keeper Mamma Mia Mommy Dearest Mother’s Little Helper O Brother Where Art Thou Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven Rising Son Wayward Sisters What’s Up Tiger Mommy

SAYINGS/EXPRESSIONS Abandon All Hope And Then There Were None Fallen Idols Jump the Shark Keep Calm and Carry On Mint Condition No Rest for the Wicked Of Grave Importance On the Head of a Pin Rock and a Hard Place Southern Comfort Survival of the Fittest

SINGLE WORD #thinman Absence Asylum Baby Breakdown Bugs Byzantium Captives Croatoan Despair Faith Funeralia Ghostfacers Hunted LOTUS Metamorphosis Nihilism Ouroboros Pilot Plush Provenance Roadkill Sacrifice Salvation Scarecrow Shadow Skin Unity Wendigo

SONG Executioner’s Song Song Remains the Same Swan Song

SONG TITLES All Along the Watchtower Dream a Little Dream of Me Folsom Prison Blues I Think I’m Gonna Like it Here Like a Virgin Paper Moon Stuck in the Middle With You

SUPERNATURAL A Very Supernatural Christmas Scoobynatural

TEETH Bitten Citizen Fang Sharp Teeth

THE Benders Big Empty Chitters End Foundry Future Gamblers Great Escapist Mentalists Prisoner Purge Raid Rapture Rupture Scar Spear Trap Vessel Werther Project

THING/SOMETHING Something Wicked The Thing The Things They Carried The Things We Left Behind

TIME As Time Goes By Golden Time Time After Time Time After Time After Time Time is on My Side

TV After School Special Changing Channels Clip Show

UN Unfinished Business Unforgiven Unhuman Nature

WHO/WHAT/WHEN What Is and What Should Never Be When the Levee Breaks Who We Are

YOU & ME Drag Me Away From You Free to Be You and Me

Some obviously qualify for more than one category, so I just picked one 🤷‍♀️

[van-dyne]

I'm thinking of skipping some seasons of spn, are there any seasons that would be good to skip(I don't want to skip them I just don't have the time to watch them)

S1-5 is the ‘classic’ supernatural, so don’t skip any of them. The first 5 seasons tell a coherent story, and it’s an Epic one. They set the tone of the show, develop your attachment to the characters, makes you fall in love with them and their relationship with one another. It’s the Winchesters origin story, and imo you’d always feel something is missing, something you can’t quite grasp if you hadn’t been there with them from the start. 

With that covered, let’s go into the later seasons, I assume you want to catch up with the current season asap? I wouldn’t recommend to skip a whole season because in order to understand the characters’ action (primarily Sam and Dean) you have to know what they’ve been through, and though the later seasons are more self contained, each has its own arc, it is still a coherent journey of the brothers as a whole. And they have quality episodes each season you dont want to miss.

Here’s the episode list from s 6-12, I highlighted the important episodes in order to understand the story for it to progress, also point out those fun and quality episodes you may not want to miss ;) (god it’s really long list) (sorry to those who’re on mobile) 

Season 6 (there’s something wrong with Sam (!), monsters, demons and angels all want to open the backdoor to purgatory (imo it’s a mess)1. Exile on Main Street2. Two and a Half Men 3. The Third Man 4. Weekend at Bobby’s* (Love letter to Bobby)5. Live Free or Twi-hard* (Dean becomes a vampire, temporarily) 6. You Can’t Handle the Truth 7. Family Matters 8. All Dogs Go to Heaven 9. Clap Your Hands If You Believe*  (This is a fun one, X-file style)10. Caged Heat 11. Appointment in Samarra 12. Like a Virgin 13. Unforgiven 14. Mannequin 3: The Reckoning 15. The French Mistake* (The one that will go down in television history) 16. And Then There Were None 17. My Heart Will Go On* (The one where they un-sink the Titanic)18. Frontierland* (The one where they time travel to the Western )19. Mommy Dearest 20. The Man Who Would Be King 21. Let It Bleed 22. The Man Who Knew Too Much

Season 7 (this season arc is basically Leviathan from purgatory is unleashed on earth and they can impose people, cause the winchesters a few, but they manage to off the monster in the end. The leviathan story is not that engaging but they have fun episodes. The more intriguing and important part in terms of characters arc is about Sam’s hallucination)  1. Meet the New Boss 2. Hello Cruel World 3. The Girl Next Door (Dean did something /questionable/)4. Defending Your Life 5. Shut Up, Dr. Phil* (The one with the Buffy reunion)6. Slash Fiction* (Leviathans!Winchesters, forcing the real winchesters on the run)7. The Mentalists (The bros resolve their conflict)8. Time for a Wedding! 9. How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters 10. Death’s Door 11. Adventures in Babysitting 12. Time After Time* (Dean travels back in time to the 40s) 13. The Slice Girls (Dean doesn’t want you to know about this one)14. Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie* (The one with the clowns, it’s fun)15. Repo Man 16. Out with the Old* (It’s a fun one, also Sam’s hallucination is getting worse)17. The Born-Again Identity 18. Party on, Garth (The one they drunk kill Ghost)19. Of Grave Importance 20. The Girl With the Dungeons and Dragons Tattoo* (The one introduces Charlie) 21. Reading is Fundamental (The one introduces Kevin)22. There Will Be Blood 23. Survival of the Fittest (The one where they finally off the big Dick)

Season 8 (Dean’s back from purgatory and Sam quit hunting for a year, bros are back together, conflict ensured, they find a way to shut the gates of Hell in the second half of the season) 1. We Need to Talk About Kevin 2. What’s Up, Tiger Mommy? 3. Heartache 4. Bitten 5. Blood Brother (Benny the vampire friend of Dean) 6. Southern Comfort (The bros are lashing out on each other)7. A Little Slice of Kevin 8. Hunteri Heroici (The one with the looney tones, so fun)9. Citizen Fang (More Benny)10. Torn and Frayed 11. LARP and the Real Girl (The one where Dean dresses up as Medieval knight, it’s good fun)12. As Time Goes By (Grandpa Henry Winchester! Introducing Men of letters)13. Everybody Hates Hitler (The one introduces the Bunker) 14. Trial and Error 15. Man’s Best Friend with Benefits 16. Remember the Titans (The one with all the greek gods, it’s solid episode)17. Goodbye Stranger 18. Freaks and Geeks 19. Taxi Driver 20. Pac-Man Fever 21. The Great Escapist 22. Clip Show 23. Sacrifice

Season 9  (Dean is burden with guilt)1. I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here 2. Devil May Care 3. I’m No Angel 4. Slumber Party 5. Dog Dean Afternoon (The one Dean becomes a dog, temporarily)  6. Heaven Can’t Wait 7. Bad Boys* (get to know a slice of Dean’s childhood)8. Rock and a Hard Place 9. Holy Terror 10. Road Trip 11. First Born 12. Sharp Teeth 13. The Purge* (Undercover as yoga instructor and food lady, it’s fun)14. Captives (The winchesters have really nice coats in this one just sayin) 15. #thinman 16. Blade Runners 17. Mother’s Little Helper 18. Meta Fiction (it’s weird one I don’t know)19. Alex Annie Alexis Ann 20. Bloodlines 21. King of the Damned 22. Stairway to Heaven 23. Do You Believe in Miracles

Season 10 (Sam is gonna save his Dean no matter the cost) 1. Black 2. Reichenbach 3. Soul Survivor 4. Paper Moon* (Something you need, as a therapy, after the first three episode)5. Fan Fiction* (The one with the Supernatural Meta Musical) 6. Ask Jeeves* (Cluedo style, FUN)7. Girls, Girls, Girls 8. Hibbing 911 9. The Things We Left Behind* (Re-introduces Claire novak) 10. The Hunter Games 11. There’s No Place Like Home* (Charlie and her evil twins) 12. About a Boy* (De-aged Dean, yes) 13. Halt & Catch Fire 14. The Executioner’s Song !! (holy shit this episode)15. The Things They Carried 16. Paint it Black17. Inside Man 18. Book of the Damned 19. The Werther Project 20. Angel Heart 21. Dark Dynasty 22. The Prisoner 23. Brother’s Keeper

Season 11 (Darkness on earth, but at least the brothers are on the same page) 1. Out of the Darkness, Into the Fire 2. Form and Void 3. The Bad Seed 4. Baby ** !! ( A love letter to Baby)5. Thin Lizzie (There’s that kid from Stranger Things)6. Our Little World 7. Plush 8. Just My Imagination* !! (the one with the imaginary friend, very fun and unique)9. O Brother Where Art Thou? 10. The Devil in the Details 11. Into the Mystic 12. Don’t You Forget About Me 13. Love Hurts* (epic Winchesters wardrobe) 14. The Vessel* (Dean travels back in time! again)15. Beyond the Mat* (Happy fanboy Winchesters)16. Safe House* (Bobby and Rufus old case)17. Red Meat* !! (Epic Monster of the week episode)18. Hell’s Angel 19. The Chitters 20. Don’t Call Me Shurley !!21. All in the Family (Meh but you kinda maybe need to watch it)22. We Happy Few (UGH but you kinda maybe need to watch it)23. Alpha and Omega

Season 12 (British Men of Letters wants to take control of the American hunters, also Mama Winchester is back, also a hot mess) 1. Keep Calm and Carry On 2. Mamma Mia 3. The Foundry 4. American Nightmare* (the theme is dark af but it’s a very good episode) 5. The One You’ve Been Waiting For (Dean kills Hitler)6. Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox* (introduces the hunter network, solid episode)7. Rock Never Dies 8. Lotus 9. First Blood 10. Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets 11. Regarding Dean** (Jensen A+ acting)12. Stuck in the Middle (With You) * (the way this episode is directed is worth watching)13. Family Feud 14. The Raid 15. Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell 16. Ladies Drink Free 17. The British Invasion 18. The Memory Remains 19. The Future 20. Twigs & Twine & Tasha Banes* (A solid monster of the week episode with the Hunter Twins) 21. There’s Something About Mary 22. Who We Are !! (this episode imo saves the whole season)23. All Along the Watchtower ! (now you’re excited for what comes next)

[integralshock]

Antifragile: how to live in a world we don't understand

The core idea behind this book is simple and quite enticing. Nassim Nicholas divides the world and all that's in it (people, things, institutions, ways of life) into three categories: the fragile, the robust and the antifragile. You are fragile if you avoid disorder and disruption for fear of the mess they might make of your life: you think you are keeping safe, but really you are making yourself vulnerable to the shock that will tear everything apart. You are robust if you can stand up to shocks without flinching and without changing who you are. But you are antifragile if shocks and disruptions make you stronger and more creative, better able to adapt to each new challenge you face. Taleb thinks we should all try to be antifragile.

If the idea is nice and neat, however, the book that houses it is just the opposite. It is a big, baggy, sprawling mess. Taleb seems to have decided not just to explain his idea but also to try to exemplify it. One of his bugbears is the fragility of most of what passes for "knowledge" – especially the kind produced by academics – which he thinks is so hung up on order and completeness that it falls apart at the first breath of disruption. So he has gone for deliberate disorder: Antifragile jumps around from aphorism to anecdote to technical analysis, interspersed with a certain amount of hectoring encouragement to the reader to keep up. The aim, apparently, is to show how much more interesting an argument can be if it resists being pinned down.

There are two problems with this. First, the book is very hard going. Everything is taken to link to everything else but nothing is ever followed through. Taleb despises mere "theorists" but still aspires to produce a theory of everything. So what we get are lots of personal reminiscences buttressed by the ideas of the few thinkers he respects, almost all of whom happen to be his friends. The result is both solipsistic and ultimately dispiriting. Reading this book is the intellectual equivalent of having to sit patiently while someone shows you their holiday snaps.                     

The other difficulty is that too many of the ideas contained here appear thin and brittle rather than rich and flexible: fragile rather than antifragile. Taleb is keen on "heuristics" – shortcuts to wisdom that encapsulate human experience – but often these seem simply to reflect his own prejudices. To take just one example: Taleb thinks modern states become fragile when they get into debt, and that a prerequisite of political antifragility is rigid fiscal conservatism. This is nonsense. Eschewing debt makes states just as fragile as having too much of it. The durability of both the British and American states throughout their history has depended on their ability to use public debt to adapt to different challenges. As political analysis, Taleb's heuristic – "when you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation … and somehow it's only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one" – is glib and unconvincing.

Antifragile is trying to be two things at once: a philosophical treatise and a how-to guide for living. Taleb's two previous books – Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan – drew their appeal from being more narrowly focused on the failures of economists and financial traders to understand the game they were in. Their enormous success derived in part from his apparently being proved right by the financial crash of 2007-08. But now Taleb wants more than just vindication: he wants long-term intellectual respect. He makes a great play in this book of denigrating those earlier volumes as somehow lesser versions of his big idea. He says Antifragile, along with a technical treatise he published before he became famous, are by far his favourite pieces of writing. If I may be forgiven a heuristic of my own, it is a very bad sign when authors start to look down on the books that connected them to their audience: it means they are now irredeemably up themselves.

As a how-to guide Antifragile is a mixture of the pretentious and the banal. Some of this is deliberate provocation: we are told that real scholarship depends on having a private library rather than learning in the classroom. But much of the advice is just a warmed-up anti-health-and-safety rant with a bit of Nietzsche thrown in. Relying on gyms and doctors make us ill. We all eat too much: better to avoid breakfast. Our kids are being cosseted into fragility by "soccer mom" parenting: we need to let them toughen up. The childrearing implications of Taleb's argument illustrate some of its limitations. Being a parent is an inherently fragile business, given the permanent possibility of something going disastrously wrong. Of course, one way to avoid that would be to live in a world where people are accustomed to their children dying young. Taleb is deeply and depressingly nostalgic for the virtues of the ancients, with their stoicism and tolerance for suffering. To want to return to the miseries of a world that requires such virtues strikes me as ridiculous.

Antifragile is not all bad: it has flashes of wit and insight. Taleb says the least antifragile state in the world at the moment is Saudi Arabia, a plausible claim though one it would be nice to see argued out. He is good at knockabout invective, laying into "fragilista" economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and self-aggrandising journalists such as "the vile and harmful" Thomas Friedman, who was an apologist for the Iraq war. And there are some nice lines: "We practitioners and quants aren't too fazed by remarks on the part of academics – it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns." The problem, though, is that Taleb no longer writes from the perspective of the practitioner but of someone who has crossed over to live among the academics and wants to tell them what they are missing. He is now more like the nun with a racy past who lectures the rest of the convent about the meaning of sex: not much fun for anyone.

He says books and their authors should be antifragile too. That means that negative reviews should be welcomed: "Criticism for a book is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signalling that it is not boring." He even specifies a bad review given by an academic to a popular author in these pages recently (Glen Bowersock's review of Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword) as a reason for going out to buy the book. At the same time, he suggests that a useful heuristic for book readers is not to bother with anything less than 10 years old, since most recently published books will soon reveal themselves to be worthless. He thinks you should abandon a book as soon as it starts to bore you (so don't be a book reviewer: I had to plough on with this one to the bitter end). He thinks all criticism of his work is essentially ad hominem (though with a book as self-referential as this it's hard to know what else there is to do). All in all, Taleb is not going to care about anything I say here.

Still, this book should be approached with caution. We do live in a fragile world, vulnerable to extreme shocks. But antifragility is not the solution. It is too crass an idea, and Taleb, for all his vaunted intellectual curiosity, is not really curious about the lives of anyone who doesn't live like him. He says it's better to be a taxi driver than a stockbroker, because you are less exposed to the whims of others. Let him try it. He thinks it's better to be a mafia hard man than a tenured academic. Again, let him try it. The problem with Antifragile is that it is a deeply antisocial book. I am pretty sure people will still be reading Taleb's two previous books in 10 years' time. But I'd be surprised if they are still reading this one.

First published in The Guardian by English academic David Runciman

Image by Rob Lambert