Needed a globally accessible place to jot down notes about books, films, music and the such.
Another magic novel, enjoyable so far.
Six (former) students are invited for an apprenticeship at the "hidden" library of Alexandria, ran by a guy names Blake Atlas.
Nico + Libby ("physicalists"?), Callum (empath), Parisa (telepath), Reina (naturalist), Tristan (illusionists)
Writing is OK, the story is fun, even though some parts and character descriptions seem rushed.
Every chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the six, which works surprisingly well to create a coherent narrative.
Interesting quiet time travel film set in Lao.
A man can travel 50 years back to his younger self. As he once saw his mother die, he now "helps" his young self prepare a tea for his mother that will kill her, as he has "helped" many other girls.
A silent girl, a motorcycle crash, who he found when he was young, accompagnies him and his younger self.
Things start to change through his actions. Glass he breaks in the past that never was broken, now is. A girl who stays with him after searching for her mother, initially leaves for Vientiane with her girlfriend, but later becomes his captive.
The quiet girl has watched him grow old "a thousand times, but only saw him die once". Buddhism wheel of fate?
from rotten tomatoes:
An old man walks the dusty roads between his isolated farm and the nearby rural village in the company of a silent spirit whose death he witnessed fifty years earlier. For decades, the old man's regret over losing his mother to tuberculosis has bred a pathological need to ease the suffering of the terminally ill, and over the years, he has quietly euthanized several sick women. As he realizes that his spectral companion is able to transport him back in time, the old man trespasses into his own past to set in motion a plan to convince his younger self to preempt his mother's terminal suffering.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome
imposter syndrome, the people who first coined the idea/phrase
[Jody-Ann] Burey, who was born in Jamaica, didn't feel like an imposter; she felt enraged by the systems that had been built to disenfranchise her. She also didn't experience any yearning to belong, to inhabit certain spaces of power. "White women want to access power, they want to sit at the table," she told me. "Black women say, this table is rotten, this table is hurting everyone."
Every time [Suzanne]Imes hears the phrase "imposter syndrome," she told me, it lodges in her gut. It's technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is "an experience rather than a pathology," and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it. Their concept was never meant to be a solution for inequality and prejudice in the workplace–a task for which it would necessarily prove insufficient.
The psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, in her book "Animal Joy," explains imposter syndrome by drawing on D. W. Winnicott's concepts of "false self" and "true self." She sees the anxiety as stemming from "a False Self that is so fortified by layers of compliant behavior that is loses contact with the raw impulses and expressions that characterize the True Self." Attempts to prevent the discovery of one's "true self" end up compounding the belief that this self, were it ever discovered, would be rejected and dismissed.
Curious film about a girl (Karen Gillian) with a terminal illness who creates a clone, then has to fight her when she doesn't die.
Very dry, dark humour and acting. Almost no music.
Strangely, in style somewhat reminiscent of Scarlett Johansson's "Under the skin"
Little by little and stealthily, she establishes within us the footing of her authority; but having, by this mild and humble beginning, stayed and rooted it with the aid of time, she then displays a fierce and tyrannical countenance, in opposition to which we no longer have liberty even to lift up our eyes. We see her do violence constantly to the laws of nature.
Alexander Herzen makes much the same point in "Omnia Mea Mecum Porto":
People allow the external world to overcome them, to captivate them against their will; they renounce their independence, depending on all occasions not on themselves but on the world, pulling ever tighter the knots that bind them to it. They expect from the world all the good and evil in life; the last thing they rely on is themselves.
