exasperation

I'm a subscriber to their monthly print copy, and a lot of the stories in the print version don't make it to the website as quickly. I've got the February copy on my desk with the following headlines:

• Trump Administration Offers Free At-Home Loyalty Tests: Tool That Diagnoses Disobedience to be Mailed to U.S. Households
• U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat - Wars Will No Longer Be Fought By Male Shannons, Terrys, or Carmens
• Baby Saves Affair: Illicit Relationship Rekindled by Out-of-Wedlock Birth

As far as I can tell, these articles never made it online. And they are funny. Good coffee table material.

I'm basically saying two things.

1. Permanence isn't required or expected, although in some instances permanence is valued, in defining success.
2. Permanence itself does not require continuing effort. One can leave a permanent mark on something without active maintenance.

Taken together, success doesn't require permanence, and permanence doesn't require continued effort. The screenshot text is wrong to presume that our culture only values permanence, and is wrong in its implicit argument that permanence requires continued effort.

This comment is like telling Superman not to lift with his back.

All I'm saying is that continuing effort is not necessary. Permanence/longevity can be achieved through other means, in situations where permanence is important. The lack of need for continuing effort is even more obvious in situations in which permanence isn't even a desired or intended outcome.

we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

I really don't agree with the premise, and would encourage others to reject that worldview if it starts creeping into how they think about things.

In the sports world, everything is always changing, and careers are very short. But what people do will be recorded forever, so those snapshots in time are part of one's legacy after they're done with their careers. We can look back fondly at certain athletes or coaches or specific games or plays, even if (or especially if) that was just a particular moment in time that the sport has since moved on from. Longevity is regarded as valuable, and maybe relevant to greatness in the sport, but it is by no means necessary or even expected. Michael Jordan isn't a failed basketball player just because he wasn't able to stay in the league, or even that his last few years in the league weren't as legendary as his prime years. Barry Sanders isn't a failed American football player just because he retired young, either.

Same with entertainment. Nobody really treats past stars as "failed" artists.

If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you're a “failed” writer.

That is a foreign concept to me, and I question the extent to which this happens. I don't know anyone who treats these authors (or actors or directors or musicians) as failures, just because they've moved onto something else. Take, for example, young actors who just don't continue in the career. Jack Gleeson, famous for playing Joffrey in the Game of Thrones series, is an actor who took a hiatus, might not come back to full time acting. And that's fine, and it doesn't take away from his amazing performance in that role.

The circumstances of how things end matter. Sometimes the ending actually does indicate failure. But ending, in itself, doesn't change the value of that thing's run when it was going on.

| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good.

Exactly. I would think that most people agree, and question the extent to which people feel that the culture values permanence. If anything, I'd argue that modern culture values the opposite, that we tend to want new things always changing, with new fresh faces and trends taking over for the old guard.

You guys are getting diagnosed?!?

Maybe I'm not up to date on my porn slang but "BBC micro" sounds like an inherent contradiction.

It's immunotherapy that prevents the cancers from deactivating the immune cells that would ordinarily kill the cancer cells. So it's like a traditional vaccine in that it causes changes to the immune system to better equip it to fight disease, but it's a pretty new methodology of accomplishing that.

I'm a human! I'm a human male!

In both of those examples, the actors played characters of their own race, pretending to be another race as the plot of the respective movies.

I feel the same way about the first and second Terminators, and the first Rambo and its sequels.

That paper reads like it was written by an undergrad going through cargo cult motions of sounding like a scientist. And the evidence is still weak: many of those studies being summarized are studies where they poisoned rats and investigated whether onion juice has some kind of protection against the poison, as measured by testosterone levels.