Immoderate Puns

If there's a way, besides obsessed, to live

It's somehow that has not occurred to me.

I have no skill in moderating glee.

I find a lovely thing and suck my breath

I close my eyes and place one finger down

and always end up all the way inside.

I pose a danger to a gorgeous thing.

I'll shriek towards it, open-mouthed, and cry

in adoration, tearing out its hair,

and gorging, grateful, on its luscious guts!

I'll lob a chunk at everyone to find

an alter ego who can love (with) me.

I'm clawing off their eyes to make them see!

I eat their tongue and beg for them to say

some bright, elusive phrase to plug my wound,

and be my mirror so I'm not alone.

Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, by William Ophuls, (75 page text / 2:33 audio) is considered by many to be the single best short introduction to the field of collapse. In only 75 pages of easy-to-read prose (6 chapters), Ophuls sums up a vast library of scholarship on the subject. His annotated "bibliographic note” at the end is worth the price of the book in itself.

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ophuls

Ophuls website: https://ophuls.org/about-me

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Immoderate-Greatness-Why-Civilizations-Fail/dp/1479243140

Audio: https://soundcloud.com/michael-dowd-grace-limits/immoderate-greatness-ophuls

Here are a couple of quotes to whet your appetite…

>“Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes.  While it still lives, it generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course.  A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation.” ~ William Ophuls
>
>“Sustainability as usually understood is an oxymoron. Industrial man has used the found wealth of the New World and the stocks of fossil hydrocarbons to create an anti-ecological Titanic. Making the deck chairs recyclable, painting them red or blue, feeding the boilers with biofuels, and every other effort to ‘transform’ or ‘green’ the Titanic will ultimately fail. In the end, the ship is doomed by the laws of thermodynamics and by implacable biological and geological limits that are already beginning to bite. We shall soon be obliged to trade in the Titanic for a schooner — in other words, a post-industrial future that, however technological

Moderation cannot ultimately defeat a pattern of unhealthy reaction to life's difficulties, but growth can.

So it's better to aim at growth than solely attempting to curb the symptoms.

Because, in the long run, you're unlikely to have success suppressing the symptoms (compulsion to use weed), while the root cause (isolation, dissatisfaction, depression, etc) remains unconfronted.

This is to all the people who are spending a lot of time obsessing over these little details of their weed use, in hopes that will bring the clarity they are looking for. In my experience, it doesn't work, and I hope I can save other people some time spent futilely running around in circles.

For me, meditating has been huge, and learning to be both more self-aware about the reasons for my choices, and accepting of discomfort and pain without running into a cloud of smoke to obscure it, has been more helpful than the time-locking safes and other methods I ultimately would just undermine.

I'm not instantly opposed to weed and living a perfect life, but I am a lot more content, fulfilled, and have a little more faith in my future, knowing my capacity to be present for it has increased.

Welcome to the discussion of "Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail" by William Ophuls. Feel free to participate even if you haven’t finished the book yet.

TEXT: 75 pages // AUDIO: 2:33

Please leave your thoughts as a comment below. You are welcome to leave a free-form comment, but in case you’d like some inspiration, here are a few questions to "prime the pump":

1. What did you find particularly insightful, interesting, or challenging, and why?
2. What were your favorite quotes, both from Ophuls and from those he quotes?
3. What did you find helpful (or missing) in how Ophuls structured his book? (PART ONE: Biophysical Limits: Ecological Exhaustion, Exponential Growth, Expedited Entropy, Excessive Complexity. PART TWO: Human Error: Moral Decay, Practical Failure.)
4. What thoughts and feelings arose in you by reading his "Conclusion: Trampled Down, Barren, and Bare"?
5. What additional resources would you add to Ophuls' annotated "Bibliographic Note"?

EXTRA CREDIT: If you took time to also read (or listen to) Sir John Glubb's essay, "The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival" (TEXT / AUDIO) or William Ophuls' more recent little book, "Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences" (TEXT / AUDIO), please share your experience, thoughts, and feelings about these in the comments section, below, as well. ​

The Collapse Book Club is a monthly event wherein we read a book from the Books Wiki. We keep track of what we have been reading in our Goodreads group. As always, if you want to recommend a book that has helped you better understand or cope with collapse, feel free to share that recommendation below!

Basically, the algorithm values kills on supports too much. On the one hand, this results in very good ratings in games where you don't perform well as support but rather killsteal, take minions and so on and so on. On the other hand, great 0/4/26 only get B, even if you carried the whole team to victory.

Why? Because -Warning, simplification- the algorithm compares your KDA, Cs and other data to the average player. This works pretty good the most time, but, there is a problem with the support role: You are only "better" than the average when you get more kills.

Btw, i posted about this before, including example and more in-depth solution so you might want to read it: Post

Until the Mastery Update this was a minor problem, but now people actually trying to get their S at any cost (bit overexaggerated) to achieve their cool lvl. 6 or 7 icon. This is annoying as adc, when you got a support who only cares about his evaluation but also as support main when you get to either betray your beloved adc or stick with the filthy lvl. 5 icon.

As explained in my linked post, i suggest just to give kills less value when a player locks support. I think this is important to take some toxiticy potential out of the botlane and making support AND the mastery system an healthy combination.

Happy supporting!

EDIT: Clarification: It compares your data to the average player performance on the same champion. Bad wording. This still leads to unreasonable results with the support role.

asking for

a

friend

should have said “most things”. For some endeavors you wanna go balls out 💯