Just Culture #18: Two Seasons of Severance in Review + some music + insta reels
Apple TV series Severance speaks to those living double lives.
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No longer have Grammarly, so apologies for some mistakes in sentence structures. I have dyslexia, and I’ve used the tool to overcome my impediments. This content is handwritten, with no AI other than spell checking to help create it.
Apple TV’s hit series Severance has a stellar 8.7 rating on IMDB and a 96% Tomatoes meter, with a 78% Popcorn meter at the time of this review.
It’s good because it’s a captivating story that uses the camera, as well as the scenes, to tell a story that speaks to the modern worker who tends to be another person at work and another at home. The story is also satisfying in the sense that it gives you the answer you seek as the audience, leaving you enough questions at the end of each episode to have a compelling reason to watch the next one.
One thing Severance is not, it’s not fast, it’s not one of those series you watch between meals or when you want a mental break. It’s for the evenings you want to be entertained. I watched it until the end for the sake of popularity, but it wasn’t a story that spoke to me personally, as none of the characters were relatable. I’m not one to pretend to be someone else at work than I would be at home, but I get why people like the series. It describes a sort of escapism people practice all around the world. Everyday.
To make it a little interesting to watch season 3, my prediction is that Miss Huang is the daughter of the protagonist and his wife, because the ultimate test is to see if you can identify your child as your own. After all, the timeline of things, between the past and the present, is not clearly defined in years in the series.
Something I’ve missed from music history is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was only inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. The person who influenced the first rock legends like Elvis Presley, and arguably made the first rock n roll track ever.
When it comes to black music influence in contrast to how history remembers it; If Kendrick Lamar had to hide all the messages in his Super Bowl performance, as you may not want to say everything explicitly the way you mean it. Here’s Macklemore as a white male speaking like it is;
”stand for something or fall for anything…. two weeks (referring to US presidency) in think where we’ll be around July…. Elon, we know exactly what that was, bruh… and if you still haven’t said anything about the genocide, your grandkids will ask you why?”
On a completely different musical note came across these Finnish upcoming artists who have an interesting sound, It’s interesting because what you deem as “Finnish” is changing, and these youngsters are acting like they are already somebodies.
As most people do, part of modern culture is endless doom-scrolling, but to make the habit a learning exercise, I pick content that moves me and save the links. I do the same on LinkedIn as a learning exercise. I don’t know why, but it feels more powerful to save it for yourself and return to them later to see if you still think they are relevant.
Can you remember why you thought it was interesting, and to what end? What value does this message hold, and to what audience? Who would I like to share this with? What do I want to take out of this one message for me to remember by heart?
The dynamics of rich & poor people
They proved that if you give people in a monopoly an unfair advantage by chance, people start acting like they are better because of it. In other words, people are blind to their privilege. Now, if you want to fight this phenomenon, spend time with people outside your bubble, who have a different upbringing than you, and understand that most things in life are a consequence of luck, and how you optimize opportunities coming your way.
Stephen King’s Dollar Babies
This idea is gold for someone like us who is building a product for creative writers. Being able to distribute your writing for others to build on is essentially why people develop software in an open-source way; your ideas become better, and others can find ways to utilize your code (story) the way they want to.
The ethics of Dune vs the ethics of Tolkien
I never thought about this, but it makes for a great point of reference. Dune’s moral decisions shift with context, whereas acts of good and evil in Tolkien’s stories are inherently one or the other, regardless of context. What are your definitions of good and evil, and how do you write your story?
Menopause is nature’s way to preserve wisdom?
The causality here is well constructed, but maybe not rooted in science. Human bodies simply aren’t made to withstand stuff after a certain age, nonetheless, I shared this with the family chat to praise the iron lady who is our grandma. The more interesting convention debunked by science lately is the fact that the egg chooses the sperm, meaning it’s always been a matter of finding the perfect match; it’s never been about who’s the fittest.
Always make time for wonder
This is the one thing modern people simply don’t get right these days. They assume cramming your calendar with stuff makes for a better life, that keeping busy is a measure of quality. Albiet, cramming the empty stuff with social media scrolling is also not the right way of “finding wonder”.
Some people go to war, others keep it civil
The post says enough in itself, it would be quite the stunt for Kyrö and leave a Finnish flag there and a crate of Kyrö Rie Whiskey. Nonetheless, a more powerful example of peace could be how the Germans and French Christmas truces in WW1. Somehow, these acts of humanity seem absent in modern warfare, or the stories don’t get properly told, in a world where the media favours atrocity.
What it’s like to stop acting
I think this holds to any job that requires commitment and focus over long periods without rest. It resonated with me as so many entrepreneurs and event producers undergo the same kind of hangover as described in this reel.
The power of community working together
Getting something like this to happen in the modern world is priceless and extremely hard. Creating community endeavors like these is an undervalued skill and phenomenon in a world that favours solving hard problems.
Trying to hype your reader with the possibility of suicide
This must be the most morbid intro in the history of literature. What a way to “inspire” your reader.
To all my biking friends, you ain’t got anything on Hakansson
I like this because this is the stuff that inspires those who need the most inspiration. In a world where most middle-aged people are being overwhelmed by the speed of change, you need more reason to find inspiration to find your new path than what the media gives young people these days.
AI-generated podcasts
In case you haven’t been keeping up with what’s possible with AI, here’s a funny example. Creating a thing like this is almost counted in minutes these days, and not hours. The possibilities are endless. I’ve been practicing story writing with the help of AI, and will share content on the just work, probably under Just Stories.
This was a different way to cover culture. How did you like it? What are your social media habits?
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