Recently started studying Theravada Buddhism. Eddie's a little mixed up on the mysticism with regard to Theravada vs Mahayana. Must be thinking of a lot of the other Mahayana schools, like Pure Land's worship of Amitabha, or the overarching Mahayana beliefs of bardo as spirit-purgatory, lots of rituals, and how the Lotus Sutra (a key Mahayana doctrine separating the two major schools) is all like "Buddhahood == Phoenix Force." I don't know tons about Zen, but at this point I just loosely consider its relentless dedication to abject nothingness to be less than practical. (I mean, shikantaza ignores, like, most of the Satipatthana, right?)

The Buddha's dhamma is the same between the schools, but Theravada is the more orthodox and sticks only to the teachings of Gotama Buddha, whereas in Mahayana there are a number more revered figures, an expanded canon that stresses and builds on parts of the Pali canon, and lots of regional differences.

But like Eddie said, the biggest thing to separate Buddhism from the whole western idea of religion is that there is no inherent faith. Simply the practice of developing personal confidence in sets of methods and psychological tools that have been proven capable of diminishing dukkha for like the last 2600 years. Fits in well with what was being said earlier about personal accountability.

The foundations are built like logic proofs, making the whole operation about as religious as eighth year math, and the big question posed by the thread irrelevant.

During his hajj to Mecca Mansa Musa gave away so much gold he devalued the metal across northern Africa for a decade oops

chowskis gonna chowsk

Didn't see much this year, but:

Upstream Color
Blue Is the Warmest Colour
The World's End
Nebraska
The Spectacular Now
Gravity

Won't number, order changes on mood and circumstance.

Two anecdotes:

1. There's a scene in one of the newer Bonds where someone's spelling a name to search for and the computer is listening. The name was "Mueller" or something. Bond (or M?) goes "emm, you, eee, double," – at which point the computer has filled in a "W" – "...ell" – and the machine's smart enough to erase the "w" and replace it with "LL." It's never directly mentioned but always thought it was a clever flourish.

2. Was once working on a shot where a character was miming having picked up a powered off phone and checked what the last call was. In the performance the character pressed "left, down, down" or something, and I had to design and animate an interface that made it work.

In an effort to separate my personal character from a fictitious representation of myself, let it be known that I abhor mom jokes.

P.S. This show rocks.