How Does We The Living Compare To Ayn Rand'S Other Works?

I’ve been following his channel on and off, and as of 2024 he’s based in Columbus, Ohio. He posts most of his videos from a house there and often references local life in his vlogs, so it’s pretty clear that Columbus is where he’s living now. He didn’t start there — his on-screen path has hopped around a bit: earlier chapters of his life and career were tied to New York, and for a spell he spent time in Florida. Those moves showed up in the background and energy of his videos, but the recent uploads have a consistent Columbus vibe: midwestern suburban rooms, local deliveries, and the odd local-sourced food spot. That’s where his filming hub is. I don’t stalk celebs, but I do enjoy seeing how creators’ lives shift with their content. Columbus gives his channel a different backdrop, and that change shows up in small, oddly charming ways — like the way he talks about shopping for groceries or dealing with local services. It feels like a new chapter, honestly.

Late-night pages have turned into the most honest classroom for me: grief gets taught, and recovery is something you practice in small, awkward steps. I love recommending 'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine' because it's a clear, funny, and devastating portrait of a woman who rebuilds a life after traumatic loss — she finds work, friendship, and the courage to ask for help. Pair that with 'Olive Kitteridge' by Elizabeth Strout, where older women negotiate loneliness, mortality, and meaning across short stories; Olive's tough exterior softens into a surprisingly rich afterlife. There are quieter, more lyrical books too. 'The Stone Angel' gives an aging woman a fierce, stubborn dignity as she confronts regrets and loss, whereas 'The Signature of All Things' follows a woman who discovers purpose through curiosity and botanical study after personal setbacks. Even novels like 'Where the Crawdads Sing' show a woman fashioned by abandonment who learns to live fully on her own terms. Across these books I keep returning to themes: chosen family, steady routines, work that matters, and small pleasures. Those elements turn mourning into living, and that's what stays with me — hope braided into ordinary days.

Small towns have this weird, slow-motion magic in movies—everyday rhythms become vivid and choices feel weighty. I love films that celebrate women who carve out meaningful lives in those cozy pockets of the world. For a warm, community-driven take, watch 'The Spitfire Grill'—it’s about a woman starting over and, in doing so, reviving a sleepy town through kindness, food, and stubborn optimism. 'Fried Green Tomatoes' is another favorite: friendship, local history, and women supporting each other across decades make the small-town setting feel like a living, breathing character. If you want humor and solidarity, 'Calendar Girls' shows a group of ordinary women in a British town doing something wildly unexpected together, and it’s surprisingly tender about agency and public perception. For gentler, domestic joy, 'Our Little Sister' (also known as 'Umimachi Diary') is a Japanese slice-of-life gem about sisters building a calm, fulfilling household in a coastal town. Lastly, period adaptations like 'Little Women' and 'Pride and Prejudice' often frame small villages as places where women negotiate autonomy, creativity, and family—timeless themes that still resonate. These films don’t glamorize everything; they show ordinary pleasures, community ties, and quiet rebellions. I always leave them feeling quietly uplifted and ready to bake something or call a friend.

On fog-damp mornings I pull out my battered copy of 'The Living Mountain' and feel like I’ve found a map that isn’t trying to conquer territory but to translate it into feeling. Nan Shepherd writes about walking as an act of getting to know a place from the inside: perception, attention, and the physicality of moving across rock and peat become central themes. She refuses the simple nature-essay checklist — plants, routes, weather — and instead makes the mountain a living subject whose moods, textures, and timing you learn to read. Another big theme is language’s limits and strengths. Shepherd shows how ordinary words fail to capture the mountain’s presence, and yet she insists on trying, on inventing small, precise phrases to convey sensory experience. There’s also solitude and companionship in silence: the book celebrates solitary immersion but never slides into self-centeredness; the landscape reshapes the self. Reading it, I’m left thinking about how place reshapes perception and how walking can be a way of thinking, which feels quietly revolutionary to me.

I get oddly sentimental when I think about how a living book breathes on its own terms and how its screen sibling breathes differently. A novel lets me live inside a character's head for pages on end — their messy thoughts, unreliable memories, little obsessions that never make it to a screenplay. That interior life means slow, delicious layers: metaphors, sentence rhythms, entire scenes where nothing half-happens but the reader's mind hums. For instance, in 'The Lord of the Rings' you can luxuriate in landscape descriptions and private reflections that films have to trim or translate into a sweeping shot or a lingering musical cue. On screen, the story becomes communal and immediate. Filmmakers trade long internal chapters for gestures, camera angles, actors' expressions, and sound design. A decision that takes a paragraph in a book might become a ninety-second montage. Subplots get pruned — not always unjustly — to keep momentum. Sometimes new scenes appear to clarify a character for viewers or to heighten visual drama; sometimes an adaptation will swap a novel's subtle moral ambiguity for a clearer, more cinematic arc. I think of 'Harry Potter' where whole scenes vanish but certain visuals, like the Dementors or the Sorting Hat, become iconic in ways words alone couldn't achieve. Ultimately each medium has muscles the other doesn't. Books let the reader co-author meaning by imagining faces and timing; films deliver a shared spectacle you can feel in your chest. I usually re-read the book after seeing the film just to rediscover the private notes the movie left out — both versions enrich each other in odd, satisfying ways, and I enjoy the back-and-forth.

Big Magic' by Elizabeth Gilbert has been one of those books that just stuck with me long after I turned the last page. If you're looking to grab a copy, I'd recommend checking out local indie bookstores first—there's something magical about discovering it tucked between other inspiring reads. Online, Amazon usually has both paperback and Kindle versions ready to ship, and Book Depository offers free worldwide delivery, which is great if you're outside the US. For audiobook lovers, Audible has Gilbert’s warm narration, which adds a whole extra layer of charm. If you’re into secondhand treasures, ThriftBooks or AbeBooks often have gently used copies at a steal. Libraries might carry it too, but honestly, this is one of those books you’ll want to highlight and revisit. I’ve lent my copy to three friends already, and every time it comes back, I find new notes in the margins.

Sometimes I sit on my tiny balcony with a mug gone cold and think about that blunt old line attributed to Socrates: 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' For me, mental health flips that line into something both hopeful and dangerous. Hopeful, because self-examination—therapy, journaling, quiet walks where I actually notice the weather—has been the single most reliable way to catch myself before cycles spiral. Dangerous, because I also learned the hard way that overthinking can feel like a hobby gone wrong: rumination disguises itself as insight and leaves me exhausted, not enlightened. There’s no one-size-fits-all here. Sometimes a person needs the kind of deep reflective work I found hinted at in 'Meditations' or 'Man's Search for Meaning': steady practice, values-checks, and a willingness to question why certain patterns keep repeating. Other times you need stabilizing routines, medication, or simply someone to say, “You're safe right now,” because chemical imbalances and trauma don’t dissolve under a magnifying glass. I try to balance curiosity about my inner life with practical safeguards—set limits on how long I journal, call a friend if I start spiraling, and keep therapy appointments like dentist visits. If I had to give one small suggestion it would be this: treat self-examination like gardening, not excavation. You don't always have to dig to bedrock; sometimes you water what’s already growing. That perspective makes checking in feel less like an interrogation and more like care, and that tiny shift has helped me stay sane more than any clever epiphany ever did.

I still get a little thrill every time the cosmic big players show up on the page, and the Living Tribunal is one of those characters who makes you feel the scale of the universe. To keep it short-ish: in mainstream Marvel continuity the Tribunal has been effectively killed once — during Jonathan Hickman's 'Time Runs Out' lead-up to 'Secret Wars'. The Beyonders (those multiversal villains who blew up realities) took out a bunch of cosmic arbiters, and the Tribunal was among the casualties. That is the clearest, most widely cited 'death' on his record. Before that moment he’d been threatened, negotiated with, and momentarily overruled in stories like 'Infinity Gauntlet' and various Doctor Strange tales, but those were not permanent deaths. After 'Secret Wars' the cosmic order was scrambled and the Tribunal’s presence was noticeably diminished; he didn’t immediately snap back into his old omnipotent courtroom role. Writers sometimes treat his absence as a big hole in the hierarchy and sometimes fill the seat conceptually with other forces (like Molecule Man’s reality-shaping role during the Beyonders arc), but that isn’t the same as a straightforward resurrection. So, tallying it up as plainly as I can: canonically killed once in that Hickman/Beyonders storyline, then effectively removed from the cosmic chessboard for a while. He’s been referenced and echoed in later books, and a few creators have hinted or teased returns or replacements, but there hasn’t been a simple, repeated die-and-return cycle like some other characters. If you want to chase the panels, read 'New Avengers'/'Time Runs Out' and the various tie-ins around 'Secret Wars' for the clearest depiction.