Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn’t great. I don’t want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can’t control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.
I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.
I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.
If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.
So I quickly gave myself diabetes…
The A. americanum (lonestar) tick larvae are insane this year. I blame the wet summer. At least it’s hot and dry now, and I can imagine them dying by the truckload!
I don’t want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don’t think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it’s how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can’t have life without it, given the laws of physics.
I don’t think “humans are a virus” is correct because it’s a pejorative and I don’t think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of “bad” rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the “virus” is intelligence and the machines already caught it.
I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don’t feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are “body stuff”, mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same “level” of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.
I don’t care for the “antinatalist” label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don’t mind what other people choose to believe. It’s none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don’t have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I’m not. They won’t engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I’m suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I’m leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don’t bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.
I think some of the Reddit refuges honestly think Reddit sucks because Spez Man Bad. There’s no analysis of what creates Reddits and Spezes, and therefore they don’t recognize who made this platform and why.
I have to believe ultimately some of these people will come around, so that’s good at least.
Radio was huge. Some rapper could make slang local to his street corner famous and it would be in car commercials within two years.
I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.
Aside from Signal messenger, I feel like I could go back to having a casio watch, some sort of GPS in my vehicle, and a dumb phone. My phone is ancient and hasn’t gotten a security update in years, I was thinking of going Graphene next but maybe the solution is to just dump it and go full 1990s again.
In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.
At first I thought she meant ‘fantastic’ in its literal sense and I was optimistic. No, of course the former CFO of Morgan Stanley is a ghoul.
“Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported ‘the climate extremist agenda,’ which he defined as the idea that ‘a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.’ Burgum added: ‘I’ve always been a little offended by that.’”
Well it’s like 3 or 4 degrees at this point, which is civilization-ending. Real, “we’re all going to die anyway” energy here. Glad we’re doing this to hallucinate the next Amazon show and not slow down the approaching catastophe or at least give poor people food or some shit. Is that a little offensive?
I think Stephenson is a genius but honestly I slog through large parts of his books. He always creates a dozen threads, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, and on the last three pages they tie together beautifully and you end the book with an ache in your heart because of how beautiful it was. Even when I know that’s coming I sometimes can’t make it. He’s like the anti-Stephen King: the middle drags but the ending is wonderful.
Anathem is the exception. I couldn’t put it down. It’s one of those books that infected the way I think and little things remind me of it all the time.
If jacking off constantly at age 14 doomed a person we would never have left the Miocene epoch.
It seems like a perpetual panic, sustained because it creates a lever of exploitation to control the gullible. Like you can read complaints about “oversexed youth” from time periods when pornography was totally banned and women were essentially chattel. And hey, Boomers didn’t have internet porn and they are fucked.
Stories from the USA. My mom said that when she was a little girl my grandparents used to take the kids on road trips and they would do this thing where when they got to the destination they wouldn’t leave the car. Like, they would drive hours to see the monument (or whatever) and when they got there they would roll down the windows, slowly pass by the object going, “wow! Look there it is!”, then they would roll up the window and drive away. This happened multiple times.
It’s a fucking mystery to us. Didn’t want to pay for a ticket? Savage, unmedicated ADHD? Just fucking with your children? All are totally plausible. She didn’t realize it was weird until later in life.
You paid for something and never got it. Initiate chargeback with your bank. Amazon may close your account for this, but fuck them.
The Naked Lunch. I was probably 10 years old? I didn’t understand any of the plot, I was weirded the fuck out and the giant bugs made me sick to my stomach.
Pre-COVID. I wonder what it’s like now. Anecdotes from people who work in education seem to say it was pretty devastating for child development, but it’s hard to tell if it’s above and beyond the perennial “this new generation is totally fucked” sentiment.