clever_fellow

i've been offline lately and have mostly found that we should invent a balance between "living under a rock" and "overwhelmed by totally illegible, constant horrors"

it's a very transparent substitution of questions people do all the time and it's very annoying, "are anti-vaxxers correct / their ideas permissible?" is not the same question as "are anti-vaxxers bad people?" and I don't really think we're politically on the hook to answer the latter (or to soothe)

had a dream where sam altman & other tech executives were doing something called the "billionaire exercise" where they'd pour a random number of buttons out of a jar, rapidly count them, and then put them back into the jar and repeat

calling my boss mr. teacher

there were many problems but one of the worst for me re: “train dreams” was the tedious narration at the end checking in to make sure you had been sufficiently affected by the preceding 2 hours of misery

feel very crotchety complaining about this but too many new movies have overbearing or intrusive narration. let me breathe!

there should be a “super like” you can only use once per day to indicate to someone you really liked their post, your like wasn’t just perfunctory

when i got word of this i threw all my books in the river, sang this like a scream, we’ve killed the tomatometer, the tomatometer is dead, etc.

there were a lot of difficult questions but i think the easy one chosen instead was “is europe or america more awesome?” i don’t really think we should be interested in that question.

it was funny (bad) about a month ago when a bunch of people doing a very tired rehash of common folk liberalism america vs. the learnèd virtues of europe thing. i believe this is called substituting a difficult question for an easy one

reading borges the whole aside in 2666 where the academics are arguing about whether the cab driver quoted borges is a lot funnier, given that all the driver said was “london is like a labyrinth”

thought this was subtweeting the nancy comic strip at first. was reflexively like i love the current nancy arc…

spent too much money on a “life journal” but day four of using it and i realize i no longer spend the entire day sort of constantly vocalizing the various things i need to do on repeat. the mental space is like discovering a hidden extra bedroom in your home

when you get the ones at the tip of your inner nose occluded by the ring though…. it makes it all worth it

the choice of frame from starship troopers is ironically fitting

i feel like i really missed the boat on posting leftist reactions to the news with a mordant bent, i’ll never break into it now, all i know how to do is mill the grist pretty much, not even so good at that

however funny the concept is to me i think this is called ocd.

have been troubled by the concept of “performative cleaning,” where i’m somehow only cleaning for appearances, but not really getting all the dirt & dust up

airbnb host charging guests a cleaning fee, states that what cleaning they did was mostly “performative,” residence was only superficially clean

i feel like it also bears worth noting that the “elite” spent (spend) a lot of time explicitly concerned about what kinds of ideas theaters &c were getting into the heads of the “mobility”—the early hays code refers directly to what vivid ideas movies could give “morons”

a world of misogynists whose misogyny is most fully realized in the slavery of women, to be honest this strikes me as totally incongruent to our world, basically nonsense, unless … it’s an elaborate prophecy about one particular guy …

it’s funny to choose the guy would be equally inept at making a watchable period piece without genAI. muddies the waters a bit on what was the tool’s fault

i’ve seen enough. the best pastry is a slightly warm apple turnover

i’ve been trying to live like someone worth mourning. who will mourn these klansmen?

a weird conservative refrain, mocking those who’ve died for “people who don’t know/care about them”; not sure what breaks in your brain to hold martyrdom in contempt

i guess i'm fine with your deviance if i don't have to see it, but you better show up for my personal sense of myth about the enslaving people country

what kinds of sex acts would desecrate public virtues--and how?

being the pope nowadays is mostly about saying god is really small, or god is really big, or god is one years old or infinity years old

some of us are still marxists, you know

i think it is disheartening how many people still seem to have a personal investment in the idea of “america,” or for that matter, “europe”