The load-bearing assumption is that America is a rational nation, making decisions in pursuit of articulable goals. States like Iran are, by contrast, unpredictable, dangerous, potentially even rogue.
But a cursory examination of the facts on the ground reveals the opposite: WE are the rogue state.
there's a thing I like to call "load-bearing assumptions", that you don't notice until they're suddenly gone (e.g the air you breath has oxygen in it).
the post-ww2 order is a load-bearing assumption for basically the entirety of american life. trump took a sledgehammer to it in the last 90 days.
Trump has fully shattered the world we all grew up in. It’s a dramatic break from how things worked before, even compared to the Iraq War and other misadventures - the United States abruptly tumbling over a cliff and becoming literally more reckless and domineering than Putin’s Russia.
“Only a man as powerful as I can afford to dress this way,” propping the huge clown shoes on the gleaming conference table and honking a horn
He’s trying to pull off the CIA guy in Sicario, who doesn’t wear a suit or a uniform, in fact wears flip flops, and is therefore all the more powerful due to his freedom from conventional constraints.
the subtext is just everywhere
...have to assume he was on a whaler those three months.
Now imagine Wemby in this picture, the top boundary somewhere around his nose or upper lip
man, am i ever not thrilled that ESPN has the game
as Mahatma Gandhi once said, "you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall"
True Detective S5.
"Together they fight/do crime"
This reminds of Matt Damon's dishing on Netflix telling productions that they have to have a scene in every episode where the characters remind the audience what's going on, because Netflix assumes/knows that its audience isn't actually paying attention.
occasionally I get pushed on the question of - why did you choose to write about an empire? why doesn't your book series interrogate the legitimacy of empires? aren't all empires inherently illegitimate?
this is kind of a funny series of questions, to me.
I highly recommend the Matt Dinnaman Patreon, btw.
especially cool when you accidentally click on named tags in Outlook (because you'd never click on them on purpose) and they all look like this
THIS IS THE WAY
cf, the time that one guy's data center couldn't send email more than 500 terrestrial miles away in any direction.
web.mit.edu/jemorris/hum...
Degenerative brain diseases are so terrifying.
Dick Francis's wife had died not long before that time, and his subsequent works confirmed pretty well some long-standing rumors that his wife did all the writing. So I had been influenced by that as well.
It made me quite sad. Glad in retrospect that I came up with that explanation instead of this one.
I had thought that Raising Steam had been written by someone else, especially given some speculation at the time that Rhiannon might take over the series. I wasn't looking at prose, but at the randomness of the plot-- characters dashing here and there without much reason other than to remain busy.
Alt-backtick to cycle among windows of the same application, alt-tab among applications.
The combination is fantastic, and they haven’t broken it yet.
get hooked on the carl audiobooks and ruin all of the rest of media, as well.
there's nothing else like the audiobooks out there.
You don’t hate these people enough.
absolutely the thought leaders in model-assisted software development. if you're using anything else, you're making sure that it's compatible so you can use everyone else's Claude add-ons.
Been staring at my own shadows a long time and my neck is really stiff, do you think I’ll need to turn my head to the side?
A wizard putting a normal-size book inside a giant feral tome?
Crash-based development is an actual thing, especially for embedded systems that get turned on and off a lot anyway.
