__ 2: __ Boogaloo is dispositive. i've never heard a funny person say it or found a person who said it to be funny

Odyssey discourse suffered from the same problem as the movie itself: a cerebral yet headless morass replacing any concerns of the body. How can you adapt this book without a single bath? without a closeup of a thickly woven robe? without a sincerely celebrated feast? without a postponed dawn?

We truly live in an age of abundance. What a panoply of social media options we have! There's the one that is 60% generation ragebait 40% gender ragebait. Then the one that's 70% gender ragebait 30% ethnic ragebait. And if you are sick of that, you can go to the economic-poltical ragebait platform.

history forgets him, but certainly there was a guy telling everyone that bread is the oven's killer app

aspiring man of letters complains of being trapped in "Elo hell". Believes his witticisms fall on blind eyes, but of course epistolic Elo is holistic-- what about listening? Weaving together the relationship fabric? Forging a new language? Where is the fuel of all good letters? a well-lived life?

you wouldn't hit an old dusty trail

if you went to your annual town fair and a kid walked up to every adult saying "what's on your mind?" would you be able to come up with a japanese RPG NPC fastball? Mine might be "Overgrown brush has been choking off the trails lately. But you can still get around if know know what you're doing."

guy who is indifferent to drinks. stops at a convenience store and grabs whatever is closest: orange juice, dr. pepper, monster, "i just needed some liquid"

funny how common it is in american lit for a sensitive character to enter a diner, pick up on a weird dynamic between regulars and the waitress, and have it ruin their mood for like 50 pages

ok, reading further. it turns out that, even though it sold millions, no one has ever read this book: paid critics, gearheads, hippies, philosophers. Everyone (correctly) skims through the 100pp of amateur plato. It is nabokov/gogol, but selects for the wrong audience. same as Games People Play.

@reply-token.bsky.social · last mo.

reading Zen+Art of Motorcycle Maintenance now. It's ok, but it pairs two traits which I really hate combined: an all-knowing philosophical voice and highly particular, of-its-time advice. 1950's-70s were notorious for this c.f. Kerouac, Vonnegut. Thoreau who inspired them was fine. Aurelius grates.

the attack on wojacks "guys playing with their dolls" instantly killed them in the developed world. But the criticism applies to a much broader swath of text-based posts which are harder to instantly pattern-match to the criticism

no one wants to admit the obvious truth: the skills of colonizing translate 1:1 with being a good football coach/scout. the test of this theory will be whether america becomes a soccer powerhouse only upon taking its pieces off the global chessboard

reading Zen+Art of Motorcycle Maintenance now. It's ok, but it pairs two traits which I really hate combined: an all-knowing philosophical voice and highly particular, of-its-time advice. 1950's-70s were notorious for this c.f. Kerouac, Vonnegut. Thoreau who inspired them was fine. Aurelius grates.

"plant" to mean spy or astroturfed artist a waste of the word. plant should refer to the innumerable people who bend towards the sun of social media attention metrics. Plant solves the fruitless malicious vs stupid dichotomy. Just a plant planting. better than clunky "audience capture"

i really hate that there are so many humiliation rituals. more humiliation should come from one-off spontaneous events

had completely forgotten the govt shut down for a month last november. there is too much news

i only let myself get so into soccer. it is self-harm to give oneself to a sport with that system of tie-breaking

current pope is a guardian columnist

so funny the french "sous les toits" controversy. A garret-dwelling army of Raskolnikovs demand The Right Thing be Done

- credibility of internet numbers (imo) - real: - somewhat real: - fudged: github stars borderline fraud: youtube views, movie ratings legit fraud: vertical video metrics, x likes, streamer metrics, spotify plays monopoly money: any popular reddit sub, facebook engagement, netflix viewership

there is a "dog that didn't bark" tell in Thiel and his ilk lamenting for decades the (potential) centralizing power of AI, but never lauding the leveling power of drones

is there a more poetic geopolitical term than iron curtain?

ai sends its inferents to the groupchats most surprising, original, with ideas and language hard to predict. Those places where it barely passes the turing test is called the front, ever expanding and snuffing out pockets of resistance. ai just wants to learn. the internet just wants to die.

many people are confusing fashion and taste. taste is closer to beauty. not solely a positional good. a good in itself. if more people develop taste the world gets and stays more pleasing. things don't go "out of taste"

i enjoy Ulysses content and the book itself, but if I hadn't read it, I think I would find the references obnoxious and suggestive of there being no "there" there.

2x2 | talks mostly about: controversial (C) or safe (S) topics honestly (H) or deceptively (D) _ _ = what you get called, archetype (reward) SH = rube, yeoman (inner peace) CH = blunt, artist (elite prestige) SD = annoying, sophist (pays well) CD = edgy, podcaster (gets attention)

if an american wrote waugh's decline and fall, the hapless teacher would have simply developed hap, expanding and modernizing the human trafficking operation they stumbled into

you can stop wandering when things stay perpetually good, which is to say never

RL:DF - Freud, it came to me in a dream RL:OF - let's not wage war, just saw a dead hawk RL:AF - in so behaving, i can feel warming the heat of future hell RL:CF - in so having behaved, this shows me as the kind of person who already will have been selected for heaven

must great art change you? Could a piece of great art be simply beautiful and pleasing, but not life-changing?