Social media can surface quality views & information, but it's extremely likely also to dishearten, confuse, and exhaust us. In troubled and uncertain times, we are best advised to protect our emotional and spiritual resources, and determine our best area of effective action (or how to enlarge it).
Well on a different topic, noting that the bot-generated followers that ex-Twitter keeps dumping onto my account over there now have much more clearly machine-generated names like "Montana Wobble", "Ladderlee Bidlock" and "Ocean Holhauser" than they did before. So that's progress, at least.
All of this is completely dwarfed by the fact that in the "Party" chapter of "Fellowship" he says that one of Gandalf's fireworks passed over the crowd "like an express train".
Wow. And here I am just thinking about the timeline where the thing that caused the Tunguska event arrived 2 hours later & destroyed the city of St. Petersburg, killing the Russian imperial family, making it impossible for Russia to mobilize in WWI, the Schlieffen Plan worked & WW2 never happened.
i can't ever imagine it as being binary good/bad, but we're definitely living in the timeline where buddy holly died rather than lived, and i — no shit, not kidding — think about that ALL THE FUCKING TIME
I needed to do three (3) particular things today. Did the least important of the three. Then slept. Then goofed off, and slept again. Then did something else entirely. And that was my day.
At the big box store, a friend & I discovered profound a difference of view over whether the sign "no merchandise in the restroom" covers stuff you've paid for. Oh god, universes collided. Shouting, cursing, referencing Baudrillard. Target had to send someone to escort us out. I'm so ashamed.
It's Saturday morning and I can already tell I'm not going to pass the "stop myself from going to the thrift store in the hope that rummaging used office equipment and buying some weird thing I can use as an inkwell will fix me" challenge.
I don't have a "favorite" TV show, or band, or book, in the way people mean when they ask that, and I never have. I just don't know what to say. It's like when Vita Sackville-West asked Virginia Woolf about her "inner life" and Woolf just went.... "Huh?"
Literally every outraged and profane expression in my feed right now is a response to "post hidden by muted word". You all need to try this, it's awesome
Lying in bed reading one of the acclaimed masterpieces of human philosophy -- fall asleep & the book hits my face. Lying in bed browsing the utter garbage cesspool of literary vomit micro-blogging social media on my phone -- awake all night. 😐😑
I try to self-remind of the wise counsel (which I think is from @mitchellepner.bsky.social ) that "the future hasn't happened yet." Planning, goal-setting & scenario-building are all good, but much troubled thought comes from treating imagined possible futures as inevitable or already-happened.
The phrase "History is Bunk" is attributed to Henry Ford, who pencil scribbled it in a notebook, angered by some historian debunking one of his pseudo-historical fantasies. On the same page he scribbled "Money the root of all evil" which he spelled "Eval".
Literally every outraged and profane expression in my feed right now is a response to "post hidden by muted word". You all need to try this, it's awesome
"President, (n) - The leading figure in a small group of men whom -- and of whom only -- it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" c.1906
Despite all the pain and trauma in the world, There are still performers and artists who just want people to be happy, to smile and experience innocent joy.
HOW DARE THEY
There was some drama where everybody was calling each other "kliff" and "floof" or some such words but after briefly considering whether to look into it, I decided.... no
Man I am so following the right people, because any time I see anyone talking about drama on this site, I have no idea what it is, and I am on here constantly.
I have had the impression, for years, that the line "age is just a number" first appeared in some rock song in which the singer is trying to pick up an underage girl. But the internet, including the vaunted glories of artificial intelligence, is producing nothing but stupidity when I search so ???.
I find myself inclined to traditionalism, but I recently read a lit-crit book by a very capable writer of the 1970s and it was *jarring* to me how often the "author = he" pronoun trope appeared, in sentences that would have been easy to rephrase to avoid the pronoun at all.
And, happily, all the "he or she" variations are now the deadest ducks.
And if you're still using "he" as a pronoun for unspecified theoretical single people whose gender is either unknown or irrelevant:
Knock it off.
One of those personal transformations of thought that it seems we can't un-think once we've had it, is when someone realizes that one of the traditionally sanctioned major purposes of the police is to make sure everybody in town always knows who holds the legal monopoly on violence.
Sort of orthogonal to the main point, but we are at least a decade past the point where “police helicopter” should have ceased to exist as a concept. The only thing is Sikorsky can do that a camera drone can’t is intentionally terrorize an entire neighborhood for being too friendly to protestors.
