I like Vince Gilligan shows because he's got 3 qualities that are usually a 'pick 2' situation in commercial film & TV auteurs: consummate pro, personal imagination, not corny or vulgar

As I grow older my dysgraphia shifts from giving callow youth energy to giving early dementia energy

Sad to have missed the death anniversary of TS Eliot, whose lines feel like a tentacle's caressing my skull from the inside

I get jealous of other people's fame and recognition if I think we are about equally good, because if they're way better than me it's like 'yeah that's right' and if they're worse than me than what they have is false fame and false recognition, which is actually bad to have

You couldn't write Theory of Vibe '25 today (you'd have to call it Theory of Vibe '26) substacktools.com/sharex/yD7Eo...

I'm in a kind of a weird situation where a project I really believe in (formalizing/naturalizing a virtue-ethical viewpoint on agency) tends to get an 'I like it but don't love it' response from people. I hope maybe some of the motivation just isn't articulated vividly

I'm looking to pick up some extra contract-work this month. Research in AI policy and AI alignment, also open to technical writing and science communications contracts if very high-end

I sometimes wonder how often big accounts reverse the natural order of things and get parasocial relationships with small accounts, like there's some reply guy they think of as their nemesis who's absolutely obsessed with them but for the reply guy it's just Tuesday

My girlfriend read out an extremely stupid post to me and I immediately asked 'is it by somebody named Justin Murphy'

Cultural history is a beautiful field that studies how semi-canonical concepts, ideas, and traditions got promoted to very-canonical but for some reason calls it 'the invention of [concept/idea/tradition]'

'Judaism has no hell' and 'Judaism doesn't have a concept of faith' gotta have some of the worst ratios of truth to respectability out there

When the magazine asks me how the 2 pieces I promised them are progressing

for the record, this is still happening as recently as 3 minutes ago. I know there has been some reporting on it, but most of it seems to center around the Grok account's fake apology rather than on the fact that neither X nor xAI are stopping this despite it being entirely in their power to do so.

We need to study JCO's brain like we're studying that immortal jellyfish

This is just neuroslop, you only believe it because of the electricity in your brain

Since there is no random evil, no disease or death; it's a realm of full agency and freedom; there are still physical constraints but full control over the creative process, and its realization is never hampered by outside forces or weakness of will; therefore the Stardew Valley setting is Valinor,

This New Year's Day I'm thinking about Gramsci, who said: 'All days are New Year's, but not all days have in society the function of new years. Now is the time of New Year's'

Do people ever relate Marx saying that under communism there'd be no morality to Aristotle saying that between friends there's no justice

Analytic philosophers in the left who had to sit through 'A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy' last year to our Western Marxist friends today

I know most of you hated it but Kinds of Kindness still makes me laugh 2-3 times a week through the power of memory

Apropos nothing this is my favorite essay (and favorite essayist) in American letters: www.pseudopodium.org/search.cgi?e...

'No currency has intrinsic value' lmao WRONG

Earth’s pivot to video.

A good metaphor for chat-LLMs is that they're like magnets that snap to ideas, including subtle ones, but from short distances

Looked into this last year and it turns out that there's a back-and-forth where a friend of Adorno's wrote a 'what about Armstrong and Parker though' response-essay and then Adorno wrote an 'I mean all that stuff, it's all the same' response-essay back

IDC what you say, Brigitte's a genius and an icon and her ferocity into old age inspires me www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-J...

One thing we know for sure given how I respond when people say snide things to me on twitter is if I could drive I'd be in jail for life over a road-rage incident

I wish Amanda Seyfried could have won a second Emmy for The Dropout

kind of a weird connection to draw, but the the way the knives out movies work make especially clear that the pirates of the caribean movies should have each focused on completely new main characters and stories with jack sparrow popping in

I found an old blog post in drafts that I decided to modify somewhat and put out - my own little plea for humanism, why I self-describe and generally consider myself a humanist. Not sure if anyone else will care, but fwiw here it is. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-...

Eyes Wide Shut is about how sex haunts upper middle class human sociality but the rich exorcise it by making it more than human (mystical) and less than human (bestial) and shifting it from an interpersonal force of chaos to suprapersonal force of class solidarity

The singularity is not here

I'm ready to release my statement about the TV show Pluribus

I sometimes forget that Joanna Newsom is a straight-up genius

Jamiroquai when Jamiro vewwy sad

to anyone teaching an epistemology class anytime soon, you're welcome

You just cannot make an experimental rock album that's better than This Heat: Deceit

One of the most beautiful lines in pop/rock imo is 'I know their majesty by heart'

We saw your canonical formula of myth from across the bar and think it has a non-trivial model in the quaternions

Funny that both things CLS can stand for involve applying math to culture

The marketing needs to let people know that I Love L.A. is a comedy and not a dramedy. I wasn't interested and now I am

Migraines so bad this weak I kind of lost my will to live, but just now learned there's a New York Times top 100 restaurant in walking distance from my house that's famous for its deviled eggs so overall it's been an OK week

Wake Up Dead Man was basically as good as OG Knives Out, just terrific

Having a slow evening

Personally not a big fan of the midcentury revised-scientistic 'it's not that it *will* happen but that either it *will* happen or everyone dies' strand of predictive Marxist science-of-history, and not a big fan of today's climate-change version of it either

Haunted by knowing that I go through life only 90% clear on when to use a hyphen

You could use silver as an intrinsically valuable currency, because when you've got about $6,000 worth of silver you can make an amazing frying pan

'That's my emotional support-manifold'

Assuming that Claude 4.5 rate limits for the $20 subscription are about break-even, the amount of money OpenAI must be losing on every $20 subscription to GPT 5.2 is one of the funniest things of all time

Always thought Trojan Horse is meant to be a parable about the culture-relativity of 'obvious.' That if your culture hasn't really gotten into war tricks yet you're not gonna think about war tricks, like how if you never played chess someone can schoalr's-mate you