Berlin conference, 1884, colorized

they’re warning u about

Always curious as to what the "unusual urges" the antidepressant commercials list as a side effect are.

Other Twilight Zone marathon thoughts, re: the commercials. I'm ready to illegalize pretty much all gambling.

This new year, my observation from the Twilight Zone marathon is that the hour long episodes were much weaker, as they tended to have lots of "filler."

Imagine being an automotive, aerospace, and tech magnate, being the richest human being in the history of all mankind, and spending your middle age trying to be a ca. 2011 online teenaged boy. Such an absolute failure of imagination.

The arrival of gout and my body telling me "You go over two drinks in any given day and you get an icepick to the toe" kicked me from 9th to 8th decile. (I was in 9th by way of drink with dinner, drink before bed, 3 drinks on Friday.)

As an over-educated person, I'm partial to the notion that Smart Technocrats are the solution to all our problems and so naturally stan the genro. So this sort of thing is a natural corrective to someone like me in particular.

One thing about a shuttered steel mill (or a steel mill that's now using one small corner to do anything while the vast majority is abandoned) is that it powerfully creates a sense of squatting in your own ruins *even if* in aggregate there's now more steel coming from recycling-based mini-mills.

Doing course prep for this upcoming semester's History of the Inquisition and man, even in 2025 AD with a great ILL and all sorts of electronic resources, I still miss grad school and the ready access to materials that a research university's library afforded.

So history of emotions has hit the mainstream media. On the one hand, cool. OTOH, it's a field that feels like the rather vexing habit of intellectual history guys to say that some phenomenon of modern life we take for granted actually originated in the intellectual historian's period of study.

Someone on r/40kLore asked if the Fall of Cadia "has always been part of the lore."

Having the Awful Realization that the start of term is two weeks away.

Always fascinated by the Venn diagram where "too embarrassed to buy butt toys sober" and "loses an entire shampoo bottle up his ass after a few drinks" intersect.

Merry Christmas to all. defector.com/what-did-we-...

Seriously, this is a great episode and I'm going to liberally borrow -- with attribution! -- from it for the introductory lecture next time I teach History of Magic. (Also, if you are not already listening to the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, you should be.)

I am genuinely happy that Syria has turned out better than I feared.

The huge problem is that we have a pipeline designed and built when higher ed was expanding, and now it's *at best* stagnant, but inertia + path dependence + tragedy of commons means that we're producing PhDs at late 20th c. numbers for a mid-21st c. job market.

I finished my PhD in the Summer of 2009, i.e., right after the global economy shit the bed in the worst financial crisis in seventy years, which kind of rendered the already survivorship-biased job market advice of the previous few years obsolete.

Fine, I'll talk a bit more about that Compact piece. You'd think that social media would make things more democratic, but currently the federal government is being run by lots of high SES white creatives with all this pent-up resentment at getting shut out of the culture industry.

Am I jealous of the Boomer Academic hired with his dissertation only half done when his advisor got a phone call asking if he had a good man available to fill a position? Yes! But getting in on the ground floor of an institution that's starting exponential expansion isn't a thing you can just do.

What got me to thinking about this is that an under-discussed feature of Internet Sex Positivity in the Millennial Era was the presence of, well, older guys in both on and offline spaces.

The thing about North American tenure-track hiring for the last 3/4 century was that for a hot minute in the mid-20th c. a combo of super-high fertility, GI Bill, and, ahem draft deferment rules made higher ed expand exponentially, but that was never sustainable.

Was recently thinking about how the leadership of Youth Movements (at least in the last century and a half or so) is usually made up of thirty- and forty-something Peter Pan types (or 30- or 40-something guys looking to get laid). This is a skeleton key to their dysfunctions.

Randomly: if you enjoy The Count of Monte Cristo, you should watch Gankutsuo, an anime series that adapts Count of Monte Cristo, but with Dantes becoming a blue space vampire. And it *works.*

I'm genuinely fascinated by the fact that TikTok is the most successful endeavor by a country's intel apparatus ever. Just dwarfs cracking Enigma and misdirecting Germany re:D-day location. But seriously, what are they *doing* with the data?

Something I'm deeply curious about but will never know (barring somehow getting a TS clearance again) is exactly how Chinese intelligence uses all the data they get from TikTok. How do the AIs sort it? Are they analyzing content trends? Phone Metadata? What do they pass on to human analysts? Etc.

Thinking about Walkable Cities, and realizing that the town I live in is actually surprisingly walkable -- but that's because, um, pre-1965 The Help needed to be able to walk to work.

The professor looking at all the finals left to grade

I'm a PHEV driver, and the reason that I love NYC, TO, and London is that they've got great transit. But I also realize that I am by no means anywhere close to the modal American.

One area in which I think that lefties and liberals Of A Certain Sort are genuinely in a bubble from most Americans is their fundamental lack of interest in or even hostility to the car and Americans' love of it. Need more Dems like Senator Gallego who acknowledge the desire for the Big Ass Truck.

I lowkey hate that one of the most successful brands of EVs managed to gain traction not in spite of the fact that, but *because* it came to code as High-Earning Recent Grad Douchemobile.

Average Midwest progressive 1941: We must put the unemployed back to work, just as leader of the Nordic races Adolf Hitler did Average Southern Democrat 1941: I would personally kill Adolf Hitler, just as I'd kill any black man who attempted to vote

I occasionally think about how 20th-c. post-colonial thought was a result of the Brits and French taking the best and brightest of Asian and African elites, fully assimilating them into Oxbridge / Sorbonne culture, and then telling them that no, j/k you actually don't belong.

Something I think about a lot is how in the five years between 2007 and 2012 Facebook went from young people sharing slightly naughty party pics to "LIKE and SHARE if you remember when young people knew the COWBOW CODE!"

Was recently gifted an IJA gunto, and it has me thinking of the Axis having lost in spite of their drip. There's a lesson there.

this is not behavior becoming of a FIFA Peace Prize recipient.

Boomers say stuff like, "Back Then movies didn't have all that sex" and meanwhile I'm watching a 1946 movie where the adult protagonist is talking to his mom who all but explicitly tells him that it's one thing to pick up a hooker in Chinatown, but don't sleep with a married woman.

Every now and then you watch a Hays Code-era movie and wonder if the censors were just completely asleep at the switch. Watched Humoresque (1946) last night, and a huge plot point is that the protagonist is fucking a married woman. Like, as long as he didn't say,"I am committing adultery" it was ok?

TFW your friend kisses a curb, you need to change a flat at night, and fortunately your hobby equipment comes in clutch.

Christmas night: "But Santa, you've hardly touched your Zardoz cookies."

Thing I feel mildly guilty about. This morning during the homily, our priest said that from prison, John the Baptist asks where the promised messiah is, and a set of Tom Cardy lyrics popped into my head unbidden.

Man, Inquisitorial history is absolutely *wild.*

One thing that I continually note is that were I just a few years younger, I shudder to think what social media would have done to me. I'm glad that on Usenet I heavily imprinted on @carloshasanax.bsky.social and our mutual friend Doug M (and to a lesser extent @jdnicoll.bsky.social).

Thinking about genre fiction in the back half of the twentieth c. and how much of it was driven by epigones who'd read, e.g., Heinlein, Tolkien, etc., say to themselves, "I'm gonna write something just! like! that!" and then run to their typewriters.

A common form of madness amongst (male) Boomer SF authors is "I will write a Heinlein novel!" Is there an analogous author for younger SFF author, a long dead author nostalgia compels the middle aged to emulate?

Man, holding out for one more year of a shitty congress but then finally getting that Savanah to Nashville by way of Macon route.

The last generation of Americans that got the Cowboys and Indians / Tobias the Happy Slave version of US History is hobbling around retirement homes on walkers. We don't need to keep flogging, "I bet you didn't know that America did bad things, did you, rube?!"

Did you know that the Venetians got the idea for ghettoes from USA redlining using a time machine

It's maddening. American white supremacy was bad enough. You don't need to push it to, "America taught Hitler how to be racist." Also: the problem with this sort of narrative is that it makes it really hard to articulate a case for why liberal-democratic America is worth fighting for.