“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house."  Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...

It is, in fact, scarier to recognise that the future's darkness may conceal good outcomes than to declare that evil days are foreordained. You feel like you're in control, you're savvy, you won't get got, you won't be made a fool of. There's comfort in all of that.

So. You don't know what to do. You are scared, angry, and you can't believe this is happening. You can't believe it might happen to you, to your community. What do you do now? A thread.

Really liked this story! A pleasingly ambiguous tone.

The reason I dislike the term "content" is that it centers a container, a money-making structure, and reduces creativity to interchangeable "stuff" that exists only to fill that structure. Just call it writing, videos, whatever it is. It's not something for another thing to "contain."

I do not understand why Democrats aren't saying "this Greenland shit is indicative that the president is not in his right mind and it is time to invoke the 25th amendment" except that almost every American politician does at heart believe we should rule the world with military might

McCartney: "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End" (this is one song, don't @ me, etc.) Lennon: "Don't Let Me Down" Harrison: "I Me Mine" Starr: "Octopus's Garden"

I guess this means I’m not serious, because I think this song is great!

This will continue as long as poorly-trained, unprepared, heavily-armed, masked federal agents with self-esteem issues roam our streets abusing basic constitutional rights and targeting, harassing, & terrorizing immigrants & citizens. Most Americans rightly will not put up with this. No fucking way.

It doesn't matter one bit how good the poem is, but on top of everything else, it's a good poem. poets.org/2020-on-lear...

I want to build a world where every day can be a Grinch toilet day. I never want to make a serious post again for the rest of my life

My friend @naokan.bsky.social has a great essay about it! www.woman-of-letters.com/p/moby-dick-...

Naps is where it's at.

I love how, in the book, Frankenstein IMMEDIATELY reacts to the creature with "Oh I fucked up bad", closes the door behind him & crawls into bed It's so relatable. Spending 6mo rushing into a stupid thing w/o considering what happens next & deciding "Perfect solution: I won't consider it at all"

*spins wheel*

I don’t know where they’d get the idea that a “sufficient fraction” of moderates and mainstream conservatives could be sold a stupid political bill of goods!

What in the Gestapo is going on in Grand Rapids? Watch this activist get arrested *mid-interview* for speaking out against U.S. action in Venezuela.

Really, truly impossible to choose a favorite, and I like all the most popular ones a lot, but I will say that the lesser-knowns (in particular Porco Rosso, Whisper of the Heart, From Up on Poppy Hill, Pom Poko, and Only Yesterday) are also great and worth your time.

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

I understand that people may find means-testing appealing as a way to prevent “lazy“ people from “taking tax dollars.” My main rejoinder to this argument is “so your solution is to spend more of your tax dollars on the program and create more bureaucracy?”

What if none of these things is a distraction from the other things and instead they're all just horrible things

My whole life, advocating war has been fed to me as “the adult position,” akin to drinking your coffee black or reading the business section of the newspaper. Let’s be very clear — war is the childish nonsense of impulsive destructive idiots playing baby-brained video games with real human lives.

i’d die for her

Spending New Year’s Eve with family, including two boys under six who love binging YouTube videos, including some AI-generated stuff. They just went over the moon for the climactic cabin-on-the-cliff sequence in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. It’s going to be okay, I‘ve decided.

The only matter of note in the 2010s was that there were multiple popular dark fantasy characters known as “Onion Knight.” This was our greatest achievement. Here’s hoping we manage something better in the latter half of this decade, but I’m not holding my breath.

it’s all i’ve got

Walking out of my hotel on a trip to New York, Richard Kind walked past me with a group of dudes. He was dressed in very old and dirty clothes.

We noticed a rising interest regarding the use of AI in browsers. To be clear about our position on this: Zen currently is disabling all AI features included in Firefox and will continue to do so.

About just this cliche that’s highlighted…I can understand the feeling that a consensus opinion has calcified because a large number of people simply get on a bandwagon. But when people say the below, it’s almost never that they want “honest debate.” It’s that they want their side to win.

shopping for food is so clutch. you can put it together to make meals

Books, poems, film, etc. may require retraining a brain to slow down. And it's important bc while scrolling social media pushes the happy button, it rarely provides actual happiness. It's like food with no nutrients; your brain ate a lot but it's still starving for things that scrolling can't give.

And it's Christmas!

The thing is, writing advice doesn’t really work in general. Art is personal and innovative by nature. Try to follow any piece of advice slavishly and you will probably find yourself unable to write at all…which, I guess, is my advice.

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

I mean, 1) books are different than movies, 2) Sauron is pretty clearly an immortal celestial being, some kind of dark god or demon type thing, whereas Palpatine is in theory a human man. A less silly phrasing for him would be “Palpatine isn’t dead.”

I have no business talking about this--haven't even read much of the novel--but I just realized how much the "It" in Stephen King directly represents adulthood. It eats children. Duh.

It's always fun when the teens and tweens make a seemingly nonsensical thing vault into the public consciousness and force twentysomethings to realize they're only going to keep getting older.

The work prep/well-rounded education discourse is pretty astounding to me. The most mercenary student/graduate/admin should absolutely be interested in well-rounded education FOR mercenary reasons because the economy is so dynamic. You don't know what you need for work until you hire your weakness.

Maybe my favorite Tim Minchin lyric is “And the weirdest thing about [my body] is/ I spend so much time hating it,/ But it never says a bad word about me.”

Maybe the greatest murder mystery ever written about handjobs and MILFs (these are both genuinely load-bearing plot points)

Spotify is garbage on every count: Its treatment of artists, its ICE advertising, the CEO's investment in military AI, its leading role in the commodification and AI slopification of music, its terrible audio quality—you name it. So I quit, and put together a complete guide to getting off Spotify:

I heard that now they're placing people who criticize ICE under surveillance. I want it to be known to the entire world that I despise ICE to the core and I think their entire institution should be abolished. They are cruel, inhumane, and are examples of the worst of humanity Fuck ICE Fuck Fascism.

You will also be confused if you rely too heavily on “X is a metaphor for Y” as a means of narrative analysis!

I think what a lot of debates about whether or not something is a Christmas movie miss is that almost every movie is a Christmas movie. It’s movies that are not Christmas movies that are the exceptions.

R: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat? G: No, no, no… death is not. Death isn’t. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not be on a boat. R: I’ve frequently not been on boats. G: No, no… what you’ve been is not on boats.

If I may add my own point that will convince or educate exactly no one, books written in 1930 (1931 starting in January!) or earlier are free, no piracy necessary. There are a lot of these. Some are pretty good!