The hell site hosted this very, very good rundown of what Fascism IS. x.com/1zzyzyx1/sta...

"Philosophers conceive the affects by which we’re torn as vices, which men fall into by their own fault." <<< this seems to be the Archmedian point for Spinoza, the lever of "fault" (and therefore blame).

on one of my favorite people I've met on the Internet...who feels like she is still with me.

I've just been musing that somehow I always (unconsciously) "pictured" Spinoza's Substance as "up there" or "out there", but then it struck me in a weird, emotional way that as someone literate in Latin, it was "SUB" stance, that which stands under, the firmness beneath...

He was kinda good...like.

in full makeup.

We're practicing a on one day, off one day digital fast. If you want to really see how crazy "reality tv" politics is right now, do that. Outrage stories blow in and out so fast after a day away it feels like you've missed weeks. It's just pump, pump, pump.

Just watched Once Upon A Time In The West in 4K for the first time...just...wow. Top 10 film experience for me maybe. Blown away.

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Our Wizard of Oz.

My guess. The Mark Zuckerberg character puts the eye-alien into his own head...and he becomes Elon Musk.

Not very far from Spinoza.

I think we are all getting to the point of realizing social media is itself Malware.

This is largely true. But wisdom consists in knowing that each time you "breakdown" the problem into a subproblem you are performing and translation...a distortion (...and that this is often very hard to keep track of, both individually, but also in sum).

I strangely find it soothing to just watch the eye-alien sheep just watch stuff happening, and figuring it all out slowly. Kind of has herding dog energy.

America's in quite a state. 1. Affluent as hell bc of the equalization of Capitalism, a "smooth space" of production & consumption (regardless of race, gender, politics, etc), a machine of duplications/variances. 2. And a supreme racializing, essentializing desire to cut oneself off from all that.

Some of my photographs from this week. Jitmuangnon Gym, Bangkok.

We live in such a time. The infinite regress of parodies upon parodies, like mirrors cascading into mirrors.

The blacks are so insane in My Darling Clementine (1946), cinematographer Joseph MacDonald killing it. Watching the film on Blu Ray was almost a spiritual - certainly aesthetic - experience. Humans dark, dark and more dark, against the bright luminous Land.

Unfortunately, a large portion of this is just that Trump wants an indelible mark in US history, and he saw that the way that the South remembers the Civil War is just that sort of thing. He just doesn't want to be erased. As his life ends he will push harder and harder. He wants to start it.

3. One of the best action films I've ever seen. Crushes 2, well, because Boyka shines so completely. And the "chocola-tes" villainy of Marko Zaror sublime. Some films just hit the sweetspot of perfection. Endless quotable lines, physical, character driven fighting styles. Seen it probably 10x.

Watched it again, in 4K this time, and the characters with the best hair were the true heroes.

Not far from the scaled time in Panarchy theory.

Besson's Dracula: A Love Story (2025) absolutely smashes Egger's Nosferatu (2024). Yes, it draws on, evokes, Coppola's 1992 Dracula, and Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and Beauty and the Beast, even Cocteau's 1947 version, but that's what Besson does best...make fairytales.

Borrowing content from the Antichrist site. So good.

Loved this film (and the other Ghost Stories) back in the day when I used to collect Kung Fu and wuxua DVDs from China Town. A sweetspot series.

MEDIUM: i will now speak and translate the words of author franz kafka. speak, and his spirit answers ME: mr. kafka! i love your work. what do you see as the core kafka cinematic universe? MEDIUM: he is praying you contract tuberculosis ME: ha ha! tell him we can cure that now. call him a bitch

seems fair to say...if not a bit too reductive in mythos.

Giordano Bruno. The arguments of Panpsychism (precursor to Spinoza). www.academia.edu/82100272/_Gi...

David Graeber once told me that his job as an educator was to become worthless.

The taxidermy of feeling.

Biblically-accurate Wittgenstein

not having diabetes will soon be "woke". "I miss the days when REAL men died of heart attacks when 40 or breathed in tough-guy iron lungs." "I miss the corn syrup days!" I think our culture has gone mentally ill, in a fairly significant way. But then again not being mentally ill might be Woke.

One of the failings of Kantian ethics application. The "motto" can be just about anything, within context. How about: "It is wrong to fall into intersubjective dynamics with instruments of aggressive Capitalism, (especially) as they seek to colonize our social fabric"?

photos I enjoyed today.

How to Logic of the Totalitarian state lurks within Spinoza's logic. kvond.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/s...

I enjoyed Halo for Sci-fi fun (tho, not a Halo game player & far from everyone who hated it). Big M. Yeoh fan, but maybe not as a lead in English, where she is less comfortable (still). Not expecting much here, but the idea that men own IPs, not a fan. www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/scifi/bl...

I mean this in the lightest way, but unbridled Capitalism came to a new phase as rampant HGH, HRT use in aging wealthy men has produced a sense of "immortality" (& NOW greed) in the ruling political/financial male elite. Men with power their 70s feel like they are in their 40s (without consequence).

No doubt for me Alien to Aliens is the biggest drop. Just rewatched Alien on a good screen and it really is a terribly beautiful masterpiece, Scott hitting out out of the park all over the place. It has a sublime coherence. Aliens stripped all of that away and made a pew-pew blockbuster. Steep fall.

80s nostalgia is quite a complex thing, but also very RIGHT and race coded. AI taking us back to a time that never was, and pulling specific affective threads forward largely to bind us in new ways.

Watched Cassavetes' Shadows for the first time, on a nice screen. From the beginning he resolved the cinema debate if Cinema was properly an elaboration of Theater (plot), or a Hypnosis (Renoir's thought). Theater's freedom of live improvisation of real life, incredible hypnosis thru the close up.

Only 2.5% of animal biomass is human. Still, that fraction is reshaping the fate of the whole 🌍.

Spinoza and Tommaso Campanella kvond.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/t...

Donald Davidson...the great unacknowledged Spinozist.

This sounds brilliant. One of the perceived weaknesses of Spinoza is his oblique treatment of Time (one could even speculatively opine that it makes up a hidden 3rd Attribute). Here we seem to have a properly temporal Spinoza w/ open lines to Bergson's duration (ie, ratios of motion & rest).

Philosophy in action.

So much of Alien: Earth just feels absolutely borrowed from 100 films, many sci-fi, some just character versions from Legion repeating. I was pretty surprised how just everything, everyone just seemed like a "quotation". But this one my wife called out. Yep.

God I hate that other site, legit, progressive, low-key evil, but so far @criterion.bsky.social doesn't post here yet. Jamie Lee Curtis so on point with her selections. I guess I have to see Danton Monsoon Wedding Downhill Racer ...because the only ones I haven't seen that she picks.

"How Science works"...is ironically enough, trusting others.

Ethel Cain's second album probably the most sonically WHOLE experience of musical story telling I've had since I first listened to Dark Side of the Moon as a kid...likely, because it revisits that emotional space of intense sound release. I didn't 1/ open.spotify.com/album/3iSPMf...