I think I am spending too much time on this website so I'm posting about it, of course. I am going to take a two week break to read Joseph Andrews. See you all then!

part of me thinks that the reason I won the Hugo was that the guy who helped me pick out the suit I wore for the awards ceremony gassed me up and told me I would win without a doubt. you don't get that experience with online shopping.

post your computer setup

now to check on who governs Vietnam

I read this pamphlet on "The Inefficiency of Capitalism" at a young age and it was formative for me. I think it deserves wider circulation.

a key fascist idea is that we should focus on productive capitalism (factory owners, workers, farmers) and get rid of all parasitical jobs. what this fails to see is that finance, bureaucracy, and service labor are intrinsic to capitalism's development and stagnation. they won't go away under it.

people like to say that old novels are slow, but I think if you teleported a novelist from another century they would find it odd that contemporary novels tend to focus on brief periods in the characters' lives instead of covering an entire life or career.

"Ranch was born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

"You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means."

I never want to become a “get off my lawn” old person, but I do think about posting this several times a day

some awkward social interactions are not historically or politically significant. even if we returned to a prior era or built a better future, people would still be foolish sometimes.

the superhero movie is like if after Lethal Weapon (1987) there were 2-3 big tentpole buddy cop movies dominating every single summer and in 2005 people were still asking each other "is this one underperforming buddy cop movie going to kill the genre?"

"Are superhero movies dying?" Superhero movies died the day they wouldn't let Guillermo del Toro make a 3rd Hellboy.

they always leave off that the US runs disinformation campaigns like this, too. in 2020-2021 the DoD ran a covert internet propaganda campaign designed to cast false doubt on the safety of Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccines. Muslims were told it contained pork gelatin. how many people died?

the right seems obsessed with eternalizing dating norms that were mostly solidified by apps. obviously being a seven foot tall ripped guy has long been an advantage, but let's not forget that in the 2000s this was THE example of a guy who really hit it off with the ladies.

I saw in the bookstore that Marvel is now releasing classic storylines as self-contained graphic novels in the Marvel Premiere Collection. I really wish this had been available when I was teaching a class on superheroes.

I don't think you become incredibly ripped like a body-builder working as a day-laborer, and even if there were gymnasia in rural Palestine it would be remarkable for an anti-imperialist rebel like Jesus to attend a symbol of Greco-Roman cultural domination.

I think we need to wait on the science to see if eating fruits and vegetables contaminated with feces-loving parasites that cause explosive diarrhea is worse than consuming seed oil.

shot, chaser

Zohran has proven that social democracy gains wide appeal when it shows that it can not only redress harms but also practically maintain a functioning society. Communists need to take this as an opportunity to put forward specific proposals, too, @abenanav.bsky.social's recent work does just that.

we would be much readier to handle the challenges of AI if we'd had robust data privacy and security regulations already in place circa 2020. data centers would be more manageable, too, if local politicians hadn't let corporations basically rewrite any zoning policies that might apply to them.

we're going to see two competing responses to US decline: centrists who are hawkish towards China for strategic reasons and reactionaries who are hawkish towards China for racist reasons. in the end, though, the racists will only be bolstered by the efforts of the centrists.

businesses should offer training for new employees instead of outsourcing it to universities where it's provided at the student's and taxpayer's expense.

who is this for? the median GOP-voting college student wants to take classes in Applied Entrepreneurship. meanwhile, the college-age reactionaries who do read are mostly white nationalists or Neo-Calvinists with no interest in the Judeo-Christian values of the US Constitution or whatever.

Today I hit 50,000 words on the novel manuscript. I may not finish the novel this summer, but it seems likely I will make my goal of 70k words.

The State sketch comedy show should have more cultural currency. Also Exit 57 and Strangers with Candy.

I want to quantum shift to the universe where Trent Reznor kept making video game scores after Quake.

I really wish I could devote all of my time to three things. No, I don’t mean 33% of my time to each thing; I mean I want to devote 100% of my time to a single pursuit, three times over.

the greatest lie Norton editions every told was that this novel is only 280 pages.

not everybody has to play to the streaming music meta, but if you start your album off with an entire minute of church bells tolling you can't be doing yourself any favors.

Just heard another interview where the guest announced that they wanted to end or abolish an institution before explaining how they think it should be radically changed to meet the very real needs it addresses. Can we just say “revolutionize,” please?

anime theme song for a show about a little boy, a talking pig, and his panty-stealing grampa: I sigh amidst the gathering dusk / as I wonder if you could love me anime theme song for a show about the existential solitude of being human: Go! Go! Go! Go! Do your best today!

I don't want to sound like I just want to go back to brunch, but it's exhausting that every week Trump starts a pointless new diplomatic crisis where the outcome is invariably the further degradation of US hegemony in general and relations with specific nations in particular.

anyone who has taught writing has had this experience: student: here's my blah thesis prof: why do you think that? student: I was reading the text and oh, by the way, here's my intriguing tangent about a fascinating but unrelated detail prof: that's your topic now AI eliminates that tangent

"The promise of generative AI is that it can think for us, and that is a truly fascist idea, the idea of outsourcing thinking. Our power is the ability to think with each other to generate genuinely new ideas." Naomi Klein

the angel on my shoulder: Don't weigh in on the Hugo discourse. the devil on my shoulder: Don't weigh in on the Hugo discourse.

please pardon my genre shifts

I'm as Marxist as the next guy, but I think it's fine that some people in humanities departments want to focus on language and culture (i.e., the humanities) instead of political economy.

maybe I should read more G*briel R*ckhill, but it sure seems like an odd time to attack French theory and Western Marxism when the institutional basis for both is disappearing.

this is why I'm glad my fanfic was on AOL (rip)

In this house, we believe no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Purchasing a commodity—any commodity—is a much more consequential political act than holding the right opinions.

When I see these billboards all over town, I feel like I am living in the last act of a 90s comedy where the protagonist has finally made good.

what is your most transgressive opinion?

you've become an undead skeleton—your entire face is gone—yet still somehow you have RBF

someone should have the courage to voice Skeletor without using any bilabial stops to reflect that he doesn't have any lips.

I can't explain why, but it so cool that 17th century cutpurses wore little thimbles when they were cutting the strings that held purses to their owners' girdles

I googled the smell of burning rope for my novel, and google replied that if your child's bedroom smells like burning rope they may very well be engaging in recreational drug use.