Thomas Pynchon Is Angry […] one detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions. via Reddit i read Gravity’s Rainbow last year. Pynchon’s relevance is so profound as to be deafening. i have V and Lot 49 on the shelves, i […]
Category Archives: serious stuff
Why do people listen to this shit?
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
The Hatred of Podcasting Shows like this have a flow that the listener doesn’t actually participate in—the hosts have gone home, you’re the only one in the room, and it’s a dead conversation that’s already happened—but, given the intimacy of how the product is consumed, can get the same psychic impression. On your commute, while […]
Go home, Tilly
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Dear Tilly Norwood: Some Blunt Advice, Actress to “Actress,” From Betty Gilpin Tilly, you can not look up and become half of someone. Because you are no one.
Scared
Thursday, September 11, 2025
THE SPECTACLE MADE FLESH What I want to talk about is about the reaction to the assassination. The hit did something I haven’t seen before. It spooked the political influencers. They are scared. Many of them spent last night issuing lengthy, serious statements on X about the gravity of the situation. Some of them are […]
Another quote
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
I get high, I get fucked up … what the hell’s wrong with getting fucked up? There must be something wrong with the system if so many people have to get fucked up. Ozzy Osbourne, interview in Sounds magazine, 1978 (via Adam Curtis, Shifty)
A long quote, true as can be
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
The further down the hill she goes the more subdued and shadowy her mood becomes, as though Bath Street were an emotional gradient. She’s thinking about history’s celebrated victims, thinking of the holocaust, the blight of slavery, female suppression and the persecution of sexual minorities. She can recall her own Spare Rib days in the […]
fighting enshittification, one search at a time
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies […] we spent weeks conducting research into air purifiers we reviewed (including models that don’t exist) to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice. It turns out this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, with ramifications that span […]
Security? Politics? Life?
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Rational Astrologies and Security In 2003, [Bruce] Schneier coined the term security theater to describe security measures that provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it. […] There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these […]
so you will remember
Saturday, December 7, 2024
This Strange MomentA message to you from the fleeting present. For when this moment passes (and it will pass, as all things do), every effort will be taken to erase it from memory, to exclude it from the official record.
interplanetary neurosurgery
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn The practice of neurosurgery on Saturn is almost identical to the one practiced on Earth. Because the art of practice of Medicine was transferred by homo sapiens sapiens “exearthed” 30 years ago from Earth to Saturn. […] These cases give us the means of reflection to improve the practice of […]
