Breakfast Across the Globe
looks like shit 👍
the problem with visual platforms like instagram and tiktok (or ones that limit the amount of words you can use like twitter) is that they are inhospitable to complex discussions of themes and narrative. which is why booktok/booktwt are both so stupid. they incentivise u to aestheticise reading to the point where even your personal annotations are more for the benefit of an unseen audience than for yourself. fuck understanding or interrogating the book that youre reading. what u need is likes and retweets. don't buy a book that will make your bookshelf ugly. don't crack the spine, read it once, or read the ebook and keep the physical copy purely for display purposes. only read about hot people, young people, middle class english speaking westerners. only read about people who are exactly like you. you must never be pretentious you must never be overly serious you must never be ugly. etc. its all very miserable
I remember a few years ago I would go on twitter or tumblr or whatever and see so many posts hating on Bukowski, how he was a trash poet, he was a piece of shit, etc. and I know Bukowski actively despised Disney and was one of the very few famous poets who wrote about and belonged to the working class, and now a few years later and everything is owned by Disney and I cant help myself from feeling like some big machine was paving the way.
People keep acting like poetry and literature should just be longer versions of r/showerthoughts posts.
Let people interpret Patrick Bateman and Walter White and Don Draper wrong. It's their right to do so and it helps a lot. There is no better and easier sign to stop interacting with a person than knowing they watched American Psycho and thought "this guy is cool, I should be like him" or knowing they saw the entirety of Mad Men and somehow got absolutely nothing out of it.
A subreddit about how planet earth is a prison and we're being harvested by the Archons and then someone posts a link to Dominion and wonders "maybe WE are the Archons?" and after a week of endless comment wars the sub goes private.
I swear to God, when people here talk about academia they’re honestly thinking Harvard or Oxford in the 50s. Guys, I’m sorry to break it to you but academia is PhDs students who don’t even get a desk to work in their university and overworked lecturers who are forced to do tons of unpaid work to “get ahead”. i’m begging you all to educate yourselves.
i’m also imploring you to do some research on the importance of universities as cultural and political hubs that bring actual, concrete change to underdeveloped communities, by providing poor and marginalized kids with an education and by actually conducting vital research meant to improve people’s lives. Please remember that there are places in the world where people do not pay thousands of dollars for an university degree and that for many people Universities ARE institutions that considerably improve their lives and not just a place you go after high school because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
I feel like all the crazy schemes the characters from Better Call Saul keep coming up with diminishes Walt's supposed cunning intelligence in Breaking Bad. Walt was the only one who would craft these elaborate schemes that you were in the dark about until the very end but now there's at least 5 other guys in that show's universe that do it too, to the point where I actively wish they would stop because I'm tired of that formula.
I was just looking at my starred emails on Gmail looking for an old piece of writing and I came across an email I sent myself 14 years ago that's just dozens of pictures of Winona Ryder.
The Sheets, a parable
Translated from the Chinese by habla-memoria.
In a modest house located in the Xiuzhou district, near Hangzhou, a woman was washing her husband’s clothes late at night. After all the work, she became very sleepy and tired, and before going to her bedroom, she heard a moaning sound, and looking out the window she saw a white, waving figure in the yard. Startled, she called for her husband, who quickly understood the situation and told her:
"Don’t worry, my darling, it is only the sheets, which you have hung to dry earlier this evening, flapping in the strong wind."
"Thank you," she said, taking a deep breath. "For a moment I thought I was seeing a ghost."
Weeks passed, and she had forgotten about the incident with the white sheets. Again she was washing her husband’s clothes late at night, when she heard a moaning sound, and looking out the window she saw a white, waving figure. Startled once more, she called for her husband, who quickly understood the situation and told her:
"Don’t worry, my darling, it is only a ghost."
"Thank you," she said, taking a deep breath. "For a moment I thought I was seeing the sheets, which I have hung to dry earlier this evening, flapping in the strong wind."
After watching six and a half seasons of Buffy I've come to the conclusion that it's a good show.
one thing that really strikes me about anti-intellectualism is that it's just so. self-limiting and sad. like it's a good thing to learn and i feel like we've forgotten it. all this information at our fingertips and people are refusing to use it for the simplest things like when they don't understand one specific word in a text. if something is a tough read it's a moral failing of the author and not an opportunity to build on your own personal knowledge and experiences. it doesn't matter if you think picasso is a renaissance artist because who cares about art history anyway and besides, picasso was a creep, even though it would take a minute to look this up. like obviously there are issues with accessibility in say, access to academia, but some things are genuinely not going to take significant amounts of effort to look up and remember for future. yes it's not a bad thing to not know something already, but a refusal to learn? come on. learning - expanding your knowledge, getting to know more about the world or humanity or art or science or anything - serves you, not some elitist academic in the sky or whatever. whether that's just reading the first paragraph of the wikipedia page for pragmatism or taking three months to read crime and punishment, there's a sense of achievement in the end. and yeah to some extent it's a skill, but it's not a difficult thing to foster and build upon, and sitting around proclaiming how you refuse to learn anything, even the most basic and simple fun facts, due to whatever the excuse of the month is is just so insular. it's a truly wonderful and interesting and diverse world out there and we're letting it all pass us by
I love cats, but I would rather kill myself than play a whole game where you have to witness a bunch of stupid robots pretending to have feelings.