California supremacist. Climber. English prof. Urbit: pasmul-hopnel. Author of "Excavating the Memory Palace" and "The Last Mixtape." Blog at link below.
SoCal and High Plains
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Lots of corporations and institutions are so wealthy that it makes sense to pay someone a full time salary for 10 hours of work per week, because those 10 hours really do help keep the machine running, and no one's gonna do it for 10 hours of pay.
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The Ukrainian-Russian War of 2022 will be remembered not as a war but as a social media event that generated the best takes ever poasted.
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A McLuhan insight: as one tech environment gives way to a new one, the old environment will turn into "art." Just like the Romantics romanticized the agrarian way of life as England industrialized, we've started to romanticize the industrial and the electric analog way of life as the world digitizes itself into the cloud.
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My wife bought a pro-colonialism game called Botany. You play a wealthy Englishman who travels to places like "Siam" and "Cape Colony" collecting plant specimens for his estate.
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The salary man gamble is that you end up in a job that requires as few hours of work as possible. If you win, you work 20 hours a week. If you lose, you work 80 hours a week. Money stays the same either way.
Update on my friend who's “jiggled” through his white collar middle management career for almost a decade.
Gets a raise every year despite fake working... now $200K+ plus incentives/bonus. Rarely went to an office even before COVID, now formally 100% remote.
Sent me a pic of his latest USB “jiggler” and says he'll never get caught. Apparently he works even less now... like 30-60 minutes a day tops.
He just hangs with his kids, works out, does personal stuff, and works on side hustles with his wife like real estate and organizing neighborhood kids activities.
Travels all the time and pretends he’s at home if he gets an email or call. He thinks he can do this for the next 20 years and keep collecting higher comp then downsize and retire once the kids go to college. Basically he doesn't see himself actually ever working again.
For Christmas they're spending an entire month in the Caribbean... he won't tell anyone where he is and will pre-write and schedule emails to people to make it seem like he's busy working.
Says he doesn't care if he gets fired because "it's just so easy" to find another mindless remote job somewhere within a month and rinse and repeat.
He makes fun of me as a self-employed consultant... says I'm “low-IQ” for not just getting some pointless W2 corporate job, faking the work, and getting paid hundreds of thousands a year with minimal effort.
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It's easy for essay or short-answer classes. You use one of these bad boys the first couple weeks and then announce, "Now I know how you all actually write."
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Lodge does this with their "cooking spray" for their cast iron pans. It's literally just canola oil, for twice the price.
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They'll come back. The latest prestige "This Old House" remodel showed the rich New England couple going with red oak in the kitchen and wood grain throughout the whole home. The HGTV style makes kitchens look like morgues, and people are starting to notice.
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Today's infants and toddlers are indeed going to inherit a shitshow. But *their* kids (what few there are), born after that aged bubble is dead and gone, will essentially be given a blank slate. Like kids born right after a Black Plague in Europe.
Like, sorry to those who are Italian or South Korean but the jig is up. It's over. Find a new homeland
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You see it up/down the salary hierarchy. Teen me worked at a retail computer store, got promoted from warehouse to "business sales," and got paid more to just chill most of the day because when I did work, I could talk to clients without drooling on myself.
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Cinco de Mayo was just a regional Mexican holiday, like Mardi Gras, until Americans started celebrating it as an excuse to drink tequila, and then we exported it back to Mexico so everyone celebrates it there now too. Big flex on our part.
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Young men, I am here to tell you:
Absolutely marry your childhood sweetheart. If you must, marry your college sweetheart.
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I didn't fully appreciate the negative effects until I moved to a low-immigration area from the LA suburbs (the majority Hispanic eastern ones, not the lily white western ones). The ambient chaos I just took for granted as life---cars get stolen or broken into, 5 hour waits at urgent care and months-long waits for doctors, sky-high rents for crappy apartments, few opportunities for entry-level work unless you're an adult who doesn't speak English---has been replaced by people who leave their cars running in parking lots, instantly available medical care around the clock, teens serving my burgers and mowing the lawns, and a middle class life accessible to the median income.
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Nice reference to commonplace books at the end. The last living "memory palace" practice. Note it's to "impress upon my mind." You would write down the best passages or bits of info you came across and then make drawings around them or interesting, drawn connections between them, to provide some visual flair to solidify the impression on memory. Commonplace books were supposed to supply you with the ability to quote from memory later in life.
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Midwestern small business owner who can afford entry-level luxury cars but chooses to buy the $100k Jeep. I guess there are a lot of those guys out there if Jeep is still in business.
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Yeah. My father made bank coming back after his retirement as a "consultant" due to his old school knowledge.
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DuckDuckGo has its moments. But no, no, the search engines are no longer optimized for us nerds.
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Learning about astronomy photography is like learning that Santa Claus isn't real. Just massive deception that scars you.
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Country vacucumed up all the listeners who no longer have new rock to listen to, which is also why country has grown an alt rock vibe.
American country/folk artists like Zach Bryan represent the cultural product of a certain people, time, and place— and should be appreciated as such.
I think many coastal conservative intellectual types fail to see importance of the genre, maybe out of a desire to be seen as someone who is above it, to be seen as enjoying Bruckner or Schubert (generally, these types are personally tone deaf, but enjoy the warm feeling of sitting in a certain box at the Kennedy Center)— the same desire that led them to put on the bow tie and LARP as Buckley until 2022.
Really, the surge in popularity of the country genre, which has ~10x-ed in revenue ($) and other metrics over past 25 years, is rooted, I suspect, in mass nostalgia for an America that has mostly died.
It’s maybe hard for “normies” to articulate the loss of the thing that was America before mass migration and other economic / technological shifts, but the music resonates with them, it's a sort of artistic memorialization the old American ways.
Yes, I appreciate great music of Western tradition, especially much of the forgotten church music— I post it often through one of my efforts, @KyrialProject— few others do on this platform.
But I also think not enough intellectual energy has been directed toward understanding the recent growth of the American country/folk scene.
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My kid, screaming: "Why are you putting pants on me? Are we a steppe warrior family? Will I learn to ride before I learn to walk? No? Then why can't you put me in a robe or toga? Why can't my groin and legs remain free, papa?"
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Gotta hand it to chiropractors. The entire medical establishment against them, even when the medical establishment was well respected. There's still one on every corner, fully booked.
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You don't even need to read the whole damn book. Just read Marlowe's opening monologue, hell, just the opening line: "And this too has been one of the dark places." Basically: "The colonial project can be ugly, it can drive you mad, but the ideal behind it is good, much like how the Romans civilized the Britons."
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I was never totally convinced about the "protests are funded" thing until now. The UCLA encampment clearly had massive infrastructure support, and no undergrad is going to have quick access to this sort of projector equipment.
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Especially late Roman stuff. Have you read St. Augustine's Confessions? You of all people would appreciate it, up to and including his anecdote about getting a boner in the public baths.
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There are lighthouses in nearly every state of the nation. But the Midwest ones do need funding for lonely cowboy keepers. Here are two in Nebraska.
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I mean, you just hit your deductible, which for most people will be under $5k and as low as $1500. I think ours was $3500.
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Mom wants to hear from you. Lindy.
A mother writes to her son in the 2nd-3rd c. AD: "Don't hesitate to write me for anything you need...I took care to send and ask about your health and inquire what you're reading; he said Book 6 [τὸ ζῆτα] and reported many things about your attendant" (P.Oxy. 6.930).
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The mysterious orient. Cities of 10 million you've never heard of, now buildings you've never heard of with more people than an average college town.
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That's gym climbing culture. Venture with me into the back country for real climbing on granite and you will encounter "human-capital" types, to be fair, but mostly misfits and malcontents that don't even kinda sorta fit into this frame of reference.
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Plain vanilla or chocolate ice cream is healthy, especially when it's Hagen Dazs and only has 5 ingredients. I wouldn't recommend daily doses of Orange Dreamsicle Cherry Fizz Swirl Dairy Treat.
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Even the evangelicals share some blame here. The "purity ring" culture. Getting pregnant as 17 as the worse sin imaginable, even worse than being gay.
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Tom shows up with a long list of nouns. He says each noun to you, followed by "Lindy?" He just needs to know.
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As a public project, mass literacy beyond the 8th grade level will come to an end in my lifetime. Martin Luther started it. Dewey et al. really pushed it into high gear. But not Lindy, in the long run.
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Never again. It was pitched as developing some select areas adjacent to urban centers. This would just turn the west's public lands into Texas. Millionaires fencing it all up.
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The Plains states only open up when you leave the interstates, which follow the river valleys. But even as a SoCal native, I think the beauty rivals places like J Tree or the San Gabes.
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Also, from Boeing to your local grocery store taking EBT to the HVAC guy working on a civil servant's home in NoVa, most of the private sector gets direct or indirect revenue from state or federal spending. What % of the "private sector" is wholly pure of receiving tax monies?
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Lack of Sunday School in this case, in addition to lack of a childhood reading anything harder than "Harry Potter." They don't get the Flood reference, don't know anything about the era's post-diluvian worldview, so they have no reference point for the imagery.
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Southern English and Black English have a lot in common, for the obvious historic reasons.
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Board games the latest victim of refinement culture. “Watch this hour long video to get set up.” No thanks I’ll play battleship
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My wife recognized the truth of this and detoxxed herself when she wanted to get knocked up. Now she won't touch it for the worst migraine, like a former heroin addict saying no to meds after a surgery.
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My father did this in LA burbs. Commute wasn't terrible in the 90s but by the end of his career it was nearly 2 hours each way. I honored his legacy by getting out of SoCal so that I could have a 5 minute commute and good schools both.
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I am extremely average and have managed to get lots of compliments from the neighbors on what we're doing to our 100 year old home, which was a rental for the last three decades.
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cats and small dogs being flung -- slow motion -- into the neon cyberpunk night from above the 90th floor . . . opera music in the background . . . aesthetic stuff.
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Tolkien and Lewis and many others wrote poetry on the front. Lewis's first thought upon getting there was to think about the Illiad. Different mindset.
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My Starbucks went from the % to a $1, $2, $3 option, which I appreciated. Happy to throw a couple bucks at them, but not an assumed 25% minimum, even if that only adds up to $2.34.
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Reminds me of Adam Corolla's old idea for a restaurant that caters to divorced dads. It serves microwave meals and doesn't have chairs or tables, just counters to lean on while you eat.
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All BLM and NFS land here. The entirety of the Eastern sierras, where a Bigfoot breeding population has been confirmed.
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When I train writing center tutors who work with ESL students, I tell them to stick with "yes" and "no" when answering questions instead of the two thousand variations on "yes" and "no" that English possesses.
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I used to think Taylor would start pivoting back to country in her late 30s, as she "aged." But she's going to do the Madonna thing now I think.
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The US has "private club" exemptions, too, if she uses them carefully. That's how gay bath houses get away with it. aclupa.org/en/press-releases…
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"Lots of wandering" is a good way to describe the experience of American youth before the smart phone. We'd ditch the last couple periods of class, go wander from McD's to Target to Blockbuster, maybe to someone's house if the parents weren't home. Just walk and shoot the shit.
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Most of these obviously took hours or even days to choreograph, practice, and film. In the middle of a pandemic. That’s when I started shifting my stance on the whole thing.
One of the lingering mysteries of the response to COVID is why we were presented with this onslaught of high-production-value TikTok videos of nurses performing well-choreographed dance routines in hospitals across the world in 2020. Theories welcome.
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C.S. Lewis writes a lot about the nostalgic desire to "go back," and how it is inherently satanic, because actually going back will never fulfill its own desire. You have to "go in" to the upper lands. Higher up and higher in.
Bryan Johnson spends $2 million a year to be 18 years old again.
In 2021, he reduced his epigenetic age by 5.1 years in 7 months (a world record)
His 13-steps for a long healthy life:
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The bass pro shop libertarians against this are too coddled and lethargic to walk it, so they want to sell it out of spite. At least the obese purple hairs intuit the larger principle.
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The Dickens passage is modern English. The only somewhat archaic usage is "wonderful" (meaning "surprising" here instead of "very good"), but anyone who went to Sunday school should be able to get the general post-diluvian imagery.
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The safest salary man gamble used to be teaching: 50-60 hours a week, but guaranteed 2-3 months off a year. Good trade.
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Inland Empire. Latinos wearing Bass Pro Shop hats and Don’t Tread On Me swim trunks in the grocery store. Drawn-on eyelashes gf waiting in raised Silverado in the parking lot. Love to see it.
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Something like this happened to the Plains Indians. In a couple generations, they went from self-sufficient hunters to severe malnourishment if the rations didn't arrive. The generation that made the switch were referred to as "loafers" by the Crazy Horses who tried to fight the degradation.
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Currently doing some eye-tracking research on this. Our running hypothesis is that it's real and that, just like the OP and lots of others have said, aphantasiacs' visualizations are verbal (as in, they see written language). They don't convert words into images as others do.
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There's Achilles and Odysseus, but there's also Chesterton and many others who sing the praises of the common heroism of doing a good job, being a good husband and father, living life in quiet decency. Emily needs to read some Chesterton.
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4k+ deaths in NYC. Meanwhile, LA still hasn't cracked 200. SF? Lol. 10? No one knows what's going on. Not about the thing or about how we're turning the thing into data. Theory fatigue gonna set in soon.
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I teach at exactly this kind of university. Problem 1 is a total lack of background cultural knowledge because even Midwest kids aren't going to Sunday school anymore. They're intellectually and imaginatively shut out from anything written before 1990. Problem 2 is that even bookish types no longer evolve beyond the "YA" stage of reading in high school, the way they use to do. So, unlike 15 years ago, fewer English majors are showing up to college having at least *attempted,* on their own, someone like Dickens, or Conrad, or whoever. This is also related to Problem 1, which is the bigger problem.
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I have to bring her a surprise iced coffee if I want sex that night, so it does in my case.
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The size of boats i see on midwest "lakes" (aka dammed up reservoirs) rival what i see on the Alaska crab fishing show.
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Protestants sadly have Catholics beat on the meet-and-greet, donuts, and fellowship hall socialization front.
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Alliteracy alert: my students have gotten bad about looking up "big words" I use in class. They didn't get phonics education, don't know how to turn the sounds I make into letters they tap into a search bar.
I’m going to let you in on a PhD level secret. If you don’t know what someone is talking about, you can look it up in a book. Make sure you don’t tell anyone.
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It takes all my willpower and Christian charity not to secretly take pictures of peoples' grocery carts on the day when SNAP cards get reloaded, despite the excellent content it would make.
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Terrible take. Spelling bee winners have deeply studied etymology and learned about language history. It's not rote memorization.
The spelling bee is depressing. It doesn't promote creativity or teamwork, or physical fitness, or any important knowledge about the world. It is nothing more than a meaningless signaling game.
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This is what happens when you stop going to church, getting to know your neighbors, or living near relatives. You have to re-invent social technology and call it weird names.
The atomic family often forces modern parents to choose between pursuing their great ambitions vs raising a kid. Maybe that tradeoff isn’t necessary. Maybe we can create social technology that lets us do both
Today we started “Baby Artemis’s Coworking Club” where we both cowork and relieve @Prigoose & @__drewface by taking one-hour shifts rocking, burping, and entertaining this wonderful little lady. The plan is to gather from 10-5p each workday.
If you’re a young parent, I encourage you to try it out and tell us how it goes! We just had the idea yesterday and texted ~10 friends asking if they wanted to participate. They all said yes. It turns out taking a work break with a baby over your shoulder is amazingly reviving.
Pictured: Andrew teaching us how to hold & feed Artemis as well as change her diaper.
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The East Coast has the most diabolical energy. Where Puritans battled all the Black Philips. It slowly diminishes until you get to the Missouri River. Then there's some Wendigo energy till you get to the west coast, which is populated entirely by neon demons of lust.
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