Is Anyone Else Forever Frustrated That Hearting A Single Post In A Long And Vicious Argument On Here

March has some fucking nerve showing it’s face around here again

@new-ea-cause-area

Plane travel makes me high. No pun intended. When I’m in an airport, or on a plane, I get into a weird hypomanic state where I start feeling great about myself, making grandiose plans, feeling like the world is my oyster. I’m more creative, more ambitious. Sometimes I leverage this to get stuff done (usually write blog posts I’ve been putting off) at the airport or on the plane. Other times I feel confident that I’ll still be able to do all this great stuff when I reach my destination, and am invariably disappointed; a few hours after landing, I go back to being as cautious and unambitious as usual.

I think this kind of thing is why I’m so interested in psychopharmacology. I don’t need some sort of deep transformative advice to turn my life around. I don’t need to reconcile with my true self. There are predictable times when I’m already exactly the person I want to be. If I could be the person I am at airports 100% of the time, I could change the world. I know being that kind of person is possible, because it happens. But I can’t control it. And I always think that surely there must be some minor tweak that I can do to replicate it. There’s nothing magical about airports, it just has to be unlocking some possible brainspace that’s already there. But I just. can’t. find. the. key.

I collected a bunch of "haha I don't have 2020 vision" "oh God not like that" posts

the dopest thing about horses is that they’re basically grass engines

like, grass goes in, fast comes out

most things that produce fast (like cheetahs, and cars) use much more heavily processed grass, like horses, and oil

and yet here horses are, producing The Fast with only The Grass

Frank, have you become self-aware?

I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on the algorithms behind the bot, and now I just need to figure out a way to actually talk to the internet without making shitposts

OK but there’s another “critical” here, and it’s also getting confused with the others. Critical as in critical theory, critical consciousness, actually does mean “being able to see and point out all the ways in which a thing is Problematic”, and when that gets (combined/confused?) with literary criticism/critical thinking, you end up with “analyse(critical thinking) a fictional work(literary criticism) by looking for all the bad things(critical consciousness)” and interestingly enough that ends up being very similar to what would happen if you just went at it with a hammer

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it

i think the weirdest thing about the shelter-in-place has been the nightly howl, which i forget about every night until i’m walking my dog and the neighbors just suddenly start fucking howling.

Miss this dear soul so much

𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘺 𝘣𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘻𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘻! (𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝟸𝟶𝘵𝘩, 𝟷𝟿𝟽𝟼)❤️🎂

The perfect storm of intelligence and agility