• what i'm reading: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen

The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

• what i'm listening to: Eidolon Playtest One of my red flags is being a Homestuck apologist. It was fucking good, idgaf. Sorry, is there some other ambitious multimedia project making seismic shifts in the entire internet's vocabulary? Skibbidy toilet? Sorry.

  I was introduced to Eidolon by some random 0-note post on (obviously) Tumblr that compared it to Homestuck. That's a very loaded comparison which just boils down to "it's gay loser nerd shit". It's either for you or it's not.

  It's a nice break from every other podcast I listen to, which is about contemporary politics, ranging in perspectives from unbearable Lib hand-wringing about Our Precious Institutions to You Need To Buy A Gun Now anarchism. Eidolon at least makes me laugh.

• what i'm watching: Its great when movies look good and are fucked up.

• something i liked: 900 People Are Collectively Driving an 'Internet Roadtrip' on Google Street View The summer after senior year I was unemployed and depressed and I would stay up very late at night. I was too exhausted to do anything, but I didn't want to go to sleep because it would mean battling intrusive thoughts and anxiety for hours in bed. And then having to wake up and still be alive and still be me. So I would open Google Maps and look at places very far away. I would go on street view in mining towns in the middle of Canada. Industrial parks in the Philippines. Random mid-western suburbs.

  I would look at the blurred-out faces of people frozen in the lives they were living years ago, lives I'd never know about in places I'd never visit. It was surreal, melancholy, and comfortingly depersonalizing.

  An audience-participation road-trip feels anachronistically quaint right now. It's very 2010s. It's hard today to believe a group of stranger coming together on the internet does anything good-- or even just innocent. The last time I saw a livestream thing like this, it was 4channers piloting a tiny robot tank with a trump head around a wrecked house and spamming the N word in the chat, which the robot would then read aloud in a TTS voice.

  This is the massification of what for me was a solitary maladjusted coping mechanism. Maybe if they happen to pass by my apartment, I'll go outside and wave to the empty street.

• something i hated: Healthline.com's cookie paywall If you click "disagree" on Healthline.com's cookie consent popup, it will redirect you away from whatever page you're on and to anon.healthline.com (archived), and you'll get a static page with this message:

  Unfortunately, a tracking-free version of our full website is currently unavailable... Cookies and similar tracking technologies allow us to improve your browsing experience... and better understand you

  What a crock!!!!! Let me translate: How dare you act like you're anything but a squealing pig. You should be happy to wallow in our muck! All you're good for is your personally identifying data!!!

• a picture: