what i'm reading:
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
After degrading being into having, the society of the spectacle has further transformed having into merely appearing.
cheating here since I've actually been reading this off-and-on for over a year. if you want my thoughts on anarchism you have to buy me dinner first.
what i'm listening to:
Thinking Face Emoji podcast
I really like these brief and thoughtful investigations of internet culture. I like that the Institute of Network Cultures treats sigmas, sadgirls and gooners as serious subjects of inquiry, and I've been working through the Critical Meme Reader III.
I spent my childhood and adolescence on the computer and have always felt like the society of the internet cannot be adequately translated to meatspace. That's especially clear when the hosts read the very memes they're studying out loud: it's just unbearable, as if memes emit a cringe-inducing neurotoxin when they're removed from their natural medium. But it's necessary.
what i'm watching:
Playtime (1967)
A really beautiful, rambling movie. Sometime it's laugh-out-loud, sometimes it's blink-and-you'll-miss-it. Today's filmmakers simply do not have the guts to bankrupt themselves to make a movie this pointless. Jacques Tati is a real artist.
what i'm playing:
Friendship and Absolute Contingency in Since November
What we saw with the wave of divorces during the COVID lock-downs was that relationship are structurally contingent. Like bodies, they require energy from outside to keep going; you have to do things in order to have stuff to talk about at the dinner table.
Romantic love is an economy of libido and material security. Partners must ask: what can this person do for me? Will they pay their half of the rent? Tend house? Satisfy me in bed? Make me feel wanted? What's the R.O.I. on dating this person?[1]
Meanwhile, the love between friends seems to-- under normal circumstances-- transcend changes that would sink a romance, like time, distance, and over-familiarity. What can we pin that on? Shared interests, senses of humor; a catalog of knowing glances, inside jokes, and mutual histories; an ineffable pocket universe of understanding?
In Since November, friendship is pressed to the boilerplate of absolute contingency, and we witness what's left over.
November punches above its weight in structure and form, proudly inspired by its predecessors to advance the medium. Each branch of the decision tree is in dialog with the others, and it's only by exhausting every choice that we can see the full shape of November's dialectic.
@phwog achieves a visual unity of character and backdrop that's effective in the CG sequences that make up the bulk of the game. We're locked into the protagonist's first-person perspective, and I especially like the scenes where Phwog makes it feels really gonzo.
Since November is short, sweet, and hard to forget.
what i'm working on:
usually when i have an intrusive thought that induces self-loathing, my knee-jerk response is to say "I'm going to fucking kill myself". I'm working on replacing that with 'BLOCKED! BLOCKED! BLOCKED!'. it doesn't make the thoughts occur less frequently but it's kinda funny.
something i liked:
I did 300lbs on the leg press machine the other day : )
something i hated:
telegram has inexplicably blocked my number, so I'll never be able to see the NSFW channels of some of my favorite artists. : (
a picture:
look at this grasshopper I saw
my incel is showing ↩︎