“She blinks at me. … The blink isn’t confusion. It’s not processing. It’s a screensaver. It’s her brain going into standby mode because the incoming information doesn’t match the preset programming.” from a repost with no author name
Category: uncategorized
Jan 25 2026
“Future Canadian Resistance Tactics” – hilarious list at Sweeneys
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/future-canadian-resistance-tactics
Sep 05 2025
your brain on psychedelics
How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan – an interesting read, especially, for me, the chapter on the neuroscience of psychedelics “It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.” …
Sep 03 2025
People Skills: assuming dishonesty
Apparently, I have poor people skills. I’m literal-minded and I take people ‘at face value’, which means that I assume that people mean exactly what they say. Which is to say that having people skills means assuming that people do not mean what they say—i.e., that they are dishonest (or, less likely, linguistically inept). Which …
Aug 28 2025
An applicable-to-so-many-things exchange
“Matthew, how do you know these things?” “How do you not?” (from one of Jodi Taylor’s Time Police novels, but sooooo applicable to so many conversations)
Aug 16 2025
from The Hunger of the Wolf, Stephen Marche
“Capitalism can be good, proper, brutal fun, the biggest schoolyard game in the world.” Indeed. Schoolyard. “What do you think she would be like in bed?” “I’ve nevr met her.” “How would that matter?” So telling.
Aug 15 2025
from “Losing Earth” by Nathaniel Rich
from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news “The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate …
Aug 05 2025
John Kerry on Trump (on Bill Maher)
“Trump responds more to his Twitter ‘likes’ than his briefing books and the Constitution of the United States.” (And that was about his first term.) “He has the maturity of an 8-year-old boy and the insecurity of a teenage girl.”
fiction
