Edinburgh, 2019

The Atlantic

Scolding Beachgoers Isn’t Helping

People complain that going to the shore is a careless act during a pandemic, but the science so far suggests otherwise.

I strongly recommend the entire article.

dataandphilosophy replied to your post “I just wanted to get on and read some rationalist posts on tumblr and…”

But Kelsey, how can I solve my problem of not having read the Silmarillion by converting to Orthodox Judaism?

Now that you’re observant of Shabbat and don’t use technology from sundown Friday-Saturday, you have a lot of free time, which like any sensible person you spend catching up on all the books you want to read. Thrilled at the prospect of ensnaring someone in two of my interests at once, I send you a pocket Siddur and a pocket Silmarillion, and you end up reading them at the same time, having strange dreams, and writing a long, revolutionary essay on the compatibility of Beresheit with Middle-earth’s revised cosmology. The Christians get mad at us for cultural appropriation. 

epic sax office 

People aren’t the only ones with vivid imaginations

I had a dream that a cruise ship went down off the coast of a national park and for some reason no one else knew—its passengers were ALL celebrities and I watched them all scramble ashore looking for help.

The park was enormous, and possibly also Area X from the Southern Reach, so it became my job to lead all ~50 movie stars back to safety.

This was terrible. They did not want to cooperate and did not want to take orders from me, so I had to go full hardass and forcibly assign them buddy system partners. Some wanted to race ahead to show how fit they were and did not appreciate being told to stay with the group so that they did not get lost and would be able to use their extra energy to assist anyone who was injured or capacitated.

A few of them tried the “do you know who I AM?” routine on me and I was like “well I’m mostly faceblind so I’m not sure but I DO know that you’re a whiny little bastard who needs to get his shit together”.

The kid from Stranger Things kept compulsively running off the trail to knock shit over, including trial markers, so I had to change his partner from Danny DeVito.

At one point the forest disappeared and we were suddenly at an Arab-American festival in Seattle and my old Arabic teacher came over and started angrily interrogating me about why I didn’t study harder, I cried, and then I stole a fist full of meat from a cooked eel outside a restaurant, at it, and became Brendan Fraser from George of the Jungle, but gay and in love with my girlfriend’s ex boyfriend.

christ

I’d really like structural critiques to move away from using words like “scum” in general. Individualist moralizing doesn’t belong in discussion of systemic forces; in fact, the two are directly at odds. And it’s a mindfuck of a double-bind for people who are prone to taking ideas seriously: “this issue is very large and touches many aspects of society, and you personally are directly responsible for it.” Structural problems will not be solved by obsessively purifying your own heart. 

*cusses you out in cuneiform*

I can’t stop watching this 😂

🎥 The Film Crew by Aimee La Joie

Fifty-nine seconds of bliss!