bluestem

I've been back and forth on this for some time. My partner and I have discussed leaving, but we both seem to always waffle on it because we don't want to leave our family and friends.

I've found that many people stop emotionally maturing at about 18-25 years old. I'd like to believe that there's some way to break these people out of this "rut" - possibly through class consciousness or some other thing that might open them up to more introspective thought patterns.

I was admittedly racist and Islamophobic and a bit of a bully as a teenager until I was about 19 or 20, having grown up in a very very rural American town where that was basically the norm. I found my way to where I am now via years of introspection, exposure to more diversity, and opening my mind to trying to understand things like class and anti-imperialism (probably initially by good faith exposure to Israeli apartheid and the Palestinian genocide). I'm definitely not a "finished product" by any means, but I'm a much better person than I was back then (over a decade ago now). This leads me to hold out some sliver of hope that there is some way to move the needle with the people who are like I was when I was younger.

At least for people with my background, I do think there are a surprising number of them that would be open to left wing beliefs if you could somehow break through the endless layers of right wing propaganda. If you talk to enough of them, they will occasionally say something that sounds like they're essentially paraphrasing Das Kapital, but somehow they come to the conclusion that the solution is hating immigrants and lowering taxes for the rich.

Finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski late last week, then read a 70s crime/heist novel called Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake over the weekend. Now I'm reading Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers.

House of Leaves was a horror novel that was also a very weird parody of academic writing. I may come back and read it again in the future and it did make me want to delve further into ergodic literature - literature that requires non-trivial effort just to read (a couple other examples I'm aware of are Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall). On the horror front, to me, it wasn't particularly scary at all. It was extremely metatextual and made me frequently consider what was actually real inside the books universe - there are multiple layers to the narrative and there is the legitimate possibility that even within the book's universe, almost everything in the book is fake. I think it even goes so far as to essentially make the book a metaphor for itself and makes the reader a character or entity within the book.

Hot Rocks was a much simpler book to read. It really felt almost like reading a movie. A very needed reprieve after House of Leaves. It is a pretty funny story - basically a group of thieves are hired to steal an emerald and end up having to pull off a multitude of different capers due to bad luck leaving them without the rock each time.

Don't let your emotions turn you into an unwilling consumer. If you feel your phone is going to imminently crap the bed, then get a new one. If not, then don't. Also, phones don't change much generation to generation anymore, so just get a used/refurbished one from a couple generations ago. It'll be nearly identical and save you probably upwards of $600-700 (or your local equivalent currency).

Below the iceberg: "Not all dogs have bones"

"Redwood are algae" is a similar statement to "Pterodactyls are fish" or "bees are crustaceans". Redwoods are land plants, thus are also members of Viridiplantae - the clade containing land plants and green algae. The sister taxa to Viridiplantae in clade Archaeplastida are Glaucophyta (unicellular algae), and Rhodaria (contains red algae among other things). Thus since land plants are more closely related to green algae than green algae is to red algae or glaucophytes, if we want to treat the term "algae" as a monophyletic clade, then we have to include land plants in that, which of course includes redwoods. Essentially, this framing would make the term "algae" equivalent to Archaeplastida.

Another simpler interpretation (same idea as "ducks are dinosaurs") might be that all land plants evolved from algae, and nothing can evolve out of a clade, therefore plants must be algae. My hesitation to put this first is due to the fact that I'm unsure if the most recent common ancestor of green algae and plants would itself be classified as algae - this is an exercise left to the reader.

I feel for you comrade. I've had a very different journey than you but I've struggled with loneliness and lost friendships as well. I think an important thing to do in the short term is to reach out to your old friends. Some may be uninterested, but you might be surprised how easily many dormant friendships can be rekindled - I've had friends that I hadn't spoken to for well over 5 years that picked back up like we didn't miss a beat once I actually built up the nerve to reach out. This could be helpful to getting you out of a negative feedback loop.

I've been reading House of Leaves. Not too much to say on it yet since I'm maybe a third of the way through. There's one chapter that serves as a deconstruction on the meaning of echoes that was exceptionally difficult to get through .

I've seen this posted around here a few times. Do you know the source of where this came from? Not trying to be combative, just want to arm myself with more knowledge!

I just finished A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. Certain aspects of it were good, but I think "cozy" books probably just aren't for me. I think I need my fiction to have higher stakes. I'll probably still finish the series out to see if it grows on me any further.

yes