Cristof de Loet

I don’t get the “I want to quit Twitter cuz Musk, but where will I get my [insert hobby etc] news and updates?” Are the live blogs and such for many activities insufficient? Or the hours of wait for “traditional” media so long that it overrides the expresssed moral reservations?

Digital subs that require a phone call, don’t link the phone number on their site, and then don’t offer cancellation as a menu item. Boo.

One of the substack newsletters I subscribe to is moving to another platform. I’m dropping the rest. I can no longer support the platform monetarily, directly. Now I have to decide if I will stop indirectly supporting it though links.

Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad is so good. Whether one loves the epic tale or has never found a way into it, I can’t recommend it enough. 📚

Edgar Ramírez has so much screen presence. At least in Florida Man!

I predicted from the beginning of the Musk era that it was unlikely Twitter would (effectively) die and that, if it did, it would take a long, long time. Even so, I don’t understand why people are still there. Everyone doesn’t need opinions on everything. The speed of traditional media is more than fast enough for anyone’s needs…and where it isn’t, accuracy is proportionally terrible. Why won’t people give it up, especially those who don’t generate significant revenue from their presence there?

I’ll admit to finding a few interesting ideas in Amy Hungerford’s Post *45 book (Making Literature Now), but when she gets to sniffing which way the wind is blowing to get attention and attempting to justify willful ignorance through the momentum of square-wheeled bandwagons, her work is dreadful.

Given the harmful effects of light pollution, Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist at the University of San Francisco, and John Barentine, astronomer and science communicator at Dark Sky Consulting, have coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term … is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

—from The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it | Space [archive]

What if the money you accumulated in life died with you? What if actuaries determined the amount of money people need to live a comfortable life, and earnings were capped there? What would a world look like in which the ardor of one’s work — not just luck and geography and privilege — determined a person’s wealth?

[…]

Money may be a language, a way to translate value in terms we all understand, but money is not the sum of what we have to say. The more money one has, the less meaning work has to that person. At the same time, life’s most meaningful work, like raising children or cooking a meal for others, often goes unpaid. And yet this is the substance of life, the stuff that determines who we are and how we will be remembered.

[…]

Is his idea of an expiring currency any more absurd than the status quo we inherited? Perhaps his greatest contribution is to remind us that the rules of money can be reinvented, as indeed they always have.

—from What If Money Expired? - NOEMA [archive]

Let me correct the headlines: Clarence Thomas blackmailed conservative oligarchs for bribes.

There’s the American pronunciation of names like Odysseus, there’s the Greek pronunciation, and then there’s the unique fusion of the two indelibly imparted to me by D.A. Bartlett, beloved teacher of Ancient Greek literature (RIP).

“When My Time Comes”

There were moments of dreams I was offered to save
I lived less like a workhorse, more like a slave
I thought that one quick moment that was noble or brave
Would be worth the most of my life
So I pointed my fingers and shouted few quotes I knew
As if something that’s written should be taken as true
But every path I had taken and conclusion I drew
Would put truth back under the knife

And now the only piece of advice that continues to help
Is anyone that’s making anything new only breaks something else

When my time comes
When my time comes

So I took what I wanted and put it out of my reach
I wanted to pay for my successes with all my defeats
And if Heaven was all that was promised to me
Why don’t I pray for death?
Now, it seems like the unravelling started too soon
Now I’m sleeping in hallways and I’m drinking perfume
And I’m speaking to mirrors and I’m howling at moons
While the worse and the worse that it gets

Oh, you can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks
Yes, you can stare into the abyss, but it’s starin' right back

When my time comes
When my time comes

Well, you can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks
Yes, you can stare into the abyss, but it’s starin' right back

When my time comes
When my time comes

When my time comes

—lyrics by Dawes

When I was young, I was angry, cynical and possessed of a tragic world view. Life was cruel and people were fools.

As I grew older, though, I realized that most people are angry and cynical and possessed of a tragic world view, and so I was faced with something of a pessimist’s conundrum: if A) people were fools, and B) people tended to be angry and cynical, then C) how could I be angry and cynical without being a fool as well? As George Carlin said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” It follows, then, that if large groups of people are doing something, it’s probably stupid (check out the Best Seller lists, or box-office hits). Even misery. Misery began to seem easy to me - lazy, dull, obvious, no matter how much the miseries patted themselves on the back for being so insightful and wise. I determined, instead, to laugh – a Vonnegutian laugh, a Beckettian laugh, a Kafkaian laugh – a laugh that doesn’t deny the abyss, it mocks it. The highest laugh, as Beckett put it, the risus puris, the laugh that laughs at that which isn’t funny.

—Shalom Auslander
—from The Not-Sad Story About the Very Sad Thing [archive]

I started writing in July 2020 when I was eight years old. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury sparked something in me, and since then I have been writing every day. I’ve completed two novels, two feature screenplays, and hundreds of short stories and poems. Some of my other favorite writers are Haruki Murakami, Louise Glück, Daphne du Maurier, Sara Teasdale, Leonora Carrington, W. Somerset Maugham, and Kelly Link.

—Mazzy Sleep
—found in Mazzy Sleep [archive]

📝 (emphasis mine)

Wow.