Shifters

I think Noah is right — the younger millennials and Gen Z are losing, slowly. People like sex and fun. That’s hard to fight against long term. What’s odd is how little the pandemic actually shifted. Culturally, it’s like it never happened. You don’t have to be a Covidian to think it would’ve changed more. But it did not. That bears some examination.

But Sure

I can’t get over people saying that someone like Sydney Sweeney has an “impossible” body. Like, come on, I’ve dated quite a few women with bodies very similar to hers. I assure you it’s not impossible or even unlikely.

It’s certainly impossible, however, if you snarf 4,000 calories a day and consider a full quart of ice cream a normal dessert portion. The clownish Fat Acceptance movement really, really fucked a lot of people over with their ideology. That movement should be dissolved as a terrorist organization (I’m half serious).

Jarring

I have to admit, it was a little jarring seeing someone refer to Nine Inch Nails as “old people music” the other day. Because of course I’m old enough to remember when NIN was very new and quite threatening to middle class sensibilities.

But I also agree — NIN music seems aslant our current cultural moment, having little to do with modern concerns. The music is not relevant because it’s talking about different matters from a very different time. It’s embedded in vastly variant assumptions that seem inapplicable or even trivial today. Prudishness resurgent makes a song like “Closer” seem like an alien artifact. Also, “Head Like a Hole” is a debate that became a generally-accepted conclusion among younger people.

So yeah, NIN is “old people music.” It has precious little to do with today. Then, it seemed like the future because it was talking about the present. Now it just feels like ancient history.

Electricull

I remember when electric cars becoming common was “impossible.” That was being claimed regularly as recently as five years ago.

It’s interesting how often the “impossible” becomes quotidian in a very short span of time. Something to remember when you see confident pronouncements about the future.

Blasting

To be clear about something, I’m not looking forward to Civil War 2.0.

However, I absolutely am looking forward to a wing of A-10s absolutely blasting the fuck out of a column of MAGA dipshits in F-250s. I’ll be hooting and hollering just like I somehow got the chance to travel back in time to see Big Mama Thornton perform “Hound Dog” live in 1952. No, I do not give a fuck about them, their deaths or its effects on their (mostly) wives or their kids. I hope they all die embarrassingly if they do something like begin another civil war and that there are no body parts left to recover after they are all blasted apart by 30mm depleted uranium rounds fired from the A-10’s GAU-8 Avenger gun.

As the saying goes, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And they’re gonna win a helluva lot of those.

Read Speed

God me too. I can read French, German, Spanish and now Italian to an increasing extent — but I am slow! Well, slow by my standards. I read English absurdly quickly. I can only read French half as fast as that, Spanish and German even slower, etc. It’s quite annoying and it’s difficult to feel like I’m crawling through something that I could go warp speed through in English.

But hey, I’m having fun (usually).

Deck Aid

If you’re not trans, this is also a great map of states you should not fucking move to, and states that you should urgently move away from if you’re living there now. Most of them are going to go to absolute hell in the next decade.

Believe it. Because I’ll be right.

Libertidiot

As many people have noted, it was funny watching the ludicrous tears of all the pseudo-libertarians demanding a bailout after their easily-preventable failures. They got it, too. All of them should’ve been hung out to dry. For years they had styled themselves as too clever to need government, too intelligent to require state intervention in their provident lives. Then some minor inconvenience occurred and they were bawling like a two-year-old denied eating from the dog’s bowl.

They got what they wanted this time but I’m not quite sure they realize the contempt many people have for them, how ridiculous they look to most others not in the Silicon Valley bubble, and how that can quickly turn into real change. Let’s hope it does.

Virality

A lot of people do in fact believe it. They are insane but they want to buy into the propaganda. Also, a lot of non-Chinese viral researchers doing stuff with gain-of-function and related science are also extremely eager to push this sort of nonsense so their funding doesn’t get cut.