2024.04.23

Argentina

(inspired by this one for the sake of full transparency)

Is it me or has this site become much slower as of recent?

worth checking your cookies, because tumblr was trying to run games on mine

what in the fuck

Yeah, I had 3.8 GB stored, that's so weird.

‘The grave of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow is surmounted by a stone on which is engraved a rest beneath a fermata with a triple forte noted at the bottom: A very, very loud extended silence.’

- John Biguenet, Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.49.

The fermata suggests the indicated notation (in this case, a rest) is to continue at the discretion of the conductor. When the chosen conductor arrives, Alfred Schnittke will rise again.

One of the most misunderstood lines in Sense and Sensibility

It's not uncommon to see quotes from Jane Austen novels out of context without any regard to irony or the speaker's real motives, but one quote I see posted without many people commenting is this one:

It sounds very deep and profound, but in context, we're seeing the extremes of Marianne Dashwood's views.

I believe in penny. She’s an unstoppable force.

there's indoor cats, there's outdoor cats, and then there's penny

Check your hand sanitizer y'all

Here's the full, updated list from the FDA. It's currently (well, as of March 14 '24) 67 pages.

Also be aware that a LOT of companies substitute cheaper ingredients in their food products. Which is obnoxious but fine, unless you're allergic to the substitute ingredients.

Olive oil, tea, honey, cinnamon (not that lead is exactly "safe" to eat), vanilla, coffee, fish, blah blah blah. The list goes on. Any corners a company can cut to save .001%, they will. Usually the substitutes are mostly harmless, but it isn't as if companies care about consumer safety when there's profit to be made.

To clarify, the list linked is ALL hand sanitizer products officially recalled (and may have ongoing additions). It is NOT just the Aruba Aloe brand; there are many brands by various manufacturers on the list. So please check to see if you own anything on that list.

Well remembered, Mr. Lipwig.

my copy didn't come with a dust jacket so I'm making my own cover instead x

Thinking about how Moist's scams and cons are rooted in a cynical belief that those bastards would try to trick me if they could as well. That's his justification for his actions, other than just because he finds it thrilling. And he sees what he does as ultimately harmless - he doesn't kill or maim, slips in and out of lives without a trace - so he doesn't recognize that his actions have meaning until Mr Pump hits him with 2.338 statistical deaths, and doesn't accept it until he finds out Adora Belle was hurt by his scam.

He's wounded so many people. Sure there are the people he believes everyone to be, the ones he relies upon for his scams to work, who try to take advantage of him and are cheated in turn. But there are also desperate people, people who weren't directly involved like Adora Belle, maybe even people who against all odds still tried to be kind to a stranger and were punished for it. And he just isn't capable of realizing that maybe people are real for longer than he sees them for, that they have lives to live and worldviews that can be shredded with too many hurts. He can't accept that people are capable of more than cynical pragmatism, of don't hurt others because they might hurt me.

But all throughout Going Postal, that idea of his is disproven again and again. There's Stanley and Mr Groat, who eke out a little coexistence despite being forgotten, and the elderly postmasters who join him just because they loved their job; there's Adora Belle Dearheart, who was wounded and cheated in life from so many sides and still used that resentment to help marginalized people. Although his own perspective focuses more on who he is rather than a new understanding of who he was, and he rarely reflects on just how much his worldview changes from beginning to end (except when confronted by Adora Belle), he still goes from doing selfish things for selfish reasons to doing things that benefit everyone, especially those he cares about, for selfish reasons. He can still enjoy the exhilarating game of creating new personas and pushing his luck while believing a bit more that humans can be genuinely earnest people as well. And as he approaches that truth, he becomes invested in his life as well, because now he has to stick with it.

Going Postal's about redemption in many ways - the idea that atonement doesn't lie in fixing every mistake you've made, but in moving on and trying to prevent making them again, in recognizing your own crimes being done by others and working against them.

Isn't that at least a little hopeful? That, ultimately, the world isn't so cynical and bitter as you've based your entire life on? That it isn't so difficult to exist after all? It's a lot to take in, but so is any paradigm shift.

Sense and Sensibility is high up on my list of favorite Jane Austen novels (Persuasion is at the top), but as Austen’s first published book, it does retain a few problems that later books don’t, chiefly (imho) that there are very few on page interactions between the end game couples.

We know that Elinor and Edward exhibit closeness with each other because we see other characters who’ve seen them together react to it, but in terms of conversations that make it into the book, there are far more scenes of Edward gently teasing Marianne about the fact that they have opposite tastes in art and nature (as in, scenic views.)

Meanwhile, Marianne spends most of the book actively avoiding Colonel Brandon while he has important and surprisingly emotionally intimate conversations with Elinor.

There might be something in how the relationship between the sisters is so much more important in this book than any of the others that it’s almost more important to demonstrate how Elinor’ and Marianne’s future partners will fit into this relationship as brothers-in-law than as husbands.

But about a third of the way through the book, it’s hard not to be intrigued by the idea of an alternate ending where the sisters end up with the opposite partner. I do think the actual couples are ultimately well matched. Elinor and Edward are both “still waters run deep” kind of people who understand each other well, and the annotated edition I’ve read most recently (David M Shapard) points out that Colonel Brandon’s tragic backstory is ripped right from the common tropes for heroes of Romantic novels of the time, signaling to contemporary readers that he actually fits Marianne’s romantic ideals as well or better than Willoughby even while she dismisses him.

But wouldn’t it also be fun if, in commiserating with Elinor about his unrequited feelings for Marianne, Colonel Brandon were to realize to his surprise that his initial infatuation with her was more about nostalgia for the first love he lost than real, current interest in passionate and idealistic teenage girls, and that as an adult what he really wants is a grown woman with enough sense to match him as an equal partner. And Elinor, disappointed that Edward’s sense did not prevent him from acting very foolishly in a way that hurt her, finds herself falling for an older, wiser version of a man who could have stepped right out of the pages of one of Marianne’s favorite novels.

Meanwhile, Edward having fallen for the first time for the sharp and pretty Lucy Steele only to be disenchanted by her ignorance, then found himself in love with her polar opposite in the sensible and noble Elinor Dashwood (who initially returns his feelings but moves on from him before he can disentangle himself from Lucy Steele), loses his heart for a third time to the romantic and sensitive Marianne Dashwood, whom he had once hoped to call sister. And Marianne looks up one day from her “I’ll never love again after Willoighby” philosophizing to find that without noticing it happening, she’s already fallen for a shy, subdued man who feels emotions with the same quiet intensity she learned to recognize and love in her sister but who commits what she once considered the unforgivable crime of preferring to look at straight, healthy trees over the picturesque ideal of twisted, blasted ones.

It would be really cute is what I’m saying.

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

The Panama Canal

Unmute !

Oh my goodness, that's a lot of opinions.

Rolling AND crispy meows.