125 replies to this topic

[rudy the red-beaked reindeer]

I'm joking, I'm joking! I'm jealous. Do you remember the general time period you were an active member, waitress? there were certainly a lot of awful things from the real old days. lotsa prolly prot-incels on the internet at the time, but I also think there were things of value from then as well.

I think I was probably extremely active from about 2003 to 2010? after that, not so much. I definitely ditched the whole admin thing towards the very end, and I feel like that was around 2009 or so. I think by then I was just aging out of the place, and a lot of people I used to talk to had moved on as well. I also just like... didn't want to be the internet persona headphonics, so I spent a number of years avoiding any socializing in internet communities whatsoever. it was like a cleanse. I remember catamites showing up and being way too cool for anyone else here, and after that other people started coming around and it seemed like a cooler place, but I was already gone so I mostly just felt good about the community developing into something better and more interesting and considerably stranger. I didn't feel like I had any real place in it, but I thought that the people who did were probably a lot less terrible than I was. unlike other members I feel like this place so consistently incentivized sneering critiques of ________ that it actively stifled my ability to think creatively. I think that probably changed a lot after I left tho

but yeah, what I remember most at this point was the incel-adjacent shit. it seems obvious in hindsight. there was a lot of dope shit, though; I'm not trying to say there wasn't. I learned to love video games and began developing a critical lens for art in general here, I had friends and a place to kick it. I've spent a large majority of my life being incredibly certain I don't entirely belong in the room I'm in, and that's fine, but this was one of two places where I was able to feel like I was in the right room, even if I'm embarrassed about it.

maybe the most important thing is that this place left me discontent with my real life friendships and I think it taught me to expect more from connections off the internet, and to try to feel less hostility towards strangers because they didn't get me or whatever. also, steel dying was of the most important points in my early adulthood. I remember sitting around finding it strange that I couldn't talk to him and eventually coming to terms with the fact that it was such a waste to feel ashamed of loving people and of loving other men and of refusing to accept the vulnerability that came with that. so the place was toxic, but I think I came away from it with a better sense of how my anxieties and insecurities about all that stuff had ultimately been the cause of my needing this community to begin with, and that paradoxically the community itself was probably the biggest source of loneliness. so I guess you could say the ~most important lesson~ that I learned here was that I should leave immediately

so all of that was cool, but I can't bring myself to feel any nostalgia, like, at all. even with everything I said above, I remember the doxxing and borderline-hate speech and rampant misogyny and the actual child pornography the most vividly. it's hard for me to talk about that shit with people while still being able to credibly articulate any positive impact being here could have had, and at a certain point you kinda start to understand where they're coming from. I'm glad other people don't necessarily feel the same, though

love ya headphonics, you still write kind of similar so I figured it was either you or esiann in a dark mood finally venting how much she secretly fucking hated this place all along. genuinely glad it sounds like you're doing well and are successful! still remember you posting about how you found out you couldn't eat gluten. my stomach got completely fucked at the beginning of this year and I thought of you several times while going to the doctor and getting scoped and trying eliminating stuff from my diet.

 

I think if you had stuck around maybe you'd see this place and what it became differently, but it makes sense why you wanted to leave and doesn't sound like you needed it anymore. I'm sure I romanticize academia but it's long been a fantasy of mine. myself, it's really rare anything ever stimulates me creatively or intellectually, and that's largely my fault for being depressed, introverted and overworking myself, but it would certainly help knowing people looking for the same thing. god bless the people I work with but they're just not interested in anything not dealing with work, college football, home-ownership, stocks/money, netflix shows and music if I'm lucky. that's a long boring story tho.

[boy_waitress]

sometimes I remember esiann if only because her name was excerpted from patty mayonnaise from doug spelled backwards, and I can't even begin to understand how one would reach such a decision. also as it turns out I don't have issues with gluten, I just had (read: have) what is apparently moderately severe IBS. still tho, having a Completely Fucked Stomach is v relatable. I don't remember anything about you super clearly except that you were talking with someone about Kate bush before I knew who that was and I'll sometimes wish I could remember the conversation.

 

what did you end up doing? i think it's kind of impossible not to romanticize academia unless your opinion is that it's kind of terrible. I used to think finding some tenure track faculty position would be really cool, but as an institution, it's so grossly exploitative and hostile to people working in it that it's hard to imagine actually staying in it. part of this is the cynicism that comes from being a negro in a white people department/field, and it's esp. bad for minorities. idk, I'm ambivalent but leaning towards the negative. I love that I get to think about things I think are interesting for a living, but also think it means something that nobody's called a polymath anymore; hyper-specialization ends up obscuring a lot of the beauty of thought, imo.

 

it also means that in practice you frequently have nobody around to talk about your interests with, either. the guy across the hall does phylogenetic shit, the next two do theoretical population genetics, the people at the other end of the floor do conservation economics, the people downstairs do gut microbiomes in various species of beetles, the person upstairs does I don't even know... probably something about nitrogen cycles in the soil (this is actually really cool bc you start getting into world systems ecology and like bioenergetics and some really interesting sociopolitical territory that nobody in my department wants to talk about even a little bit!!)? the people across the street do invasion biology and some shit about botany and moss that I never paid enough attention to to remember, and I do mathematical models of sociocultural evolution. none of us have any idea what anybody else is talking about beyond some baseline education in evolutionary biology. it's kind of worse than it was before because you'd expect it to be a space for Enlightened Discussion.  sometimes we get to argue about the ethics and implicit construction of ~the other~ in invasion biology, tho, and I've gotten pretty into some philosophy of science stuff.

it's like... have you ever been at a party and talking with someone about music and you realize that despite both of you being into indie/alternative/whatever the fuck, neither of you have ever heard of any of the same bands? like you just keep naming them and neither of you recognize any of them at all? it's like that. like, it's exactly like that. ahhh!!!!

but you should still got to grad school someday if you want!!! most other people around me seem like they're happy fine. or just join a book club or an obscure subreddit. imo it's been easier to find Your People over the pandemic in some ways just because the barrier to interaction via zoom is essentially nonexistent and people are now used to navigating relationships through video chatting.

I still write too much, tho. years of education have still left me in a place where I have to go through repeated rounds of edits for even, like, an important email.

 

[boy_waitress]

Would you say it’s a combination of some sort of trauma or regret over your past self?

I mostly just think it was kind of a waste of time and wish I hadn't needed to extensively participate in what was in retrospect kind of a gross internet community to reach some relation of self. I'm in a good place now, but I was dumb and ruined all my relationships for years after I left here, and I can specifically attribute a lot of it to ways of being a dude on the internet that I just kinda uncritically carried over into my real life. blech. blech. 

[rudy the red-beaked reindeer]

sometimes I remember esiann if only because her name was excerpted from patty mayonnaise from doug spelled backwards, and I can't even begin to understand how one would reach such a decision. also as it turns out I don't have issues with gluten, I just had (read: have) what is apparently moderately severe IBS. still tho, having a Completely Fucked Stomach is v relatable. I don't remember anything about you super clearly except that you were talking with someone about Kate bush before I knew who that was and I'll sometimes wish I could remember the conversation.

what did you end up doing? i think it's kind of impossible not to romanticize academia unless your opinion is that it's kind of terrible. I used to think finding some tenure track faculty position would be really cool, but as an institution, it's so grossly exploitative and hostile to people working in it that it's hard to imagine actually staying in it. part of this is the cynicism that comes from being a negro in a white people department/field, and it's esp. bad for minorities. idk, I'm ambivalent but leaning towards the negative. I love that I get to think about things I think are interesting for a living, but also think it means something that nobody's called a polymath anymore; hyper-specialization ends up obscuring a lot of the beauty of thought, imo.

it also means that in practice you frequently have nobody around to talk about your interests with, either. the guy across the hall does phylogenetic shit, the next two do theoretical population genetics, the people at the other end of the floor do conservation economics, the people downstairs do gut microbiomes in various species of beetles, the person upstairs does I don't even know... probably something about nitrogen cycles in the soil (this is actually really cool bc you start getting into world systems ecology and like bioenergetics and some really interesting sociopolitical territory that nobody in my department wants to talk about even a little bit!!)? the people across the street do invasion biology and some shit about botany and moss that I never paid enough attention to to remember, and I do mathematical models of sociocultural evolution. none of us have any idea what anybody else is talking about beyond some baseline education in evolutionary biology. it's kind of worse than it was before because you'd expect it to be a space for Enlightened Discussion. sometimes we get to argue about the ethics and implicit construction of ~the other~ in invasion biology, tho, and I've gotten pretty into some philosophy of science stuff.

it's like... have you ever been at a party and talking with someone about music and you realize that despite both of you being into indie/alternative/whatever the fuck, neither of you have ever heard of any of the same bands? like you just keep naming them and neither of you recognize any of them at all? it's like that. like, it's exactly like that. ahhh!!!!

but you should still got to grad school someday if you want!!! most other people around me seem like they're happy fine. or just join a book club or an obscure subreddit. imo it's been easier to find Your People over the pandemic in some ways just because the barrier to interaction via zoom is essentially nonexistent and people are now used to navigating relationships through video chatting.

I still write too much, tho. years of education have still left me in a place where I have to go through repeated rounds of edits for even, like, an important email.

editing is the best, I miss when it automatically added "last edited by: at:" so you'd be forced to share your secret shame with the world

ya that was real early on, I think that's when steel blocked me from his livejournal? I was really into Kate Bush at the time and I guess he or someone had an issue with being a fan of a solo female artist. this prompted me to post some cringy acerbic pseudo-feminist attempt at an argument as a comment on his lj that got me banned. that or I conflated two events, but the memory pops in my head sometimes of steel (or someone, but in my memory it's always steel) on the forums thinking it was friggen g*y that I liked Kate Bush. it had to be early af though because I recall talking openly about female artists later on during the Bad Times with no issue. we didn't interact a lot but we mostly butted heads for absolutely no good reason, at that point in time forum politics and other utterly insignificant shit really seemed to matter. I swear we had like a heart to heart in PM years later but I can't find it, closest thing I could find was a convo with someone on a throwaway acct about urbanism and stuff where they told me to read Walzer

whats the relationship between soil nitrogen cycles and sociopolitical territory? sounds way too complex to explain in a forum post, sorry nevermind!!! invasion biology, I deal with that consumer-side because I am a landscape architect, and we learn that invasive species are Bad until you start working for a firm and wait the principal says no actually this particular species is Good and then you research it and find out no one knows wrt this species but it got put on a list by someone who's not a scientist for no biological reason. landscape architecture is 2% designing cool stuff and 98% coordination, bad projects you have to do to earn a living, and working with rich people who are sometimes nice but also sometimes will openly treat you like a peasant. we don't earn much for the cost of living in the areas where it's a viable job, so that's why the older guys with families are focused on work-family life and everything that goes with it. and I actually do have some good convos with one or two of the younger people sometimes, it's just not enough. I haven't found my people outside this nearly empty forum and made no progress toward that over the demi, but not for not trying.

I don't think I'll ever do grad school bc I never figured out how to do it that makes sense for me from a financial pov, but I fantasize about fully diving in. I could maybe teach a class though, that could actually happen! what you and your colleagues do does sound really interesting tho, and even with the indie band comparison it's still hard for me to comprehend how these fields could be so specialized that you can barely converse with each other about them, but that is unfortunate. not to mention the exploitation and things like that that would certainly take a lot of the appeal out of it!

[Mope]

I was wondering that too about soil cycles and sociopolitical territory

I assumed it was something like a huge metropolis or densely urban environment once depending on local farmlands for food, produce and shit but overtime the nutrition gets drained out the soil cus of over farming or overdevelopment so they outsource these things with trade to more rural or underdeveloped regions which inevitably occurs in a kinda rinse and repeat cycle but I could just be assuming shit.


And I thought about compartmentalizing academics; figure it’s kinda like the Manhattan project because you’re all working within a specific scope of academia that may or may not interrelate but I guess this is considered more efficient for material purposes?

Like finding and applying new discoveries or data?

It probably wouldn’t be as beneficial to the individual in terms of understanding or learning but to the institution itself I reckon it would be.

Figure that’s probably got a lot to do with the marketability of it though

I likes learning things

I learns lots of things

But I kind of listened to what diet coke said once, “learn your passions, your interests” because oftentimes pursuit of a career out of it can ruin it for you.


I don’t think I’d like academia, I’ve worked around quite a few professionals like that and when they were cool, they were REALLY cool.

But a lot were pompous assholes and just sad people. Like; very critical and had an air of superiority about them.

I know not all are like that but I figure it’s kind of like finding a cop who isn’t a judgemental, authoritarian asshole.

Also I listen to ABBA ironically

Think Halsey is a fuckin goddess and really like cat power

I remember steel being like that, early on. I also remember him kind of changing about it too

I remember identifying as a feminist and getting in a really long, stupid argument with vellfire about it.

Cus I really like old school feminism

The kind where women didn’t wait or get irate because men were too ignorant to change. They took it upon themselves and were fuckin soldiers.

Then I kind of stopped identifying as a feminist because in a lot of ways she was right. Not my place to really have an opinion. Though at the same time everyone will and everyone does.

Now I don’t really identify with anything; I take good ideas or good principles, doesn’t matter where.

I takes em and makes em mines

[boy_waitress]

oh man i love walzer! i read him at the same time as i was reading rawls and nozik and found his account of political and economic life considerably more compelling than either, and certainly more useful than a lot of the continental shit i’ve gotten into in recent years (except agamben. has anyone read agamben?). altho i've revisited rawls in the past couple of years when trying to develop a sort of ontology of progress as we understand it, mostly bc it gets conflated with what amounts to standard of living stuff, e.g., well at least the peasants have big screen TVs now, and i think that obscures the fact that justice is not necessarily based on the distribution of resources. rawls seem to have displayed a degree of ambivalence on the matter, but leaned towards resourcist views. if u go into more contemporary discussion of his ideas, e.g., nussbaum, you start getting more pushback against the idea that an ugg on your face is any less unjust than a jackboot. walzer was still probably the most influential thinker for me tho and there existing different domains for what constitutes a just distribution of resources, material or otherwise, is still mostly how i think about things.

this actually lead to a lot of reading on my part about different theories of currency and how its intrinsic fungibility allowed for all sorts of weird shit that’s probably not socially ideal but can’t really be mitigated unless one simply limits the spaces in which money is a meaningful means (lol) of acquisition. this eventually culminated in me considering the absurdity of transitive valuation by calculating approx. how many grains of rice it would take to buy a lamborghini, where the cost of rice is pegged to the median cost of a pound of rice in the US, and the # of grains in a pound of rice was just pulled from some source that i think calculated the average size of a grain of rice and the volume of a container that would hold a pound of rice. the lambo was just the median cost of lambos in general for the past... decade i think? i was too lazy to go back further bc i didn’t want to get into the used market or have to account for inflation. anyway the answer is about 12.5 billion. a lamborghini costs, on average, 12,500,000,000 grains of rice. i'm not sure how i feel about "how much rice equals a laborghini?" being a perfectly valid question. so, thanks walzer!!!

anyway yeah the politics of bioenergetics stuff is too long or w/e, and a lot of my thoughts on it are pretty young. if you're into leftist sci-fi you should check out the mars trilogy by ksr; he talks about the most basic unit of currency, and the only truly egalitarian one, being the kcal and there’s some writing about conceptualizing value through energy flows. that's getting into a really radical political space tho. has anyone read any of the laboria cuboniks/xenofeminism stuff? or like, meta-modernism, or the politics of the supernatural? i have like two people to talk about this with and they're both v busy when i'm not! i still talk to darkwhite/idiot_kid from old gw about mark fisher and stuff, though. if you're into it i'd legit love to talk about Nature as construct, and how that intersects with anthropogenic alteration of the Environment. my ex-gf-current-roommate has a lot of strong feelings about lawns, and landscaping.

and yeah idk, they can talk to each other but one of the points of collaboration is that you very often have an interest in projects that you in no way have the means to do, and often it entails enlisting ppl whose skillset you only barely understand. these dudes go to seminars and stuff so they can talk to each other but academics in general are pretty myopic in their interests/expertise. it’s kinda the point of interdisciplinarity too (that and nobody knows how to use databases and it’s impossible to find ppl in other fields doing the same research. once i saw someone in a social science essentially rediscover calculus and somehow get published).

teaching is good, btw; you should do it! i genuinely enjoy it. but also my job is doing exactly what tucker carlson tells white folks i'm doing to our youth so ofc i do. currently procrastinating on course design tbh. get at me if you wanna shit on charles murray or talk about fascists’ somewhat successful deployment of "human biodiversity" as part of an attempt to legitimize fundamentally racist ideas!!! god i'm so lonely. not really but it gets a little boring writing in a journal and then filing it away under n for nobody gives a shit but you jeff and my students are often p into but are also… 22. my friends are super into it but adults can only really kick it once every week or two. sry this is rambly and i genuinely don’t wanna sound like i’m word-dropping but it would be cool to chat if u(’s guys) have ideas

ps i response to the data question i'm a theory scumbag and have never worked w/ any data whatsoever. also, yeah, white insulated classism, misogyny, etc. etc. your experience is accurate, tho I've been lucky to find more sincere ppl than self-aggrandizing. tho its complicated bc certain groups of people aren't going to automatically get credit for the work they do and they have to be their own advocates and that can often read as vanity

[Mope]

anyway yeah the politics of bioenergetics stuff is too long or w/e, and a lot of my thoughts on it are pretty young. if you're into leftist sci-fi you should check out the mars trilogy by ksr; he talks about the most basic unit of currency, and the only truly egalitarian one, being the kcal and there’s some writing about conceptualizing value through energy flows. that's getting into a really radical political space tho. has anyone read any of the laboria cuboniks/xenofeminism stuff? or like, meta-modernism, or the politics of the supernatural? i have like two people to talk about this with and they're both v busy when i'm not! i still talk to darkwhite/idiot_kid from old gw about mark fisher and stuff, though. if you're into it i'd legit love to talk about Nature as construct, and how that intersects with anthropogenic alteration of the Environment. my ex-gf-current-roommate has a lot of strong feelings about lawns, and landscaping.

I need to know about all these things


And I get a feeling kind of like that when I come back from work for an extended period of time.

It’s wierd; usually I come in through rural Louisiana but I just take in the kind of makeup and layout of the towns and more densely populated living spaces themselves. The winding roads and disjointed suburbs and businesses kind of stacked upon each other. Big stacks pumping smoke and small, fucked up; makeshift marinas along the river.

Probably not exactly the same but I just get this feeling it is so automated, monotonous, kind of self defeating in a way.

Like a big human scar in the world, there’s just this sheer overwhelming feeling of self preservation and self importance but to me it just looks like a million ignorant assed ants going about their business. And I’m not simply talking about URBAN DEVELOPMENT itself; just….the way it’s done feels really wrong to me in certain instances. Like there’s no harmony there.

Like; if a big sinkhole came and swallowed up half the fuckin city they’d still find a way to cope, reason it away and keep on truckin.

They can be really bad about that in the south, I went to Houston like….ten years ago and absolutely hated it.

When they told me I was going I was walking around everywhere excited: TEXAS! TEXAS TEXAS TEXAS

But it was just this congested, sprawling; concrete hellhole with tolls everywhere

I fucking hated it

I read something about an ancient tree that a family bought and handed over property rights to it; so legally the tree was considered a separate entity. Like a human life capable of making its own decisions concerning itself.

And a greedy land developer wanted to cut it down to build.


But officials were like….”the tree says NO”

Then it died and another tree grew in its place from a seed from the first tree and they tried again and they were like

“The son of the first tree has inheritance rights and also says, NO.”

I just thought this was magnificently hilarious and laughed my ass off for awhile over it.

[Mope]

I get what you’re saying about academics

I’m blue collar though and formerly uneducated, like mine is professional training

It’s not as BAD where I’ve been working recently because comparatively speaking most everyone else is barely literate

But before; it was god awful

These people would just shoot out college thinking everyone else around them was a fucking moron because they went bankrupt dolling out for a degree.

I’d have fun with them though; I act kinda purposefully ignorant in a way I use stupid words or speak simply. I have a more complex vocabulary and understanding of SOME things but I don’t necessarily flex it unless I meet someone that doesn’t find it threatening or overwhelming.


So they’d watch me walking around cutting up and not caring about how I’m perceived then condescend and I’d whip that shit out in a really funny and unexpected way.

“W-WHAT!?”

I learned a lot that way too though

I worked with an Egyptian kid and people would tease him about not being able to touch pork

He was talking about other places he’d worked and I was like: “BRAH! How the FUCK you work at a meat factory in TEXAS and you can’t touch pork!?”

I was joking but it escalated in us talking about the Gaza Strip, how it was founded. The nature of Hamas, Israeli overdevelopment and authoritarianism. Difference between shi’ite and Sunnis (if I remember that right)

I was asking questions about the 14th century Muslim golden age and modern militant Muslim ideology in comparison and contrast.

He basically explained to me that the only way to go that kind of harmony that USED to be there between the three great faiths would be for Muslims to reform and own it.

Something about it’s a kind of underlying indoctrinated belief; it’s not a thing the more fundamentalist sects could easily let go of.

Talked about the Taliban, Yemen was in conflict at the time.

Now a lot of it was HIS perspective, but one few really commonly understood or hear I think

I got really pissed off because I’d gone hardcore manic and Israel was BOMBING THE SHIT out of UN clinics, schools, everyone trying to get Hamas (‘twas bullshit) and they had this cool bald English dude on the news dodging rockets and talking mad shit to the Israeli officials trying to explain it away.

I was mad because I couldn’t stop thinking about it and was like

THIS IS BULLSHIT! THIS IS BULLSHIT!

IMA BREAK A TV!

Egyptian kid: Don’t break a tv Farren

[rudy the red-beaked reindeer]

waitress there are a lot of good, legitimate ecological issues with lawns and to some extent certain kinds of landscaping. whoops going on a big tangent, guess this will be the whole post: I haven't thought about it in a long time but the sustainability model is kinda silly tho, it's consumer-grade to begin with and imo condescends to us dumb dirty-ass peasants who prolly only need to see infographics to believe something if the colors are nice enough. it can maybe be useful if applied to things that already have a widely-understood value or lack thereof, like cars, and it's especially useful when applied to things that are already numbers-based reductions of life, like factory farming.

 

it's less useful when people in my profession ruthlessly and indiscriminately apply it to more abstract or less quantifiable things, like how a design makes you feel. like there's a certain utility to be sure, and yeah this is stream of consciousness and I will try to do better, it's just within the profession of landscape architecture it's such a reduction that is currently over-emphasized as part of the profession's attempt to garner more pop appeal and widely-appreciated Value within a capitalist-apologist Democrat kind of framework, like a 'woke capitalism' framework. which is understandable because it's the only place where there's some degree of power to get shit done, and the dirty truth of my profession is that no matter how much they teach you in school about poverty and food deserts and disenfranchised communities and ecology and saving humans and the world and reuniting everyone with nature, we're still a service industry for the wealthy and powerful and maybe, sometimes if we're lucky, we cab dig into one or two of our pet issues on a project and have a positive effect on some facet of society. and when it fucking works it's the absolute best imo. you talk to an old grandma, perched upon a boulder at the highest point at the top of the ADA-accessible spiral ramp in the little public park in the middle of the city, and she tells you her grandkid's names as they play in the stream that was a major fucking hassle to get through with the city and actually inexplicably through it all turned out really nice, and she's beaming ear to ear the whole time telling you she almost never gets to leave the city and never imagined she'd see anything like this. that's great, that will keep you going for a few months at least! but whoops buuuuuuuuuuuurp fart, the stream is not sustainable and needs to be run by a pump and thru a filtration system, don't you fucking get it??? there are people without anywhere to live and crushing medical problems and their family at the end of their rope struggling to help them, but people's tax dollars in part pay for this bullshit??? nothing is allowed to be good under capitalism by its own goddamn fucking self-replicating rules DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND YOU SCUM nothing is good or will ever be allowed to be good, you work for money alone and you chose the dumbest fucking job to do it dumbass no one outside the profession even knows what the fuck it is.

 

fascists’ somewhat successful deployment of "human biodiversity" as part of an attempt to legitimize fundamentally racist ideas!!!

lmao goddamn these people are so fucking dumb. you could immediately think of the next obvious bullshit stance they could have and it will still take their collective brainpower 10 years to get to it on their own, working on it every fucking day on telegram between making posts they deeply, earnestly believe are totally covert on reddit and youtube. like on youtube today I saw yet another obvious numerical code for white supremacy!! ya still doing that, can't think of anything better and somehow it's still fun and interesting to them

 

I haven't read any of the stuff you've mentioned but it sounds interesting at least! ain't too proud anymore to say I struggle with heady political theory sometimes so maybe the mars trilogy is more up my alley.

 

[rudy the red-beaked reindeer]

the egyptian kid story is the best farren, I've said it before but that's my favorite kind of story you tell. just your life and travels man.

dietcoke was definitely right to an extent, but at least I can still enjoy nature and art and design, albeit in a different way than before. I can't look at anything designed without having an opinion on its effectiveness, and it's extremely difficult to look at a plant without focusing on its identifying characteristics and trying to place it in the framework of a botanical family, genus or species, how well the plant is doing in its environment, what could be better. all of that is clutter, none of it's that natural observational place I want to get to.

waitress I didn't end up responding to much but yeah I'd love to chat. virtually everything you've mentioned I'm pretty uneducated about but I enjoy learning.

[Mope]

About sustainability: I DEFINITELY GET EXACTLY what you’re saying about it being a kind of commercialized way to cater to contrived liberal bullshit and the guilt ridden excessively wealthy

But also though; it some ways I see it as the next thing, you know what I mean? A kind of economic self awareness

I think we’re still pretty far off from it having the kind of practical applications we’d really need to make a difference but I also think these things are kind of psychologically and socially important

Like rooftop garden ideas or planting certain types of trees intermittently throughout an area to help filtrate the air.

I saw this real cool thing; like, wind farms are a kinda big deal and they legit work in some places but in the states a lotta people complain because they interfere with scenery or are prone to natural disaster

There’s a kind of theoretical schematic for a ship that operates on these cylindrical wind turbines


They stick out the top of I reckon what you’d call deck level and as the wind interacts with them they generate power that can be stored then redistributed

Also knew this dude on linked in that was planning to manufacture/modify a kind of ship with an open kind of moon pool thing in the keel with a conveyer belt and equipment for sorting/crane and shit. He was going to design drag nets I think it was to collect trash and debris out the ocean, then sort it, then recycle and sell it.


Plastics were going to be redistributed as little pellets and whatever else.

Honestly, it was a pretty good fucking idea. You could use a crane like a dredge does over the side for heavier or more massive layers of debris and trash

He friended me and was asking me about something and I read what he was doing and was like: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!?

And he was showing it to me and explaining it, some stuff about how much trash he could potentially collect. Most of it sits within a certain scope of debt. How he could get returns on investment and then some.

Was looking for investors or support

It was fucking hilarious because he’d kinda troll those liberal leaning conservation posts and topics and be like:

GOT THE ANSWER RIGHT HERE YOU DUMB FUCKS BUT YOURE TOO FULL OF YOUR OWN SHIT AND HEMORRHAGING MONEY TO FUCKIN CARE!


I really like those things; but yeah. So many REALLY GOOD ideas and concepts just get drowned out in the branding, the diatribes, and the politicized bullshit

When I talk to people about it I’m just like “brah, I don’t care what you do or don’t believe in. You cannot deny that we’re wasteful, trashy, ignorant and counter productive. And that MOST of it is because we feed off our own bullshit and don’t hold ourselves accountable. Doesn’t matter if we’re potentially going to kill ourselves or not….there’s a distinct possibility WE WILL. But it doesn’t matter, we are capable of better. That is the reality, we just are.”

Funny thing is even the most ignorant, backwater conservatives will even give you that much.

[Mope]

Yeah I had a few more people ask me to write about those things and I have a few times.

I guess it is kind of interesting and I do perceive and act in different ways that can be entertaining or thoughtful I guess.

I wrote one about this time I thought we were gonna fucking die hooked to a flipped over jackup boat in the middle of winter. Blacked out; loss of power because of a senile engineer the dickhead company man stuck with us.

“It’ll be cool”

…it wasn’t

I remember being in the dark in an engine room, climbing over pipes feeling for an air leak while the boat was bombing up and down like a cork at the beach yelling at him in Spanish because he kept rambling about shit.

Then they finally got this same dude off. He’s got to cross from us to another crew boat though.

Dude, this old fucker got rickety knees and is barely getting around to begin with.

So I’m like DONT WORRY ABOUT YOUR SHIT! I GOT YOUR SHIT! You just worry about getting across the damn boat without falling between them and getting smashed like a fuckin pruny grape!

Engineer: SI HERMANO!

So I just stand there watching this motherfucker try to walk across like a toddler taking steps against a wall.

Pretty much just 100% waiting for him to fall

Because I tried to get the other captain to let me run a line to secure their boat…dumbass redneck wouldn’t listen.

I tried to tell ours he was probably gonna fucking die…couldn’t listen.

So this old dude takes a dip off the tire, starts falling with their boat swaying towards him so I grabbed him, jerked him up over the bulwark then log rolled his ass onto the deck

An older black engineer who had already crossed over was like: DUDE! I SEEN THAT SHIT! YOU LITTLE MOTHERFUCKIN HERO!

I don’t really think that way; it’s different. You just get used to having to do things like that sometimes but that old Mexican had a man crush on me after that

[Mope]

I wrote another one about going to New England and that was really fun

I think I said something about it. Met a dude who was the spitting image of kid cudi and would tell everyone ITS MY BIRTHDAY then order a bunch of drinks and fucking
V A N I S H

It was funny

Our captain taught us a way to play odds on roulette, which actually worked pretty well and every so often I’d see these Jersey shore guido dudes walking around in suits rambling to themselves out loud or screaming

I mean screaming REALLY LOUD

FFFFUUUUUUUUCK

SON OF A BIIIIITCH!

All throughout the casino in Atlantic city

Finally, my drunk ass turns to the table and I’m like. ARE ALL THESE DUDES FUCKING INSANE OR WHAT!?

And a serviceman who was drinking with us turns to me and says; “Bro, if you just bottomed out 40k you’d be screaming like that too!”

And I was like: “Yeah….you’re probably right!”

[Mope]

I also wrote a kind of comedic biopic about a guy I worked with while I sailed on a pseudo military ship in Japan named PAUL

And PAUL was a schizophrenic who was discharged from the army at 19 but dressed in full military get up from that day forward for the rest of his goddamned life.

Paul acted and spoke just like that sergeant off of full metal jacket and had this kind of subtle, clever wit that was SO FUNNY because if you don’t learn him you think he’s just a crazy old man rambling but he’s actually intentionally fucking with people

ALL OF THE TIME

He’s like a fucking savant

[boy_waitress]

It’s wierd; usually I come in through rural Louisiana but I just take in the kind of makeup and layout of the towns and more densely populated living spaces themselves. The winding roads and disjointed suburbs and businesses kind of stacked upon each other. Big stacks pumping smoke and small, fucked up; makeshift marinas along the river.

yeah, the half of my family that isn’t nigerian comes from rural w.v. and i can sort of get where you’re coming from because it’s what the state starts to look like when you’re transitioning out of rural places and into the outer suburbs and it starts to feel like what I imagine tampa is like. i went to pick up a record console a few years back and it was in the middle of nowhere and i realized that i could actually probably live in out of the way areas p easily, and i can handle urban settings well too, but the suburb/exurb parts immediately prompt a sense of ennui

tbh tho i am 100% down with the idea of making do in the presence of a sinkhole. i’m not romanticizing it but esp coming from the rust belt there’s something of profound value and respect for me in being able to build a life among the bones of what was promised to you. ~rust belt gothic~ and all that

btw the tree thing both a) is funny, and b) reminds me of discussions around what constitutes personhood. i got into it through the convo about the delineation between the natural and the man-made, but it’s a really dope area of thought, especially when you consider organisms like clonal colonies, e.g., pando. astra taylor wrote democracy may not exist but we’ll miss it when it’s gone which is a great book and spends a lot of time considering who and what gets to be a stakeholder in society, and specifically references trees

[boy_waitress]

and rudy yea!!! i struggle with a lot of the popular conception of and conversation around sustainability. this occurs in my department and i generally avoid convos about the barriers to the generalizability of that sort of behavior and also why a lot of people they think should Care More don’t give a shit and probably shouldn’t give a shit and individual behaviors are meaningless in any event unless you consider their value as political signals and in any other event it strikes me as similar to arguments that europe had moved past slavery before the US did despite its entire early industrial sector being dependent upon cotton exports

like ~there is no ethical consumption under capitalism~ so i get frustrated when the conversations occur without an acknowledgement that even sustainable models of development generally cannot be disentangled from far less sustainable areas of a market economy and that maybe dumb poor people and minorities don’t give a shit about the environment bc you literally stole it from them and they have so significant investment in land that is mostly owned by you. last year i was trying to leverage floydian white guilt into developing a collab course between my department and africana studies that would be about black ppl and their relationship to nature bc i think it’s a lot more complicated than a lot of people in those circles understand. anyway that went nowhere but i’m trying to get a piece about this published so we’ll see!!

like even in the same convo when she was talking about laws it was v clear that her thoughts on the subject were (understandably) constrained by the environments she’d been directly exposed to: mostly affluent suburbs. it gets really condescending and judgmental and explicitly and obliviously classist. it’s fucking exhausting and they say they want Diversity so that their perspectives can be expanded but they’re often genuinely intransigent and confused when you actually interrogate any premise derived from being white and making a six figure income

[boy_waitress]

p.s. yeah i stan ksr real hardcore but mostly silently and in this case only bc he’s explicitly relevant to the convo. he published ministry for the future last year and i got some friends of mine to read it together, with moderate success. as far as “cli-fi” goes it’s the high water mark and touches on a lot of stuff you and i are talking about rudy about capitalism and land management and alteration and different models of sustainability and their relative effectiveness and all sorts of other dry policy shit and stuff about glaciology etc. it’s technically a novel but it’s not really about ppl as characters. it’s a trip and it’s made me more invested in the intersection between capital and conservation/curation movements.

also I feel v ambivalent about things like rooftop gardens and Conscious Living bc I think it often obscures or otherwise diminishes the fundamental and decisive role global economic development plays and that it can kind of placate peoples' anxieties in detrimental ways in the same way reading white guilt or something instead of considering police as an extension of a repressive state can be. like I don't give a shit if your floor is made of the bottoms of discarded beer bottles and actually think its actively distracting bc its not scalable and requires some initial quantity of capital that is so uncommon that for our purposes it would need to be excluded from the equation in which case all this shit immediately becomes nonviable

he also wrote the years of rice and salt which spends a considerable portion of its time attempting to reconcile the islamic golden age with the more repressive elements of contemporary islam and is a great alternate history novel that centers eastern and middle-eastern societies and ideas and history so there’s also that!! it had some good stuff in it about feminist readings of the quran and the ways they could potentially allow for a different form of or relationship to islam

[Mope]

he also wrote the years of rice and salt which spends a considerable portion of its time attempting to reconcile the islamic golden age with the more repressive elements of contemporary islam and is a great alternate history novel that centers eastern and middle-eastern societies and ideas and history so there’s also that!! it had some good stuff in it about feminist readings of the quran and the ways they could potentially allow for a different form of or relationship to islam

I love this and actually think about it a lot because after old dude started going into depth about the different sects, interpretations of Islam I was actually astounded.

Like, historically speaking they achieved ALOT and a certain sense of religious harmony which I’m not really religious at all but I was like: FUCK HAPPENED BRO!?

He essentially explained it as the very same kind of thing that happens today. Binding hatred with religious fundamentalism and anti intellectualism

I mean that’s a very generic kind of summary but it’s just so stupid how fucking racist and ignorant the general public is towards that region and how much they conveniently forget.

It’s very interesting

And yes that is a definite catch 22 of human ingenuity and persistence

Which I kind of endear myself to yet fucking hate simultaneously

How we’re so death defyingly persistently stubborn and ignorant yet it’s also kind of an integral part of our survival and growth as a species

I like looking at all these things from an outside perspective; like I’m watching these little ignorant assed gremlins constantly fuck shit up yet kind of klutz their way through it. Then you’ve got some, not nearly enough IMO that produce this beautiful, brilliant, creative SHIT.

I get infatuated and I’m like WHAT IS THIS!?

It’s a fantastic way to kind of reflect on the nature of humanity, it’s fun.

Feel like an alien a lotta times because people don’t generally understand why I get so fixated on specific things or why I get excited or critical of them.

I’ll explain it sometimes and they’ll be like “you know i never thought about it like that”

A lot of it’s my mania but I like to share it

Last big thing was “Wall Street bets”

I ate it up, I loved it. All of these kids remembering the last housing market crash and what was happening during Covid and just committing Internet guerrilla warfare on these investment firms

I didn’t really look at the efficiency or practicality of it as much as what it said about PEOPLE and their motivations and intent to follow through

It was like looking at the Mona Lisa for me

[boy_waitress]

idk man I'm so disillusioned about technocrats that I can kind of understand the anti-intellectual shit. on the one hand getting to the point of, like, the khmer rouge is disastrous, but I also think that intellectualism is often wielded as a cudgel against ppl with less education and as a means of delegitimizing their ideas/excluding them from conversation, and that a lot of intellectuals -- even those on the left -- have absolutely no fucking idea what they're talking about and waste too much time on navel-gazing abstractions of social dynamics, and I even like doing that shit too. I get frustrated with people who are anti-book learnin' but also v frustrated with the people who look at them and are like ugh unwashed masses or, worst of all, pay lip service to The People while still displaying obvious disdain for the actual individuals that comprise The People once they realize how non-academic they are

I read the wretched of the earth a while back and he talks a bit about intellectuals in the colonized population being kind of suspect bc even after the colonizers have left, the sophisticated natives have internalized an ideology that is functionally constructed in support of their colonizers. intellectualism for them was a means of using the educated subset of the domestic pop. to launder what are p clearly intellectual traditions that originate in a sharply ethnocentric european context.

[Mope]

I completely agree with that I think the sense of superiority that comes with certain intellectual circles and anti intellectualism itself are both incredibly dangerous and very divisive

You see a lot of that with how COVID has affected our society over the past year or so. In one corner you have these officials and more liberal leaning leadership making decisions or statements that bite them in the ass or backfire because it’s a thing we just don’t completely understand yet.

And this virus is so fucking crafty and adaptive it’s like watching virology evolution in real time.

So you’ve got this other side of politicized, poaching anti intellectuals or those posing to be knee jerking and making self destructive decisions

It’s really interesting but also sad watching it unfold. This goes back to the “sinkhole” analogy.

People are just thoroughly overconfident and stupid in the worst ways.

And I think when you talk about colonization and the remnants of colonial intellectual ideology I see that a lot with the certain people in liberal politics or in institutions that are like…I don’t know the best way to put it. People trying to reform what is or what was to their own cultural or ethnic identity

But at the same time those very identities are kind of convoluted and like you say; very blended with colonial intellectualism

I think critical race theory is a good example of this

I actually LIKE IT, I read up on it and have been in part embracing the principles myself for years but at the same time to me it seems like instead of teaching relative truths it’s being used or weaponized


Which when you say “I’m essentially doing exactly what tucker Carlson says were doing to kids”

Now, I don’t really agree or contribute to that narrative but at the same time, there are points to it.

I think it’s a standardized teaching like standardized testing that is too heavy handed and influential to developing minds.

Rather than exposing them to certain perspectives or ideas and letting them decide for themselves they’re being molded by the predominant narrative or those in power.

This is the exact same motherfuckin thing that they’re supposedly railing against, just for themselves in a way

I read up on who walzer is because I had no idea but from what I read a good bit of what he talks about is concerning this

And they are things I’ve thought about on my own but didn’t really know there was a dude who talks about it extensively