this is an old essay I wrote that is no longer available at its original host. Posting here for posterity.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a very scary time for everyone who has been affected, and the millions adjacent to it. Fears around the growing infection numbers and the risk it presents to older people and those with immune problems especially. A lot of these fears have manifested in unhealthy desperation from both individuals[1] and companies[2]. However, one of the most unsettling reactions I have seen is the growth of ecofascism.
In the last year I think I've said to myself "I want to read this, but I don't have time… Let me get it as an audiobook" 100 times. But then I don't because I don't want to support Amazon/Audible, and I can't find a good way to listen to them and find them. So yesterday I sat down and figured out the best way to do it so that I can listen to Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.
this is an old essay I wrote that is no longer available at its original host. Posting here for posterity.
The time has come for a new way of thinking about green space. The automobile industry pushed it to the side, and made it an afterthought to fill in all the empty spaces in their massive roads. The public spaces we can enjoy nature in are relegated to areas outside the urban center, while inside the cities we are treated to small patches of manicured itchy invasive grass. Our trees (when we have them) provide little in the way of shade, and simply exist to greenwash the crushing weight of industrial capitalism and the toll it has on the people who live there. It is time to think about our ecology in a new way.
The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realised that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called 'realistic' trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details.
Around here, supermarkets usually carry only very few species of fresh mushroom. You'll find the button mushroom and sometimes oyster, king oyster or shiitake. Asian supermarkets occasionally also carry enokitake, but that's about it. Besides the button mushroom, they are often quite pricey and because they don't have a long shelf life, they are rarely very fresh.
A good way to get your hands on some fresh specimen of more species, is to learn about mushroom identification and foraging for them. If, however, you don't have access to a suitable habitat or the mushroom of your desire is just not in season right now, mushroom cultivation might be an interesting option for you.
Logicians, mathematicians, linguists, and other overly smart people often have problems with something your average hick can easily express and comprehend: the subset of a set that excludes another subset.
That’s a mouthful but here are two super clear examples:
Someone might say “humans and animals” but we overly smart people will fall over ourselves saying “humans are animals!” at risk of missing the original point the speaker was trying to make.
The Geminispace debate about IDEs rages on! Well, there were three more posts.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
