after publishing his latest autofiction novel “leave society”note: haven't read it, though i have read taipei (which was mostly set in new york) a couple years ago, tao lin did the most based thing possible and actually did that, he moved to rural hawaii and has been living off-grid for several years now as a literary recluse, posting some of the best content on substack about hanging out with his feral pig friends or nude confrontations with the authorities because he illegally imported leeches to do some good old fashioned natural bloodletting. i’ve been to the part of the big island where i imagine he lives, the area between hilo and hawaii volcanoes national park where the jungle is crisscrossed in several places by subdivision grids of various sizes and orientations, it’s incredible that you can live in a jungle hut while still on US soil. i’ve sometimes fantasized about dropping everything and moving out there, it’s completely attainable and i could do it any time, you can straight-up buy plots of land out there for like ten grand... (mainly because it's some of the only land in the country at imminent risk of getting wiped out by a lava flow, during a 2018 eruption hundreds of houses in that area were destroyed)
finally, someone brave enough to criticize frieren, now i have something to cite whenever people try to get me to watch it: “oh, well, i heard it was mostly just the naruto chuunin exam arc with depressed gap moe elf...” as i mentioned in my review of re:zero (frieren’s predecessor, in a way, as the "i know it's isekai but it's actually good"), the isekai “genre” is such a wasteland that everything’s graded on a generous curve, stuff that’s barely halfway decent immediately stands out from everything else and thus gets hailed as a masterpiece, propelled to the coveted #1 spot on myanimelist and sweeping the annual r/anime awards. i salute makin for enduring the whole show in order to read three mediocre fanfics based on it, and as a consequence bringing us this review.
probably the WORST post i've ever seen on substack, i don't even know where to start... the huffpost-tier clickbait title? the awful takes? the way this lady runs a substack about reading the classics and yet seems to hate them all? and, of course, there's the fact that the whole article is BLATANTLY ai-generated, written in that rancid "sassy" AI house style... despite being only a sentence long, fully half of the capsule reviews contain em dashes, what are the odds? perhaps the worst part, which elevates it to an indictment of the entire platform, is the fact that it ended up being a big hit, hundreds of likes and fawning comments saying "wow you're so right, moby dick sucks". "it's bad on purpose to make you click, it's bad on purpose to make you click" i repeat as a mantra to avoid completely losing it.
i picked up this article because i've definitely noticed on my occasional visits to non-used bookstores that there does seem to be a huge influx of japanese "cozy cat cafe"-type books (usually coming in thin paperback volumes plastered in pastels) and i wanted to know what the deal was. unfortunately this wasn't quite the devastating takedown of the genre the somewhat-clickbaity title seemed to promise, for that they'd need to send in a grouchier "i write because i HATE"-type. in the middle of the article, she randomly mentions that they just added the word "isekai" to the oxford english dictionary, which i definitely did NOT want to know.
MOM! get the scissors, sam kriss is in the new york times (magazine)!
A lot of people don’t seem to mind this. Every time I run into a blog post about how love means carving a new scripture out of the marble of our imperfections, the comments are full of people saying things like “Beautifully put” and “That brought a tear to my eye.” Researchers found that most people vastly prefer A.I.-generated poetry to the actual works of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson. It’s more beautiful. It’s more emotive. It’s more likely to mention deep, touching things, like quietness or echoes. It’s more of what poetry ought to be.
this paragraph from the conclusion has got me all
"Man Who Thought He'd Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit Of Hope He Didn't Even Know He Still Had"
i love reading these behind-the-scenes exposés about the goofy irl lives of obscure internet personalities, there are so many people out there with what you might call a "cult" following, tens of thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of followers on various platforms, but that doesn't exactly translate to a "comfortable" life offline. then again, who cares about making a good living off the net or being respect offline when if you're sauced up enough online you can still live the dream and convince bennington babes to drop everything and come halfway across the country to live with you despite being a random broke paranoid austin hipster...
although the meat of the article is about how sacks managed to be one of the most stubbornly repressed homosexuals of all time"Shengold once told Sacks that he had 'never met anyone less affected by gay liberation.'", the big scandal is that it turns out his poignant and literary neurological case studies were a little too perfect to be entirely true after all. the way one of the damning discrepancies is revealed in the article is insane:
Sacks characterizes Leonard as a solitary figure even before his illness: he was “continually buried in books, and had few or no friends, and indulged in none of the sexual, social, or other activities common to boys of his age.” But, in an autobiography that Leonard wrote after taking L-dopa, he never mentions reading or writing or being alone in those years. In fact, he notes that he spent all his time with his two best friends—“We were inseparable,” he writes. He also recalls raping several people.
wait, WHAT???
anyways, i don't wanna say i called it in my brief review of his book the man who mistook his wife for a hat when i remarked "at times feels almost like a short story collection", but i'm definitely not that shocked to find out. i'm also not as torn up about it as many seem to be, probably because i was approaching it from the start from a literary perspective... from the register it's written in and its publication in the form of "popular non-fiction" it's obviously not intended to be a serious academic work of neurological research, its value lies elsewhere entirely. a wise novelist once said that you can't let facts get in the way of Truth. overall, the outrage is reminding me of that time when "rationalists" were getting really mad at sam kriss for posting borgesian literary forgeries to his substack without a big surgeon general's warning saying "MAY CONTAIN ELEMENTS OF FICTION"...
one thing that doesn't seem talked about enough is the enormous impact that random obscure regulations some well-meaning city planners semi-arbitrarily cooked up decades have on the built environment... it's like they're the ones who coded the basic ground rules for a simulation and then let it rip, the form of our cities today is the result after years of evolution and unexpected emergent behavior shaped by those rules. sometimes you stumble upon the unexpected butterfly effects those rules create:
Somebody was like, "Yes, the reason why American roads are so extremely wide is a result of lobbying from both local and national fire departments that try to make it so that their giant, extremely big fire truck can fit on any road in the country," which is then crazy.
I did this estimate where it's plausible to me that 30 to 40% of traffic fatalities in the US are a result of building fire and road fire code regulations. Roughly the history as far as I can tell is: American fire departments lobbied for extremely wide roads. Extremely wide roads enabled America to have by far the biggest cars in the world. It's one of the primary reasons why America has such big cars. When you look into statistics about why American road fatalities are so much higher than almost anywhere else in the world, the size and volume of the car is one of the top primary determinants, next to a few other things around driver education.
It's not crazy to look at that and be like, oh my God, I think it's plausible to me that 30% of traffic fatalities in the US are downstream of building fire code regulations.
it makes sense that the biggest driver of those regulations has been fire prevention, historically fire was pretty much the biggest danger to cities, if you read a lot of history or old books you'll see stuff was just constantly burning down, in the way you might expect if your main building material was wood and only source of light/heat was fire. the thing is, this is another one of those instances in which i can't help but think that perhaps the historical traumas have led to an overcorrection that's resulted in prioritizing fire prevention too much, compromising heavily on other important things for only marginal fire safety gains...
Then I went to university and finally got to move to Tokyo—my long-awaited goal. I was so excited, wondering what kind of hardcore otaku I’d meet and how dense the conversations would be. But when I knocked on that door... everyone was just talking about Love Live!.
I mean, it’s fine to talk about Love Live!, but that was all they talked about. It was a bit of a letdown.
just replace Love Live! with whatever the current Thing is (likely involving idols and/or some gacha) and you've got the situation right now (and forever?)...