Down with some almost sickness
I think I'll beat the drum of “please body, either be really sick or not at all” until I am really sick again. Then I'll go back to wishing for not being sick as much. I hate the middle ground so much. Last week was pretty aggressively okay.
- Lobsterbomb came to the studio to talk about their new record Overstimulated
- There was a new blog bandwagon in the ttrpg/osr space and it was all about The Appendices Ns or in other words lists of media that made people who they are now. Here is a collection.
- here is a movie about Grimdark and lots of small figurines
I had to think about this quote while walking through a neighborhood today. Sorry for its length. Emphasis mine.
It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?
Funny how that quote is from a piece published in 2007. Has anything changed? And that reminds me that I should read How to blow up a pipeline and that Andreas Malm has a new book out soonish. I took a lot from The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth and the new one is called The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late and it is a “A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster, by the bestselling authors of Overshoot”.
Anne Trubek writes about reading more and how to do it. I did take my book with me. I listened to podcasts instead of reading. This takes work. Gina Trapani reminds us to take time off. Oh I am looking forward to one day taking a sabbatical. This last one is more for me. A reminder that You Teach a Class of 25 Individual Students, Not a Monolithic Many-Headed Behemoth.
So long.