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The previous owners of our house were big wine people, and it was plainly evident from their decor on our first visit. We moved in two and a half years ago, and our understanding is that they moved to Portugal, where I imagine there is some fantastic wine, but the mark of their lifestyle is still visible on the house. We still have a bunch of decorative bottles they left behind. There are windows that still have decorative grape stickers.

A couple of months ago, I was clearing out a corner of the garage I hadn't gotten around to clearing yet. There I discovered another part of their legacy: an bottle of Chardonnay. This bottle has been sitting on the floor of the garage for at least two years, through three cold winters and two (very) hot summers. It was unopened, but it was also sitting mere feet from a stack of old paint cans.

Anyway, we call it the floor wine. We're a little over halfway through the bottle now. It's not excellent.

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Tracey Emin, Birds 2012 London Olympic Print, 2011

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Finally finished the book today, and I don't believe I found a single additional story that I disliked. A very solid collection overall.

Part of that, I imagine, is getting a feel for what Liu is about as a writer, and for the themes that tie all these stories together. When you spend more time with an author's stories, you see more of what you might have missed at first.

I started reading The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu today. I thought I might take it slow, but I ended up breezing through the first five stories. I'd say I liked four of them, so that's pretty good so far.

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If you ever find yourself thinking "it's the year 2000 and whatever, nobody actually believes in x anymore," remind yourself that there probably is a group of people who not only still believe it, but are prepared to act in accordance with that belief.

IMO you can't say anything coherent about most US-based right wing conspiracy theories without understanding how seriously the diehards in these movements believe in The Devil

the obvious question, "who benefits from maintaining this elaborate lie," does not stop people like Flat Earthers because many of them are young earth creationists who believe in powerful spiritual forces whose only goals are

1. convincing people that Christianity isn't true

2. the proliferation of largely symbolic Evil, which they enjoy tricking you into supporting

"tricking" people into believing the earth is round is enough of a goal for The Devil to go to all that trouble. if people don't believe in God's perfect little flat earth then they're also free to believe in things like evolution and the big bang

practicality and material concerns are usually irrelevant. the lie is worth maintaining because The Devil has near unlimited time, resources, and human servants, and his top priority is Getting You

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we do not talk enough about how you get hit front and back by being a jew and supporting Palestine. For a recipe that i want to make during Shabbat I have to scroll through a jewish recipe blog and cringe at the I Stand With Israel posts and then go back.

so a bunch of jewish spaces aren't safe anymore or are landmines. then you're forced to go someplace else. then there's tumblr with the people who think Jews=Zionist.

like oh, you're jewish? they immediately think you support the idf or something and praise genocide or something. your family barely survived a genocide that wasn't even like more than three generations ago and its being used as some sort of crutch to israel's moral defense when israel does NOT give a fuck about holocaust survivors at all except for their pr...

like damn bro im just trying to live my life and cook normally. Palestine has my entire heart. but like the pipeline from Palestine advocacy to accidental antisemitism to purposeful antisemitism is so 😭😭. man. i just wanna say guys jewish people aren't your enemies. the goal is to stop genocide not make the nazis proud of you or something

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you wouldnt last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

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nobuddy feels like they have a sharp attention span these days, right? and we all just click “agree on terms of service” because its hard to love yourself sometimes, well

enter Terms of Service, Didn’t Read: a website and a browser addon that streamlines the terms of service of many popular web services to be read by the tech sunday drivers.

It’s graded from A (great) to E (awful) and if you have the addon you have access to the info about the website on your bar

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Day One Thousand One Hundred and Forty Seven

If my gal cried whisky Instead of cryin' salt water tears If my gal cried whisky Instead of cryin' salt water tears I would never be sober babe For another twenty-five years

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"What makes the concept of society so deceptive is that we assume the world is organized into a series of compact, modular units called 'societies,' and that all people know which one they're in. Historically, this is very rarely the case.

Imagine I am a Christian Armenian merchant living under the reign of Genghis Khan. What is 'society' for me? Is it the city where I grew up, the society of international merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I conduct my daily affairs, other speakers of Armenian, Christendom (or maybe just Orthodox Christendom), or the inhabitants of the Mongol empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Korea?

Historically, kingdoms and empires have rarely been the most important reference points in peoples' lives. Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and many people in history were never entirely clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were never even quite sure what country they were supposed to be in, or why it should matter.

My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood:

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill.

'So where are we, Russia or Poland?'

'According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.'

The villagers immediately began dancing for joy.

'Why?' the surveyors asked. 'What difference does it make?'

'Don't you know what this means?' they replied. 'It means we'll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!'"

- David Graeber, from Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011.

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'we transcend petty political tribalisms like left and right' is--not always, but much too often-- a marker that what you're about to read is unfiltered, high-octane, triple-distilled Turbo Fascism

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His Undulations

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Phil Buckenham

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Check out your local independent bookstores, there's treasure inside.

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Some people never met a problem they didn't think a bullet could fix.

Every dog with Republican owners today.

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"I'm tired of watching bottles and soup cans dance. It would be a relief to see a ballet of liver pills for a change" (HT Webster cartoon, 1951)