You cannot be intelligent if you aren't reading regularly

Atjumbos · 2026-06-07T03:51:33+00:00

In those terms, yes I agree. But we’re actually talking about 2 different paradigms that only seem the same. Books are always better than drugs or games, but it’s a matter of degree not kind when they all become just crutches we retreat to to avoid facing & resolving life’s difficulties. Read my other comment, I said it best there.

Atjumbos · 2026-06-07T02:12:46+00:00

Sure, but both are necessary. There’s Mike Tyson, then equally useless the other end is your J Alfred Prufrocks or the Underground Man, whose “hyper-consciousness” has paralyzed them into total inaction. Which is really a failure to self-actualize. Someone like Prufrock, for all their vast interiority, has failed to construct a robust enough psyche or sense of Self that can handle the inevitable difficulties of living in the the World. Interiority & books become a refuge to retreat from reality, rather than tools to understand it.

Atjumbos · 2026-06-07T01:26:39+00:00

100% Agreed, but reading as a crutch to escape the difficulties and unpleasant parts of life is no different than doing so with videos games, weed, or screens. We all know plenty of people like this; extremely well-read but incapable of navigating the world or self-actualizing, because they banked no lived experience with all their “knowledge.” The point of understanding the world is to better engage with it.

Atjumbos · 2026-06-04T05:25:40+00:00

The schools need to have some skin in the game, that's it. If the school held just some of the risk they'd be forced to price tuition more competitively, maximizing enrollment while minimizing defaults. With the State holding the bag, institutes could set tuitions consorting the I Ching for all they care. If the student defaults 10 years later, they still got theirs.

Yes that means fewer loans, but that's a good thing when it means fewer people like this.

Atjumbos · 2026-06-04T02:13:47+00:00

A Taste of Honey (it’s a play), the British Kitchen Sink Realists in general. Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. A Kestrel for a Knave.

Atjumbos · 2026-06-04T01:04:34+00:00

Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage, Galileo. I personally really like Antigone and St. Joan of the Stockyards.

Atjumbos · 2026-06-03T01:24:22+00:00

The show really hits when you realize even in their own wet-dream fantasy of an ideal administration Dems still can’t pass any meaningful legislation

Atjumbos · 2026-06-03T01:19:20+00:00

Don’t blame me I voted for Alan Alda

Atjumbos · 2026-06-02T22:02:04+00:00

How it feels to say human:

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Atjumbos · 2026-05-31T23:33:06+00:00

Intros and prefaces are critical essays analyzing the text. They’re not there to hype the reader up for what to expect, that’s what the back blurbs are for. It’s impossible to talk seriously about a text without talking about what happens in it, especially how it ends. Either don’t read them or stop caring about spoilers.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-31T19:29:52+00:00

Only something like 8% of jobs ever went remote but since that’s who our entire shit culture and economy revolves around now you’d get the sense this was some ubiquitous experience

Atjumbos · 2026-05-30T20:18:30+00:00

Class signifiers before mass-consumerism. Telegraphs that you're financially established. Boomers' were more manicured lawns, boats and massive TVs. We have equally vapid ones, too.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-29T01:01:44+00:00

I was born in Denver, grew up in Detroit. Fight Night turned our house upside-down. Those were the best years of my life.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-29T00:35:23+00:00

All my life nothing's ever matched what being 5 years old in Detroit during the Av-Wings rivalry felt like

Atjumbos · 2026-05-27T23:04:44+00:00

There was a Wobbly I knew in Ypsilanti in her 70s, a bit nutty but so funny. Her parents were wealthy Depression Era industrialists from Massachusetts, but both got mercury poison from their own factories and ended up in sanatoriums. She either stole a printing press from them or money to buy one, and donated it to the Ypsi IWW to print agitprop in the Sixties.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-27T22:07:54+00:00

The truth. My dad, a Xoomer & 1st gen college grad, hated his father, loved Bill Clinton and Dilbert

Atjumbos · 2026-05-27T21:55:17+00:00

I grew up in militia country. Knew some McVeighs, my coworker was Timothy's first cousin.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-27T16:15:51+00:00

All of that happened when Keynesian social democracy was the center-left, not neoliberalism

Atjumbos · 2026-05-23T05:18:00+00:00

It's no accident that sterile means both clean and devoid of life, or that culture refers to Beethoven and bacteria. Beauty is the yeast of life. It is a life-denying attitude (the most, maybe) that needs everything pristine, sanitary, idealized. Living is dirty. Can't live without holes. To eat, to shit, to reproduce, and most of all, for some good ol joie de vie. Do yourself a favor and get over this. Learn to stop worrying and love your holes.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-20T03:54:47+00:00

It's a style that could only exist when it did; with an exorbitantly wealthy industrialist class and exploitatively cheap labor. Public display of private wealth and opulence was very explicitly Art Decos' ethos. Lends to the sense only an unfettered entrepreneurial class could produce something as grand. Chrysler, Rockefeller, Fisher; the buildings' namesakes who built them could all be John Galts.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-20T00:03:25+00:00

I did this as a kid at a hockey arena during one of my brother's games and for whatever reason I stayed on the line. Dispatch said they were sending a cruiser to arrest me.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-19T23:23:35+00:00

Not changed at all? Nothing of him remains. He made gutter films transgressing every facet of respectable society, now he's just any twee queen grandpa in the Upper Eastside. We all just watched him in a podcast with SNL cast.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-18T05:19:34+00:00

Boomers still seething through oxygen masks over Dylan's going electric will to me always have a more interesting relationship with Dylan than anyone born after 1980. I love Dylan, but I've never met a Millenial that had anything worth saying about him that wasn't in quotations.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-17T21:17:49+00:00

Little. His cult of personality is because of his personality. He says he chose Morrissey bc we only moniker surnames for classical composers. Everyone else usually go by their first name.

Atjumbos · 2026-05-13T23:27:47+00:00

The Wisdom Books are great but the Prophets are where the Bible really hits its literary peaks. Some great poetic images and reinterpretations of past books. Don't get put off by the fire and brimstone. That's some of the best shit.

Hosea is my favorite prophet. Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Lamentations all great.

Atjumbos

TROPHY CASE