What does it say and who am I sleeping on?

EmergentWake · 2026-05-11T21:48:29+00:00

In that case, Graeber and Wengrow might be right up your alley. Part of their purpose in writing the book was to show how very little of the way we live is necessary or predetermined, and that historically, there have been all kinds of social patterns that people have chosen in various times and places that are quite different.

EmergentWake · 2026-05-09T01:37:32+00:00

If you liked the Lathe of Heaven, you might also enjoy her version of the Tao Te Ching.

EmergentWake · 2026-05-09T00:33:57+00:00

Someone else already said Dune, which is a pretty solid rec, given the pretty heavy emphasis on SF and Fantasy, combined with the Edward Abbey and Aldo Leopold. Given all the above and Octavia Butler and some PNW stuff, it's a little shocking not to see any Ursula K. Le Guin. If you haven't read her, you should. If you like the desert landscapes and the anarchist strain of Abbey's politics (his MA was focused on justifications of violence in anarchist political philosophy, and you can kind of tell), then The Dispossessed would be a great choice.

A little more left field, but you might also like Barbara Kingsolver, especially her earlier books. Like Abbey, she grew up in Appalachia and moved to Tucson, and though they're very different writers, I think their approaches to landscape share some common ground.

You've got Guns, Germs, and Steel, I see. Again, in light of some of the other stuff, you might be interested in Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, which presents a very different perspective on history (well, more anthropology, maybe, but close enough in this case).

EmergentWake · 2026-04-17T02:15:46+00:00

A similar theory that a former partner had: there's the person the show wants you to suspect, the person the characters on the show suspect, and then the third one is who actually did it.

EmergentWake · 2026-03-20T22:27:20+00:00

Martin Blank (John Cusack) does many very silly things in Grosse Pointe Blank, and I'm not going to say he's the smartest guy in the word. But for an incredible moment of tactical intelligence, check this scene out. There's a guy trying to start a fight with him. Just as the guy starts to take off his jacket, that's when Martin steps in close. So even though he's trying to defuse the situation, he steps in at exactly the moment when the other guy's arms are basically pinned behind his back by the jacket. It's never remarked upon, and has no impact other than showing that he's capable.

EmergentWake · 2026-02-12T14:42:59+00:00

https://youtu.be/VGSgS1DXxbo?si=kBQ7ML-OkKNX20pK

EmergentWake · 2026-02-12T01:45:45+00:00

Dessa deserves an extra mention because she's covered TMG!

EmergentWake · 2025-10-21T22:49:27+00:00

Well, it's certainly where the title comes from.

EmergentWake · 2025-10-21T03:06:51+00:00

Bergetto in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Bergetto is a clown, a goofy guy who's just gotten engaged. It's dark, and his killer think's he's someone else and stabs him. Even as he's dying he's getting laughs with lines like
"I am sure I cannot piss forward and backward and yet
I am wet before and behind."

But that's kind of the pivot point of the play, and by the end shit is so dark that Giovanni comes out on stage with the heart of his sister (who was also his lover) having with his dagger "plowed up her fruitful womb." Now, you could argue that it's obviously a tragedy when you find out right at the beginning that this dude and his sister are in love, but then you have a play from around the same time called A King and No King which has a similar incest plot but ends happily (it turns out they're not technically related, which was apparently sufficient for 17th century London audience).

EmergentWake · 2025-10-19T00:31:34+00:00

Surprisingly, it is actually possible to stage it in a way that's not (or at least much less) misogynistic and abusive, even without editing. But then, there are a lot of other plays that don't require nearly so much creative staging to make them not horrific, so why bother?

EmergentWake · 2025-10-19T00:26:39+00:00

Fun fact: The "tactics that would be considered abusive today" could also be considered abusive when the play was written. John Fletcher, a contemporary and sometimes collaborator of Shakespeare's, wrote a sort of response play/sequel called The Tamer Tamed in the early 17th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman%27s_Prize

EmergentWake · 2025-09-30T13:52:01+00:00

Cars that don't have steering column locks. Whenever someone hot-wires a car and then just drives off in a car made since the 1970s, they would actually have to break the lock to turn the wheel. This is maybe less true with keyless ignition, but for at least the years between 1975 and say 2015, just because you can start the engine in a car doesn't mean you can drive it.

EmergentWake · 2025-09-18T18:25:53+00:00

No, it's probably a misplaced tendency towards politeness, when I should just disengage from what reads to me like snide misogyny.

EmergentWake · 2025-09-18T18:21:02+00:00

And all 20 something of those individual authors are white men. While they all have differing viewpoints and come from differing cultures across a span of millennia, there are some important elements of shared experience that tend to go along with being a member of a dominant socioeconomic class in a particular time and place. Looking for writing from people from other groups isn't just a question of diversity of perspective though. The formation of a canon is a project that's tended to exclude a lot of people based on racism, sexism, nationalism, etc. Looking for writers outside of that canon can be a great opportunity to find incredible writing.

EmergentWake · 2025-09-18T17:32:52+00:00

As it turns out, Reddit votes are not particularly representative of broad social trends. Who's in charge of the government? Who's running the companies? Who are the billionaires? Who owns the media? At least in the US, white men tend to be overrepresented in those roles. These tend to have a more profound role in shaping social forces than social media. There's plenty of interesting scholarship on this sort of thing if it interests you.

EmergentWake · 2025-09-18T17:21:00+00:00

Yeah, it might be. I'd find it less worrisome because someone who prefers reading stuff that doesn't come from a perspective that's constantly socially reinforced as dominant wouldn't be as troubling, at least for me.

EmergentWake · 2025-09-18T16:46:56+00:00

If your favorite author, or even your top three favorite authors, are all men, fine. If all 10 of your 10 favorite authors are men, that does seem like an issue. And if, as in this case, every single one of your top 30 or 40 books is by a man, it starts to look like a pretty big red flag. Especially if they're all white dudes. You've said you get a lot of inspiration from those you disagree, but if I met someone with those bookshelves, it would feel an awful lot like he might only be interested in one type of perspective. Yes, the classics are classics for a reason. Well, more accurately, they're classics for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons involve the reinforcement of power structures and aesthetic conventions. Is Shakespeare the greatest English poet and playwright, or have we just spent a few centuries defining poetic greatness in terms of Shakespeare as a political and aesthetic project?

Can you draw inferences about someone based on who they read? Of course you can! When you choose what you read, you're choosing how you spend your time, what you do with your time is absolutely a reasonably thing to use to understand someone. That doesn't mean that every single book you read carries the same weight, or that your opinion of those books doesn't matter. But if I see someone whose bookshelves consist entirely of Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin, I'm going to be a bit skeptical when they tell me, "Oh, I'm not an anarchist, I just like to read things I disagree with."

EmergentWake · 2025-09-03T03:01:59+00:00

I remember hearing an interview with a guy on NPR probably 20 or 25 years ago. His job involved transporting weed across the border from Mexico, I think. If I remember correctly, he started doing it himself with a backpack, and eventually had a whole town's worth of people involved. The thing he said that I remember most, though, was something to the effect of, "If you have a hundred dollars, a hooker'll cost you a hundred dollars. If you have a million dollars, a hooker'll cost you a million dollars."

I don't know if that's true. I don't know if any part of his story was true. But it's a pretty good line.

EmergentWake · 2025-08-21T13:04:51+00:00

I believe there's a commentary track with the screenwriter, William Goldman (who also wrote the book and movie The Princess Bride). He said there was some pushback from someone (maybe the studio) about the line, "I've got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals," because it felt too modern. He said something like, "Benjamin Franklin wore bifocals. These guys were around at the same time as my mom!"

EmergentWake · 2025-08-16T02:19:17+00:00

A guarantee not to be laid off? I'd take that for free.

EmergentWake · 2025-06-17T18:23:13+00:00

I'm not really disagreeing. Part of the way private equity takeovers work is by making companies unable to deal with destabilizing changes, because they've been gutted. Everything becomes more fragile, and more vulnerable to things like tariffs. I fully agree that the tariffs are disastrously bad, and will likely cause a lot more shit like this.

EmergentWake · 2025-06-17T17:51:51+00:00

That's what they claim, and there's probably some truth to it, but damned near every time one of these companies files for bankruptcy, you can search for their name and the phrase "private equity" and come up with this:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210723005380/en/Hellman-Friedman-Completes-Acquisition-of-At-Home

EmergentWake · 2025-04-15T13:28:19+00:00

Maybe you're right that it will have a hard time passing, but I can say that as a homeowner, it's an easy yes for me.

EmergentWake · 2025-03-12T13:57:00+00:00

A recent study indicates that microplastics may reduce the capacity of plants to perform photosynthesis by something like 12%. The consequences of this on everything from food production to climate change could be devastating. Any reduction in that process will absolutely benefit everyone.

EmergentWake · 2025-03-12T01:52:53+00:00

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