BEHOLD MY SQUEES

I have been very fortunate with translators. One time I was in Germany, and all these interviewers kept comparing my books to Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut and whatnot."

Like, the interviewers would be like, "Along with the other great American writers, your work focuses on adolescence. Do you feel that America is a nation coming of age?"

This PSA has been brought to you by the four fawns and does that ran out in front of me at various points on my drive home.

When I moved, I’m certain they understood I was leaving because I had all my stuff and gave them lots of food and compliments.

But, they chased down my friend who lived in the next burrough over. They had recognised that friend with me several times and followed them to their house when they couldn’t find me.

They adopted my friend and it was now my friend’s job to bring them snacks and receive the presents.

This was maybe 6-7 years ago.

I visited London last year. Went to see my friend. The crows all not only recognised me, they tracked me down. We got into my friend’s flat and not twenty minutes later there was chaos on the balcony.

We open the curtains, the entire fucking murder is there shouting because they wanted to see me.

Mulder, on the phone at 3am: Scully have you ever realized that the white pedestrian symbol looks just like the sighting of Bigfoot on the Patterson-Gimlin film?

Scully: ohmygod Mulder please go to bed

What the x files is really like:

Mulder, on the phone at 3am: Scully have you ever realized that the white pedestrian symbol looks just like the sighting of Bigfoot on the Patterson-Gimlin film?

Some points of interest:

Corporate profits are soaring. After taxes, they now take 12.3 percent of national output, far above their postwar average of 7.3 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019, Ip noted. Corporate profits over the same period have risen 50 percent.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that since 1979 the productivity of American workers has grown 90 percent while the pay of the typical worker has grown 33 percent. Had wages tracked output, the average worker would earn $16.40 more an hour today.

The profits are concentrated among the largest corporations. Earnings at the 500 biggest US firms rose 28 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2021, and their profit margins reached 14.8 percent. The seven technology giants known as the “Magnificent 7”—Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla—grew their profits 63 percent.

Just starting abortive medications already improved my quality of life so much and now that my doctor started me on preventatives, I might actually be able to have more than a handful of headache-free days each month.

Migraine is frequently misdiagnosed as chronic sinusitis or tension headaches according to research. Mostly because people have a very rigid (inaccurate) idea of what it actually is.

But even if it's not migraine, you still deserve treatment for your headaches. Just because someone else has them worse than you doesn't mean you don't deserve relief.

It was her responsibility as a mother to ensure that Ada didn't turn out like her father;

Fundamentally, the thing that was wrong with Lord Byron is that he was a poet; and

The opposite of poetry is math.

A 2006 study in the Journal of Political Economy found that "cohorts in utero during the pandemic displayed reduced educational attainment, increased rates of physical disability, lower income, lower socioeconomic status, and higher transfer payments received compared with other birth cohorts."[311] A 2018 study found that the pandemic reduced educational attainment in populations.[312] The flu has also been linked to the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s.[313] Survivors faced an elevated mortality risk. Some survivors did not fully recover from physiological conditions resulting from infection.[314]

i was even talking TO my dad about this a few weeks ago. and he was talking about how his wife, my stepmother, a lovely woman, was going through it a bit with some medical stuff ad she was frustrated dealing with all the recovery shit. and he said something like, "this is just a normal part of life fo everyone eventually, we used to have people we called 'invalids' in the last three centuries, people who we just took care of and weren't expected to do anything except survive and if they were lucky maybe recover. and it's not a big deal". and he's right!

...to a giant rat...

...to a warthog with rizz...

...to some sort of scaly gremlin creature...

...to a kindly gentle bear.

Disney really perfected this aspect of the fairy tale.

Find more info, and credits of all of the paintings/illustrations here:

"Beauty and the Beast" (Chichester Featival Theater, 2017, Puppet Designer: Nick Barnes)

"Beauty and the Beast" (Synetic Theatre, 2023, Puppet Designer: Zana Gankhuyag)

La belle et la Bete dir. Jean Cocteau 1946

The Czechoslovakia Adaptation is called, "Panna a Netvor" (aka "Virgin & the Monster").

john d batten (1904)

eleanor vere boyle (1875)

warwick goble (1913)

w heath robinson (1921)

Mahlon and Kinuko Craft (2016). After Disney but who cares with these details so rich you just want to crawl into the painting and never come out again.

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.