2026-04-25 12:59:00
It's an interesting feeling to realize you've been propagandized to for your entire life. I'm simultaneously angry at those who've lied to me, although they're often victims of the same propaganda. I also feel free, and able to reanalyze all these things I thought I knew with an entirely new context for understanding the world.
I stumbled across an article from the Global Times titled “Phrase ‘US kill line’ sparks debate on American ordinary people’s economic fragility and social safety nets on Chinese social media." The Global Times is explicitly Chinese state media, so take it for what it is, and be aware of it's bias.
The article explains that "kill line" is zoomer slang referring to when you're playing a game, and your health is low enough that you can be killed with one shot (apparently, idk, I've never heard it, but I'm not a gamer). The gist of the article is that Chinese kids are starting to learn about American poverty, and about how close so many Americans are to being homeless, and they don't have a way to relate to it. In 1979, the Chinese government made a goal of creating a "moderately prosperous society." That is, a society made up almost entirely of the middle class, with no extremes at either end. It was an ambitious goal, as the World Bank estimated that 88% of the population of China lived in extreme poverty. Over the last forty years, they've managed to bring 850,000,000 people out of poverty by devoting their economy to centrally planned jobs programs similar to The New Deal in the United States. It's an absolutely staggering accomplishment, and they're not done yet, but the progress they've made is nothing short of miraculous. It's remarkable what can happen when government focuses it's spending internally, on it's own citizens.
The idea that all Americans know that we're just a few bad dice rolls away from complete financial ruin, and that we all more-or-less accept it, is absolutely wild. It struck me recently that last year was without a doubt the most devastating year of my life, and if I didn't have family that could support me financially, and didn't get extremely lucky at work, there's a good chance I'd have lost everything as a result.
To set the stage, I was unemployed for about 10 months in 2024. I lost my job in March, and didn't start a new one until December. So I came into the year with considerable debt just from trying to make it through 2024. Then, of course, my wife died in early February. It was impossible to give a shit about literally anything else for months (which I still struggle with now, 15 months out). I'm extraordinarily lucky that my brand new job gave me basically as much time as I needed. I had only been there for two months, after all, they didn't owe me anything. Even so, I don't like that people need to get lucky to make it through situations like that, as opposed to having a publicly funded safety net that we could count on.
Then, in May my gall bladder decided to get infected, and once again, had I not gotten lucky with how supportive my work was and if I didn't have health insurance at the time, it could've single handedly put me underwater. The hospital bill was something like $60,000 without insurance. If all that hadn't managed to wipe me out, a microburst of wind in my back yard sending an entire whole-ass tree falling on top of my house might've. There's a possible world in which I'm homeless right now.
I've realized that people don't hate homeless people for any particular reason (and no doubt about it, housed people do hate the homeless, although they rarely come out and say it). People hate homeless people because they're a reminder of exactly how close 95% of Americans are to the same fate. Instead of blaming the systems that allow homelessness to happen in the first place, we've been propagandized into blaming the homeless people themselves.
But it doesn't have to be this way. There are better ways to organize a country and economy, we know that for an absolute fact. China's done it. Do you know how much it would cost to permanently house all of the homeless people in the entire country? Roughly $9.6 billion. Put another way, it would cost about five days of this war we started in Iran for no particular reason. That's just the military spend. The devastation that this war will continue to wreck on the economy makes the two costs almost non-comparable.
Is China a utopia where everyone has everything they need? Of course not. Do they have their issues with human rights and censorship? Of course. And naturally, that's all the New York Times boiled down the whole "American Kill Line" concept to - Chinese propaganda, nothing more. But it seems obvious to me that they're doing something right.
Today, Meta and Nike announced new rounds of layoffs, and Microsoft announced they'd be offering early retirement to people (and presumably laying people off if the offers aren't taken). Amazon laid off 30,000 people already this year (but don't worry, the CEO got a 30% raise and stock is up 14.67% since the start of the year). Block and Salesforce have also announced massive layoffs, and have explicitly blamed it on AI reducing their need for human employees. And of course, because of last year's Big Beautiful Bill, all of these tech industry workers being laid off won't be able to get on Medicaid, and because of the war and tarriffs, inflation is skyrocketing and everything is more expensive.
Our economy is broken. We need to try something new, and we need to try it soon, because the amount of people suffering has been rising drastically over the past 10 years, and it's going to continue to rise as wealth inequality reaches new extremes.
We have a rare chance these midterm elections to elect representatives who are about as far left as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. People absolutely hate Trump and the Republican run congress. Yet somehow, people hate the Democrats almost as much! It's remarkable. But it leaves the door open for Democratic challengers from the left who want to implement real, drastic change. In Denver, Melat Kiros is launching a strong primary campaign against Diana Degette, our 14-term congresswoman. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul Sayed is running a strong primary for the Democratic nomination for the Senate. There are examples of this all over the country, of socialists and leftists running for office. I don't know about you, but I've seen enough of where imperialist neoliberal policies get us, and I'm ready to try something new.
2026-04-25 09:30:00
i have google alerts set up for my high school and its associated creeps. this guy’s name was a jump scare in my email this morning.
when i thought i knew him, he was pursuing an arts-related phd and was the smartest, most interesting person i’d ever met. he traveled internationally to present at conferences, which sounded important, and lectured as if building up to an o captain! my captain! ovation from students.
for over a decade, our relationship lived in my head as a largely impotent schoolgirl crush – i was enamored and he indulged, but only a little bit, and only for a moment.
a few years after graduation, a friend visited me at college and yelled in my ear over the bass at an outdoor club: “you know what he did was fucked up though, right?”
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between pestering me for suggestive photos and inviting me to “say something sexy, say something scandalous, say something provocative,” he found time to nurture my love of writing and budding interest in feminism.
he introduced me to artists like carolee schneemann and marina ambromovic, to bell hooks and audre lorde. he gave me access to his jstor account and printed a dozen articles for me to read about the body as art or medium or whatever. he would send me excerpts from his dissertation and i would vague-post poetry about him online, which he would respond to via text.
we spent hours “synthesizing” my “research” into a cohesive “narrative” “portfolio” for my application to his undergrad alma mater; his feedback was signed “your biggest fan” in big, curly letters. when i was accepted into the program, we cried and embraced dramatically in front of my classmates. and when i was in the fitting room trying on junior prom dresses, he told me he wanted to see.
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it’s impossible for these vignettes to coexist in my mind – the image of him pouring life into me and the one of him teasing it out – and so, over time, both gave way to a new memory, where i was the one goading and coaxing and prodding and he humored me to avoid hurting my fragile, teenage feelings, which is still bad, but in a way that insists he was just a little drunk on his own koolaid and not the alternative.
the best parts of me, i knew, came from him, and my stomach burned with betrayal when i considered anything else.
then, in my late-twenties, our school was in the news for a similar story involving another teacher and i started having panic attacks when driving in its direction on my visits home.
it was a visceral repulsion, as if the big atrium of the main building had a miles-wide blast radius i couldn’t breach.
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the relationship was secretive, but not subtle. we ate lunch together in his office daily, sometimes in coordinating outfits if he texted me that morning with instructions for what to wear.
our “work” was often in dark rooms during skipped class periods, or in the hours between school and some monthly fundraising obligation i was eager to volunteer for because i could, like, you know, just stay here instead of going home and coming back later, if that’s okay with you.
it was always okay with him.
i’m still not clear on what was my idea and what was his – whether i was the one who asked to go for coffee, whether he was the one who offered to pick me up.
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another year and the disorientation became overwhelming.
when you are hiding something from yourself – protecting yourself from it – you feel fractured: one part of you braced against the door and another part of you slamming into it from the other side. you want to believe it’s for your own good, but you know that it isn’t, you know that opening this door is your one task of this moment.
so i eventually pulled the two peeling pleather journals off the shelf, the ones where i’d written this story out in real time, the ones i had refused to read because i already knew what happened and i didn’t need to go looking because what was there to find.
i bargained with myself that i could flip to a single random page, and if i didn’t see anything weird, i had to admit defeat and for the love of god move on with my life.
except i did see something weird.
obviously.
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the next week was effectively spent in a k-hole of my own past trying to understand how i didn’t remember literally any of this. it’s like i was retroactively violating myself reading back through such meticulous records and transcribed texts – comments about the size of my body, a story of him spamming messages about my perfume during class and watching for my reaction, the way he punished me with silence when i wouldn’t take the bait to escalate our relationship further.
it wasn’t just him, or this, but two brutal years of my life that had been neutered in my memory. i stared at the wall for hours trying to square what i was reading with what i was sure i thought i knew.
this shattering of your perspective feels physical. your vision goes blurry and it’s as if you’re floating in some liminal space, because your through-line has snapped and suddenly your journey from there to here doesn’t make sense anymore and where is here anyway? you don’t know because you don’t know anything.
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anyway, looks like he started a new youtube channel. curiosity got the best of me and i found myself watching an ai-generated version of him in an ai-generated boardroom, his ai-generated voice reading some ai-generated script about being hungry for hard work or something.
i scrolled more and had to stop when i heard, “what’s up, guys!” in, to his credit, the most youtube voice i’ve ever heard.
his websites, too, are full of blog posts and media analyses written by chatgpt, and not even a good model.
which is all to say:
i guess the rest of the illusion broke. whoever i thought he was would hate him.
2026-04-25 09:20:00
I've marveled lately at the active surrendering of cognition to AI that I've witnessed.
I watched a guy at work use ChatGPT to draft a four-sentence letter for a customer. I said "that's ridiculous, man" and he said "it just helps me sound better" which didn't make it less ridiculous to me. He's fully capable of drafting that letter on his own in just a couple minutes if he wanted to. It would have sounded perfectly fine. I've seen him perform similar tasks, and I'm 100% certain he could have done it. But instead, he let AI do it for him because it was faster and easier. There wasn't any rush. He just didn't want to do the thinking.
The same guy was paying for a monthly subscription to ChatGPT for a while (canceled it now, though), and has used it to tell him if his outfit looked good. 'Cause who cares what he thinks of his outfit, right? Better get AI to give him an "opinion" so he knows he doesn't look like a fool. It genuinely blows my mind. I don't care what another person thinks of my outfit, let alone a fucking AI model.
I get angry about this sort of thing. Part of that anger has to do with the environmental disregard, and the lack of empathy for communities already impacted by data center pollution. But I think it's also a fear response. I get mad because the world I see developing in front of me is scary. It could still be stopped. We don't have to forfeit our minds to the computers. I know AI isn't going anywhere, but we don't have to surrender the very thing that makes us human to it either. AI isn't capable of cognition. It has superior computing power, and has been trained on far more expansive materials. But we are the dominant beings. Will we always be, though? Or are we staring down the barrel of a bad sci-fi movie where all the main characters make the dumbest fucking decisions and sacrifice our species in the process?
We'll have to protect our daughter from AI proliferation and cognitive surrender. Her generation is the first to grow up without knowing a world before AI was in everything. It scares me that we might not be able to protect her—that pressure from the world around her when she's not safe in my arms might overpower our parenting. But I suppose all I can do is my damndest. As with everything, I think, it starts with the example.
I laugh or shake my head sometimes at the old folks who are so resistant to well-established technology like debit cards, online banking, and email. That's probably going to be me some day when it comes to AI. But at least I won't be one who surrendered my mind to it.
2026-04-25 05:37:56
I am simply and passionately Done with people telling other people that what they do to survive is unethical.
The argument is always based in "alternatives" that not everyone has.
"Just eat plant-based foods:" because those are freely and cheaply available everywhere? Because grain, fruit, and vegetable farming isn't exploitative of sentient beings or the environment? Because you can overcome your allergies and aversions if you care enough about cows?
"Just get a better job:" because jobs that pay a living wage are just lying around for the taking? Because being trafficked is a choice? Because things like "eating" and "not dying of exposure" can wait until you convince someone to pay you for something you're not ashamed to do?
"Just don't give money to--" yeah, okay, sure. A handful of vast conglomerates own everything on earth. Even if you can live naked in a field eating nothing but organic native grasses (which, more power to you), you're still going to have to pay taxes to a corrupt government.
"No ethical consumption under capitalism" isn't an excuse. It's a fact. Everyone alive on this planet has to make moral compromises in order to live at all. Yes, some of those compromises are more defensible than others. That doesn't mean you get to tell strangers on the internet that they're bad people because they want to survive in a shitty world.
Am I saying you can't talk shit about internet strangers at all? Of course not. Things that are not crucial to anyone's survival include but are not limited to: inflicting pain for shits and giggles! Getting ChatGPT to write your term papers! Calling abuse survivors liars! Shitting in someone's Cheerios! Driving 90mph on a one-lane road at 3 am! Playing your music so loudly that the neighbor's house shakes! Arbitrarily declaring people subhuman based on their physical characteristics! Making your child feel bad about their weight! Travelling around the world for the sole purpose of killing large animals so you can prove your dominance! Wearing your underpants on your head! Cheering for someone's death! Leaving the toilet seat up! There are any number of reasons -- valid, invalid, profound, petty -- to criticize other people's behavior.
But "they're doing whatever they have to in order to live any kind of life" is not on the list.
2026-04-25 00:20:00
This one may be a controversial one, but I'm writing it anyway.
You've heard the saying "rules are meant to be broken", for the most part I agree. Some "rules" are basically just common sense, or what should be common sense: don't dive on the shallow end of the pool, don't light a match near a gas tank, clip your nails before entry, stuff like that.
However some rules are just... stupid. Pointless even. Existing only for the sake of seemingly keeping people in line. This is done either socially or legally. Many self-imposed rules exist simply because they have "always been done that way". Many legal rules aren't even enforceable.
Little acts of defiance in the face of the authority that insists upon its own legitimacy go a long way for when it comes time to do something for the greater good. The civil rights movement was built upon breaking laws, black people sitting in a whites-only restaurant was illegal. Breaking the small stuff makes it easier for when it comes time to break the big stuff.
You also start to exercise why certain rules became rules, like the aforementioned don't dive head-first into the shallow end of the pool. The rule is in-place for your safety, but the rule isn't enforceable. It just becomes a guideline or boundary.
Another byproduct of breaking small arbitrary rules is it becomes easier to not fall victim into herd mentality. You've basically trained that "muscle" in your brain to ignore the scoffs and the social anxiety. You begin to recognize your own autonomy as a person.
You may also spark within someone that confidence to follow suit and maybe start questioning what is just social conditioning vs something actually meant for personal/social safety.
"In order to liberate others, one must liberate themselves", as the saying goes.
I really can't answer this for you. It's up to you and understanding your own agency in deciding what personal social/legal rules you want to break.
But a simple starting-out rule that I often tell people they can break first is social/work-related ones. Low stakes. Here's some examples:
When someone asks you "how are you doing?", don't default to "good, you?". Be a bit more open, doesn't have to give deep details, you can just say something like "Honestly, pretty tired." or "pretty great, got a little love note from my wife this morning with breakfast while I was heading out the door" (this one I used recently). You can also make some joke to break the monotony, I like saying "Awake and not crying" which often gets a chuckle.
Wear pajamas when going to the grocery store or alternatively overdress when going to the grocery store. We often always say we'll wear X fancy thing on a special occasion. You're alive, that is a special occasion, wear that dress.
Be honest without being a dick when someone asks for your opinion. Work on shedding that fear of expressing your opinion. If you're in school, raise your hand to answer questions if you otherwise don't out of fear of looking "stupid", you're in school you're all relatively stupid. If you feel the urge to be productive, fight that urge and try to give yourself a break, you don't need to productive at all times. For men, do/wear something that someone else might call "gay" or "feminine". So on and so on.
I can go on listing a bunch of examples, but then this blog would be a fucking novel. This is just a way to spark ideas for what is supposed to act as a sort of "gateway drug" to the "harder stuff"
Now you're breaking real rules. Yesterday's telling someone you don't feel like going to some gathering instead of trying to make up an excuse, is today's jaywalking.
Now for the harder stuff. These ones might take a bit more courage to do.
For me, it's been at my train stations. For context, there's platforms you stand at to board the train, and a ramp that leads to a walkway that you're supposed to use to cross to the other platforms. I started just jumping down and jumping back up onto the platform, completely skipping the long walk around down the ramp. I'm physically capable of doing so, the rails aren't electrified, and the train doesn't move nearly fast enough to catch me by surprise (it barely goes above 20mph when approaching a station).
Another example is Jaywalking. If there is literally no cars anywhere in sight, just walk across. People will often follow with you to my surprise. Some might not, some might give you an odd look. Good. You're doing multiple things, stress testing your reflex to obey, as well as combatting that peer pressure. For me, it's also one small act of defying the car-centric society and infrastructure we've built.
You have to be aware of your surroundings with these ones. Be aware of any potential immediate threats, cars, trains, bikes, cops. The idea is to stress test, not land yourself with a medical bill or a ticket.
After seeing a video of traffic in the Netherlands where people were walking, biking, and driving without any form of stop sign/light in sight. I obviously wouldn't jump down if there was an active train coming (look both ways and all that). I started questioning "what's stopping us from doing this for ourselves?
There's also dealing with confrontation. Telling some pervert harassing someone to pound sand for example. Or putting a racist in his place. An example that I think about often is this time my wife and I were on a bus waiting to get back to the cruise ship while on a stop in Mexico. There was this couple, a Thai woman I had a conversation with and this dollar store Henry Winkler looking motherfucker she unfortunately calls a husband. In the front of the bus came this group of Chinese women who were talking amongst themselves in Mandarin. Well, old coot decided to start loudly shouting that stereotypical "bing bong ching chong" shit that racists do to make fun of Asian people. Made my fucking blood boil, but I did nothing in that moment out of the likelihood of escalation. I'm not afraid of confrontation. I've worked in retail and have told customers in no uncertain terms to kiss my ass, but in the moment I didn't. Maybe had my wife not been there, who is far more anxious about confrontation than me, I would have. Anyway, He eventually stopped when his wife got him to stop being an asshole for a second, but I regret not saying something. Never again.
Do what you feel you feasibly can safely. Commit time theft at work, tag a political message in a bathroom stall with sharpie (I mean in areas like a 7-11 or some franchise, not a small coffee shop), pirate from greedy corporations, etc., etc.
All this to essentially be said, exercise your personal autonomy and practice sticking up for yourself/others and practice defiance in the face of oppressive systems.
This is just one aspect of proper social change, but a very important one. Ruthlessly question the legitimacy of a social/institutional rule, and if it ends up making no sense and if you feel safe enough doing so to push yourself out of your comfort zone, then do it.
If you read all this, congratulations. You just got tricked into reading a little bit about Anarchist calisthenics. If you want a little more information, I'll share this link. Even if you don't consider yourself an anarchist, it's still a useful tool because one day protests aren't going to be these neat little government-sanctioned marches on a Saturday. With that, I'll leave you with this little quote:
“One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.” —James C. Scott, Two Cheers For Anarchism
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Ready for the weekend. Just wanna spend time with my family. Been making good progress on Blood Meridian finally now that I'm taking a train to commute to work. I read about 1-2 chapters each day, and when I finish a chapter I'll often just stare out the window at the view. I tried seeing if I could use my skateboard to make my walk from car-to-station-to-work faster, and about ate shit so I'm gonna have to practice (and maybe get some better wheels). Also been working on a Windows XP gaming rig which has been fun, got that aquarium screensaver going.
2026-04-24 23:38:00
Once again, shame on me for forgetting where I first found this post:
The BIC Pen Experiment, Part 3 | The Tinkering Dwarf
I know it's on Bubbles but I am fairly certain I saw it on someone else's round-up. Maybe Joel?
Anyway the gist of the experiment was to see how long it would take to use up the ink well in a classic BIC cristal pen. It's one of my favourite reliable pens and I don't think I'm alone in that matter. It writes well and is smooth - what more do you want from a cheap ballpoint?
I have a vast collection of pens at my disposal, and in the interest of actually using all of them, I switch between pens week-to-week. Upon reading this experiment I decided to grab my BIC Cristal ReNew from my locker at work on Monday and have committed to using it up1.
As of Monday it was about half-full, and as I type today, it's not far from the same spot. I don't write as much on weekends so it may take a while to empty it.
This is a neat, slick-looking pen that is re-loadable! I have another ink well in my locker and if I so-chose I could put in a blue ink well from another pen. But for this time I'm just using up this ink well, I'm not going to use up both.↩
