[ A Black Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar on a dill plant. ]

My first week back at work after a two-week break, and as usual, it was not so much a break as a deferred workload. Therefore this past week was exceptionally busy. Little time for creative pursuits.

I did find time on Friday to spend an hour or so with my friend Mark, beating on each other in the back yard. Mark teaches karate and kickboxing, and I teach kung fu and tai chi, so the techniques we come up with tend to be an interesting mix of a variety of sources. It was a good workout. And I feel it today in most of my joints.

Reading

I am currently about a quarter of the way through The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, which explores how supposedly-smart, competent people can end up making stupid and destructive decisions. To sum up: They don’t. Or rather, the larger capitalist system is set up so that event the well-meaning (lol) members of the Professional Managerial Class couldn’t make truly ethical decisions even if they wanted to. I am already angry, and expect I will only become more angry as I work my way through the book.

Baudrillard is breaking my brain. I am about 20 pages into Simulacra and Simulation and need to take frequent breaks so my head-meat doesn’t char and set off the smoke alarm.

Writing

I spent some time reviewing the manuscripts I printed out last week, and I think Neighbors can be cleaned up and turned into a real draft, but Cacophonous will need to be re-written from scratch, though the bones of the story are solid. Now I just need to free up the necessary time to do the work.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Revenge, Colonization
Setting: Wilderness
Genre: Solarpunk

Listening

“The Ludlows,” from the soundtrack to Legends of the Fall, composed by James Horner. Jim Harrison‘s Legends of the Fall is one of my very favorite books, and the movie does it justice, thanks in large part to Horner’s extraordinary score.

Interesting Links

• ““The Corporate Takeover of Housing”” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – Smith discusses the embedded article by John P. Ruehl, which looks at the housing situation in the United States. Briefly put, there are lots of houses available, but few people can afford them. Corporate ownership is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. As usual for Naked Capitalism posts, there is a lot of excellent additional information and nuance to be found in the comments.
• “Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic) – The conclusions Doctorow draws in this excellent article tie in to Curtis Yarvin’s “dark enlightenment,” which is the most cowardly, impotent, bootlicking school of thought to emerge in the entire internet age. I am in the process of writing up a take-down of the entirety of the Moldbug philosophy, which is probably vast overkill, since it really only needs a short paragraph to counter every variation of the dark enlightenment, from every one of its adherents.