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ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 Profile picture
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩
@kunley_drukpa
ʟᴇᴠᴇʟ-ʜᴇᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴘʀᴀɢᴍᴀᴛɪꜱᴛ || 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 || འབྲུག་
Jun 10 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The concept of the sectarian murals in Northern Ireland getting repainted in a Studio Ghibli style because that is the aesthetic preference the new zoomer generation has Image Real BEFORE and AFTER Image
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Jun 10 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Littering is one of my biggest personal bugbears, cannot stand it. Triggers PTSD from travel in the third world where, apart from being unpleasant, garbage everywhere is an indicator that there is some state or social breakdown in a country. Big visual marker of enshittification Part of the ‘Drukpa Kunley’ ‘Origin Story’ is being radicalised in India by, among other experiences, the amount of litter everywhere
Jun 9 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
THE 2026 NORTHERN IRELAND RIOTS

A Picture Compilation Thread 🧵 Image Image
Jun 9 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
“Spotted by Peter Thiel” Image POV: You are Clavicular
Jun 9 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Concept of ‘Nerd Escorts’ that tech people pay a premium for because they know the word ‘Ethereum’ is just Silicon Valley re-inventing Geishas from first principles Image Classical Geishas were expected to be pleasant and entertaining conversationalists knowledgeable in poetry, literature, traditional music etc. Silicon Valley ‘Nerd Escort’ Geishas are expected to be know about crypto, AI and the latest TPOT discourse. Different elite priorities Image
Jun 8 • 4 tweets • 5 min read
WATCHING ‘FIXATED ON THINGS BEING SLIGHTLY OFF’ EXPLORATION OF THE ZOOMER PSYCHE ‘BACKROOMS’ (2026) WITH A LATINA WOMAN

Had seen a lot of hype for Backrooms online that made me curious to see it. Asked Latina friend if she wanted to go too

Asked her, “have you heard of the backrooms before?”

She hadn’t

“Do you know what a ‘liminal space’ is?”

She didn’t know. Translated it for her. She still didn’t know

“Do you know what 4chan is?”

She didn’t know

“It’s a famous internet forum”

“I see”

“Well… this concept of the backrooms started when a 4chan user posted a picture of an empty furniture store in Wisconsin. Lots of people found it spooky and it spiralled from there and became a big meme”

“Ok”

“There was a teenage YouTuber called Kane Parsons who made lots of videos about it and as a ‘wot if we made a zoomer into a film director’ gimmick a film studio gave him $10 million to make a movie about it. He’s one of the first zoomers to direct a major film”

Her eyes were glazing over as I explained this

First half of movie is exposition. Drags a little. Plot is Chiwetel Ejiofor gave up his dream of being an architect for his nagging bitch wife and then she divorced him anyway so now he sells furniture nobody buys. He has therapy sessions where he speaks dialogue that sounds like it’s from a Mr. Beast video because Parsons is an autistic zoomer who doesn’t know how to write proper human emotion yet. One day he discovers the BACKROOMS (2026) in his basement. He goes to his therapist and says “oi there’s a liminal space in me basement” and she say “you are mentally ill”. In a fit of seethe he heads off on an expedition into the Backrooms where he gets chased by creatures that all look like 2022-era generative AI prompt outputs and enjoy leaning slightly out from behind a wall in the distance. Don’t know if early AI allusion was deliberate or not but the movie really pushes the ‘everything is slight off’ motif. Zoomers find things being ‘slightly off’ spooky

Actually, felt like a lot of the concepts were a bit ‘sort of thing that makes you go woahhh in your first year philosophy class’ ‘-with zoomer characteristics’ concepts. Don’t want to sound zoomerphobic I’m not a zoomerphobe but there is a lot of very zoomerish dialogue like “oi wot if you were describing a dog to a bloke who had never seen a dog before and then he had to draw that dog from your description wouldn’t he draw it ‘slightly off’ don’t ya reckon oi wot if there was a dog that was ‘slightly off’ spooky stuff mate”. Or, “fuckkk everytime I go in this room the furniture is arranged in a slightly different way than I remember”. In that way would say what makes this especially zoomer rather than millennial is a millennial fixation would be something like “dude, wot if the world wasn’t real and we were in the matrix” or “dude, wot if you could rate everyone you met on an app and your rating determined your socioeconomic status”. Zoomer fixation is more things being ‘slightly-off’, ‘mis-rismembered’, ‘uncanny valley’, ‘liminal spaces’ etc. Also there’s often a horror element

Ghost of Wittgenstein really looms large over this movie then. Don’t want to give impression I disliked BACKROOMS (2026). Last 45 minutes where they don’t have to do character exposition anymore and can get properly into the ‘oooh liminal spaces oooh’ concept is fun. The main reason I am being so catty about it is because I think I could make a better movie than Kane Parsons if I got given $10 million

“What was that place they kept going to? Was it a dream?”

“What?”

“The offices they were in”

“The Backrooms?”

“Yes”

“No it wasn’t a dream”

“Can you explain what it was?”

“It was a sort of… mirror or substrate dimension that reflects the real world, but it does it in a ‘slightly off’ way. Everything in the backrooms is a ‘slightly off’ version of real life”

“I thought it was a dream”

“How did you get that from what you saw onscreen?”

“I just assumed it was a dream”

She is a zillenialImage
Image Has been noted how ‘liminal spaces’ have evolved aesthetically over time. The sterile and slightly off BACKROOMS (2026) are a very aesthetically zoomer ‘liminal space’. Movie also has lots of VHS camera shots. Use of flickering VHS aesthetics for added spookiness feels zoomer too
Jun 7 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Nothing Europeans love more than sneering at Americans so if you are an American politician like Vance who wants to critique immigration policy the only way to get them to listen is to trick them by leaning so into your Americanness they find it endearing and let their guard down Image This works along same principle as ‘Orientalism-maxing’ where if you lean into your (good) eccentricities more people find you more endearing and tolerable. Could call it ‘Occidentalism-maxxing’ in the case of Americans. Vance must dress up as Davy Crochet on visits to Europe
Jun 7 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Sad how much our liminal infinite subspaces beneath reality have declined in recent years - we used to have impossibly-sized libraries or glimpses of the divine. Imagine remaking Dante’s Inferno today except because it’s for zoomers he traverses the backrooms instead of purgatory Image If you ever try to read The Divine Comedy typically you will to have refer to the index of names at the back of the book because there are lot of obscure early Renaissance Italian figures Dante throws in that you’re not going to know unless you really really like Late Medieval to Renaissance Italian history. Classical figures like Homer, Plato, Brutus etc you will know to be sure but you get to the Italians and it’s Farinata degli Uberti, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, Venedico Caccianemico etc. etc. Who? This is obviously what 20 year old zoomer director of BACKROOMS (2026) Kane Parsons was directly referencing when he said that he was sick and tired of ‘lorebloat’ and ‘having to know all the lore’ before being able to enjoy a piece of media. If there’s one thing zoomers really hate it’s ‘lore’ - hence the decline of our liminal spacesImage
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Jun 7 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
‘Bodega’ appears to be word used only in New York to describe a type of store that is called everywhere else something like ‘convenience store’. Amazing New York exceptionalism - esp. since it romanticises corner stores that are often surprisingly shabby vs equivalents elsewhere Image Which ramp is found in which city? Deduce the answers based on each ramp’s respective ‘strange beauty’ and leave them below
Jun 5 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Pulling silly faces is an incredibly powerful technique in political debates. The sillier the faces you pull the less you have to refute your opponent’s arguments. If you ever have to debate someone just pull silly faces whenever they are speaking and you will win easily Image If you were in a political debate and your opponent kept making these faces whenever you spoke which face would cause you to ‘crash out’ the most?
Jun 5 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
How much more ‘Brazil’ can Brazil get? Where is the ceiling for ‘Brazilian-ness’? If Brazil continues on its current trajectory we might start reaching levels of ‘Brazilification’ like nobody has ever seen before Image See Also:
Jun 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Donald Trump defends the bold panpsychist claim that even grass has a soul - does this make Trump America’s first Animist President? Image He got The Call Image
Jun 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
DID YOU KNOW? Famous Greek Socialist and former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis while at University once justified his appointment as Secretary of the ‘Black Students Alliance’ by arguing that “Ethnic Greeks are Black” Image Do You Agree - Are Greeks Black?
Jun 4 • 4 tweets • 6 min read
THE STUPID AMOUNT OF STATUES IN SKOPJE, NORTH MACEDONIA 🇲🇰

Skopje, North Macedonia on first appearance is an uninteresting though not terrible Balkan city. If you visit this is probably a fair description BUT it doesn’t quite capture the most engaging aspect of the city which is the absurd number of statues it has - for whatever reason there are literally hundreds of statues of different historical figures in the city centre. Skopje’s architects seem to have gone out of their way to include every even tangentially related to modern or historical Hellenistic Macedonia named historical figure on Wikipedia. Even the Wikipedia entries that only have two lines. And not even just the historical figures from Macedonia either, apparently also any historical figure of note who passed through the territory on horseback once. I don’t want to say modern day North Macedonia formerly the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is a made-up country that exists because Serbia and Bulgaria couldn’t equitably settle a territory dispute but you do kind of wonder why modern Macedonians felt like they had to erect all these statues. Was it an insecurity about their own identity? Look, I am not categorically saying it was an insecurity about their own identity, a felt need to embark on a project of national identity creation or whatever, but you would be hard pressed to find this many statues in the centre of the capital of even the world’s most chauvinistic country. I’ve been to Pyongyang and I don’t recall it having as many statues

I consider myself fairly well-educated (you can agree or disagree, up to you) so I made a point of walking along the bases of all the statues to see how many I recognised. Starts off well enough - a few statues of Alexander the Great and Philip II of Macedon. Okay, not really Slavic were they but we’ll accept the framing for argument’s sake, fair enough. Then we get to various saints, Saints Cyril and Methodius, Saint Naum, Saint Clement of Ohrid… Okay, again fair enough. Justinian I - was he Macedonian? Had to look that up. Turns out he was born in the Roman province of Dardania, near modern day Skopje. He was a Latin-speaking Roman though. Maybe we can let that one slide. Samuel of Bulgaria, the first Tsar of the Bulgarian Empire, had his court centred at Ohrid. Why not? Serbian King Stefan Dušan - well he was born in Belgrade but he did conquer Macedonia from the Byzantines and move his capital to Skopje. Then a few Maceondian nationalist figures you may not know like Goce Delčev and Dame Gruev. Mostly passable but these are just the A-listers

Then we start to get a bit more silly. Lots of statues associated with the Argead dynasty of Macedon - Caranus, Perdiccas I, Alexander I, Amyntas III, Olympia, Parmenion, Perseus… already this is a bit much. Very autistic hyper-focus completions brain. They throw in an aborted-looking Achilles too at the end presumably just for a laugh. Then, lots of various obscure Slavic tribal leaders, I didn’t really know any of these - Prebond, Hacon, Petar Delyan, Georgi Voiteh, Ivats… who? You can look them up. Many were resistance heroes against the Byzantines, not even against the Turks. Various other medieval figures I won’t name, was really having to consult Wikipedia a lot. A few other saints besides the major names above like Saint Joachim Osogovski, Saint Prohor Pčinjski, Saint Gavril Lesnovski, others… again, no I did not know who these people were

(Please note most of these statues are displayed right next to each other along bridges in the very centre of Skopje. Also note that these statues are rarely of the best quality, a few even look appreciably shoddy. You remember that botched Christiano Ronaldo statue from a few years ago? Some look a little bit like that, very disjointed proportions and blocky Nintendo 64 faces)

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Image Then we get to more modern figures. Lots of Macedonian ‘resistance’ figures (to be fair every Eastern European countries has a lot of statues of these kinds of figures); Karpoš, Pitu Guli, Hristo Tatarčev… I didn’t know any of these people either but in just skimming their biographies their profiles and achievements would get more and more obscure the further along the bridge you went. ‘Assistant Commander’ ‘Pamphleter’ etc. Again, I’m not going to list them all

The most obscure statues are found on the ‘bridge of artists’ - they really probably put the ‘Who?’ in ‘Who’s Who?’. As an aside, I’m not saying painters or poets or singers etc are illegitimate subjects for statuary and I’m sure that if you were actually Macedonian you might recognise a few or even most of them BUT I will say that when I went on some of their Wikipedia pages to find out who they were they would have like two lines descriptions. Made a point of going on their Macedonian language pages too and in some cases, again, two lines. I’ll just give you some names for effect, I didn’t know any and I am sure you probably don’t either; Toše Proeski, Trajko Prokopiev, Grigor Prličev, Petre Prličko, Kočo Racin etc… in short there are a lot of these statues, the broader point in this sense the really silly number of statues. It’s bug collecting with statues - this is probably just what ‘weaponised autism’ looks like in the Balkans of course. Nationalism as your special autistic obsession. Apparently the entire cost of installing all of these statues was over €600 million

Actually in modern Macedonian politics the policy of promoting ancient Macedonian revivalism as integral to modern Macedonian identity - and especially where it was lead by the right wing nationalist VMRO-DPMNE (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity) governments between 2006 and 2017 - is known as ‘Antiquization’. Which is to say, it has been deliberate Macedonian government policy to ‘imply’ a cultural and ethnic continuity with ancient Macedonia. Is this ‘retardrightism’? You decide. Either way, this has created considerable tensions with Greece and Macedonia’s minorities (Albanians, Turks, Serbs, Aromanians etc) as well as between the Macedonians themselves. Less nationalistic Macedonians, whatever ‘nationalistic’ means in the context of modern Macedonia, often regard the statuary as ridiculous. The VMRO-DPMNE still continue to win elections regardless

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Jun 3 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
DID YOU KNOW? Singapore has an elite police unit called the ‘Gurkha Contingent’ that Lee Kuan Yew recruited via the British for their loyalty and competence. He often deployed them to police race riots because he trusted them to be effective and impartial enforcers of the law Image Lee Kuan Yew (yet again) ahead of the curve
Jun 2 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Total voicenoteification of X - a complete victory for the Third World. Continued introduction of new features to the site that improve ease of access for people from ‘In My Culture Family Is Important’ Countries. No need for the written word. X to be turned into a digital Brazil Image Spiritual redline for me - can’t bear it. Lusotropicalism wins again. Will have to start a Substack soon now Image
Jun 1 • 4 tweets • 6 min read
“YOU CAN’T JUST DO THINGS” - Trying and Failing to Copy Bukele - The Ecuador Case 🇪🇨

With the spread of ‘Bukeleism’ in Latin America, assumption might be that the continent is on track to improve significantly in the near future, maybe maybe potentially even become ‘Basically Fine’. Was told recently though that this isn’t quite yet the case. Some countries have already tried to copy the Bukele model of ‘just locking up all the criminals’ with far less success. The Ecuador case is very instructive

In 2023 and then in 2025 Daniel Noboa was elected as President of Ecuador on an anti-crime platform, pledging to significantly improve the country’s safety as in El Salvador. Noboa has attempted to tackle Ecuador’s crime crisis using some methods that resemble those employed by Bukele - eg states of emergency, military deployments, prison crackdowns and the framing of criminal organistions as enemies of the state - but the results have been far less dramatic vs in El Salvador. Violence in many Ecuadorian cities remains high despite extensive security operations

Why is the Bukele approach not working as well in Ecuador? The most important distinction is that Ecuador’s gangs are deeply connected to international drug trafficking networks. Organisations such as Los Choneros and Los Lobos are not just local street gangs (MS13 in El Salvador would infamously control defined territory within Salvadoran cities) and are instead linked to a multinational cocaine trade connecting producers in Colombia and Peru with markets in North America and Europe. As long as these trafficking routes remain profitable, criminal groups alway have strong incentives to rebuild after arrests, raids and leadership losses

Geography also makes Ecuador more difficult to control. Unlike El Salvador - which is relatively small, flat and densely populated - Ecuador contains remote Amazonian jungle regions, mountainous terrain, extensive coastlines and very porous borders. Criminal groups can relocate, hide and operate in areas where government presence is always going to be limited. ‘Just go and hide in the jungle’-maxxing is unfortunately generally an effective strategy. A successful military operation (and there have been many, often in these kinds of remote locales and in conjunction with the US) may clear an area but only temporarily and without permanently eliminating the underlying organisations being targeted

A big structural challenge too is that Ecuador’s gangs do not function like conventional armies. Military forces or at least Bukele-style gang sweeps are designed to defeat organised groups that hold territory and present identifiable targets. Ecuadorian criminal organisations though often operate as decentralised networks consisting of eg local cells, prison-based coordinators, corrupt contacts, subcontractors, informants and hired assassins etc. Because gangs generally avoid direct confrontation with soldiers too police security operations will rarely achieve decisive victories

Another major reason Noboa has struggled to replicate Bukele’s success is that violence in Ecuador’s cities remains closely tied to the criminal economy. Many homicides stem from disputes between gangs over trafficking routes. Even if security forces weaken one group rivals will move in to compete for the same opportunities. Infamously violent cities such as Guayaquil (jokingly called Guaya-‘kill’) will always remain strategically important because they contain important infrastructure - ports, transport links, warehouses etc. As a result, urban violence has proven resilient even when gang members can sometimes be decisively identified. Military patrols and emergency measures may suppress violence temporarily but gangs will just adapt and reorganise. Homicide rates and other forms of violent crime remain significantly higher than they were a decade ago

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Image One of the other big differences between Ecuador and El Salvador is the legal environment. Like Bukele, Noboa has used emergency powers extensively, but unlike in El Salvador those powers do not completely override Ecuador’s constitutional framework. Courts retain the authority to review emergency measures and the government must generally justify the continuation of exceptional powers. Security forces cannot simply detain unlimited numbers of people indefinitely without legal processes. Authorities must also consider the risk of arresting people who are not actually involved in criminal activity, particularly because, again, Ecuador’s criminal networks are often less visible and less clearly defined than the gangs targeted in El Salvador

Mass incarceration also creates practical legal problems. Thousands of detainees require prosecutors, judges, prison space and administrative capacity. If large numbers of arrests are not supported by sufficient evidence cases may collapse or generate significant political and legal controversy. These constraints do not prevent strong action against gangs, but they make a Bukele-style strategy more difficult to implement on the same scale. Political conditions differ too. Bukele after his initial successes benefited from extraordinarily high public support and a political environment that allowed him to pursue a highly centralised security strategy. Ecuador’s political system has historically been more fragmented, with stronger institutional constraints, competing political interests and greater opportunities for opposition groups, courts and other actors (the left is strong in politically volatile coup-happy Ecuador, ex- left wing Presidents like Rafael Correa and Lenin Moreno still retain significant influence) to challenge government policies, especially where police and military operations can be portrayed as ‘thuggish’, ‘in violation of human rights’ etc

Ecuador’s greatest obstacle is that its criminal problem is structurally different from El Salvador’s. Bukele confronted gangs that depended heavily on controlling neighbourhoods within a small national territory. Noboa faces a decentralised criminal ecosystem tied to international drug trafficking. As in El Salvador military operations, emergency powers and mass arrests have disrupted these organisations and produced some successes - but they haven’t generated the decisive collapse of criminal networks that occurred in El Salvador. The continuing profitability of the drug trade, the decentralised nature of crime in Ecuador, Ecuador’s topography and the legal and institutional constraints of Ecuador’s democratic system have all combined to make the country’s security challenge far more difficult to resolve

An aside - Colombia, by comparison, has similar structural issues to Ecuador (as well as an even stronger left and a history of armed ‘anti-rightist’ insurgency) that will likely ensure its criminal networks continue to flourish to some degree even if Abelardo ‘The Tiger’ de la Espriella wins the presidential election on a Bukeleist platform and proves more competent than Ecuador’s Noboa

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May 31 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Colombia phoning it in with its derivative election; candidates are man who looks like Bukele who has Bukele’s politics vs man who looks like Trotsky who has Trotsky’s politics. A real microcosm of the ideological split in Latin America though - keeps it simple and easy to follow Image There is sense that as much as ‘these kinds of countries’ want to ‘do a Bukele’ there are not enough actual Bukeles to go around to ‘do a Bukele’ everywhere properly. For instance in Ecuador President Daniel Noboa was elected to ‘do a Bukele’ but has so far had only partial success because Ecuador unlike El Salvador has a lot of jungle and mountains and all the criminals just go and hide in the jungle and mountains. Compare and contrast also Colombia’s previous unsuccessful attempts to eradicate eg FARC, who also just went and hid in the mountainsImage
May 30 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Arsenal is the most ‘Yookay’ British football team Image Almost reached the point where Arsenal is the official National Team of the Yookayian peoples Image
May 28 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
ABOUT BRAZILIAN ENGINEERING 🇧🇷

Common sight in Brazil, especially in poorer areas, is infrastructure with bizarro topsy-turvy world de-constructed shapes and forms. Houses as thin as a person, shopfronts draped in jungle foliage-like wiring, red clay brick favelas with non-sequitur storeys from the upside down dimension layered on top of each other like badly stacked Tetris blocks. Really just a deconstructivist favelapunk nightmare, neighbourhoods full of buildings that look like they were designed by Frank Gehry on a $20 budget. Fun in the abstract to be sure but also a really ‘what the hell is going on in Brazil’-type phenomenon

Might surprise you but Brazil does actually have fairly extensive building and electrical codes, including standards from the Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT) and municipal building regulations. On paper many cities require permits, structural standards, grounding, breaker systems and safety compliance. In practice, nobody cares and violations are rarely prosecuted

Informal construction or ‘autoconstrução’ is a major element of favela growth. People ‘just show up’ on say a hillside one day and start building their little huts and there isn’t really anything you can do to stop them. A significant share of housing - especially in poorer urban peripheries and some favelas - has historically been self-built floor by floor over many years without architects or formal inspection. This can produce irregular shapes, exposed rebar, unfinished upper stories and random ad hoc extensions with Pablo Picasso dimensions. An incremental building culture exists where even legal buildings are often expanded gradually too as families try to save money. You may see odd geometry or apparently unfinished façades because owners either intend to add another floor later, don’t have money for anything else or, again, (because a lot of favela culture is in the mind) just don’t care

WRT the farcical amounts of wiring in some areas, improvised overhead wiring - sometimes called ‘spaghetti wiring’ - will be a result of unauthorised power hookups, aging infrastructure or overlapping telecom / electrical cabling. When you see electricity poles covered in this kind of wiring often it will be because people have attached those wires to the grid in order to siphon electricity off from it

I’ve seen a lot of unusually-shaped buildings in poorer neighbourhoods in Brazil and while I’m a very open-minded pro experimenting with form in architecture person don’t think I’ve ever seen a finished project were I thought “wow what a postmodernist triumph.” Building that sticks with me most was the Alice in Wonderland restroom at a roadside gas station I encountered while in Brazil’s northeast. Went in the gas station to buy a Coca Cola Zero and a protein bar, asked where the bathroom was. Time to fall down the rabbit hole! Attendant gave me a comically oversized key and pointed me to a tiny narrow door at the edge of the station forecourt. Put the key in the lock and opened the door, it opened up into a long, narrow stained white tile hallway only slightly wider than my shoulders. It got weirder - as I walked down the hallway the floor would undulate sharply, jolt up and down in level. The walls kept getting narrower and the roof lower too until eventually I couldn’t walk straight on. Had to turn and shimmy along sideways to keep progressing. Eventually had to crouch down slightly too because the roof was getting too low. When I finally reached the end of the passage there was a small hobbit door which I had to duck into to reach the toilet. Half expected to find a white rabbit inside. As it turned out there was no rabbit but it did at least seem like the bathroom had been built for rabbits, ceiling couldn’t have been higher than about 160cm. Had a piss and then made my way back along the passageway. Was in a bit of a stupor for a while afterwards, really remarkable through the looking glass spatial design. Only in BrazilImage See Also:
May 25 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
WATCHING ‘RYAN GOSLING STARS AS RYAN GOSLING’ ‘I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE’ REVIVALISM FILM ‘PROJECT HAIL MARY’ (2026) WITH A LATINA WOMAN

Noticed ‘Project Hail Mary’ (called derisively by some ‘Project Reddit’) was available on streaming. Saw it described as a Neo-‘Scientism’ film in the sense of it is thematically very ‘I Fucking Love Science’ but where the ‘Scientism’ here is ‘Scientism’ in a not massively woke way. Andy Weir Hard Science ‘Scientism’ where the author is too much of a sperg about making sure all ‘The Science’ is correct to care about properly getting into the weeds of social commentary and where the mostly upbeat plot is basically just the main character ‘doing science’ to ‘solve science puzzles’. I’m a big sucker for this kind of techno-optimism, I’m not embarrassed to admit I do actually ‘Fucking Love Science’

Suggested to Latina ‘friend’ and she perked up and said “yeah of course let’s watch it, actually I’ve seen it at the cinema twice already I really liked it I want to watch it again”. Thought ‘huh’? No offence to her she is sweet if a little ditzy but did wonder what was wrong with either her or ‘Project Hail Mary’ that she went to the cinema to see it twice. TLDR enjoyed the film but wouldn’t pay to see it twice, also I don’t have a vagina either. Strange

Film stars Ryan Gosling as himself which is great casting because Gosling does borderline Reddit but not full-on Reddit really well, you know he has enough charisma to float above ‘Reddit-ness’ even if a lot of his mannerisms are Reddit-coded. This casting prevents the film - despite Weir’s Reddit tendencies - from ever becoming properly Reddit, it has a lot of Reddit moments but Gosling as himself means it escapes full ‘Reddit-dom’. Contrast vs if Ryan Reynolds had been cast instead

With ‘Scientism’ in general it’s easy to descend into ‘Reddit-ness’, to get too excited and prematurely ejaculate a load of insipid moralisms into it. This is a shame because I am very pro pro-science messaging. I mean science here in the proper hard empiricism sense - Bacon, Kuhn, Feyerabend etc. Basically Fine Carl Sagan ‘Scientism’ descended into New Atheism ‘Scientism’ descended into the mess that was popular culture in the 2010s, then the COVID debacle too… ended up tarnishing ‘Science’ as a brand. ‘Science’ has been in need of a proper revival since

Plot is the sun and every other star within a few hundred light years is being eaten by space bacteria so Gosling has to go into space to the one star nearby that isn’t being eaten by space bacteria in order to find out why. When Gosling arrives he discovers spooky aliens have also traveled there for the same reason; their home star is being eaten by space bacteria too. Build-up to the alien reveal has a dash of cosmic horror about it, the interior of their ship is aesthetically a bit ‘I Fucking Love Science’ “uh actually intelligent life probably isn’t going to be humanoid it’s probably going to be Truly Alien” (fractals made of xenon, the air is ammonia etc) but it still manages to be tasteful ‘Alien’ alien

Single surviving occupant is revealed to be a rock alien Gosling names ‘Rocky’. Unfortunately it turns out Rocky’s species is a Reddit species - he talks and acts like a Redditor, is unambiguously Reddit in conception. Latina found the Rocky character hilarious, kept laughing out loud at him. Not even at the sometimes bordering Reddit-escape velocity quite sweet funny dialogue bits, at like the bits where he would be walking around and slip on a banana skin, at the very Minions-esque spiritually Indonesian parts of the character. Rocky is kind of cute to be sure but he isn’t laugh out loud funny - that and all the parts where she didn’t really seem to understand the ‘Space Is Really Fucking Big Science 101 Science’ to be honest I was starting to get the ick

Overall, some Reddit moments (esp. Rocky) but on balance a mostly not-Reddit film. Promising move towards a post-Reddit ‘I Fucking Love Science’ ‘Science’Image
Image Probably difficult to always avoid pro-Science content descending into ‘sub-Reddit-dom’ just because a lot of the people involved are going to be by disposition a little Reddit, ‘nerdy’ as we used to say. Don’t think the existence of Carl Sagan necessarily entails Bill Nye though Image