here's a book called richard scarry's busy busy world. i find this book extremely interesting from a pedagogical perspective.

our culture has taken the position of having an extreme aversion to stereotypes. well, that's all this book is: the stereotypes of each country.

[...] the story in france has people in fancy restaurants. the story in switzerland has goats climbing mountains. the story in mexico has a guy eating beans and buying clay pots. the story in india has a fortune teller. and so on. the entire content is just basic stereotypes.

what is the nature of the self in christian eschatology?

for those unfamiliar, eschatology is a branch of theology that just means, "how everything ends up". the final state of things. end of the story. how does this all play out? how the pieces land: that's eschatology.

[...] in the eastern system i'm the most familiar with, buddhism, there's a concept called shunyata. usually translated as emptiness - it means things are empty of inherent existence. like a sweater: you can see the sweater, but if you keep pulling threads off, you never get "it".

today i flew to nyc. a guy tells me they just implemented a program where, to drive into lower manhattan, you have to pay $9. its to ease traffic congestion.

why is this unethical? well, if youre familiar with the work of B.F. skinner, its very easy to explain.

here’s why: […] skinner himself wouldnt have seen this as unethical, but would have clearly recognized it as a form of operant conditioning (conditioning operants, changing people’s volitional actions) - as opposed to classical conditioning (pavlov’s dogs drooling)

can we find it on this chart?

it's fascinating how quickly a culture's conception of a topic can change. an entire civilization can basically forget or remember large pieces of its own history.

one of the first recent psychologists to treat the phenomenon of self-harm is a guy named steven levenkron.

[...] of course the phenomenon of self-harm had probably gotten people referred to psychologists for some time. however, when he told his colleagues he was opening a practice specifically focusing on people who engaged in self-mutilation, he got an interesting response from them.

i have a folder on my computer called:

“insane christmas vibes 1850-1950”

here are some things from it: the above image is louis rhead

this one is eugene grasset:

every aspect of having a pregnant wife is almost designed to be a thought experiment that illuminates 1000 aspects of our culture that are always there, but mostly invisible - and therefore difficult to grab until they’re impressing upon you - then suddenly, they’re right there.

https://twitter.com/borjomidrinker/status/1870277191562604922

consider: the due date. how do they know what day your baby is supposed to be born? well, they give you this date. they don’t tell you, generally (lets presume not out of malevolence) that something like 5% of babies are actually born on their due date. almost no one knows this.

one thing i've enjoy about the internet is getting a window into aspects of people's story that they would never share in normal everyday life. if you're interested here's one of mine.

my life changed forever here, off the main street in burlington vermont. it looks like this:

https://twitter.com/owenbroadcast/status/1868662807069397216

i was somewhere around my early teens, in a bookstore. i looked up on a bookshelf and saw a purple book spine. i just grabbed it. there was some feeling of providence about this book. i was called to take this book from the shelf.

this is the book. it's called stencil pirates.

if, at some point, you lived around a TV, you may be familiar with ‘festivus’: a holiday george costanza’s father created on seinfeld. as a resident atypical american religion enjoyer, let’s take a slightly academic religious ethnography pass over this (there will be magic).

… festivus is presented as a holiday created by george’s father as a reaction against commercialism. this holiday is then actually celebrated, and becomes a family tradition.

consciously crafting religion - live. a joke, but its real. is there an existing framework for this? yes.

johnny hart was an american cartoonist who started a comic called B.C. in 1958. he also created another popular strip called 'wizard of id'.

he was called "the most widely read christian of our time," by a former director of the office of public liaison at the white house.

... that designation may seem somewhat absurd, but he was still doing B.C. when he died in the 2000s. considering he made two of the most popular american newspaper comics, and ran them for about half a century - in light of how many people read books, it might actually be the case.

bizarre unnavigable part of being a parent is that there is no way to reveal the information that you dont give your kid any screens without making other parents upset. even if you intentionally set out to not tell them, if they dig enough, and find out, they then become upset. you can laugh about it, or blame it on any reason, or pad it infinitely with how much you love screens, or how youre just an idiot and dont know anything about parenting and are just winging it: doesnt matter. people just become upset at the information. its upsetting information

i have critical art history information. a guy named bob eckstein wrote a book called 'the history of the snowman' and this was the earliest image of a snowman he could find anywhere, from a dutch book of hours in the 1380s: he also claimed this was a snowman, from 1603 (yellow circle). real "that guy" research hours

here’s an interesting ethics problem:

i had a friend, an artist. when you make prints as a fine artist, the convention is that the printer does a run of 5-10 prints as a test, to show you what they’ll look like. if the artist approves them, then he does the actual prints.

… so if youre getting 60 prints done, at the end there’s the 5 test ones. what do you do with these? these are “artists proofs”. you write “AP” on them instead of a number. its extra cool to have these, so they sell for more money.

my friend was doing a run of prints. around 60.

a spectre is the 2024 internet man. and that spectre is:

the difference between modernism and post-modernism.

this has been a huge part of my "navigating people trying to force you to do stuff" studies. it is useful.

know the difference. it could save your life.

[thread]....
my education is native to postmodern world. this isnt really a flex at all, because its a terrible place to start. you essentially start off with everything disassembled, and then you have to work backwards and figure out why people disassembled it. really, its a horrible set up

one of my favorite weird internet things. was in a program like this around 3rd grade. in retrospect, makes no sense. was taken out of school half a day once a week and taken to a non-school building to do weird puzzles and take strange tests. generic name, 0 record of it online

https://twitter.com/milkmybunny/status/1858657495616467121

i remember being in the basement of our school, a huge grey room, with all the kids there sitting very far from each other. they gave us a test with lots of images. me and three other kids got in, and they’d take just the three of us on this bus to the program with the other kids

really enjoyable when you get the name of an aesthetic and it immediately becomes super tangible and concrete, for example: ‘utopian scholastic’


like: yes, this actually is a cohesive aesthetic

today is st.martin's day, also known as martinmas. the story of st. martin is that he had a coat, and cut part of it off to help another man keep warm

a lot of waldorf (anthroposophy) stuff is about catholic saints. on martinmas, they do a lantern walk. aesthetically, its cool:


the kids line up with lanterns they made and walk out into the darkness in a line. it has an obvious symbolic component: being the light in the darkness, going into the dark part of the year - st. martin's act, and others like it, that we can do, as illuminating a dark world:

after elections, much is made about how the educated vote vs the uneducated. ive benefited from education and am generally a book nerd, but there are dimensions to the educated vs uneducated dichotomy that dont fit into intelligent vs unintelligent. one is: cause and effect

… when you receive education, you are not “a cause”: you are “an effect”. you are receiving. you are there to be the effect of the educational institution. some people that are well educated have been in this state for years - this receptive state has been the focus of their life.

appalachia is a crazy place. “first and last frontier”. millions of people, but only one state is fully in it (west virginia) so it flys under the radar as a region - unlike the pacific northwest, the midwest, the south, which you can associate with many full states.

https://twitter.com/appyortho/status/1854559445314859436

appalachia took the brunt of having no environmental regulations at the time. they basically blew off the tops of mountains to strip them and things like that. in my opinion you can kind of code the increasing environmentalist vibe as you scan america east to west, starting here.

king of the hill, soon to be rebooted, has a voting episode. it ends with a voting PSA, taking the typical angle of: "what's important is that YOU vote" - implied: "that's more important than who you vote for".

its worth asking: did anyone ever actually feel this way?

... public voting PSAs take this angle for obvious reasons - entering the world of "popular civics" or "the civic religion" at this time had this notice on the door

but was it real? were there really a number of people so "lawfully neutral" that they actually thought this was real?

'the nightmare before christmas' was released 31 years ago today.

a strange film: after three decades, its still a feature of the cultural landscape (year round), you see its imagery often - it clearly has a special relationship to us.

this year, i tried to figure out why

... some people seem to instinctually take on this movie as part of their personality. i remember going to a girl's room once and she had a nightmare before christmas blanket. "yeah, that makes sense". people wear shirts of it, bumper stickers - all year, not just at either holiday.

one time i worked at a front desk in new york. we got what i call “jewish missionaries”: orthodox jews who want to get non-orthodox jews to be orthodox, or at least be more jewish.

so, they walk in the front door and ask, “is anyone that works here jewish?”.

“uh… probably“

… i mean, this is an arts building in new york.

so they (two guys) ask, “alright, can you check?”

…can i check… … uh… well surprisingly i do not have a list of jews here. you might imagine a variety of people would be kind of sensitive about that.

“uh… no. i cant check”

…