Stephen Berquist

I am Tosk

I dunno, when you grow up in the hollers a lot of things that seem like "Americana" feel a lot more like chanting and dancing for the fairies. My aunt still has a hex pattern up on her barn.

Even growing up in the small town midwest in the 90's, we had plenty of parades, festivals, local culture, historical reenactments (including acknowledging some nasty stuff like Indigenous removal). A lot of that stuff has disappeared as everything turns into suburbia.

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

some rich shit invites a buncha thugs into the shire, they take over and start throwing people in lockup for even minor acts of resistance. hobbits band together and drive them out with a minimum of violence because there's more of them but they need organizing first.

scouring of the shire would be pretty relevant atm

Harry Balls?

i'm from the rural midwest and i have a phd in anthropology and i think i can say, with quite a bit of confidence, that an awful lot of people don't vote for democrats precisely because of their endless pandering and poll-chasing

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondas_...

it's cool, it has a weird internal structure to it resembling circuit boards and electronics in it that you don't often see in Legos. it's also, when finished, almost indistinguishable from a real game boy.

Evil in LOTR is pretty clearly laid out as the desire to bend the world to your will through violence, cruelty, or manipulation, stemming ultimately from a fear of death or loss. That requires some media literacy though, and I've yet to see anyone on the right display that.

retire already. get out.

lmao cool i just got a paper accepted saying something like this

I'm not going to buy or publish from your press after learning that you publish right-wing agitprop. inexcusable and embarrassing.

I know a lot of lefty academics (myself included). It's more rooted in a sort of anarchist antipathy towards "the State" as the primary source of oppression. instead of treating "the State" as a codification of oppressive or violent social structures emerging through daily interactions

every trans person i see post about the OU suspension knows that the suspended target is trans & a grad student, & has an innate awareness that this is about purging trans employees. every cis person i see thinks the target is a rando professor & that this is about giving conservatives good grades

i have a cathedral in there too

it gets slightly more nuanced in some cases, but its still essentially just people arguing over the definition of "fascism"

nor do any of these people define what "moving to the left" means or describe how this characterizes democratic politics. utter charlatans. completely unserious.

My grandpa was a photographer in WWII and was stationed in Guyana- he took a photo of a man who had been more-or-less skeletonized by piranhas. It's real!

given the urgency of global warming, it's possible that he may, in the long term, have collapsed civilization

I've noticed the opposing team's fans only cheer when the opponents score on us. To win those fans over, I recommend we score on ourselves repeatedly; that will surely make them so happy they'll start supporting us. And I'm sure all our fans will keep cheering for us—who else is there to cheer for?

this isn't a legitimate government, they have no interest in the mechanisms of governing and no belief in the value of governance. you don't need to play at process anymore. you need to build a plan whereby as many of these officials and their funders as possible are eventually behind bars or broke

my takeaway from climate week nyc is that "climate storytelling" is a little too much "we must reimagine our deepest souls in relationship to mother nature and the moral abyss of the polycrisis into which we must now stare" and not enough "ok but get a heat pump"

UChicago always had these irritating little intellectual cults around e.g., Mearsheimer, Sunstein, the Comaroffs, etc. and it's been mildly amusing to watch them all gradually outed as frauds, idiots, and perverts

actually, one of the first things that they really drill into us in archaeology school is that burials and monuments to the dead don't necessarily say much about the dead person

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I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose???

This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

porchetta is basically the same as Peruvian chicharron, which is explicitly a breakfast sandwich (which I just ate for breakfast). just needs some fried sweet potato and sarsa criolla.

you should stop saying things like this. if you notice that your arm hurts and then decide to cut it off, you haven't "accurately diagnosed the pathology," you've accurately observed a symptom of it and then wildly misdiagnosed the pathology.

Counterpoint: what if shadowy cabal, but all very stupid