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Merry Christmas from Robert Southwell and his Baby Jesus Meteor

Mira Bellwether, author of Fucking Trans Women, died today. The world is poorer for her absence.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_

Season's greetings from eight-year-old me, who recognized the importance of managing expectations

People make fun of vi because it’s hard to get out, but it says right there: “esc : w q”. Whereas getting out of emacs apparently requires the gradual realization over the course of decades that all of your heroes are monsters and the ideological basis of the liberatory movements you championed in your youth are inherently flawed, and they are futile exercises

In celebration of #PublicDomain day, someone needs to make a To the Lighthouse video game. The ultimate goal will be making to the lighthouse (obvs), but intermediate levels would include Trying to Get to Z, Making the Boar Skull Appear and Disappear, Cooking the Boeuf en Daube, and Having Your Vision. Watch out for the Time Passes level, Mrs. Ramsey!!!

Zoë Heller on Shirley Hazzard:
“The portrait of the permissive era that emerges from these stories is a rather somber one. Eros is less the bringer of carnal fun than a dark and rather dangerous force on which men and women (but mostly women) pin their romantic hopes at their peril. Hazzard’s female characters are not constrained by conventional sexual morality, inasmuch as they engage in premarital and extramarital sex without compunction or shame, but they evince none of the antic libertinism or experience-gathering curiosity of, say, Mary McCarthy’s women. Sex remains for them a solemn rite, a significant act of surrender, and their inability to divorce the act from higher feeling leaves them horribly vulnerable to the emotional sadism and moral carelessness of men.”

“Meanwhile, Brenda’s corporate clients were self-satisfied knowing they had not replaced their phone lines with a customer-service bot. What they were using, instead, was cutting-edge AI backed by PhDs in literature.”

nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essay

The constant failure of muscle memory on putting contact lenses in versus taking them out, such that I’m always either sticking a lens onto another lens or grabbing voids off my cornea

And really, both of those amount to challenging alto exercises in themselves.

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Spotify wrapped my year idiotically in that the top three spots were taken by the alto-range vocal exercises I do every day, leaving as a footnote the actual music I listen to, which is apparently, um, Mitski and Bach.

Who is going to tell the Texans that kids don't become queer by seeing drag shows? Kids become queer by seeing Linda Hamilton do pull-ups in Terminator 2.

@rooster Also importantly: you're not doing anything wrong if they cry all the time, completely standard

Penelope Fitzgerald, Innocence. This "party" scene starring a count, a monsignor, and three novelists is the funniest thing I've read in a bit.

I call it a November-loneliness because there is a sort of demanding stillness in my heart...November never pauses, it listlessly seems to show off, don’t you think so?

-Katharine Mansfield, letter to Virginia Woolf, Nov 1921

#everynightapoem #ofsorts #epistolary #portrait
[Portrait of Katharine Mansfield by Anne Rice, 1918]

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myna.social

Basic models of flocking behavior are controlled by three simple rules: 1) separation: avoid crowding neighbours (short range repulsion); 2) alignment: steer towards average heading of neighbors; 3) cohesion: steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction). With these three simple rules, the flock moves in an extremely realistic way.