So this is a chemistry kit-style home genetic engineering webstore that I found off a Facebook ad with a Rick & Morty screenshot with the Impact text “AFRAID YOU WON’T SURVIVE THE NEXT CRONENBERG OUTBREAK?/FIGHT BACK BY LEARNING TO GENETICALLY ENGINEER”
my strangest legacy - in high school, for one reason or another (I can’t remember) my friends and I wrote “34 days until March 2nd” on the whiteboard in the drama classroom. It was completely arbitrary but we kept it it up, “30 days until March 2nd” ”23 days until March 2nd” etc. It spread around enough that the entire school is buzzing about what is going to happen on March 2nd. We figure we should think of something and decide to bring in cake. There were about 13 of us in total committed to bringing a cake. On March 2nd, during 3rd period lunch we all entered the cafeteria in a line (the parade of the cakes) and laid them out—a grand cake buffet for everyone in that lunch period. We did it the next year. And after we graduated it kept going.
This past March 2nd was the 9th year they’ve done it. It’s become a school sponsored event. There are t-shirts for this thing every year. March 2nd is cake day. I am a god.
my former teacher sent me a package. it’s the 10th anniversary this year. they’re already getting ready for march 2nd. it’s january.
It’s this time of the year again :)
11th year this year. more than a decade of cake day
Millennial left: through years of grinding institution-building we have revived MILD SOCIAL DEMOCRACY… from "unthinkable" to "doomed"
Millennial right: yeah we kind of shitposted herrenvolk democracy into power and if that doesn't work we've got fascism, feudalism, and monasticism on standby
at a pinballish bar and there’s a slurred-back-from-repressed Alabama accent at the rail with a camo Duck Dynasty hat asking if I want to do a shot with him
his bubba friend is dissuading him and I’m prosocial so no, he falls back to his table before the tender has his check and resummons
it’s an expense account and he and the tender banter back til it’s clear they’re used to this
camo boy is up from Cali as part of a litigation team put up downtown and feeling his oatroots miles across the river, don’t worry how trashed he is he’ll Uber on their tab
bartender used to tend the not great bar in Juneau good enough that the political names passing thru stopped at, remembers Scalia coming thru (hunting trip? one of those National Review cruises they discovered Palin?)
he remembers an Alaska ethics reform all of a sudden people were paying the same tabs they used to with 8 different cards
So under pressure from the NAACP and accusations of transphobia the Portland anti-Trump “Women’s March” maaaaay have put itself under the control of a sketchy ex-con who took all their money and tried to run away to Canada
tbh people go talking “oh, this is just a revival of the same racial discourse we’ve had for centuries”
I don’t think they’re accounting for the collapse of agriculture as the fundamental human substrate
Like, for most of humanity the modal experience was raising, nurturing, shaping living things with an eye not to their self-realization but for breeding, harvest, and consumption; purposive use
The eugenic-to-genocidal themes of the early 20th century are such echoes of preceding scientific agriculture - you could say “listen as our doctorates and outreach workers teach you to invest in the best and cull the rest” and people would recognize that as an idiom that had in fact improved their lives, made their countries stronger in living memory
All the genetic stuff coming out of what Sailer and whoever were pushing in the 90-2000s - haplotypes, epigenetics, Watson’s Bell Curve - has been so marginal to the recent social reorientation around race, it’s there if you’re migrating in from a subculture that insists on having something in that role I guess
The themes where I do notice continuity go back to the post-WWI “Return to Normalcy”, the 1940s antifeminism that presaged the 50s suburban idyll, ‘70s Nixonian law and order
Which is to say themes fundamentally about what it’s like to live in urbanity
Anonymous asked: It's extremely weird to see somebody proximate to the rationalist sphere (not exactly sure what your ideology/relative position is) who lives near me. I expect the geographical references on this corner of the internet to be group houses in San Francisco, not the arcade I walk by on my way to my favored coffee shop.
