Found another thing that the new personality has innate skills at plus I still have the developed abilities the old personality compensated with: somehow the stereoblindness resulted in an inability to compose a complete 3D mental map of an area and instead I developed by-“scene” local maps but an iffy sense how they connected and some really powerful dead reckoning, that I mentally kept track of how far away things were and in what direction and could use that to retrace my steps for as far as 15 mi (I found when I started tooling around in the car) or navigate blind through unknown territory to a known destination on the other side
Anyway I went to the downtown Apple Store to get my phone glass replaced from when I fell down on it with my keys in the same pocket, and wandering around waiting for it I found I could do both now and it makes for very powerful orienteering
The weirdest thing about Dracula Daily to me is all the Tumblr fans I’ve seen going,
“How come nobody ever told me that Dracula is totally hot?”
Which, as someone halfway through the book is super weird to me that people on Tumblr would only think of Dracula as sexy after reading the book.
Because in the Bela Lugosi version that everyone thinks of, Dracula is a wealthy, suave, sophisticated man about town who flirts with all the ladies and has a mysterious foreign air of danger about him.
Whereas in the book, Dracula is a weird-looking recluse who lives in a basement and never talks to anybody or ever comes out at all except in the middle of the night to occasionally eat a person so I don’t see why Tumblr would-
Okay wait, no, I just heard it this makes 100% sense nevermind.
It is stupid what petty shit gets me sore with muscle growth now (in fairness, some of it might be petty because it “feels like nothing” but before all the muscle growth I woulda recognized it as significant). On the positive side though, “it’ll make you sexy” is a good motivator to get me out when it’s cold and drizzly
Before I learned stereoblindness was a thing, I 100% believed that it’s impossible to eyeball distances and that everyone who claimed they could was just lying to sound cool
That’s the word I didn’t know was missing from my life. I always thought telling distances was an average skill that I never developed. Now I have the words to talk to a doctor about possible treatment.
Oh, huh, so I guess that’s how the old personality saw?
this notion that if you’re an adult still on tumblr it’s bc something is wrong doesn’t sit right with me… unfortunately I can’t refute it bc there is something wrong with me
also me: You know how you talk about how the Torah contains speeches, laws, proverbs, genaeologies, censuses, economic records, and romantic poetry, so everyone who learns from it will have a sense how to do that?
me: yeah?
also me: have you thought through that the Gospels are records of charismatic rabblerousing against the powers that be?
This is Ron Unz reposting a thorough 1999 article of his about the development of racial politics in 1990s California, framed around 3 high-profile, racially relevant ballot initiative campaigns.
It’s fascinating because it very clearly foreshadows and leads into where we are now, right down to its terminal predictions (the attempt to put racial issues in politics to rest and realign around a cross-racial citizenship faces difficulties and cannot be assumed, there is a real risk the system will continue on current logic with whites developing a conscious political identity in response), and yet as Unz depicts them - and he was in the weeds here - the actual motivations of the players involved are near-completely incomprehensible from a modern standpoint, a measure of how fast things change.
That is one critique I have, on how fast things change, Unz puts the 1992 “Rodney King” riots as the moment that put Californian whites on notice that their comfortable paradise was threatened by racial unrest.
Now, I really do want to emphasize the scale of this shift - as I’ve mentioned before, California during most of the 20th century was a white middle class bastion of conservative Republicanism. For all its Summer of Love, hippie, surfer girl, Black Panther mystique, it was a reliable Republican presidential vote from the end of the FDR-Truman New Deal Dynasty all the way up through Bush the Elder in ‘88 (excepting the Goldwater/Johnson landslide).
Like, if you’ve got a modern sense of what “California” and “Los Angeles” mean, that’s a bit jarring, and the shift was jarring as hell to live through. This explains Steve Sailer. If you’ve ever wondered what explains Steve Sailer, this explains Steve Sailer.
But, for all that I find Unz’s depiction of the ’92 riots as an end to innocence a bit wishful. For one, the Watts Riots of 1965, Hunter’s Point ’66. But closer at hand than that, I can off the top of my head think of several prominent artistic depictions of a racially tense California that were produced just prior to this, indicating that the tensions were on thinking people’s minds.
There’s White Men Can’t Jump, which basically shared Unz’s “no illusions, but this might just work out” tack, released almost exactly a month before the riots. Falling Down, an elegy for white middle class LA, was released almost a year afterwards on an accelerated production schedule but still written prior.
Closest to my heart, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is a fantastic projection of period SoCal, gated communities and franchised everything, and its looming specter of the “The Raft” threatening to arrive and swamp the locals is drawn partly from the Mexican immigrant wave that usually gets dated contemporary to the ’84 Summer Olympics, and partly from the Asian “boat people” refugee wave all the way back in the 1970s.
So, maybe up to that point it registered as “nothing LAPD nightsticks can’t solve”, but the idea that racial tensions weren’t noticed as a threat strikes me as a bit of a stretch.
Remembering the time my Brooklyn urban planning college girlfriend visited me after graduation in LA and I was looking up (in a Thomas Guide, this was before smartphones) where we were going and it was like 12 blocks away and I told her to get in the car and she did dramatic frown at me and I was like “fine” and that day she got to learn how long LA blocks are to walk
