Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

remember when everyone cared about this

I just got bamboozled by the instructions to assembling a scooter so

Looking longingly at a set of plans for an elaborate flying machine rn

@tootkoTootarov Maybe I should shout at those people that their SILENCE is VIOLENCE

Sitting in a dark empty room with a RokuTV self-narrating its own software update with a really bad speech synth.

You need to be Wes Anderson-maxxing. You need to be consumed by frivolous preoccupations that reflect both a deep personal need and a forgotten era of Americana. You need to be extremely direct in your communications, especially when you directly contradict yourself. You need to have bonds of either intense unspoken trust or inexpressable longing. Either way you don't say much.

A deconstructionist author makes a typo. Looks at the page and says, "eh, what's the differance?"

I just learned that gold is so *gold* because relativistic effects at the transition between the 5d and 6s orbital, leading to a disproportionate absorption of blue light by gold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry#Color_of_gold_and_caesium

Today I had an encounter with a complete boor who was being obnoxious in multiple modalities in a public space. I restrained myself from commenting and moved to the back corner. Then he stood up and I saw his ankle monitor. I was totally vindicated. Then his beautiful young lady appeared and threw herself into his arms and I decided I need to be a bit more perspicacious in my judgments.

Some of the men moving in the dark of night are friends and they are bringing each other home.

You've got to think things through, you know.

I had been, at some level, sincerely considering making a flying contraption UNTIL I read something this morning that indicated I might crash it in the desert, which would maim me and force me to rely on Siri or a smartspeaker with verbal commands.

It sounds so thin without a California Quaker sermonizing about brotherhood and peace.

I once listened to a one-hour remix of 14 avril at the same time as Richard Nixon's inaugural address, and now I like it so much I can't listen to 14 avril any other way.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ido3BmswnX8>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipyhSEvfaUs>

Read Thucydides. A righteous justification is something you develop exactly before you eat shit.

What would you do if you knew you could rationalize everything?

You have the sense that it's never going to get much better than this. You saw the sites once. That's better than most people ever get. Your cousins don't understand. They want to say something kind but it just makes you cry. You had a brief moment in the sun but you haven't proven useful to your superiors in years. So you ask some embarrassing questions in the hipster coffee shop and you'll start to learn the technique at home. But at least you'll be at home and not here.

You don't really want to live here. You have told yourself that it might be acceptable to live anywhere so long as there's a coffee shop like this, a beacon of culture slathered in the worst paint job you've ever seen. But now you're here and you're trying to be happy, and so you know at last that this is not enough. It is not enough to be better than expected. You will never get to make good on scouting an under-valued life because you will never be able to cash in on the speculation.

Under-estimation is the coin of this realm. You'll never get the best of anything. You'll never even get anything good because you have no money and no one thinks you're even worthy of employment. But you act as if you have the eye of a connoisseur: you can see the rough gems, uncut from the vein. And as part of this self-concept you will go to the coffee shop next to the vinyl store and none of the tables will ever stop wiggling. You will wince when you pay two hours' wages for two coffees.

You are trying to be happy. It is the summer in 2014 and you have never had any money but somehow you are attempting a vacation to someplace unnoteworthy, but the kind of place where the hip kids from the surrounding backwoods have escaped to. You know the place -- you're never getting to live in NYC or California or Denver or the PNW, but you can live here and you won't ever have to see your high school again as long as you live. You can tell yourself it's hip or under-estimated. ...