By hooks for in links — 07 Sep 2025

w36 links and recs

things that are funny but not funny really

The week started strong.

I loved everything about the following article except that it was necessary - I subscribe to this writer, I have their actual book on my TBR, they have the most tremendously savage tone without being chatty. Absolute demolition of target.

We've never had more access to collective human knowledge, or more access to those who have dedicated themselves to mastering some sliver of it and are eager to share their expertise, yet despite this we have no shortage of people who have decided, when faced with mystery, not to learn from the knowledgeable, nor even to investigate the answer, but to rummage into their pocket, take out the same device that could inform them in an instant, and use it to broadcast the message I don't understand this, so it follows that nobody else does either.

Someone in the study discord posted a screenshot of the citations of the thing they were reading, and I said 'After Hegemony is a BALLSY title, adding to TBR' but the library doesn't have it so instead I added a bunch of blue terms about international relations to my instapaper. And of course I already had Hobbes' Leviathan on my ereader but I've added Russell's Why Men Fight now.

I'm rereading Graeber's Debt, because the time I read it before I was in a sort of post-apocalypse prepper mood & not ready to be told that there's no such thing as going back to barter. That barter occurred if at all between people who did not have previous association & did not expect to have future association. That if there is a time after central currency, one will need continuing association. So it was unsettling, last time.

The following video would have been more immediately useful eight years ago (before I found that pot of fairy gold) but it's still nice to have someone with such a lovely voice and face affirm things about self-belief.

The next video is far from being my mood/aesthetic - this is a businesswoman talking about getting ahead of others, while I am workshy and aiming to get away from others - but she's very funny about it. I like her voice, too.

I think the following poem is about looking away from the crisis & it affecting you anyway. I could be wrong. That's how that works.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/1710589/the-poem-with-no-end

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