Jenneral HQ

the works of critical media studies scholars are like eldritch monsters to me. they reveal too much about the world, turns it upside-down into something strange and unknowable, and the truth of it rattles me out of my comfortable stupor. the revelations don't rest easily in my skull and they slip away quickly, antimemetic, even as they deliver brilliant insights about the cultural phenomena i'm most interested in.

it doesn't escape me how many of the most brilliant people who study this end up taking their own lives - debord, fisher, wallace. though mcluhan seems to have made it out alright, by keeping that ironic distance. perhaps it would be survivable for me, too.

RSS folks, you may or may not have noticed, but I moved my blog recently from WordPress to bearblog! as part of the move, I'm looking to have a few streams of lower effort content, like shortform and screenshots.

if you want the classic experience with only the relatively effortful posts, you should change my feed url to https://jenn.site/feed/?type=longform

if you want the deluge, no action is needed on your end :)

It's cursed that the prevailing theory on the internet is that if you accidentally have lactose as a lactose intolerant person, the only thing you can do is tank the next 6-12 hours of suffering. it's cursed because actually if you have a simethicone (gas-x) and a tylenol (not an advil since it irritates the stomach lining) the pain becomes pretty much entirely manageable.

Of course if you google "simethicone lactose intolerance" articles pop up. but just googling "lactose intolerance" doesn't do shit!!!

I'm very glad that I know this now, but it's bad that I had to figure this out from just randomly buying over the counter drugs related to bloating and trying them to see if they do anything, and also there were literal years where I suffered needlessly.

Whenever a truly original genius appears in this world, people immediately endeavor to get rid of him. To this end, they have two methods. The first one is suppression: they isolate him, they starve him, they surround him with silence, they bury him alive. If this does not work, they adopt the second method (which is much more radical and dreadful): exaltation—they put him on a pedestal and they turn him into a god.

Translators Introduction, 2014 Norton Critical Analects of Confucius

• this is the exact kind of midwit take that im a real sucker for. no idea if it's true or not but it sounds so interestingly transgressive and that's the important bit.
• that being said i do think its pretty good that the rationalists have so far avoided exaltation of any of our major thinkers. go us

i owe my life to the naomi kanakia book on classics imprints i was struggling so much w my penguin copy of the analects and then i was like, this is dumb, let me try to get my hands on a norton. and it's so much better!!!

The UN spent $47 billion in 2021 on a hilariously imbalanced set of 17 development goals. These goals are revised every 15 years. We can try to grab a seat at the table in 2030 or 2045 and align the new goals with EA principles - that could mean billions dollars per year diverted to EA causes assuming current funding levels. (This is a very very conservative assumption btw - funding appears to be increasing steadily YoY)

But on the flipside, would an organization that can get a seat at the UN table still be recognizably EA? Or will we have destroyed the heart of it to get there?