ethan > Recent Status Updates

just to drive home my point from yesterday, a literal quote from the team that first developed the genius idea of ‘just keep cooking the earth, one day we’ll uncook it’, emph. mine: “The situation changes substantially if negative emissions ARE ASSUMED TO BE POSSIBLE: the urgency for near-term emissions reduction becomes much less.”

within which i learned, more in depth than i already had, that the powerful people fucking the world to scorched bits are quite literally playing Calvinball with the future survival of (at minimum) 2-4 billion people. they force their programs not to consider systems-level solutions and allow for overshoot of targets like 1.5C based on the hypothetical future existence of tech that IS NOT REAL (carbon sequestration).

feels very silly to still have 350 pages to go when i’m already convinced this is among the greatest novels i have ever read. in none of Pynchon’s novels has his scope been wider than in this one: what was it like staring down the barrel of capitalism’s and imperialism’s emergent, destructive power, to be a cog in their new machines (literal and metaphorical), and know there was nothing to be done to stop it?

the call between PKD and Eric Lampton finally convinced me to go digging for some articles about PKD’s drug use and religious psychosis and suffice to say i am now amazed and engrossed rather than bewildered

made it to part 2 🥳🥳🥳

read all but the Lost Highway essay, keeping in currently reading until then!

chance i DNF this because the preface was chock full of “the US didn’t used to be this evil we need to save our democracy!!” schlock lol. yeah bro we’re all shocked that the country founded on indigenous genocide ended up fighting oil wars for the benefit of petrobillionaires, totally out of left field! honestly, why even write history if you’re a liberal and therefore forbidden from understanding it

this book makes me feel so dumb