Eisen Brower > Recent Status Updates

Quality is undefined
"Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words."

or imo chopped up into images; being square means you can only see something as quality after its been neatly categorized (e.g. cottagecore, indie sleaze, etc.). quality for "squares" is created only discursively

“I think this fear of insanity [meaning the inability to be rational] is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics.”
Lolcows

Chapter 10 (pg 97) talks abt science -worth revisiting

“What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth.”

“The major producer of social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.”

Not moving us forward

Thx Claire for lending and recommending but I fear what Simon Hanselmann has done to comics

“I have always drawn Anka as if she was blue because she was what mama would have called ‘melancholy.’ Now I draw her husband that way and it makes me wonder if when we die we leave people more than our stuff. Maybe we leave them out sadness, too.”

The sphinx said to oedipus after he answered her riddle about what creature is four-footed, two-footed, and then three-footed

“Oh you stupid villager!! Of course you’re scared! Because the part of you that is me is a much bigger part of you than you think! That’s why you poor weak mortals have to tell stories about outwitting and killing us monsters over-and-over again in all your ‘myths.’”

“The attitude is that the lives of prostitutes are worthless. I think it is self-hate. Our world hates anyone who would accept us and our bodies, and our secret desires without reservation. But that is what the ladies taught me… to welcome disdained things.”

That last line really makes me read the insults that fill the rest of the page in a different way. Disidentification and prostitution smth to think abt..

I will find us a maker and get the bite and I’ll bring it home and buy you and Deeze… and we’ll live forever together I promise

Maybe it’s stupid to everybody that I believe this can happen but this is what I want-more than I want anything else in this stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid world.

Humans are afraid of death it makes the frantic. Because I’ll be one of the undead when I grow up (made of darkness and foreverness and stuff like that) I won’t have to fear death. Used fold don’t have a ‘self esteem problem’ about being undead.

“…how little I remember from my early childhood. Entire years are empty, reminding me of how I feel when I visit abandoned amusement parks with their defunct and rusting rides… When I do have any fleeting images, fragile as the ash from burned paper floating in thermal air currents, they are mostly devoid of clear connected feelings.“

disheartened on this book after learning Gen was a serial abuser and liar

I’m rly into it so far, very compelling story and am rly enjoying not only the writing style but also the composition(I think you’d call it). The way he resurfaces prior things mentioned is rly cool and definitely helps to build the feeling that u r remembering something from your history. He also rly buries the lead in a way where a paragraph or section will only rly make sense once you’ve read the last part

Lots of great passages and techniques in this book that I hope I internalize and don’t forget somehow, hopefully doing this logs will help.

Good so far it’s a really easy & quick read & I like how it’s written as if by an alien. Really reminds me of hhgttg.
Some parts feel like they’re better for younger ppl.
Rn my fav parts are how the author alludes to a wild future and the sci fi stories of Kilgore trout; i like to imagine the future as wild & weird bc there r so many ways of doing things that we discount bc they don’t align with our history