Stormgrass

the excitement of boredom

Some prescience

Reading an op-ed by David Runciman in an LRB from February 2025, and he's so spot-on on so many things. Like this, for example:

The new Department of Government Efficiency is intended to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget. But it also putatively means placing the power to hire and fire in the hands of the world’s richest man. You do not need to have a massively bloated government in order to operate a spoils system, as 19th-century politicians understood. All you need is an unaccountable government. In many ways, it’s easier if the remit is narrower. Corruption thrives on the politics of personal relationships and private fiefdoms. Inevitably, Trump’s personal relationships will corrode quickly, as they did the first time around. He and Musk are unlikely to remain friends for long.
3 hours ago

#linklog: "Every Novel Is Boringβ€”Until It Isn’t"

A case for reading novels, even if they seem to bore you at first (it's part of the appeal) #

Every Novel Is Boringβ€”Until It Isn’t
β€œIf you didn’t get into novels at a young ageβ€”and organically discover that, at some point, a switch would flip, and then you couldn’t stop reading if you triedβ€”there is no reason to intuit that this is how novel reading goes.” "If you didn’t get into novels at a young ageβ€”and organically discover that, at some point, a switch would flip, and then you couldn’t stop reading if you triedβ€”there is no reason to intuit that this is how novel reading goes."

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Note: This is a quick and dirty linkpost. Find all past links here.

3 days ago

Stakka Bo

I only just learned that Stakka Bo, of pop star fame, later became a director and eventually won a ton of awards for his work on the mini-series Chernobyl. Wild.

3 months ago

Under Brescia

My favourite Queen song is one about, I suppose, the canal system of a Northern Italian town called "Under Brescia".

3 months ago

tilde and pipe

Is it just me, or is the tilde placement on a keyboard using MacOS especially cumbersome? Why not just map it to where my logitech keyboard actually displays it? Same for the pipe symbol, both of which I had to search far and wide for to actually find how to produce (it's opt+n for ~ and opt+7 for |, in case you were wondering).

3 months ago

Procrastionation (again)

Why is it that always when I should be focusing on my writing in Obsidian, updating and maybe even finding new plugins looks so enticing?

(sorry for all the duplicates, it seems I'm still working out some kinks, which, funnily enough, is perfect to procrastinate)

4 months ago