brendan halpin

This whole post is going to be rife with spoilers. So if you haven’t finished Season 2 yet, come back when you do!

Saturday I went to the Tesla Takedown protest at the Prudential Center in Boston. At 56, I was one of the youngest people there, and almost everyone there was white. I don’t draw any conclusions from this—it was just interesting to me. I associate protesting with the young, but the young were mostly not in evidence.

A few weeks ago, I read a piece on 404 Media about how Hoopla was full of AI-generated slop. Then there was a followup about how Hoopla was removing the AI-generated books in its catalog. (I’m not linking to either because they’re paywalled, which is a shame because the information is important.)

Well, I guess Hoopla removed the books mentioned in the article, but that’s far from all the books. I went looking for a fantasy book to read, and folks, Hoopla is essentially unusable at this point.

If you work in higher ed, you’ve probably seen this article floating around recently. I read it and discussed it with my students, and I have some thoughts.

Here in the fascist USA, things are about to get a lot more expensive because our billionaire overlords are crashing the economy on purpose so they can buy up everything at bargain prices! You know, like the billionaires did in Russia!

Here in New England, our utility prices are set to skyrocket due to the fact that we get most of our energy from Canada. I’m sure there is similar bullshit on the way just about everywhere.

So everybody who’s not a billionaire is about to get a lot broker. And the tendency when you’re broke is to eat shitty food because it’s cheap. You can’t beat the price of instant noodles, but if you’re broke and working a lot you can’t stay fueled up on instant noodles. If you’re going to have any energy at all to resist fascism, you need to eat real food.

Here are some concrete tips to help you eat real food while being broke.

Dear [names redacted],

Hi. I have some questions for you. I’m too chicken to start a big conflict at a family get together, and of course the dynamic of white people gatherings (or maybe everyone’s, I don’t know) is that if I object to your politics in a public place, I’m being unreasonable and rude.

So I want to ask you here. Why do you hate me?

You know how you start watching a show and you think you know what kind of show it is but then it turns out to be something different? I love that. But then also, you know when you’re watching a cool show and the ending ruins the whole thing for you? I hate that.

Both things happened with Nine Perfect Strangers, in which a bunch of people go to a wellness retreat run by Nicole Kidman doing a Karma Chameleon Russian accent. (it comes and goes!)

What to do when the world falls apart? Watch horror movies, of course! I wrote about Ghoulies here, and apparently this kicked off a spree of Funny Little Guys Wrecking Stuff movies.

I am old enough that to have watched countries that once existed simply stop existing. I’m not talking about countries from my youth like Rhodesia and Zaire and Burma that changed names. I’m talking about countries that just stopped existing in the form in which I knew them: The USSR. East and West Germany. Yugoslavia. Czechoslovakia.

What a strange, beautiful, creepy movie this is!

A powdered, bewigged French nobleman gets stuck in the Serbian countryside and shelters with a family whose father comes back changed from a mission of revenge.