POOR PEOPLE BY WILLIAM T VULLMAN

                        4-24-26
‘Poor People’ by William T Vullman

Poor People is the first non-fiction book I’ve finished in nearly five years. Vullman’s international exploration for a definitive answer to the questions of poverty in the third world was one of the most excellent books I’ve read in so long that I finished it in a day’s time (which is exceedingly rare for me). My biggest take away (because, as someone whose day job brings them in contact with poor Americans constantly, and who is poor myself, I have a pretty good understanding of the many different belief systems among them) was the in depth analysis’ of all of the different cultures he was immersed in. It’s edifying hearing first hand accounts of the way people in whatever country live and the overarching ideals from a person whose analysis I trust - partly because he’s not beholden to any corporate interests, but is also doubtlessly due to the fact that he wasn’t interviewing politicians or ambassadors or spokespeople for foreign corporations, but people on the ground who experience the country the way I would also experience the country by way of my own class. 

What I found particularly interesting was his section on Invisibility inside Pakistan and Afghanistan, wherein he explores the nuances of wearing a burqa vs wearing a hijab vs wearing neither. I had an assumption as to what women in those regions thought regarding their ‘modesty’, which was essentially what the same as they thought; which can amount to considering their entire body as a ‘private part’, or, when considering their modest garb, they would compare their own modesty to American women, who they actually pity for their sexual openness, where an American woman’s perceived lack of modesty could potentially lead them into situations where their bodies are used for another’s enjoyment at their own detriment. The way Vullman considers the nuances, while interviewing everyone from cab drivers to his own interviewer to farmers and even members of the Al-Qaeda, not unduly placing blame on anyone while also not excusing the circumstances that facilitate any person’s oppression was beautiful. He made well-brought-to points on either side of the ‘burqa discussion’ which I found myself agreeing on, either way. 

The chapter on Invisibility was one of seven or so chapters each dedicated to identifying and examining prevailing states of being that are brought about by, or at least pointedly exacerbated by, poverty. He ended the chapter on Invisibility, which is almost entirely composed of his travels in the countries, by discussing how much more difficult the function of invisibility is to maneuver when the homeless woman asking for change can’t show her face, a person’s most identifying factor, and what all passerbys look for when determining if a homeless person is ‘worthy’ of their charity. Many parts of that book have haunted me since finishing it days ago.

TIMEQUAKE BY KURT VONNEGUT

                         2-26-2026
‘Timequake’ by Kurt Vonnegut

Timequake was the last Vonnegut novel that I have not read at least the first fifty pages of, and probably the ninth book of Vonnegut’s I’ve read. His book Cat’s Cradle was the first book that moved me, maybe the second after The Sun Also Rises. Vonnegut’s books are probably more responsible for pushing and then broadly defining my tastes than any external influence that wasn’t a family member. His books are the only reason I enjoy science-fiction today. So much of his own personal philosophy has defined my own ethos; his work always grounds me, almost every story he’s written being about coming to terms with one's own inconsequential existence in the universe. This might seem like an especially nihilist interpretation, but I choose to look at the other side of that coin - that, if nothing we do matters, then nothing we do can leave a lasting scar. 

I love Vonnegut’s work, but have found some of his later novels to drag, his characters and how they relate to their world being so familiar to me, even if the character and their world have just been introduced to me. I’ve read every book of his before Slapstick, and have started every book of his after, except for Timequake. After the first ten chapters or so, as he transitioned into more autobiographical sections for every fictional section, I was drawn - it took me six months to read the first fifty pages, and yesterday to read the last one-hundred-fifty. 

Returning to Vonnegut after going half-a-decade at least since the last time I’ve finished one of his stories for the first time (a time in which I’ve reread Cat’s Cradle at least thrice and Siren’s of Titan once) felt exactly like reuniting with a beloved member of your extended family after decades away from each other; becoming a sincere and heartfelt dive into his family and his friends and his relationship with them was like catching up. I realized that, for how important Vonnegut’s books were to my late adolescence, I knew very little about his life - or, rather, didn’t quite know what he incorporated into his work was based on his real life, what characters or settings were direct parallels. 

He is so succinct and so profound all while speaking so deceptively doltishly; he reminds me so much of my grandfather and my father to a secondary degree. The ways in which he thinks he’s funny fall so oafishly flat to me that I can’t help but become more endeared to him, in similar ways to which my grandpa would try to relate to me by being silly well past the age that it produced a genuine laugh from me. I say Vonnegut’s work defined my own ethos and the way in which I answer almost any theory, but can’t quite tell whether that’s the case or if I happened upon a strikingly similar rationale independently - so much of Vonnegut’s messaging mimics the way my dad thinks, which he unconsciously passed on to me, that I think I would come to similar conclusions even if I had never read a word of his, as my dad had already came to similar conclusions, and I had to introduce my dad to Vonnegut’s work (the total sum of which he binged within a month, and then wouldn’t shut up about). 

I haven’t read any of his strictly non-fiction work, and am not sure how much of it consists of autobiographical stories, but getting some clear insight into my favorite author’s favorite people - at least who I gathered as being real people - felt like the first piece of Vonnegut’s work that was written for pure fan service. I’m so happy he had so many loved ones, he had so much family and so many of them that he raised. Upon reading the epilogue, and realizing that the book was a tribute to his late brother, who died five months before Timequake was published, and who a sizable portion of the book was centered around, I was floored. I couldn’t help but once more think of my grandfather, and his dad, and all those of their shared generations and just what has been lost to the world with their collective passing. They took with them a sort of constitutional magnanimity that is so rare to come across anymore and seemed to be universal to everyone born before the second half of the 20th century. Maybe we have it too easy, or our experiences are too varied to find total commonality with one another, though I still try to. 

Timequake, in retrospect, is circled around the death of Vonnegut’s siblings, and, in further retrospect, his own death, which would come to pass ten years later. Certain aspects of the novel read as premonitions. The novel as a whole reads as his good-bye to his readers - whether he knew he wouldn’t publish another novel in his lifetime or not at the time, I have no way of knowing, but his sending off of his self-insert Kilgore Trout with a sudden reversal of fortunes, seemingly as a subtle nod to his own fortunes (fortunes he managed to find in the face of tragedy), will stand as a fitting bow to wrap around an astronaut-sized career.

THE PASTEL CITY BY M. JOHN HARRISON

                         2-16-26
‘The Pastel City’ by M. John Harrison

I picked up the first novel of John Harrison’s Viroconium Sequence to put off finishing the last novel of his Kefahuchi Tract Discontinuity trilogy, the latter of which just may be the best series of fiction books I’ve ever read. The first book of the Kefahuchi series was my introduction to the author two years ago and it breathed new life into my love for science-fiction. Light inspired me to change how I thought about and approached science fiction writing. Harrison made me realize that it was possible to both distance a story from the high-science-fiction I usually gravitate towards and ground it in reality, while also leaning into the high-science of a world when needed, avoiding the impulse to constantly simplify the more complex (or convoluted) aspects of a story and instead trusting in the audience to be intelligent enough to follow the story regardless. 

I thought The Pastel City was a good story, but his later series of novels - the final novel in the trilogy being published after he had already spent nearly fifty years on his craft - were so intimidatingly well-written and effortlessly read that the bar I had for Harrison’s writing was set unfairly high. 

I have always rejected the idea that science-fiction, fantasy, action, adventure, etc. were mutually exclusive genres from great or classic literature; that all great stories, no matter how violent or how many action or chase sequences were involved, were doubtlessly only great because they were wrapped in a blanket of inspired prose. This preconception, for most people and for the most part, comes from soulless cash-grab action movies; but some of the blame is owed to pulp fiction authors, who too often can come up with a brilliant plotline and an imaginative setting for it to take place in, yet the prose that connects one plot-device to the next will come out stunted in comparison to how inspired the story is or the depth of the setting. 

To my mind, out of all authors of the pulp-derived genres, John Harrison’s stories exemplify just how brilliant an idea for a genre-fiction can be without resting on the laurels of the plot and successfully delivering the idea without sacrificing prose. 

The Pastel City was his second book, and it was published the same year he published his first book. The book and the series of stories are doubtlessly inspired, and populated with inventive peoples and landscapes, well-detailed vistas that are easily pictured in the reader’s mind - but so much of the dialogue seemed unnecessary and at times even grating. Harrison’s sophomore effort just lacked the cohesion to actually bridge the gap between.

What I discovered upon reflection was that, even in the gap of caliber between his first and his last books, The Pastel City had still inspired me, just not necessarily by the virtue of his gift for his craft as his other books had for me. In fact, the gap itself inspired me; that, if one of my favorite authors, one of the most original voices in genre-fiction can grow in his craft in such a way that even I notice it, then there is plenty of time for me to do the same. To put it succinctly, it humanized someone who I unquestioningly considered to be of another caliber of person past human. 

As I finalize the draft for the last few chapters of my first high-genre-fiction, encyclopedic novel, I’ve become increasingly critical of my own work, I’ve been second guessing additions and whether or not I am even qualified to know what to add or cut from a story to make it believable, or appropriately paced. But, when I thought about it, and consented to the idea that I wasn’t good at writing, then remembered that I have (hopefully) fifty more years to draft and hone my craft - fifty years to create my own brilliantly layered and believed story. Whether or not any of my stories get published is ultimately of less importance than refining my own writing processes and hitting new personal goals therein.

EVERYONE IS GOING TO KILL YOU EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME

EVERYONE IS GOING TO KILL YOU EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME

        a meditation on media manipulation, manufactured consent, and the idea of random crime

                        - “He picked the wrong one that day *crying laughing emoji*”

* Attached is a video of an old man acting belligerently and screaming at a waitress in a Bob Evans, then, out of no where a thirty year old guy in cargo shorts appears and knocks the old man out with a running punch, the video ends before you can see if the old man got back up after

- “Make this bouquet for your partner to prove how much you love them *heart eyes emoji*” 

* Attached is a video of a woman placing five tomahawk steaks into a stack and wrapping them in parchment paper

- “This is the result of the thirteen percent”

* Attached is an image of the United States showing average share of population employed in a labor trade in each state, with the key explaining this cropped out, and an asterisk added that read “Percent of population who are scared of black crime”

- “WTF!”

* Attached is a life-hack video showing how to repair drywall with cardboard and paper towels - the end result looks like a square of paper in your wall

- “This Russian soldier heard the drone approaching, and look what he did next..”

* Attached is a video captured by a drone in some nondescript Eastern European badlands, wherein the machine draws in on a man lying in a ditch beside a road and praying so intently that he physically cannot keep himself still. Instead of killing the soldier and being done with it, the drone operator toys with the soldier, draws in as close as he can, hovers above the soldier, waits until the exact moment wherein the twenty year old kid on the ground starts to second-guess whether his death is actually imminent, then the operator dispassionately levies a bomb against a lone soldier in a field

- “This is Zohran Musdani’s New York *angry faced emoji*”

* Attached is a video taken in a park in Queens, wherein a fifteen year old is getting jumped by at least three or four older kids (who are definitely still kids), with a crowd of near fifty people gathered to watch as this kid gets thrown head-first into a solid metal rail, eat punches from people who immediately fade back into the crowd after getting their cheap shot in, then a kid who didn’t throw a single punch during the entire video, and couldn’t be older than seventeen, pulls a gun out and shoots the fifteen year old in the chest. Everyone in the crowd who had been cheering them on a second earlier runs for their lives. 

__________________________________________________________________

What you’ve just read are a few examples of real posts (the exact verbiage of which I forgot, but at least tried to approximate as accurately as possible) that I’ve read on Twitter that were either so horrible or so stupid that they’re burned into my memory, where they will remain long after I’ve forgotten my own name. The last example was a post I saw today. It was tweeted out by the former Mayor of New York City Eric Adams - who in 2025, as the incumbent, polled lower than an alleged sex offender - directed at the current mayor of New York City (who is all of four months into his term). 

In a calendar year, New York City will average over, or at least near, one murder per day. If you so choose, you could find footage of most murders in New York City (along with Chicago and Atlanta, it is one of the most surveilled cities in the country), and post one video a day, every day, and every day you could pick a different person to assign blame for the murder. I mean, as much as Mamdani is responsible for the existence of violent crime, so is everyone else to an equally superficial extent. So why did Eric Adams choose today to post a video of a child being murdered, and why did he blame the murder on Zohran Mamdani, despite the fact Mamdani has likely never been to that playground where the kid was shot? 

Some may chalk it up to coincidence that days after Mamdani announces the successful passing of a new tax on properties that aren’t the owner’s primary residence and are worth five-million or more dollars, his predecessor shares a video of a child being killed and finds whatever hollow excuse he can to bring Mamdani up (this time he blamed Zohran for the fact that it isn’t a front page news story) so that the passing layman can see a child getting shot beside the mayor’s name. I, however, am of the opposite opinion, that this latest attempt at a smear campaign (and actually most smear campaigns) is nothing more than a piece of carefully crafted propaganda. I have no misconceptions as to whether or not Adams’ post is propaganda (he was a cop for twenty years - the only profession that comes with a gun; he doesn’t care about random violence and further, I would argue he owes his career to it). The real questions are; where did the attempt at manufactured outrage originate from? And when did collective standards regarding graphic, real life violence fall below ‘seventeen year old shoots fifteen year old dead’? And, why aren’t more people asking ‘why am I being exposed to this?’

As to the first question; in 2024, Adams was indicted on federal criminal charges for wire fraud, solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, conspiracy to defraud, and bribery for his quid-pro-quo dealings with the Turkish state. Within the first forty-five days of Trump’s second term, his DOJ ordered federal prosecutors to drop all of the charges against Adams. This led to the resignations of the head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, the head of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, the US Attorney for the district that the case was being held in, and the lead prosecutor against Adams. A year ago, in April of 2025, the presiding judge dismissed the case against Adams, citing the Justice Department’s refusal to prosecute. I can’t think of a more blatant example of ‘quo’ than having the DOJ personally instruct prosecutors not to prosecute you for your quid-pro-quo indictments. The manufactured outrage could very easily be the quid pro last year’s quo. Adams is also a shamelessly virulent supporter of Israel, so much so that he earned himself an honorary birthright trip. The difference between the State Department and the Mossad is becoming an increasingly pedantic distinction, in my opinion, and most psy-ops that one is involved in so is the other. 

It is also just as likely that Adams, who holds dual-citizenship in Albania where he currently lives and who owns at least four units of New York real estate, was acting purely in his own self-interest. I also consider it pedantic to attempt to determine whether a piece of propaganda came from the state department, or if it just came from a lifetime asset of the state department. 

What is true is it was artfully crafted propaganda that (similar to Adam’s tenure as Mayor) was theoretically targeted towards liberals but found a real audience among the virulently racist whose political analysis is incapable of expanding beyond calling the black children in the video animals. I know it was propaganda because evoking the image of black-crime is a certified classic move for manufacturing outrage or manufacturing anxiety. 

What concerns me the most about that video, apart from the fact that a kid dies in it, is just how explicit the footage is, it hits the sensibilities in the way a snuff film or a beheading video might. For many years Twitter has been the premier online location for watching some get murdered both against your will and against your desires. This was an issue since before Elon bought twitter, but has since only gotten worse under the new boomer-slop encouraging, interaction farming framework that Elon pretends isn’t a rip off of Facebook’s business model. 

I was quite old (comparatively) the first time that a friend I was smoking weed with forced me to watch an ISIS beheading video, and after it was over I had the stark realization that I had never seen a person die before. I remember that it felt acutely similar to the feeling I had when I lost my virginity; that there were these inevitabilities in life that sound intriguing or that you mistakenly consider to be a milestone before you’ve had any kind of exposure to them (sex, doing drugs, seeing someone close to you pass, or even committing acts of violence), then once you cross that threshold you discover that you’re changed - no matter how little value you put into the thing previously - but once you’re forced to consider exactly how you are changed, you realize that it’s because you lost some of your innocence, and you didn’t even get anything of lasting value in return. 

When I first saw someone die I was near around sixteen; I lost my virginity at fourteen. I would assume that most kids in America - let’s just say everyone younger than eighteen - saw a person die on the internet by the age of twelve, and likely closer to ten. And, considering the general attitude of the most vocal portion of eighteen to twenty-three years old, most people are now losing their virginity after seeing a person die. 

I would like to consider this phenomena to be a simple inevitability of shameless profiteering by the heads of the respective industries inside the entertainment market and their desperate need to compete with each other over an extra 1% percent jump in viewership even if that means lobbying the government to relax FCC regulations on your specific media format. And that is doubtlessly a part of it. It’s obvious that a business model that incentivizes reacting and generating reactions will pander to the most base of human sensibilities. But I also think there are more sinister motives at play in the background.

Of course, it could just be a matter of personal preferences. Just because I personally don’t consider gore and serial killings and true crime and all of these related media niches to be art - or even really entertainment - doesn’t mean that that’s a universally held opinion. In fact, there is a sharp overrepresentation of those exact subgenres (usually relegated to the lower-tier formats of creative output; ie podcasts, slapped together cash-grab documentaries, copy-and-paste cash-grab biographies, etc.), so much so that, in the early 2020’s, they completely diminished the esteem of the documentary format and basically undid all the good will documentary film-making had earned for itself in the two decades prior. The seemingly ever-compounding availability of realistic-murder-entertainment media is the most reliable example of the death of American cultural hegemony. 

For as long as stories have existed, the various nuances of death and murder have been explored through them - both in humanity’s most foundational works (Hamlet) and in humanity’s best works (The Brothers Karamazov). In fact, I would say that  ninety-nine percent of books I’ve read touch on death or murder to one degree or another; but the distinction between The Sopranos and any of the dozen TV documentaries made about Jeffrey Dahmer lies in what themes are explored and how they’re explored. The Sopranos probably showed as many people being killed as they had episodes, but the shootings were either to drive the plot forward, to give the audience an idea of a character’s moral barometer, to drive a point home; it explored the inherent absurdity of violent crime in a modern setting - and maybe most importantly is that anytime someone was murdered, it was just a plot point. Whereas the crux of serial killer bios and true crime are the violent acts themselves and not the emotions or responses they elicit; as a piece of media true crime exists primarily as a tool for reaction, relying solely on telling the audience the details of a murder and in turn letting the audience respond, “Wow, that’s fucked up,” without any deeper analysis to be found, whereas a good thriller smart action movie tries to get the audience to consider the context of violence, the circumstances or state of mind of a character, the consequence, etc. A documentary about Jeffrey Dahmer or any other mass murderer wraps the plot in the events as opposed to allowing for the events to form a plot. 

 Then there’s a sizable portion of the population who have worked for the American war industries - either directly by serving in the military or indirectly by working in factories or for companies that refine chemicals or manufacture weapons or aircraft - for the most part, though, the people working in those positions unconsciously divorce themselves from the end results of their labor completely, especially the latter. The only sizable vet population that actually relishes their time in the service specifically for the murdering stuff are the generations involved in absolutely evil work in covert intelligence during the Operation Condor era and the Desert Storm generation (who exist in stark contrast to the Iraq War generation). 

For the last fifteen-or-so years, since the end of the Iraq War, our military has been in a transitional state, inside of which we quit sending large swaths of our population to the east to be used as ground fodder. The differences in the battlefields we fight on has observably contributed to a distinct drop in the rates of military personnel becoming psycho hoo-ra casual killers and family annihilators just from the generations born in the late eighties to the generations born in the late nineties; talk to any veteran of the Iraq War versus any logistical employee who programmed a drone’s flight path to Yemen - nine out of ten times, the Iraq vet will be observably less connected to reality despite having a more traditional job role. Our present strategy for waging wars almost entirely consists of; fighting in war as a remote job from a laptop, offshoring the war via arms deals to whatever country we want to destabilize, more clandestine operations with smaller units, and for anything that requires throwing a mass of people at a country’s military, contract out to the Kurds. This strategy, while no longer actively inflicting our entire military body with PTSD at once, still comes with the secondary effect of allowing those who are directly involved in the war industry as drone operators or navigators on an aircraft carrier to further separate themselves from their actions - which is just another road to becoming disconnected from reality, only with the additions of lying to yourself. 

And still also, there is another part of the American populace, likely with a lot of overlap with the military, that are facilitating the once unthinkable return of Catholicism among the younger generation on the right. With the resurgence of Catholicism, a resurgence of peasant-brained existentialism followed close behind; in that, only through sacrifice and unhappiness and toil is a person truly complete, and other meathead faux-populace platitudes from social media influencers who trick themselves and the working class into thinking they, too, are working class for talking at their phone all day. The TradCath rebrand did an excellent (and hilariously absurd) job at building a bridge between Christianity and Capitalism. Now we have influencers who, while not explicitly Catholic, mimic the belief system so strictly that they could basically come up with the idea for Catholicism independently of catholicism - are actually becoming successful and even rich off of telling young men that their bodies, and by extension their lives, are nothing greater than tools to be thrown at Iran or tools to be used up on an oil rig. 

All of this to say that; there are definitely niche, fringe segments of the population that are either academically or philosophically interested in death as a concept, and groups desensitized to the point of becoming unaffected after having been in the same vicinity as death for so long. And, I don’t know, maybe they constitute a large enough content base for media companies to include videos of people dying into users metadata taste profiles - but I’m almost positive that isn't happening, and that the reason I keep seeing people getting killed on social media isn’t the result of some AI that got it wrong.

I think now would be an important time to make a distinction between fake acts of violence and real acts of violence so to distance myself from parallels that could be drawn between my arguments and those made by evangelicals and satanic-panic obsessed housewives against music in the 50’s, movies in the 80’s, and video games in the 2000’s. But there is a palpable difference between being a participant in simulated violence amongst cartoon characters (as in a video game) and just being a witness to actual violence against real people, who are relegated to either life or death and their circumstances cannot be retconned and reversed like a Marvel movie. I don’t think watching Tony Soprano shoot someone is anywhere near as dangerous or as traumatic as seeing a regular guy wearing the same shirt as you shoot someone. 

A theory and an example of my meaning; I don’t believe that a twenty-five percent increase in the number of thriller procedurals in a given production year would translate to a rise in gun deaths. I do think, however, that a twenty-five percent increase in gun deaths along with the subsequent sensationalized coverage of these incidents would create a compounding effect and lead to a second, even greater rise in gun deaths. Nearly this exact scenario has actually already been played out in America; when school shootings started happening on a regular basis, they were followed by an even greater increase in school shootings; eventually school shootings would hit a record high, then plateau as we gradually become desensitized to that specific violent manifestation, and the more desensitized we became to school shootings, the less coverage they received, and when coverage for school shootings dropped, the number of school shootings dropped. It’s like a dumb guy manufacturing consent without realizing that that’s what he’s doing. 

Another theory, one that I believe just a bit more than the last theory, is that the considerable increase in violent displays on social media is the result of an evil guy manufacturing consent with the express desire to do so. It's the idea that owners of media conglomerates, especially those that deal in reporting the news, will attempt to trick their audience into subconsciously adopting a certain belief or ideology by carefully determining how much time is allotted to what kind of stories, or to prepare a population for certain upcoming social conditions through a sustained campaign of exposing the audience to stories of a similar theme - perhaps the most famous example of this in modern America was when George HW held the first national address of his term in which he introduced the nation to crack to manufacture consent for the war on drugs and prepare Americans for the future overinflation of police budgets. 

Those stories that represent an ideological belief that mass media companies want the audience to adopt will be afforded more time, while the stories that represent subversive ideologies won’t get any air time at all. In this way, the decision-makers of mass media companies can craft an overarching narrative of the world at large. And it’s not like this is a new contention; Jon Stewart made this exact point on Crossfire twenty years ago when he correctly recognized that program for being a sensationalist political drama masquerading as a news show. The news has been a tool of sensationalisation and desensitization since the advent of twenty-four hour news channels, and maybe even from before then (how old is the NY Post?)

The ability to manufacture consent has been having its own renaissance period with the introduction of social media platforms; they’re regulated less than television in America, so you can disseminate more radical ideologies, they’re less likely to face backlash for the ideologies they boost (transferring that consequence to the users), they’re easier to maintain an exact standard for what content gets shared and what gets suffocated, they’re less likely to ever be discovered as their algorithms are almost all proprietary, and they’re often just afforded the assumption of neutrality out of the gate for being a supposedly decentralized representation of the world scaled down. 

Around the beginning of 2026, a study of Twitter’s metadata was released wherein they compiled which accounts received the most interactions per year, and compared the results from (I think) 2022 with the results from 2025. In 2022, the accounts that received the most interactions included Taylor Swift, Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, LeBron James, and so on; as should be expected, the most famous people in the world got the most interactions. In 2025, after Elon bought Twitter, the top accounts included Elon Musk sitting comfortably at the top, then LibsofTikTok and something called Catturd. International celebrities were now receiving less engagement than anonymous accounts. Taylor Swift does less numbers than a guy whose online moniker is Catturd. Anyone that has been on twitter pre-Elon to post-Elon knew that he had been intentionally skewing the algorithm so that rightwing accounts dominated everyone’s feed (and very noticeably his own account would appear the most, it was one of the most expensive acquisitions of all time - he spent forty-four billion dollars on twitter so the world would be forced to read him tweet Le Epic Bacon a hundred times). When he first started tampering with the algorithm it was so obvious that you could tell the difference from one day to the next - he couldn’t get it right for the longest time because he fired a large portion of twitter’s software devs when he first took over - some days it would skew so far right that every third post was something like “All black people should be killed.” which ran so many users off of the platform within months of taking over. A marked increase in bot activity followed that, likely coming from Elon’s own pocket (which should probably be considered fraud - the only reason he would hire bot farms would be because he knew that a noticeable drop in active users would cause people to panic sell or short Twitter). Even if he had to pay in for the rest of his life it wouldn’t matter (obviously, he’s the richest person in the world), he owned one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and he turned it into his personal propaganda machine.

Now, think about all of that; Elon buys twitter, and the algorithm suddenly starts giving you multiple snuff films a day, let alone all of the groypchud accounts trying to summon a mass culling of the Indian population in America or whatever - we have definitive proof now that he was tampering with the algorithm at one point at least. And let’s just assume Elon is engaging in some level of manufacturing consent (he is. It’s the only reason anybody owns a media company and Elon gets caught lying basically every time he speaks in public); why would videos of people dying show up in the algorithm more often? What could he be preparing his audience for by overrepresenting random acts of violence? 

Consider the systematic dismantling of government agencies, public projects, watchdog agencies, medical research, social safety net programs both domestic and foreign that he was the face of in the first six months of Trump’s second term; now consider he was as competent as he thinks he is - safety net programs are slashed, he was able to get rid of social security, all regulatory agents are castrated - now ask yourself, why would he want to desensitize people to random acts of violence? He was expecting civil unrest. Well, little did he know that American citizens are so cucked and so stubborn in their refusal to admit when they were wrong that they’d rather just defend the largest upstream cash funnel in history.

In retrospect, it makes sense that he was paranoid. He should be. He was so paranoid in the first half of 2025 that would wear a bullet proof vest anytime he was seen out in public (which was the same era in which he was always seen with one of his young children, who was only seen sitting on his shoulders. When people figured out that he carried his son around as sniper deterrent - and essentially a human shield - suddenly those pictures stopped appearing all over my feed. It was good, humanizing PR until it became another reminder of just how much of a schizophrenic ghoul he is). 

Honestly, we as a country deserve Elon Musk. He’s the perfect distillation of everything the lowest forms of ourselves hold sacred. Obsessed with superficial interactions and online validation, looking for a way to prove his status at every turn (even when it comes to being a gamer, the lowest status class in the country), compulsively engaged in endless wealth accumulation that he extracts from the poorest classes in such greedy fistfuls that he starts seeing guillotines around every corner, and instead of just paying his taxes, he decides that it would be easier to strap a ten year old to his chest. You would have a hard time writing a character as perfectly absurd. 

But, to give him some credit, he’s far from the first CEO of a media organization to prioritize sensationalizing random, solitary acts of violence over making news. There has to be time when all of the desensitization campaigns finally reach a point of diminishing returns. Americans are desensitized from birth; we’re already the most hedonistic, anti-humanist nation to ever exist. I would assume that there are many people who get wrapped up in every single ‘radicalizing’ (dehumanizing) propaganda piece that Elon pretends to care about, and each time there’s a new horrible low to stoop to, instead of becoming further desensitized, they just become more schizophrenic, more detached from reality. Every time he shares a news article about a homeless black guy in Tempe who took a shit on the sidewalk, he creates that many more future snipers. I thought the run of the mill media conglomerates were blatant in their induction of mass paranoia, but twitter under Elon is shameless; Every day he fires off ten posts about white genocide target directly at millions of disenfranchised and isolated twenty year old white dudes even though he’s dodging reflex sights every time he steps out onto his lawn. 

Because of these media moguls and their thoughtless profit seeking Americans across the country, in every city, are too scared to leave their homes out of fear that they’ll be the victim of a random act of violence. Suddenly every car-jacking in the next town over becomes a personal affront to your own safety. You read so many hundreds of news articles about a stranger acting untoward in public and now every stranger you pass on the street becomes a rapist or a murderer. Solitary crimes are overrepresented by a multitude of 100 when compared to how often you will be the victim of crime, so you just assume everyone you see is capable of committing the most heinous acts imaginable, because how else could there be so much crime unless everyone was a criminal? Even rational, kind, considerate people fall prey to this most basic of propagandas. I can’t remember who said it first; but when you watch the news, and you remember that advertising pay is based on viewership, what do you do but convince the audience that leaving the house is a death sentence, and they’re only safe in front of the tv.

CONGRATULATIONS TO PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

CONGRATULATIONS TO PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON ON MAKING TEN OF THE BEST MOVIES OF THE AMERICAN ZEITGEIST AND YOUR FIRST OSCAR WIN

a response to the backlash One Battle After Another has been receiving for winning the Oscars for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, and some thoughts on how we interpret art

The trailer for Dune 3 was released today, and it had been haunting me ever since I saw it, so I’m currently on - maybe - my tenth rewatch of the second movie. Denis Villenueve is about to accomplish what some of the most prolific directors have failed to do; successfully adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune for the big screen. Not only will he adapt the series successfully - source material that is basically considered to be as cursed for adapting as MacBeth - but his Dune Trilogy has the potential to become as culturally significant as The Godfather or The Original Star Wars trilogies. And he will have made them in the matter of five years. Before he started work on his Dune Trilogy, Denis had been on three-year-run from 2015 to 2017 in which he released Sicario, Arrivals, then Blade Runner 2049; no film director since the 1970’s has had such an impressive three-year run; in fact, I was hard pressed to find another examples of a director even releasing three movies in three years, let alone three critically acclaimed masterpieces - Blade Runner 2049 has become one of the most iconic and cult popular releases of the millennium (rivaled only by a handful of Christopher Nolan films, a handful of Tarantino films, The Wolf of Wall Street, some comedies, and, of course - regrettably - Marvel movies), and a serious argument could be made that Sicario is one of the greatest English speaking films of the 21st century (the only other serious contenders, in my opinion, is There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Children of Men, Adaptation, First Reformed, Moonlight, Zodiac, Casino Royale, Nightcrawler, and maybe The Lighthouse). The only directors to release three or more classics in as many years are Cronenberg, Carpenter, Sydney Lumet, and Coppola - if that criteria were extended to screenplays, it would also include Tarantino, Mamet, and Paul Schrader. The most recent of any of these films being Mamet’s State and Main in 2000. 

Dune 2 was Denis’ tenth great film, but he has yet to win an Oscar for his own work. The first Dune won the Academy Award for sound, film editing, cinematography, production design, visual effects, and score, but Denis wasn’t even a nominee for Best Director. He has been nominated for two less Oscars than his Dune won in a year. 

Paul Thomas Anderson had to make ten great movies, and lose eleven Oscar nominations until this year, when he won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for One Battle After Another, making both him the highest awarded nominee and the film led in wins. Today, when I learned that Paul Thomas Anderson had been snubbed at the Academy Awards his whole career, much like Denis, I was appalled that he didn’t win them all for There Will Be Blood (which is most likely, if such a thing could be so objective, the best movie of all time). When I saw the response to his wins I naturally figured this was what everyone was so upset about; but I didn’t see any twenty year old on the internet or cheap media rag point out that these were PTA’s first Oscar wins. 

Some of the responses came from the same schizophrenically-right-wing people that took exception to the movie at its release, with their usual grievances over minority representation or leftist messaging (the fact that the source material is older than most of the people who would care enough to comment on it was completely lost on them). 

But, to a strangely larger degree, many people on the internet and even reporters at the award show seemed to have had the opposite impression. While right-winger psychos will swear that it’s a jewish world order propaganda film to familiarize people with greater crowds of minorities, some on the left thought that it was negative representation for black people. Until now, I hadn’t given the criticism enough credence to actually look into it (because the two most sympathetic characters with the most agency were Deandra and Willa), but I assumed that the supposed negative-themes came from misinterpretations of Teyana Taylor’s character. So I looked it up, and it turned out to be exactly that, and that Teyana Taylor has had to explain on many occasions that Perfidia’s decisions and the point of her character were being misinterpreted. 

Nearly for her entire performance, Perfidia is being raped via blackmail by Sean Penn’s character, she’s a domestic terrorist by her government’s standards, and she’s a human being, and because of all of these things and the million others that go into developing a character’s personality off-screen and off-script, she is understandably traumatised and it turns her into a flawed character. Because she is a flawed character (as so many real people are and so many characters should be) some people will have a knee-jerk reaction and take her humanity to be an insult, and whatever amount of representation she was supposed to fulfill is reversed and becomes that much of a net negative. Perfidia is a great, very nuanced character who makes regretful, but believable decisions, decisions that are often likely beneath her character - as every person has had to make. 

It seems as if it were mostly interviewers and buzzfeed-like online publications who took exception with Perfidia as a character, and very few people who talk to other people and leave their house every day interpreted her character as a stereotype. Regina Hall and Chase Infiniti’s characters were the two black leads who had the most screentime - even if the story surrounds Perfidia - and along with Benecio Del Toro, they were the most competent and morally sound of the entire cast. Representation that isn’t actually and honestly representative should be the important insult, and to expect every minority character to be uniformly righteous (and essentially perfect) is not true representation; it’s pandering and it dehumanizes. Black characters can be flawed and still be deserving of our sympathy, just like black people and every other person can be. I don’t see how you can not view her as a tragically sympathetic character by the end of the movie. In fact, after what Sean Penn does to Perfidia, on top of postpartum depression, I would venture to say it's even more racist to expect her to just pull herself up by her bootstraps and make the perfectly ideal and comfortable decision. Sexual assault and postpartum depression are two very serious subjects that such a large percentage of women will have to deal with at some point in their life, and to undermine their severity by having Perfidia just stay unchanged through it all would be a disservice to the reality of those experiences. The idea that the power imbalances against Perfidia were meant to be a slight against her as a person and not a material reality of what so many black women have to go through is the most braindead, surface level analysis of a story that I found to be deeply sweet and honest and personal. 

A lot of the dissatisfaction with the movie likely stems from a supposed slight against Sinners because it was written and directed by a black man; but they were both black stories and OBAA is a series of black stories set in something that at least tries to mirror reality and real, material conditions. To expect an action-horror-musical genre fiction to win out over a political-thriller adaptation of a Pynchon novel is unrealistic. And it’s not really the point, but Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Wood Harris are all leagues ahead of Michael B Jordan in terms of ability and likability. 

The majority of complaints I saw, however, seemed to come from Sean Penn’s character, and how repelling he was - as if he was meant to be a sympathetic character, and that he wasn’t intentionally repulsive because he was the film’s antagonist. His treatment of Perfidia also got lain at her feet instead of being turned into disdain for Lockjaw. Eighty percent of the negative reactions to OBAA just come from people fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of a villain or why someone would write their characters with realistic responses, or being unable to accept the idea of a character who doesn’t neatly fit into a good/evil binary. People are disappointing and even the ones that love you the most will disappoint you; mostly every character in the movie disappointed Willa to some extent. 

As far as representation, and mostly in response to people who get a visceral reaction at seeing a black character in a movie; I’ve never felt more represented by any movie or more similar to any character than I did with Willa (even though she’s a woman, I can still relate to her. If the only difference you have between a person is your gender or your race, all that should mean is that you only have one difference from them). As a mixed child who grew up with my white dad and a mom who was only slightly-less absent than Perfidia, OBAA is deeply sentimental to me. Being mixed, I’ve always been able to see myself in any character, but to actually see the further nuances of being biracial be fundamental in a leading role, on top of being a story about being a dad, which will never not elicit a visceral emotional response from me, made this movie deeply personal to me.

As someone who has a mom nearly identical to Perfidia, I think I can speak with some authority when I say that she still deserves sympathy and understanding and forgiveness.