Hello! :) Inspired by Visa V's "Do 100 Things", I'm aiming to write 100 blog...
wordcount: 23.8k In fall 2025, my youtube recommendations put a video into my feed titled "The Absolute Degeneracy of Modern Writing" by Hilary Layne. Despite/because of the eyebrow-raising title 1 , I watched it... and found myself deeply disagreeing with Layne's cherry-picked examples and poorly reasoned arguments. A brief summary of (most of) the video's major ideas: American/English…
wordcount: 5.9k "But we know immortality is possible because nature has already solved it. This isn’t a physics problem like trying to travel faster than the speed of light, it’s a biological engineering problem that evolution has cracked multiple times. The freshwater hydra constantly regenerates its own cells and doesn’t succumb to senescence. It is effectively ageless. The 'immortal jellyfish'…
wordcount: 6.2k Spoilers for The Cleansing Hour (2021), Avengers: Endgame, Robin Hobb's The Tawney Man trilogy, and all of the tv show Supernatural. One other thing I was pondering about The Cleansing Hour (2021) was its use of heterosexual romantic relationships as a shorthand for emotional maturity, particularly for men. By the end of movie, I'd argue we're supposed to see Drew as somewhat more…
wordcount: 4.9k Spoilers for the entire film. I recently watched The Cleansing Hour (2021), a decent scary horror flick. The premise: best friends Max and Drew run a fake exorcism show/live-stream for the profits... and the followers. But when an actor fails to show, Drew convinces his fiancée Lane to sub in as the possession victim--only for her to fall prey to a real demonic possession. The show…
wordcount: 1.6k Watched Strange Darling (2023) this weekend. Hell of a film. Highly recommended -- while noting it's a horror/thriller with graphic / sexual violence. Besides that, it's best to go in without knowing anything else, as I did. I may write something more analysis-esque on it, but my first thought when I finished watching was: Dang, that was a good film for adults. And not just because…
"It feels prosecutorial to have spent so long detailing what seems to me the novel’s homophobic logic, but my intent isn’t to condemn Giovanni’s Room . It’s instead to understand how, despite this, the novel offers a kind of affirmation many of our current conversations about art can’t explain. As I’ve said, I don’t think the desire for affirmation is trivial; I don’t think it’s degrading of art.…
wordcount: 5.6k “Among teens, 18 percent have fatty liver disease, close to 30 percent are prediabetic, and more than 40 percent are overweight or obese. Fifty years ago, pediatricians might go an entire career without seeing these conditions among their patients. Today, young adults exist in a culture where conditions such as obesity, acne, fatigue, depression, infertility, high cholesterol, or…
wordcount: 7.8k In The New Atlantis 's 2025 summer issue, David Polansky wrote an article entitled "What's the Difference Between Hearing Aids & Puberty Blockers?" . The piece contrasts Deaf 1 and transgender activism. On first glance, these groups seem to have opposite attitudes, with Deaf activists opposing new technologies and transgender activists embracing them: stay within nature's silence…