Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: February 2022

  • an epistemic heat death of universal solipsism

    Interesting (old?) idea from Venkatesh Rao: Divergentism is both an idea you can believe or disbelieve, and a basis for an ideological doctrine (hence the –ism) that you can subscribe to or reject. You could capture both aspects with this simple statement: Humans diverge at all levels of thought-space, from the sub-individual to species, and…

  • more futures than people

    TFW a webcomic, which you’ve been reading for what is probably fifteen years or so by this point, unexpectedly recapitulates one of the major planks of your own academic theoretical framework, and does so via the staggeringly economical medium of a few panels of dinosaur clip-art: Of course, the observation that all futures—from the most…

  • blues funeral

    Mark Lanegan’s gone. Hard pressed to pick a favourite tune, though Bubblegum is easily the album I’ve listened to most, so here’s one of the ones that’s always struck me as a masterpiece marriage of songwriting and delivery: Sad to lose another of the singers that shaped my youth, but—as I remarked to L____ when…

  • ankomstårsdagen

    Just realised that yesterday was the two-year anniversary of my arrival in Sweden*. As is so often the case with such temporal landmarks, it feels like aeons ago, and at the same time feels like it happened just yesterday—a cognitive distortion surely enhanced by The Still Ongoing Situation, but perhaps not as much as one…

  • cultural fracking / “indie sleaze”

    Nothing is more eyerollingly contemptible than someone else’s nostalgia, for the very obvious reason that—d’uh—there were better things to be nostalgic about when I was young. The above, for the avoidance of doubt, is meant to be read as deeply ironic, but there’s also an element of truth to it. This has become very apparent…