7/7/2026 - Aristotle
This is what it comes down to for Aristotle, right? He says, if they're fixable, a friend will stay in there and try to get things right again. If they're not fixable, it seems like the prudent thing to do is to cut them loose. That's a tough thing, right? Have you ever had to do this, by the way? Have you ever had to cut a friend loose because it was just kind of like, boy, once upon a time you were a good person. Now you just don't really seem like a good person. I can't stand by... I don't know about you, I have tons and tons of friends who come to me with their bullshit drama and they're just like, things suck because X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, X, Y, and Z are all changeable. Here's how you change them. This is maybe not like what friends want when they come to you to complain, by the way, is to like explain how they can solve their problems. I've been told this by my wife as well. But there are only so many times that somebody can come to me with a complaint about something that they can fix without fixing it.
Before I'm just kind of like, I don't get why I should care anymore. I don't get why I should care that your life sucks because you refuse to fix it. I can't fix it for you.
- Adam Rosenfeld, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (books VIII & IX) - Friendship
October 31st, 2017.
5/23/2026 - 9/11
And in this age of the telephone most communication has become evanescent, gone into thin air no matter how important or heartfelt. Think of all those people inside the World Trade Center saying goodbye by phone. If only, in the blizzard of paper that followed the collapse of the buildings, a letter had fallen from the sky for every family member and friend, something to hold on to, something to read and reread. Something real. Words on paper confer a kind of immortality. Wouldn't all of us love to have a journal, a memoir, a letter, from those we have loved and lost? Shouldn't all of us leave a bit of that behind?
- Anna Quindlen, "Write For Your Life."
January 22nd, 2007. Newsweek.
5/18/2026 - LOL Superman
We contacted a mutual friend who specializes in
VFX work, and over the course of a week with our guidance he would use his free time to experiment with a semi-realistic 3D render of the World Trade Center plaza during the attacks. While all the dimensions of the structures were accurate, many textures were flawed as it was designed around the idea that it would be heavily compressed and downscaled when finished, so they had to translate well. Many reference photos were used: Cullity's, Rosbrook's, Labriola's, and more. The images would be triangulated for surface reconstruction so we knew exactly where each body and piece of debris would go.
The video would be rendered in blender, 30fps 1080p, downscaled and heavily compressed with
2005 software and 2003-era video codecs, and made to play at 10fps. It would be then copied onto an old 2005-era computer where it would be converted into a .GIF with even more era-appropriate software, the type that skipped frames and would randomly make the GIF play at the wrong speed due to messy default settings. The computer was not connected to the internet, and we calibrated it to show the wrong date on every file we created:
July 27, 2006.
- u/DVDRipper, "You have all been had."
March 14th, 2026.
5/11/2026 - 4chan
"the sun is going down and you're getting cold."
- Anonymous, 1/7/2021(Thu)21:04:44
No. 301025036
4/30/2026 – Letterman
The Xanax was beginning to take effect, and I felt good.
I felt psyched up to appear.
You could say it's like what happened over at Saturday Night Live, Ron said.
It's the exact same phenomena.
The cheap sets that are supposed to look even cheaper than they are.
The home movie mugging for the cameras.
The backyard props like monkey cam or thrill cam or coneheads or low-grade mache.
Late night SNL. They're anti-shows.
[...]
But even if something's an anti-show, if it's a hit, it's a show.
- David Foster Wallace, My Appearance (1989)
2/28/2026 - DFW
[…]at least half the room's men listening with what's called half an ear while pursuing their own private lines of thought and Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and or flows only the sharp caps showing unknown and noble to one another he imagined that it was probably only in marriage and a good marriage Not the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for 70 years, but rather true conjugal intimacy that partners allowed each other to see below the iceberg’s caps, public mask, and consented to be truly known. Maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm, or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks, but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms. late at night, and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness.
Within a grinding professional machine, you can't believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in.
- David Foster Wallace, Mister Squishy. 2000
1/9/2026 - Sy
The red eye effect in a photograph is a result of light rays from a camera's flash or any other bright light source entering your dilated pupil
and reflecting back the color red from the epithelial layer of your retina.
This layer in our human eye is similar to the topetum in Nocturnal Animals.
This tissue doubles the amount of light entering the eye and helps the animal to maneuver and hunt by night.
So when we see this red eye effect in photographs of our family or of ourselves, it always jolts us.
It seems a kind of warning, a kind of unwanted reminder of something.
- One Hour Photo, Deleted Scene
12/24/2025 - Silence
The possibility that the nyhill emptiness, meaninglessness and hopelessness, will eventually prevail uncertainty about the
fate of the soul or the self-versacularists lies at the heart of the human experience.
Injecting many a mind with the existential fear, trembling and sickness unto death,
the silence of God in the Jesuit priest experiences eventually allows him to finally understand the role of Judas and reconcile with his own personal Judas for one who in the mercy of that kenosis radically sympathizes with the weakness and frailty of human beings, even ones like Judas
and Kichijiro.
- kianlayer0
12/17/2025 - Survivorship Bias
12/15/2025 - myhouse.wad
February 14, 2023
Happy Valentines day to the only person I ever loved. For a short time, you brought a little happiness to this painful existence called life. I hope we can be together again one day. In the meantime.. I'll keep looking for that other someone who can be the ray of light in my life that you turned out to be
12/10/2025 - No Correlation
12/8/2025 - Fall Out Boy
i want to make you as lonely as me
- pavlove
12/2/2025 - Siren Song
let's say what's going on is this kind of Truman Show delusion where he he's basically convinced himself that his life is not his own real life but it's all sort of for a global audience. Once he has an inkling of that and he feels some kind of comfort about it because it lets him escape the banality of what his actual life was, in his opinion it was banality and there's something in him that cannot appreciate what was good or meaningful about it. There's something in him that needs it to be grander than that. So the first inkling that he might sort of be on this global stage that he might actually have this unseen audience and that he could escape that banal life if he only takes these series of steps, sort of plays out what he needs to do to become this hermit character that inkling feels good to him but at first it also feels crazy to him. You know he can't really conceive of it other than it coming into his head and feeling good at doing something for his ego let's say but he keeps revisiting it and that's the siren song that delusion sort of get their hooks into people because they're playing upon some kind of vulnerability and if you let them play upon you, if you keep turning them over in your head it's like listening to the sirens from the sea and giving in to letting your ship veer towards the siren song and so what it looks like is it seemed wacky at first but I started getting comfortable with it that's what listening to the siren song and letting it get in your head that's what it does - Dr. Andrew Van Der Vart, The Truman Show Delusion
11/21/2025 - Dionaea Passage
from: "Condry, Mark"
date: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 2:21 AM
subject: (No Subject)
hey
i just saw this thing on discovery channel, probably a rerun i bet you can catch it sometime.
all about natural predators and stuff. wild things. yeah i’m up watching tv since i can’t sleep.
anyway they had this thing on the venus fly trap talking about how it lures the curious insect to its lip
and then these invisible hairs or something sense when one of the suckers lands on it and wham! it swallows
the bug. just like that. later on it spits out the skeleton of the fly and waits for the next victim.
some types of fly trap plants emit this odor to entice more food, says the voice on the tv.
the fancy name for them is dionaea muscipula.
so i wonder if that’s all this is, this whole thing with the shooting and the anonymous article
and houston and the footprints on the carpet, it’s all to get me into the venus fly trap,
only the scent isn’t sweet sap, it’s guilt. guilt over all those times i was around drew and
didn’t do anything you know what i mean? and i’m flying all over the fucking country and my head is buzzing
and i think i’m getting close to the truth but really i’m tickling some invisible hair and the ground
is about to fold up on me and swallow me down into that place where nancy hughes and ken malone went.
i’m gonna go take some sleeping pills. ihope connie is going better, man. i miss jen.
she has a way of making me feel like i’m home just by being around her. i’m tired of motels.
i’m sorry, eric i’m so sorry.
- m
11/17/2025 — Pavel Paragraph
I must tell you, I do not go to the states very often except on important business.
I was stopped in Danbury, Connecticut to meet with a client on importing marmalade
when at this time I was still in that line of work. The man I met had a wife who was
principle at the local high school, and he would often join her for lunch. So we meet
there, and I must tell you, American high schools are absolutely horrendous. In my childhood,
I would think the schools were bad, but these definitely exceeded my expectations of primal, negative energy.
Kids looked like zombies, stripped of any sort of ambition.
The whole ordeal depressed me so, I ended up having to leave the facilities and take a smoke break.
These kids were there smoking, sneaking outside. I heard them speak of their hatred of the education.
I could not imagine this, a school that taught its kids to hate learning.
Brought physical illness. Due to this, I rarely ever returned to this country.
It might be the land of the free, but these schools reminded me of a soviet prison.
- Pavel