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Individualism Must Die!

  The thoughts below were mostly spurred on by this piece in Harper’s. Modern Western philosophy is usually said to have been inaugurated by René Descartes’ relatively short essay, “Meditations on First Philosophy”. If you’re “trying to get into philosophy”, you’re usually told to start either here or with Plato. There are 6 essays actually, but all anyone talks about is the first because the rest are about proving God exists, which we don’t consider to be an issue worth arguing about these days. In that famous first meditation, Descartes attempts to systematically doubt everything that he believes to be true, even fundamental axioms such as 1+1=2. He tries to imagine a little demon who deceives all his senses to make him perceive things falsely, you could also just imagine you’re in the Matrix and are actually a body in a vat if you wish. The point is that after he goes through doubting all his beliefs, the one thing he feels that is undoubtable is that he was doing some doubting...
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Larf Awards 2025

2024 list here AOTY - I Love My Computer by Ninajirachi There were plenty of great releases this year, but no full album felt more complete than this one for me. Nina said she put a ton of effort into the tracklist flow for this album and it shows - it includes the best song transitions I’ve heard this year. Every time I hear a song out of context of the album I anticipate the next song on the album, especially songs like Ipod Touch and CSIRAC. Ninajirachi covers a wide range of EDM genres to keep the sound from getting stale throughout the runtime, and ties it together with her own voice and consistent perspective. Anyone who grew up with the internet can relate to the stories on this album. It’s also great to hear someone who’s still having fun with their computer. Nina clearly associates the computer with music making, and thus her self-actualization through art, but also makes clear early on that she appreciates that her computer can take her anywhere, even a country that she’s nev...
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Books I Read 2025

 See the 2024 edition  here. The Vegetarian by Han Kang Started the year off with a real stinker. I decided to read this given that the author was just awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that it’s supposedly about a vegetarian. I’m vegan , so this seemed like a relevant subject matter to me. However, this novel is in the same vein as the horrible 2016 French horror film Raw , where vegetarianism isn’t actually vegetarianism, it’s a metaphor for some other shit. The main character of the novel decides to stop eating meat after having a nightmare, and her shitty husband and dad freak out about it. This isn’t entirely unreasonable from them, because she is also being unhealthy. She’s barely eating anything at all and is not able to explain her decision clearly, so the sudden change would actually be concerning. She is then exploited and arguably raped by her artist brother-in-law who decides to put his shitty video art over his morality. Men being bad, how original. From...
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