Larfen Writes Longer Posts

  As part of my attempts to spend my free time less on social media, and as an attempt to consolidate my dedication to words , I’ve subscribed to a couple magazines, namely Harper’s and Jacobin . My first issue of Harper’s came in last week, and having read most of it, I wanted to summarize the most exciting thing I learned as a result. There’s going to be a new country soon, probably in the next 2 years or so: Bougainville . The article I read was The Island King by Sean Williams , and while I loved reading about his journey to meet the self-proclaimed king of Bougainville, I most enjoyed just learning about this island’s existence. So this blog will basically be a walkthrough of my Wikipedia binge on the topic. Bougainville is a small set of islands that are currently part of Papua New Guinea, a nation well known for its diversity of languages (at least 840 recognized ones). It’s basically one of the most “indigenous” nations in the world, where many people live in a rural, trib...

  CW Animal harm I’ve been a lot less annoying about being vegan lately (I think) but I think it’s valuable to have written down how I arrived at this stance. This is going to be extremely personal to my experience, but some parts may be more universal. I think the place to start is two events from my childhood. One was when we got a BB gun to keep chipmunks off our bird feeders. My dad wanted the bird feeders exclusively for the birds, and didn’t want chipmunks burrowing under our house. I only shot a chipmunk once, with my brother. It fell off the deck and we followed it and found it still alive, twitching, mouth open, expiring. It was horrible. The other event was when I went fishing with my dad and brother. We were in a two seat canoe, and since I was the smallest I sat on the floor so they could paddle. I caught an enormous catfish, the biggest fish I saw any of us ever catch. I was rewarded by my dad placing it on the floor right next to me, gasping and writhing, as we paddle...

The monetization model of the internet has been a disaster for the human race.  I'm going to lay out some stuff we all know but is extremely important context. After you pay the monthly fee to access the internet, you get the web for "free". That's because your data and your eyeballs are the product being sold to the advertisers that actually fund your favorite website. This incentivizes websites to keep your eyeballs glued to their site for as long as possible, so that the advertisers can invade your vision and mind. This incentive leads to, as Anthony Fantano  pointed out in a great recent video, websites encouraging content that validates you, content that enrages you, or braindead memes. Any content that doesn't fit one of those three categories requires a lot of extra effort on the user's part to seek out and engage with, since the algorithms that dictate what gets in front of the user don't prefer it. Bo Burnham's Inside  resonated with a lot of ...

Autism has been in the air lately. I know it’s not just me who’s noticed a lot more people openly identifying themselves as autistic, with or without a diagnosis. I don’t really care about whether that sort of thing is ethical or problematic, as most psychiatric diagnoses are kinda fake anyway.  What interests me is the proliferation of guides that lay out what are supposedly symptoms of autism, which many have criticized as being common human experiences. You prefer being on your own? Autism. Have a hard time making friends? Autism. There are even more absurd examples on TikTok but I’m writing this at work so I can’t look them up right now. Hopefully the reader is in the same corners of the internet I am and gets the picture. What these guides really make me curious about though, is who the fuck are these supposed neurotypical people? Are there really people out there who have an innate understanding of social rules that they did not have to be taught through either trial and erro...

I want to know what real aliens look like. As a kid, I was always disappointed that in cartoons or old Star Trek the aliens were always pretty humanoid. I thought it showed a lack of imagination. I still think it does, but as I’ve gotten older I realized imagination isn’t as easy as you think it is when you’re a kid.  The ideas that you thought were creative or your own as a child you are eventually able to map precedents to. In the 3rd grade, I wrote a short story for a class that was pretty much the exact plot for the movie Gladiator , which I had never seen. As a college student, I tried my best to write a creative story for a weird fiction class, and ended up with a premise that was identical to the Arcade Fire song “Tunnels”. I eventually learned that even this observation is far from new. Ecclesiastes 1:10 “ Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.” Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations has similar notions. So...