Larfen Writes Longer Posts

  Welcome to the Larf awards! I’m going to write a bit about my favorite media from this year in each of the major mediums I engage with. For the most part I’m going to try and limit it to things that came out this year (as is tradition for year end lists) but if I didn’t consume enough new shit then I might bring out something old that I found out about for the first time this year. The TV Show of the Year: Real Housewives of Salt Lake City I don’t really watch much TV these days, as it’s a huge time investment for what is usually low quality programming. The only fictional TV shows I currently follow are Severance and White Lotus, neither of which had new seasons this year. I liked Succession too while it was on. I still think fictional TV can do it for me, and “prestige TV” still has some juice in it, but to have prestige TV you have to actually make something good. In the meantime, we have reality TV. The other shows I enjoyed this year are The Traitors and (as always) RuPaul’...

  In this blog I’m going to be outlining the history of my engagement with recorded music. That is, I’m going to be writing a bit about the artists and albums that I believe had the greatest impact on my taste throughout my life. I feel like I’m reaching the end of my big youthful musical exploration journey and have settled into my taste a bit, so it’s a ripe time for some retrospection. My thoughts on listening to new music are nicely summarized in this tweet.   I’ve always wanted an excuse to organize this for my own benefit, and a personal blog seems like the place. I’m not sure what value others will get out of this, but I hope that it illuminates some of my personality and maybe gives you ideas on how to expand your taste. My first exposure to music came from two sources: piano lessons and my dad’s collection. My parents started me on piano lessons at a very early age, which I continued until I was around 12. I can still play a bit, but the most important thing I got fro...

  Hi! Welcome to reality. You are a human being, a mammal with a rather large brain. You are on Earth, a planet in the Milky Way galaxy. You’re probably going to stay on Earth your whole life despite all the other planets and stars up there, so get used to it here and keep it nice. You probably have a lot more questions, which is normal. Unfortunately we haven’t figured everything out yet, but we’re working on it. You can even become one of those people if you’re interested. If you want to see what we’ve figured out so far, most of that information is going to be in books or online on Wikipedia. If you apply yourself, you can grasp any ideas that we have come up with so far, I promise. Speaking of online, use that thing sparingly, there’s a lot of people trying to trap you there. Here are some of the things you might want to know that we haven’t figured out yet:  Why does reality exist, since it seems like not existing is much more probable? We’ve found that just about everyth...

I’ve been reading books. It’s usually a lot better than whatever the internet is showing me. Last fall, I started a book club and it’s been a really phenomenal experience getting to have people over and talk about something other than a video game. Even though sometimes the book is about video games. I read books on my commute to work, on my computer in the office during downtime, on my lunch break, and now I’m starting to at home too. TV & Movies & Video Games are really starting to lose their appeal to me, though I still enjoy them sometimes. I’m less interested in SEEING (I’ve seen enough) and more interested in UNDERSTANDING. I’m a slow reader so this voracious appetite has resulted in fewer completions than I’d like, but as of writing I’ve completed at least 26 books this year, plus some books that I dropped. I’m going to list them all out and give some thoughts on them. DROPPED BOOKS Michael Lewis - Liar’s Poker (Audiobook) Spotify’s audiobook service has been great for w...

  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...