you don't need to have cute handwriting girl, Dostoevsky's manuscript drafts looked like this

left- draft of Demons. right- draft of The Brothers Karamazov

☀Voynich Manuscript

the most mysterious manuscript in history is the Voynich Manuscript . This book , written about 600 years ago by an unknown author in an unknown language , has not yet been deciphered

The manuscript was discovered by a New York antiquarian of Polish-Lithuanian origin , Wilfred Voynich, at a theological seminary in Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century

First you procrastinate on the task because it is not a big enough deal to get done urgently. Then you procrastinate on the task because it has become such a big deal that doing it is overwhelming. You would think that this implies a middle point where it is just big enough of a deal to get done easily, however the inherent perversity of the universe's causal geometry prevents this

Sir Edward Burne-Jones, School For Dragon Babies, 1884, pencil on paper

my friend and i were going to study a language together and wound up having to cancel our plans due to scheduling pressures, but! through research we came across a really cool resource for reading in a TON of languages: bloom library!

as you can see, it has a lot of books for languages that are usually a bit harder to find materials for—we were going to use it for kyrgyz, for example, which has over 1000 books, which was really hard to find textbook materials for otherwise. as you can see it also has books with audio options, which would be really useful for pronunciation checking. as far as i can tell, everything on the site is free as well.

Inventing Anna

This weekend I had pretty serious jet-lag after some international travel, so in between taking very deep naps at weird hours I binged all of Inventing Anna and rage-munched a lot of chocolate while doing so. spoilers below, obviously.

I suspect the creators of Inventing Anna believe the audience insert is Vivian Kent, but the characters the audience will ultimately identify with most are the long-suffering spouses of Vivian and Todd Spodek, who watch helplessly as Vivian and Todd become more entangled with Anna Delvey to the point they’ve lost all sense of objectivity and boundaries.

Now, I get this is one of the many dimensions of Anna Delvey’s scam the story purposefully explores—that she was (like all scammers) very good at drawing people into her orbit as she needed. I also understand that one of the major points of the series is that every character saw Anna Delvey in a different light and particularly that they saw her as a means to their own ends, whether those ends were a good story, professional acclaim, or a free trip to Morocco. I understand the fundamental assumption of the show that capitalism itself is a scam, and that ultimately under capitalism maybe we’re all just scamming each other to get through the day, in different ways. If we’re going to tell stories about the economic landscape of the 2000’s, I think that’s a necessary place to start.

BUT I was also ready to throw my iPad out the window by the umpteenth monologue about how Anna was alone and she was just a girl trying to do something and she had courage. Jesus Christ. The show owes us damages for making brilliant actors like Arian Moayed and Anna Chlumsky say such absurd things far beyond the point of believability. The first and final episodes seem to argue that *ultimate* crime is actually pretending your intentions are pure when we’re all just looking out here in the world for our own interests in some way (except the show totally contradicts this in other moments, by holding up Neff as some kind of moral paragon for sticking by Anna at all costs). The idea that grifting is relatable because we’re all forced to scam our way under capitalism and that most of us aren’t born in the elite classes?! Pardon me, but there was only ONE character on that show who didn’t pay her absurd hotel bills and who compulsively lied about being a German heiress. The moral equivalencies made by the show’s writers were completely off-balance. Yes, everyone is on Wall Street is lying to each other, and that’s why they believed Anna Delvey. It’s bad that the Wall Street fat cats didn’t go to jail after 2008. Rachel Williams seems like a pretty shallow person. Yes, of course, women face more professional obstacles than men in the world. So…Anna Delvey shouldn’t face any legal consequences for her actions? What?! Make it make sense!

In some ways I feel like the show’s ultimate flaw was that the writers didn’t seem interested in the true heart of the Anna Delvey story, which is a) just a super weird story on its front, the type of weird that can't necessarily be explained and b) that some people grow into become sociopathic liars who live in their own delusions for mysterious brain-chemistry reasons. It’s a fundamental human truth, which is why Vivian Kent couldn’t find an answer to the “why” of Anna Delvey. Not everything can be explained by psychological or historical context. And putting aside the question of Anna Delvey's personal cognitive health, humans have been scamming each other since the dawn of time; people looking out for their own interests is not a human behavior that is exclusive to capitalism, just one that capitalism weaponizes to a particularly dangerous degree. I laughed out loud when Stewey-as-Todd-Spodek told Anna she was “below average at crime” because it was true! She didn’t know shit about high finance, it was just her chosen playground in which to manipulate others, and she wanted to be rich and famous.

What’s interesting too is that the original Pressler article didn't claim to be some profoundly introspective piece about capitalism and identity and whatnot. It’s just a very entertaining, very well-reported story about the bonkers antics of Anna Sorokin, presented with very little commentary other than the basic truism that most people won’t ask questions about your money if you can tip with $100 bills. The show wanted to go deeper, though, to find something more interesting and compelling about Anna the person, but…there really wasn’t.

Yes, this is just a television show, and one that is purposefully playing with perspective and narrative, blah blah, why am I all riled up over nine episodes of television. Because! If we’re going to interrogate how grift is baked into neoliberal capitalism, if we’re going to interrogate people like Anna Delvey, we need to be more thoughtful about it than “idk everyone is a scammer I guess.” That’s a copout. The economic plunder of the 2010’s and its consequences is clearly an emerging theme in American culture—we’re looking back on the 2010’s wondering how the hell we ended up here. There are four shows coming out in the first half of 2022 about various financial schemes that were built on questionable financial practices that eventually caught up to them. Of course, there’s a difference between Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Theranos in terms of the scale of their cons, there's a difference between one girl lying to a few bankers and Silicon Valley tech bros running apps built on exploitation. BUT there is also a difference between Anna Delvey and most people. The show absolutely overplayed her relatability.

Anyway, in spite of my rage at the show’s wishy washy attitude to narcissistic grifters, it was super entertaining in a visual sense--impeccable design, clever cinematography, especially in how they portrayed social media. The cast was stacked—the talent was not the problem. Hell, this ensemble included Anna Deavere Smith, Jeff Perry, and Terry Kinney, and their primary function was to just show up for ten minutes each episode and make snarky comments. Obviously Julia Garner chewed the scenery off the walls...the whole thing would have fallen apart without her performance, too.

Anna Chlumsky was great in a poorly conceived part, so great she almost made up for the mushy writing—she is, undoubtedly, very good at playing passionate, hyper-focused women who have blurry emotional boundaries where their work is concerned and see themselves as lone figures of sanity and righteousness. Her scenes with Arian Moayed really popped, I thought--maybe because they both have theater training? And I appreciated a portrayal of pregnancy and motherhood where a woman aggressively prioritized her job and was allowed to experience a range of emotions about her impending motherhood and the narrative didn’t punish her for it. (I’ll just take all the scenes of Anna Chlumsky performing pregnancy-related comedy and apply them to the Veep alternate universe in my own head where Amy Brookheimer got to have her baby. Dan would have been a much more entertaining baby daddy than Vivian’s bland husband.).

It’s insane to me that the big takeaway from most critics reviewing Inventing Anna is “wow how dangerous to paint her as a feminist icon” like are we not watching the same show or did you fake having media literacy as much as Anna faked being a German heiress? Is the show perfect, no of course not and yes it does maybe take a few questionable stances but the ENTIRE concept is exploring how people can manipulate truth by manipulating perception. 

It intentionally presents every character in the light they want to be presented in and they never inform the audience who is “right” or who got the shortest end of the stick. It constantly reminds you through direct dialogue that every character is acting in their own self interest and approaching the facts with that bias in mind. And it does that because that idea, that manipulation of perception and truth is what fascinates people about the story. 

If you want to come to a definitive answer in this moral quarry, research the information that’s out there and come to your own conclusion. This show isn’t attempting to do that for you, so stop asking it to. 

(Side note: if your takeaway was “wow Anna Delvey really is a feminist icon”, you’re also wrong)

studio trigger understood the assignment. i would let her wreck me.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

You, a heroic paladin have successfully slain a fearsome dragon. But the dragon warns you that death is but a door, and dragons don’t die, they reincarnate. You paid it no mind….until your son was born with golden, slitted eyes.

Finding out the fae are parasitic fungi, huh.

Things that work in fiction but not real life

torture getting reliable information out of people

knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour

jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact

calling the police to deescalate a situation

rafting your way off a desert island

correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes

effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else

ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences

heterosexual cowboy