I’ve been reading Durán on socials for a while and pre-ordered The Nerd Reich as soon as that was possible.

It is an incredible bummer that a few thousand weirdos have accumulated so much, and even more of a bummer, for lack of sufficient invectives, curses, and scenes of pianos and ACME safes and potted flowers falling on their heads one after the other just before they light an exploding cigar only to get get hit by a speeding locomotive and then run over by a municipal bus full of commuters, that a pile of them are fascists. That they beclown themselves so thoroughly is at least a hopeful preview of their future demise but in the meantime, here we are.

And so of course they merit another book by and for the left detailing all of the material power they’ve marshaled for the right, and why.

I have friends who enjoy hate reads. We have learned to make them hide the links they posts to each other so that the rest of us don’t accidentally follow. This book is not a hate read, but if you are like me, you will not exactly enjoy reading it. This kind of read renews my enthusiasm for not extending libertarians any generosity whatsoever, a limitless enthusiasm that needs no renewal. And so it takes me a while to get through because I have to treat this kind of nonsense like an assignment to myself, which I keep putting down saying things like “god damn it” and “what an asshole” and so on.

Durán includes dozens of pages of citations. This is great because it made for a happy surprise when I finished the final chapter with plenty of paper left in my right hand.

I haven’t used these citations to look up any of the more frustrating claims Durán makes, and I need to be cause I winced near the end of the penultimate chapter, Antichrist, when Durán cites a poll that found that 44% of American christians support a specific weird set of principles the book has presented. This is of course plausible (that said poll exists and concludes such a thing) but the conclusion it comes to, to me, is not. I’m not a christian and so who am I to know what’s going on with American christians lately but I don’t think it is plausible that many of them share even basic beliefs about what their own religion is all about. I winced similarly when reading a Good Naomi (Klein) book’s story about some beclowning of their own that SFO Airport officials got up to, I think in The Shock Doctrine, which I happened to have just read a bunch about, when her telling of the same tale was fine but a little off.

I winced because I like to think I’m reading stuff like this from the high ground, and not also mad and titled by and like the subjects being described but of course I am mad and tilted, and I don’t know how anyone can write bout this stuff without feeling similarly and maybe allowing a little of that frustration to bend their analysis. It’s fine, whatever.

A great gift for the tech executives in your life, or if you like tilting your actual friends, them too I guess. I really hope a bunch of people read it and come to the obvious conclusions Durán has come to, and so it is nice to see it and Durán get the attention it merits. I would much rather that hard line dogmatic poll-driven pluralistic better-things-are-worse-actually aw shucks there is no such thing as neoliberalism third-way Atlantic reading capital D democrats read it. Haha, just kidding… unless?

The forecast this morning claims it’ll be “🌅 Pleasant with brilliant sunshine.”

Low #ffdddd this morning. High: #ffeeee; partly #ffffaa.

I made baguettes for the first time yesterday, purely on a lark, out of the pantry, because I was making coq au vin for dinner and my copy of the Tartine book on the shelf happened to catch my eye.

Bread is always a side quest challenge and not a destination for me, where the main course pairing and some time to kill is more motivating than actually having the bread.

As in, when I’m on a cut (a fat, protein, carb, and fiber oriented caloric deficit practice using scales and calculators), I pretty easily fall into carb deficiency and have to force myself to bother to eat enough carbs, usually as rice, to sleep comfortably.

That said, I maintain a nameless from-scratch starter and have a large deli container of SAF instant yeast on hand, and a pantry full of various types of flour, so I kinda lay this trap for myself.

I would have preferred a longer, skinnier loaf but this is how big my baking steel is. The slashes should also have been deeper, and my shaping leaves a lot to be desired. I cannot use my ample sized neapolitan-style pizza oven for bread like this because bread like this springs best in steam.

I have no idea which setting on my fancy kitchen oven is best for this kind of thing. Aero bake? Bake? The rear loaf got darker on the top than the loaf in the front. My razor slashes were definitely too shallow, and I think I degassed the dough too much in my clumsy shaping, and so the crumb was tight.

But what the hell do I know, I don’t really eat baguette and I associate the style more with that scene from Michael Clayton ( https://defector.com/tom-wilkinson-and-his-baguettes-are-eternal) more than any experience or style guide.

Tom Wilkinson And His Baguettes Are Eternal | DefectorThe baguettes are central. I mean this literally. My (very legally procured, if anyone asks!!) digital copy of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton—the film in which the mentally ill character played by the late actor Tom Wilkinson carries a medically inadvisable number of baguettes into an impromptu confrontation with his titular friend and handler, the last…defector.com (opens in a new tab)

All that nonsense aside, this recipe (and I guess most modern ones) calls for using both a from-nature starter in a levain, and a from-commercial-yeast starter in a poolish, which is just cute as a snapshot of industrialization.

I’ve overheard bakers and pizza makers at IRL places I enjoy explain to questioners that is their proven approach as well, and I really need to get down to firming up pizza dough recipes that build on the same approach to get my dough to the next level.

It is funny to make all of these observations to myself when someone tries my baking or cooking, and only to hear “oh don’t be hard on yourself, this is great" or something like that.

To be super clear, if you find yourself in that kind of conversation: thinking about what to change about next time about some craft and critiquing output the craft is the entire point of doing the craft. It isn’t a self-esteem thing, if anything, is quite the opposite.

I used to make beer all the time. When the last year or so of batches was all, to my mind, commercial quality, I ran out of things to care about and lost all motivation for making the stuff. It became a big chore of doing dishes and collecting ingredients instead of a way to occupy my mind with a simple challenge of one or two things to improve right next time.

In a way very real way, that’s what hobbies are for, to me. I’m just not gonna be explicit about it.

“check it out, I successfully tricked my brain into not being a dick for like six hours today doing this.”

I’m also very jealous of the memorization gang who can put their mind to the gear in every hobby. That probably works really well. I can never remember, and could not care less about gear, parts, model numbers, and attributes.

It’s process or nothing with me.

Anyway, the bread was incredible with dinner and now I’m gonna make french toast with it, which I just wing every single time.

One of the dumber things about the torment nexus is that a lot of it also gives tree falling in a forrest in the ways that it enables regressive, alienated attribution to things that previously we dealt with attribution free or better, that left no legacy in the material world.

To use pithy examples, I would rather live in a world where graffiti emerges “from nowhere” and trash left after a party is an emergent property of parties and so on.

If we are gonna universalize some idiot’s preference, it should be mine that we universalize and not some rich weirdo’s. But it’s always some rich weirdo’s.

After many stubborn attempts to pass and use various pyrex (hiss) and pyrex-imitator (hiss) measuring cups and various purpose built gravy boats (hiss) I’ve switched to the one thing in the house that can pour hot liquid correctly: my little blue (beep beep beep) hario v60 carafe (snaps).

With it, I can serve gravies and curries at the dinner table quite neatly.

https://www.hario-usa.com/products/v60-pour-over-coffee-starter-set-01

V60 Pour Over Coffee Starter Set 01 - 20th Anniversary ColorsThis set has all the basic essentials now in 5 new color ways.  Includes the following items: V60 Plastic Coffee Dripper 01 V60 Coffee Server 01 V60 Paper White Filters (40ct) Product Number: VCSD-01-20CP-MB Color: Mint Breeze   Product Number: VCSD-01-20CP-KB Color: Kinari Beige   Product Number: VCSD-01-20CP-UG ColorHario USA (opens in a new tab)

Ah heck, I typed a nice paragraph up about how this one is about community discourse, and naming things, and class and ecology, about how the climaxes of each book seem to be MacGuffins, and how the cracks in the repetition are continuing to be just magical and do not survive in-story scrutiny or reader scrutiny, they are just happening, but it got lost in posting? I’m bummed to be current now.