Chris Cyr @poppersghost@qoto.org

Just finished reading The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton. Not sure what I think of it. Virgina struck me as a sort of laughable imitation of the squadron commander in Goshawk Squadron.

The stakes are so seemingly trivial. Everything is so overblown, but then you remember, actually that's kind of how high school is sometimes.

Interesting to see how harsh some people are being at Good Reads. Idk, are 5000 word I HATE THIS BOOK reviews normal?

In any case, I've read one too many death scenes this week thank you very much.

Feels strange thinking Birdsite might actually go down. I mean, it can't actually. Feel so stupid for writing about the lockdown at just one place. I don't have the time to go back and get all those tweets.

Lots of people that went through things far worse must have similar thoughts atm. But maybe it is for the best. Still can't imagine it actually happening. Just not that knowledgeable about how websites fail, what's at risk.

Also feel a bit disgusted at myself. This is what I care about? All the other shit going on and Twitter meltdown is top of my mind. ffs

One of the #books I'm reading this week is The Wind from the East by Richard Wolin. It looks at the idolization of the Cultural Revolution by certain students at the Ecole normale superieure and their subsequent influence on French society -- mostly by looking at how they influenced more established thinkers like Sartre and Foucault. It also discusses the wider student movement during 1968. Worth a read.

"None spoke Chinese, and reliable information about contemporary China was nearly impossible to come by, since Mao had basically forbidden access to outsiders. Little matter. The less these normaliens knew about contemporary China, the better it suited their purposes, Cultural Revolutionary China became a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their inner-most radical political hopes and fantasies which in de Gaulle's France had been deprived of a real-world outlet. China became the embodiment of a "radical utopian future," by assuming new identities as French incarnations of China's Red Guards, these dissident Althusserians sought to reinvent themselves wholesale. [...] The "successes" of Chinese communism--or its imagined successes--would magically compensate for the abysmal failures of the Communist experience elsewhere."

Guangzhou Cases 11.11

259 new symptomatic cases, 2921 new asymptomatic cases, and 437 previously asymptomatic cases reclassed as symptomatic.

Spillover here is light. More code checking/temp checks at the compound gate, but small stores aren't bothering. A lot of people we know that commute from GZ are stuck here for the time being.