Status Updates From Everything Must Go: The Sto...

Take that, Eliza

this is the first audiobook in my life that i’ve had to slow down to 0.85x speed to understand so we’ll see what i can get through in the next four days before my libby hold expires 3

making me remember how good the oppenheimer movie was

enjoying this chapter that is just the movie oppenheimer

absolutely chock-full of references, dates and quotes.

“Things fall apart, over and over again, yet the beast never quite reaches Bethlehem.”

Of all things I expected to learn in this book, it was not what CAPTCHA (Completely Automates Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) stands for

How long will it take us to grasp that nuclear weapons are not weapons, that they are slashed wrists, gas-filled rooms, global booby-traps?
Martin Amis, 'Thinkability' (1987)

The cover of the version I have is cooler

“What the apologists for survivalism are really preaching is the death of law and the triumph of selfishness.”

“Y2K might be the quintessential example of how a disaster averted too easily becomes a disaster forgotten.”

In moments of crisis, the sentimental clichés prove true. Nobody has come up with a better idea than love.

Are we – have we been – worrying about the right things? Have our fears made the world better or worse? Which warnings are essential to our future and which lead us to battle phantoms? Centuries of predictions reveal that there is no sure way of knowing which fears to prioritize even if you factor in every bias and listen to the majority of scientists – even if you are a scientist....

One in three people on earth contracted influenza, including T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, President Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Haile Selassie, Kemal Atatürk and Mahatma Gandhi....
https://substack.com/profile/11328384...

....The art critic Peter Schjeldahl suggested that it was precisely the non-event of nuclear war that explained the decade’s uncommon morbidity: ‘What makes the ’70s so eerie is the sneaking conviction we all have that this decade wasn’t supposed to happen. In a civilization living as if there were no tomorrow, we are the tomorrow.’

Moving into the 1970s, the whole world seemed to be suffering from a surplus of calamitous options. We have seen that the Bomb swallowed the imagination after 1945, relegating all other problems to secondary concerns. Now, thanks to successful arms-limitation diplomacy, the imagination was spat out and exposed to a confounding array of dilemmas.

Bit: Binary Digit.

The only thing better than end of the world art is a historical survey of end of the world art.

“The message was always the same: wake up! Or perish.”

“The imaginative power of a comet is clearly immune to statistic probability.” Fate, judgment, etc. portents of doom.

“Suffering is my Alpha and Omega” -Mary Shelley

“Revelation is in the lifeblood of American conspiracy theories, embodying a distinctly American blend of exceptionalist optimism and violent paranoia.”

Before apocalypse became a synonym of the end of the world (19th century), it was a genre rather than an event. A form of storytelling”, where secret knowledge of the end times are dispelled.

“The unrealized fears of the past can be a comfort, because the conviction that one is living in the worst of times is evergreen.”

“Apocalyptic angst has become a constant, all flow and no ebb.”

“Chronocentrism: the delusion that one’s own generation is experiencing what has never been experienced before, and will never be experienced again.” Lynskey argues this is part of all fictional end of the world media.

“The end of the world is a pervasive mood. A vibe.”

got through the parts that proved directly relevant to ai/internet doomerism 4 project and then my hold lapsed so!!! will return in approx 12 weeks when i get it again

"THE APOCYALYPTIC NATURE OF GRIEF AND THE IRRATIONAL DEMAND THAT THE ENTIRE WORLD HALT TO ACKNOWLEDGE A PERSONAL CATASTROPHE."

the quote on suffering........
oh mary shelley you and i are cut from the same cloth