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Glad to hear you are enjoying. I read Bleeding Edge when it came out, but was underwhelmed. It is characteristically Pynchon, but did not enchant me in the same way as did Inherent Vice some years earlier.

Still, his best novels have got to be Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. Those are the monsters. But you get out what you put in.

Not exactly related, a friend recently told me that calling someone a "spaz" who acts absurdly or with an excess of enthusiasm, is no longer (/ was never ?) appropriate. My boss and other boomer (ok technically gen-xer) coworkers use this term liberally, as does my boomer mother and myself and others of my cohort. I do not want to dwell on correctness of this term or of prescribing / proscribing language, only to share that this is the sort of the thing I had thought the article would be about.

An uncle of mine loaned me his abridged Vonnegut shelf, including Galapagos. Sirens of Titan also is good. Very strange. For people who do not read much but are desirous of learning more, I'm unsure of the best approach. Maybe Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat's Cradle? Vonnegut deals in Scenes. It is why we love him. Like Fitzgerald, he wrote of a Movie Age. And so I evaluate him based upon his individual scenes, not books. My favorite is from Breakfast of Champions. Kilgore Trout, who I believe was a trucker or maybe only a hitchhiker, walks onto the tarmac of a strip mall used car dealership. He has somehow warped thru various dimensionalities. He looks down at the ground. It reminded me of my father's description of walking the sidewalks of nyc after eating a brown paper bag of buttons: kicking a suddenly kaleidoscopic shard of glass. Or as Pynchon would say, you see "the warp and woof" of things.

It is tough. I feel you. Your hands suddenly, are very large; where do they go, or what do they do? But turn the music off. Take a breath. No one is talking about you, nor do you even exist; except as another human body cohabiting, briefly, space with others. Your identity consists of your instantiation in space; you can relax, allow your body-vessel to idle, and crunch through non-present problems. Or just relish the ambient hum. Maybe someone else who is unplugged has made fleeting eye contact, and asked you about the weather.

"With the inevitable advancement of our civilization"

unless advancement is understood as necessarily attendant upon linear time unspooling, it is no ways inevitable

Amen. One easy step anyone can take towards this direction of intentful filtering is to refrain from pulling the phone out of the pocket when standing in line. Just stand there. Look around. Watch other people. Think. Listen. The world exposed via your pocket device will not miss you. And after a while, you will learn to not miss it.

I just got my first iphone. A 3rd gen(?) SE. I love the device. I'm not a big computers guy, but have used two different mac book pros and most recently a household imac for personal since 2008. On mobile, after BlackBerry, I went samsung / android in large part to intentionally fragment my device / os ecosystem, not put all my eggs in one cart. Samsung devices are very clever. They do not have the same cozy feel as apple, but they are smart. Now my work buddy texts me a twitter link, and it shows on my desktop when i open up safari to check my mail. I don't like that, I don't want that. Maybe I am not ready for ambient computing? I love apple devices, but the os increasingly seems openly confrontational if not hostile. In part I finally switched to apple on mobile because i was tired of android bloat, but it has followed me, just in a different form. A lot of the angst in this thread seems to be borne of the competing incentives of hardware, software, and services. Apple used to be more of a walled garden than they are today. And that, before they were a trillion dollar concern, maybe gave them latitude to execute purely on creative vision.

Great literature -- not airport bestsellers, of course. How could a deep, intimate window into another part of our shared human condition _not_ change you? Mostly for the better.

Something well made, the function and form of which has proven the test of time. Buy your kid a baseball, not an apple watch. In another time and space, we used to say, style trumps fashion.

As a fellow WoWer, I always opted for aesthetics, writ large, over optimization. I get that folks seek out competition, either vs environment or other players. But adhering to a personal aesthetic Code is another option.

See also, I suppose, conduct runs in many roguelikes.

See also, David Foster Wallace's character David Cusk in 'The Pale King'. A wonderful portrayal of how attending to ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts) catalyzes this feedback loop.

Plus one for 'as long as it's not down the middle'. Or, nothing by half measures.

Gas station coffee is a Rite. I am not a maniac, I use a burr grinder for locally & lightly roasted beans, and a v60. With an electric kettle that's about a five minute process, $1.30/300ml.

On the other hand, nothing beats an early morning pop-in to the 7/11, couple 24oz "Regular Roast" cups, slide the cardboard sleeves on, fit the lids, pack of non filtered Camels, and, as you say, a long trip in the car.

Interesting reading of the meteor incident, had not considered in that light.

Do we know how Heinlein treats the episode, if at all?

Patsis's blog contains a post from 2014 and a post from 2018. Yet its "Pearls Books" page has been kept slightly more up to date. There is something comically sad about a recently active blog with only two posts over a 6+ year period. Bill Waterson and a canceled United flight were some of the most noteworthy things to have happened to him.