Quote board, fall 2020

Inexplicably, people keep talking around me and my brain keeps latching on to the strange ways they arrange words and ideas.

K: "96% of your quarantine room capacity is available."
Z: "Book now and save!"

(assorted chorus of voices): "Did you get the spoiler for the back to cut down on air resistance? can it pop wheelies? how much does that keyboard bench?"

K: "You're getting feature requests from a feral cat?"
Z: "Yeah."

Z: "But your parents aren't there, right? As far as raucous house parties go, feeding your dog bacon to get her to like you is, like... fine."

Z: "Our hot take is that you need to just lubricate the freshmen so they have snail trails and can't actually get close to each other, they just slide off... we want to make McGill Walk into a slip'n'slide."

K: "I'm not a colonizer."
F: "It's widely regarded as a mistake."

R: "I once realized I was a WASP and was shocked."

F: "When Lenin was young and the revolution was strong, THAT would be the way to take power."

Q: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

F: "Sometimes it's a conjunctive AND and sometimes it's a disjunctive AND."

F: "It's the prosperity gospel of tenure lines."

D: "Tiny houses intended for birds: very cute. It is a truth universally acknowledged."

K: "Have you tuned the wheelbarrow?"
L: "I've been trying to hit it with a hammer. I'll post it on YouTube."

F: "I've been appreciative from the beginning. And I'm waiting to receive one more... make it blue to match my eyes."

? (from a 66-person video call): "That is a way not to have a coup: you think you're on private chat but you broadcast to the entire school."

? (on 142-person call): "I look forward to meeting some of you in person one day."

L: "I don't exactly understand the science of Wifi --- I know it's little elves that fly through the air and whisper the voices of other people..."
K,M, and O (simultaneously): "You basically got it."

R: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

L: "In the sewing room --- well, in the third sewing room, ..."

S: "If you don't like my build infrastructure, we can talk about that offline." FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Z: "[Q] has been on sabbatical for the past 10 years, so..."
Q: "from future import *"

N: "I have to say, for me, experiencing it on film was sufficient."
Z: "You don't feel the call to the southern pole?"

D: "Some would argue that this 'premium content' is not, in fact, content. But I would argue that it takes time to watch and is unedited."

D (in response to me): "Lila, did you lose your Zoom premium? I'm getting ads." (I did a funny bit!)

Z: "Extend the cat a line of credit. [beat] Step 3, profit."

R: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

I: "Is that your foot in front of you?"
N: "That's his face."

C: "Can the system keep the chipmunks out?"
D: "Are the chipmunks committing identity fraud using your credit card?"

N: "I succumbed to the lure of firecrackers in my youth, so I remember the attraction."

F: "I found a way around it."
N: "He naturalized the bayonet."

R: "Plus their proprietary blend of whatever they think almonds taste like."

C (distantly, off-camera): "Ooooh! Ow ow ow!"
N (distantly, off-camera): "I gave birth to three children, it hurt more than this."

F: "That was when the sun didn't rise. That day."

K: "I have a +1 resistance to emotional damage."
F: "I need to activate that."

D: "Our first thought was to go to Denver. But it's far away and on fire."

Z: "I lightly overshopped because I was excited about the squash."

M: "What is the saying?"
A: "More money, more problems."
M: "Oh. My first thought was, more children, more problems."

D: "Here's my backend. Please engineer it to something useful. I wrote... no test cases."

D (on Zoom): "I'm streaming this on Instagram Live right now."

L: "If I misunderstand something, you can be almost sure I didn't misunderstand it."

N: "Congratulations on assembling those Ikea shelves."
Z: "It is what I was raised to do."

U: "I don't know how much we can train people to be nice."

F: "You've solved the dilemma! I'm going to die in a warehouse fire."

K: "If you lose by 5 pants I will be very interested to see how that plays out."

D: "You definitely shouldn't buy a vintage electric blanket."

K: "I like to turn the cereal box off and on again."
L: "On the cereal box, they hide the controls."

Z: "Do I not know my own course number?"

F: "It's not screwed over in the sense that... I could have played better. But I didn't."

L: "Rampantly floating with pubic hairs."

J: "Bread is the bread of life."

D (faintly, with astonishment): "Oh, Mom, you added me to your friends."

D: "It's your turn. Disappointingly, I am prepared to talk you through beating me."

J: "It's about the journey. The slow, inexorable journey."

K: "I can't believe we're moving past 'arbitorium'!"
L: "Arbitrarium!"
M: "Arboretum?"
N: "I got it, clearly: Lab of Ornithology." (<-- this was, unbelievably, correct!)

Z: "I just think --- and I hear myself saying this as it comes out --- when people ask questions they don't think about what they don't know."

K: "How'd you get out of the pentagram?"
F: "It's a demon-backed demon trust."

Z: "It's hard to both get off at the same time. It's also hard to both go down at the same time." (IIRC this was about internet service uptime but WOW)

F: "A mountain of lawyers, in a giant mech suit, as another lawyer. With missiles."

Z: "We're just multiplying matrices by vectors in my course, man, I'm not touching that third rail."

Z: "The other thing --- there are lots of problems bathroom-related --- living with my sister..."

Z: "They came up with 2 major options to save money. One was to demolish the building."

R: "If you decapitate someone, it's rated R."

This post's theme word is heterophemy (n), "the use of a word different from the one intended." It's easy to get on the quote board by accidental heterophemy in earshot of me.

How 2020 feels

Basically the only way I can engage with the horribleness of modernity, politics, society, economics, and human-built institutions which degrade everything about the human condition, is through other people's senses of humor.

For example, Tycho of Penny Arcade on the Google monopoly lawsuit:

There's a lot of odd dialogue that surrounds this stuff, like if you hate the naked exertion of monopoly power you're just hating the player or some shit. That you have a problem with people winning or something, issues with the concept of profit fundamentally. What an incredible rhetorical dodge! We're not talking about profit, and even if we were, it matters how the profit was generated. What we're talking about is a Draconic hoarding of wealth, collected in a vessel made from illegal mergers and filled by illegal acts.

... You can't really make the case to younger people that "capitalism," broadly writ, is gonna do shit for them. ... if money is allowed to pool like this, devils grow in it. If you don't fucking govern, if you don't moat these things in a circle of salt, they will invariably become something uncontainable - something too big to fail, part of the walls.  

Or Alice Fraser on reasons that the money-vampires who rule us hate the idea of minimum wage:

In the news today, debates about minimum wage rage on in America despite the entire economy collapsing in all directions. Because if you can't argue about how much money you shouldn't be paying the employees you're itching to replace with robots, how can you even call yourself a bloated blutocrat? 

Isn't it actually more insulting to pay someone a minimum wage that they can afford to feed their children with, than have them work for free while sucking at the milky teat of a rhetorical belief in forward momentum to a Trumpian future? Do you even want a job if you don't want to work for free? Have you ever thought that working for tips is just charity by c**ts who can refuse to give it to you if they don't like your smile, and let's be honest, you've got a shitty smile 'cause you can't afford teeth in your goddamn mess of a country. 

European countries have suggested that if you can't afford to pay your employees then you shouldn't have employees, if you can't run an economy on businesses that can afford to pay their employees, your economy is a lie, and if you're paying your employees in hopes for some sort of amorphous future advancement, you're not a business, you're a religion. (The Last Post 248: Arts in Crisis, 1m59s -- 2m51s, bleeping in original)

... or basically any episode of TRASHFUTURE, although I warn you that listening to educated people describe the state of the world has flung me into intense despair several times. (The hosts do lighten it with comedy but it's very much a sarcastic look at how horrible everything is.)

If you want something hopeful instead, I suggest following Cory Doctorow's excellent advocacy work, for example  the several articles, books, and links offered here.

This post's theme word is scamander (v. intr.), "to take a winding course." Most dystopias do not reasonably portray the slow scamander preface.