• Yesterday I walked all around Crystal Palace and listened to Malcolm Gladwellā€™s Revisionist History. Specifically season 3 Episode 7. The episode is about ā€œagreeablenessā€ - the extent to which your actions are affected by a desire for approval from others. It made me wonder how agreeable I am. It had some interviews with very disagreeable people, who advocate doing things that make perfect rational sense but would cause most people to recoil in horror. I think I might be quite agreeable but in combination with being veryā€¦ Looks up work personality test results ā€œdetermined and independentā€. Malcolm Gladwell didnā€™t discuss the extent to which western society conditions women to be agreeable but thatā€™s probably a thing, right? All the very disagreeable people Malcolm interviewed were men.
  • Hi Matt.
  • We played Agricola last night. I enjoyed it a lot but maybe just because I won. Iā€™m not sure how to pronounce that name. Is it ā€˜Agri-colaā€™ (like youā€™re saying two syllables ā€˜agriā€™ and ā€˜colaā€™) or ā€˜Agricolaā€™ (like, youā€™re trying to get the word out as quickly as possible, so you sort of squash the ā€˜iā€™ and the ā€˜oā€™).
  • This Bellingcat piece about ā€˜red pillingā€™ was super horrifying and super interesting. Iā€™ve noticed the phrase ā€˜kekā€™ around a bit, coming out of alt-right pepĆ© shitposting accounts. I didnā€™t think much of it - because of the people using it I had assumed it was an anti-semitic slur, but actually itā€™s completely not that:

Kek is a term that first appeared in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. The two sides in that game, Horde and Alliance, were not supposed to communicate with one another. So when a member of one side chatted at another, their words were run through a filter to make it sound like a foreign language. When Horde players would type ā€œlol,ā€ it was translated as ā€œkekā€. Over time ā€œkekā€ became another way of expressing laughter online. On 4chanā€™s /pol/ board kek took on a grander meaning and came to embody the essence of the ā€œmeme magicā€ that first made the alt-right so prominent. The cultural rock tumbler of /pol/ eventually transmuted kek into Kekistan, a fictional ethno-state for ā€œshitposters.ā€

  • Edith had her 10 month check this week. She is in the 98th centile for length. My dream of raising an army of giants is on track.

Did you like this? Are you still using RSS? Subscribe here!