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I have fire in my ass

We're the Dank of America, oowaooo

B R

B R

— 3 min read

Just a quick update as we are literally mid-move from Seattle to Montreal!

Learning French via Duolingo and The Simpsons.

Disney+ is a sucks but they DO have The Simpsons in French, and not just any French but in Canadian French which is distinct. The Parisians see it as quant while I see it as quite funny, with some terms like “J’ai l’feu au cul” which means “I am angry” but a direct translation is apparently “I have fire in my ass”
Hell yeah. Despite these things though I want to make it clear: my French is sub-child/aged-dog level, at best.

Seattle → Vancouver BC → Montreal

On advice of counsel - specifically the lawyers employed by my partner’s company to help move people over here - we crossed the land border in British Columbia.

If you were a Canadian traveling south into Washington State this is one of the first shops you would find.

We showed up at the border with a monstrous packet of information to obtain work visas right then and there - which is the only alternative to sitting around waiting 3-6 weeks for them to mail them. My partner already had an extremely good job, and while we aren’t married1 the province of Quebec is pretty generous with the concept of partnership.

This worked, as it turned out, and we were on our way to the airport to catch basically the last flight2 in North America that will accept our fat, stinky old lady dog as an emotional support animal.

She was not pleased with this episode! But eventually she got tired. She is not under the influence of anything from Dank of America

Six hours and a whole-ass continent later we arrived in Montreal Canada.

Quite lovely and already pretty cold. It lightly snowed the evening we arrived, but locals tell us it doesn’t really stick until January.

Reading

Silicon Valley doesn’t understand fun

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wendgrow trace not just the course our species has taken over the last 10,000 years, but also the very poor story we have told ourselves about how that came about. This book basically refutes Sapiens with a mountain of evidence and also includes no empire apologia.

Twitter, sadly:

We can always afford another war.

Watching

Killers of the Flower Moon is exceptional - my favorite Scorsese movie since Gangs of New York. You know it’s good when there are active attempts to get the book banned from the state it takes place in (Oklahoma).

This is a long but strong work describing how the current mode of production we got (petrocapitalism) is by definition unsustainable in the face of climate change. But this is no doomer video; rather it recognizes that when human systems fail there are still humans, and they are informed by the failures of the previous mode of production (see the transition from feudalism to capitalism).

This is shorter and funnier:

  1. We’ve been together for more than seven years but are just not fans of the institution. ↩

  2. This is the only airline we could find that still does this, and they literally stop flying between BC and Montreal during the winter. ↩

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