Back in the land of the living, clutching a bachelor’s certificate to my chest, panting.

Here’s an examination of the ideology underlying Pixar movies on The Awl:

In every Pixar film, the protagonist’s arc is oriented toward the ultimate goal of being an efficient, productive worker—whether employment has been thematized as being a father, princess, robot janitor, toy, ant colonist, harvester of screams, adventurer in South America, or otherwise.

Incidentally, The Verge recently published a delightful profile of The Awl, which not only gives a clear-eyed survey of the current media landscape, but also contains gems like this:

It’s really a giant lesbian Australian socialized collective with capitalism in the mix in a really gross way.

The community on Tumblr has apparently started evolving its own linguistic conventions.

Now that free time is a thing in my life again, I started reading the Southern Reach trilogy. It’s nice and mysterious and creepy, like a less high-octane nightmare fuel version of Liminal States. I’m also reading Aristoi, but it’s a bit hard to parse all the neologisms.

After refusing to even admit that vlog is an actual word for years, I finally got around to watching Casey Neistat’s. I’m still struggling to make sense of it all.

Beme is strangely amusing; I’m sirmarcel there. (The article is fun too, with its barely contained undertone of “what the hell are those kids up to today?”)