Chase Padusniak
@ChasePadusniak
PhD in Medieval Literature: mysticism, class, and urban political theology. Local New Jersey tribune. Love movies. salus populi suprema lex esto
Current head of the House of Ghassan (a family that claims descent from the Byzantine-allied Ghassanids) with his martial arts sensei, Steven Seagal
To what degree is this unique spelling/naming thing downstream of how 1) English works and 2) how Americans think? The fact that our language is phonetic only accounting for one million exceptions, combined with manifest destiny of the mind, has to be a major player here.
People want this to be political but the truth is it's because people are obsessed with achieving unique names for their children, to the point where millennials often claim to have "trauma" from sharing names with classmates. The most searched thing on Nameberry is "unique"
Haywood's "Fantomina." Now mostly forgotten. The novella itself concerns a woman who, desiring to understand how a man treats different women, disguises herself as women of four different classes, ages, and dispositions.
What’s the best obscure book(s) you’ve ever read that more people should know about?
In 2010, this painting was in our history textbook to tell us why manifest destiny was bad.
A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending. American Progress - John Gast
This, from Ovid’s Amores, is a pretty good bit of Lovecraftian horror avant le lettre
I think about this too much. We live, creatively speaking, very much in the shadow of the Silents/Boomers. Scorsese, Mick Jagger, the two remaining Beatles, Willie Nelson, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Brian De Palma, DeNiro. We just lost Sly Stone. Now Ozzy. There's a void a' comin'.
I don't think ppl realize how many of our culture's foundational artists will leave us in the coming years - it's really sad and there isn't really anyone on the bench to take up that mantle. irreplaceable in the deepest sense
Big tech promotes the story that since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, AI has been so popular it's rushed to meet the demand. The reality is different. A study by a trio of design scholars shows tech co's have had to push AI on its users with a variety of intrusive tactics. 1/x
What's notable about this is how few correlate to "traditional" religious beliefs. It seems that secularization removed some of our faith in organized religion but did little to eradicate the things people, especially peasants, believed regardless of religious affiliation.
Paranormal beliefs in America
I sat in on one of UChicago's humanities core classes in like 2017 or something and was incredibly impressed with what these freshman and sophomore were reading and doing. And all my life I've been surrounded by people who actually learned something there as undergrads.
Evil institution destroys some of its only redeeming parts.
it’s all cooked. if you’re a scholar you need to have identified a religious order in order to find a backup place in a monastery yesterday
my alma mater slashed the budget of all the social sciences and introduced a degree in “AI Prompting”
I just said “Tyson chicken nuggets” into my phone one million times, and now I’m awash in chicken advertisements.
Your phone listens to you and gives you targeted ads based just on what's said (this is denied in almost all mainstream media, but IIRC there do exist various leaked documents that show it's true. Experience is really more than enough in this case).
Very unpopular take from me. I'm ready for the pyre. But, as much as I love & need AC, being a denizen of a swamp, I wish I had the heat stamina of the average European. It hits 80, and I need my treats. Plus, they just recalled my AC model. What's an American to do?
It’s something that as we face continued ecological degradation and global warming, without any current hope to even leveling off the warming, we are now assaulted every day with ridiculous promises of AI, with barely a mention of its astonishing environmental costs
When I was studying Old Norse, I had to translate sagas. We did them online, so I could hover over any unknown words and just "get a translation." Today, my Old Norse is very bad. There's a lesson in there, I think, about how most learning happens. And we're not heeding it.
!!! I belong to a (rapidly vanishing) generation that memorized all sorts of things including multiplication tables, the alphabet, poetry, even Bible verses (once, I could recite 100 verses like a robot beginning with "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was...") & of…
oh my god the american exurbs are horrible, horrible places. in massachusetts, the richest people live in colonials from the 18th and 19th centuries. they maintain them perfectly and decorate them tastefully, intentionally, and timelessly.
Fuck you money