Mummelpuffin

...Because I only just read the first chapter, and I know it's gonna throw me for a loop, but come on. This whole sequence of events feels like a parody of Westerns– Specifically the "everyone in a bar gets into a fight" trope. I feel like it's playing out like a Three Stooges sketch.

Dude with a penchant for random acts of violence fights sailors because IDK he's a cowboy I guess. A freaky-looking judge lies about a priest and you get that moment where the music stops and everyone goes "git 'em!" before they all laugh about how they semi-accidentally murdered an innocent man, because violence funny, Mr. Judge just gave them a pretense and they're greatful.

A guy named Toadvine insists the kid's in his way. When the kid refuses to move his immediate reaction is an earnest attempt at murder. They flop around in the mud. When the kid wakes up Toadvine is concerned about the possibility that he broke the kid's neck because, well, that's not what he was tryin' to do. Just kill him. No bad blood between them, they trudge through the mud to hand each other their weapons and the kid wordlessly follows Toadvine (I guess they're friends now), who immediately goes to attack someone else because... who knows why. Pries their eye out.

It really is as if Blood Meridian is depicting the west as one giant stupid bar fight. I wonder if the punchline that it becomes escalatingly awful over time and how dare you glorify stupid random violence like this? or something?

I don't know, I'm just ranting. This is strange.

On one hand (heh) there's apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren't typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful.

On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as... intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it's all just fetishizing living a more analogue life.

It actually makes the techbro in me think there's something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you do choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable.

I suppose that's actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there will just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again.

...Meanwhile I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That's sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I'm finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don't get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I'd get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things.

TL;DR someone who's bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal