Every week, Liz goes to Scarecrow Video and grabs a bunch of movies for me at random off my Letterboxd watchlist. But as I power through movies week after week, year after year, that watchlist is dwindling... especially for English-language films I can watch while doing other stuff. So she's started throwing in the occasional movie that catches her eye from one of Scarecrow's many exciting curated sections. At the same time, I have absolutely no memory for what I put on my watchlist and why. So every time I watch a movie now, it's a fun game for me to try to figure out if someone recommended it, if I saw someone else on Letterboxd enjoy it, or if Liz grabbed it sight-unseen.

Zandra has a song she sings about this frog:

🎵 Push a block, ring a bell,
🎵 send a frog straight to hell

🎵 Turn the clock round and round,
🎵 put a frog in the ground

🎵 well it's a long, hard, cold day in hell
🎵 but that's especially true for a frog
🎵 and it's a long, hard, cold road ahead
🎵 so watch out if you happen to be a frog

The thing about making the world a better place is that all you have to do is make the world a better place. You don't have to dismantle capitalism, you don't have to stop every atrocity you've ever heard of, you just have to wake up most days with the intention to leave things better than you found them. There's so much that needs doing, and even if you just do a bit of it you're helping.

(loosely inspired by this post)

I've been reading Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, a fascinating book that makes an extremely compelling argument^[1] that the Zionist cause as well as many individual Zionists threw European Jewry as a whole under the bus during the Nazi years and particularly during the holocaust in order to eke out the highest possible number of Jews emigrating to Palestine in particular. The book emphasizes the solidarity between Palestinian and Jewish liberation, by framing the Zionist philosophy as collaborationist not just in practice but at its roots: Zionism is fundamentally the agreement with the antisemitic trope that Jews are a separate nation who do not belong in solidarity with the other inhabitants of the countries they have made their diasporic homes.

What the book doesn't point out explicitly, but I've realized while reading it, is another aspect to why Zionists seemed so blasé about averting or mitigating the murder of six million Jews^[2]. Because who were the six million Jews who died in Europe? They were specifically those Jews who did not immigrate to Palestine. The holocaust was, by and large, a slaughtering of one of the most potent threats to Zionist ideology: non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. And Zionists demonstrated (and stated outright) again and again that their first priority was establishing a Jewish state, not the welfare of actual Jews, so of course they didn't lift a finger to stop it. The Nazis were doing them a favor.

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1. Pointedly using only Jewish-authored sources to avoid charges of antisemitism! ↩︎

2. This is abundantly clear in both their actions and in Zionist primary sources during and immediately after the holocaust. Zionists only started accurately portraying it as the massive culture-defining tragedy that it is once it was safely ensconced in the past—and even then, actual survivors were reportedly look down on in Israel as weak and pathetic. ↩︎

they say the best way to learn a language is total immersion so I'm excited to announce that I will be spending the next six months in a bacta tank full of french onion soup

Block Koala, or as I call it, Weft Tank

Warp Tank, or as I call it, Attack Koala

Ask me this on three different days and you'll probably get three different answers, but right now I'm feelin' Dusty because her metanarrative role as "the not-as-important one" tickles me immensely. Despite originally being envisioned as a way to backfill the flashback/present day chapter structure and flesh out the setting and Lou's character, the maid chapters have ended up introducing some extremely important characters—Sleeves is pivotal in Act 2, Chiffon is a crucial emotional support for Lou and looks to be increasingly relevant in Act 3, even the at-the-time-unnamed guard who stumbled upon Lou in the halls has gone on to be the storied Soixante Douze.

But not Dusty! Sleeves and Chiffon both know Lou's secret, but not Dusty. Sleeves and Chiffon have both left the city to seek adventure, but not Dusty. Dusty just stays Dusty. She's the archetypal friend in the group who's kind of out of the loop, doesn't really participate in the group chat, but who everyone's glad to see during the reunions. Dusty abides. And I love her for that.

I haven't had an ask in a hot minute. *knocking on ask@nex-3.com* is this thing on?

underappreciated aspect of hanging out with friends irl after a long time is reminding yourself of the particular way they speak so you can read their posts in their voice