http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2024-11-19T19:50:47Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#b53bf90438ea22769e2854587b4517368a667ce5 2024-11-19T19:50:47Z November 19. Just got back from Ireland. We picked it because it was cheap. Airfare and hotel for two weeks in Dublin was about the same as for five nights in Hawaii. A few notes.

Dublin is a very walkable city. In a half mile radius there are more good bookstores than in the entire Seattle metropolitan area. We went to all of them, and found some great books, including Listen to the Land Speak by Manchan Magan. I'm always looking for books about weird stuff, and Magan does a great job of making premodern manifestations accessible to mainstream readers. My favorite chapter is about Hy Brasail, an island now considered completely mythical, but it once appeared on respectable maps, and reliable witnesses claimed to have landed there.

And in a bookstore heaped with unfiled books, Leigh Ann picked out a gem that's not even on AbeBooks, The Paranormal Explained by Sean O'Donnell. He explains it as "anti-memory", a framing of precognition that he claims is completely scientific. This is the kind of book I love. The guy is sort of a crackpot, but he's smart and curious, and has lots of tips for being more intuitive.

The best museum in Dublin, everyone agrees, is the Archaeology museum, which is free, and contains breathtaking prehistoric jewelry and some cool bog bodies. The best lesser known museum is 14 Henrietta Street, a fascinating guided tour through a building that started out as upper class and eventually became filthy tenements.

Everyone knows the Irish love Guinness, but I didn't know how much. If you go into a pub and see three Irishmen at a table with three drinks, it's more likely to be three pints of Guinness than all other possibilities combined. In America I drink red ale, but Irish red ale has not kept up and is pretty lame. But where American IPAs tend to hide mediocre beer behind loads of hops and alcohol, Irish IPAs are excellent, typically light and citrusy.

We tried a lot of restaurants, and the best was a Chinese small plates place called Bigfan. But it's expensive and hard to get into. The one we went back to was Forno 500, an Italian place with excellent pizzas and a perfect atmosphere. Also we spent three nights in the west of Ireland, and a great hidden gem in Galway is a Mayan tapas restaurant called Sangria.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#45be3ccd168161aa1b106e83656659aacb38a094 2024-11-15T15:10:36Z November 15. Quick note on travel. It's amazing how it distorts time, and this is somewhat related to money. If you have a few thousand dollars, you can spend it on a month of routine living that feels like a week, or a week of travel that feels like a month. I'm sure there are ways to get the same effect for free.


Quick note on AI. I'm traveling without my laptop, and drafting posts on my phone, which suggests the next word. Occasionally it's better than the word I had in mind, so I'll use it.

AI will never replace human creativity, because creativity is less about the product and more about the experience of making choices. But it can help by giving us more stuff to choose from.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#604470e2c1d10e0ec0a0df424bc5623f432eb102 2024-11-10T22:20:47Z November 10. Just spent a couple hours hanging out with Shane, an Irish leftist. He says everyone he knows is happy that Trump won. Not that they like Trump, but that since he took over the Republican party, the Democrats are the standard bearers for terrible American foreign policy.

He also made an interesting point, that while no Trumpers would ever identify as Communist, they want something similar: for a centralized state to make sure there are lots of manufacturing jobs.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#aa713cc2b245c88ec4c3a046e0c17b539d0d494e 2024-11-07T19:50:59Z November 7, 2024. Columbus, on meeting the Arawaks, famously wrote that they were such saps that "with fifty men we could subjugate them all." That must be how Trump feels right now. While the Dems are trying really hard and failing, he's like, I can't believe how easy it is to rule these soft and guileless people.

Trump is on a different karmic level. I don't mean that metaphorically, nor do I mean the popular concept of karma as a metaphysical enforcer of our own ideas about reward and punishment. Karma is an alien amoral system loosely related to human morality, with levels we do not understand. I don't know how one person can play life on single player cheat mode, while other players have to share the same world, but that's what it looks like.

Trump is Voldemort, and there is no Harry Potter, only a wide variety of Muggles including two unfortunate categories: Muggles who don't know that magic is real, and Muggles who seek power over others by allying themselves with a powerful wizard who doesn't care about them.

Of all the weird things that Trump's followers believe, the weirdest is that he will keep them safe. Sure, now they're safe from nonexistent dog eating immigrants. But it's the Dems who are so desperately safe that they are fatally un-fun, while Trump is clearly bringing the Apocalypse.

I wouldn't take that myth too literally, but I expect something recognizably similar, and I keep thinking of the Neil Young line: Look around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#b53382a45b6845ccf6b9124309b481d550dc94a2 2024-11-01T13:50:15Z November 1. I'll be traveling for the next two weeks and posting lightly. This is one of the best songs of 2024, and fitting: Sam Abbo - Doomsday

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