"The simplest Surrealist action," wrote the leader of the Surrealists in 1930, "is to go out on the street with two revolvers in one's fists and blindly shoot down as many as possible in the crowd."

Rupnow, a rare girl shooter, also left a rare explanation, a "manifesto" titled War Against Humanity. You can see screenshots in this Twitter thread, and I don't see anyone saying anything nice about it. At worst, it reminds me of incel shooter Elliot Rodger, a troubled person trying too hard to be evil. While insisting she's different, she falls into negativity in a normal way.

But it also contains some nuggets and some honesty. I love this sentence: "This situation and the situation of a lifetime is a get the fuck out moment and don't come back." And surely we've all felt like this: "I hate looking at some of the people in the society, and seeing what they are and what they do with their lives." This bit is pure comedy: "If only some days we could do a public execution, that would be gladly needed. I wouldn't mind throwing some stones at idiots or even watching from the far back when they get hanged." Admit it, did you smile?

At the end is some teenage Nietzsche: "The wolf hunts its prey and continues life with no other bruises or scars. There is no predator and prey anymore, it is all filth walking. There's nothing more with filth, it simply can't die or make hunts real if all they want is value."

Wolves get bruises and scars of course. "Other" means non-physical, and it's true, being human is a decades long ordeal of emotional and psychic bruises and scars, a far outlier among all life on Earth. If you replace "filth" with "industrial society" or "disenchanted modernity", and add "quantitative" to value, you can see that she's only lacking clever words.

This couldn't be said better: "Death is something most people need to embrace and accept instead of running away from it." And this is poetry, and if you understand it, the motive:

I hate humanity for forcing me into this little hole
I once had this time when I was young
You made me dig for so long and now I can't leave it

Anxiety tends to feel one or more of: rushed, urgent, and in the form of questions rather than facts ("did I lock the door??" not "I forgot to lock the door")

It often skips between objects to worry about ("is there someone behind that car? or in the alley up ahead? or behind me? what was that sound?" - that's free-floating anxiety looking for something to attach to).

Intuition tends to come as a calm, settled certainty - calm even about objectively terrifying things - and focused on a single, specific piece of information.

Noah sends an essay he wrote about the modern loss of community, which he correctly blames on the built environment and especially cars. See also Ivan Illich on Cars.

A thread in the Reality Shifting subreddit, Does anyone else feel like something's off? Personally I don't get those kinds of feelings, but my intellectual curiosity about weird stuff leads me to expect a lot more of it. Related: Peak sunspot activity expected in 2025

And some music. I keep putting off my own Christmas playlist for another year, but here's a great one, Christmas Apocalypse 2024.

It's like the space in this room. Once it knows itself, it doesn't feel separate from the space outside the room, or indeed the space in your kitchen. From the point of view of the space there's one space so likewise from the point of view of awareness there's just itself, infinite without borders and without divisions. There's no separation, there's no otherness in it, and this absence of otherness is the experience that we refer to as as love. That's why love is sometimes said to be the nature of reality.

But mules are not stubborn simply because they feel like; they refuse to do things if they think it's a bad idea, or if they do not trust the human commanding them. I think it's really interesting that for many centuries, humans have been able to get horses (and humans, for that matter) to charge into battle to meet violent deaths. You simply can't get a mule to do that, because mules know better.

And a Reddit thread with lots of good stories, What's the strangest but completely legitimate reason you've ever made a decision?

Always seemed pretty strange to me that you can build and oversee an organization widely perceived (whether fairly or not) as evil, host what those evil-perceivers will view as Bad Rich Guy Conference in public, in a country where anyone can get as many guns as they want, and there isn't more violence like this. Seems like an unstable operating point for a society.