Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2026-05-04T16:40:01Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com May 4. http://ranprieur.com/#924837a5437b21d013af8d8f455a3b7ed8c4f383 2026-05-04T16:40:01Z May 4. Doug comments on the above quote by Vachel Lindsay:

This is a man who literally walked across America trading poems for bread, and meant every word of it. The War Bulletins were self-published pamphlets he printed and distributed by hand. Pre-internet zine culture, evangelical pamphleteer energy, total outsider operation.

What makes this passage cut deeper than most anti-civ writing is that it's not against anything. It's not burning the iron streets -- it's abandoning them as unworthy of your death. That's a different move. The nihilist says tear it down. Lindsay says it doesn't deserve your attention long enough to tear it down. Walk away. Die somewhere beautiful.

"Ragged with the beggar's pride." The pride isn't despite the raggedness. It is the raggedness. Proof of motion. Proof you didn't trade your hours for upholstery. "Seeing the angels" isn't metaphor-decoration. Lindsay means it. The highroad opens perception that the iron street chemically suppresses. The commerce-made manners aren't just bad aesthetics -- they're a perceptual closing. You literally can't see certain things from inside a managed life.

And four doom threads from Reddit, starting with a tangent from Friday's post: US birth rates just hit another record low, what do you think is the leading cause of this?

Anyone else in US noticed food quality degrading recently and if so what product in what way?

What's a recession indicator that you’ve noticed lately in your everyday life?

What is an industry that is currently on fire (in a bad way) behind the scenes, but the general public hasn't noticed yet?

]]> May 1. http://ranprieur.com/#6e1fe861abe28aa0daabbd59abf8e18b9fe89968 2026-05-01T13:10:26Z May 1. For Mayday, a new video of a good political song: Meatraffle - The Wickerman. Usually I prompt the images line by line, but this time I mainly just generated a ton of wickermen. I decided to go square instead of landscape because wickermen are taller than they are wide. Another thing I noticed about this song was that the rhythm didn't vary at all. Sometimes it takes me hours to do the timing, but they must have used some kind of digital metronome because every measure is 4.00 seconds.

Today is Bandcamp Friday. You might want to give a listen to the album Bad Vibes OST by Sexfaces, a D.C. punk band that I went and saw last weekend. It was strange, the entire crowd was old. There were no Gen Z in the whole place. I hope Gen A restarts the cycle of listening to noisier music than their parents. If you like non-noisy music, I want to give another plug to Melissa Kassab.

On a tangent, I saw somewhere that Gen Z is having less sex than any generation in history, and probably also prehistory. It reminds me of the mouse utopia experiment, where mice were given unlimited food in limited space and lost interest in procreating. Modern society is doing something similar, where all measures of quality of life are being ignored except for not dying. "What do you mean you don't want to bring children into this world? The world is better than it's ever been as measured by the number of cures for cancer." If I saw a giant mushroom cloud on the horizon I would probably be relieved that I no longer have to do two factor authentication.

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