God I'm so sick of hearing about crypto

How Cryptocurrency Revolutionized the White Supremacist Movement
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/12/09/how-cryptocurrency-revolutionized-white-supremacist-movement

This is a long report, and I'm not going to pull a quote from it. It basically confirms what I think most of us already sort of knew. (Or not? It can be difficult to know about these things if you don't run in overlapping circles.)

Anyway, every once in a while I get into an anarchist thoughtspace where I'm like, Local government is a farce and federal government is nothing more than red and blue labels on the same military-industrial-media complex, and the only way to do anything meaningful is to start the largest trashfire you possibly can...

...but then I remember that I have to share this thoughtspace with 38-year-olds who have convinced themselves that they need to keep their money safe from "the Jewish conspiracy" and slowly walk away.

In the end, no matter what you believe, I feel like you're kind of ethically obligated to support a government that pays the salaries of postal workers and sends checks to the contractors who install mobility accessibility ramps, and to get that sort of government you really do have to go out and vote while advocating for course correction to the extent of your limited ability. That doesn't have anything to do with cryptocurrency, but there you go.

Hint: The Answer Is Swords

High Fantasy and Heroic Romance
https://www.hbook.com/story/high-fantasy-and-heroic-romance

What makes fantasy so memorable? Unfortunately, art is not always susceptible to logical analysis, or at least not to the same patterns of logic that apply in other areas. Instead of provable answers, we have possibilities, hints, and suggestions. The most obvious answers are the least accurate. Fantasy can be considered an escape from complex reality to a more simplistic world, the yearning for a past that never existed, or a vehicle for regression. Attractive as these answers may be, fantasy offers no such escapes from life. It can refresh and delight, certainly; give us a new vision; make us weep or laugh. None of these possibilities constitutes escape, or denial of something most of us begin to suspect at a rather early age: that being alive in the world is a hard piece of business.

This is from a speech given by Lloyd Alexander (the author of The Black Cauldron) at the New England Round Table of Children's Librarians in October 1969 and published as an essay in 1971. I learned about it from Wikipedia while trying to remember who painted the covers of the old Conan paperbacks (it was Frank Frazetta btw, look at him go). Anyway, according to Wikipedia, this is one of the first recorded uses of the expression "high fantasy." Interesting.