Za’chary Westbrook, author

My wife: Remember to do the chore.

Also my wife: *immediately does the chore*

It was a monster show where I cared about the humans. It was incredible!

TIL Weird Al Yankovic played Madison Square Garden for the first time THIS YEAR.

This year! July, 2025. That is crazy.

Perhaps the CEOs have. Oskar Schindler had to keep his factories open to be of much use.

The politicians are trying to save the system we have and you can’t do that by violating the system’s principles.

Uni presidents were always collaborators. The profs are the fighters.

Minimalism is for people who never consciously developed a personality.

You didn’t? We had at least one unit on the French Resistance.

There’s a mountain town in Colorado that’s little more than a gas station. It was an hour’s hard bike ride from my house.

This tiny Thai woman opened a restaurant in a space the size of my living room. She spoke zero English and ruined me for every Asian restaurant before I moved to the west coast.

Which is super awkward because Gotham City is based on St Louis.

Right, but that’s only meaningful when there’s somebody to retaliate.

It’s like he’s a socially well adjusted person who enjoys normal things.

So…WW1 wasn’t one war. It was an international war plus several civil wars and revolutions. Some of these revolutions succeeded and others didn’t. The difference?

The military.

When the better part of the military took a side, that side won. Max Weber knew where his towel was.

I think the biggest difference between America and every country that has fallen to dictatorship is kings.

In every country that has become a dictatorship in modern history, the adult population grew up in a monarchy. Having a dictator was almost a return to normalcy.

Is it? The citizens of fallen empires rarely learn anything about their old holdings. Part of it is shame, part of it is the lingering sense of superiority.

I teach, among others, Japanese uni students and they’re often surprised that South Korea isn’t a mud hole.

So…we’re moving out of “privatize everything” into “nationalize everything”.

The cult to Roko’s Basilisk needs hymns.

What’s the buffer for?

A: Stop reading long books and read short story collections!

Me: Hey, yeah, I do want to read that.

B: Everybody just read whatever you want.

Me: *stares at book shelf for two hours, reading nothing*

Trying to help a middle aged student fix this sentence: “I went to Japan to travel.”

Me: Okay, when people spend money, they expect to get something back. You spent money going to Japan. Why?

Her: You’re the only one that thinks like that. I went to Japan for no purpose.

#teaching

I’ve sprung “eating hamburgers as the world cries” and the Johnny Long Torso song on unsuspecting people multiple times.

More apropos, I use “I’m betting this is the entire reason this movie was made” during bad movies a lot.

That scene where Laszlo strikes up La Marseillaise is hitting different these days.

Watching my four-year-old and two-year-old twins start showing off as soon as four-month-old Cousin Y showed up was beyond precious.

He haunted my childhood and I first realized he was wrong when I saw that his gospel was not love, but decency; a WASPy fever dream of clean and mild living. He tax evaders to the unkempt (so long as their ties were in Windsor knots). Dobson never washed feet because he didn’t allow dirt that close.

With another @erikaishii.bsky.social @worldsbeyondnumber.bsky.social game on the horizon, this is your sign to relisten to A County Affair.

A super high rating means it’s so obviously trash that the only people who would read it are the people who would love it.

A 3.5 means it sounds interesting to a lot of people—because it’s very good—but about half those people lack the reading comprehension.

You’re in two-digit ratings. You’re good. High three digits, four digits; that’s where the metric comes in.

I refuse to feel bad for people on cruise ships. Oh, you’re leaving port late because some passengers aren’t returning on time? Yes, that is very entitled behavior. You were expecting cruise ship passengers to be…what exactly?

Which unoriginal villains have appeared in Star Wars?

Mine was from a book:
“Do everything as if it is what you will be remembered for doing.”

And it makes the hobbyists quit.

And I’m cool with that! If renaming “solar panels” to “Bezos panels” would get them replacing every coal or oil power plant in the country, I would be totally down for it.