Fantastic work Mike

move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror

The whole chapter is amazing. Works as a standalone short story.

Nine books

1. Moby Dick (nothing like you think it'd be)

2. Infinite Jest

3. Plant life of Banks Peninsula

4. Something Happened

5. Homage to Catalonia

6. The Other Side of Eden

7. Against the Grain — a Deep History of the Early States

8. 100 Years of Solitude

9. Pathway of the birds

I mean the world's megafauna would disagree I think. If anything we're a bit too good at hunting big game!

Don't use it, surely.

Not entirely your fault. I'd just finished saying he's arguably the best in the world over the last ten years.

It continues: " ; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs."

Melville was the best to ever do it.

Do the nzpolice teargas deportees?

Give Toby Manhire Saturday morning if he wants it.

Totally reasonable to look at climate change projections, decaying democracy etc and think, maybe I don't want loved ones living late into the 21st century. I have children and I worry for them sometimes. Also, how many billion of us are we aiming for?

I see a kiwi, a kākāpō I guess, a kererū and a pīwakawakaish bird, and a bad tuī. The rest are nothing.

Unbelievable prose.

It's not. It would take much longer for the unsustainability to become a problem, but it would inevitably become a problem.

Exact. Hunting and gathering just couldn't support eight billion people. And if the world population was just a tenth of what it currently is, if that 800 million people lived like I did it would still be totally unsustainable.

It's both.

it at least, and use it as a way to see how we live now more clearly, by contrast. You can do that without thinking you can go live that way tomorrow. You can do all this well or badly in other words.

Yeah there's definitely a pretty clear path from "this is wildly unsustainable" (true) to some kind of eco fascist view of the world. But you don't have to take that path. It's also useful to look at the way Inuit or pre-colonial Polynesian people, or Amish people live/lived and admire parts of...

gathering pretty much indefinitely, ecologically speaking. Whereas whatever this right now is, you definitely can't.

Yeah pre-modern encompasses a lot of different wildly different ways of living, pretty much none of which are workable for most people today. Which doesn't mean some of these ways of living weren't better in some aspects, even when they were net worse. But at least you could do e.g. hunting and..

You can't do better than Meliville...

I figured it was mostly just because 2000-2009 and 2010-2019 just don't have very good names, and the twenties haven't finished yet.