if you're an email power user disregard everything i am saying. this is only for power users whereby power is defined as having reached sufficient status and station in life to hate email, literally despise it, to thusly opt out of it and never use it and merely try to minimize its risk and its violence to you as a deeply inherent security vector. as much as humanly possible. i don't even know where to start. i've used fastmail for two seconds and it's the best i've seen. for one, i thought fast meant like, whatever. get set up with an email fast. who cares. like really doesn't everyone have email. no. apparently fast actually means fast. it's blindingly fast on browser. i don't use chrome for obvious reasons and let me tell you, nothing is fast on safari. and yet. fastmail is literally shockingly fast. puts gmail to shame. i don't know how it is so fast. the fastmail app is fine. it's not super fast. i think it's faster than the gmail app. but i only really notice the app is not "super fast" because the browser is ungodly fast. i imported the first 33 gigabytes of email and it was as if it was 33 kilobytes. their SLA on replies is insane. i got a reply to the first question i asked in one fucking hour. they've got a hey do you want to answer with ai first and i tried it but the button bugged out. maybe they should fix that. i filed a ticket instead. and then. A FUCKING HUMAN. FLESH BAG. FROM FELLOW MEATSPACE. RESPONDED TO ME AND ANSWERED. AND I HADN'T EVEN PAID THEM MONEY YET i just checked the time stamps. it wasn't even an hour. it was 31 fucking minutes. the first time i asked proton a question was after i'd prepaid their most expensive tier for a year on like half a dozen accounts specifically to get priority support and i think it took a week. the tldr on proton is they're too swiss to function. that's the good news. everything about security is meticulous. the bad news is the swissness. nothing fucking works. and they don't care. they do not fucking care about something as plebeian and uncouth as things working. i mean. if proton wasn't legitimately so good at having actually hardened login i'd say: no worries. rest easy. because when an attacker gets in, they won't be able to find anything important either. don't ask me how much i've paid fucking google. is it $10,000? is it twenty? they can't help you. they literally cannot. they have no concept of helping. and you pay google like it's a bygone conclusion. it's like, death and taxes and google workspaces. and yet their products barely work. do you know you once could partial word search match. not anymore. i guess it's too computationally expensive. now you only get exact match. i mean. sort of. if you search taxes in our year two thousand twenty six it will surface your taxes from 2016 before the ones from yesterday. thanks google. in the era of infinite compute for tokens, how can it can be too expensive to search my email. to be clear, the proton thing is my fault. for importing 60 million gigabytes of email to proton. i got so excited it was possible. that you could even vacuum entire inboxes in there, with folder structures retained and everything. after the first one worked, i did them all. i didn't do a test search. why would i? you've got to be able to search emails right. right? is that not minimum viable function? proton's like who cares if it works. it's secure. whatever. so now i'm rolling back proton. at first it's not so bad. you go to a label, you select all, then it pops up asking, do you want to select ALL ALL, like the all in the label option appears. would you like to delete 16,217 emails? why yes. whoosh. goodbye. so i'm doing that. label by label. then i accidentally delete a label before it rendered that anything was in it. because it loads as fucking slow as fucking mud. and there was, i don't know, probably 39,000 emails in that label. ok. no big deal. i remember what label it was. so i use search to specify and get pulled up the correct, but now unlabeled, 39,000 emails. tried to delete from there. but no. there's no select ALL ALL anymore. there's only select 50. one page at a time. fine. i mean not fine. but the child is watching a movie. i'm sitting on the couch with him. we're having a nice time together. it's perfectly cozy as i crank out 50 pages. 50 pages of, select, select all 50 emails, delete. do you want to really delete? yes. whoosh. goodbye. we've gone from 792 pages of 50 emails each down to 742 pages. i refresh. you know. just to check. there's nothing in the trash. what the fuck. i reload the search. the 50 pages of 50 emails are still fucking there. i tested a bunch of different views and nuances to find: in what cases, if any, does proton actually delete your email when you hit delete? turns out basically none. eventually i found one. one single way. now you're asking: why did i still do it manual? why didn't i just spin up an agent to do it? well because i like the pain. sometimes pain is good. with every painful delete i am more committed to fastmail. no. not really. i am more committed to never ever having email again. i've embraced the fate now. i look briefly at every page as it goes by. i'm so fast at clicking you only get a tenth of a second to see, because. you know. it takes so fucking long to load. and it's like a little tour down memory lane. cathartic really. i mean, it's just play deleting. it's only gone from this stupid swiss bank account that has no money in it, only fucking email. which i have all backed up anyway. as i'm going, i start to feel like. well. fastmail was so fast to import literal gigatons of email. it was so fucking fast that maybe i don't need it perma loaded into fastmail after all. i realize it's enough to know that, unlike proton or eaglefiler or thunderbird, i COULD action the mbox files in the future. i could pop them into fastmail, like a memory stick, and find exactly delightfully what i need. and, then, with only a slightly longer wait time than the lag of hitting macbook eject, i could basically hurl the data back out. for the slog that is web based software is this not nearly indistinguishable from magic? i'm clicking fast. by the time each page loads, emails are already going gone. i see flashes of emails and the emails are like old friends. well not old friends, i think, as i cast them down a black hole. but they're emails i remember agonizing over sending. getting the tone right. they're so well written. a thousand million dust bunnies. "delete permanently". confirm. whoosh. goodbye. 642 pages down. only a hundred more pages to go. the child is watching totoro. husband showed it to him. i've never seen it before. we're at the part where the child in the movie gives totoro an umbrella. the rain mists the umbrella. you know. it's just ambient rain. i was busy hating email but i gather totoro is some sort of enormous magical beast and he's clearly got too much mass to notice the harmless ambient rain. even as we inferior humans, you become accustomed to things. if you walk in the rain you get used to it. after few minutes you get accustomed to it and it just doesn't bother you at all. you get wet and then you're wet and you're like ok i'm going to be wet who cares. most of the unpleasant feeling of rain is you get wet. but once you're already wet walking in the rain is actually reasonably pleasant. except. the trees dripping on you is always unpleasant. it's the big fat drops from the trees that get you. no matter how wet you are or how much of a zen monk you are getting water dropped on your head is not pleasant. so totoro is standing there at the bus stop with the child in the movie. totoro is not that impressed. he's like why am i holding this thing that does nothing. then come the louder drops. like the ones down from the trees. the kind that kind of hit your head in an insulting way if you don't have an umbrella. you see totoro light up. like it's an outsized physical visceral reaction from an entire life in the rain under trees getting the insulting drops. the drops don't get him. they get the umbrella. he jumps realizing the umbrella makes him invincible. you should hear the child laugh. not the child in the movie. the real child, mine, in the room with me. he is 5 years old and i've never heard him laugh like this not once in his entire life. he is broken wide open by the whimsy. this is a magical beast that can fly and walk up trees and summon shapeshifting cat buses and the humble human umbrella is actually still a useful new superpower to him. it's very tough to sum up totoro. it's ridiculous. the concept of totoro is so ridiculous. the whole thing is so ridiculous and nonsensical and basically nothing happens in the entire movie. most of the time when there's a haunted house and a haunted forrest there must be some dark evil force at work and somehow the grownups aren't paying attention and the children have to go defend against it. we have lots of stories like this. we have lots of stories where the children are absurdly comically brave in the face of grave danger because the grownups have lost the plot. but we have nothing in the entire western canon where it turns out haunted is not dark and evil it's such a delightful idea that there's this unwieldy magical beast that takes an interest in the children and helping them. and he likes the umbrella so much. even when it's not raining. he still has it. he likes it so much. he carries it around with him. i think to myself, i like very few things as much as this cheshire not-a-cat with rabbit ears likes the dumb umbrella. email is not one of those things. i do not want to carry it around with me. it only took an hour to delete it all. do you know how much i would have paid for this level of mental clarity? had i known this is the relief i would get? for the feeling of having everything tucked away, away from me, warm in bed, in an mbox on a cloud. that now i could take it out anytime and load it and unload it again. a hundred thousand emails. humans should not have any emails. whoosh. goodbye.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Brutally Honest Opinions on 63 of the “Greatest” Writers to Ever Write (1973) Auden, W. H. Not familiar with his poetry, but his translations contain deplorable blunders. Austen, Jane. Great. Balzac, Honoré de. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Barbusse, Henri. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing. Beckett, Samuel. Author of lovely novellas and wretched plays. Bergson, Henri. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. Borges, Jorge Luis. A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous labyrinths! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. A man of infinite talent. Brecht, Bertolt. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Brooke, Rupert. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, but no longer. Camus, Albert. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful. Carroll, Lewis. Have always been fond of him. One would like to have filmed his picnics. The greatest children's story writer of all time. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. A cruel and crude old book. Cheever, John. “The Country Husband.” A particular favorite. Satisfying coherence. Chekhov, Anton. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Talent, but not genius. Love him dearly, but cannot rationalize that feeling. Chesterton, G. K. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. Conan Doyle, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14, but no longer. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. Conrad, Joseph. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Hemingway and Wells. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Romantic in the large sense. Slightly bogus. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously. Dreiser, Theodore. Dislike him. A formidable mediocrity. Eliot, T. S. Not quite first-rate. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. His poetry is delightful. Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Flaubert, Gustave. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Forster, E. M. Only read one of his novels (possibly A Passage to India?) and disliked it. Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense. García Lorca, Federico. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Gogol, Nikolai. Nobody takes his mystical didacticism seriously. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stuff, he is a worthless writer; at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable. Loathe his moralistic slant, am depressed and puzzled by his inability to describe young women, deplore his obsession with religion. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. A splendid writer. Hemingway, Ernest. A writer of books for boys. Certainly better than Conrad. Has at least a voice of his own. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Loathe his works about bells, balls, and bulls. The Killers. Delightful, highly artistic. Admirable. The Old Man and the Sea. Wonderful. The description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination is superb. Housman, A. E. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. James, Henry. Dislike him rather intensely, but now and then his wording causes a kind of electric tingle. Certainly not a genius. Joyce, James. Great. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. Let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game. A genius. I. Ulysses. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Towers above the rest of Joyce's writing. Noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style. Molly's monologue is the weakest chapter in the book. Love it for its lucidity and precision. II. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book. III. Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Second-greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Kazantzakis, Nikos. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Keats, John. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Kipling, Rudyard. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. Lawrence, D. H. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Execrable. Lowell, Robert. Not a good translator. A greater offender than Auden. Mandelshtam, Osip. A wonderful poet, the greatest in Soviet Russia. His poems are admirable specimens of the human mind at its deepest and highest. Not as good as Blok. His tragic fate makes his poetry seem greater than it actually is. Mann, Thomas. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Maupassant, Guy de. Certainly not a genius. Maugham, W. Somerset. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Certainly not a genius. Melville, Herman. Love him. One would like to have filmed him at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat. Marx, Karl. Loathe him. Milton, John. A genius. Pasternak, Boris. An excellent poet, but a poor novelist. Doctor Zhivago. Detest it. Melodramatic and vilely written. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Pro-Bolshevist, historically false. A sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite coincidences. Pirandello, Luigi. Never cared for him. Plato. Not particularly fond of him. Poe, Edgar Allan. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer. One would like to have filmed his wedding. Pound, Ezra. Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud. Proust, Marcel. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. In Search of Lost Time. The first half is the fourth-greatest masterpiece of 20th-century prose. Pushkin, Alexander. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. A genius. Rimbaud, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Great. A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous labyrinths! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. Magnificently poetical and original. Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus. Shakespeare, William. Read complete works between 14 and 15. One would like to have filmed him in the role of the King's Ghost. His verbal poetic texture is the greatest the world has ever known, and immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. It is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. A genius. Sterne, Laurence. Love him. Tolstoy, Leo. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Nobody takes his utilitarian moralism seriously. A genius. I. Anna Karenina. Incomparable prose artistry. The supreme masterpiece of 19th-century literature. II. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A close second to Anna Karenina. III. War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying. Cumbersome messages, didactic interludes, artificial coincidences. Uncritical of its historical sources. Turgenev, Ivan. Talent, but not genius. Updike, John. By far one of the finest artists in recent years. Like so many of his stories that it is difficult to choose one. Wells, H. G. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. A great artist, my favorite writer when I was a boy. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, but his romances and fantasies are superb. A far greater artist than Conrad. A writer for whom I have the deepest admiration. Wilde, Oscar. Rank moralist and didacticist. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. Wolfe, Thomas. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.

Imagine telling someone from the 1800s that today is National Autonomous Vehicle Day

in paris, we don't have air conditioning. it's illegal. we have whatever this is, and i think it's beautiful