Substrate

Sunday nights are all these confrontations, these dug-out trenches, and Sunday nights are prestige television. ​ and we watched the second season once a week every Sunday night, along with the rest of the world, unable to access the relief of that long lightless escape, but showing up every Sunday for a fractional hit of it, to sniff at the memory of the one time it had worked. ​ Game of Thrones has been a placeholder, an empty center. Its point has been to talk about it, to feel about it, to focus a Sunday around it. The noise and ritual around the show has been large enough that it was not necessary for the show to be good, and hardly necessary for it to exist at all.

my philosophy on blogging has shifted from “every essay must be a perfect, shimmering artifact” to “blog posts should be short, authentic, and flawed transportation devices”. they mark off from ten to noon and three to five as “engineering time”, and spend the intervening three hours doing anything but programming. I am growing more and more tempted to steal this for myself. those “correct” Sundays, where you flit from obligation to obligation and never grow tired enough to require pause.

“But in the end we did my actual favorite thing, which is staying in the city over a major holiday weekend. Staying here over Thanksgiving or Christmas is the closest you will ever get to seeing a private New York, a New York as a small town, the bare, dead, and wonderful skeleton that remains when scrubbed of both transplants and tourists, when divested of anyone with anywhere else to go.” “We filled our apartment with loud, bright, sincere, concerned people being loud and bright and sincere and concerned at one another.”