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“The study isn’t able to determine if the empathy gained through reading is ever applied. “Which means that a reader might shove an elderly woman in the gutter and walk on her back to avoid getting his shoes wet, and the only difference between him and a non-reader would be that he’d better understand what that elderly meat bridge was feeling while she burbled away in torrent of melted bus runoff. “Is unused empathy stored up in the Think Bank worth writing articles about? Probably not.” Today at @litreactor, a column about why reading science is mostly nonsense, and also a message about why reading doesn’t have to make you a good person.

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I made this art for a LitReactor column about whether or not the library will recover from COVID. Short answer: I don’t know. Read and learn more. In the meantime, I have some things to say about COVID and how people are reacting to it. If you’re unvaxxed by choice and refuse to wear a mask, just stop being a scared bitch. If your body can handle the virus, it can handle the vaccine and a little stick. If your grandfather could wear the same pair of combat boots all the way across France, you can wear a mask for 20 minutes in the grocery store. To vaxxed and masked people: you can probably do better. I’m sorry, but if you got on a plane between now and April 2020 for anything other than a necessity (I consider visiting close family a necessity btw) you’ve been spreading shit. If you’ve been dining in, attending events, doing all that sort of shit, I don’t want to be the first person to tell you this, but you’re making things worse. Your choices are spreading this virus, and maybe you don’t worry about killing people because of the availability of vaccines, but I want you to consider that libraries are closing unexpectedly and cancelling events because they don’t have enough healthy staff. This may not sound like a big deal, but if your library closes at 2 pm when it’s 20 degrees outside, it’s a pretty big deal for a lot of folks. Libraries, schools, and other services like these closing is a big problem for people who can’t pay for childcare or don’t have a home or who are generally underserved. We talk a lot about medicine, but consider what happens when the food bank can’t be open, or when the fire department is short handed on the week you need them. Consider that our county has been way behind on plowing because of their staff being out with COVID, and consider that this makes the roads less safe. This is a much bigger deal than long lines at the ski slopes, okay? I just ask that everyone consider that their optional activities have an effect on everyone right now. If you can reduce these sorts of activities a bit longer, you can do something concrete to help the people in your community.

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Another Cagemas. We paid the ghost. This one isn’t bad, although we’re hitting the Cagemas point where that scale isn’t…consistent. But Pay the Ghost is coherent, it’s a story. Not a super original one, but there was a ghost who demanded payment. Ghosts are hilarious because they’re so revenge-oriented. Wouldn’t getting revenge like FOREVER get boring? Like the earth is dead and maybe a Star Trek crew comes down, and you’re still going to haunt them? Isn’t the point of a ghostly punishment kind of defeated when there’s no longer any context, when the characters have no ducking idea what’s happening or why? But whatever. I guess dumb people become ghosts too.

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Beermas/Cagemas double feature! PBR Coffee: this is not an unholy combination of pbr and coffee, it’s like a super sweet Frappuccino thing. I thought it’d be like the sort of thing a dockworker would drink to fight a hangover, a pbr with coffee dropped in, and I was wrong. It’s so sweet it’s almost impossible to drink. The Rose, I’m told, was excellent, and at about three times the alcohol content of a beer, it was a hit. Season of the Witch was almost a movie. It had characters with a purpose and a plot twist of sorts, but at the end of the day it was kinda boring. Did learn from the credits that Gabor is like Mike in Croatia. Fosters is like any decent cheap beer, but being large is a plus. The opening is also small, like the standard opening from before someone invented the wide mouth, so it gets comedy points because it just looks hilarious. The Shandy was pretty good, though the consumer might have still been working through the Rose at that point. Drive Angry is kind of like one of those movies that seems like it was written by me when I was 17. I thought for sure it’d win this year’s Cagey Award for Most Inappropriate Onscreen Relationship, but somehow that’s avoided and instead Cage has sex with a waitress while also having a gunfight, which leaves the waitress understandably traumatized, but also is a good example of the weird tone in this movie. If you’re gonna make that scene, you have to make the waitress a sick weirdo who’s into it, or who like blisses out when she orgasms and doesn’t even remember the gunfight (give her a line like “gunfight? I don’t know. I definitely saw fireworks.”) It’s not as fun as-is. Anyway, it misses the Cage sweet spot because it’s not so weird that it works, and it’s not so fun that it works, it’s just kinda…there.

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