Georeactor Blog

I am trying to take a break from some snacking habits and Reddit (where I've at least voted on something daily for over a year). If you have a Google-linked account you get logged back in automatically, so I used NoScript on desktop and Desktop mode on mobile to make the pages less readable. Will I start writing more deliberately? Or will I shift my snarky comments on Hacker News? It remains to be seen.

On the road I got into the Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but the full thing is 700 pages. I've also made progress on No One Writes Back (nomad fiction from Korea), The Afterlife of Pope Joan (a full historiography of the legend of a female Pope), and All Deliberate Speed (an autobiography and history of desegregation by Charles Ogletree Jr., who taught both Obamas at Harvard Law).

Here are some other side tangents:

Pre-War Disaster Fiction

I was listening to an episode of Ologies about societal collapse, and the expert attributed his interest in the subject to his Cold War childhood. This got me wondering whether modern, pre-war society was similarly interested in the apocalypse. ChatGPT suggested a few titles, which I've then researched manually:

The Last Man, 1826 work by Mary Shelley, brings back the bubonic plague. The pandemic and floods lead to clashes of refugee groups trying to settle the remaining land. Wikipedia calls it one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction.
Modern analogue: Greenland 2: Migration

After London, 1885, takes place in the aftermath of some space phenomena which shifted Earth's axis. London returns to nature and feudalism.
Modern analogue: Threads

The Purple Cloud, 1901, where a polar explorer returns to find everyone has died. There is a supernatural element to why he is chosen to survive. He spends years building a palace for himself before sailing to Constantinople and finding a "Circassian" woman who was born in a sealed shelter and never learned to speak. She is apparently destined to be his Eve?
Modern analogue: The Pink Cloud

Notably these next two are after the first world war:

Theodore Savage, 1922, where a conventional war burns cities and our protagonist was an office worker.
Modern analogue: The Postman

Deluge, 1928, about most of the world being flooded, but it's also "a romance". Film reels from the 1933 adaptation were rediscovered in 2016.
Modern analogue: 2012

Revolving Circles of Malaysian Monarchy

I've previously mentioned Malaysia's rotating monarchy, where the current head of state is the Sultan of Johor (the state bordering Singapore). But on Reddit I learned that the king from Negeri Sembilan is also unconventional - he is elected from local families by a council of four ruling chiefs (Undang Yang Empat).

In April 2026 there was a court ruling to replace their monarch, Muhriz. His supporters countered that one of the council members on that court who signed the ruling had already been removed. Muhriz has continued to occupy the official residence and role, recently welcoming members to replace the council. The faction in favor of deposing him announced a new king in June, but the coronation had to take place at a hotel. The national Conference of Rulers was postponed, presumably to avoid taking sides.
Assuming a normal rotation, the king from Negeri Sembilan will become head of state in 2034.

There isn't much material online to explain this crisis. A pseudonymous Substack publishes updates and research on, for example, why the council chief was removed: https://www.anaknogori.com/p/what-are-the-33-offences-mubarak They also have an Instagram illustrating things with Lego people (I assume that's inspired by Iran's social media strategy).
The writer's point-of-view is admittedly in one direction: that the council has "never, not once, publicly stated what [Muhriz] actually did wrong" and they claim that social media shows overwhelming public support.

Previous Reads

Lonnie Bunch, who's now leading the Smithsonian after starting up their museum on African-American History, responded to a White House report on the National Museum of American History: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/smithsonian-head-says-white-house-report-unfairly-characterized-us-history-2026-07-09/
Related story from Monticello: https://prospect.org/2026/07/02/what-broke-monticello-thomas-jefferson-virginia-glenn-youngkin/

Maybe Happy Ending has become the longest-running show (by number of performances) in the Bellasco Theatre.
At a work dinner with Business People I tried to talk culture with someone who was curious about my MoMA work. We agreed on a few NYC museums, but she had never heard of MHE or Proof.

YouTuber "The Tim Traveller" is finally getting around to Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau, the wacky border town between Belgium and the Netherlands. I visited a few years ago, but am fearful of having missed something important. There are also comments which are convinced that there's much more:

I can't believe you didn't go to the Jumbo grocery shop that has a border through it. They paint the border on the shop floor and shelves, and even try stock items according to the country of origin.

There is a Jumbo in town, but it's not on the border. Maybe they are thinking of the beer store?

As I was leaving Burlington Vermont, my Lyft driver pointed out that the Champlain Parkway was opening up the next day. I excitedly explained OSM, looked up an article giving times on Monday and Tuesday, then I updated the ways. Well, someone had to call me out to revert it, because it really opened a week later =(

William Foege, the former CDC director who played a major role in eradicating smallpox, and had a Theranos connection, died in January.

This video about the Golden Triangle includes a story of a Chinese community in northern Thailand, which escaped Yunnan after the KMT lost, lines up with stories from the Chin Peng and Lianda books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML5RC4VyNZs

Chinese Civil War re-enactment tourist attraction https://www.instagram.com/p/DaZZ-C9qyi0/

I submitted a document to Unicode to add ڵا and ـڵا as Arabic presentation form characters. They request a lot of documentation and specific codepoints, which I wasn't prepared for. Maybe that means it will get desk rejected? But I wanted to get info out there.

After my pinball aside about Space Cadet, the difficulty of DIY pinball hardware, and the one open source platform, surprised to see this on HN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHQ8c8i42VE

I also appreciate the HN comment

I have given up any pretext of living a conventional life and am building an airplane in the main living area of my house, which is massivly relaxing, and feels right/normal, which it didn't without the airplane.

Investigating LLM biases, in Kazakh language: https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.598/

Tamil traveler in Egypt 2,000 years ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-traveler-from-india-graffitied-his-name-on-five-ancient-tombs-in-egypts-valley-of-the-kings-2000-years-ago-180988318/

Along with the general grossness of tolerating scams, it surprises me that in NYC there are guys in baggage claim saying "Uber, Uber" and someone out there a) knows that Uber = car service, but b) does not know that it's an app? Recently I have seen a kiosk in the airport and a hotel where you swipe a card to order an Uber (note: launched in December), but this is an exception.

I have no special insight into this, but nearly all bottled Soylent disappeared from Amazon and their own website for around 2 months. Subscription customers were disrupted, too. This is similar to how Soylent acted when their Canada business was in trouble. The 'soy' of Soylent and GLP-1s might have reduced its relevance in the modern market?
This is dumb, but it looks like I've averaged ~1 order/month since 2021, so I will feel weird if Soylent disappears. I saw it at a grocery store only once, in Grand Rapids.

Mass Media

"Welcome in" at the restaurant. "Welcome in" when joining a Zoom. "Welcome in" from the person selling wine at the grocery store. wtf is happening

I'm just hearing that Paul Atreides in Dune is canonically a descendant of Agamemnon. I would be suspicious of this claim in the year 2026, much less the distant space future?

After Sam Neill's death, I used a VPN to watch his 2024 appearance on Australia's premiere episode of "The Assembly", a concept from the UK where autistic journalism students ask questions of a guest. They sit in a ring around the guest, a little Jubilee-style. There is also a Canadian series, so maybe a US streaming network will discover this format. There were a couple of questions about cancer and death.

I think that I must have heard about The Backrooms a few years ago through Jenny Nicholson, but it's only around the movie's release that I understand the significance of the YouTube series. This explains discussions of additional lore, and takes it beyond the 'Slender Man' online horror entity inspo.
It felt like navigating a dream or a video game, where I need to remember little bread crumbs on how to get home. This made me quite frustrated when they say that the rooms are changing (so mapping them would be pointless?). There's a popular post out there which claimed its total area is "600 million square miles", which makes it finite but significantly larger than Earth, which I also really don't like.
I appreciate that the movie doesn't explain what created the Backrooms, or add some Borg Queen-esque final mastermind. A little reminiscient of https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm
I'd previously thought of a story about an unpopulated parallel Earth which you reach through a wall, also set in the 90s. Post-Backrooms I guess this needs to cook a bit more. There are some threads like nomad mathematician Erdős, the Hungarian figure 'Anonymous', Borneo's kongsis, refugee status and reconciliation, the development of the internet, Yugoslavia, and space mirrors, which I could lean into more.

Boston Orange line extension overshadowed by needless AI image generation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmLikQaka8E

In a 2017 episode of The Handmaid's Tale, there's a flashback where the background track is 2001's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" even though they are in a smartphone / Tinder era. I'm going to point out, since apparently no one else on the internet has the GUTS, that its music video features women in weird red plastic hoods, and SOMEONE must have thought of it after seeing Handmaid outfits.

CBS Sunday Morning show did an interview with Carol Bove about an exhibit which I saw at the Guggenheim Museum. I thought it was odd that the clip on Instagram was about the importance of touching art, when virtually all of it, including painted metal, was not touchable. The interactive bit is you can walk through and around a sculpture garden. Commenters generally took the idea of a touchable museum at face value, and attacked it. lol https://www.instagram.com/p/DbEFWrtke-6/

Complaints after a newspaper accepted an ad as the front page: https://bsky.app/profile/nydnunion.bsky.social/post/3movlv5sdw22y
I recently had a book ad just inside the cover of the New Yorker and then on the back cover of a recent issue. IDK, it's good targeting your audience, but it feels sketchy.

After Beef S2, many people are asking basic media literacy questions like "what happened with Eunice?". Someone could mine Reddit karma just by auto-answering questions like this.

The White House quantum executive order reached my news bubble, but I heard from the QAA podcast about QAnon-themed posts that they used to promote the event. The QAA hosts are ambivalent / confused whether they were mocking Q as an old meme, recalling niche quantum / time travel beliefs of the conspiracy, trying to get clicks, or it's inevitable that it's conspiracy brain now.

I had a paragraph dissecting why there is a national conspiratorial view of the LA mayoral election, but it looks like we all moved on from that.

ScriptNotes podcast did a story about the Designated Driver rising as a named concept in the late 80s through an organized campaign. They said that they worked with TV programs to help spread the message. https://hsph.harvard.edu/research/health-communication/harvard-alcohol-project-designated-driver/