Now for an embarrassing confession: At the beginning of this year, I also began to toy around with Artificial Intelligence a good bit. I never enjoyed using ChatGPT (my drug of choice) for anything big, anytime I did something like set-up a website with a new tool, or install Arch Linux I'd reach for proper documentation or Wikis. But I did develop a habit of using ChatGPT to find quick fixes when I was in a pinch, and I did have it generate one YouTube thumbnail for me (I'm now refusing to change the thumbnail so I'll be reminded of how dumb an idea that was every-time I see the image on my website). The disturbing truth is that I was never even convinced of AI's superior intelligence. I never even thought of GPT as a better Google, as many less sycophantic users claim it to be. Very early on in my usage, I found that these tools couldn't write, were prone to hallucinations, and couldn't be trusted for anything mission critical (unless that mission critical thing is choosing a target for missile strikes). Unfortunately, I also just happened to notice that, at least when it came to small Linux eccentricis or low-level coding questions, GPT and other models were pretty good at providing a good 'nough style of fix, so long as the questions were well documented elsewhere on the internet and GPT could steal the answer from Stack Overflow or others.

So a few weeks ago when I finally made the shift to a Wayland window manger (better late than never), and started toying around with Hyprland, I ended up using the GPT more than I really care to admit. To be clear, Hyprland's documentation is really solid, and I did rely on it quite heavily as well, but for anything that was an abstraction on top of Hyprland I was running to the AI for quick fixes that I knew I'd have to redo later when I learned more and realized that I'd fixed my problem in the dumbest possible way. This was precisely the kind of fix I was looking for the first time that I took my laptop to work and, upon finding my battery already run down to 17%, realized that the hypridle config I had set up was clearly not working as intended. So I ran to the AI overlords begging for a quick fix that could let me solve the problem and get on with what I had intended to use my laptop for.

Almost immediately I hit a wall with ChatGPT: Despite the fact that I had mentioned I was running Cachy OS with the default options selected during install, even specifically stating that I was using the Limine boot manager, I kept getting nonsensical answers that suggested I make changes to GRUB andior Systemd configs. But I was committed to the lazy solution, and after a few minutes of back and forth I was finally given an answer that sounded reasonable enough: my laptop's Nvidia GPU, and the dreaded proprietary drivers I have to run so I can use Davinci Resolve were the culprit (every Linux users favorite nemesis). As is ChatGPT's way, it also provided me with a simple one line fix to paste into my Limine config:

cmdline: root=UUID=xxxxx rw quiet splash nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 nvidia_drm.modeset=1

Having never actually edited this Limine config before, I had a few follow up questions for ChatGPT. Specifically I was unsure whether all of these options needed to go on one cmdline:, or if I should separate out the PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 to it's own line. While asking this I ended up actually copy & pasting into Chat GPT my current Limine cmdline:, including the proper UUID identifier for my SSD:

cmdline: quiet nowatchdog splash rw rootflags=subvol=/0 root=UUID=8b17bdfb-efb4-41a-852342

It was at this point that ChatGPT suggested the most feral and unhinged thing I'd ever see in my days of relying on robots to do human work: Simply append GPT's recommendation onto the end of my existing Limine cmdline, repeating commands like rw, quiet and splash, and leaving in the boilerplate: root=UUID=xxxxx. I can't get the screen-shot because (!Spoilers!) I ended up deleting my ChatGPT account, but scout's honor, no BS, this is actually what GPT recommended I paste into my config:

cmdline: quiet nowatchdog splash rw rootflags=subvol=/0 root=UUID=8b17bdfb-efb4-41a-852342 root=UUID=xxxxx rw quiet splash nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 nvidia_drm.modeset=1

One doesn't need to be a Linux expert to know just how stupid this suggestion was. I'll save you from all the excuses that I want to make to present myself as less stupid than I truly was in this moment, as the truth is that I put far too much trust in a fundamentally untrustworthy tool. Without even bothering to read the line that was so quickly offered up for my copy & pasting needs, I dropped the line into my Limine config and had typed reboot into a terminal before I had time to register a second thought. The end result? For the first time in five years of using Linux full time I manged to actually trigger a straight up Linux blue screen, a feature that I actually didn't even know existed. Full on kernel panic: Cachy OS had blocked out the root user, and refused to even try to boot my OS; not surprising as I had mapped out the UUID of my boot drive as: xxxxx.

But what then is a good little fake Arch-BTW user meant to do when the AI overlords brick their computer? We go running back to AI for the fix of course. To GPT's credit (I guess), when pressed a second time and told "WTF? My computer won't boot now!", it did pretty much immediately identify the problem as the fact that it had recommended the ludicrous cmdline than included a UUID path to nowhere. GPT quickly gave me instructions to fix the problem that included getting a Linux installer on a USB key, booting off of that, mounting my nvme drive and editing the Limine config to make the drive bootable again. But this solution was no good. I was stuck at work, alone in a guard shack with no USB drive, no way to download a Linux installer and unable to leave for another ten hours. No matter how desperately I pleaded with this serf of a demigod there was no way to solve my problem without the USB key and Linux installer that I didn't have. Fun fact: I actually did have a Tails OS USB in the glove box of my car (I always do), but I was quite sleep deprived and this fact did not enter my mind.

I threw my phone down on the desk in despair, and leaned back in my chair starring back at the mess I had created in front of me: The Limine boot menu with my boot drive selected, but the knowledge that if dared I press enter the system would just try and fail to boot once again.

That's when I noticed it: a submenu in the Cachy OS boot options labeled: Snapshots. As mentioned earlier, I wasn't even aware that Cachy OS turned on btrfs Snapshots by default during the installation process, but here was a potential solution starring back at me. I opened the submenu and noticed that there was a Snapshot available from only about ten minutes ago. Cachy OS automatically has btrfs create a snapshot every time a full system upgrade is triggered, and by mere coincidence I happened to have run the now life-saving sudo pacman -Syu command moments before starting to fiddle with the Limine config. I hit enter, and seconds later was met with the familiar Hyprland userspace I had built over the past few days. I quickly opened up the Limine config and found that it contained the garbled mess that I had pasted in minutes ago. I had found my solution: (a) fix the config, (b) reboot, (c) problem solved.

Like a good little drone though, I first opened up Firefox and ran the idea past my old pal ChatGPT. Sure it had screwed me once already tonight. But surely it would be able to tell me if this was the fix that I thought it would be? Once again I was hit with devastating news. ChatGPT swore up and down that this would not be the fix I was looking for. One couldn't just boot from a Snapshot, fix an error and reboot to solve a problem. GPT stuck to it's guns. The only way to solve my problem was to follow its original advice: boot off a USB, mount my boot drive and manually edit the config.

Something inside me stirred. What was this? A desire to thrust off the shackles placed on me by my over-reliance on this inhuman scourge on my nation's power and water resources? An inkling of courage? A returning ability to think independently? What was the point of a snapshot if I couldn't use it to fix config errors? Was this not the whole point of the feature in the first place? I gathered up all my free will and for the second fateful time this night typed those fateful letters into my terminal: reboot. Once again I was greeted by the Limine boot menu. I made sure that I was launching not from the snapshot of ten minutes ago, but instead from my system's boot drive. I waited, fingers crossed, breath held in anticipation until finally: success! My risky (not risky) endeavor was rewarded! Once again I could operate a system without the infernal advice of an AI agent spoon feeding me commands to paste into terminals! Free from my self-imposed, headless pillory, I was again my own man! After all is there a more masculine story than finding a way to solve problems of one's own design‽

A note: While the ultimate resolution of this story was 100% me setting up a DNS level block on ChatGPT's website; I do think I should say a quick word on why. As mentioned a few times here, AI agents are more than capable of providing quick and dirty fixes to some technical problems, and probably a good bit more if they are employed correctly. But I have come to the conclusion that the reward is simply not worth it. Not because these fixes are sub optimal (though they usually are), but rather, because there is great knowledge to be had through the process of trouble-shooting a process the old fashioned way. Much of what I have learned about any number of topics, but particularly about technical subjects has been learned because I found myself having to read more to solve problems. When troubleshooting this way it's far harder to find fixes that just work, without having any clue as to why they work. I'm not suggesting that this doesn't still happen from time to time, my personal GitHub repositories are sufficient proof that it does, but learning a solution for yourself, in my opinion, has a far better end result than relying on an AI agent to find one for you.

Also, in case anyone was wondering: GPT's initial diagnosis of my Nvidia GPU being the culprit was incorrect from the outset.

This is, objectively, one of the most absurd positions the American military has ever placed itself in. However, this moment is not an aberration, rather, a logical extension of how American political elites have understood—and justified—foreign policy since at least the end of World War II, and arguably long before that.

I haven’t ever written about foreign policy before. That’s not because the subject hasn’t held my interest over the past decade. It’s because—embarrassingly—I bought into propaganda produced by people who claimed to understand the world better than the average American. I deferred to “serious” commentators. I trusted the experts.

That posture was summarized perfectly in a recent interview with Hillary Clinton, in which she reaffirmed her support for Israel amid its occupation and genocide of Gaza. She offered no substantive defense of her position. Instead, she scolded young people for forming opinions based on social media rather than through proper channels—traditional news outlets, which, she implied, alone possess the necessary historical context to evaluate Israel’s actions responsibly.

I’ve thought quite a bit about Israel for years, nearly as long as I’ve thought about politics, and I’ve always found Zionism to be an impossible position to support. But I’ve always hit a wall: commentators I genuinely respected—Sam Harris and Bill Maher, among others—insisted that any discomfort with Israel’s occupation of Palestine could be resolved by acquiring a fuller understanding of history. And I believed them.

Part of that was because the apparent hypocrisy seemed too extreme to actually be hypocrisy. Sam Harris, for example, is a fierce atheist who has spent years arguing against religious influence in government, particularly Christian and Muslim influence in Western states. So when Harris argued that Israel, because of its unique history, was perhaps the only state in history justified in existing as a religiously defined, authoritarian ethnostate, I assumed I must be missing something.

I wasn’t.

What looked like a contradiction too wild to be real was exactly that. I spent years reading, listening, and actively attempting to propagandize myself into believing the Zionist position. But it was always a lie. The United States has propped up one of the most brutal state actors in the Middle East for decades, while Americans who rejected the propaganda were dismissed as ignorant or naïve—told we simply lacked sufficient historical understanding. Given that the history stretches back thousands of years, it’s a clever argument. It’s also an absurd one.

But this essay isn’t just about Israel.

It’s about American military interventionism as a whole: regime change, occupation, coercion, and influence in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba, China, Russia, Ukraine—virtually every country where American boots have touched the ground since World War II, and many before that. What’s most disturbing isn’t just that the United States has behaved as an imperial power every bit as ruthless as the British Empire it once rebelled against. It’s that a political elite has spent the last century convincing ordinary Americans that criticizing these actions is ignorant, unpatriotic, or dangerous—despite dissent being the very first right enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

There are, of course, many reasons elites pursue war. One of the most obvious is profit. But unlike empires of old, which plundered openly, modern American capitalism has become far more adept at extracting wealth without distributing it. The Iraq War under George W. Bush—engineered by figures like Dick Cheney—made billions for defense contractors and energy interests while leaving Iraq in ruins.

The Trump administration’s action in Venezuela may ultimately surpass even that in its brazenness. Reports already indicate that oil executives at companies like ExxonMobil were informed of the operation in advance, while opposition party leadership learned about it the same way the rest of us did—after it happened. At least Bush’s administration went through the motions of lying about weapons of mass destruction and seeking congressional authorization. This time, even the pretense has been dropped.

Still, there’s a deeper issue at play—one I’ve clearly been circling for years without naming. It’s the corrupted legacy of what figures like John Adams articulated as the Monroe Doctrine.

Originally, the doctrine wasn’t a blank check for imperial conquest. It was an acknowledgment that great powers exert influence over the territories they occupy—and a warning that European empires should stop treating the Western Hemisphere as their playground. Early American involvement in South America often aimed—however imperfectly—at undermining Spanish, French, and British imperial control. It coincided with westward expansion and the belief that a fledgling republic had the right to determine its own sphere of influence.

None of this is meant to romanticize early American expansion. That period included genocide against Native Americans, a war of conquest against Mexico, and countless other atrocities. Much of America’s territorial growth came not through legitimate purchase, but through violence indistinguishable from the imperialism it claimed to oppose.

The point is narrower than that: I don’t believe the Monroe Doctrine was conceived as a justification for indiscriminate invasion or resource theft. Early American military action was debated intensely by people who had personally experienced imperial subjugation. For a brief historical moment, the United States genuinely inspired independence movements abroad. That’s why statues of George Washington still stand in countries across South America and Europe.

Power corrupts even the most idealistic ideas.

The Monroe Doctrine, like so many philosophies before it, was stripped of its original intent and repurposed to justify exploitation. Nietzsche’s philosophy was bastardized by Ayn Rand. Jesus’ teachings mangled by the Catholic Church. And the writings of America’s founders have been contorted by generations of power-hungry political and corporate elites.

As much as I admire the early ideals of Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, the nation they founded has become precisely what they once fought against. There is no hidden historical context that makes this make sense. No deeper understanding that redeems it.

War is America’s primary export. We no longer manufacture meaningfully. We don’t lead. We invade. We extract. We destroy. And we leave behind rubble, resentment, and mass graves.

The most complicated part of this process is solved by 11ty itself. Typically, any page that I can get away with not writing custom HTML for, I simply write in the Markdown format. Using 11ty, however, this is no problem. Once the site is compiled, Markdown is automatically converted to HTML, and I can easily style any text that was marked as code in Markdown as a class separate from the site’s normal text. Even when attempting to take the next step and add individual syntax highlighting to these code blocks, I quickly came across a tool called PrismJS that seemed to do exactly what I needed it to. Simply running one command in the terminal and adding some text to my eleventy.config.js seemed like it would just work, just the way I’ve become accustomed to things in the 11ty ecosystem working.

npm install @11ty/eleventy-plugin-syntaxhighlight --save-dev

const syntaxHighlight = require("@11ty/eleventy-plugin-syntaxhighlight");

module.exports = function (eleventyConfig) {
    eleventyConfig.addPlugin(syntaxHighlight);
    return eleventyConfig; 
};

However, after hooking everything up and compiling my 11ty site, I found that nothing appeared to have changed. I did a bit of research and found a great article by Martin Gunnarsson, in which he detailed his own experience going through the same process. He ran into problems when he didn’t label code blocks through Markdown as PrismJS was expecting. If you are unfamiliar with Markdown, there are three different ways to denote code in Markdown:

1. Inline markdown where only `a few words` are denoted as code

2. A proper code block: 
'''
console.log("some code");
'''

3. A code block with a label: 
'''javascript
console.log("some code");
'''

It turns out that the syntax highlighting plugin from 11ty only supports the third option: a full code block with a label at the top line declaring the language to which the syntax highlighting needs to be applied. Unfortunately for me, this is how I had already formatted damn near all of my code blocks site-wide. So I went ahead and took a closer look:

After taking a look at the inspector window in Firefox, it became clear to me that the PrismJS plugin was doing quite a bit. When rendering the HTML document for my site, 11ty no longer was simply putting all of the text in a generic code block, but was instead creating individual CSS classes for language-javascript, language-shell, and so on - as well as breaking down the contents of the block even further into classes for punctuation, string, operator, comment and several other elements that made up the blocks. The only problem? The text in the code block was still the same color as generic text, no styling at all. This was odd, but it also wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Knowing myself, I knew I’d eventually want a way to customize the colors and makeup of the individual elements myself anyway, so I began the process of trying to compile a concrete list of every class that the syntax highlighting plugin would create for every single one of the nearly 300 languages that PrismJS supports -- no easy task.

But, before I break down how I solved that problem, it is worth noting that 11ty’s plugin should automatically add syntax highlighting when it is installed. I have since confirmed that the only reason this was not happening on my site is that I had previously added customization to the “code” and “pre” CSS classes, changing the text color. After removing that customization, the syntax highlighting worked as expected. But unfortunately, I didn’t confirm that this was the case until after I had already spent nearly a full workday figuring out a way more complex workaround, which just happens to add a higher level of customization.

It only took me a matter of minutes to find a way to isolate every one of these class names that PrismJS was creating. Simply opening the Console in Firefox and typing the following showed me every class being rendered on an individual page.

[...new Set(
  [...document.querySelectorAll('pre code span')]
    .map(el => el.className)
)]

// That returned: 
Array(9) [ "token function", "token keyword", "token operator", "token punctuation", "token string", "token function-variable function", "token parameter", "token list punctuation", "token code-snippet code keyword" ]

Of course, I realized now that using this method, the only way I’d ever be able to make sure that every piece of syntax was formatted properly would be to somehow have a snippet of every single one of PrismJS’s 297 supported languages in one Markdown document. So I got to work.

A few hours later, I had a single Markdown file that contained a one-line snippet of all 297 languages (or pretty close to all of them), and once I compiled the site and ran my console code again, I had a comprehensive enough list of every class that PrismJS could potentially create on my site. Once I had that list, the process was as simple as creating a custom set of color variables at the top of my main CSS page, which I themed using the Gruvbox color scheme:

:root { /* Base Settings */
  --code-aqua: #8ec07c;
  --code-green: #b8bb26;
  --code-purple: #d3869b;
  --code-blue: #83a598;
  --code-yellow: #fabd2f;
  --code-red: #fb4934;
  --code-gray: #a89984;
} /* Defining color scheme */

And after setting up color definitions, I began the work of applying each color to the proper CSS classes. Luckily for me, 297 different languages only generated 34 different CSS classes that I needed to assign, but once again, this process took a few hours of experimenting to get everything right. Eventually, I managed to get everything where it was meant to be and ended up with what should be proper syntax highlighting for every single one of PrismJS’s supported languages.

/* CODE COLORS */
.token.comment, .token.prolog, .token.doctype, .token.cdata {
    color: var(--code-gray);
    font-style: italic; }

.token.operator, .token.assign-left, .token.builtin, .token.entity, .token.namespace {
    color: var(--code-aqua); }

.token.string, .token.char, .token.attr-value, .token.inserted {
    color: var(--code-green); }

.token.attr-name, .token.property, .token.keyword, .token.selector {
    color: var(--code-purple); }

.token.function { color: var(--code-blue); }

.token.number, .token.boolean, .token.variable, .token.parameter, .token.class-name, .token.type {
    color: var(--code-yellow); }

.token.regex, .token.symbol, .token.punctuation, .token.constant, .token.tag {
    color: var(--code-red); }

.token.bold { font-weight: bold; }
.token.italic { font-style: italic; }
.token.deleted { color: var(--code-red); }

.token.important {
    color: var(--code-red);
    font-weight: bold;
} .token { color: var(--code-gray); }

It does seem worth mentioning once more that this whole process is not necessary to get syntax highlighting working with 11ty. But if anyone else out there just happens to want to use a custom color scheme that isn’t supported by Prism, or finds themselves in a position where they need to customize any of the syntax highlighting that PrismJS generated, hopefully you’ll come across this essay and not waste the six hours that I wasted figuring this all out.

If you lived through this era of computing, I probably don’t need to tell you there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot that I could actually do with the machine. A lone Windows 95 Box without an internet connection in the middle of the south Texas woods in 2005 or 2006 wasn’t exactly a portal to anything dangerous or exciting. But for an eight year old me, it was more than enough to capture my attention. I spent hours on end sitting in front of that old PC, toying around, learning everything I could about it. I spend days cataloging every CD in the house. Ripping individual CDs, manually adding all the metadata that was available to add in an early version of Windows Media Player. I toyed around with the screen savers (particularly the maze screen saver), breaking random things, painstakingly fixing them - I even managed to convince myself that I had drawn the attention of law enforcement one night when I tried to print without a printer attached, and got the dreaded message:

Even when I managed to find some old Ethernet wire and figure out how to run myself a dial up connection under the house to my bedroom, all I ever really managed to figure out how to do was slowly download album art for my Media Player library. Still I spent days manually downloading images online, often queuing up ten or fifteen album covers to download before going to sleep and adding them to my Media Library when I woke up the next morning.

Eventually though, things changed. At some point the old dial-up connection was replaced with a fancy new 5Mbps internet connection. The old Windows 95 box got replaced with whatever the cheapest laptop Dell sold at the time was, and my days of cataloging old CDs were replaced by days of hanging out on sites like VideoCopilot, Creative Cow, Reddit, and more than anything else; YouTube. Now, my ability to learn about my new computer was virtually unlimited. There wasn’t a single thing I wanted to do that I couldn’t find a video tutorial or online article telling me how to do. These were the early days of the internet culture we find ourselves a part of now. Back before the days of hyper-monetization, algorithms and far before you heard the word “influencer” as much as you hear the word “breakfast”. Even when I did get on sites like Facebook or Twitter there was no algorithm pushing some content to the top and silencing other content. Posts were simply displayed chronologically, and seeing posts from someone you didn’t explicitly follow was almost unheard of. The content was still out there, you could still learn about any topic you wanted to, or jump down any internet rabbit hole that caught your fancy; but you did have to go find the content yourself as opposed to having a few billion dollar companies simply decide for you what you’d be viewing for the day the second you open one of their apps.

These were the glory days of social media. People put content online not because they thought it was a good way to make some extra money, but because they had a real desire to create and contribute to the zeitgeist. Communication was different. There were trolls and people who would say disgusting things online that they’d never say in person. Buy largely you could effectively communicate and learn from complete strangers in a way that I don’t know is possible today. I spent much of my teenage years on Twitter connecting with other aspiring filmmakers and creative-types around the world. I was able to learn a massive amount on the same platforms that I now wan’t nothing to do with simply by asking. I could message industry professionals and have a conversation with them as if I was just a co-worker, and not a thirteen year old kid. I even found my first job the same way I had learned the skills to actually do that job. I simply saw a company that was hiring a motion graphics artist, clicked on the Google Form, saw they wanted a link to a demo reel, and then spent all night putting together a reel to send them by the next morning. It wasn’t anything special, thirty seconds or so of miscellaneous designs, half of which I put together the night before, but it was enough to get me in the door.

By the time I was graduating high school in 2016, the seams were already more than apparent. What was once, through Twitter, a platform that allowed me to talk, learn and share my creations; became a platform that only accepted arguments and inflammatory content. It was around this time that Twitter first moved away from a chronological feed and replaced the feed with an algorithm that decided for users what they’d like to see. There was resistance to this of course. For years I continued to use Twitter and simply opted to use third-party apps that would allow you do nix the algorithm and simply use Twitter the way it was originally designed to be used. But the world had already shifted. It wasn’t long before Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and every one else began to embrace the world of algorithms and trading in user data. It’s not hard to see why, it’s clearly profitable for the companies, but it’s also not hard to see the damage that this shift has done to our culture.

I, like everyone else saw the recent footage of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The difference is that while everyone in the news media and general public seemed to be shocked and appalled by the social media firestorm that followed in the immediate aftermath, I was not. Whether we’re talking about the way that people on scene immediately tried to exploit the murder and start live-streaming, being sure to tell everyone their TikTok handle Or the outrageous posts from people on the political left attempting to quietly justify Kirk’s murder Or the equally outrageous attempts from the political right to use the murder as their vehicle to advance their political agenda What’s very clear is that for a not insignificant percentage of Americans, Kirk’s assassination was not viewed as a murder at all, but rather, nothing more than an opportunity.

Shocking behavior? Yes. But, un-predictable? Not even close. We’ve seen a steady rise in this kind of behavior for at least the past decade. People pulling out their phones to record or live-stream a shooting or an emergency situation, as opposed to putting the phone down and actually trying to help. People competing on a daily basis to try and say the most outrageous thing that will draw eye-balls to them. There isn’t an area of our culture that hasn’t been harmed by social media algorithms. It’s in advertising, it’s in politics, it’s in daily life. Even if, like me, you’ve completely removed yourself from social media over the past few years, it’s not as if you haven’t felt the same effects as everyone else. The algorithms and constant draw of a chance to become internet-famous has infected enough of us now, that no one can escape it’s effects. Even if Facebook, X, TikTok, YouTube and every other social media platform in the world ditched their algorithms tomorrow and returned to chronological feeds, turned off monetization; it still wouldn’t solve the problem. The damage has been done. We’ve already been trained to think like an algorithm even if what we’re saying isn’t being fed into one.

The clear irony of course is that this reality is precisely the opposite of the one made by companies on the frontiers of the internet. Online communities were meant to be decentralized, free from corporate or government control. And in the early days, this was more or less true. There weren’t five websites that made up 90% of internet traffic, rather millions of individual sites created by passionate people who were interested solely in sharing their ideas with the world. But where organizations like Alphabet and Meta originally claimed to be an answer to monolithic control and the stifling of communication, they’ve simply become exactly the thing they were designed to replace, but with a much a higher degree of efficiency.

Now, we’re left to ask the question; is there something we can do to fix this? It’s not as if there aren’t corners of the internet free from the effects of algorithms, monetization and “influencers”. Much of what I outlined as being a positive part of the early days of the internet still exists, it’s just buried under a mountain of click-bait thumbnails and outrageous tweets. But there isn’t any real reason why everyone couldn’t simply abandon the platforms that have ruined us tomorrow, delete their accounts, set up a DNS filter to block the sites from tracking us, and return to a simpler time. But it would require a good deal of sacrifice. The issue however isn’t a technological one, it’s a human problem.

Years ago some internet dwellers coined the term Endless September. This was way back in the days of dial-up or nothing being the standard level of internet connectivity. Back then the way that most people gained access to the world wide web was through a university. Every September a new group of students would be turned loose on the websites and forums of old, annoying veteran users with the way that they broke community norms, violated forum rules, and polluted what was, for most of the year, a source of intriguing discussion for most members. Then, as utility companies caught up with the time and Megabit or better internet connections became the standard, the internet experienced a September influx that never ended, and a part of internet culture died.

Back before anyone could get online by puling a computer out of their pocket, it took real effort to get onto the internet. In a lot of cases there was a massive premium to be paid for a suitable internet connection, but even when there wasn’t, the level of technological knowledge required to set up your home network alone was enough to filter out most potential users. Those who did manage to get online, not only almost always had a basic level of understanding about the technology they were using, but also knew what was required to protect these new technologies from corruption. Early history of computing and networking is full of individuals who saw deep into the future, and understood the consequences of exactly the problem we’re dealing with today, before it was even created.

But this is the problem that comes with any new technology. At first it’s just a few users, and users who truly understand the limitations and capabilities of the machine. There weren’t car accidents in the early history of automobiles - at least not ones caused by the things that cause accidents today. In the super early days of cars, owning one meant you probably built it yourself. But even after that, simply starting a car required a great deal more knowledge of the machine than just pushing a button. To get into a position where you could successfully be driving down the road, the end-user had to have a great deal more knowledge than modern drivers could ever dream of possessing about their own vehicles. But, of course, slowly, over time, the technology became better, the price of entry become lower, and the required knowledge became nearly zero. Before you know it, we arrived in a world where there are a million and a half car crashes a year caused by people looking at their phone instead of the road, just in the US.

The problem isn’t unique to the internet, or to computing, but it is greatly exacerbated by the incredible speed in which technological advances in these areas can be made. There is good news here though; it’s not all that difficult to actually break free almost entirely from the world of algorithms. An increasingly reasonable way to break free form Microsoft, or Apple is to make the swap to Linux. I did this years ago, and have since converted at least twenty friends and family members over as well. Services like Invidious and FreeTube make it possible to watch any YouTube video without dealing with YouTube’s tracking or algorithm. And while there are some promising alternatives to the social media sites that capture most of our attention, it’s just as easy to simply stop using social media all together, and just talk to people. A quick profile set up with NextDNS and a simple configuration of a router will block out all of these sites in their entirety. At that point the only thing left to lock down is a cell phone, which, admittedly is the one area where there isn’t an amazing or easy solution available yet. There are custom ROMs that can run on Android devices and “De-Google” your device, but these come with their own problems.

The technological problem, isn’t the hard one to solve though. It requires effort and social-consciousness to break free from all of this. The biggest hurdle: simply convincing people that there is a problem. Being willing to go through the effort to consciously disassociate from platforms that do us harm, requires individuals either realizing the problem for themselves, or being convinced of the problem. Either way, the process can only happen one person at a time. It’s a painstakingly slow speed, especially when the enemy that we’re attempting to break free from is one that can move at the speed of the internet. But it’s not impossible.

However, there is one last point worth mentioning here. The frontier-era of the internet is over, almost certainly dead and gone for good. There isn’t a reality in which suddenly 90% of the world once again doesn’t have access to the internet. Part of what we are now experiencing is an unavoidable consequence of human nature, and that’s not something that can simply be negotiated away. We can embrace alternatives to social media, sites like Mastodon or run to even further de-centralized corners of the internet, IRC chats and the like. But at some point we have to accept that the same pressures that led Twitter, Facbeook, YouTube, Google, Microsoft and all the rest to become the antithesis of what they once claimed to be, will exist with any platform that rises up to take their place. Like it or not, this is the world that we live in now. Steps can be taken to mitigate it’s effects on us, but there is no removing it entirely.

There are plenty of absurd laws still technically on the books in America—and in every other country. Remnants from another time, they persist, yet no one thinks of enforcing them. But there is no natural expiration date for a law, no guarantee that it will quietly vanish just because it’s unjust, irrelevant, or plainly stupid. Even today, despite forty states legalizing marijuana for medical use, the drug remains classified as Schedule I on the federal level. That contradiction alone proves that injustice can sit in plain sight, uncorrected, indefinitely.

The strange and unsettling truth is this: the reaction to a protest is often more important than the protest itself. That may sound cynical—but history offers few counterexamples.

Why do we remember Jesus? Why Socrates? They weren’t the first prophets or philosophers. Neither did they make any effort to preserve their own legacy. Jesus may have been illiterate. Socrates deliberately avoided writing his teachings down. And yet both men inspired students and followers who documented their words, spread their ideas, and endured persecution on their behalf. What turned them into symbols wasn’t the originality of their ideas; it was the injustice of their punishment. Without the crucifixion or the hemlock, we might know nothing of either man.

Their teachings were shared by others before and after. What immortalized them was the reaction. Their deaths exposed the fragile cruelty of the systems that killed them. The same has been true of almost every transformative figure or movement since.

But what happens when power doesn’t react? When it refuses to acknowledge a protest at all?

This, too, is a tactic—one often more chilling than suppression. A protest that provokes no backlash, no commentary, no visible consequence, is at risk of simply disappearing. Without confrontation, the best we can hope for is a law’s slow fade into irrelevance. But even then, it’s not truly dead, just dormant. And what lies dormant can always be reawakened. Worse, it can be used selectively, quietly, to punish those whom power deems inconvenient. Its obscurity becomes its strength. The public pays it no mind, while it becomes a surgical instrument of control.

We’ve seen this play out in dozens of contexts. Consider Gandhi leading the Salt March, Hypatia’s execution by an early Christian mob, or the Stonewall Riots. In each case, the protest alone did not make history—it was the overreaction, the visible persecution, that forced the world to pay attention. That moment of disproportionality is what flips the moral balance and changes the public narrative.

Even in recent history, the same dynamic persists. The first accusations against Bill Cosby came three decades before he was brought to justice. It wasn’t until Hannibal Buress launched a public reaction with a comedy routine that the former star was held accountable for years of abuse. Edward Snowden wasn’t the first NSA employee to blow the whistle on surveillance abuses made possible under the Patriot Act. It wasn’t until the state tried to make an example of him—charging him with espionage—that the country was forced to pay attention.

Some regimes have mastered the weaponization of silence itself. Stalinist Russia didn’t crush dissent with drama—it erased it with cold efficiency. Potential dissidents simply disappeared. No spectacle. No martyrdom. No memory. China’s censorship model is even more refined: protests aren’t just suppressed—they’re ignored out of existence. They aren’t acknowledged by the state or shown to the public. This deliberate absence confuses the public, demoralizes activists, and dissolves clarity. No reaction means no symbol. No martyr. No spark.

Many readers may remember hearing, as children: “If you’re going to break the rules, be prepared to face the consequences.” But this isn’t about justice. It’s not a moral appeal. It’s a reflection of how change happens. Not from the act of defiance, but from the consequences it provokes. Martyrdom is what transforms a simple protest into a legacy.

Unjust laws don’t fall because they should. They fall because someone breaks them, and power punishes them, and in doing so reveals the law’s own ugliness. The paradox of progress is that systems of power destroy themselves not when laws are broken, but when they try to punish those who dare to break them.

Power doesn’t fear disobedience; it fears being seen as punishing it. That’s when the mask slips. That’s when history begins to shift.

And I, God help me struck not from hate,
But with love inflamed, to seal another's fate.
The blood ran hot. It chilled my chest;
My brother lived. I found no rest.

Weep not for the man who's breath I broke,
But for the law in me, who felt the stroke.
A line I swore I'd never cross,
Shattered by a single toss.

Is this my flaw? Not lust, not prideful thrill,
But mercy's specter, averted by unconscious will?
Lord of grace, of earth, of sea, of sky,
May love lay scourge to Logos, and justify?

Speak not to me now, let silence fan the flame,
For I must bear the weight of a blood-soaked mane.
One soul, now wears the twisted martyrant brand,
Another, now damned for salting mercy’s land.

Fortunately, I caught the problem early enough to turn it around. I did what every financial advisor suggests: built a strict budget that includes only essentials. To my surprise, I found myself in a decent position—able to put at least $500 a month toward debt. In short, six months of disciplined effort could wipe out the worst of it, and another six to eight could have me completely debt-free, car and all.

Everything was going smoothly—until last week.

On an ordinary Wednesday, I woke up feeling proud of the discipline I’d shown over the past two weeks. I had already saved enough for a one-month emergency fund and was ready to start chipping away at my debt. That morning, I noticed an email from Chick-fil-A offering me a free birthday milkshake.

Thirty-five seconds later, I had downloaded the app, added the milkshake to my cart, and thrown in a chicken sandwich meal for good measure. I told myself it was a small celebration.

You can probably guess where this goes.

An hour and a half later, I was staring at a passenger seat full of fast food bags, two empty cans of Monster, a bag of Hot Cheetos I don’t remember grabbing, and a pack of cigarettes I had bought at the gas station. In total, I’d spent just under $50. But the real damage wasn’t financial—it was emotional. I threw away most of the food and the cigarettes in disgust and sat there feeling completely deflated.

Then a thought struck me: what if I calculated not just what I spent, but the actual cost—the opportunity cost—of this slip?

I had spent $46.29. If that amount became a recurring habit (which, let’s be honest, it has before), it would cost me more than just cash. At the pace I had set today, my habit would end up costing me an absolutely staggering amount: $16,895.85.

But the real kicker came when I factored in investing. Assuming an average annual return of about 8% (adjusted for inflation, roughly the historical S&P 500 average), that same spending habit could cost me:

• Over $250,000 in 10 years
• Nearly $1 million in 20
• More than $2.2 million in 30

Of course, I can’t afford to invest $45 every single day—not yet. But this exercise gave me a crystal-clear picture of just how damaging small, impulsive purchases can be over time.

Since that day, I’ve been using this method every time I’m tempted to spend unnecessarily. So far, it’s worked almost every time. The one exception? I bought a can of white Monster while filling up my gas tank. But even then, I sat in the car, did the math, and realized I had just bought a $200,000 energy drink. And I have to admit—it was the most satisfying can of Monster I’ve ever had. I savored every drop.

At first, I did these calculations by hand, which I actually recommend. Something is grounding about manually working out the numbers. But as I started using the method more frequently, I built a simple website to do the math for me automatically. It’s made the process much quicker.

If you’re dealing with similar habits, feel free to use the site—but I also encourage you to try doing the math yourself, at least once or twice. The impact hits a little harder that way.

What initially fascinated me about Barge Haulers wasn’t just the painting itself, but the unexpected historical rabbit hole it sent me down. After admiring the image online, I wound up on its Wikipedia page (pro tip: Wikipedia is actually one of the best sources I’ve found for high-resolution artwork). A few links later, I was reading about the Burlaks—a class of Russian laborers whose job was to haul ships upstream, often by literally dragging them along the banks of the Volga.

Most people today don’t realize how ineffective traditional sailing was before the 20th century. Before the advent of efficient hull designs that allowed boats to sail effectively across the wind or even at a close reach against the wind, if you weren't going downwind, you weren’t going. Without engines or favorable currents, rowing or hauling vessels manually was often the only option. This latter is the raw, backbreaking labor that Repin captures with unnerving precision.

But while the history behind the painting adds depth, what struck me most were the eleven men depicted—specifically, the contrast between ten of them and the one at the center. These ten figures are darkened by grime, fatigue, and shadows so heavy they almost obscure their ethnicity. At a glance, their appearances suggest they've become indistinguishable from the filth and hardship of their lives. They are bent, broken, trudging forward with a resigned stoicism that anyone who has done hard manual labor will instantly recognize. They’re not protesting. They’re not posturing. They're simply enduring.

And then there is the man at the center—lit as if by a spotlight, his features cleaner, his shadows gentler, his clothes no less ragged, but his posture unmistakably different. While the others lean into the weight of the ship, he resists it. His hands don’t even allow the rope to press against his chest. He leans backward and avoids the task at hand in a silent, but no less clear protest. His presence is jarring, not because he breaks from the group physically, but because he breaks from them spiritually. He refuses.

What Repin meant to convey with this contrast is open to interpretation. Maybe it’s a statement on the quiet heroism of resistance—of refusing to yield to an unjust reality. Maybe it’s the opposite: a reminder of how useless dissent can be in the face of overwhelming necessity. Or perhaps it’s not a judgment at all, but a question. Do we admire the stoic or the rebel? Is there honor in compliance, or only in protest?

Whatever the answer, the painting lingers. It reminds me of moments in my own life—at work, at school—when pushing against the grain came at a cost, even when I believed I was right. And that’s what great art does: it doesn’t just reflect history or beauty; it reflects us.

The most discussed section is The Art of Virtue, where Franklin lays out 13 qualities he believed make a “good human specimen”:

1. Temperance – Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence – Speak only when it benefits yourself or others. Avoid trivial talk.
3. Order – Let all things have their place; every task its time.
4. Resolution – Do what you ought; follow through without fail.
5. Frugality – Spend only to benefit yourself or others. Waste nothing.
6. Industry – Always be doing something useful. Cut out the unnecessary.
7. Sincerity – Use no deceit. Think justly, speak accordingly.
8. Justice – Do no harm, whether by action or neglect.
9. Moderation – Avoid extremes; don’t overreact to injury.
10. Cleanliness – Keep yourself, your clothes, and your home clean.
11. Tranquility – Don’t be disturbed by small things or accidents.
12. Chastity – Use sex only for health or offspring, never to excess or harm.
13. Humility – Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Two things grabbed me right away:

1. The Comparison Between Jesus and Socrates. Franklin isn’t the only Founder to pair them; Jefferson does the same in The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, his cut-and-paste iterative isolation of just the story of Jesus and philosophy contained in The New Testament Gospels.
2. The idea of tracking virtues, not habits. Franklin built a weekly chart (see below) and marked a box whenever he failed a virtue. The goal was character, not routine.

That distinction solved a problem I’ve long had with habit trackers. My lists balloon—work out, read, Duolingo, create something—until the whole system implodes. Franklin’s approach refocuses on principles I actually value. Habits follow naturally.

He also advanced one virtue at a time. Week 1: Temperance. Week 2: add Silence. And so on. Tracking all 13 gives honest data; concentrating on one prevents overload.

In practice, I’ve slimmed Franklin’s list to seven virtues that group naturally for me—e.g., I can’t picture Order, Industry, and Cleanliness separately. Your mileage may vary.

Paper worked fine, but I wanted weekly grades for quick comparison, so I built a spreadsheet. Each day, I type “X” under any virtue I feel I have succeeded in representing, and the sheet totals my slips, converting them to a letter grade:

=COUNTIF(START:END,"*X*") * 2.04

=LOOKUP( GRADE-CELL,  
{0;60;63;67;70;73;77;80;83;87;90;93;97},  
{"F";"D-";"D";"D+";"C-";"C";"C+";"B-";"B";"B+";"A-";"A";"A+"} )

Franklin’s simple chart still feels modern: measure what matters, focus narrowly, improve steadily. It’s habit‑tracking with a soul.

This does beg a bit of an interesting question: Why, if Woolman was running around as a powerful anti-slavery advocate, well before our nation was even formed, did it take so damn long for us to outlaw slavery?

One possible theory: Woolman was a bit of a dick.

None of what I'm about to say should take away from his contributions to history, but having just read the guy's personal journals, I can pretty soundly say that this is not exactly the type of guy that I'd want to be listening to lectures from. Is this surprising? A Quaker coming off as a bit preachy -- yeah, kind of.

Maybe the weirdest thing about Woolman's early campaigning was the way in which he decided to make his case. In the early days, Woolman was something akin to a notary, or maybe just someone who could write properly (the difference between the two in 1740 isn't as big as you'd think). As a result, Woolman often had requests to write up wills or miscellaneous contracts, which, given the fact that this was eighteenth century colonial America, often facilitated the transfer of ownership of slaves. Rather than tell his peers outright that he wasn't willing to actually do this service for them; he would invite them to his house, write up the entirety of the contract, save for the bit about the slaves; and then proceed to lecture them about the ownership of slaves until they either gave up and bailed, or gave up and agreed to set the slaves free.

Now, it's hard to take shots at the guy for doing something that, according to his journals, did free at least two or three slaves from captivity. But just imagine if this were any other type of transaction. Let's say you're selling an iPhone. I see your ad, but I'm an Android guy (newly converted too), and the last thing in the world I want is an iPhone. But rather than just ignore the ad like a normal person, I invite you to my house under the pretense of promising to buy the phone; but when you get there, I proceed to lecture you for hours on end until you agree to just take the iPhone outback and put it down Old Yeller style.

Again, this criticism feels kind of gross even as I'm writing it, because the guy was using deceptive marketing to argue on behalf of freeing slaves -- so I'll just move on to another example:

In Chapter IX of his journal, Woolman goes into great detail about his account of the time that he stood outside a magic show, pestering patrons for an hour, before feeling satisfied enough that he could leave.

The story goes that Woolman was traveling around, going to various Quaker meetings and spreading his anti-slavery message, or at least that's what he was meant to be doing. He also just mentions several times over and over again that he gets to some meeting and just sits there without saying anything at all the entire time, so make of that what you will. Anyway, while traveling around, Woolman spots what I'm guessing by his description is a kind of pop-up magic show. He specifically asks the sleight of hand artist there if it's cool if he hangs out; the artist says yes. At which point Woolman proceeds to stand outside of the show, preaching the evils of magicians, pestering everyone who thought about coming to the show, until finally:

"So, having spent about an Hour amongst them, and feeling my Mind easy, I departed."

I could go on and on about the various dickish pursuits of John Woolman, but unfortunately, I'd just be making stuff up. I read the whole journal, and I could only find two moments that I could twist into something negative. Of course, the reality is that Woolman was a trailblazer of early American politics and deserves a huge amount of respect, even if he won't let you go to a magic show. I just thought this might be a fun essay to read, if you happen to actually come across it on the day that it's published:

Happy April Fool’s Day!

Embracing evil with full force, as opposed to running from evil, is the only true way that I have found to mitigate the effects of the evil we all must contend with. The interesting thing, however, is that it seems not to matter what form the evil is taking. When we phrase things in nigh apocalyptic terms, we tend to think of the application of this kind of logic on a massive scale. Clearly, this logic works here: If you want to avoid falling prey to mass societal acceptances of evil, you have no chance of being able to do so if you can not identify the evil, and even less of a shot if you simply dig your head in the sand and pretend that you simply are not capable of doing an evil thing. That last idea: pretending that you simply are not capable of true evil, is one of the most pervasive bad ideas that society has ever developed. If you are not capable of evil, then by definition, everything you do will not be evil. You'll find yourself personally filling the chamber with Zyklon B, all the while still telling yourself that pervasive lie: "I'm simply not capable of that kind of evil.”

But, importantly, embracing evil can be used to defeat even the smallest forms of evil, the ones that are annoying more than murderous. In particular, I'm referring to vice, but I do not want to limit the train of thought. Interestingly enough, the thing that finally got me to quit smoking cigarettes was smoking more than I had ever smoked in my entire life. I had a job where I smoked damn near a pack of cigarettes a day, if not more. If I were driving, it would be impossible that I didn't have a cigarette in my mouth. If I were on break, same situation. Even when getting home from a sixteen-hour shift, I could not go inside and go to sleep until I smoked a cigarette. I became so reliant on nicotine that I was smoking cigarettes with nicotine pouches in my mouth and nicotine patches on my arm (only a mild exaggeration).

Then I simply decided I wanted to stop. Being now immensely familiar with the perks and downsides of the drug, I was able to make that decision with more clarity than I could have had before. I took a break for a very short amount of time, maybe a week and a half, maybe two weeks, and then attempted to smoke again. The nicotine had no effect whatsoever, save for putting a disgusting chemical taste in my mouth; and when I forced myself to smoke another cigarette (for science, I guess), I instantly got a headache that lasted the rest of the day. Even the Zyn pouches that I used to pop like candy were absolutely useless to me. I went from being fully addicted to nicotine to a nicotine non-responder in the space of a fortnight.

Of course, it does seem like this kind of thing is possible to do as a thought exercise; there's no need to actually destroy your lungs just to stop a casual habit. It would be a wild world indeed if, for example, the only way humans could get rid of a desire to murder was to go out and physically murder so many people that they were simply bored with it. But, luckily, that is not the world that we live in. It seems more than possible to simply imagine the depths of evil that you might descend into, as a safeguard against ever actually going there unconsciously.

Fortunately, I can say with a high degree of confidence that The Harvard Classics is actually the most unique and complete collection of literature I've every encountered. The collection was put together by Charles William Elliot, who was the President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; a man who established himself as a real stuffy nerd when he tried to ban the playing of football at Harvard, and was later quoted claiming that Rowing and Tennis were the only "clean sports". Despite his anti-sporting rhetoric, Elliot was a prominent member of American Academia at a time when it was much better respected, and objectively more effective than it is today. Plenty of people would argue that the 1950's and 1960's were the true Golden of Age of American Academia; and while I'm not going to argue that they weren't; I will say that Eliot was one of the men best placed in history and proximity to Academia to be able to accurately make decisions about what would fit into the category of required reading. It honestly shouldn't be surprising at all then that this collection contain virtually all of the most influential works of the past three centuries (at least up to 1909 that is), as well as a massive amount of literature pre-dating America itself.

Just as a thought experiment, a few days ago I opened up the table of contents, and made a note of everything that I had either read previously and thought was valuable, or had heard of in high esteem and earmarked for future reading. That list ended up being so long that it's probably a bad idea to put it here in it's entirety; but I can think of no better way to actually prove the point that I'm trying to make:

The first volume alone contains:

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Some Fruits of Solitude
• and The Journal of John Woolman

However, this is actually a pretty weak start - no offense to Franklin and crew, but the second volume is an absolute unit of ancient Greek philosophy, containing:

• The Apology, Phaedo, and Crito from Plato
• Epictetus' The Golden Sayings, as well as
• Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

It's worth reminding readers here that Socrates himself didn't actually write any of his own philosophy down. Almost all of what we know of Socrates' teachings, we know because it was documented by his peers and students; the foremost of which was Plato. Therefore we're really not only getting the work of Epictetus and Plato here, but also Socrates.

The next three volumes are dedicated to the poetry of:

• John Milton
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• and Robert Burns, respectively.

And throughout the remaining 45 volumes, in no particular order of importance you will find:

• The Confessions from Augustine of Hippo
• The Imitation of Christ
• Agamenon
• The Wealth of Nation
• The Origin of Species
• Plutarch's Lives
• The Æneid
• Pilgrim's Progress
• The Divine Comedy
• Don Quixote
• The Odyssey
• The Voyage of the Beagle
• Machiaveli's The Prince
• Beowul
• The Song of Roland
• The Alchemist
• Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Pride and Prejudice
• The Astroleger
• David Copperfield, the Charles Dickens novel. Not a book about the magician who maybe or maybe wasn't hanging out on Epstein Island.
• The Mill on the Floss
• The Scarlet Letter
• The Portrait of a Lady
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Anna Karenina
• Ivan the Fool
• and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (only Crime and Punsihment though, oddly enough)

The collection also includes miscellaneous writings from:

• John Locke
• Berkeley
• Hume
• Descartes
• Shakespeare
• Voltaire
• Thomas Hobbes
• Pascal
• Lord Byron
• Faust
• Euripides
• Virgil
• Confucius

As well as fables from:

• Aesop
• The Brothers's Grimm
• Anderson

Followed by a pretty massive collection of early US historical artifacts, including:

• The Declaration of Independence (obviously), but also:
• The Mayflower Compact
• The First Charter of Virginia
• Washington's Farewell Address
• The Treaty with Great Britain (the one following the Revolution and the one following the war of 1812)
• The Monroe Doctrine
• The Federalist Papers
• The Fugitive Slave Act
• The Emancipation Proclamation
• The Gettysburg Address
• and even The Terms of Robert E. Lee's Surrender at Appomattox

Finally, we get into the religious texts, which I was surprised to find included more than just the bog standard Judeo-Christian artifacts that you would expect to find in a collection like this:

• The Book of Job
• Psalms
• Ecclesiastes
• The Gospels according to Luke
• The Acts of the Apostles
• Not all of, but several passages from The Qur'an
• The Bhagavad Gita in it's entirety

I hope it's quite clear now why I was so interested in this collection. Basically if you threw in a copy of Zorba the Greek and a couple of Cormac McCrathy novels, I would have everything that I'd really want to read for the rest of my life anyway. What I found most surprising while conducting my little experiment; was the fact that I didn't come across a single volume that looked like it had nothing to offer. Just statistically speaking, you'd think there would be a dud in a collection of fifty books, and there very well might be, but, at least it wasn't immediately obvious which one it would be.

As you can imagine, actually getting your hands on a physical copy of the collection is a bit of an investment. For a while I really couldn't find anywhere that would sell a full-set for less than 4 figures. Eventually however, I did find some eBay sellers who were actually willing to part with their collection for exceedingly reasonable prices. However shipping is still a bit complex, to say the least, and I'm only really wiling to drive so far to pick up some books-- none of that's really relevant though, because it turns out you can get the whole thing for 99¢.

I'm not even being hyperbolic: Completely by chance I was messing around on my Kobo eReader a few days ago, and searched for "Harvard Classics" in the store, expecting to find nothing. I found a result claiming to be the full set, but also on sale from it's normal price of $1.99, for 99¢. I bought the eBook expecting it to be, maybe the first volume, or worse, somebody writing a book about the collection. But when I opened the book, I found that I now had access not only to the original 51 volumes; but also an additional twenty volumes that were published in 1917 under the title: The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. The latter is, exactly what it sounds like: and additional twenty volumes full of nothing but fiction reading.

To be clear this isn't some kind of freak deal in the Kobo Store. This same collection is $1.99 if you buy if from Barnes & Noble for a Nook, $1.99 in the Google Play Store, $1.99 from Apple Books, and please have enough self-respect not to buy it from Amazon -- but it's also 99¢ in the Kindle Store. Don't get me wrong the collection is more than worth the five or six hundred bucks I'd have to pay to get my physical copy, and I'll probably still end up buying my own set at some point in the future. But if it's worth $500 it's definitely worth paying $2 for. I can't think of a single other place where you could acquire this quantity of literature for less than the price of a pack of a gum; and please, feel free to take that as a challenge: if you know of a better bargain now, or discover on in the future; I'll be here eagerly waiting to here about it.

Also, if you’re not familiar with Markdown, the rest of this will make no sense whatsoever. Sorry.

Who Am I To Judge

I write a lot of text. Which, I know, alone isn’t really a qualification. What I do think is a qualification, however, is the diversity of text that I work with, basically every day. I write an insane amount of text in this format. I routinely work with books, blog posts like this, notes, recipe cards, and even my to-do list (when I use it) is a markdown file. I manipulate all of these types of markdown files daily. This is important for two reasons:

1. Exporting: I’m writing a lot of different things in Markdown, with the intention of exporting them to other formats. So I’m not just writing markdown. I routinely need to get markdown files formatted as HTML, PDFs, Word documents, and only occasionally (personal notes & GitHub) is markdown the final product. Of course, that’s sort of one of the pillars of the language, so I think it’s important to be familiar with the way that this process works.
2. Stress Testing: It’s very easy for me to tell, immediately, if a markdown editor is not up to snuff. I often have multiple files open at one time, and I routinely open up very large files. I have four or five documents that are somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 words, which I need to open up every day. A lot of markdown editors, especially new ones, just won’t do this for me. They’ll freeze up, crash, chug, or find other more unique ways to make their usage miserable.

On a final note: I have tried a ridiculous amount of Markdown apps on every platform. Whether it be iOS, OSX, Linux, Windows, or BSD. Really, the only platform on which I haven’t done enough experimentation to really say anything confidently is Android. I don’t have anything against Android; it’s just that I sort of hate phones, and I don’t want to spend a ton of time on them. I have an iPhone just because that was the first smartphone that I bought, and I haven’t really messed around too much since then.

My Grading Criteria

Power

I think that I have pretty high expectations for Markdown. I didn’t try to develop a stressful test to put editors through. I just have a pretty heavy workload, as a result of the way that I like to work. Even before I started using Markdown, I was hitting Microsoft Word or Google Sheets with very heavy workloads.

But this is, essentially, the criteria by which I grade a Markdown app. I like really nice-looking, beautiful apps, but I’m totally fine using something a bit more ugly if it does the job better. I think most people feel the same way, but in my case, I’m pretty good at figuring out quickly whether or not the pretty apps are even worth wasting my time with.

Cross-platform Compatibility

I also really care about an app being cross-platform. I really want to be able to use an app on at least MacOS and Linux; ideally, Windows as well.

Feature Set (Export, Templates, ext.)

I overlooked this for a really long time. But being able to export quickly and easily, to a lot of different formats, is sort of a must for a good markdown editor. More than just being able to export to PDF or Word, I’m also looking for editors that will support a lot of customization in this department as well. Being able to browse a lot of pre-made templates and being able to create custom templates myself is a huge bonus.

Speed

There’s not a lot to say about his category. I want to be able to write and manipulate text quickly. If that requires some additional learning (keyboard shortcuts and whatnot), that’s totally fine.

Launch Time

Finally, I’ve taken into account the launch time. Not just for the app itself, but for the opening of files once the application is open, and the switching between files. This, I think, should be pretty self-explanatory. Obviously, Photoshop is the gold standard for photo editing, but it takes so long to launch, in comparison to other apps, that I’m probably not opening up Photoshop just to crop an image. Being able to just launch an app when you launch your computer and leave it open is one thing. But that’s not really a good way to get around a slow launch time. A slow launch time for the app almost always means a slow loading time when opening files. Also, apps crash, and sometimes you have to restart, and I don’t want to be sitting around waiting for Photoshop to open when I can rotate an image from Finder.

Vim

There are two apps that I want to talk about today, and the first of which is Vim. This is a very old app, originally released in 1991, and based on an even older text editor, Vi, that’s been around since the mid-seventies. I’m going to wager that a good chunk of the markdown crowd has never heard of Vim, and that’s because, despite being a wickedly fast and powerful text editor, Vim has never really caught on with a lot of writing communities. Vim really thrives, almost exclusively, in the Linux and BSD world, which is where I found it.

So the first thing to mention is that Vim checks four of the five boxes on my criteria better than any app I have ever used. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, I’m being honest. The launch time, both for files and the app itself, is instant. Again, it may sound like I’m being hyperbolic, but I’m 100% serious. It doesn’t matter whether I’m opening up a list of 10 names or a 150,000-word novel, Vim launches immediately. This is because of the fact that Vim, at least in the form that I use it and recommend people use it, is a command-line application.

This is likely why Vim has yet to take off, among writers, the way that I believe it should have. Vim has a learning curve, and a lot of mythology around that learning curve. People who use Vim daily will ward off new users, because it’s not for just anyone. This mythology is the main reason why I stayed away from Vim for as long as I did. I was constantly being told by people who used Vim every day not to mess around with it unless you were already a senior developer capable of writing your own text editor over a weekend.

But the truth is, Vim’s brutal learning curve is conquered in about a week, mostly a weekend in my case. But you will actually be slower in Vim when you first start. Which is a very odd and off-putting thing. Your typical learning curve for any piece of software is a nice, gentle upward curve. But when using Vim, you will quite literally start typing at a fairly normal speed, get way slower for a brief period of time, and then become faster in Vim than any other application you’ve ever used. This is mostly because Vim does not utilize your computer’s mouse. Vim, or at least Vi, was built at a time before the mouse was really a thing. Everything was then, and is still now, done via the keyboard.

This is Vim’s real strength. If you think about it, you can only ever type in any application as fast as your fingers will go. If I type 60 WPM in Microsoft Word, I won’t type 120 WPM in Vim. The real strength of any text editor is its ability to manipulate text. Markdown takes care of a lot of the basic formatting for us, which is why writing Markdown probably already feels fast and more efficient than anything else. But if Markdown handles formatting, Vim handles everything else. You can correct words, spell check, delete, re-write, change, and manipulate text in a matter of seconds using Vim. Vim has movement controls to navigate by line, paragraph, sentence, word, and all the way down to the individual characters, and it’s all done without ever moving your fingers from the home row. Most Vim users I know of actually disable arrow keys to force themselves to use Vim’s alternative arrow keys: h,j,k,l (the real pros even disable the backspace).

Typora

However, as much as I like Vim, and I really do use Vim for basically everything, the app does have a glaring weakness. Vim is an app that is only interested in being one thing: a text editor. It’s designed to allow you to write and manipulate whatever kind of text you need to work with, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Even Vim’s closest competitor, Emacs, does much, much more out of the box than Vim. By default in Vim, something as basic as spell checking is turned off. Vim writes and edits text. That’s all.

So, in some ways, it really shouldn’t even be considered a contender for the top spot on my list of Markdown editors, as it miserably fails on one point of criteria. Vim does not export to anything. You have to find an alternative solution for exporting Markdown. But this should say a lot about the quality of the text editing experience that you’ll get with Vim. It just straight up doesn’t even try to work with Markdown, and yet I still call it the best text editor for Markdown. I hope this makes sense to people who’ve never used Vim before, as that’s the target audience for this post.

Anyway, I recommend Typora as an alternative tool for exporting Markdown to other formats. It’s not as pretty as something like Ulysses or IA Writer, but it does pretty much all the same stuff, and it runs on more than just MacOS. Typora runs on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and is really easy to install. (That might not make sense if you run MacOS or Windows, but any Linux users will know that, depending on your distribution, some apps can actually be pretty difficult to install.)

Typora is a really good graphical editor. I’ve never had much of an issue in terms of reliability, and it handles my 100,000+ word documents absolutely fine. So if you’re not going to use Vim, and you’re not on MacOS, Typora really is the way to go. But even if you’re using Vim as your primary editor, Typora will be very helpful for you.

First of all, Typora will actually allow you to export to alternative formats. HTML, PDF, Word, Epub, ext, you can convert Markdown to anything else you might need very quickly and easily. But where I really think Typora stands out are in two areas:

1. Simplicity: Like Vim, Typora does seem to be built to do one thing, and do it better than anything else. Typora is a markdown editor, and it’s built to edit markdown as quickly as possible. There aren’t any crazy UI elements that get in the way; it has a very simple layout. Of course, the simplicity is sort of misleading, because it’s very powerful under the hood, as you might expect, and maintains the useful feature sets of any other Markdown editors I’ve used.
2. Customization: Not only does Typora have its own Theme Gallery that allows user submission, but it also allows for easy, custom theming. Typora’s themes are powered by CSS, a language that is easy to learn, if you don’t already know it, and even easier to manipulate, even if you don’t. I imagine it would be very easy for a committed tinkerer to create custom Typora themes for their projects without ever intentionally setting out to learn CSS.

Also, it’s free!

Apple actually did make a really great move back with the release of macOS Whatever It Was, when they first implemented a system-wide dark mode. They baked in one button that would change the theming for every system app and every little piece of UI (with a few tiny exceptions). Then Apple did the really smart thing, and gave developers a quick and easy way to sort of tap into that theme switching within their apps (and seriously, it actually is really easy, I’ve only ever used Xcode in short spurts, working on iOS apps, but even I feel confident after reading the Documentation that I could get this working).

Then, after a little delay, Apple also handed this feature over to web developers. If you’re interested,d you can build a website that will follow the system-wide theme without any need to reload the page, or enable any weird features, it just works.

The biggest issue with this feature is that for it to just work, a lot of conditions have to be met. You have to be on a supported operating system (that means just MacOS), using a supported browser (for the longest time, that was just Safari), and actually be a user who was running the latest software, and taking advantage of the new dark mode feature. And yet, when it did work, this was, dare I say it, the absolute best implementation of any dark mode; no need to fish around for settings, no need to even care to pay attention to what was going on, if you were the end user, it just worked.

But now, a little over a year later, this functionality is becoming quite a bit more widely supported. The biggest sign of this is that both a new, system-wide dark mode, as well as support for websites following the system dark mode, is being added to the upcoming iOS 13, but that’s far from the only support that’s been added. Mozilla added this functionality to Firefox relatively recently, and while Google Chrome still doesn’t actually support this theme switching in their official release of the browser, both Chromium and Chrome Canary support this feature in their most recent updates, so I’ve got to assume that this is coming to Chrome at some point in the near future.

This really kind of leaves it up to Microsoft, whose Windows 10 also now has a system-wide dark mode, to either develop a similar system for web developers, or just join in with Apple, and the vast majority of web users will be able to get the most no-nonsense Dark Mode the world has ever known. I’m not ignoring Android and Linux users; I just think that Android will almost certainly implement this feature soon, and there are way too many Linux distributions for me to keep track of, and most people just use Firefox or Chrome anyway.

But for now, we’re stuck in a relative corner where our new, amazing, dark mode only works in a few places. So the way I see it, there are two options:

1. Go ahead and enable a dark mode the old-fashioned way with a button and a bit of JavaScript. This isn’t a terrible solution; you can actually enable both the manual dark mode with JavaScript and the automatic with media queries, and that will work fine.
2. The second option is basically to rely 100% on Apple’s solution, and then just serve up a very specific version of your website on the platforms that don’t support theme switching.

I’m actually going with the second option for now, while working on the redesign of my personal website. I might end up actually adding a manual dark mode switcher, button thing, before the site goes live, but at least for now, I’m kind of happy with the way that things work. The way that I have this set up is to serve, by default, not the standard light mode of my site, but the dark mode version. Anyone on an unsupported platform will just see the dark version of my site. But when a user moves over to a supported browser, my site will follow the preference set by the OS. Setting this up is fairly straightforward.

The first step is to decide what version of your site you want users to see by default, before you ever start writing it. This is important because whatever classes you set up in your CSS document at the top will be what users in an unsupported browser will see.

So in my case, since I want to serve the dark mode by default, I would design my site in dark mode by default, dark backgrounds, light text, that type of thing:

html, body {
	background-color: black; 
	color: white; 
}

Then we can use media queries to enable theme-switching, which works in one of two ways:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) /* Which will only trigger when a user is in light mode on their system. */

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) /* Which will only trigger when a user is in dark mode on their system. */

In my case, I want to enable a dark mode by default, and then use media queries to enable a light mode, so I’ll want to trigger the changes when a user is in light mode, which would look like this:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
	body, html {
		background-color: white;
    color: black;
	}
}

Then, if we want to put it all together:

html, body {
  background-color: black; 
  color: white; 
} /* Made dark mode color settings */
@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
	body, html {
		background-color: white; 
		color: black; 
	}
} /* Switching to light color scheme when enabled on supported system */

You could make a case that the bulk of the characters that came back after Hulk’s snap weren’t given enough time to shine, but at least the main characters, the original six Avengers, all had very complete story arcs. Whether it was Iron Man’s journey from loss to security, to risk, and ultimately his decision to sacrifice himself; or Black Widow’s very similar journey; or Captain America’s journey to be done with the world, and go back in time to live out his days with Peggy Carter, everyone seemed to have a fully fleshed out story. What I found most odd about these character arcs is that, rather than rebuild a narrative arc to fit their film, Markus & McFeely instead built on what was already there in previous films, no matter how deeply it was hidden.

Of course, the best example, or at least the most obvious example of this, was the way that the film heavily leaned on “Thor: The Dark World”, an almost universally despised part of the MCU. There was plenty of material to work with from Thor’s past experiences, most notably in his most recent solo outing, “Thor: Ragnarok”, however, the screenwriters seemed happy to give themselves a bigger challenge. But I don’t want to talk about that; plenty of other people already are. I want to talk about Hulk.

Almost by accident, I watched Edward Norton’s “The Incredible Hulk”, right before I saw “Avengers: Endgame”. I’ve held the opinion for a while now that “The Incredible Hulk” is the MCU’s most underrated film, more on that later. But I was surprised to see that this didn’t stop the “Avengers: Endgame” screenwriters from dropping easter eggs for fans of “The Incredible Hulk”.

About 2/3 of the way through “Avengers: Endgame”, the team finishes their time heist and gets their hands on all six Infinity Stones. Very quickly, the team starts nobly arguing over who should wield the new Infinity Gauntlet and risk dying to bring back all their old teammates. The bickering goes on for a minute until Bruce Banner shuts everyone up and makes it clear that he will be the one performing the un-snappening. The way he does this, though, threw me off for a second, until I re-watched Joss Whedon’s original “The Avengers” film, that is. Bruce Banner convinces everyone he can handle the force of the Infinity Gauntlet by saying that the force coming from the stones “is mostly gamma anyways”.

It’s an obvious allusion to Bruce Banner/ Hulk’s well-known origin story, but it’s still an odd thing to say, until you realize it’s actually a more direct allusion to Joss Whedon’s film. Early on in that film, Erik Selvig is examining the Tesseract (ie, the Space Stone), and comments to Nick Fury that there is radiation coming off of the stone, which he describes as “mostly harmless, low-level gamma”, and of course Nick Fury gets the killer line, “that can be dangerous.

But that’s beside the point; we’re already building Hulk’s character arc. He’s a character that’s mostly ignored in the MCU, until the rest of the Avengers need a tank to deal with some big enemy in the middle of a fight. But Markus & McFeely went out of their way to pay attention to what little backstory Bruce Banner did have. But of course, this little “easter egg” pales in comparison to the second reference we get in “Avengers: Endgame”:

At the very beginning of the film, right after the time jump, we’re introduced to our characters as they’ll exist for the rest of the film. Tony Stark the dad, Black Widow the project manager, fat Thor, and most impressively, Bruce Banner’s new persona: He’s no longer doing the whole Jekyll-Hyde thing and transforming into a green monster at increasingly less well defined times, but has rather leaned fully into the Hulk side of the, uh, personality, we’ll say — much like what we saw in “Thor: Ragnarok”. This time around, however, we get to see what I’m dubbing: “The Hanna Montana Hulk” (the best of both worlds). Basicall,y Hulk’s body and Banner’s brain.

What’s interesting about this transformation isn’t so much the fact that it exists, but how Banner explains it came about. Bruce Banner explains his current existence is only possible because he “stopped trying to treat The Hulk like a disease” and, rather than trying to cure it, decided to attempt a kind of coexistence. But when did we ever see Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner trying to cure The Hulk? He was tepidly comfortable with the Jekyll-Hyde setup in “The Avengers”, lost control of The Hulk completely in “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, was completely consumed by The Hulk in “Thor: Ragnarok”, and spent the entirety of “Avengers: Infinity War” trying, unsuccessfully, to coax The Hulk out. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk has, at least from my reading of the films, viewed The Hulk as a tool. He’s lost control of it from time to time, and certainly isn’t happy about being The Hulk, but we’ve never once seen him try to cure The Hulk.

Everyone that I talked to about this bit of the film seemed happy to just write this off as something that happened during the five-year time gap. Many seem to be going as far as demanding to see a solo film based on Hulk’s journey during that five-year gap. While I’d certainly be the first to get my tickets to that movie, I actually had a different read on the scene. It certainly could be like Hawkeye & Black Widow’s throw-away reference to Budapest throughout the franchise. But I think it’s much more likely a reference to “The Incredible Hulk”. A film that focuses entirely on Bruce Banner’s effort to cure himself and get rid of The Hulk. It’s the inciting incident that causes him to head to America; it’s the reason the film’s villain comes to exist; Bruce Banner’s drive to find a cure is what makes “The Incredible Hulk” work.

There’s a pretty good chance that I’m wrong, but even if I am, the connection is there. “Avengers: Endgame” is a film that rewards long-time viewers of the MCU. Most of the films in the MCU tend to pretend like inconvenient, or less revered films, just don’t exist. Tony Stark blew up all of his suits in “Iron Man 3” only to build more than ever by the time “Avengers: Age of Ultron” started rolling. Jane Foster has been almost completely erased from the MCU because Natalie Portman refused to come back. But of course, “The Incredible Hulk” is probably the best example of this. Bruce Banner travels to Canada at the end of “The Incredible Hulk”, only to be picked up by Black Widow in Calcutta at the start of “The Avengers”, Bruce Banner was recast, Abomination is never mentioned again, and Liv Tyler went the way of Jane Foster. But then, whether intentional or not, Markus and McFeely acknowledged “The Incredible Hulk”. I think that’s pretty awesome.

This next bit is pretty off topic, so just quit reading if you’re not interested.

I’m not one of those “The Incredible Hulk” fans that pretends like the movie is perfect or anything. It’s not even close to my favorite film in the MCU. There are 22 films to choose from there, and 4 of them are directed by Joe & Anthony Russo, so there’s really not much of a contest.

However, I think the biggest issue with “The Incredible Hulk”, at least in terms of audience reception, is the timing. I’d posit that if “The Incredible Hulk” were released today, rather than back in 2008, it would be received by the audience with open arms.

“The Incredible Hulk” came out in 2008, a few short months after “Iron Man”. Compare a fun, sarcastic super-hero who announces his secret identity at the end of the film just so that he can bask in the glory of being Iron Man; to the much more deliberate, at points just straight-up morose, film focused on contemplating the tragedy that being a super-hero is… I mean… is it any surprise that “Iron Man” tripled “The Incredible Hulk’s” box office numbers?

Of course, following “The Incredible Hulk” we get “Iron Man 2” in 2010, another film about the same cocky, fun superhero who’s having a blast getting to save the world. Then, like a one-two punch, we get “Thor” in 2011, and are introduced to another hero who loves being a hero. Of course, later that year, we got “Captain America: The First Avenger”, and with that, a hero who’s a bit more stoic, and doesn’t love 100% of his time as Captain America. But I’d still argue he’s living out his dreams for at least 70% of the film.

But even if “Captain America: The First Avenger” was half as morose and brooding as “The Incredible Hulk”, it’s only a year later that we get Joss Weadon’s “Avengers”. A film that’s so fun, and groundbreaking (at the time) that we forget forever that super-hero’s are allowed be self-aware.

But then something odd happens. Shane Black takes over the reins of the Iron Man franchise and starts to steer the story in a kind of “The Incredible Hulk” direction. Tony Stark spends the biggest chunk of “Iron Man 3” fighting PTSD that he’s developed as a result of the last film, “Avengers”. He loses all interest in being a hero anymore and blows up all of his suits at the end of the film.

Then Joe & Anthony Russo get brought in to direct “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”, and they start to steer things in the same direction again. Captain America spends that whole movie fighting against S.H.I.E.L.D., the organization that tracked him down, and gave him a reason to be alive in between “Captain America: The First Avenger” & “Avengers”. It’s starting to feel like maybe the filmmakers behind the movies are having more fun getting to write and direct superheroes that are, at least somewhat, self-aware.

I’m coming at this piece with a lot of opposition, so let me explain a few things. First of all, I am writing this as a fan of the books first, who is also a pretty big fan of the movies. Anytime I need a distraction or white noise, Harry Potter is my go-to. I’ve seen all of the Harry Potter movies, as many times as a Netflix addict has seen all the episodes of The Office. I do like all of the movies. I also like all of the books, though I have a much harder time ranking them. Technically speaking, The Prisoner of Azkaban is a very well-made movie. If I were rating the movies on that principle alone, I think I would likely put it at the top of my list. But I’m not. I also don’t know that I think The Prisoner of Azkaban is actually “the worst movie” in the series. I just don’t think it’s the best. I actually think it should be pretty low in the list. Perhaps not #8, but certainly no higher than #5; if you’re looking for a numeric breakdown.

So, what follows is, simply put, a breakdown of a few of my biggest issues with the film. These issues don’t really ruin the movie for me; I still get excited when it’s time for movie three, in my never-ending binge-watching sessions. But I think that has more to do with what the movie does for the series as a whole, re-casting some essential characters, and largely changing the tone of the movie to make them dramatically more interesting and fun to watch, than it has to do with the movie itself.

Fred & George

Fred & George are largely absent from the Prisoner of Azkaban. This isn’t saying a lot, because Fred & George are characters who, much like Tonks, or Ginny, or Lupin, are hugely important in the books, but had their roles severely butchered on their way to the big screen. It’s a sad fact of the movie franchise in general, but it doesn’t say anything about The Prisoner of Azkaban in particular. That being said, we have, essentially, two notable scenes with Fred & George in this movie; the first is Fred & George giving Harry the Marauder’s Map, pure plot, nothing really to reflect on there, and the second, I’ll get to in a moment. Before that, however, I think it would be beneficial to quickly break down the character traits that drive the book versions of Fred & George.

When we first meet Fred & George in The Sorcerer’s Stone, they are introduced as comic relief. That’s not meant to degrade them; they help turn what could have been a nightmarish scene (as anyone who has ever had trouble finding a bus) at Platform Nine and Three Quarters, into a happy and quirky second introduction into the wizarding world for Harry. But later in this very book, we first get a real glimpse at the true nature of Fred & George.

On Christmas Day, the four Weasley brothers at Hogwarts, along with Harry, receive some lovely hand-made sweaters from Molly Weasley. Ron and Percy both react to the gift the way that most would, either begrudgingly putting it on and hiding in others’ shadows, or, in the case of Percy, refusing to put it on entirely. But Fred & George have the complete opposite reaction. They show up in the Gryffindor common room proudly sporting their new sweaters and making sure that their brothers are doing the same. In the case of Percy, literally forcing him into the sweater. This is a striking scene, and admittedly an unexpected one. Molly is nowhere to be found; there’s no chance that she could be offended by her sons’ refusal to wear the sweaters she worked so hard on. But that never matters to Fred & George. They’re proud to be Weasley’s, are happy to show it, and are incapable of understanding why their brothers wouldn’t feel the same way.

The brothers continue to define themselves as perhaps the most loving members of the Weasley family throughout the books. Maybe the most interesting thing about the Weasley twins is that we never really witness them complaining about the financial status of the family. At least for the boys in the family, this is really saying something. Ron can be found feeling sorry for his lack of money off and on throughout the series, most notably in The Goblet of Fire. Percy disowns the family for two whole books, and it’s quite clear that this has as much to do with his disdain for the family’s lifestyle as it has to do with his dedication to his job at the Ministry of Magic. But Fred & George never seem to have this problem. They have the perfect mix of pride, intelligence, bravado, and love that force them to realize how lucky they are to be in such a great family. In short, they grew up in a loving family, well taken care of, but appreciate it like people who didn’t.

So, when we first meet Fred & George in The Prisoner of Azkaban, I was shocked at what I saw. Harry arrives at The Leaky Cauldron, quickly followed by Hermione and the entire Weasley family. Ron wastes no time in showing Harry a newspaper clipping from the family’s vacation to Egypt, which they took after winning prize money from The Daily Prophet. Fred & George then enter the scene, immediately rip the newspaper clipping from Ron’s hands, and proceed to berate him for showing anyone the clipping in the first place. I have no doubt in saying that book Fred & George would have been the first ones to show off the newspaper clipping, and would have never considered for a moment being embarrassed by their summer with the family in Egypt. Cuarón has Fred & George behaving as many fifteen-year-old boys probably would. This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that it totally contradicts the characters that exist in the book world.

Dumbledore

At the end of The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry, Ron, and Hermione discover the truth about Sirius. But before this can happen, Ron is bitten and has his leg broken by Sirius, in dog form, and is then dragged all the way through the secret passage under the Whomping Willow and through the preceding tunnel, into the Shrieking Shack. Even after he gets away from Sirius, Ron is forced to walk around on a broken leg, as the trio escapes from Professor Lupin, now transformed into a werewolf, and attacking any living thing in sight. It’s after all of this that we catch up with Ron again, enjoying some well-deserved peace in the hospital wing. He’s resting as peacefully as you can with a broken leg, when Dumbledore makes his way into the room, and immediately breaks into a monologue, recapping the previous scenes’ events, and telling Harry and Hermione to go back in time to save Sirius and Buckbeak. At some point in this monologue, Dumbledore makes his way over to Ron and does a little more than pat Ron on his broken leg. It’s quite clear in the movie that he’s actually causing Ron a good deal of pain.

This is another huge violation of the character traits established in the books. You certainly could make the case that Dumbledore is more flippant with the safety of his students than he should be. We get our first example of this in the first book, when he allows Harry to chase the Sorcerer’s Stone and face Voldemort on his own at eleven-years-old. But the idea of Dumbledore physically causing anyone pain is a foreign concept to anyone who’s read the books. The only example I can think of of Dumbledore physically harming anyone in the books is when he hexes an Auror in the Order of the Phoenix, so that he can avoid being taken to Azkaban. Even when confronted with the certainty of his own death in The Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore has a calm and collected conversation with the Death Eaters closing in on him, as he awaits Snape to finish the job.

What’s most annoying about this little gaff is the fact that it seems to happen mostly for comic relief. This is probably why this moment in the film has become one of the most criticized by book lovers, but that doesn’t make the criticism any less valid.

Wizarding Law

Perhaps the best-established piece of the Wizarding World is the Ministry of Magic. This is probably the single most notable reason why the Harry Potter universe feels more realistic than other magical universes. The bureaucracy of the world grounds the characters and adds age to the world as a whole, making it feel refined. Perhaps the most well-understood of all the various Ministry regulations is the “Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery. Three times Harry is caught playing fast and loose with this law, once in The Chamber of Secrets (though technically it was Dobby’s fault), again in The Order of the Phoenix, and finally, later in The Prisoner of Azkaban itself. This couldn’t be clearer. Until a witch or wizard turns seventeen, they are not allowed to use magic outside of school.

So, when I turn on The Prisoner of Azkaban, and the first thing I see is Harry casting Lumos under his bedsheets, with no consequences; I’m understandably irked by the scene. Much like the scene with Dumbledore, I’m flustered by the fact that this scene happens for no real reason at all. The Lumos scene happens as part of the opening credits. The light from the spell is the transition to reveal the title of the movie. Cuarón broke the most basic, most well-understood rule of the universe for spectacle. This is a cardinal sin in filmmaking, and deservedly so.

Now that I’ve thoroughly trashed the film for seven minutes, it seems like a good idea to repeat the fact that, buying large, I like this movie quite a bit. I highly recommend you watch the video linked above. This is because I don’t think any amount of criticism of the film should outweigh its well-deserved praise. The movie is important in the series, not only because it changes the tone of the films and enables the films that came after it, but also because it really is spectacular in its own right. The movie is consistent in its themes, more so than any of the others. While it deviates from the book more than the previous two films, it does so with the best of intentions. Largely, this movie first sets up the dynamic of the movies and the books as two entities to be enjoyed separately.