he had plenty of time to see...?

Cyclist crashes straight into parked cop motorcycle.pic.twitter.com/mW4H9Zk0fg

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) March 22, 2026

While it's tempting to attribute this to idiocy, I don't think it is. If you replay the video a few times, you see that the biker was in an uncomfortable position: he'd been using the shoulder as his bike lane (which, depending on the state, can be legal or not—freeway biking is not encouraged), and the traffic to his left was relentless. I think he was trying to thread the needle between the parked vehicles and the traffic, and he simply miscalculated. The alternative is ridiculous: You have to believe the biker simply wasn't paying attention, but that's all bikers do when they're biking! A biker's attention can't waver for even a fraction of a second because road hazards are everywhere, even when bikers aren't on freeways. And I'm sure the biker was aware of the cameraman's car, which was right on his ass, and which might actually have been the cause of the cyclist's difficulty. So while the scene is admittedly hilarious and feels like revenge for all of the rude bikers who stray into pedestrian lanes, in this one case, my sympathy is entirely with the biker.

le fléau contre la masse

Project Hail Mary: review

Ryan Gosling (Ryland Grace) and friend in front of video images of Earth

[WARNING: spoilers. And see my 2021 review of the novel here.]

2026's Project Hail Mary is a science-fiction movie directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (known in the industry as "Lord and Miller"), the pair who are famous for their comedic and animation-related sensibilities thanks to efforts like Into the Spider-verse, Across the Spider-verse, The Lego Movie, the Jump Street comedies, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Lord and Miller's newest film is based on the novel Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. One of the biggest questions for me, going into this movie, was how faithful the movie would be to the book. The answer is mixed, but the movie is generally faithful to the book's story beats. So the only issue is how much the book-wise viewer can tolerate the many changes to the plot details. The standard defenses for changes from books to movies revolve around the types of media involved and the need to respect a movie's time constraints. I can understand this to some extent, but then how do you justify it when filmmakers add new material to a story after subtracting material from the original story? To this day, people are still arguing about Peter Jackson's excision of Tom Bombadil from his The Lord of the Rings films while including non-canonical events like, among other things, Aragorn's accidental cliff-dive in the movie version of The Two Towers. I'm beginning to think that, if you take material out for time constraints, you shouldn't add new material in. Fortunately or unfortunately, Lord and Miller's Project Hail Mary, like Peter Jackson's 2001-2003 Meisterwerk, does both.

A brief summary of the movie version of Project Hail Mary would be this. Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is a middle-school science teacher who, years ago, wrote a controversial paper on xenobiology arguing that extraterrestrial life doesn't need to be water-based. He is roped in by the mysterious-but-powerful Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to help solve the problem of the sudden diminution of our sun's luminosity. After the discovery that the cause of the problem is an alien microorganism dubbed astrophage (Gk. "star-eater"), and the further discovery that the sun Tau Ceti has not been affected by astrophage while so many local stars have, Project Hail Mary is commissioned: a one-way trip by three astronauts on an astrophage-fueled vessel, the Hail Mary, to see Tau Ceti up close, learn the secret of the star's immunity, then bring the secret back to Earth to save our solar system. Grace helps to train the mission team, but when the team's scientist is killed in an astrophage explosion, Grace—a coward—becomes an unwilling replacement. He is the only one to survive the four-year journey to Tau Ceti, and once there, he meets an arachnoid, echolocating, boulder-like alien from 40 Eridani whom he calls Rocky; the two learn to communicate with each other, realize they have the same mission, and work together to save their respective worlds.

For people who've never read the novel, the movie is a fine experience, and I can understand the rave reviews it's been getting. The pacing and editing are both kept tight; the visuals (especially of planet Adrian by Tau Ceti) are often stunning; the dialogue is witty and well written. The scene in which Grace has to select the computer voice he uses for Rocky's translated utterances (Rocky communicates in tunes and tones) contains some hilarious alternatives—like the voices of an orgasmic porn star, Meryl Streep (her actual voice), and a Frenchman—that get discarded before Grace finally settles on a more generically masculine voice (James Ortiz). I was a bit worried, based on dialogue that is heard in one of the preview trailers, that they were going to have Rocky's English-speaking voice quaver like a human's to convey emotion, but for the most part, the voice we hear in the movie is realistically that of an AI voice, i.e., not very wide-ranging in tone. Instead, Rocky expresses stress by repeating certain words (like the classic "Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!" or "Bad. Bad. Bad."). The rendering of Rocky's English grammar is uneven, but an in-universe explanation might be that the AI translating Rocky's tuneful utterances isn't perfect, which is why, at some points, Rocky seems to have a perfect understanding of human verb tenses while, at other points, he seems unable to conjure up the correct parts of speech. Overall, the movie does indeed catch all of the novel's major story beats, and on the general level, it's a good adaptation.

For people who've read the novel, though, the experience might be a little less positive. A lot gets left out from the book, some major story points are radically changed, and some new story elements not found in the book are added in. Let's talk additions first. One plot element that is added to the film version is a short scene in which Stratt watches video of Ryland Grace with his new Eridian friend Rocky. This repairs what I thought of as a plot hole in the book: I don't recall that Grace, in the novel, ever sends Earth evidence that sapient life exists elsewhere. This could be for prudential reasons: Humans in groups tend to ruin everything they touch, so Grace might be hesitant to let humanity know about the existence of the Eridians. But by including Rocky in a video in Lord and Miller's cinematic version, Grace gives the Eridians credit for helping him to solve the problem of how to get rid of astrophage. Another rather major and character-altering addition is a scene in which Eva Stratt, shortly before her astronauts are to launch on their one-way mission (and before the team's scientist is killed), sings a karaoke version of Harry Styles's "Sign of the Times" (which, frankly, I don't like—not Hüller's singing, but the song itself). The scene humanizes Stratt in a way the novel never does. In fact, the book version of Stratt is straitlaced, generally unsentimental (Stratt bitterly/resignedly muses that she will be jailed for all the stunts she's had to pull to save humanity), and contemptuous of Ryland Grace's cowardice when he refuses to be the replacement for the killed scientist. She admires Grace for his knowledge and teaching ability, but she doesn't respect him at all because, as she makes clear in the book, she took the measure of him and figured him for a coward from the moment she met him. The movie version of Stratt, compassionately played by Sandra Hüller, looks and feels much more weighed down by events, by the burden of having to coordinate a huge interplanetary mission and to send a group of people to their deaths. In the book, Stratt is also in charge of trying to preserve the earth's climate by enlisting a famous climate scientist to induce more global warming as a way to compensate for the sun's astrophage-induced cooling. In the movie, Stratt is much nicer to Ryland Grace; it almost feels, at certain moments, that there might be some romantic potential there. And when "movie Stratt" finally has to force her lead scientist onto the one-way mission, her expression is one of deep regret: she's hurt because she knows that Grace thinks she's betrayed him. A third addition was Grace's boarding of the Blip-A so he could see how a life form navigating by sound might build a vessel.

Several scenes from the book were flat-out missing from the movie; I assume these were cut for time and to keep the story both smooth and comprehensible to the average moviegoer. In no particular order: (1) the use of Beetles (little drones named after the Beatles—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—built to send information rapidly back to Earth at bone-crushing acceleration) as attitude jets to compensate for damage to the Hail Mary; (2) the movie makes no mention of the "coma gene" that allows 1 in 7000 people to undergo long-term comas more or less without ill effects, and which is one reason why Grace—who has the gene—is forced into the mission team; (3) Grace and Rocky's discussion, toward the end, about how similar human and Eridian life are in terms of sapience and social realities, leading to a tentative conclusion in support of the panspermia theory of life-seeding throughout the galaxy; (4) the humorous subplot about Dr. Dubois (the black doctor killed in the astrophage explosion), who is Spock-like in his literalism and perfectly open about falling into a sexual relationship with his backup scientist; (5) the humorous incident in which Dubois confesses that he (and everyone else) had quietly assumed that Grace and Stratt were in a sexual relationship given how closely they worked together; (6) the book's conclusion on Erid, Rocky's homeworld, which leaves off some crucial details, like how the transparent biodome built in gratitude by the Eridian government gives a view of nothing but inky blackness; (7) how Grace subsists on a diet of "meburgers," i.e., cloned meat made from his own cells, or (8) how Erid's 1.5 g (because of its larger mass) affects Grace's aging over the years (he ends up needing a cane). (9) In fact, Grace's 1.5-g acceleration in the Hail Mary isn't shown at all; a whole chapter in the book is devoted to how, as Grace travels to Tau Ceti, he "feels" something wrong with his environment and deduces, through science, that he's experiencing extra g-forces, which leads to his further conclusion that he must be out in space. In the movie, Grace almost immediately has access to windows and scopes, and he can see that he's no longer in Kansas. The movie also doesn't give a clear notion of the time jump from Grace's arrival at Erid to the movie's final scene. The movie does show by implication that some time has passed: A complete biodome has been built to house Grace (better furnished than in the novel), but no mention is made of the thankful Eridian government, or the fact that Eridians in authority (and, presumably, others as well) communicate via a sort of communal telepathy that Grace whimsically calls "the thrum" when arriving at collective decisions.

There were also some outright changes from the book to the movie: In the movie, Grace isn't given the chance to remember his name on his own after he wakes up with amnesia: The ship's AI supplies his name to him. Also: The corpses of his teammates, who have been dead for years when Grace wakes up, aren't nearly as desiccated as they should have been. Third: When Grace encounters the Blip-A (Rocky's ship), the maneuvers that Grace does (in the book, he never tries to evade the Blip-A) aren't the same at all.

Even though the movie mentions Grace's paper on xenobiology—the one that got him in trouble for arguing that alien life doesn't have to be associated with water—it fails to follow through with the fact that Rocky, as it turns out, is proof of the correctness of Grace's thesis: While we do see, in the movie, that Rocky bleeds mercury, there's no explicit mention in the film that Rocky's blood is essentially mercury, and that his biology contains no water at all (Eridians eat minerals, and they consider the act of eating both private and fairly disgusting—something the movie depicts in one humorous scene).

Also unclear to me: In the book, the aircraft carrier that Grace ends up on is Chinese; is it also Chinese in the movie? Whenever I get a chance to rewatch the film (probably when it's on streaming), I'll check out the writing on the carrier's walls to see what language it's in. In the book, the carrier is Chinese (as in The Martian, Andy Weir ropes the Chinese in again). And one more thing that is unclear to me from both the book and the movie: If Eridians initially "don't know about radiation," as Grace says in the movie, how did they perceive the Petrova Line, i.e., the astrophage-created band of infrared radiation connecting a sun to a planet with CO₂ in its atmosphere? There are many other unclear things, but most of them are inherent to the original story; they reveal themselves in Andy Weir's novel and are reflected implicitly or explicitly in the movie, e.g., How do Eridians have the same range of emotions that humans do (e.g., recognizable anger, sadness, disgust, alarm, joy, and feelings of friendship)? Why does Eridian impatience and directness sound almost exactly like the frank, honest rudeness of a Korean ajumma? In the movie, when Rocky comes into the Hail Mary and complains about how messy Grace has left the place, how does the Eridian sense or notion of neatness/tidiness map so closely onto the human sense? And in terms of infection control: If Earth and Erid are now saved, what about the rest of the galaxy?

Despite all of the differences noted above, I saw two very interesting parallels. First, we have to talk about the Interstellar thing because a lot of other reviewers immediately brought this up. Not having seen Project Hail Mary when I first learned of these parallels, my first thought was to reject them outright: These are two fundamentally different stories. After seeing Hail Mary, though, I now understand why people have been making that connection: It all comes down to one dramatic scene in which the Hail Mary is skimming the atmosphere of the planet Adrian in an attempt to collect an organism that Grace names taumoeba, a predator that kills astrophage and is the solution to Earth and Erid's problems. The Hail Mary loses control partly thanks to Grace's shaky piloting skills and partly because the astrophage in one of his ship's fuel tanks bursts out into space in an attempt to migrate to Adrian's CO₂-rich atmosphere so as to breed (astrophage, when it moves, moves at almost the speed of light). The ship goes into a high-gee spin reminiscent of a similar scene in Interstellar. Grace is knocked out by the violence of the spin (trivia: remember that centrifugal force might not be a thing), and Rocky—who can't survive in an Earth-like atmosphere—breaks out of his protective, geodesic "spacesuit" to rescue Grace at severe cost to himself. Now, it should be said that, other than this one scene, I still see no reason to draw parallels with Interstellar. But I can understand, given the emotional power of both scenes in both movies, why people might make that connection. The second parallel is weirder. In both the novel and the movie, Ryland Grace ends up on Erid and goes back to doing what he did on Earth: teaching children. Only now, his students are all young Eridians. The movie ends with all of his kids raising their hands when Grace asks them a question about the speed of light; he's obviously bent on teaching Eridians everything he knows about radiation. What's funny (in the sense of being both strange and humorous) is that Ridley Scott's 2015 movie version of Andy Weir's 2011 The Martian also ends with an epilogue on Earth, with Matt Damon's astronaut Mark Watney asking his class if they have any questions. The whole class raises their hands—roll credits. And this movie ends on the exact same beat. What makes director Scott's choice to do this seem almost prophetic is that the classroom epilogue isn't in Andy Weir's novel. The novel ends in space. I doubt I'm the only one to remark on this strange and interesting parallel.

Project Hail Mary got plenty right, though. Rocky's insistent, persistent personality is spot on. Stratt might have been radically changed, but her basically no-nonsense nature is still visible. Ryland Grace is portrayed pretty much as he is in the books—as an affable, knowledgeable coward who has to go through a trial to grow a spine. The movie's portrayal of g-forces isn't quite book-faithful, but whenever the Hail Mary goes into centrifuge mode to create artificial gravity, those scenes are done well. When Rocky steps into the Hail Mary's Earth atmosphere to rescue Grace, his carapace begins smoking dangerously (Eridian body temperature is incredibly high), which is depicted exactly how I imagined it from reading the book. And while Rocky himself doesn't look quite as craggy as my own imagination made him, the puppeteering/CGI team that brought him to life did a great job of ensouling what could have been an utterly blank, unexpressive character. Overall, I was impressed.

I didn't come away thinking Project Hail Mary was the best film I've ever seen, but many of the questions I brought up in this review, along with the flaws I mentioned, are more rooted in the original novel than in the story we see unfolding on screen. I would definitely confirm that this movie deserves to be seen on the big screen. It's big, bold, brave, and beautiful, and it's told with humor and heart. It also works despite having a very limited cast of main characters (Grace, Stratt, Rocky), and that's a testament to the quality of the story itself. Whether the story counts as "hard science fiction" is difficult for me to say since I'm no scientist. But it doesn't trip the usual plausibility alarms. I'm just trying to remember whether the space scenes have any sound in them. Sound in space is the undoing of many sci-fi stories. That issue aside, I do recommend that you see this movie. It's a very good ride.

The Critical Drinker tells the sad tale of Kristen Stewart

I've said this before, but it bears mentioning again: I think Kristen Stewart is a talented actress when given the right material and pushed by the right director. Her performance in Spencer proved she was Oscar-caliber (if that means anything anymore). And when I first saw her, years ago, in a little 2007 movie called In the Land of Women, I thought she was charming. Stewart has potential. She gets a lot of shit for wooden performances lately, but I think she often defaults to quiet subtlety, which gets misread as woodenness. Anyway, the Drinker is right that Stewart went off the deep end. In recent times, she's said some amazingly stupid things that make me question her character. So it's only appropriate to chronicle her personal and career collapse since her enstupidation became apparent.

anyone else find this disappointing?

Watch this video and see whether you end up as disappointed as I did. I'm not talking about the Cthulhu commentary, which is insightful, but rather the artistry. To me, it looks like a case of The Artist Who Can't Leave Well Enough Alone. The guy is making a picture of Cthulhu as he narrates, and its awesome up to about 70-80% of the way through it, then the guy starts adding white paint as a contrast (I think he started off with dark watercolors and, bizarrely, ended with acrylics or oils).

When my mother was president of her Korean-American Women's Society (yes, KAWS, like the grating sound of a crow), she once invited a Korean artist to come and exhibit many of his works. Mom begged me to help her and the artist set the exhibit up; typical of my selfish-yet-pliant nature, I rolled my eyes in exasperation (Jesus, not this again) and helped her. The artist turned out to be a chatterbox in Korean; I did my best to follow what he has saying, but I'm not sure I understood much. Finally, he offered to do a large painting right then and there. He chose a large sheet of hwaseonji (paper used for calligraphy and brush art), then loaded up the brush with ink and went to town. It wasn't obvious what he was making at first, but it didn't take long for a galloping horse to appear, charging straight at the viewer. It was, frankly, magnificent—dynamic and full of life. My own austere sensibility started shouting Enough! when I thought the horse-image had reached peak awesomeness... but the artist kept going until the horse was almost lost in a jumble of other swooping, smoky lines that symbolized God-only-knows-what. By the time the artist finished the artwork to his satisfaction, the whole thing looked like a scribbled, unprofessional mess to me. Maybe I'm just artistically stupid, but as with the Cthulhu video above, I wish the artist had known when to stop.

Am I too austere? Too ignorant of real art to appreciate it?

All I know is that I like what I like.

Christmas movie

"It's them! Blast 'em!"

so indescribably bad

I slap these bad puns up just to torture myself. 

Can we talk about the terrible handling of the speech balloons?

keto breffus sammiches, Day 2

I confess I've eaten a lot this weekend. It was all keto, but I can't hide behind the "keto" label after gobbling down so many calories. Like it or not, calories do still matter, even on keto. And as a result of this orgy of eating, I gained weight and even felt some angina this evening. Ugh.

Anyway, I'm fasting all day Monday and most of Tuesday, then meeting people for dinner Tuesday evening. I will, by that time, have seen Project Hail Mary, which is part of the reason for the meet-up: to talk about the movie. I guess Wednesday won't be an eating day; I'll just eat again on Saturday.

As you might imagine, though, the brief photo essay below has nothing to do with science fiction. Just enjoy the pics, the captions, and the commentary.

waffle iron, no Pam non-stick spray this time

My waffle iron (it's American and uses a 110V plug, so I have to plug it into one of my "down" transformers) has a non-stick interior. I'd been spraying Pam into it to "grease" the thing up in preparation for my keto-waffle batter, but today, I did an experiment with the first waffle to see whether it could be removed without difficulty: I didn't use any Pam. And—there was no problem. So I made six waffles without any difficulty.

thick, sludgy keto-waffle/pancake batter—a heaping spoonful per waffle

I don't know whether this is actually true, but it strikes me that pancake and waffle batter are essentially the same sort of batter. That's certainly been true of the keto batter I use: the recipe is for pancake batter, but I've used the exact same recipe in my little waffle iron (about four minutes per waffle), and it makes for perfect waffles. These waffles, if eaten right away, are too soft: they need to cool down and harden a bit to have a better texture. For those desiring an Eggo-style crunch, the cooled waffles can be put into a toaster set to a high enough heat to guarantee a decent browning. I thought my waffles came out great. And no, these weren't keto "chaffles" (waffles made with a base of mozzarella or Jack or some other cheese)—these were waffles with an almond-flour base (plus eggs, cream cheese, baking powder, salt, BochaSweet, cinnamon, and heavy cream). Behold:

after eight minutes

24 minutes, and done

I promised you a look at my blueberry "jam" (also keto):

This was mixed with melted butter.

Here's a naughty peek under a skirt of American cheese:

heading off to the microwave for a final heating

side view, bacon sandwich in front

side view, homemade sausage patties in front

The breakfast sandwiches worked out well, and on top of those, I had my standard two grocery salads (the downstairs grocery was open after all). I don't expect my blood sugar to be that great tomorrow: even though I ate nothing but keto food today, I ate a lot of it, and quantity can spike your insulin almost as much as carbs can.

But everything tasted good. The waffles are soft enough that I think a savory version might work should I decide to make keto hamburgers ever again.

Larry Niven dealt with these questions years ago

Read Larry Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex."

always looking for a new gyro (or gyro-ish) recipe

discussion re: the new Spider-Man trailer

I might watch this, but I'm pretty much done with Marvel.

Happy Palm Sunday

Holy Week begins for the believers. Today is Palm Sunday, so Happy Palm Sunday!

Of course, we now know that velociraptors were the size of chickens, so the above tableau could have been much more ridiculous.

Easter Sunday next week. While the Buddha's birthday sometimes coincides with the Passover/Easter season, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni's birthday is celebrated in Korea this year on May 24 (Sunday).

Dave Cullen on reasons for the Buffy reboot's cancellation

I saw the movie when it came out, but I never saw the TV series.

sneak peek

Bollocks! Henry Cavill speakin' like a Scot? Well, he doesn't have to: In the original Highlander, Christophe Lambert—a French-American actor—played Connor McCleod as a man who had lived for centuries and had a "mixed" or "muddled" accent from all of the places where he'd lived. Cavill can easily do the same.

today's lunch (in part)

Saturday's lunch was a combination of keto breakfast sandwiches and two grocery-store salads (not pictured below), and I have enough sandwich material left over for tomorrow. I made my usual breakfast-sausage patties, but with regular BochaSweet instead of brown sugar (I'm out of BochaSweet brown sugar). I also cooked up some thick-cut bacon (sliced into lardons) and made some blueberry jam with cinnamon, lemon juice, and BochaSweet. Lastly, I used my waffle iron to make keto waffles from an almond-flour base (plus eggs, heavy cream, cream cheese, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and yes—more BochaSweet). Oh, right: I also added a slice of American cheese to each sandwich. You can see the results below. My pancake/waffle recipe, found online, barely makes six waffles, i.e., three sandwiches.

sausage, egg, cheese, and bloob-jam sandwiches

I see that the bloob jam isn't visible. I'll provide a picture tomorrow.

side view

third sammich, with bacon

horizontal view

The sandwiches were good and filling. I then had myself a big salad (well, two small salads combined into one big one, with added leftover bacon). Tomorrow, since the grocery will be closed, I'll grab salads from Paris Baguette. Unless it's closed, too, but it usually isn't. 

Normally, my meals on eating days are a lot simpler (Sat., Sun., Wed.): just my salads plus a 250-gram (half-pound) salmon steak that I poach by immersing in boiling water (still wrapped in its packaging), then allowing to simmer for 14 minutes before extracting the fish, opening the package, and enjoying the flaky perfection. I added only lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and that's a perfectly decent hunk of fish. 

So today was and tomorrow will be something of a keto treat. And yes, berries in moderation are okay on keto thanks to their fiber content, which helps to protect one from their fructose content. Other keto-friendly berries include strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

There might be more pics tomorrow. 

E-words quiz

I missed a few of the esoteric ones related to England.

on FL teaching and learning

[from an Instapundit comment I'd left... here, slightly edited]

Learning English remains a mania here, but Koreans insist on backwards and antiquated ways of teaching and learning FL, which is why they continue to score around 2 or 3 (out of 5) on the two types of TOEFL essays (integrated and writing for academic discussion), and why they can learn English for ten years, then go to America, the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa and realize they can neither understand English nor speak it. The Koreans who do well with English are the ones who live overseas long-term in anglophone countries. And even then, many go overseas and isolate themselves in "Little Korea"s and never bother to learn the language of their host country.

Korean nationalism does come into play though. But it usually takes the form of wanting to replace those horrible foreign teachers with AI-driven robots. Foreign teachers here generally have the reputation of not knowing much about grammar (or much else technical about English); those teachers often correct the students while using vague justifications like "that sounds better" or "it's less awkward" or "it flows better" because they can't quote the relevant rules, and the students can smell this ignorance.

Also: most FL-teaching emphasis in the West, these days, is on oral proficiency to get students speaking coherently much earlier in the process. I'm in partial agreement with this emphasis, but I've seen the disadvantages: I learned French the old-fashioned way with grammar charts, choral repetition, scripted conversation, etc. One of my brothers went to the same high school I did; by that point, the old-guard teachers had been replaced by the oral-proficiency crowd, and I was really impressed with my brother's ability to speak French by level/year 2 or 3. But I quickly noticed that the quality of his French writing was utter shite, and that's part of the problem with not stressing grammar or correcting students' errors. Grammar is important because it aids in clarity of thought and expression.

I don't know what the answer to the teaching/learning problem is even after years of FL teaching. (I started off as a French teacher, then moved to Korea and used my FL-teaching skills to become an English teacher. I spent the last decade as a content creator, not a teacher, but I'll soon be going back into teaching.) I suspect the answer is some sort of middle ground: Korean students in particular need more emphasis on productive macroskills like speaking and writing; they do way too much listening and reading, and none of it is helping because the style of Korean instruction is to take a super-analytical approach to foreign languages. Compounding this problem is that the Korean analytical approach to English is often just plain wrong. Did you ever hear, for example, that there are only five sentence types in English (see chart below)? I can guarantee you that there are a lot more than five.

So a lot needs to change in Korea if Koreans really want to learn English fast and well. My own humble suggestions, after years in country, would be:

1. Korean instructors need to be fluent in English before they can teach, and their fluency should be tested by native-level speakers of English.

2. The Korean curriculum needs to emphasize productive macroskills (speaking, writing) as much as it emphasizes receptive macroskills (listening, reading).

3. The Korean curriculum needs to be stripped of false notions about English (like "There are only 5 English sentence types").

4. The foreigners who are hired to teach English should pass rigorous tests of linguistic competency—not just grammar—before they ever step into a Korean classroom. Too many foreign teachers are just 20-something kids fresh out of college, just looking to earn money so they can backpack all over Asia. It's an old story. Yawn. And it adds to the already-bad reputation of foreign teachers in Korea. And since Korean "cram schools" (hagweon/학원) are fundamentally businesses and not centers of education, they don't care whom they hire—just put a white face in the classroom, preferably somebody thin and good-looking. And if the foreigner isn't white, well, good fookin' luck. I'd say hire only the linguistically competent.

5. While I would never suggest an obsessive focus on grammar in particular (it produces a "missing the forest for the trees" effect), I should note the irony that many Koreans say, "We know English grammar better than Westerners do," then when they speak or write, 95% of their many, many errors are grammatical in nature. They've been trained to recognize grammar patterns but not to produce them in any reliable way, and these are two totally separate skills.

But I despair of ever seeing major changes like the above. There's a pervasive cultural conservatism/inertia here, and not the good kind of conservatism. Koreans will continue to want to learn English, to learn it badly (because that's how it's always been done), to suffer at the hands of incompetent Korean and foreign teachers, and to pine for the ever-hoped-for AI robots so they can chase the fuzzy little furriners off the peninsula.

Oh, yeah—that sentence-type chart:

[new material starts here]

Want me to list off some sentence types for you the way Americans learn them (or at least used to learn them)?

1. simple sentence
2. compound sentence
3. complex sentence
4. compound-complex sentence
5. interrogative sentence (verb-first form is not even shown on the above chart)*
6. infinite combinations of the above joined by conjunctions, etc.

That's just off the top of my head. The AI god adds moods and clause types:

English sentences are categorized by structure (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex) and by purpose/function (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory). The four structures mix independent and dependent clauses, while the four functional types determine if a sentence makes a statement, asks a question, gives a command, or shows emotion.

Once you start mixing, matching, and adding complexity, the number of English "sentence types" is uncountable. To reduce them to only five types, and to use a weird typology in doing so, is at best vaguely insulting, and at worst harmful to EFL students. What would Koreans think if I presented an oversimplified chart of supposed Korean sentence types?

__________

*Interrogatives can be written as declaratives, but with a question mark on the end.

• You're going fishing?
• He said what?

—but where in the above chart do you see the grammar for

Do you have a name?

The V_aux + S + V_main + O_dir structure is not on the chart. Interrogatives are sentences, too. I would humbly submit that the chart is crap. And if there's one chart like this, there are others.

ululate!

You're a slacker! was a much better line than Your ego is writing checks your body can't cash. That latter one gets my vote for Stupidest Line of the Century. In the late 1980s, if you needed someone to play the quintessential irritated hardass, Tolkan (whose name I didn't know until just a few minutes ago) was your man. RIP.

James Tolkan, best known for his roles in “Top Gun” and the “Back to the Future” franchise, has died. He was 94.

He famously played Mr. Strickland in the “Back to the Future” trilogy and Commander Tom “Stinger” Jardian in “Top Gun.”https://t.co/NNxgVfFnTL pic.twitter.com/QaTiDuRy8p

— Variety (@Variety) March 28, 2026

dog drama and shenanigans

how about this for a restaurant idea?

You're Korean. You come into my restaurant, the Grammar Hut (name subject to change). You see from the signs and posters that you get a 10% discount for ordering in English. There's also a chance for you to get a 20% discount on your next order if you take and pass a grammar quiz, one that is different for every person and changes daily. You order in English, receive congratulations and your 10% discount, then eat your meal. After the meal, you go over to the carrel- or arcade-style booth to take the grammar test (maybe it's on a touch screen; maybe it's more old-school), which is relentlessly in English. A proctor is there to monitor that you're not cheating. You take the quiz and pass. You receive a chit with a QR code and instructions to go back to the counter and have it scanned. You're told not to throw the QR code away so it can be re-scanned the next time you come in to order your food and confirm your 20% discount. If, next time, you order in English and bring your QR code, you get a 30% discount. This cycle can repeat until you hit ten "passes" of the grammar test. Since you are scanned in and on record, if you take and pass the quiz ten times, you will get a 50% discount off your next order. At 100 "passes," it's a 60% discount off the next order.

The menu is good but eclectic. Basically, it's the shit I cook: burgers, shoestring fries, potato chips, Moroccan-inspired chicken, spaghetti, chili, chili dogs, lasagna, tacos, nachos, ddeokbokgi, gyros, boeuf bourguignon, various soups and stews (some Korean), breakfast items, and desserts (cakes, pies, cookies), maybe some keto selections. A happily varied menu that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. Think: Silver Diner in the US. Or the Cheesecake Factory.

Does this sound like the start of a decent business model? Poke holes in my idea in the comments. This grammar-nerd stuff would probably work in Korea. Not so much in the States, where people just don't give a fuck.

trending recently: "seahorse emoji" and AI hallucination

"Yes, you're right. It never existed." Creeping ever closer to "I'm sorry, Dave."

funny thought

I watched this and thought: China's answer to the crunch wrap.

I absolutely agree

Everything this guy says is spot-on. I completely agree with his entire spiel. It's at the heart of the problem with Korean English testing, and it's a problem for the years-long trendy thinking in FL-teaching circles that tra-la-la oral-proficiency curricula can just rely on people "watching soap operas" to really learn a language. He's also right that language learning should involve stress, effort, and discipline, and that the priority shouldn't be to try to make the learning (well, "learning") as smooth and easy as possible. You can't really learn or improve on anything unless you pressure-test. Sure, learning shouldn't be a thoroughly unpleasant experience, but it also shouldn't be absolutely free of pain and effort, either. Develop your active macroskills along with your passive macroskills. Yes—that's the key.

One thing, though: I'm not sure I agree with how he reckons with Stephen Krashen. I may need to watch the video again to see whether I've understood him correctly, but it sounded to me as though he were making Krashen out to be someone he's not. Otherwise, in terms of language-learning philosophy, I think everything this gentleman says is absolutely correct. What a relief to know I'm not the only one thinking this way.

Dave Cullen on undead Val

"Porkahontas"

If you're fat and easily insulted, please don't click on this.

the rats find out

Too bad there was no English equivalent to Saint Patrick to drive all the rats out of England. Instead, it's up to the gunners. Or as they call themselves, the rat busters.

when you accidentally find a playground... in hell

Run away! Run away!

Never mind.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/GRuG6RLcVS

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 26, 2026

today's agenda

Now that I'm done with the blog-slog, and I've written my book review of Destiny of the Republic, it's back to work. I need to create the rest of the Substack material that'll last through April, then get back to working on my movie-review book. I also need to repopulate my blog's scheduled posts and, if possible, get cracking on making some videos. We'll see how all of that goes.

unobtainium and space-whale brain juice

the turd attempt

Not mine, I'm ashamed to say. Image found here.

For da turd toyme, I fired a missile into the toilet this morning, and it clogged the toilet. It wasn't even a huge one—it just happened to lodge itself into the toilet's throat just right, preventing a full flush. Luckily, all I needed to unclog the toilet was the plunger. Three pumps, and the blockage was gone.

The shittiest(!) part of using the plunger is having to clean it afterward. You hold it suspended in the toilet water, hit the flush, shake the plunger around while the "clean" water swirls around it, then move the plunger over to the sink to give it a working-over with soap and, if you have it, some sort of cleaning spray like Windex. Both the rubber head and the handle, which has been baptized with shit-water. Then you have to clean your sink.

With that problem out of the way, I can go about my... business.

slummin' with Sackhoff

Watch Katee and her Canuck hubbie react to a two-decades-old series, which Katee is only now watching through for the first time. Their leftism does slip through on occasion, but hey, it was a leftie show. I loved it anyway. My humongous, comprehensive review is here.

the promise of Dune, Part 3

Look at the poster image for Dune, Part 3 above. I didn't notice until someone pointed it out, but the horizontal solar flare inside the "E" in "DUNE" has three parallel lines representing the Roman numeral 3, i.e., this is the third movie. So I immediately checked the poster for Dune, Part 2, and sure enough, this has been a thing for a while. As graphic designs go, I'm impressed. This is very clever design language. I only wish I'd caught it earlier.

Destiny of the Republic: review

Since I had Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President on my phone's Kindle app, I finished reading it on the trip over to Daejeon right before I began my recent abortive walk. I've already reviewed the Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning, which is based on Millard's 2011 book, essentially a double-biography of the latter part of the intertwined lives of President James Garfield and his assassin, an insane man named Charles Guiteau. Like the miniseries, the book jumps back and forth between the lives of Guiteau and Garfield, showing with the benefit of hindsight how these men's lives are on a collision course from early on, what may be the true cause of Garfield's death, and what implications there are, after Garfield's assassination, for both presidential security and infection control in medicine.

We're given some of Garfield's background in terms of his earlier years, aptitude, education, thirst for knowledge, strong sense of family, and work ethic. Garfield becomes a professor of literature and ancient languages; later, he becomes the president of Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (Hiram College today). On top of that, Garfield serves as a general in the Civil War, then as a congressman for almost eighteen years. As the miniseries shows, he is indeed nominated for president at the 1880 Republican Convention in Chicago. After delivering an eloquent and captivating nomination speech on behalf of John Sherman, brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman (who had burned his way down to Atlanta in the Civil War), Garfield ends his address with the question, "What do we want?" to which a voice shouts, "We want Garfield!" And thus begins a process that culminates in Garfield's nomination and leads to his election as the United States' 20th president. Garfield is a good-hearted man with sharp people skills who always tends to build coalitions. His political enemies include corrupt, prideful, and stubborn New York Senator Roscoe Conkling and his henchman Chester A. Arthur. Arthur is chosen to be Garfield's running mate, and the two are often at loggerheads as Conkling tries to use Arthur as a way to influence presidential policy.

Charles Guiteau's story begins with the sinking of a ship he had been on: the Stonington, a steamship. Believing his survival to have been a miracle, Guiteau, already mentally unstable, begins to view his life as having some manner of sacred purpose or destiny. Talented in some ways but aimless, temperamental, and given to being a moocher, Guiteau spends time as part of a weirdly religious free-love commune before leaving and going back to doing various jobs. He is supported in part by his long-suffering sister Frances, but Guiteau's instability leads to his constantly getting into trouble. He often finds himself unable to pay the rent for whatever accommodation he's in, which means he quietly slips out and moves on to another unsuspecting landlord. Guiteau also borrows money from more parties than just his sister, but he rarely if ever pays anyone back. Initially coming to see his sacred destiny as somehow tied to that of James Garfield, Guiteau begins campaigning for Garfield during the election. He starts to see himself as instrumental in—even central to—Garfield's eventual electoral victory and thinks himself deserving of a high-level post, like ambassador to France. To this end, Guiteau often comes to the White House with a host of other petitioners in an attempt to see the president and present his request. In this effort, too, he fails, and his frustration mounts, which eventually leads to his purchase of a Webley British Bull Dog .442 pistol and his shooting of the president at a train station.

The miniseries covers Garfield's shooting in the fourth and final episode, but Millard's book covers Guiteau's shooting of Garfield at about the halfway point in her story. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to the horrible comedy of errors that ensues when Dr. D. Willard Bliss, recommended by Abraham Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln, is requested to come and care for the wounded president, who is shot in July of 1881 and endures until September. At the time, European medicine is undergoing a revolution thanks to the work of Dr. Joseph Lister, a champion of antiseptics and infection control. Hand-washing, carbolic acid, and other procedures are found to radically reduce the rates of deadly in-hospital infections in Europe. But across the pond in America, venerable doctors are unconvinced that Lister's seemingly complicated procedures produce anything but delay and inefficiency. As a result, Dr. Bliss deals with the president in the manner of most of his American colleagues of the time: by probing the president's bullet wound with unwashed fingers and unsterile instruments. One embarrassing reality is that Bliss is unable to find Guiteau's bullet (Guiteau, meanwhile, is sitting in jail, with the American public loudly calling for his slow and agonizing death). The Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell does what he can to help by creating a device he calls an induction balance, which can essentially act as a noninvasive metal detector to find the embedded bullet. But Bliss is adamant that, as Bell goes through several iterations of this invention, Bell should probe only the side of the president's body where Bliss suspects the bullet to be.

After the president's death from severe sepsis, the autopsy reveals the bullet to be, frustratingly, on the opposite side of the body from where Bliss had thought it was. Not only that, but the bullet had nestled close to certain vital organs and become encysted by new tissue: the bullet, left alone, would have done the president no harm. Even though Guiteau's bullet instigates this horrible chain of events, Dr. D. Willard Bliss is arguably more directly responsible for James Garfield's death thanks to a combination of pride, stupidity, incompetence, and stubbornness about the need for antisepsis. In the wake of Garfield's death, changes are made to American medical procedures to reflect Lister's discoveries and imperatives. Changes are eventually also made to presidential protection (the Secret Service, already in existence in Garfield's time, becomes a full-time security detail only later, in 1902, after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901) despite a general public feeling that America is not a monarchy, and that the US president should be more readily available to the people than any king. But with Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, then Garfield's in 1881, those close to the president realize they have no choice but to bow to certain realities. Charles Guiteau, meanwhile, is hanged in front of witnesses in 1882, almost a year after shooting Garfield. After Garfield's death, Chester Arthur is elevated to the presidency, and he is a changed man, dissociating himself from his former master Roscoe Conklin and enthusiastically adopting most if not all of Garfield's policies and priorities. It's an extreme metanoia, and Arthur is inspired by one correspondent in particular—Julia Sand, a bedridden woman who constantly writes him, urging him to change his ways, to find his better self, and to lead a grieving nation with strength and wisdom. Sand is never mentioned in the Netflix miniseries, but according to Millard, she is a quietly enormous influence on the life, reformation, and spiritual redemption of Chester A. Arthur.

Overall, I found Candice Millard's retelling of events to be a compelling, lively, and detailed read. I did often wonder, though, how she was able to insert certain bits of fine-grained detail into her narrative. I realize that she worked extensively with voluminous amounts of correspondence, so she was doubtless able to plausibly deduce and re-create events and dialogue based on the letters she read. Millard succeeds in giving us a sad tale of wasted potential: Garfield was a fiercely intelligent and amazingly noble man, the likes of whom would not survive in today's dirty, truth-twisting political reality. For his life to be cut short was painful not only for his immediate family but also for the nation. Millard's narrative is also sophisticated enough to allow the reader to speculate as to who and what really caused James Garfield's death. Was it Charles Guiteau, who fired a bullet that would have done no harm had the bullet wound been left alone? Was it Robert Todd Lincoln's fateful recommendation of Dr. Bliss, the doctor who had been there when his father Abraham Lincoln had been shot? Was it the willfully incompetent Dr. Bliss himself—a man who, until his death, never backed down from his obviously errant conclusions and convictions?

On a personal level, the hubristic figure of Dr. Bliss reminds me strongly of certain types of Korean incompetence in important fields ranging from health care to aviation. Bliss enjoyed the same sort of benefits deriving from social hierarchy that older Koreans in prominent positions enjoy. With underlings unable to question decisions, with new inventions and techniques not being permitted to be used to their full potential (Alexander Graham Bell could have saved the president had he been permitted to conduct his exploration of the president's body on his own terms), with one's own pride, status, and ego being more important than truth and reality... Dr. Bliss's situation felt rather Korean to me. I'm not saying Koreans are generally incompetent (quite the opposite!), but in cases where tragedies or scandals occur (e.g., Asiana 214 in 2013, or Dr. Hwang Woo-seok's 2006 bioethics fraud, or any number of preventable disasters), they're often the result of the abovementioned social factors, and this was apparently also true of 1880s-era America (and, for all I know, still true in America today, though probably to a lesser degree than in Korea).

My buddy Mike had recommended that I read Millard's book, and I'm very glad I did. It's a worthwhile read—a compassionate, dynamic, well-written narrative, and I look forward to reading more of Millard's work.

insane matrimony of the rich and famous

Bezos married an over-surgeried freak.

done

(from Day 4, Leg 3 of the recent walk) The cat sings its final note.

I've completed Day 4, Leg 3 of the walk blog, so I think the blog is now complete. If you see any mistakes in facts or language, let me know with a comment or an email.

it's a rare thing

How bad or weird can it be? If you've had tartare or carpaccio, this is nothing unusual.

chicks be spicy, yo

If I'm not mistaken, Koreanish chicken wins.

another pair of Dune videos

Dumping on the movie version of Chani! Yes, she's very different from in the books.

Paul/Anakin parallels:

I'd rather chill here

I was up at 7:05 a.m. today, which is early when I'm not out walking. I had considered going out to Jamshil Lotte World Tower to watch a matinee of Project Hail Mary, but a combination of lazy inertia and pragmatism kept me in bed: I realized that I'd actually rather sleep in a little more and work on my walk blog than go see a movie that I can see in a few months at home.

I had a further realization that might sound heretical to some, especially given the current wave of enthusiasm: I'm not nearly as excited as I'd thought I'd be about this movie. I've seen it getting rave reviews from my go-to circle of YouTube reviewers, but my own experience of the movie's preview trailer has been, at best, only the mildest quickening of the pulse. Rocky the alien doesn't look or move quite the way I'd imagined him, and while Ryan Gosling is likeable and seems well cast, something still feels wrong about his presence in the movie. So, frankly, I'm not exactly champing at the bit to see this film. 

Which is why I'm still chilling at my place instead of leaping out to grab a ticket. Who knows? I might feel differently next week, and there's a chance the movie, once I see it, will utterly shatter my expectations. But I have a feeling that I can wait. At least another week. The movie seems to be doing fine without me.

tout sur les fermetures éclair

The zipper on my winter coat annoys the hell out of me.

to hold or not to hold the bowl?

Are you a dog? Are you a beggar? One of my Korean uncles, who had lived in Japan for eleven years, gave me almost exactly this explanation as to why Koreans don't hold their bowls when eating while the Japanese do hold their bowls.

live like a retard, die like a retard

No sympathy.

it's gonna take longer than originally planned

I've been working on the Day 4, Leg 3 post on my walk blog, which has a host of errors, and to which I'd added a ton of captions and commentary... then I fucked everything up by accidentally right-clicking my mouse and inadvertently hitting some form of "translate" that turned my entire blog into a French-language blog, including the edit window where I write my entries. I fumblingly figured out how to reverse the damage for the edit window's language, but not how to reverse the damage to my blog's content, which all got automatically translated into French. I did eventually discover a way to get my written text back to English, but at the cost of losing most of the effort I had made today. I don't have to start from zero, but I do have to start from just before the halfway point, which sucks. I want to tear my entire apartment building down because of all the time I've wasted, so for now, the plan is just to leave off for tonight, allow myself to cool down, then maybe go see Project Hail Mary early tomorrow morning at the Jamshil Lotte World Tower multiplex. On weekday mornings, finding a seat for an early matinee shouldn't be hard.

Fuck my life.

ROE

I hope things are better now.

almost an American Ricky Gervais

the wound channel is the stuff of nightmares

I'd hate to have a bullet do that inside of me. But at least I could take comfort in knowing I wouldn't live through being shot by it... pretty much no matter where I was hit.

Guga dines where the rich dine

walk blog: Day 2 entry now done

I've completed work on the Day 2 entry of the walk blog—see here. All the pics are in place and captioned, and I've added commentary and made some revisions. If you spot any errors of fact or language, leave a comment or send me an email.

Day 3 might take two days, though: There are a lot of photos.

poison ivy on the house itself

Another guy just doing the Lord's work.

food from around the world... Amurricanized

Most of it looks appetizing.

pancakes with Alton

This feels like a partial return to Good Eats. I guess you do what you know.

noble dawgz

the part they left out: these dogs were stolen for the dog meat trade in Jilin, China. Jilin province has 50+ slaughterhouses.

they escaped from a moving truck, formed a defensive formation around an injured german shepherd, and a corgi navigated them 17km home over 2 days.… https://t.co/Y5jImOQce4

— shira (@shiraeis) March 23, 2026

visual puns are the simplest

a romp through Thai food with Chef Andy

2 for Dune 3

Is it possible that Villeneuve is fixing Chani from Dune, Part 2?

walk blog: Day 1 post is complete

Check out my abortive walk's Day 1 entry over at Kevin's Walk 10. Hundreds of pics, plus captions and commentary to fill in some of the gaps.

Dave Cullen on yet another Trek prequel

language on both sides of the pond

I have some thoughts on this one. But just watch.

train crashes and more!

housekeeping notes

1. My sources tell me that Project Hail Mary doesn't open in South Korea until April 17. I might have to heave my large self up in lovely spring weather next month and watch this movie some weekday.
2. I had to kill (throw away) my lovely black jacket, gifted to me by my boss in 2024. It had a lovely, heavy-canvas exterior and was reliably water-resistant, but the interior lining might as well have been made of toilet paper. Despite knowing this, I decided to risk giving the jacket a gentle wash in my machine upon returning from my 3/5-completed Geumgang walk. Result: thousands of little, ripped-up scraps of fabric all over the place—all over my other clothes (I had put in only one other jacket in that load because I suspected trouble), and all over the inside of the machine. So I scraped out the machine and ran it while empty to rinse it out, shook the scraps off my other jacket (my old, blue windbreaker), vacuumed the scraps up (I have a hand vac now), bundled up the black jacket, and tossed it in the trash, where it now awaits its ultimate fate: disposal downstairs and, eventually, reintegration into the churning cosmos as it breaks down naturally. A sad end to what ought to have been a decent piece of clothing. And no, I'm not putting it in the clothes-recycling hamper downstairs so someone else can use it: the jacket has no lining now, and it's a mangled mess. If I didn't think it'd be expensive, I'd ask a seamstress or alterations expert to rip out the remaining lining and install an sturdier interior, but as I said, that'd be expensive.
3. I'm chugging through my walk blog to finalize it. All the pics are installed and enlarged; the postmortem has been written and even revised; all that remains are the captions and extra commentary. I'll announce when I'm done.
4. Otherwise, it's back to Substack-content generation, working on projects, and—if possible—some video-making. I really need to get into the video-making.

air-fryer follies

the basic human sin

Bill Cosby, in his one-man show Himself (1983), advising his kids about his mother who has become a doting grandmother after a life of being a relentless hardass to her son:

That is not the same woman I grew up with! You are looking at an old person who is trying to get into heaven now!

I'll be talking about the bad grammar on my Substack.

Do-over fantasies, a cousin of the above desire to get into heaven (i.e., an end-of-life yearning for a longer, better future), result from a confrontation with mortality mixed with a fantasy-driven desire to right certain wrongs. Beyond that, motivations for such fantasies will vary from altruistic to selfish. Maybe the fantasizing old person feels genuine remorse for having ruined someone else's life. I can at least respect that sort of motivation. But the desire to repair one's own mistakes so as to make one's own life a better one next time around is rooted only in selfishness. I want a better life for ME. There's nothing to admire or respect about that.

Just try to live your best life now. Now is all you have. Even people who believe in reincarnation or rebirth would agree that nothing ever repeats itself exactly, hence the proverb about how history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. So even if you got your do-over wish, it'd go wrong in different ways.

What are the postmortem alternatives to living your best life now?

1. There is no God or afterlife. You die, then—nothing.
2. There is a God, and eternal heaven and hell do exist. The elevator goes up or down, and you get an eternity of whatever's on the roof or in the basement. No do-overs.
3. Afterlife involves reincarnation or rebirth. In Indian thought, the shape of your next life is determined by the momentum of your previous existence, so you won't be starting from Square 1. And if your previous life was one of unwisdom, then your next life will carry that previous unwisdom over—all of your immoderate appetites and personality flaws and stupidity-driven urges and blindness to consequences and susceptibility to temptation. All of it—ported over. You can't shake karmic baggage.
4. Afterlife follows some sort of science-fiction reincarnation scenario. You're miraculously born with the memories of your previous life, so you know what mistakes to avoid. This will make you weirdly old and wise in an infant's body, and as Q and Picard taught us, too overcautious to live a proper youth, to make the mistakes from which you're supposed to learn and grow. The further problem is that, the moment you correct your life's first major mistake, the future before you will be completely different. You won't have the chance to correct any of your other mistakes.
5. More science fiction: Afterlife means getting to choose when to restart your life and at what age. It also means retaining memories of your previous life as a map of your previous mistakes. But this scenario immediately turns into (4), above, the moment you correct your first mistake. Have fun fucking up this new life.

Do-over fantasies lean hard on the lie that you'll get to correct most or all of your real-life mistakes in this new life. But you keep running into that wall: after you correct your first mistake, the life ahead of you will be completely different, so as the above meme/quote says, you will end up just ruining your life differently. Better to learn to live wisely, to profit from the wisdom of those who've gone before instead of pushing against that wisdom and constantly rebelling and resisting. There's nothing noble about rebellion and resistance for resistance's sake. It just looks lazy and childish and shortsighted.

It's like trying to teach proper grammar (see my Substack!) to someone who doesn't really want to learn and who passive-aggressively resists, either by "forgetting" the rules and concepts just taught or by actively and lazily disdaining the in-built constraints in language that channel one's self-expression. The unwillingness to yoke oneself to the discipline of learning, the desire simply to express oneself sloppily and be happy with only that, is an example of the "resistance for resistance's sake" that I'm talking about. Someone people adopt this rebellious disposition early in life and never grow out of it. It's sad to see how stunted they are now, fantasizing about doing their lives over but failing to understand that none of this works without wisdom and effort and self-discipline (which, really, is a child of wisdom).

I'm talking about myself as much as about Certain People I Know. We could all afford to turn inward and work on ourselves. Psychotherapist M. Scott Peck wrote a book a long time ago called The Road Less Traveled (1978). In it, he argued that the fundamental human sin isn't pride but laziness. The spirit (and you can take that term to mean something secular if you want) operates according to the laws of physics: it has its own inertia. And as we all know, an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. That's laziness: spiritual inertia leading to moral and physical inertia. It hardens and crystallizes, eventually becoming an active desire not to grow, an active preference for incuriosity and stagnation. But because the spirit also has its own natural élan and yearnings, this laziness is paradoxically coupled with a desire for things to be different and/or to have been different. Somehow, though, the mind fails to make the connection between (1) being in a situation that needs change and (2) being the agent of that change. I myself have come to this realization only belatedly. Cite your favorite moral story to describe my situation; for me, Aesop's The Grasshopper and the Ants comes to mind. Make the effort early or end up weeping and discontent later. It's trite, but you have to Be the change you wish to see.