flâneur

The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas - by Max Read

maxread.substack.com · 2,985 words · saved by 1 readers

Since the dawn of human history, certain archetypal stories have recurred, appearing again and again in myth and legend across cultures, continents, and centuries. The Deluge. The Resurrection. The Hero’s Journey. On the internet, among the most important archetypes is “The Overconfident Optimist and His Ill-Advised DIY Project.” We see it in Groverhaus, in Reddit Island, in the Child-Annihilating Zipline. On Monday the user @i_zzzzzz -- a person to whom I feel personally indebted for their coinage of the extremely useful term “chaos meal” -- revealed what seemed like a new instance of this time-honored archetype. “This guy on Hacker News is buying up the entire town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas for reasons that seem unclear even to him. Someone please help him go home to his children,” @i_zzzzzz wrote. The comment appears, it seems worth noting, underneath a Hackernews post from a tech worker looking to relocate for remote work, asking for advice on finding a small town with a walkable dow

Since the dawn of human history, certain archetypal stories have recurred, appearing again and again in myth and legend across cultures, continents, and centuries. The Deluge. The Resurrection. The Hero’s Journey. On the internet, among the most important archetypes is “The Overconfident Optimist and His Ill-Advised DIY Project.” We see it in Groverhaus, in Reddit Island, in the Child-Annihilating Zipline. On Monday the user @i_zzzzzz -- a person to whom I feel personally indebted for their coinage of the extremely useful term “chaos meal” -- revealed what seemed like a new instance of this…

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