this domain is not for sale, lol

Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with — let’s face it — advanced delivery systems for advertising. It’s sad, but what can you do? I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us. That’s just not productive. So, in your own area, you just have to persist and do what you can on behalf of the things that you believe in. You have to believe that everything can change and that things can go back to being a little better.

Richard Linklater on ‘Hit Man,’ Why Indie Movies Might Be “Gone With the Algorithm” – The Hollywood Reporter

Civilization is six billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation, and yet you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise, but we are led by the least among us — the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary — and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

I don’t really want to get off on this tear because it’s a lecture in itself, but culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you, it disempowers you, it uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We understand that the felt presence of experience is what is most important, but the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, it creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness and false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what have you.

Audience: How do we fight back?

It’s a question worth asking.

Ask Terence McKenna: Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Just came across this site, which is an effort to transcribe all of McKenna’s recorded lectures, and a lot have been transcribed! What an amazing resource.

They go, ‘OK, what book are you gonna read next?’ It’s like, ‘Well, we’re never going to read another book. It’s just one book, you know?’

28 years ago, a book club began reading one novel. It’s finally reached the end – Orange County Register
The Book Pages: What it was like as the ‘Finnegans Wake’ group read the final page – Orange County Register

If there is still mystery in Apple events, it is located here, in the uncanny fictional world suggested in these images: Who are these people? And what is wrong with them that they text like this?

A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”. (source: 👔)

The OceanGate CEO is now on the list of inventors killed by their own invention, joining Thomas Andrews, Jr. the architect of the Titanic. (source: 🐦)

Until about now, most of the text online was written by humans. But this text has been used to train GPT3(.5) and GPT4, and these have popped up as writing assistants in our editing tools. So more and more of the text will be written by large language models (LLMs). Where does it all lead? What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute most of the language found online?
…
Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah.

Will GPT models choke on their own exhaust? | Light Blue Touchpaper

In the beginning, the mushrooms exhibited less electrical potential, and we boiled this down to the lack of precipitation. However, the electrical potential began to fluctuate after raining, sometimes going over 100 mV.
— Yu Fukasawa, Tohoku University

Research News - Mushrooms and their Post-rain, Electrical Conversations | Tohoku University Global Site

Patten then asked Altshuler, “You’ve got some ethnicity in you?” The doctor said no. Patten asked if he was Italian. The doctor said no. Finally, after more questioning, Altshuler said he was Jewish. “Mazel tov,” Patten said.
— Rhode Island officials' behavior in Philly leads to investigations, Zoe Greenberg

I am re-subscribing to the Inquirer on the strength of this story alone.

I was amazed by how little the world looked different over the 12 years. Whereas my childhood, if you start in the late ’60s and go to ’80, you have very different looks to the world. Clothing, hairstyles, cars look very different. It struck me, [in] my own little anthropological, sociological-whatever study of all this, [that] the 21st century wasn’t changing very rapidly in its look. It was only in technology.

About a boy - As his experimental coming-of-age saga Boyhood is re-released, filmmaker Richard Linklater reflects on the legacy of his childhood opus

I’ve marveled at the same thing: our visual culture (clothing, hairstyles, cars, etc) has been pretty much frozen for more than two decades. Whenever I bring it up though I usually get blank stares, pauses, polite shifts to a new topic of conversation. At least Linklater understands.

The full interview requires Apple News+, sorry. Some crumbs available here.

This is the first step in my master plan to save local radio.

Radio Paradise Blog - My New Reality

It’s uncanny how much the proponents of ‘AI will kills us all in the future’ are white guys and how much the ‘clear and present actual danger’ group is intersectional, especially younger women of colour. If you pay attention, it’s really striking.

Why an Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier ⊗ What A.I. Risks We Should Really Be Worried About ⊗ Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles — Sentiers

Sentiers is a great newsletter! If you need more email, you could do worse.

The environment Potter creates in her tales shares similarities to that of a plantation – a dangerous world where the fight for food and survival is paramount. Despite the backdrop of gentle Lake District landscapes and an English cottage garden, her tales are set in a context of merciless repercussions for those who don’t have the wits to avoid capture – including Peter Rabbit’s father, who we discover has been baked in a pie.

Beatrix Potter’s famous tales are rooted in stories told by enslaved Africans – but she was very quiet about their origins

…You can take the guy’s clothes off so he’s only wearing, like, kind of super underwear type stuff, and he’s barefoot and he and he has a sword, and then he rides a horse like that… And it’s like, you can ride a bear. You can… I just run around picking mushrooms. I pick mushrooms, I make dishes, then I start fires.

Sometimes I catch a horse, I ride it.

I watch the sunset from a bridge. I found this one place where you can go and sit up on the top of the hill. And every morning the dragon of that area comes out and flies within, like, one foot of your face. And it’s the most beautiful creature.

From Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, 5/12/2023: How Zelda Changed Gaming (transcript)

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Quote by Brian Eno: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortabl…” | Goodreads

via Thoughts & Prayers - by Rusty Foster and camille butera

The black box can’t compute them. Whose are they? Is there a vagina somewhere, out of frame? Nipples threaten classification. They undermine the binary. They unveil the operator behind the machine, their insatiable need to codify who we are into data.

It Glitches at the Sight of Our Nipples | COVEN BERLIN

If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? - The New Yorker

How much do I love this?! James Weiner’s exquisite 1-bit version of Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave” was designed, appropriately, on an early ’90s Mac running System 7 with Aldus SuperPaint 3.0.

This painting has long attracted artists interested in the Great Digitalization — in 1988, our science and tech high school’s gym shirts featured Judy Kirpich’s Wave of the Future which was created, significantly and remarkably, using entirely analog methods.

Previously: July 12, 2001 - you must understand the “Great Wave” from right to left

via Kottke

We’ve been teaching people for decades, for generations, that King had this harsh criticism of Malcolm X, and it’s just not true.

MLK’s famous Playboy criticism of Malcolm X was a ‘fraud,’ author says - The Washington Post

We’re doing a lot of education about anal sex. Think about that for a second. There’s something that gives you pleasure, but a court changes the law, and now your sex life is a very different thing. That’s crazy, and that sounds like the opposite of freedom to me.

Meet Tami Rose: The Woman Who Sells Mississippians Their Sex Toys discussed on MetaFilter

When I was young I read every comic I (my dad) could afford. Later my interest narrowed chiefly to autobiographical comics and — lucky for me — a lot of people are willing to recreate the epic minutiae of their lives in words and pictures.

I was super cised to learn that Gabrielle Bell has a Patreon where she posts new comics! I subscribed as soon as I found out, right around 8:30 this morning, and I’ve already lost track of how I came across this wonderful fact. If you’re not familiar, you can see some of her work on Instagram and on her blog. If you have three dollars, why not give them to Gabrielle?

The 20-track concept album plays out like a sci-fi stage musical about two young girls named Caroline and Suzi, voiced by Buffalo Daughter’s Yumiko Ohno and frequent Tomita collaborator Suzi Kim. Caroline is a young musical prodigy with a case of chronic sadness. At times, she is too sad to sing, and cries while playing Chopin. “Life’s not only about having a good time, is it?” Caroline asks, to which Suzi responds, “That’s right Caroline, life’s not only about being down and out.”

The production is wildly inventive and sort of a space age combination of cut-and-paste tape loop experiments with ’60s show tunes, exotica, Japanese pop-rock, and Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks’ Americana.

Doopee Time: The healthy, mind clearing “Cute Music” of Yann Tomita | In Sheeps Clothing

‘AMERICAN JASMINE’, ‘STAR GLORY’. Vivid scarlet 3/4" wide trumpets with yellow throats. Annual vine to 10 feet, with heart-shaped 6" leaves. E. U.S. Gives abundant bloom. Nick seed to germinate in 1 - 3 weeks. “A tiny elfin morning glory… a bright cheerful orange. Possible elf, fairy, or troll distribution vector." — D.L., South Carolina

🧝,🧚,🧌 you say?

Seedlist I-K - J. L. Hudson, Seedsman

(via [Landline] Light gliding - LANDLINE by Jay Babcock)

An example of the form can be found at mybluehouse.com/weblog, where a woman named Becky publishes Weblog entries from France, on topics as diverse as knitting and fiction, and with links to news coverage and personal photos. On a recent day, Becky’s Weblog included a link to another Web site showing pictures of Tom Thumb’s boots, followed by a review of coffee recipes.

E-Commerce Report; Internet experts wonder if Weblog technology is a powerful new media species, or just another fad. - The New York Times, 25 Feb 2002

Don’t know how I just heard of this book (thanks nedlog) but now you have too!

Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.

Butts | Book by Heather Radke | Simon & Schuster

Q: How clean does a peanut butter jar need to be for recycling?

A:

The cleaner the better, but items don’t have to be immaculate to be recyclable. If you rinse well, shake out the water, and leave less than a teaspoon of residual goo — roughly a bottle cap full — it’s fine.

What can you recycle? Find your recycling mistakes in this quiz. - Washington Post

Hard to believe I closed my Facebook account over twelve years ago! Feels like only yesterday. It’s even harder to believe I only used it for four short years. Felt like an eternity!

This post brought to you by getting my dates together in order to get my two dollars from Facebook for whatever the hell this class action settlement is about. Get yours too!

”I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations.“ — ”Buck Mulligan“ in Ulysses by James Joyce

The Joyce Project : Ulysses : Telemachus

My favorite thing about Micro.blog so far? Titles not required.

For the last several decades, Hampshire has sought to innovate what’s possible in a liberal arts education. Its student-led focus has been emulated by countless other programs, and Hampshire continues to challenge itself as an institution, particularly as it attempts to center anti-racism as a primary throughline of a student’s experience. This is no easy or simple task. It requires diligence, willpower, commitment, and resources.

…

I think it’s easy to look at an institution that doesn’t submit letter grades or adhere to strict general education requirements and somehow equate that with a lack of seriousness and rigor. But nothing could be further from the truth. Future Hampshire College students should come prepared to engage in important and challenging work, which will necessitate curiosity, introspection, reflection, adaptation, and — probably most significant — unlearning.

Professor of Creative Writing Nathan McClain Embraces the Throughline of Anti-Racism in His Teaching (and Learning) | Hampshire College

Focusing the class on the “formal properties” of a story, Baxter asks students to describe its world: “What techniques have been employed to shape this particular story? I talk about request moments, one-way gates, acute vs. chronic tension, inventories and undoings, dramatic imagery, selective listening in dialogue, sparkplug characters, plot reversals—the whole bag of tools and tricks,” says Baxter. “And then: are these techniques working well, or at cross-purposes, to dramatize the story’s narrative?”

If a writer is having a problem with a story, there is that classic Baxter response: Make it a problem in the story. If a character is talkative and boring, have other characters notice their tediousness. Listen to the problem—it has a message for you.

Feast of Love for Charles Baxter | English | College of Liberal Arts

“I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it, if I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” — Niklas Luhmann

How To Take Smart Notes: 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing - Forte Labs