I’ve been trying hard not to get involved in the day to day, “OMG! Did you see?!” of the current political circus. Instead, I’ve been trying to look at it from a slightly removed strategy and tactics perspective to understand more of the metagame so to speak.
It’s not easy to have that distance.
There’s a very subtle detail at the end of the recent All Quiet on the Western Front which absolutely hammers home the horror of war and World War I specifically.
Parvenu: derogatory a person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity. From the French, meaning “arrived.”
Such a perfect word.
Getting very excited about my 4x5 Calumet CC-401 that’ll be here next week. Finally making an ill-advised and naive jump to large format film photography. That sentence is longer than a description of what I know about photography.
It’ll be fun to learn and experiment!
I gave ChatGPT a prompt to write a one-act play. This is what it came up with:
The Prompt: Write a one-act play in the style of Samuel Becket based on the idea that our world might be a simulation.
Title: The Simulation
Setting: A bare stage with a single spotlight illuminating a lone figure in the center, dressed in a tattered suit and holding a piece of paper.
Characters: The Figure
The Figure enters the stage and stands in the center of the spotlight, looking around as if lost. He speaks to himself in a monotone voice.
Figure: Is this it? Is this all there is? A bare stage, a single spotlight, and nothing else? Am I alone here? Or are there others, like me, trapped in this simulation?
The Figure pauses and looks down at the paper in his hand.
Figure: It says here that our world might be a simulation. A computer program created by beings far more advanced than us. A virtual reality that we are all trapped in, unable to escape.
The Figure crumples the paper and throws it aside.
Figure: But what difference does it make? Whether this is real or not, it’s all we have. We might as well make the best of it.
The Figure begins to pace back and forth, his movements slow and deliberate.
Figure: Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the simulation was created to see how we would react. To test our resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. To see if we can find meaning in a world that may not even be real.
The Figure stops pacing and looks up at the invisible audience.
Figure: But how do we know what’s real and what’s not? How do we know if we’re making a difference or just playing a predetermined role in a script?
The Figure begins to laugh, a hollow and bitter sound.
Figure: Maybe we’re all just actors, performing for an audience that doesn’t even exist. Maybe this is all just a cruel joke, a cosmic prank on an unsuspecting species.
The Figure falls to his knees and stares up at the spotlight.
Figure: But even if that’s true, even if our world is nothing more than lines of code and algorithms, we still have the power to make choices. To create our own stories, to find our own meaning.
The Figure stands up and faces the invisible audience once again.
Figure: So let them watch. Let them see what we’re made of. Let them see that even in a simulated world, we can still find joy and love and purpose.
The Figure walks towards the edge of the stage, the spotlight following him.
Figure: Maybe this is all just a simulation. But maybe, just maybe, it’s a simulation worth living.
The Figure steps off the stage and the spotlight fades to black.
From a publishing executive in this article about the merger of Random House and Simon & Schuster: “Yes. We invest every year in thousands of ideas and dreams, and only a few make it to the top. So I call it the Silicon Valley of media. We are angel investors of our authors and their dreams, their stories. That’s how I call my editors and publishers: angels.”
Will Ferrell plays himself playing his Elf character. Ryan Reynolds plays himself because that’s his only skill. It’s a musical and the music is so forgettable, you won’t even remember how many songs there are. None of the leads are good singers so the songs are boring. The whole movie is too busy making jokes about itself to actually have any real momentum. There are exactly three jokes in the movie but you will get to hear them 5 or 6 times each. The dancing numbers are big and impressive but so weighed down by someone’s odd obsession with tap dancing that it almost feels like a clogging festival. Weirdly self-referential direction and writing and acting weighs down a well-trodden story before mediocre songs fatigue the viewer in the first act.
The folks behind MusicBrainz which can identify digital music files through fingerprinting are working on BookBrainz. Early days yet with around 37,000 works listed. An open database of books that has the attention to detail that MusicBrainz does is exciting.
The challenge I see is that MusicBrainz core value is the ability to identify a song/track by fingerprinting the actual file content. That’s separate from what a human claims the track is. That sort of thing won’t work with books because there’s no file or asset for them to fingerprint. So, it becomes another user-generated list of things. It’ll have all the problems that exist in that world which sites like Wikipedia have dealt with for decades.
It feels a little like “yet another site trying to catalog the world.” I’m biased having worked for Wikipedia but I’d love for there to be higher collaboration between these groups. The folks at Internet Archive work closely with the folks at Wikipedia. It might be more successful for BookBrainz to connect with Wikidata and/or Wikisource instead of building their own collection.
I don’t intend that Wikimedia should “have it all” but collaboration and data sharing between these groups is where real magic could happen.
The universe will poke you every once in a while. It just wants to make sure you’re paying attention. On the way to school this morning, I was telling my son a story about his grandfather. The story wasn’t particularly deep or meaningful. Just a story you tell your kids so they maybe learn a little about you and their grandparents.
As soon as I dropped him off, Peter Gabriel’s cover of “The Book of Love” by The Magnetic Fields came on the radio. The song is almost certainly not about being a parent but I believe that Gabriel’s sings with him on it in many of the live versions.
Anyway, my Dad passed away around this time several years ago. This morning between that story coming up and this song coming on, the universe poked me not so gently to remind me not to forget.
There’s a lot to unpack in this sentence. It’s said by a character we aren’t sure if we are supposed to like. Does the author put in this character’s mouth to portray false profundity? Does he do it because it might redeem the character to the reader? Does the character understand the challenge of this sentence?
Wonderfully complex writing hiding in plain sight.
The simple depth of those who are close to the edges of existence.
From Trust by Hernan Diaz
I looked up the word “millenary” and the adjective definition is “suggesting a millennium” or “relating to a group of 1000.” In context, this character is describing her father’s beliefs in the early 1930s. I’m struggling to understand how this word fits here. Does it mean that there are a thousand ways men rule over women? Is it describing the father’s belief that this related to some millennium of subjection?
It promised independence but was another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men.
From Trust by Hernan Diaz
I had the ultimate yak shaving homeowner day. My wife left the mower outside on Thursday. I went to move it Friday morning and it was out of gas. So, I went and got the gas can. Then, someone pulled up to the house and I got distracted. Completely forgot about it. She tried to move it Saturday morning. The battery was dead.
So, this morning, I went to see about it. Well, she had put gas in it but left the gas cap off. It rained a LOT last night. There was likely water in the gas tank. Now, I need to drain it and refill it with clean gas. Off to the store to get a siphon pump. No idea if we ever had one. Get the pump, come home and get it drained. I look and there’s a good bit of water in the fuel. Back to the store to get some fuel treatment to hopefully bind to the rest of the water that’s likely still in the tank. I do remember to get more gas just in case.
I come home, get the fuel treatment and the gas in. Now I’m ready to jumpstart the mower. Well, the battery was too dead to jump off. We used to have a 12v battery charger. That was 3 or 4 moves ago and it’s nowhere to be found. Back to the store for the battery charger.
Meanwhile, I see a storm is coming. I have to get the dead lawnmower into the shed. It takes me 30 minutes to figure out how to disengage the transmission to get it into neutral. I get it into the shed just as the rain starts. I wipe things down, put away some tools, shovel a clean spot out in the shed so there’s no hay or shavings in case I need to lie down and get under the lawnmower.
I get everything set up to charge the battery. The power outlets in the shed don’t work. I flip the breaker and it trips immediately. No time to figure that out today. I get the tools back out. I take the seat off the lawnmower and it takes 8 screws/bolts to get the battery out. I put the tools up. Take the battery, the new charger, the new extension cord, the tools, etc, etc back to the workbench. I get it all set up and it appears to be charging.
That was 5 hours of work in the sun and on the ground. Three or four trips to the store. Absolutely nothing accomplished.
MOST OF US PREFER to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail–we are ruined by forces beyond our control.
From Trust by Hernan Diaz
I don’t think I should be proud of this but I have felt this way keenly in my life. I’ve never been able to describe it as well as this. It’s a negative feeling yet its draw is inexorable.
What was truly surprising, even to himself, was that he had started to look for signs of acknowledgment in everyone he met. He was hungry to confirm that people noticed the hum enveloping him, the quiver, the very thing that estranged him from them. However paradoxical, this desire to confirm the distance separating him from others was a form of communion with them.
From Trust by Hernan Diaz
People think programming is cool and fun. I spent 30 minutes pondering the nature of truth while typing this inanity:
iex(15)> true and false
false
iex(16)> not (true and false)
true
iex(17)> true or false
true
iex(18)> not (true or false)
false
iex(19)> not (true or true)
false
iex(20)> not (false or false)
true
I think about this a lot when running or hiking in the woods. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve never been a music listener while outdoors. I’ve even recently started working in silence. No podcast or music or any sound. Just me in my office with the window open when the weather cooperates.
This silence was a great discovery. Without the foreground of other people’s words, I realized that the glorious beauty of nature was in its silence. I looked at the stars and heard their silence; the moon made no sound; the sun rose and set without a whisper. In the end even the noise of the waterfall, the bird calls, the rustle of the wind in the trees, seemed part of a stupendous, living, cosmic silence which I loved and in which I found peace. It seemed that this silence was a natural right of every man, and that this right had been taken from us. I thought with horror of how for so much of our lives we are pounded by the cacophony we have invented, imagining that it pleases us, or keeps us company. Everyone, now and then, should reaffirm this right to silence and allow himself a pause, some days of silence in which to feel himself again, to reflect and regain a degree of health.
From A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East by Tiziano Terzani
This profile of Michael Stipe goes on to explain why the author likes this story that Stipe shares. It touches a nerve because there was a time in my life where it might have been me in that Jeep. I don’t think I was ever that actively hostile to anyone but in the depths of a drunken night out, who knows? My time in Athens contains some of the brightest days and some of the darkest nights of my life. I was a person town in two and self-medicating to hide it all from the people around me and from myself.
Late one night, in the early 1990s, Stipe was in Athens, hanging out with Todd McBride, who was then the lead singer of a great bar band called the Dashboard Saviors, and the wonderfully eccentric singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt. The three were at The Grit, a cheap, vegetarian restaurant that has become one of the college town’s more iconic downtown eateries but which at the time was in a different building, closer to the edge of town. As McBride explained when he told me this story more than a decade ago, “The Grit was in this depot kind of building then — it was down at one end and this frat bar was down at the other. The place was closing up, we were getting ready to leave, and we were kind of hanging around outside The Grit, when this jeep full of frat boys comes by, throws a beer can at us, and screams, ‘Fuck you, faggots!’ Then they crank up the stereo” — at this point in his telling of the story, McBride began to sing the indelible song that was pumping from the jeep’s stereo — “It’s the end of the world as we know it / It’s the end of the …”
From “Michael Stipe is Present” in The Bitter Southerner.
There’s a reason that R.E.M. is my favorite band. Their music was a life raft I tried desperately to hang on to. Living in the town where they came to prominence made it all the more important to get lost in Swan Swan Hummingbird on repeat and spill my darkness into the chorus of Cuyahoga.
I’m pleased to have left a large part of myself behind in that place and time. But, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded occasionally of how close I might be to slipping back into the mindset, the actions, and the consequences of a life lived with little regard for others or myself. There’s nothing wrong with being humbled and being humble.
Sad, is it not? And not just for the Chinese, but for humanity in general, which loses so much when it loses its differences and becomes all the same. Mao understood that in order to save China it had be closed to Western influence, it had to seek a Chinese solution to the problems of modernity and development. In posing the problem Mao was truly great. And he was great in being wrong about how to solve it. But always great, Mao: a great poet, great strategist, great intellectual, great murderer. Great like China, great like the tragedy it is now enduring.
From A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East by Tiziano Terzani
Do web developers even look at their sites on mobile? This is the website for the World Games 2022. Probably an organization that could afford a decent website. So many overlays. A cookie warning. A chat prompt. A pop up to drive people to a particular page. A search overlay. A menu overlay.
None of this is content or necessary. Just lazy.
I just saw the new Elvis movie. It was excellent. Even if you don’t care for his music, it’s still a well made and well acted movie.
Baz Luhrmann has a distinctive style that lends itself to Elvis’s story. He also has a great sense of the motion and rhythm of music and interprets that through his direction in a compelling way.
The casting was perfect even if the Hanks role is a bit stunty. His performance has a few layers to unpack which work well with the less nuanced and more instinctual performance of Austin Butler’s Elvis.
We’ve long told young people that one of the dangers of being extremely online is that anything you post is permanent. That stuff will follow you. It will be found if someone decides to look hard enough. And now, this Senate candidate is finding that out.
I know many folks have dogs that hate the sound of fireworks. Ours do too but the 20+ horses on our farm were surrounded on 4 sides by massive fireworks tonight. We’ve already counted 6 shoes we will have to replace and a dozen fence boards that will need to be replaced or repaired.
So, we are looking at around $500 worth of repairs, plus the danger of a scared running loose horse, and it’s not even the Fourth yet.
Not a fan of this holiday.