Finished reading: Miao Dao by Joyce Carol Oates đ
The bully is always the one who has been hurt.
She realizes: the manâs power is to intimidate, to make you ashamed. But your power over him is the power of laughter.
Finished reading: Miao Dao by Joyce Carol Oates đ
The bully is always the one who has been hurt.
She realizes: the manâs power is to intimidate, to make you ashamed. But your power over him is the power of laughter.
Watched Eno last night đż
My kind of subject, film, and aesthetic.
I hope this is the beginning of generative narrative film experiments. Feels like a logical evolution of the medium.
Megalex by Alejandro Jodorowsky đ
Not as much fun as The Incal, but still classic Jodorowsky.
The most dangerous weapons are also the most beautifulâŚthe more beautiful, the more deadly!
âPatience, skill, and infinite hope.â It doesnât matter how long it takes, all that matters is getting there!
The bigger the threat, children, the smaller the means of defense.
Who cares about time, Cabot-ChaddayâŚthe cosmos is an eternal dreamâŚ
Scapegoats are the engines of historyâŚ
Finished reading: The Waste Land, Prufrock, and Other Poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot đ
Finished reading: Get Jiro! by Anthony Bourdain đ
Finished reading: Megalex - Megalex Vol. 1 - 3 - Digital Omnibus by Alejandro Jodorowsky đ
Finished reading: The Sleep Tight Motel by Lisa Unger đ
Itâs solid and heavy in my hand, a well-made thing. Which is notable in a world of shoddily made plastic junk that falls apart, gets discarded and swept into the ocean, only to be replaced by more junk.
We cling to our ideas of people, donât we? We hold on tight even when all evidence points to something else.
The serpent, the jaguar, the vampire, they glamour.
âWeâre dead far longer than weâre alive. Why not celebrate? Why not tell ourselves a story about what comes next?â
The body wants what the body wants, and sometimes the heart and mind are nowhere to be found.
People doing wrong to each other, to themselves. When will we figure it out?
Finished reading: Hannah-Beast by Jennifer McMahon đ
But the stories were just that: stories. Myths with pieces of truth hidden inside.
If you spend enough time blocking something out, built sturdy enough walls around it, then itâs almost like it didnât happen.
All the background noises of life were gone: the humming refrigerator, the ice maker, the furnace clicking on, and fans starting.
Reap3r by Eliot Peper đ
Fun fiction writing that has plenty of heft and research based in reality.
THIS!
Itâs a powerful thing, curiosityâour speciesâ defining trait.
And this!
What are the important problems of your field? What important problems are you working on? If what you are doing is not important, and if you donât think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?
I discovered Peper via Seth Godin and there are plenty of quotes from Reap3r that sound like Sethisms.
professionals shut up and did the work.
Itâs tempting to look at the world and see governments and businesses and schools and hospitals and institutions, but thatâs all a convenient fiction. The truth is that organizations are just a bunch of people trying to move in the same direction, and technology is just the way that people do things.
never underestimate momentum.
Maybe the problem wasnât selling herself short instead of long, but selling herself to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
The thing you think you want is rarely the thing you need. Letting go of the former to embrace the latter is how you grow.
There was no endgame. There was only the game itself. History, memory, life, identity. Everything was revision.
And hereâs one that sounds like Steven Pressfield:
âThe struggle is real. The struggle is the work. The struggle is everything.â
Pressfield adjacent:
Destiny was not a muse, but a wrestler that grappled you into submission. You couldnât win. You couldnât even escape. You could only tap out and hope to live another day.
It was amazing how far paying attention could take you.
Physical objects repaid attention with satisfactionâa quiet joy in the act of maintenance.
Best way to get noticed by the right people is to pretend you donât exist.
For years people had been waiting for virtual reality goggles to make good on the promise of the digital metaverse. But, as with so many paradigm shifts, the VR killer app had slipped in via a side door: audio. AirPods had ushered in a new reality as surely as the iPhone had. The metaverse was the internet whispering in your ear.
The internet warped spacetime to bend reality to usersâ wills, but in doing so it severed the connection between action and the direct subjective experience of its implications.
Novels were printed, bound invitations to asynchronously participate in collective dreams that depended more on what the reader brought to the story than the words on the page. A reader didnât sit in the audience, a reader conjured a nascent world from no more than a sequence of printed shapes.
We all know that stories spread, sometimes apotheosizing into memes. But much more interesting than straight sharing and reproduction is when stories inspire the telling of other stories in a cultural daisy-chain.
(via Lynn Chevalier)
stories are vectors for ideas. You canât just explain something directly, it doesnât stick. You have to wrap it in narrative like a capsid around a virus.
So many who aspired to sit in the directorâs chair tried to earn the position on the basis of an original premise, a clever plot twist, artful turns of phrase, or impressive special effects. But they missed the key point: stories derived their power from charactersâhow what they did showed who they were, how they changed and grew. Technology was just a prop. Ideology was just decoration. The real magic lay in human agency.
You believed in stories because the characters believed in them, and you believed in the characters.
There was power in a name. Names constrained the possibility space of imagination. Sometimes renaming somethingâeven just in your own headâcould yield a flood of new ideas.
Humans werenât unitary creatures, but waveforms rolling through the medium of life. A person was an organizing principle.
we have yet to adapt instincts honed by millennia of scarcity for a world of abundance
Looked at sidelong, culture itself was an extended conversation in which many great works of art or scholarship were simply intriguing digressions.
At base, human civilization was the sum of everyoneâs choices. It used to be that civilization consisted of overlapping physical communities of geographical proximity.
Now, to a large extent, civilization consisted of overlapping digital communities of shared interests, friends, and affiliations.
It used to be about where you were, now it was about who and what you chose.
civilization was the sum of everyone trying to do just that.
Maintenance got no respect in a culture obsessed with achievement. In the end, there was no end. Nothing was discrete. Everything bled into everything else, and any claims to authorship were vanity.
If art divided people, ideals atomized them.
separated only by the narcissism of small differences,
the tourist demands, the pilgrim gives thanks.
People liked to talk about the connections art forged without acknowledging that any us cast a shadow of them.
And the staid shepherds of the wealth Sansome wanted to deploy liked to think of themselves not as fungible cogs in a machine to turn money into more money, but as strategists of insight and initiative who chose to put their weight behind the kinds of people with ideas worth sharing,
A society was only as strong as its systems were resilient.
There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system,ââ said Esteban. ââFor the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.ââ
as they broke, systems revealed themselves.
every living being was a world unto themselves, densely interconnected, interdependent at every scale, deserving of respect and simple kindness
Power was the ability to offer false choices.
Years could pass in minutes, and minutes could take years.
the mechanical regularity of clocks belied the changeability of time, something that human intuition understood and yet rebelled against.
Time was a strange thing. You could keep on keeping on for years and then the world changed in a single day.
Itâs only when weâre out of our depth that we can find out what weâre truly capable of,
The only way to make progress was edgewise, never looking at the task directly, sneaking through the alleys of your subconscious to arrive at a decision you knew full well youâd already made.
There was a difference between living well and dying well, a distinction modernity glossed over.
By defying your assumptions, the universe occasionally forced you to confront your own ignorance.
Neuroscience showed that your conscious mind didnât make decisions, but rationalized decisions your brain had already made. The voice in your head was really a sports announcer narrating the action, not the athlete.
Everyone worried about the future. You obsessed over how tomorrow might be different. But it was the things that did not change that mattered most. If you wanted to make sense of the world, you had to focus on the finding the constants. They were the rare truths that everyone was too busy to bother with.
Strange how things like that could sneak up on you. Sometimes you only realized how much something mattered when you were about to lose it.
Transcending self wasnât a permanent achievement, but a process of constant renewal.
Movement was life.
memory had a vicious habit of slipping through your guard when you least expected.
Crisis stripped you down to your bare essence, forced you to confront whatever dynamic was really at work within you, the source of your power and your suffering, a truth too darkly radiant to approach directly unless under duress.
People seeking the meaning of life got it backward. You didnât ask life for an answer. Life asked you.
We donât grow straight up. We branch and twist and turn back on ourselves, always reaching toward the light.
Turned tubular temples
instead it was making him sick with nostalgia.
dream. To get things done, you learned to ignore realityâs surreality.
The sun was the sun was the sun.
Consciousness was forever trapped in the present, but nature waltzed in cycles.
the silence was cathedral.
as predator hunted predator through a shattered bourgeois dream.
Life was one grand improvisation.
reality was feralâand shone forth with a fierce kind of beauty.
Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley đ
This is like the mirror of William Gibsonâs quote, âThe future is already here â itâs just not very evenly distributed.â
We have been cheated out of the future, yet the futureâs ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting.
This feels like commentary on the current era of social media.
Postmodernismâs stylistic eclecticism and tendency towards the replica and simulacra complicates memory
Be weird!
But from the earliest manifestations of pop culture in the late 40s onwards, working class cultureâs avant-garde has always been totally, gleefully unafraid of looking like a wally. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of, as Adam Ant so wisely pointed out.
What is a castle but an unornamented, semi-military, functionalist fortress designed to protect its inhabitants?
the art instinct is permanently primitiveâŚthe artist of the modern movement is a savage
Finished reading: Thereâs a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed by Edgar Cantero đ
There was no sign of predators. Exactly as the presence of predators would indicate.
because a strong female character doesnât need her story to revolve around motherhood.
âAnd if I were in my dress, it doesnât have pockets either, so once again, thank you, patriarchy.â
Finished reading: The Writer and The Witch by Robin Sloan đ
Turns out this is the second time I read this. Still great.
Finished reading: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Volume 3 by Eiji Otsuka đ
Finished reading: The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix đ
Finished reading: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli đ
Finished reading: Skin Deep by Flo Woolley đ
Finished reading: Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth by Scott Lynch đ
Finished reading: The Fragile Threads of Power by V. E. Schwab đ
Really enjoyed this one.
Finished reading: Harriet Amber in the Conan Arcade by Robin Sloan đ
Finished reading: Tremors of the Buried Moon, Vol. 1 by J.C. Rogers đ
Finished reading: Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley đ
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky đ
Each time I picked this up it took a bit to get into the rhythm (a Russian lit thing?) but it quickly pulled me along. At least until I couldnât stand the obnoxious narrator anymore (which is the conceit of the book, soâŚ).
What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?
reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of manâs nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses.
our personality, our individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind;
Reading, of course, was a great helpâexciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully.
man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
âItâs by pictures, pictures like that one must get at you,â
I was angry with myself, but, of course, it was she who would have to pay for it.
I was, of course, myself the chief sufferer, because I was fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my spiteful stupidity, and yet at the same time I could not restrain myself.
We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it.
The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher đ
I found this book via Austin Kleon. Itâs a fun read that will feel all too familiar to anyone who has to use slide decks to communicate something to decision makers. Also, a good read as we enter The AI Age.
Naming things can feel impossible, but when itâs done well, itâs as if that thing could never be called something else.
Or; how every brand naming process feels.
We trivialize virtually everything meaningful to humans in a market economy.
Repetition as change.
Somewhere John Cage is smiling.
I was born, and then I liked books.
Between San Francisco and Denver, looking down 30,000 feet, whatâs notable is the lack of human presence. Humans canât seem to dominate nature at all from this distance.
When we buy a book, we think we are buying time to read.
For the individual, time may speed up or slow down, whereas, for science, it would remain the same.
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult.
Technology canât catch up. It creates holes in the timeline.
Dave once told me that the generation raised by the internet is in trouble because their grasp of culture is increasingly fragmented.
Sears, Kodak, Polaroidâone must keep up. Or else face obsolescence. The Dustbin.
Control C, Control V, itâs all too easy to add, to steal, to remix again and again.
Any system that can perceive its environment can also be unplugged.
For at least fifty years AI research has existed within a boom- and-bust cycle.
If you donât play around with the form, youâre not meant to be taken seriously.
If you are making anything completely linear, itâs probably too simple.
All narrative art is time management. Said Kyle Beachy.
Change the line breaks and call it a poem. Change one name and call it a novel. Paste it into PowerPoint and call it a deck.
A poem is just a shape. A shape is not literature.
Finished reading: A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters by Dan B Nelken đ
Highly recommended read for anyone interested in ads and copywriting.
Finished reading: When I Arrived at the Castle by Emily Carroll đ