Finished reading: The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix 📚
Finished reading: The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix 📚
Finished reading: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli 📚
Finished reading: Skin Deep by Flo Woolley 📚
Finished reading: Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth by Scott Lynch 📝
Finished reading: The Fragile Threads of Power by V. E. Schwab 📚
Really enjoyed this one.
As a follow up to my post about Alexa+, this is the inflection moment for voice assistants.
Adding “true” AI capabilities will either expand their use cases and, therefore, adoption. Or it will prove that they’ll merely be an extension of other tech and not a new platform of sorts.
Finished reading: Harriet Amber in the Conan Arcade by Robin Sloan 📝
Finished reading: Tremors of the Buried Moon, Vol. 1 by J.C. Rogers 📚
Finished reading: Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley 📚
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 📚
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 couldn’t stand the obnoxious narrator anymore (which is the conceit of the book, so…).
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 man’s 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 help—exciting 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.
“It’s by pictures, pictures like that one must get at you,”
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 📚
I found this book via Austin Kleon. It’s 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 it’s done well, it’s 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, what’s notable is the lack of human presence. Humans can’t 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 can’t 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, Polaroid—one must keep up. Or else face obsolescence. The Dustbin.
Control C, Control V, it’s 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 don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
If you are making anything completely linear, it’s 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 📚
Highly recommended read for anyone interested in ads and copywriting.
Finished reading: When I Arrived at the Castle by Emily Carroll 📚
Finished reading: In The Stacks (Maisie’s Tune) by Robin Sloan 📝
Finished reading: Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch 📝
Fun read
Finished reading: Ultimate X-Men Vol. 1 by Peach Momoko 📚
Finished reading: Twisted Romance by Alex de Campi 📚
Finished reading: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service: Volume 2 by Eiji Otsuka 📚
Finished reading: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent Part II by Scott Lynch in Grimdark #41 📓📚
Finished reading: Elyse Flayme and the final flood by Robin Sloan 📝
We cannot undo these curses with the same kind of magic that created them
Finished reading: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 📚
I finished reading In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki recently, which means it’s highlights time. 📚
As you might guess from the title, many of these passages are about the interplay between the subject and shadows / darkness.
Never has there been an age that people have been satisfied with.
seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are;
Yet of this I am convinced, that the conveniences of modern culture cater exclusively to youth, and that the times grow increasingly inconsiderate of old people
If indeed “elegance is frigid,” it can as well be described as filthy.
The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.
And there may be some who argue that if beauty has to hide its weak points in the dark it is not beauty at all.
For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face—a full body was unnecessary.
(This is adjacent to some of those uncomfy bits I mentioned, but this feels like a line from a poem.)
“the brushwood we gather—stack it together, it makes a hut; pull it apart, a field once more.” Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.
In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.
The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life.
A room should be brighter in winter, but dimmer in summer;
colors built up of countless layers of darkness, the inevitable product of the darkness in which life was lived.
Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam
Japanese ghosts have traditionally had no feet; Western ghosts have feet, but are transparent. As even this trifle suggests, pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are as clear as glass.
Finished reading: At The Tombstone by Dimiar Anakiev 📓
Finished reading: In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki 📚
I was all set to say this is a combination of “get off my lawn” complaining meets uncomfy musings on skin color and poetic passages about shadow and darkness (which it all still is). But then it ended with a self-aware (meta?) commentary on the conflicting trends that are aging and progress and how grumbling arises from this. 😵💫