In the Museum of Illusions...Texas Toy Museum had a bunch of toy collections and games (arcade and console) setup to play - Gen X nostalgia gold.Eclipse Ready...
I just want to say – you know – can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids? And ... I mean we've got enough smog in Los Angeles let alone to deal with setting these fires and things ... It's just not right. It's not right, and it's not going to change anything. We'll get our justice. They've won the battle, but they haven't won the war. We'll get our day in court, and that's all we want. And, just, uh, I love – I'm neutral. I love every – I love people of color. I'm not like they're making me out to be. We've got to quit. We've got to quit; I mean, after all, I could understand the first – upset for the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see the security guard shot on the ground – it's just not right. It's just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again. And uh, I mean, please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along. We just gotta. We gotta. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's, you know, let's try to work it out. Let's try to beat it, you know. Let's try to work it out.
Kind of an anemic month for new music, but at least two great finds:
4 star:
* Lost With You (Patrick Watson)
Beautiful, stirring tender song. Ran into on the excellent Hulu miniseries adaption of the novel "Conversations with Friends"
* Life in the Old Dog (Magna Carta)
A friend posted a different version of this - very sweet and nostalgic
* Proud Mary (Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes)
Melissa on a deep Proud Mary live kick but I keep it simple.
3 star:
* Regulate (feat. Nate Dogg) (Warren G)
* Up From The Grave He Arose (Salem Corps Brass Band Collaborate)
every once in a while I get nostalgic for music I played in Salvation Army band... this one is especially melancholy as one of those 2020 "everyone puts down a track remotely" arrangements.
* BLACKBIIRD (Beyoncé, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy & Reyna Roberts)
* Rush E (Dragonwave Version) (Erhu4All)
* Polka Face ("Weird Al" Yankovic)
* Demons (Guster)
sQ's cross-generation song that isn't "Fat Bottom Girls"
* So-Claybe (Second Beat Songs)
"Call Me, Maybe" with every other beat removed...
* Notoriety II (Malcolm Kirby Jr.)
from a Saints Row video game soundtrack.
* Workin' On the Railroad (Raffi)
I've long been on the hunt for a good "what's your life about?" question. I've always been a bit (maybe too) shy about "so what do you do?" since it sort of too strongly implies "for work", and I want to leave space for the person not defining themselves that way.
My default has been the joke-y "what do you do for fun or profit?" - I like the mood of it but too often it turns the conversational spotlight to the goofiness of the question itself.
Recently I heard "What keeps you busy?" which I kind of like... on paper it's not that different from "what do you do?" but somehow leans more towards the "for fun" part - like work is hopefully 9-5ish but the busyness might come from family or hobbies which might be cooler to talk about. On the other hand I'm not sure I like the possible suggestion that "busyness" is a goal.
I co-lead a reading + discussion group on Science and Spirituality - here's a snippet I'm encouraging group members to share on social media about our next meeting:
Come join Belmont's UU Science + Spirituality group on May 23rd (via Zoom) - we have a lively monthly reading and discussion on the world in general and the tensions and synergies of different spiritual and scientific outlooks.
In May will be discussing the book "Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most", with topics including Mary Wollstonecraft (early feminist), Confucianism, Buddhism, Stoicism and Utilitarianism as components to living a good life.
Please email kirkjerk@gmail.com to be placed on the groups announcement list to get the zoom link and a PDF of an excerpt of the reading.
too many tubas on international tuba day!
I just read Oliver Burkeman's "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" and enjoyed it a lot. Had a bit of that mid-quarantine melancholy stank.
Some of his point is that it's our very finitude that gives meaning to what we are - and our inability to have the infinities we think we want that causes so much misery.
He's kind of a recovered "time management specialist", and another theme is we can never really catch up with our todo lists, because as our accomplishments grow, so do our expectations of what we can do. Become a diligent worker, you'll likely get more work - and the same goes for our expectations of ourselves.
Like me he gets a lot of mileage out of sharing quotes and thoughts from other writers, so here are some pieces that stood out for me:
It's the very last thing, isn't it, we feel grateful for: having *happened*. You know, you needn't have happened. You needn't have happened. But you did happen.
What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.
You teach best what you most need to learn.
It's a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it's all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, "it's much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life."
The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one--which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.
"Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place," cautions one of the founding texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, in a warning echoed several centuries later by the Buddhist scholar Geshe Shawopa, who gruffly commanded his students, "Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities." Jesus says much the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (though many of his later followers would interpret the Christian idea of eternal life as a reason to fixate on the future, not to ignore it). "Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself," he advises. Then he adds the celebrated phrase "sufficient to the day is the evil thereof," a line I've only ever been able to hear in a tone of wry amusement directed at his listeners: Do you first-century working-class Galileans really lead such problem-free lives, he seems to be teasing them, that it makes sense to invent additional problems by fretting about what might happen tomorrow?
A plan is just a thought.
In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version of this sentiment [that a good childhood isn't just a way of getting a good adulthood] into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen, as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck--and whose life, Herzen insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult accomplishments. "Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up," Herzen says. "But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment ... Life's bounty is in its flow. Later is too late."
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
Finally something he doesn't quote but fits some of his themes:
I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
Still, I wonder if it's more of an attempt at sour grapes. Maybe we shouldn't want to live forever, but often it feels like it would be nicer to have more say in the timing of it all...
Heh - it's nice how often a polite note to an author will get a cordial response! (from Oliver Burkeman in this case, I inquired about how he managed notes for books etc, since his works are so rich with quotes.)
I feel like many creative folks who are not swamped by fans (maybe especially authors) will often have time for a quick note (in a more analog age, my dad realized that if he sent a self-stamped postcard when he enquired if they'd be willing to sign their book, he could usually score an autograph on the postcard even if the author didn't want to approve him sending on the book)
This morning I took part in a "Bike Bus" in Cambridge, folks from School of Honk played music for the weekly neighborhood bike troop of a local elementary school...
Open Photo Gallery
I was surprised to see this photo of Lana Del Ray at the Met Gala because I thought she was dead.
Turns out I thought it was Amy Winehouse who sang "Video Games"
The Ringer: The Greatest Diss Tracks of All Time, Ranked
My sweet tooth is driving me nuts.
Reminded me I really missed Extra "Dessert Delights" gum, especially the mint chocolate flavor.
Obviously they're wrong in so many other ways, but sometimes I wonder if Scientologists are onto something by blaming "Body Thetans" as a semi-externalized voice holding us back. I mean it's just a rehashed version of "the devil made me do it" (and I think there's a big tradition of attributing malicious thoughts to demons) or even of more modern "parts" therapies like Internal Family Systems.
But my introspection really indicates that there are huge parts of "me" that just are only under the influence, not the full control, of my more rational, inner-voice self. Like the inner classroom model I like, or sometimes even more like a pack of animals.
For the first time in my life, I formulated this joke:
Since I'm bad with names, I try not to be rude when someone makes the most common mistakes with my own. In other words: better to be Kurt than curt!
When I think about decluttering... I think about Marie Kondo's admonition NOT to do it place by place in the house. But perversely her insistence that that's not the way makes me think it might have aspects that are worth trying. I don't want to go for an extreme minimalism, but I would like the space I regularly inhabit to have everything in it showing a purpose.
Also thinking about detecting "sparking joy" reminds me of this #stupid-idea-buddies chat idea I had:
#1465 Trying to declutter but Marie Kondo is too pile-centric or mumbo-jumbo-y? Arrange all your possessions in a long straight line ordered by how much you want each item, make a perpendicular line at the cut off point, and discard everything to left. DONE AND DUSTED.(Note, you may still have to dust, especially around those shelves where the cluttering items used to sit.)
Last night in Arlington phone cameras could pick up the Northern Lights even in this horribly light-polluted land
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Summons
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.
The Quran--the book that, we are told, comes from the divine encounters Muhammad had over a period of years--contains a striking story about Smokey [Bear "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires...Only You"] responsibility. At the very beginning, when God created human beings, before any of them entered the world, God asked them, "Am I not your Lord?" Every single one answered yes. And God took note so that no one who disregarded God's commands in their earthly life could plead ignorance.
I had not heard this aspect of Islam before, but I guess it's a pretty good dodge for that "but what about people who never get to hear about the REAL God" question that has driven a lot of Christian missionary work and some doctrine (like "limbo" for infants who die unbaptized) I mean I think it would still be sus that so many people got such a bigger familial and cultural dose of Allah than others, but still.
The "Life Worth Living" book is a wide but not deep survey along with some guided exercises about ponder The Question.
I feel like I've thought about my answers to that big question a lot already: for me, humanity's purpose is to create categorical novelty in this part of the Universe, kindness is paramount, there is DEFINITELY a universal absolute moral truth (that is an emergent property of human interaction) but we DEFINITELY can't KNOW what it is (so the universal truth might be one being multifaceted and culturally-subjective but it exists, so I reject existential "believe whatever you want there are no rules"), and the best way to live is a kind of cheerful Buddhist-tinged Epicureanism; seeking a cheerful, sustainable pleasant moderation.
One other bit I pulled from the book is journalist Kathryn Schulz asking her TED audience "How does it feel to be wrong?", but they would answer "how does it feel to REALIZE you are wrong" - because being wrong without realizing it feels exactly the same as being right.
for some reason the asphalt on part of a street near me gives your shadow a rainbow halo that moves with you... or my canonization has been approved...
I must assume that eventually an army of shame engineers will rise up, writing guilt-inducing code in order to make their robots more convincingly human. But it doesn't mean I love the idea. Because right now you can see the house of cards clearly: By aggregating the world's knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to say next, we've made the funniest parody of humanity ever. These models have all of our qualities, bad and good. Helpful, smart, know-it-alls with tendencies to prejudice, spewing statistics and bragging like salesmen at the bar. They mirror the arrogant, repetitive ramblings of our betters, the horrific confidence that keeps driving us over the same cliffs. That arrogance will be sculpted down and smoothed over, but it will have been the most accurate representation of who we truly are to exist so far, a real mirror of our folly, and I will miss it when it goes.
If you want to get (at least!) a little bit verklempt about the relationship between grownups and kids this morning, Arcade Fire's "Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)":
I hate the word "inevitable." I don't believe in fate. Fate is simply where we run aground when we stop paddling on the river of life. It's the opposite of a plan. It's random chance, a circumstance free of intention. If you want to change your "fate" in life, just start paddling. Chance vs Destiny is an either-oar situation.
Please don't mistake my levity for shallowness any more than I mistake your gravity for depth.
[Engineering needs] an environment with little discipline and yet with clearly stated goals. In general, that's in conflict with a corporate form.
A simple answer that is clear and precise will always have more power in the world than a complex one that is true.
Rob [Fulop] used to say that the people who could really make it at Atari were the people who wanted to have as much fun as possible and still go to heaven. They could strike that tricky balance between goofing off enough and still getting the work done.
There was a clever game engineer at Atari who had the best definition for it. He'd say: "State-of-the-Art means when it's broken, nobody knows how to fix it."
But this is before anyone sees a crash coming, and the interdepartmental struggle is ongoing, largely because we can't see the inevitable conclusion. Spoiler alert: Marketing is destined to win, due to a phenomenon I call Warshaw's Law of Marketing Inversion. Consider this: Most companies start out engineering heavy, because there isn't much to do until they have a product. Since engineering represents most of the early budget, they receive a great deal of management's attention (especially if senior management contains engineers/developers). However, if the company starts to succeed, sales and marketing may scale up rapidly to meet the growing demand, while engineering continues making product.
Warshaw's Law of Marketing Inversion states that in a successful company, engineering resources grow arithmetically while sales and marketing resources grow geometrically. The resulting budget imbalances inflate the visibility of marketing in the eyes of management, while diminishing engineering. This tends to shift the power to define corporate direction in favor of marketing. Simply put, the expensive wheel gets the grease.
Silicon Valley is where the world's best, brightest and most ambitious people come to be average.
(Also makes me think about prestigious universities and the grade inflation there.)
As the evening sky colors its way into dusk, I'm reminded of an ending for a book I've always wanted to use:
"And as the sun slowly sinks into the east,
we notice the Earth is rotating in the wrong direction."
Google is pivoting to REALLY leaning into preferring AI summaries of information rather than traditional web links and snippets. This article is a workaround that (at least for now) makes it easier to stick to web results.
But this trend so infuriating! Google made its mark with a brilliant "BackRub" algorithm: banking on the idea that a source is more useful and trustworthy based on how many OTHER sites refer to it. That's not Truth, but it's a good first order approximation.
This throws that out the window. They are putting all their eggs in a basket of how "people just want a simple answer" (As Nolan Bushnell puts it, "A simple answer that is clear and precise will always have more power in the world than a complex one that is true") and so replacing its history of "trust us, we'll show you who you can trust!" to a simplistic "just trust us (i.e., our Bot)"
And sure, knowing whom to trust online has always been as much an art as a science - people have to develop their own nose (starting with their own preconceptions) using the content and (for better or worse) the design and presentation of a site. (And while not infallible, I think it shows the wisdom of Wikipedia's approach - insist on citations, and let knowledgeable parties slug it out. Of course conservatives suspect it has a slant - but progressives tend to think of Colbert's "It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias") But the "blurry JPEG" that is AI causes information to lose its flavor, all piped through the same Siri- or Alexa- or Google-Assistant- friendly stream of words.
And when the AI is wrong - boy there are some anecdotes out there. The one about what to do about a Rattlesnake bite is a killer. Possibly literally. It's almost enough to make one hope for some huge punitive lawsuits.
There is a weird "Idiot Ouroboros" aspect to Google's pivot away from connecting people to other knowledge sources - the AI has its knowledge base from what was gleaned from the web. And now the incentives for building up a reputable parcel on the wider information landscape fades away, and eventually the whole web starts to look like those dark corners of social media where Spambots try to pitch their wares to fake user account bots, endlessly.
Red Lobster going away, maybe a victim of that endless shrimp plan?? Beyoncé will need a new place to take your ass...
I started an AtariAge thread about a well-worn topic, the Video Game Crash of '83.
One portion of it was a pivot to home computers, which had dropped dramatically in price, and allowed massive piracy - useful for kids who didn't have much money.
But I pivoted back from the Commodore 64 to the NES even though I knew the computer was more powerful... in part because of the promotional power of Nintendo, especially the black-covered Official Nintendo Player's Guide. It really felt like no one was making a game like "Metroid", and here were the maps to prove it.
You know, I wish they DID make "liquid courage" except it didn't make you drunk, just a bit braver.
I'm still looking for that - like maybe something to control my need to stand up and walk around while working at home when even the smallest obstacle or insecurity arises.
But I realized I think I can get some of the liquid courage in the form of music; I think back in the shared office workspace days I'd use headphones a lot, and I think that can do a lot to calm my inner kids.
Though I hate that the very best form of that is my "psyched!" playlist - the 55 high energy (and now almost painfully familiar) songs there has more focus power than shuffling all 4500 songs in my collection.
On the one hand I'm glad to have re-discovered this life hack. On the other hand I kind of resent having to use it vs just being able to always muscle through everything through force of will. (And it also makes me think, what am I missing out on being able to do because I lack knowledge for a corresponding life hack for it.)
And it feels funny to try to sense it working in action... it's kind of like I can get myself to groove/dance along to the music via gettin' things done...
I made these custom LEGO Muppet minifigures last year -- my casting is:
Kermit as Captain Picard
Fozzie Bear as Riker
Rowlf as Geordi
Miss Piggy as Troi
Gonzo as Data
Janice as Dr Crusher
Animal as Worf
I based it on the drawing below, that I drew in 1994...if I weren't basing on that, I might have switched Janice and Piggy's roles. 😬😬😬
(If LEGO released a Scooter minifigure, that would be my Wesley)
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"Everything happens for a reason" has two interpretations:
1. everything has a higher purpose, or at least was caused to happen with someone's intent
2. everything is a part of a complicated chain web of cause and effect
When people are frustrated or disappointed with the world, they look to "everything happens for a reason" for solace - but too often they think more about the former definition, how so many things happen because of someone's intent - and that that intent is something like "pissing me off"
"Articles of Interest" is a podcast about fashion from a design sense, and they recently had an episode on the vestments of Clergy. (Of course, Catholic in particular but also some Anglican etc)
Two quotes from it:
"Style is not simply an ornament of speech. It is the ultimate expression of meaning. And style in life is crucial, right? What is John O'Malley? John O'Malley's a priest, John O'Malley a jesuit, he's an American, all that's important, right? HOW is John O'Malley? He's kind, he's sweet, he's a swell guy... heheh - that's what we're interested in right?"
(Interesting point, in this sense 'style' represents two things I believe to be in true: that it's more important what you DO than what you 'are', and then it's more important to get the holistic forest right than the reductionist trees)
and then her friend Nick speaks on Catholic Philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar:
and basically the concept is this: everything that is, has these three properties. It has truth, goodness, and beauty. If you're a thing in this world, you have those. And so Balthasar who was a religious philosopher, so it's all about God, he said 'Ok, so God also has truth, goodness, and beauty. And those three things are the only ways we can really explain God to people.' I mean just pointing to something and saying 'look, dude, look at the beauty of that" - and perhaps THAT could be a way in.
At last something Massachusetts, California, and Texas can agree on!
the humble "like" is oft mocked despite what it does for us. "like, three people" is a vastly different statement from "three people". "and i was like 'what the fuck'" is vastly different from "and i said 'what the fuck'". i love you "like" and anyone who says you make people sound stupid will be killed on sight
causes of death, what we worry about, what the media focuses on,
from Aaron Penne's page of data visualizations that has some other interesting ones.
New York City, 1975 By @joel_meyerowitz
i live in the most haunted house in the northern hemisphere because i keep buying cursed dolls and cracking them open like pistachios to release the ghosts inside em. see i've got this business idea and it's to unethically harvest their ectoplasm and sell it in little jars like honey. unfortunately i've hit a snag, namely that ectoplasm tastes like shit and also if you ingest it you permanently lose the capacity to feel joy. so now i've got a bunch of unsatisfied customers who are literally impossible to please banging on my door at all hours. it doesn't really matter though because the ghosts are already constantly slamming all my doors and cabinets so it's just a wall of sound in here at all times anyway. i'm pretty sure i've got tinnitus now but on the upside i've got this new business idea where i repair old dolls with kintsugi and sell them at a ridiculous markup to etsy women in cuffed corduroy pants.
I was watching the Dallas Mavericks play at home the other night.
I'm not sure if I was primed by the Israel flags some fans were holding in the stand, but trying to read the jersey, I was like... "Maus? As in the Art Spiegelman Holocaust graphic novel?"
From a half remembered dream:
"[At this terrible bakery-cafe], the employee's health care plan was a mutual pact of
1 wash your hands
2 promise that's not an std
3 does this look infected to you? eww
If their specialty rolls packaging wasn't properly sealed we could take them home to eat before they went stale, so i had a side hustle making sure sabotaging the sealing clips. "
No, no, this isn't an AI-generated image! It's a 220 million-year-old petrified log located in Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona, USA. This park is famous for its vast petrified wood deposits. Petrified wood forms when minerals replace the wood fibers over millions of years, resulting in fossilized wood that can be as hard and colorful as gemstones. The log in the picture is entirely replaced by quartz crystals, making it sparkle in the close-up view. This log, dating back to the Late Triassic Period, about 225 to 207 million years ago, serves as a fascinating reminder of the ancient forests that once covered this area. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is a brilliant graphic novel
Charles Babbage was an interesting character (I remember doing a book report on him in middle school) but Lovelace is even more so.
I'm happy I got an Arcade 1Up Star Wars - I play it nearly daily (I'm just a few thousand points away from removing "OBI" from the top of the high score table) and it's again out of stock.
I missed the window for its sibling TRON arcade machine - not that I really have room for two. It's a great game with a satisfying spinner and flight stick controller, but I think I would be almost as satisfied if I could get a big chunky hardware button for my desk that played the "disc blast" sound - it's really one of the most satisfying arcade sound fx ever.
But now that I think about it... in the game it acts more the weapon feels more like a regular gun then the movie's signature frisbee-ish discs. In between the way it launches from an extended arm and TRON's electric-blue-and-cyan suit and hat... dude feels like Mega Man's dad more than anything.
Insider on the Apprentice speaks up All the flim flammery (and edited out horrible racism) that paved Trump's way to the whitehouse. Between this and his time with Pro-wrestling? Yeesh.
Huh. Like the QR code later, the barcode clawed its way back into acceptance.
"Taking a stab" at something... seems pretty violent. Same with "take a shot"
Giving something "the ol' college try" seems a little classist! (and/or possibly increasingly beset by questions about the future of higher education)
"Have a crack at it"... is this about butts? Or drugs?
"Give it a whirl" - insensitive to people with vertigo issues.
Damn it's hard being a liberal.
The Talking Piano. Amazing how much like a human voice a regular piano played by a robot can be! (but like the text says, having captions on cheats just a tad - still amazing tho)
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at the Spontaneous Celebrations community center I was kind of delighted to see one of these old friends... this was like THE ULTIMATE dorm room stereo.... 3 CDs... you could make mixtapes... and the design of it was good, all these great chunky curved edges...
