2025 May❮❮prevnext❯❯

Some days it's tough to get the productivity ball rolling. It's like there's a part of me that's a poorly trained dog, getting me to be anxious about stuff I don't really need to be that anxious about (a lot of ego there- like it's not just I'm worried I can't do it, I'm worried even if I do it will give me that "shouldn't have been that hard" feeling")

One trick - that I kind of hate works - is playing music... it's just like a weird subconscious distractor.

Kids who grew up in the 80s on recycled Loony Tunes might remember - or even remember quoting - this one Bugs Bunny clip, cued up here where Bugs plays a violin to entrance and calm a rampaging gorilla, and he (mis)quotes "music calms the savage beast"... (later on you hear that the original was William Congreve's "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.")

Guess it's true!

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RFKjr, not content with helping bring measles back, is slow walking COVID vaccines



operation warp speed, speeding up the initial vaccine rollout was one of the few good things about the first Trump presidency. Now we got captain brainworm at the helm.

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Bonus, older photos I AI'd:

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The Roganification of the Male Mystique
Interesting.
Sometimes I think about what I get out of HONK-ish bands relative to that stuff.

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some days the corruption just smacks you in the face.

the art of the linkedin s**tpost

one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it's happening right now and it's still good even if it's not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like... this is it. this is life. you'll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don't love life for what it is now and make the most of it

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That last quote came from when I image searched for this first cartoon by shhhitsfine that I posted a few years ago. They've made a lot of good thoughtful cartoons worth checking out.

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Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and frankly if you look at what's gone on – and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side..

he is aging out worse than biden

Trump: Of course, you have the Declaration of Independence.

Moran: What does it mean to you?

Trump: Well, it means exactly what it says. It's a declaration. It's a declaration of unity and love and respect. And it means a lot. And it's something very special to our country.

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worth your 3 minutes to know about
Gov. Evers Releases Message to Wisconsinites Regarding Apparent Trump Administration Arrest Threats

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This meme is hitting for me right now, except instead of other people, it's the sub-parts of my head, the web of moods and emotions stuck to but inconsistently mapped with my actual circumstances - anxiety, contentment, courage, frustration.

Sometimes it's the pendulum swing that gets to me, like how a stretch of feeling "oh hey this is pretty manageable, lifes kinda good actually" somehow drives its countermood that this world is kinda awful, and I feel as unreasonably down as I previously did up.

Sometimes I feel empowered by using focus and self-talk to adjust my mood, but now I worry it's all a sham that just pushes that pendulum, robbing the bummed-out Peter of myself in a few hours to pay happy and content Paul now.

And not to begrudge anyone the pharmacological tools they have been given to help make their own emotional landscapes more hospitable, but sometimes I feel like I should be appreciate myself for using introspection and equanimity and going without external mood balancers, which are crucial tools for many but often clumsy ones, in terms of side-effects. (And as always with the awareness that - as with many chemical based anti-depressants - perhaps my philosophical approach is cutting some of the highs along with the lows.)

Real talk, what are your favorite mental tools for in-the-moment emotional management? Or do you just surf it and feel what you feel? I thought maybe i had ruined the 80% unreliable lightning port on my phone by trying to get rid of lint with a metal wire and breaking it and making it 100% broken - turns out I just made it only a little worse, and bringing it into the apple store they were able to clean out the debris that I I guess I had just impacted further.

The apple store / genius bar: your "Apple Tax" dollars at work!

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Justine had asked him outright, once, what nationality he was. "You're the fortune teller, you tell me," he said.
"I read the future, not the past," she told him.
"Well, the past should be easier!"
"It's not. It's far more complicated."

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'A lady doesn't *go* without a hat, my dear. Only common people.' Common! What's so uncommon about us? We're not famous, we're not society, we haven't been rich since 1930 and we aren't known for brains or beauty. But our ladies wear hats, by God! And we all have perfect manners! We may not ever talk to outsiders about anything more interesting than the weather but at least we do it politely! And we've all been taught that we disapprove of sports cars, golf, women in slacks, chewing gum, the color chartreuse, emotional displays, ranch houses, bridge, mascara, household pets, religious discussions, plastic, politics, nail polish, transparent gems of any color, jewelry shaped like animals, checkered prints ...

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Then the groom, who seemed unsuitably light of heart, followed him around before the ceremony insisting that Christianity was a dying religion. (" It's the only case I know of where *mental* sins count too; it'll never sell," he said. "Take it from me, get out while the getting's good." [...])

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"Scientists," said Duncan, "have been investigating the stimuli that cause birds to vocalize in the morning. So far they have determined only one. They sing because they're happy."

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But was she a fortune teller! I don't mind telling you, I used to go to her myself. Okay, so it's mumbo-jumbo. You know why I went? Say you got a problem, some decision to make. You ask your minister. You ask your psychiatrist, psychologist, marriage counselor, lawyer--they all say, 'Well of course I can't decide for you and we want to look at all the angles here and I wouldn't want to be responsible for--' They hedge their bets, you see. But not Madame Olita. Not any good fortune teller. 'Do X,' they say. 'Forget Y.' 'Stop seeing Z.' It's wonderful, they take full responsibility. What more could we ask?"

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"Otherwise," said Madame Olita, "why take any action at all? No, you can always choose to *some* extent. You can change your future a great deal. Also your past."
"My past?"
"Not what's happened, no," Madame Olita said gently, "but what hold it has on you."

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She had the pathetic alertness of a child who has had to depend too much on adults; she picked up every inflection, every gesture and untied ribbon and wandering eye, and turned it over and over to study its significance. (Was that how she could read the future? She had foretold Great-Grandma's death, she said, when she noticed her buying all her lotions in very tiny bottles.)

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Justine did not seem to be easily disappointed. Which was fortunate.

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"You want to hear about my movie?"
"Yes."
"I'm going to buy a camera and walk around filming to one side of things, wherever the action isn't. Say there's a touchdown at a football game, I'll narrow in on one straggling player at the other end of the field. If I see a purse-snatcher I'll find someone reading a newspaper just to the right of the victim."
"What's the point?" Justine asked.
"Point? It'll be the first realistic movie ever made. In true life you're *never* focused on where the action is. Or not so often. Not so finely."

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"After all, we're living in reduced circumstances."
He seemed to savor the last two words: reduced circumstances. Lucy thought they sounded smugly technical, like devaluated currency or municipal bonds.

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He took the hand, although she was a stranger. He would go along with anything; he always had.

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"Won't you just come away with me?" People had been saying that to him all his life. He had still not learned to turn them down.

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"If you really want to know," he said (but speaking in Caleb's general direction), "I don't believe in people sacrificing themselves for the sake of other people."

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Justine ran through the hallway, breathless and shivering. Someone had died. Something was wrong with Meg. She had never realized how many possibilities there were for disaster, or how calm and joyous her life had been until this moment.

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Reminder that wellness grifters like Trump's new Surgeon General Casey Means spread misinformation about vaccines and health because it is extremely profitable for them to do so.

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falling asleep is never going to feel as good as it is right now

4 star:
* Through the Eyes of a Child (AURORA)
Ambient vibe kind of song
* Do What You Want (Live) (OK Go)
Kind of an Elvis Costello Mystery Dance test mix vibe.
* Bittersweet Symphony (feat. Emily Roberts) (GAMPER & DADONI)
decent club style cover, with a good female vocal.
* Mad About Mad About Me (The Cantina Band) [feat. Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes] (R3X)
via my Disney trip, this is one of the songs the robot DJ is playing (I think they aim for just under 3 minutes for each) Fun that it has the class Cantina song... and at least that Disney cantina didn't discriminate against droids!

3 star:
* Just Fine (Radio Edit) (Mary J. Blige)
* Mad World (Sierra Hull)
* Houdini (Eminem)
* A Bar Song (Tipsy) (Shaboozey)
* Turbulence (Mus Kat & Nalpak)

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Guess you don't need a warrant as long as you're doing Trumps bidding... but don't worry it only affects you if you look like you might be an immigrant.

The repair tool was a little too clone-y for me but I think it got the job done... not sure how to apply a local color filter. The term "indian giver" is racist as hell and I'm not going to use it, but I wish I knew of a good replacement for noun sense of it. "Take-backer"?

ahahaha Musk's heavy handed approach to getting his AI to say what he wants backfiring in the most hilarious ways imaginable.

Reminds me of the Colbert line "Reality has a well known liberal bias", and these techbros are doing their dumbest -er, damndest - to fight it.

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Shocking Video Shows Earth Tearing Open During Myanmar's Earthquake in March

whoa. first pass it didn't register, I was looking for a crack in the pavement. But then, you realize that the WHOLE LANDSCAPE IS SHIFTING in the background.

Of course, right-wing populists such as Trump and Bolsonaro are unlikely to have read Foucault or Marx, and indeed present themselves as fiercely anti-Marxist. They also greatly differ from Marxists in their suggested policies in fields like taxation and welfare. But their basic view of society and of information is surprisingly Marxist, seeing all human interactions as a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. For example, in his inaugural address in 2017 Trump announced that "a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost."

ahahahaha - i've found out that some conservatives really are very confused by this passage, and really can't fathom what Marx actually said, framework wise.

Basically, every piece of information you add multiplies the odds of you getting blindsided by some vector of misunderstanding you didn't anticipate, even as it addresses the ones you did anticipate. The point of diminishing returns where continuing to elaborate increases the odds of unexpected miscommunication more than it decreases the odds of expected miscommunication is much nearer than you'd like.

The most effective act of communication is not the one which contains the most possible information, but the one which contains the *smallest* amount of information it possibly can while still getting its point across. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation. People far more autistic than you have been trying for hundreds of years to invent a way of communicating which doesn't work this way, without success.

All of which is to say that "getting to the damn point" is legitimately a communication skill, not just an accommodation for people who aren't paying attention.

I know I am terrible at this- I often start with the counterpoint to my main idea, so as to acknowledge the debate or just show how smart I am for understanding both sides.

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"I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want."
"But she thought you were pathetic."
"That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you."

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We're all one thing, Lieutenant. That's what I've come to realize. Like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.

It's interesting that what might be some of the better lines the actual Charlie Kaufman gives to his alter-ego "twin". Or maybe they're not better lines, they're meant to be a little corny or at least facile. Or not! I think the movie promotes that ambiguity. It so incredibly meta. Almost two far eating its own tail for even my taste, but maybe it bears more examination or rewatch. "but her EMAILS"
meanwhile

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i am disappointed that of all the ice cream varieties at my local supermarket none of them seem to be Apple Pie or similar.

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via - really cool stuff!

Pairs well with:

I'm almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you've ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.

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This is beyond stupid. FDA to limit COVID boosters to over 65s

Why on God's Green Earth would you want more COVID?

COVID, while not as blatantly menacing and death producing as the first waves, still has long term effects in a way flu, say, doesn't.

Links in there are open to public comment. So, one question I wrote about a few years ago: why do so many people conflate "openness" and "vulnerability", when to me they seem diametrically opposed - like, because I'm so resilient, and so not vulnerable, I am able to be fully open and candid about myself.

Talking with my sweetie L. - she desperately wants me have a more gushing kind of way, to be a good return the lift force on the seesaw of romance, and to live less gated, both for my sake and the sake of the viability of the romance. But during one conversation it hit me that there's confusion when people talk about "openness".

One sense, the one I was running with before, is "openness to inspection" - candor, fearlessness in introspection. I have that in spades.

But there's another sense: "openness to change", flexibility, the possibility of growth. And sure, in that case I have a lot more work to do.

(And ironically, being good at the first kind of openness can make you worse at the second; you give reasons and justifications and explanations but then it sounds like you're digging in your heels. I mean growth and change ISN'T easy, and you also have to trust that the changes being asked for are ultimately a good kind of growth, but hopefully understanding why things are they are doesn't become an excuse for leaving them that way.)

So. L lives more viscerally, I live more gated. The example that I keep coming back to was when we were watching "Alien: Romulus" with her boys. Her reaction to the jump scares was almost comic... like REALLY jumping along with it. And I was enjoying the movie's thrills, but I wasn't really that MOVED (literally) by them.

In other conversations L has framed my way of living as a "control thing" - a description on one level I kind of hate and reject, but on another level I have to admit has some truth to it...if I'm not careful I'd always live gated and never going for the gusto.

So why do I resist the "control thing" phrasing? Two things: one is, my "control" is not so much a conscious choice- it's just the way I've subconsciously shaped myself. So I'm "controlled" yeah, but like.. I'm not *controlling* the control, not deciding to control. And to me, "control" is more an act of will. (In fact, going forward I'll have to use a higher level of willful control in order to live LESS controlled, less gated...)

The second objection is... "control" for me is a means, not an end. I'm not in control for the sake of control, it's to serve the greater purpose of my sense of obligation to the world. Like, I can't live up to what the world needs from me if I'm not reliable, and I guess over the years I found raw driving emotions to be unreliable. I get worried about letting an unruly inner child run the place.

That's a place for growth that I am still dealing with. My subconscious self, the hubbub of internal parts that make up me? It's a rowdy bunch. I don't know if years living with a level of "rational" control means my internal family is less grown up than others? But between, like, the angst and anxiety I get around work and what not, my inability to make good eating decisions in the moment (if delicious food is available at hand, it's pretty much game over for me, willpower wise), the ferocious anger that sometimes comes out, just rage at malfunctioning programs or unreasonable greedy people? I admit it feels like a reason to be worried about living more viscerally and directly.

But, "gated, uptight, and implacable is no way to go through life, son". Going through my 70-80s years here on the planet without sucking more marrow out of life seems like a loss, and that's some of why it's worth pushing on this. And also for the sake of L. Thoughts on Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century...

I think I gotta read this.

Doctorow's paraphrase of one idea seems pretty insightful:

Indeed, an unwillingness to tax creates all kinds of evils. For starters, if a state can't fund its core programs out of tax, it has to borrow. And when it borrows, it borrows from the rich. So instead of taxation -- which weakens the fortunes and political influence of the wealthy -- we get bonds, through which the wealthy are paid interest out of the funds extracted from those who lack the political clout to escape taxation. The wealthy get more wealthy, and exert more political pressure.

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. [...] The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws--which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. [...]

To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it's run through the computer a dozen times. Everything's got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force. Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society. By now these battle lines should sound a little familiar.

Pirsig is talking about one of the faces of one of great divides (maybe THE great divide, with his book pointing to the Taoism as the ineffable reconciliation of the two outlooks). Other faces/terms for it are "reductionism vs holism" and "surface vs essence".

The swing into LLM-based AI has unlocked new battlefronts in terms of this conflict. AI's "what sounds reasonable to say next based on an analysis of tons of human knowledge" has the ability to gloss over so many of the dotted "i"s and crossed "t"s that used to be the exclusive domain of folks in Pirsig's "classic mode".

A few months ago Andrej Karpathy introduced the term "vibe coding", where you can have medium-good success telling the computer what program to write, and it does it. The jury is still out as to the final potential of this (most LLMs seem to kind of tap out and lose the thread, as well as generating security loopholes, but it's not clear if this is a ceiling or a floor of where we will end up) but for folks who have made their living coding (or anyone who basically types or creates on a screen) it's sobering.

Incidentally vibe coding is the latest of a long line of attempts to enable "natural language programming" - trying to empower normal folks (well, business dudes at least) to get programs via "romantic" expression of high level intent without all those pesky "classic" level enginerds getting in the way.

But the divide is not just in programming, nor is it new with AI. Like Pirsig says, these are familiar battle lines. Politics is all vibe based thinking.

Similarly this cultural moment of people's views on stuff like vaccines... should you trust the vibe of industry and science (with its corrective mechanism of skepticism baked in) or the wariness of intuitions reminding us we should be extremely careful with what we put in our bodies, and the possibility that the forces guiding us down that path are somehow reckless or nefarious, pursuing profits or some kind of control rather than having humanity's best interests against viruses at heart.

It's such a weird moment. What will making a living look like in this world? What should we encourage upcoming generations to get good at? In what ways will we all benefit, and in what ways will the benefits just be funneled upward? (Like Scott Santens said 10 years ago, writing on Basic Income, "If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?"

Interesting times, in the curse sense of the word. Wow. 25 years ago today I started my "mundane journal", a daily, high-level description of what I did that day (it lives on on a private corner of my website)

Here's the first day's entry, in the current version of the handcrafted UI.

The UI has a simple text search, a months based navigation, and a "what I did on this date across the years".

This marks my first daily kind of ritual attempt to record my time in the world. In early 1997 I started jotting more ad hoc notes (a "quote journal"/"common place book") on my Palm Pilot, at the tail end of 2000 I started by daily public blog. And in 2013 I started doing "One Second Everyday" video compilations. (Also later I tried to summarize some of it as highlevel timelines) These are all attempts to leave some wet footprints in the sand as I keep on marching through time.

I can't say I read old entries of the "mundane journal" much; I refer to it to check on some dates but I do most of my diary-like processing in public, on my blog and social media. Sometimes I'll throw in a copy and paste of some private correspondence I'd like to keep track of it but out of the public eye.

I'd recommend daily journaling as a practice to anyone, especially young people. You get old enough, entire decades slip by, and it's nice to have something to review. (Especially how my blog captures my a curated view of my photos; reviewing photos is a big part of what makes memories happen.)

But still, the daily entries are definitely "too much stuff" (which is the funny thing about time... it's too much and too little all at once.) Ah, going for the cheapest store brand paper towel was a mistake even if it was select-a-size "I want this size" "lol no you get this other size"

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long term science study shows vaccines help against long covid in kids. bummer we have vaccine skeptics at the helm.

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Lord of the (No Time for Refacto-) Ring

Fear is just weakness hijacking your body's cockpit.

I noticed the movie had strong Napolean Dynamite energy, turns out it's the same filmmaker...

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2025 May❮❮prevnext❯❯