2026 August❮❮prev

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Also:

New to me music playlist.

4 star:
* Put Your Records On (Corinne Bailey Rae)
via one of Lynette's chill playlists
* Mad World (Jasmine Thompson)
Lynette was watching "Ladies First" while cooking.
* Naked In Manhattan (Chappell Roan)
via Lynette's NYC playlist she puts on when we spy the city (always starting with Sinatra's New York, New York)
* bad idea right? (Olivia Rodrigo)
Heard in a CVS. Dig the attitude... "Seein' you tonight, it's a bad idea, right? /
Seein' you tonight, f*** it, it's fine"

3 star:
* Bottle Rocket Astronaut (Bug Hunter)
Wren introduced me to it... I don't love it as a song but watching it as a video was fun.
* Otis (PZB NOLA Remix) (PZB)
A chaotic remix via a random FB reel
* Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) [feat. Sweet Megg] (Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox)
from a random restaurant in Brooklyn. Myles really hates it, and it's not great, but I had forgotten he was annoyed because the original is so important in "Stranger Things"
* I'm Confessin' (Fabienne Delsol)
via the movie "The Invite"
* Native North American Child (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
via "The Heart of New England" movie they play at the Museum of Science IMAX
* Take Me Back To Piauí (Juca Chaves)
from the movie "How To Make a Killing"

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It's not the end of the world, but I can see it from here.

A puddle is just a mirror you can drink.

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Trump offers a new technology platform, insider trading as a service. I read Moss Hart's famous autobiography "Act One" after hearing it mentioned in the This American Life podcast episode The Book That Changed Your Life.

His passion and love of theater, his graciousness in talking about others, his own times of poverty and wealth and how despised the former and unapologetically leaned into enjoying the latter... a very good read.

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Children are not creatures of justice--they lay blame and praise about them as their needs demand.

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Yet life often imitates very bad plays or movies with a minimum of effort and a disquieting ease.

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It is hard to describe or to explain concisely the overwhelming and suffocating boredom that is the essence of being poor. A great deal has been written about the barren drudgery of poverty; but I do not recall that the numbing effect of its boredom has been much written or talked about. Yet boredom is the keynote of poverty--of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with--for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine.

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I think there is such a moment--a moment when we see our parents plain, not when they are grown old and are a symbol of ancestry to be honored or tolerated and when we can no longer know what they were like, but a moment when we see them suddenly for the first time as people. It is a fleeting moment and it passes, to be quickly replaced with the usual façade of filial devotion--that coin of the realm that passes for affection between the generations--but when this moment occurs, it seems to cut through a lifelong incrustation of love and hate, and for however brief a time it lasts, we see our parents as the fallible human beings they are and for a little while we hold them blameless.

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I looked back at the lighted canyon [of Times Square], its daytime ugliness softened into something approaching beauty by the magic of the October twilight deepening around it. The knowledge that I was going to be part of it at last brought me perilously close to that wonderful mixture of emotions that makes one want to laugh and to cry at the same time. It is a mistake to dismiss such a moment as maudlin. To do so is to rob oneself of one of the few innocent pleasures the theatre offers. I enjoyed that last lingering look unabashed by its sentimentality and unashamed of its bathos. I deserved that moment, it seemed to me, and I allowed myself to enjoy it to the full.

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There were even times when I grew hungry enough to forget about the heat and to see mirages of food heaped in front of me, for Mr. Kaufman's delicate appetite, slim enough in the winter, seemed to all but disappear with the first robin. With warm weather, long before the first heat wave enveloped the city, a salad and a not too lavish plate of thinly sliced cold meat became the unvarying menu of each day's main meal, and when on a coolish day lamb chops occasionally appeared, my old struggle not to grab and stuff was like a man wrestling with his faith.

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Max Siegel had apparently emerged from the womb liking the world and everything in it, and he liked everything we had done to the play.

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Some of the world's pleasantest reading is contained in a good hotel menu.

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A play can be blackmailed by its scenery more often than anyone connected with it is likely to realize.

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Blumineck, aka David the Arrow Bard, is amazing.

He has a series of videos where he does the craziest archery stunts and acrobatics, and explores the use of real and fantasy historical weapons. I just love that he's not a snob about the fake stuff - he might says "ok, so this probably wouldn't actually work so well", but it looks cool, so it's ok. worseonpurpose interesting website tracking famous brands that haven't kept up their standards... epecially relevant for cookware, outdoor gear, and bedding.

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Man, Trump really is a hope for Western Democracy... I mean Putin can score 5-8 hockey goals against NHL players, and Kim Jong-il could shoot 5-11 holes-in-one on his first time out, (depending on who you asked) but at least our guy can golf, shooting 10 below his age (For comparison, Arnold Palmer was just barely able to pull that off at 71)

I know I'll sleep more soundly at night.

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Mythos comes from ancient Greek. At its most basic, µῦθος meant "word" or "story." Specifically the kind of story that carries meaning beyond the literal. Not a lie. Not a fable. Not history. A mythos was an account that explained how things are by narrating how they came to be. The origins of fire. The birth of the gods. The founding of cities.

The Greeks set mythos against logos. Reasoned argument, evidence, systematic explanation. The two were not opposites so much as complements. Logos tells you how something works. Mythos tells you why it matters. Researching this, I realized I have been doing that combination for most of my career. The journalist's logos, the blogger's mythos. Unintentionally, but there it is.

The crucial distinction is epistemological. Logos makes claims that can be interrogated. Mythos makes claims that are received. You do not verify a mythos. You inhabit it. The community that holds it says it is true, and that is sufficient, because the story explains things that need explaining and provides a framework that holds the world together.

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I remember finding the July 1994 cover of Heavy Metal (with the armored sci0fi goons "Tom" and "Jerry") pretty evocative.

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minimalist animal tattoos i should remember this if I need inspiratin for Wren doodles

Maher's comments and Wikipedia's philosophy challenge the authoritative and fascistic model of truthtelling preferred by Musk and his army of right wing and "Libertarian" followers. To an authoritarian, truth is a matter of prescription. Truth descends from authority and its perspective on objectivity. Authoritarians demand that there is a single truth and that there is a single source of truth: themselves. Maher's insightful commentary on truth challenges this idea, as do her later comments that Wikipedia's model encourages shared power, that Wikipedia editors have to "let go of power... you have to trust in their ability to manage the areas of their own expertise and interests." For the American right, this represents a grave threat to their worldview, a worldview dependent on the manufacture of controversy, enemies, and the convenient truths necessary to sustain their authority.

I'm reading Ortega y Gasset's "Meditations on Quixote". I'm struck by how good a reading companion ChatGPT can be.

Anti-AI purists - even when they accept my counterexamples that something beyond "glorified autocomplete" is happening, that the training corpus is fueling some interesting and novel permutations I find of value - they might argue "sure, but wouldn't it be better, be working on more levels, if you were in dialog with a real person, a real human you can interact with in so many more modalities than a textbox on a screen?"

And that's a hard point to fully refute, except... it's hard to find that person on the regular, to match my reading schedule, and if I found them I assume I would be constantly testing their patience.

Nor is it "either-or"; I think my dialog with ChatGPT encourages me to sharpen my own writing when it seems right to bring it to my blog and social media - workshopping it a bit.

Sure, I have to be wary of becoming like one of those techie bros who gets convinced ChatGPT is helping them unlock a new undiscovered truth of quantum physics or whatever.

It's a little like Luke going into the dark tree on Dagobah, that what you see there is in part what you take with you. But by encouraging ChatGPT to push back, you can get something beyond "fancy mirror" or "robot teacher" - akin to running into Darth Vader's helmet full of Luke's face, to run a metaphor into the swamp. Interesting watching language evolve in our lifetimes.

One example is "blog"... the old shortening of "weblog". For me, that's always referred to the entire site, so I might talk about "a piece on my blog". Over time a second usage has become more common where "a blog" refers to a single article, e.g. "I just wrote a blog, tell me what you think".

I'm a descriptivist and understand that language evolves for reasons that aren't always clear or logical to me, but I dislike how blog's change is generating ambiguity. I guess you can always say "blog site" for the whole collection and "blog article" or "blog piece" for a single thing, but it's frustrating.

Compare that with "compute" as a noun, as in "all this AI is taking a hell of a lot of compute". At first I disliked the usage, but I came around to seeing it as more concise than "computational power" (and as a buzzword is more inclusive of some more techie details)

Finally, some Gen-Z/Alpha usage watch: the word "nonchalant" is gaining some new shades of meaning. To Gen-X and older, nonchalance is almost always a positive thing (actually now that I see that written... that might reflect something about Gen-X's infamous checked-out-edness)

But I'd say historically nonchalance has is more often than not an admirable thing - calm, controlled, relaxed, approachable.

Now there's a newer shade of it that sometimes (but not always) points to it as performative, a front people put on so as to seem less engaged / concerned than they are. (There is also a fun backformation of "chalant" as the opposite.)

Like for both nonchalant and chalant, there's the idea that sincerity is probably better. If you're actually relaxed, that still can be a good form of nonchalant, and if you're buzzing with excitement, let your chalant flag fly. But I find it interesting that the younguns have added a layer to what was formerly an unalloyed good (old folks would have to mark someone as being "deceptively nonchalant" or similar.) Random train of thought - ironically (or appropriately) enough derived from bouncing some philosophy around with ChatGPT:

I've long realized that the Turing Test makes humanity biased towards systems that can communicate in human text. If a new intelligence comes to us that can't communicate in English (which for better or worse is the modern "lingua franca") many folks won't be able to recognize it as intelligent.

But this reflects an assumption that basic intelligence would precede the ability to speak. You see this in Asimov's story "Robbie": the nanny robot is a delightful companion, physically graceful, emotionally expressive, but mute... and the new fangled talking robot has so much machinery to deal with the language that it sits immobile, taking up a whole room.

But here's the thing: human language isn't just the test for LLM - it's the power source! There is so much intelligence imbued in the training corpus; I hold to the idea that what's most important is the relations and interactions and thus the context things make for each other, and the (shifting) mathematical landscapes that an LLM chat traverses is so rich with those that it powers the novel problem solving abilities we see.

So language isn't just the measure of smarts, it's the cognitive structure the smarts are built out of.

Expect disappointment and you will never get disappointed.

As you know, flowing water always takes the shortest route. And in fact, sometimes, the shortest route is determined by the water itself. In this, there is a great resemblance to the human thought process.

RFK Jr: "The polio vaccine "killed many, many more people" than polio ever did."

I can't believe Captain Brainworm, this roadkill gourmet, is in the position of power that he is. Talk about the ultimate-nepo baby, so much for "competence" being the "antidote" for DEI.

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genius Hegseth thinks it's boots on the ground and not drones.

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Stags' Leap winery still carries the old Chase family crest with "Ne cede malus" - "don't give in to misfortune"

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The afformentioned art of Jack Yaghubian of Fast Cheap and Easy graphics

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When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set.

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What's your favourite toxic heavy metal? For most of us, it's gotta be lead. Sure, it's a pretty common one, but just because it's popular doesn't mean it's bad. All four of the osmium lovers are busy telling the six or seven bismuth types that they are the real aesthetes of dangerous elements. That disagreement turns into a bar brawl so small that they don't even call the cops. Meanwhile, Leadcon 2026? Sold the fuck out, baybee.

My personal fascination with lead started in the same place it did for many of you. Chewing on lead paint as a baby. Widely available, easily approachable, and comforting to return to after a long, hard day of sucking on your thumb and crawling aimlessly. As I matured, lead was still a part of my life. Plumbing solder. Electrical solder. Auto body repair. Gasoline.

Yes, it felt like Pb would always be there for me. And then the government intervened. Suddenly, it was "not cool" to have lead paint. Drinking-water pipes started getting made out of plastic or the inferior copper – which is probably just as bad for you, the scientists just haven't figured out how yet – and worst of all, lead body repair gave way to the hateful Bondo.

"Premium unleaded," sneered the man-about-town, unaware of the oxymoron.

I still think we made out better than all the arsenic fans. Lead can still be easily acquired from any number of reputable online warehouses. Sometimes it's even a surprise. You'll bite down on some modern child's toy and get that familiar tang on your tongue again. Undeclared lead is the sweetest lead of all.

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Real G's / move in silence / like lasagna

They had a billoard w/ this lyric at Last Resort bar in SF - took me a second to realize the joke is more linguistic than linguini. RIP Dolly Parton! She did so many interesting and generous things with her life, and sang some absolute bangers.

The song with her I most recently found for myself: her duet and girlish giggle with Chet Akins is just so heartwarming:
Do I Ever Cross Your Mind

Listen: what this means is that in honor of Tim Curry and Dolly Parton we have to be gaudier and kinder than ever before. That's what the world needs most of all. Get out there and be yourself.

"Don't be that way. Soon we'll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?"
"Someone who liked fucking corpses."

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And that was exactly what I wanted--my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.

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Every act of creation is an act of destruction.

On the final legs of a rocking trip to San Francisco with Lynette...

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