Nothing but respect for my president.

Can’t believe some world leaders wake up and think, Seems like WWIII might go rather nicely for me. I wonder if there’s anything I could do to trigger it?

We need a worldwide peace movement to be rid of these Putins and Netanyahus and Bidens and MBSs and Xis.

Peace! Not WWIII.

Grudging respect for this bougainvillea bush that has now twice snatched my hat off my head as I try to run under it.

Hydrangeas, England, July 2024

Google’s decision to align itself with a government determined to strip its citizens of access to safe and timely healthcare is entirely in line with the deprecation of their former motto [‘don’t be evil’]…

– “Google Delists DIY Hormone Therapy Sites”

The ever-popular “pivot to evil” strategy.

… trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest… Dissent must never lead to disorder. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to a democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.

– President Biden.

We’re in so much trouble. “Dissent must never lead to disorder” !!

Biden: committed Zionist, author of ‘94 Crime Bill, lied about marching in Civil Rights Movement, hates protesters. HISSS!

To watch (per JC):

• Brief Encounters
• Sunset Boulevard

To Watch:

• Poor Things
• The Sympathizer
• Shogun
• The Dark Crystal (again)
• The Rats of Nimh (again)

Nine years ago I wrote 1/3 of a near-future science fiction novel. The time frame? Roughly 2024. I just reread the opening, and sorry to say, I not only predicted ChatGPT, I predicted how it would feel to use:

... there was something incredible and thrilling about typing in a writing prompt and receiving a product so quickly. He changed the command to read, 500-word story, and five seconds later it flashed onto his screen... he spent most of the night reading Hemingway stories about the Raw Paleo Diet, Osama Bin Laden, and Stuart Little.

Checks out! I called the software LinkFace Writer.

Los Angeles, April 2024

Home, April 2024.

I’m happy for this guy and wish him the best, but this blurb does not mean what he or the author think it means:

“Omarion does what few others from his generation cannot do: display range on a main stream R&B level that enables him not to feel he’s chasing relevancy.”

Is there a word for writing like this, which is written to sound impressive first and for coherence second?

Bread, April 2024

Putting a pin in this anti-astrology Daring Fireball post, “ECLIPSES SHOULD BE CELEBRATIONS OF SCIENCE, NOT PSEUDOSCIENCE." I want to know more about these tech-y, atheist-y, liberal dudes who hear someone (a woman) talking about magic and just spit with venom!

See:

Astrologers horning in on the excitement about the eclipse is scientific sacrilege.

See:

Actual science is the great accomplishment of mankind. The antidote to ignorance, superstition, religious zealotry, and nonsensical beliefs in general. An eclipse exemplifies, to even the lay-est of laypeople, just how advanced modern science is.

See:

So here’s my “by the way” retort to Montúfar’s aside: how many astronomers today — not in “ancient” times — are also astrologers? Spoiler: the answer is fucking zero.

I’m forced to ask: Bro, who hurt you?

But also—tell me you’ve never been in the cone of totality without telling me you’ve never been in the cone of totality. A full eclipse is a chance to encounter the sublime, in all its terror and splendor. To touch cosmic infinity. The moon blotting out the sun makes rational sense, sure. You can describe it with numbers and equations, yes, and people have done that for millennia. But an integrated life contains more than calculus. An eclipse can transcend the rational. It can destabilize and re-enchant your experience of the world. That’s why people are excited about the eclipse.

Back to John Gruber’s post: it’s not alone in feeling aggrieved about astrology, around the eclipse. For instance, “Mom who pushed kids from moving car was astrology influencer disturbed by eclipse” describes a terrible tragedy that likely had less to do with astrology and more to do with postpartum psychosis, racial oppression, and the wellness-to-conspiracy-theory pipeline—all of which the article spends orders of magnitude less space discussing than it does astrology, which comes in for special ridicule and discrediting.

See:

In 2017, NASA published a webpage dedicated to debunking various myths surrounding that year’s eclipse. One was that eclipses are prophecies of major life changes or impending events.

‘This is a common interpretation found in astrological forecasts, which are themselves based upon coincidences and non-scientific beliefs in how celestial events control human behavior,’ NASA’s webpage says.

NASA notes that it’s only human psychology that ‘connects eclipses with future events in your life.’”

Not as shrill as Gruber, but equally, emphatically anti-magic.

What does this brittle defensiveness mean? Can one be so bold as to hope that it portends a correction-in-progress, the restoration of science to its rightful place alongside rather than above magic?

I’m skeptical of “101 Pieces of Advice” thingies, and this one like so many is fat-phobic here, capitalism-pilled there. But as a thirty-something who struggles to make new friends, I thought this was interesting:

43. The best way to make friends is by working on a large and intense project together. This could be a conference, a camp or a startup.

Los Angeles, March 2024

In half-homage to a half-as-old self, I’ve been on a Justice kick. Tonight, I sat down to write and put their self-titled album on. In my AirPods—what was to hand. Lasted like one song before tearing them out and finding my fourteen-year-old Bose cans. There it was: the remembered pleasure.

Is there anything quite so audacious and relatable as a bug coming out of nowhere and flying directly into your mouth? As if it thought, Hooray, a dark little cavern, let me in!

Here I thought lassitude characterized a lippy broad, but no, Webster’s 1913 be like

A condition of the body, or mind, when its voluntary functions are performed with difficulty, and only by a strong exertion of the will; languor; debility; weariness.

Languorous, with its long syllables and proliferation of palindromic vowels (“uorou”) has to be near the top of any list of words that look and sound like what they mean.

With, you know, curt and sussurus and polysyllabic and twee.

Finally baked some loaves I’m basically pleased with.

Sourdough baking occupies this nether space between classic baking and home cooking—you need a formula but you also have to develop and trust your intuition.

There are ten thousand courses and special programs and tutors that promise to help your child excel academically—but all I want for my kid is for them to be kind, quick to laugh, and alive to the world.

Last night I was thinking about this shopping list I found twelve years ago on the back of a twenty, and I realized that “lettuce” might be code for marijuana.

Reading an email newsletter about AI all I can think is, Did an AI write this?

My generation of students got A’s or D’s on the basis of our ability/inability to skim big chunks of text. Is it any surprise our big technology is a type of machine that artlessly condenses and expands text?