West Hollywood, September 2023

My idea of the kind of dull task perfect for AI: collecting the programming schedules of all my favorite radio stations and collating them into a TV guide-style picker. Someday, maybe.

(The other night, I asked the AI where I could stream Barbie for free, and it very confidently gave—you know it!—the wrong answer.)

Highland Park, November 2023

Art by my wife, 1994

Just ran into an old post of mine about Mohsin Hamid and writing other subject positions. It includes this line:

I of course want and love transgressive fiction, but I don’t want it to transgress against people, and especially not against oppressed people.

Makes me think: are there two types of transgression? Transgression against taste, and transgression against people?

I guess my model of the right way to do it is The Story of the Eye. A giant middle finger to taste, the Catholic church, and common decency. But not actually hurting anyone!

When I watch videos of modular synths (for instance: Benn Jordan’s video about tape delay) I always think: in another life, this is absolutely how I spend my days.

(Connected: Robin Sloan’s synth-included short story, “In the Stacks (Maisie’s Tune)")

COVID vaccine #6, a jab in my right arm at around 4pm yesterday. This morning, arm sore, body achey. Around noon a headache. Now, laying in bed, working on laptop, feeling that feeling that before the ‘VID vaccines I never knew what it was: the immune system rallying, on high alert, in every inch of my body.

There’s something so fun and frantic about working under a print deadline, realizing all the hundreds of little decisions that remain to be made, knowing you’ll now be making most of them over just a handful of days, hoping you mostly get it right. (Also: exhausting.)

Los Angeles, November 2023

Thinking more about my previous post, I have a new, even more terrifying theory: does the PT in ChatGPT stand for pterodactyl?

Wake up sheeple! It’s only a matter of time before ChatGPTerodactyl takes to the skies!

Does the PT in PT cruiser stand for pterodactyl?

In England do men say things like, “Myself, I’m more of a bosom man”?

Ma-le’l Dunes, Arcata, October 2023

Hilarious that the killer app for the “Humane Pin” is that its little camera surveils your food and then an AI chatbot negs you about calories. (Hallucinated, no doubt.)

Then you see the founders and you’re like, oh yeah, mad diet-culture-pilled.

The Thin Pin (TM)? Get lost.

My brother declares that he’s a pioneer of the digital frontier—and that I’m a digital homesteader. Which, I might quibble with “frontier” as concept, as needful of settling. But mainly it’s sweet. I like the vision of tending my garden, out beyond the fortress cities of FB and TW and YT and LI.

Ma-le’l Dunes, Arcata, October 2023

In representative democracy, the votes of citizens determine the rulers. The implied question—who is a citizen?—has given democracy its most foundational injustices, from Jim Crow to the dispossession of Indigenous folks to women’s non-suffrage, from Israeli apartheid to the murder of climate refugees in the Mediterranean.

Can we imagine democracy without borders? Without non-citizens?

Our neighbor was tossing old Gourmet magazines. I took one from 2007 with a glorious moody shot of berry pie on the cover. Inside: a profile of a farm/inn in the San Juans, fresh caught fish, fires on the beach.

A postcard from a simpler world, a time before the climate nightmare got fully underway

Longtermism’s basic formula seems to be: short-term pain … long-term gain.

The main criticism I’ve seen focuses on the ellipsis: longtermists are hilariously confident predicting the coming centuries, and discounting the present.

But look closer at the formula and see: it’s a diet. Longtermism is diet culture applied to the scale of an entire species.

Do you want some of this? has to be one of the greatest threats of all time.

Still bizarre how many profoundly socialist policies the NBA / NFL / MLB have so franchises stay at parity, distribute wealth, etc. Esp. compared to the free-market Premier League. American Socialism is alive and well—unfortunately it’s entirely confined to the pleasure activities of the hyper-rich.

I’m presently enjoying calling the almost magical way people with special paper (or large numbers entered on distant ledgers) can compel others to do their bidding “money power.“

To clarify, I’m not anti-commerce. Just against a system where some dude has 10,000,000x more money power than me.

RIP to my beloved “I GOT THIS” socks. Finally had to let them go after one final washing at the laundromat.

In Game of Thrones the pirate culture folks say they “paid the iron price” for stuff they took by force. But in our society where for those born poor it’s “work or die,” with state police enforcing borders, anti-homeless policies, and private land ownership, is our labor not also taken by force?

Small request: can we stop giving all of the money to the very richest people? They literally need it the least.

The richest: using their money power to compel a few thousand people to spend years of their lives building them a yacht.

Me: working 1.5 jobs but still can’t afford daycare for my baby.