I had a dream where I read a paper that showed that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, speech recognition models couldn’t handle certain kinds of embedded clauses, so English speakers en masse abandoned these constructions and they became “lost” and vanished from the language
When this baby (the Angel of History as imagined by Walter Benjamin) hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious shit
Mayor Katie Wilson speaking at Sound Transit Crosslake Light Rail Opening
“Having a car should not be a requirement to building a life of one’s choosing.”
🚶 🚴‍♀️ 🚌 🚆
-Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson at the Sound Transit Crosslake Light Rail Opening
A baby whale is born with 10 female whales and one male helping.
During the most beautiful event that happens in life—birth—whales were very chatty. We found vowels during the birth event as well.
@projectceti.bsky.social
The paper:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Okay okay fine I will “always historicize.” But not because you told me to.
Nadine Hurley, from Twin Peaks. She’s sitting on the floor with her drape runner and a bag of cotton balls
Staying up all night to invent a movie theater popcorn that’s completely silent
I do not want to work. I want to read books and listen to my songs of the humpback whale LP instead
More than ever I wish that awful man did not have the same name as me
Absolutely heartbroken to learn of the passing of the singular, inimitable Eliane Radigue.
I have everything to say and nothing to say so I'll simply pass along this link to an interview I gave on Eliane and her work. She is now, officially, eternal.
www.museoreinasofia.es/en/radio/son...
Still all blissed out from an especially good weekend of music: Saloli and Visible Cloaks, then Geologist and Bitchin Bajas. Good music is good for my soul
I wish I didn’t get so irritated by book blurbs that say “a meditation on [subject].” But I also wish people would stop writing that
FT article teaser reads “Grindcore is the new hustle culture”
FT News Briefing podcast, “Investors love heavy metal”
Something is going on at FT
As a result, our perceptions of the future now wrench back and forth between two, seemingly polar visions. On the one hand, techno-hucksters seduce us with hyperboles about data superhighways, global networks, expert systems, and virtual realities. They assure us that we are on the threshold of an Information Millennium that will guarantee even the humblest optically-wired hut access to an infinite “digital sea” of imagineered pleasures. On the other hand, we are confronted daily with the four horsemen of an incipient global apocalypse. The first is called Unemployment, as third world megacities (which now plausibly include Los Angeles and Moscow as well as Jakarta and Mexico D.F.) overflow with bitter postindustrial underclasses, nearly half a billion strong, who have become redundant, as either consumers or producers, to the world market. The second is Plague, as the world AIDS epidemic reveals biological pathways open for the invasion of other nightmare ailments, from penicillin-resistant TB to Ebola fever. The third is Tribalism, as multiethnic states, undermined by multinational capital, shatter into deadly shards of ethnic and religious hatred. The fourth horseman, of course, is Ecocide, as the exploitation of nature is accelerated to keep pace with falling terms of trade and rising international debt.
In the end, Virtual Light shares much of the generous spirit and slapstick humor of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). The Bridge is recognizably Vineland’s intergenerational counterculture regrouped against the silicon fascism of the year 2005. Chevette is not unlike Prairie Wheeler, Pynchon’s daughter of the Revolution, while Skinner could be a later version of her hippie dad, good ole Zoyd Wheeler. From similar perches on the seacoast of Ectopia (respectively the Redwoods and British Columbia), Pynchon and Gibson have written comic utopian novels that unabashedly defend the dream of the Commune. Given the cargo cults built around their names, these expressions of sentimentality and radical hope are also acts of considerable personal modesty. For Gibson, in particular, Virtual Light is a revealing move. No longer just the Seer of Cyberpunk, he may be becoming the Jack London of the wild youth of the ’90s.
Mike Davis in late 1993 perfectly predicted that 32 years later I would read Vineland and the Sprawl trilogy and wrote this review of Virtual Light with me in mind, it would seem
Dad said I'm allowed to immanentize the eschaton
Okay, in that case I’ll put it on my list and will let you know if I get around to it
You’ve got the wrong guy, that’s a different person with the same name as me in the article :(
Fredric Jameson on Gene Wolfe:
"The work of Gene Wolfe, richly developing in the spaces between fantasy and SF, can perhaps serve as a central exhibit in these debates: for myself, I acknowledge its quality but feel a deep reluctance to abandon these generic distinctions."
I just saw Wormrot at northwest terror fest earlier this month and they were outrageously good! Really blew me away
the empty string is invisible to the naked eye
A shelf full of many books written by Gene Wolfe
Happy Birthday to the late, great Gene Wolfe! Here’s to many reads, and many rereads.
The cover of Russell Hoban’s novel “Riddley Walker,” showing a puppet against a white background. A cat looks at the camera from behind the book.
Best book I’ve read so far this year
Drinking an outrageous amount of Taiwanese oolong lately
A black cat with very long white whiskers and green eyes looks toward the camera
Shiva came into my life unexpectedly about a month after my beloved Sylvia left it, and I’m so glad she did
I thought it was worth it and I'm glad I did! But it doesn't really "pick up," exactly, I just got better at reading it by the time I got to the end
yes! I loved it but it was very slow going, I kind of chipped away at it for a couple months until I got to the end
Last night I read an explanation of Jameson’s “ideologeme” as being like a phoneme for class discourse and it felt like a light bulb coming on
daydreaming about a multi year sabbatical to work on my emacs config and catch up on reading
