MUSIC I LOVE - do not forget (part of the flattening)

• U2 - "Love rescue me"
•  Greg Brown - "Hey baby hey"
• Robbie Robertson - "Somewhere down the crazy river" 
• Kavinsky - "Nightcall" 
• Damien Rice - "It takes a lot to know a man" 
• Stromae - "Alors on danse"
• Refused - "I want to watch the world burn" 
• The Ink Spots - "I don't want to set the world on fire" 

"99% invisible" - "100 objects #2 - 60-degree screw"

New York traffic lights history - green meant stop!

“Thousands of people who travel in the subways or on the suburban railroads know that green means go, orange means caution and red means stop.  Notwithstanding this fact, our signal system provides an orange signal for go, a green signal really for stop, for it is only flashed in the direction of the traffic which is moving and not in the direction of the traffic that is moving in right angles, and a red signal which may mean stop, but is actually taken as a ‘getaway’ signal.

https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2012/06/27/old-new-york-in-photos-19/  

that one playlist from May 2026, some bits

• Sofi Tukker - "Fuck They"
• Mountain Goats - "Rain in Soho" (oh-ohohohoh) 

Hana Videen - "Wordhord"

Great book about Old English, from roughly 500AD to 1150AD.

 

þ, "thorn", was pronounced as "th", so "the" was "þe". Scribes often used "y" instead of þ, to the point where printers would shorten "the" to "þe". This got forgotten, then strangely resurfaced when in the 17th century "ye olde"... became fake archaic English. 

 

How "miniatures" that monks drew, have nothing to do with their size, but the "minium" colour that was used for them. 

Susan Cooper - "The Dark is Rising"

Supposedly religiously reread by a few thousand folks around Christmas.

Second book in a series. Didn't read the rest. Finished in a day.

Was alright. Bit too straightforward, but a good enough story. 

The Old Ones, Merriman, fight the Dark (The Rider, the Walker, who felt betrayed by Merriman, support Will Stanton, seventh of seventh son, who is the "final" Old One, getting the six marks, circles quartered by a cross. 

Naomi Mitchison - "Travel Light"

Fairytale about a girl growing up with bears, with dragons, ... and finally with humans, but still talking to all animals. 

Supports three humans, stays with one. They fight off invaders, he finds a girl, she goes on. 

Not a happy ending, not a sad ending. Great story.

 

 

 

The dragons did not sing and Halla had never sung. But now she would mimic the birds, trying to repeat and answer their memory songs. Yet for all this beauty she could not want to be a bird.
    For a little while she was happy with the squirrels who had their treasures, who laboured and hunted and hid. But it was without thought or plan. Memory held them too. And it was the same with the other hoarders of the woods, the mice and voles. They seemed to be busy, but it was a business of the paws and teeth, not of the mind.

 

 

Or Tarkan Der turned his back on it, staring out, instead, over the enormous unbounded sea on the other side. This went on for two days, and then Roddin and Kiot began to get their bundles together. Each in turn, they tried once more to persuade Tarkan Der to come back with them. He would not come. And now they were turning inland into Marob harbour. He hid himselef in under the foredock among ropes and sails. Halla went to look for him; he had turned bearish, in a den, head buried between paws. When she spoke, kneeling beside him, he pulled her down suddenly on to the cold sail, arm heavy on her neck, his wet cheek by hers. For a time they stayed so. If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming.

World War Z

Rewatch.  Really not that amazing.

Exit 8 (2025)

Based on the game. Good pacing considering how little there was they could work with. Framing from different points of view worked well.

Silent Hill (2006)

Enjoyable. Not super scary, but OK enough. Nice to see some play logic being used.

Silent Hill ƒ

mixed at first.  Opening sequence, when the choir starts and the torii in the fog is shown... goose bumps.

But... then "just" more Japanese/Asian horror.

The bit in the fields, where at some point one of the crazy scarecrows follows you, and you notice by hearing it, but it doesn't move when you look at it... perfect.

 

Slowly Hanoki (you, main player) is called a traitor, and your "friends" share their ugly truths. More and more intense moments when you simply kill them - or let them be killed while you walk away - are adding.

The moment I had a "okay wait this is something different" was when your character saws off her own right arm.

There's not much - actually none - explanation (so far, still playing), but it suddenly got a step up. 

Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake)

Never played the original, but fantastic game.

Music, the David Lynch/Twin Peak feel, the music by Akira Yamaoka...     

Both the suspense/horror effects, as well as the story horror elements, were amazing.

 

Alex Pheby - "Waterblack (Cities of the Weft)"

Quite enjoyable.  Goes back and forth, much more exposition directly to reader?? In a good way.

 

 

    The light that emanates from the City of Death, from Waterblack, shows, eventually, the edges of drowned buildings, the path of a drowned river crossed by rusted bridges, drowned streets, some wide and open, some cramped and narrow, drowned parks, the skeletons of drowned trees, tatues of the people of the past, covered with barnacles, covered with algae, seaweed drifting like hair in a light breeze, the slow progres of deep-water jellyfish in and out of the windows of cars, long abandoned, street lamps, unlit, and everywhere - everywhere - the windows of houses.
    It is from the windows of houses that the light that scarcely illuminates evertying comes, now that Nathan is so close, his pellet having entered the precincts of the city from above.

[...]

    On the windowsills of these windows, outside, sit cats. They are all dead, half rotten. The same magic that animates them allows them to remain down there, beneath the water. They do not need to breathe - no dead cat breathes - but they move as they need to move to do their work, which is to oversee the windows.
    Behind these windows, behind the glass, the dead live, acting out the scenes that led to their deaths.

 

Cate Baum - "Land of Hope"

"Hope" being the innocent girl running away with her Bill, who becomes a murderer of children...? Their own child died?  And then a pandemic strikes...

Intriguing, and beautiful in its vernacular.

 

    One maniac pulled his fat hand cross her mouth, and like magnets, her pale eyes glinted direct on mine. She'd sensed me there somehow. Often, I've seen it that when a person knows they will sure die soon, they become for a time almost magically in tune with the world.
    I felt a warm breath just then on my cheek, quiet and small to the side of me, from inside the desk shelf. I turned slow. The lad was curled tiny in the shadows of files and folders. He put one snotty finger to his mouth, shh.
    I gave a half nod back, aye, be fockin' quiet as a mouse, and then the big bastard was raping his mother, and the lad's eyes were crawling like lizards in his head, and he smothered his ears with his little hands when they slit her throat, nand I gazed curious at her wan face staring back at mine with all sorts of songs and words in it whilst she made a sound in her throat like witches casting curses.

 

 

    I should explain that Bill first left off calling me Hope when us bairn died, which was what I was baptised. 'Hope?' he'd hissed at me at her funeral, as they sank her little pink casket in the frosted hard ground. 'What's Hope to me?' I can remember how the sky looked when he said it, the churchyard's black bare trees like slashes in the whtie, as if we could see reet throug hto the void of elsewhere. The weeds that choked the gravestones, the chill, the stink of foxes in the nettles by the gate. I'd not eaten days but for the half-stale sleeping tablet of my mum's slipped between my lips in the car. So I'd nowt of substance to say on my name. Bill took to calling me Glory after that, just like this song they'd chant at his football. It was his magickal name for me, he announced, magickal with a k so as not to be confused with conjuring tricks. As if what he started to dabble in was any more preternatural.

 

 

The knackerman, he'd abe able to follow easy which. He was granted his own judgement to cull any of the don-fer ones and load the carcases in tipper and bring them back for disposal. He'd make a note of any that looked badly, and where they were, so my da could go up and have a look-see.
    The proper name for this profession when it's advertised is 'fallen stock operator,' but nobody round ours would call it that over the fence. It was a job that required the strong stomach and pallid detachment of an abattoirman.

 

 

    See, on this land, we live by a constant, and us families, we go back solid as stone for time: dependable stock, no fussing. Slow in choosing, slower in changing. We ken us place. And naw, we'd gan too quick over and caught us shins, bringing in this unknown entity for the sake of a few pennies, and shit, if we weren't bloody paying for it straight off. 'False economy, see,' Ma rattled as she moved the tea things to the sink. 'Yer da would rather scrape mould off a spoilt apple than buy a pound fresh up' market a shilling.'

The lad didn't much react; he just kept looking at the clouds, blinking. I suppose he'd meant sommat else. Maybe that all his friends were dead, and his mam too, and the pier, so exciting in the photos he'd probably seen at school, would naw be full of stinking bodies anyway, and the slot machines wouldn't be the same without all that hustle and bustle and the machines all dinging and music blaring with that edge of golden happiness when you win a line of paper tickets; that smell of sugar coming off the laughing girls' mouths, and the throng of it all he'd so been looking forward to that someone had most likely told him all about already.

 

Mocro Maffia

Leuk (genoeg, in tegenstelling tot saaie 'Anoniem") serie so far

ekphrasis

a full-scale rehearsal of a (real or imaginary) picture's form and content, trying for a wholesale transposition, a verbal equivalent

Derek Lowe - "Things I Don't Work With"

Think I finally found the blog about "lab culture" and chemistry?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride

 

God of Cookery

crazy guy thinks he's the god of cookery.  Typical Asian humour.  The food does look amazing.

 

Het Uur van de Wolf - "Drs P"

Wonderful documentary.

 

 

Who knew, Herman van Veen covered Drs P's "Troostvogel" (which he never played himself). An uncharacteristic song for Drs P, who avoided any personal feelings and connections with the topics he sang about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTsV_c85WRI&list=RDDTsV_c85WRI&start_radio=1

 

James Vincent - "Keep It Clean", discussing Dylan Mulvin's "Proxies: The cultural work of standing in"

Discusses "Lena",  the 1972 Playboy centerfold used for jpeg (and many other) algorithm verification.

 

 

One of his illustrations is the Internatiol Prototype Kilogram, used between 1889 and 2019 to define a standard for the basic unit of weight. The actual IPK is a palm-sized cylinder of platfinum-iridium alloy stored in triple-layer bell jars in an underground vault outside Paris. In order to verify this object's mass and create copies to be used as reference measures around the world the IPK had to be washed, cleaned and weighed, before being compared to six sibling kilograms. The process, as Mulvin recounts it, is beautifully ritualistic. The cleaner must soak a piece of chamois leather in a mixture of ether and ethanol for 48 hours to ensure full absorption, then rub down the IPK before washing it with steam and removed excess water with filter paper. To ensure that no impurities are left on the kilogram's body (or at least that the same impurities are left each time), every aspect of this sacrament is minutely quantified, from the amount of pressure to be applied with the chamois (10 kPa) to the wattage of the equipment used to generate the steam (350 W) and the distance of the steam nozzle from the kilogram's body (5mm).

 

'China Girls' whose faces were inserted like subliminal messages at the start of film reels to calibrate colours from the projection booth, to the 'Shirley Cards' distributed by Kodak to fulfil a similar role in commercial photography [...] In the case of the Shirley Cards, the exclusive use of white models in early calibration tests meant that the world's most popular film stock failed to capture the detail of other skin colours. [...] Beginning in the 1960s, Kodak slowly began to fix this bias in its film, but not out of any sense of racial injustice: it was a response to complaints from furtnutre makers and chocolate sellers that Kodak cameras couldn't properly capture their products' hues.

 

 

Big Mistakes

Brother who is a clergyman (Dan Levy, son from Schitt's Creek) and sister, primary school teacher, slowly get involved with Turkish and Russian gangsters.

Bit silly but a fun enough romp to watch. 

Michael Levin - "Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are)"

https://www.noemamag.com/living-things-are-not-machines-also-they-totally-are/

 

 

What places all these systems — living or not — on the same spectrum is the fact that all have aspects that are amenable to the mechanistic and agentic lenses, all exhibit surprises and competencies that our formal models do not capture, and none wear their capabilities and limitations on their sleeve (they must be determined by experiment).

An orthopedic surgeon should see your body as a simple, mechanical machine — they’ve got hammers and chisels, and their approach works very well for their remit. In contrast, a psychoanalyst should emphasize and help augment your growth as a free agent in search of meaning.

 

 

We need to come to grips with the fact that all our frames will miss important aspects of things, that it’s OK to say something about a system without claiming you’ve said everything, and that even the simplest of systems can exert surprising effects that reach higher on the continuum of agency than mere emergence of complexity or unpredictability.

Synthetic systems, which we might think are following an algorithm, may or may not have a degree of true mind, but that determination should not be based on their following an algorithm (any more than the reality of human minds isn’t revealed by their following of the laws of chemistry).

Tobias Rees - "Why AI Is A Philosophical Rupture"

https://www.noemamag.com/why-ai-is-a-philosophical-rupture/

What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.

 

 

The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold.

 

 

AI teaches us that this is not so. And not just AI, of course. Over the last two decades or so the concept of intelligence has multiplied. We now know that there are lots of other kinds of intelligence: from bacteria to octopi, from Earth systems to the spiral arms of galaxies. We are an entry in a series. And so is AI.

To argue that these other things are not “really” intelligent because their intelligence differs from ours is a bit silly. That would be like one species of birds, say Pelicans, insisting that only Pelicans “really” know how to fly.

 

 

The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves in ways no human interlocutor can, from outside of us, free from conversational narcissism.

 

In fact, one can push that a step further and say that AI systems appear to be capable of distinguishing truths from falsehoods. That’s because truth is positively correlated with a consistent logical structure. Errors, so to speak, are all unique or different. While the truth is not. And what we see in AI models is that they can distinguish between statements that conform to the patterns that they discover and statements that don’t.

So in that sense, AI systems have a nascent sense of truth.

 

 

Gardels: Karl Jaspers was best known for his study of the so-called Axial Age when all the great religions and philosophies were born in relative simultaneity over two millennia ago — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets.

 

 

The practice of writing created new possibilities for analytical thinking that led to increasingly abstract, classificatory nouns and to a form of systematic search and production of knowledge that was not seen anywhere in human history before.

 

 

Fascinatingly, what emerges from this learning process is a high-dimensional, relational space that engineers call latent — in the sense of hidden — space.

 

It is just, and this is the third thing, that this spatial map doesn’t have only the three dimensions — length, width, depth — our conscious human mind is comfortable operating in. Instead, it has many, many more dimensions. Tens of thousands and with the latest models, perhaps millions.

That is, the understanding an LLM has formed is a spatial architecture. It has a geometry that literally determines what, for an LLM, is thinkable.

It is literally the logical condition of possibility — the a priori — of the LLM.

For all we know, human brains also create latent space representations. The neurons in our brain work in a very similar fashion to how neurons work in a neural network.

Yet, despite this similarity, it appears that the latent space representations that a human brain produces and the latent space representations that an AI can produce are different from one another.

 

 

 

Bauhaus School.

When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, in 1919, many German intellectuals were deeply skeptical of the industrial age. Not so Gropius. He experienced the possibilities that new materials like glass, steel and concrete offered as a conceptual rupture with the 19th century.

And so, he argued –– very much against the dominant opinion — that it was the duty of architects and artists to explore these new materials, and to invent forms and products that would lift people out of the 19th and into the 20th century.

Today, we need something akin to the Bauhaus — but focused on AI.

We need philosophical R&D labs that would allow us to explore and practice AI as the experimental philosophy it is. 

Marcin Wichary - "The day Return became Enter"

https://aresluna.org/the-day-return-became-enter/

 

 

However, zipping the carriage from the right side of the page to the left was slower. That created a challenge: since teletypes communicated at a constant rate, the first letter arriving after a longer line could be smeared across the page, as the carriage return was still in progress.

Just as with early typewriters, any “smart” solution would be prohibitively complicated or expensive to make. But what if the character following a carriage return was guaranteed to be non-printing? This would give the teletype a chance to catch up. And so teletypes undid the early convenience of typewriters, and Carriage Return became decoupled from Line Feed. The former key moved the carriage to the left, but stayed on the same line. The latter advanced the paper to the next line, with no horizontal movement. 

 

 

With forms came a challenge rather similar to what word processors encountered: There was a difference between returning to a new line within a form field, and the act of submitting – entering – the entire form.

Enter Enter.  

Drew M Dalton - "Reality is Evil" / Philosophers must reckon with the meaning of thermodynamics

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophers-must-reckon-with-the-meaning-of-thermodynamics

 

 

We must start by admitting that the Universe is finite and will eventually end. Moreover, we must accept that the function of the Universe is to hasten this extinction. The laws of thermodynamics reveal, in other words, that what we might view as the generative power of the Universe is instead bringing about the annihilation of everything: the flourishing of life is always contributing to the eventual collapse of the cosmos.

 

 

Life is perhaps the most effective, albeit least obvious, consequence of and agent for thermodynamic decay in our immediate system, as the biophysicist Jeremy England has shown in his lab and the biologist Lynn Margulis has confirmed in field research with her son, Dorion Sagan. Everything in existence, including our species, both arises from and works in service to the destructive order of reality. Decay, it seems, is the ultimate essence of existence, which means that our being must be understood as a mode of unbecoming. It is but one additional way in which the ultimate annihilation of the Universe is accomplished.

 

 

No longer can we conceive of existence as something that is ultimately good. Nor can we conceive of it as something that is morally neutral, as others might have it. Instead, we must acknowledge that reality – which is organised antagonistically against all that it creates, and is the direct cause of the suffering of every entity it endows with consciousness – might be morally evil. If our existence means being forever at war with ourselves and our environs, and actively contributing to the suffering of everything we encounter along the way, then it is decidedly not good to be. Life is a moral catastrophe. To exist is to be unavoidably complicit in an order that is entirely evil.

 

 

Consider, for example, the practice of medicine that, while fully acknowledging the ultimate destiny of life (ie, death), nevertheless strives with tireless passion to delay the arrival of that destiny for as long as possible and to prescribe lifestyles that will enhance the quality of life in the meantime. This is a rather obvious good. What is less intuitive is that such efforts do not work in concert with nature. Medicine is not a way of affirming the intended direction of life and existence, and yet we think of the work that doctors do as ‘good’. What makes it good is precisely that it attempts to forestall, delay, slow down or put off what nature destines. In a similar way, every effort to work against and resist the entropic flow of reality must also count as good.

 

 

To do good is not to work in concert with reality, nor should we ever strive to live in harmony with nature. This would make us complicit in an entirely evil system. To do good is to break with that complicity – to seek ways of dismantling, resisting and reconfiguring the structure of reality to neutralise, alleviate or unsettle its entropic thrust. Only by pursuing goodness negatively, through acts of refusal and resistance, can we hope to animate a new ethics within the metaphysics of decay.

Introduction to Indian English

https://www.oed.com/discover/introduction-to-indian-english/?tl=true

In order to express scale or emphasis, words in adjectival positions can be reduplicated in Indian English. Some examples are:

    little-little things ‘many things that are little’,
    big-big problems ‘several sizeable problems’
    chubby-chubby cheeks ‘very chubby cheeks’ 

 

 

Many verbs can take the particle off to give some emphasis or add a negative meaning, e.g. ‘Let’s finish it off’. The intended meaning is ‘Let’s finish it and be done with it’. ‘Let’s hide it off’ carries the extra meaning of conspiracy among the interlocutors. 

Lauri Vahtre Blogi - "Empire of the absurd"

https://laurivahtre.ee/empire-of-the-absurd/

 

 

Worse yet. Russian rulers knew, or at least suspected, what was thought of them and their land in the West. From this state of affairs stems what may be Russian culture’s most agonizing problem – a deep inferiority complex. Muscovy rulers have always suspected that the West masks a mocking or even disdainful smirk in its relations with them  and this suspicion can bring about a dire, unpredictable reaction.

 

 

With regard to agricultural economics, Marx’s great student Trotsky, with Lenin’s blessing, set out to cure the peasants’ alleged “reactionary“ mindset and the obvious idiocy of rural life by executing masses of peasants in Tambov province during Russia’s civil war. But all this was just a trivial prelude. Marx’s other great student, Stalin, raised the destruction of peasants from mass murder levels to outright genocide: in 1932-1933 a state created, deliberate famine killed 3.5 to 4 million Ukrainians; other data puts this number considerably higher. The result: Marx’s detested idiocy was replaced by a great Stalinist absurdity called kolkhoz economy.

 

 

 

Oliver Milman - "The Cult of the American Lawn"

https://www.noemamag.com/the-cult-of-the-american-lawn/

 

 

The roots of this American obsession with a neat lawn are surprisingly shallow, initially imported from European sensibilities. Defenders of castles in medieval England and France would often cut back vegetation near the fortification to enable clear sight lines of potential invaders, an unintentional aesthetic that was later replicated in grand, sweeping lawns of aristocratic country estates.

 

Peter Lukacs - "Can you rewire your brain?"

https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-metaphor-of-rewiring-gets-wrong-about-neuroplasticity

 

 

This thinking can be cruel. It ignores several factors – from the social to the environmental to the genetic – that shape and constrain neuroplasticity, many of which are only partially understood. It turns healing into a moral achievement, and failure into a personal flaw. Some therapy models and self-help programmes lean into this pressure, implying that full transformation is just a matter of effort. But science tells a different story: change is possible, yes. But it’s constrained by biology and shaped by context.

Claire O'Callaghan - "Metaphors open up our minds - but can also shut them down"

https://psyche.co/ideas/metaphors-open-up-our-minds-but-can-also-shut-them-down

 

Is there danger, then, in these analogies that can delight and inspire? One risk is that they close down possibilities. They can shut down our thinking, coercing it to fit the shape of someone else’s comparison rather than our own. In feeding you an analogy, I’m not just telling you about a thing – I’m telling you how you should think about that thing and, in doing so, robbing all opportunity for your thoughts to take their own meandering leap into unmapped territories.

 

Rachel Aviv - "Agnes Callard's Marriage of the Minds"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/agnes-callard-profile-marriage-philosophy

 

Marriage is “an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The whole point of marriage is repetition.” Agnes and Arnold felt that they had entered marriage without clearly thinking through what the institution was actually for. For many couples, marriage ends up being about making a family, and, when it fails to meet other needs, the couple lovingly and generously lets it fail. But Agnes was uncomfortable with the prospect of a relationship that had lost its aspirational character

 

 

They were sharing the same space, but Agnes felt as if they were in two separate worlds. She was reminded of a line from the Icelandic novel “Independent People,” by Halldór Laxness, which she had just read: “Two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other—there is nothing so tragical as two human beings.”

 

 

In “Parallel Lives,” a study of five couples in the Victorian era, the literary critic Phyllis Rose observes that we tend to disparage talk about marriage as gossip. “But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding,” she writes. “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.”  

Ayaka Mori - "Home Alone in Osaka: Can You Crack the Neighborhood Code from Your Desk?"

https://osakaa.net/osaka-city/home-alone-osaka-code/

 

Gokinjo-zukiai isn’t what many foreigners tend to assume. The term translates to “neighborhood relations,” but it’s less about warm, fuzzy feelings and more about a deeply embedded social contract. It’s a system of mutual support and shared responsibility aimed at ensuring the smooth, safe, and predictable functioning of a densely populated community.

 

 

[...] its network of older women, the oba-chan. They are the custodians of Gokinjo-zukiai. They’re the ones sweeping the pavement in front of their homes, chatting at the corner vegetable stall, and sitting on their porches, observing the world around them. To outsiders, this might feel like surveillance. And, in a way, it is. But it’s not driven by malice. It’s a form of community oversight rooted in care and security. They act as the neighborhood’s living security system and information hub.

 

 

In Osaka, the aisatsu (greeting) is a crucial social ritual. 

 

 

The Japanese concepts of uchi (inside/in-group) and soto (outside/out-group) influence social interactions everywhere, but their application varies. In Tokyo, your “uchi” group tends to be narrowly defined: your family, your company. Your apartment acts as your fortress, and the moment you step outside, you enter the vast, anonymous “soto.” In Osaka, the boundaries are less distinct. The neighborhood itself can feel like an extension of “uchi.” Your immediate community, the local shotengai (shopping arcade), and the people you see daily occupy a gray area—sort of a semi-“uchi.”

Piotr Wozniak - "Good sleep, good learning, good life"

https://super-memory.com/articles/sleep.htm 

 

 

The hippocampus acts as the central switchboard for the brain that can easily store short-term memory patterns. However, these patterns have to be encoded in the neocortex to provide space for coding new short-term memories. This complex process of rebuilding the neural network of the brain takes place during sleep. Unlike rest or conservation of energy, this highest feat of evolutionary neural mathematics requires the brain to be shut off entirely from environmental input (in most animals) 

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki - "In Praise of Shadows"

as per April 2026, working link:

https://files.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/4905/files/2016/09/In-Praise-of-Shadows.pdf

 

Found via the excellent "Glamour" book by Virginia Postrel, shows an intriguing (to the Western eye) view of Japanese or "Easter" approach.

 

Charles Moore in the Foreword:

Flowers and gardens serve as testimonials to our own care, and breezes loosely captured can connect us with the very edge of the infinite. 

 

 

[bathrooms, tiles]

The effect may not seem so very displeasing while everything is still new, but as the years pass, and the beauty of the grain begins to emerge on the planks and pillars, that glittering expanse of white tile comes to seem as incongruous as the proverbial bamboo grafted to wood.

 

The Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, baskingin the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, "a physiological delight" he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and grean leaves.
[...]
Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their indeas.

 

A beautiful woman, no matter how lovely her skin, would be considered indecenet were she to show here bare buttocks or feet in the presence of others, and how very crude, and tasteless to expose the toilet to such excessive illumination. The cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen.

And indeed for even the sternest ascetic the fact remains that a snowy day is cold, and there is no denying the impulse to accept the services of a heater if it happens to be there in front of one, no matter how cruelly its inelegance my shatter the spell of the day. But it is on occasions like this that I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the produtcs of our industrial art - would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?

 

   

  

 

QNTM - "There is No Antimemetics Division"

Amazing book, born from the SCP Foundation, about a division to deal with antimemetics. 

Taking its logical conclusion further and further. Great read. 

 

Also:

https://qntm.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jnv4fhkVck&list=PL2RpQoIOVVKTmwcACL16VQIy-2rgpcasQ  

Nathalie Nahai - Video essays on AI

https://www.nathalienahai.com/

 

SCP Foundation

The "source" of the antimemetic book?

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/  

Jingyu - "Why Modern Chinese is Just 'English with Hanzi'"

whole blog quite interesting...

https://www.oldnorthwhale.com/p/why-modern-chinese-is-just-english  

 

 

Traditional Chinese is a language of parataxis (意合, idea-joining). It is like a traditional landscape painting; elements are placed side by side, and the relationship between them is inferred by context, intuition, and white space. There are few connectors, no strict tenses, and subject-verb agreements are loose.

English, and other Indo-European languages, are languages of hypotaxis (形合, form-joining). They are architectural blueprints. They require conjunctions, prepositions, relative clauses, and tense markers to lock every piece of information into a precise, unshakeable hierarchy.

 

 

The linguistic update was installed in two waves. The first came from 19th-century missionaries. To translate the specific theology of The Pilgrim’s Progress (translated by William Chalmers Burns,《天路历程》), they forced the English plural “We” onto the character men (们), injecting mandatory number-specificity where context once sufficed.

The second, and larger, wave came via Japan. During the Meiji Restoration, Japan encoded Western concepts: democracy, science, economy, into Wasei-kango (和制汉语, Japanese-made Chinese words). These “returnee” words were Western souls in Hanzi shells. They flooded back into China, importing not just vocabulary, but the Indo-European logic of abstract nouns and categorization.

 

 

Paulien Cornelisse - "Japan in honderd kleine stukjes"

Bit light and short, but some fun and insightful notes about Japan and Japanese culture.

 

Envy - "A War Room"

solid postrock, found by one of the playlists (Osaka?) claude made.

Jessie Buckley covering Sinead O'Connor - "Troy"

Chillingly good performance of Sinead O'Connor's "Troy" by Jessie Buckley.

Seems she does more singing/covers?  Great stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fbc9DV1Pws&list=RD8fbc9DV1Pws  

Thrash

film so silly it's enjoyable, about a big tornado (tsunami?) that brings sharks to a little town

Bill Frisell & Eyvind Kang

live in Cadogan Hall.

Amazing "structured dissonant" music (hard to describe) and amazing to see them play together. 

Casshern Sins (2008)

A remake../ reimagining? of the original 1993 (manga)

Casshern is a (robot/human?) who "killed the sun named moon", and killed Luna (...) starting The Ruin 

OK so far. 

 

Strange, alien and desolate world.  Robots think devouring Casshern will give them eternal life and protect against the Ruin.  Sophita just wants to fight everyone but is moved by his beauty.

Good music. 

Tom Waits - "Martha"

beautiful. Found via "Better Things" series

"This is a gardening show"

Gardening show with & by Zach Galifianakis.  Great stuff, particularly his conversations with kids are gold.

 

Shadow and Bone (unfinished)

meh, couldn't get into it.  Very Games of Thrones ish, but without the solid storytelling.

From wikipedia: The series is set in the Grishaverse, which comprises the nations of Ravka, Fjerda, Shu Han, Kerch, Novyi Zem, and the Wandering Isle. Each nation draws inspiration from real-world countries, reflecting elements of language, culture, and tradition from different historical periods.[1][2][3] In the Grishaverse, there exists a group of individuals referred to as "magic-users".[1] These people, known as Grisha, are practitioners of what is called "The Small Science", a unique ability that allows each Grisha to manipulate matter at the molecular level. 

Svalbard - "Lily" (One Day All of this Will End, 2015)

solid postrock

Rose Keating - "Oddbody"

body-horror stories, fairly short.  Good stuff.

All extremely physical, and without much said, yet showing depth and emotion with minimal words. Extra points for really weird stuff, like the sheep plants.

Interesting how pain is basically ignored, yet there's still the hint or background that things *could* be bad and painful. 

 

    When the knife sank into the tigh, tense muscle of her shoulder blade, she became a knot undone. She arched her back, breathing hard.
    "Good?" Mary asked.
    Jen nodded, her face smashed against the couch, legs squeezing together. She realised she had drooled on the armrest.
    Mary began sewing the wings. The repetition of the stitching soothed Jen. Each puncture of needle felt like releasing a breath held in for too long. "Tell me something about yourself," Mary said.

 

    

    The sheep wheezed, a whining, guttural giggle.
    Bridget straightened up. She placed the knife at the start of its neck, pointing the tip of the blade just below its throat.
    She pushed down. It sliced through easily, like cutting into a bowl of jelly. She cut from its collarbones down to crotch, the line clean and straight. The sheep sighed, the sound fluttering and pleasing.
    She held the line of the incision open with her hands. She reached inside the gash, moving her fingers through the tender folks with care. Under her fingertips, she felt the sheep throb.

Silent Hill 2

Didn't bother trying to geth the original working, as the stories are completely unrelated.

Pretty intense stuff. Good horror tropes, and they work really well. 

The Making of Tron

https://theasc.com/articles/making-of-tron-1982 

 

 

it required a tremendous amount of current to provide thousands of footcandles of bounce light. At one point Logan was using 12,000 amps, and the City of Burbank called the studio to notify them that they would be shut down if they continued to draw so much current. Fortunately the studio was able to rearrange their load and work things out with the city so that Logan and his crew could resume shooting after about 45 minutes.

 

 "The depth of field was so critical we were talking about half an inch, and that gets a little weird trying to play an intimate scene with a C-stand up your back. We would usually have a camera assistant with a telescopic sight with a cross-hair, and he would tell me through hand signals whether the actor was drifting ahead or behind the mark, and I would then, through hand signals, try to help the actor regain his mark, all the while giving his Academy Award winning performance.”

 

 

 

Better Things

(co-written by Louis C. K....)

Fun enough series about a mum and her three daughters, and her 80 yo English mother, and life just happening.

Snappy dialogue, not _too_ snappy. Good stuff.

The Beauty

Disney plus, "the beauty" being a substance that turns people into beautiful young versions.  And can be sexually transmitted.  But some people explode.

Agents trying to frame the big bad guy.

It's alright. Story a bit all over the place, but what's good is how sometimes whole episodes take the time to explain/show one specific story bit or character.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Good.  Proper story telling. 

Great visuals, even on a small screen from a plane.

Akira (4k, restored)

Screen on the Green, fucking amazing to see this.

The "intense" scenes where he becomes Akira were not nearly as long and slow-motion as I seem to remember them 

Superman (2025)

No it wasn't *too* bad.

I'm gonna give it 3 out of 5 stars simply because of the Lex Luthor speech, which actually made sense.

But the robots in the "antarctic cave" ... is he batman now???  Superman was always special, because he *was* superman, did not *become* it.