Alex Pheby - "Mordew"

 hints of Gormenghast, but different.

Nathan needs to help his dad, dying of some worms, in a strange city where the dead-life produces living monsters.

Anna and the Apocolypse

 fun film: Christmas Zombie Musical

Not amazing, but good fun.

bbc6 music

• Candi Station - something from "I'm Always just a prisoner" from 1969
  amazing soul
•  

bbc6 / gideon coë

• comet is coming - "summon the fire"
  again great saxophone, power!  this is a live bbc6 recording so the actual song might be different

DARKSIDE - "Liberty Bell"

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HqhNWR5OOk

Gunship - Drone Racing

 great videoclip of bad guys drone racing, both stop motion and vc

sean keanney

• Julia Stone - "Dance"
  at it again with an amazing half-parlando half-sung sad song
• the Stokes - "Heart in a cage"
  a big like Siouxie and the banshees / Iggy Pop's "the Passenger"
  

Gideon Coe

 music, Gideon Coe, bbc6, they are equivalent. But as my brain keeps shrinking with 2 grams per year, I better tag them all.  He's a hero.  Plays the best stuff.

I *think* I'm listening to the Left Outsides.... a bit like Loreena McKennit

Cillian Murphy's Limited Edition

• Serengeti - "Universe" (the Gentle Fall) - spoken word, he's a rapper but this is way different. Post-folk?! Amazing stuff.
• BC Camplight - "I Only Drink When I'm Drunk"

Atari Teenage Riot - "Revolution Action"

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8JBUktSxvQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plAr3adKbyc

The Lighthouse

 intense, gripping black and white paranormal mystery. Great film.

Kunststof

 aardig interview met Joost Prinsen (raakt soms de draad een beetje kwijt)

Ook, prachtnummer "Zing Dan" van Jenny Arean.

Leo Blokhuis.

Instrument dat gebruikt werd is de trautonium; decennia geleden door Scala (?) ontworpen in Berlijn. Is ook gebruikt voor de vogelgeluiden in Hitchcock's The Birds.

Ook: Manuel Göttsching - voorloper van techno, maakte in '81 "E2-E4" in Berlijn.

R.F. Kuang - "The Burning God" (part 3 of the Poppy War Trilogy)

We Are The Champions

 Strange series on the craziest of competitions: running down a steep hill after a cheese, eating the hottest chillies in the world, dog dancing, frog jumping.

Enjoyable to watch (most of it: I skipped the fantasy hairdressing)

making of "Take My Breath Away"

 Composed by Giorgio Moroder, lyrics by "a car mechanic".

He also did Scarface.

Terry Nunn auditioned for princess Leia!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/16/giorgio-moroder-take-my-breath-away-top-gun-how-we-made-berlin-tom-cruise

the comnments are gold

apophasis

 Apophasis (/əˈpɒfəsɪs/; Greek: ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι apophemi,[1] "to say no") is a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up. Accordingly, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony.

The device is also called paralipsis (παράλειψις) – also spelled paraleipsis or paralepsis – or occupatio, and known also as praeteritio, preterition, or parasiopesis (παρασιώπησις).

As a rhetorical device, apophasis can serve a number of purposes.

It can be employed to raise an ad hominem or otherwise controversial attack while disclaiming responsibility for it, as in, "I refuse to discuss the rumor that my opponent is a drunk." This can make it a favored tactic in politics.

Scooter - "Fck 2020"

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu3k2PJumfI

This made me laugh out loud.

spooky playlist spotify

 * Echo and the Bunnymen - "Nocturnal Me"

George Lakoff - "Metaphors we live by"

Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity - a limited resource, even money - we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.
TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE, and TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY are all metaphorical concepts. They are metaphorical since we are using our everyday experiences with money, limited resources, and valuable commodities to conceptualize time. This isn't a necessary way for human beings to conceptualize time, it is tied to our culture. There are cultures where time is none of these things.

 

In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept (e.g., the battling aspects of arguing), a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. For example, in the midst of a heated argument, when we are intent on attacking our opponent's position and defending our own, we may lose sight of the cooperative aspects of arguing. Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity, in an effort at mutual understanding.

These examples show that the metaphorical concepts we have looked at provide us with a partial understanding of what communication, argument, and time are and that, in doing this, they hide other aspects of these concepts. It is important to see that the metaphorical structuring involved here is partial, not total. If it were total, one concept would actually be the other, not merely be understood in terms of it. For example, time isn't really really. If you spend your time trying to do something and it doesn't work, you can't get your time back.

I'm thinking of ending things (2020)

 Based on the book by Iain Reid.  Follows most of the plot, but takes a different ending.  

I  missed Kaufman's logic of the fantasy, the girl, having agency, fighting her creator. 

Quite good.

Geoff Manaugh - "A burglar's guide to the city"

Interesting book, although a bit dry at times. Starts great with history about Leslie and architecture, meanders a bit. 

[George Leonidas] Leslie was so dedicated to detail, so confident in his abilities, that he would often case the interiors of banks both during business hours and long after: before his gang robbed the Manhattan Savings Institution in October 1878, Leslie had already broken into the bank twice, stealing nothing, simply checking out the building for himself and verifying that he had the correct combination for the vault door. This gives Leslie the air of an addict, seemingly unable to resist the lure of an uninhabited architectural space emptied of its workers, unable to turn down the illicit thrill of a bank interior that temporarily belonged to him alone, having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it.

Here in Northampton, Leslie's gang turned their attention from space to time. [...] Anticipating the watchman's future narrative of the heist, which would naturally include details of when the perpetrators arrived, how long they spent in the vault, and, most important, what time they fled into the shadows of the New England night, they also tampered with the watchman's clocks, stopping or breaking them.

... his extensive, homeschooled expertise in the city's fire code, explaining how the city's own regulations can be read from the outside-in by astute burglars, turning Toronto's fire code into a kind of targeting system. Simply by looking at the regulated placement of fire escapes on the sides of residential high-rises, Dakwsin could deduce which floors ad fewer apartments (fewer would mean larger, more expensive apartments, more likely to be filled with luxury goods)

... the idea of designing out crime is by no means unique to our era. In nineteenth-century Paris, for example, acting under instructions from Emperor Napoléon III, urban administrator Georges-Eugène Haussmann instituted an extraordinarily ambitious series of urban improvements. He ordered the demolition of entire neighborhoods, the erasure of while streets from the center of Paris, and the widespread replacement of them both with the broad, leafy, and beautiful boulevards Paris is known for today. This was not motivated by aesthetics, however, but was explicitly a police project, a deliberate - and quite successful - effort to redesign the city so that the streets would be too wide to barricade, the back alleys no longer winding or confusing enough for insurgents and revolutionaries to disappear or get away. The urban landscape of Paris became a police tool, its urban core reorganized so aggressively that popular uprisings would henceforth be spatially impossible.

John Milton - "Paradise Lost" (audiobook)

 An abridged audiobook with various actors.

transcriber (woman) - "your muse is nothing if not busy"
John Milton (Patrick Stewart) - "The call is urgent. Our world falls in upon itself. These words I take as gifts from her can shape to what we've lost. There is so much to explain."

Louis Theroux - "Gotta get theroux this"

 Listened to this. Was enjoyable. For sure must have missed bits because I used it during bouts of insomnia, but overall honestly enjoyable.

J'ai perdu mon corps (I lost my body)

 Nice French animation about a hand searching for its missing body.f

Louis Theroux - "Grounded"

 Some great interviews with people during lockdown, including Helena Bonham Carter and Jon Ronson.

existential mash-ups

Maria Manson - "All I Want For Christmas is the Beautiful People"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1X3d2zWx94

Mariah Carey vs Radiohead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE4shVkwqIk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPIm1NnmVCc&feature=youtu.be

Slayer vs Katrina & the waves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MrMfoHejiw

Slayer vs B-52's - "Raining Lobsters"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnrfqPoX4WU

Dio and Gloria Gaynor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYoohbsQ9fk

Michelle Buteau - stand up comedy show

 On netflix. About her Dutch husband. Enjoyable enough.

Erin Morgenstern - "The Starless Sea"

 In style, both story and writing, quite akin to The Night Circus, but not in a bad way. Quite enjoying it.

Let's Eat Grandma - "Rapunzel"

 found in the Iggy Pop BBC 6 playlist on spotify

Brave New World

Elke Wiss - "Socrates op sneakers"

R. F. Kuang - The Poppy War trilogy

 Chinese history in myth form, with Rin as a Speerie able to summon The Phoenix.

Enjoyable although not written amazingly well - sometimes it feels rushed - and Rin's attitude is bothering me. Waiting for the final book.

The Boys

 Had forgotten about this series. Waiting until all have come out for season two.

China Miéville - "The City and the City"

 Enjoyable so far. Maybe this will cure my anti-C.M. (since "Un-lun-dun") antipathy.

Professor Elemental - "Fighting Trousers" (and other songs)

 weird stuff. Funny. Crazy quick lyrics.

also: "Weird Weird West"

and: "I'm British"

random links from lobste.rs

•  the difference between 14nm and 7nm
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kQUXpZpLXI
• hacking Tony Abbott's passport from an instagram photo
  https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram
• Matt Blaze and the nein nines mystery of Russian spies being caught
  https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/neinnines/
• Super Mario Bros 3. in 3 minutes - insane reverse engineering
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWbZFj-cLvk

A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood

 Great film.  Amazing acting from Tom Hanks.

Eva Griffin - "Soko sucking on Kristen's fingers, 2016"

 

Soko sucking on Kristen’s fingers, 2016

Eva Griffin

Hands on the window she
wears the red like a challenge
all dotted up in the parking lot.
I hadn’t washed my hair that morning just
tussled it on my way out to meet her
curls wet, tucked neat
into a baseball cap.
I can’t even see her eyes,
my own face in the frames
suspended there between
smoke breaks and grease.
When she takes my finger in her
mouth it feels like I’m being fed,
I hold her tight by the nail
of my thumb and let her wash
over me pink. Cheeks fill fast
counting the white polka dots
on her blouse until it all blurs or
turns into my open mouth or
the sun disc of my reflection or
all the buttons I’ve ever undone or
her becoming the endless pattern or
her in the doorway of our bedroom or
thick cream left in the fridge to spoil or
skin left wrinkling in the bath or
the towel peeled open, discarded or
fresh sheets screaming on the floor or
her small breasts hanging over me or
a second of breath before laughter or
sitting on the edge of the mattress afterwards
bridle roses unfurling from my chest
the vines whispering hello I love
you is it enough to make time slow
down until we are just this:
committed onto canvas
messy, half-asleep, sitting in my car and
reaching.

Tunnel 29

 10 episode series about "Tunnel 29," a tunnel dug under the Berlin Wall, rescueing 29 people.

Interesting enough, but I've been spoiled by "Shit town" and the such. Not as intense, somehow. 

random songs from Iggy

 2020-09-04

• Jo Harrop & Jamie McCredie - "Guilty"
  very country-singer-songer-like
• Angel Bat Dawid - "Transition East"
  Forlorn saxophone, bit like Etienne Jaumet?

Appearances vs Experiences: What Really Makes Us Happy

 https://fs.blog/2020/07/appearances-vs-experiences/

When we think that the way a building looks will dictate our experience living in it, we are mistaking the map for the territory. Architectural flourishes soon fade into the background. What matters is the day -to-day experience of living there, when relationsihps matter much more than how things look. Proximity to friends is a higher predictor of happiness than charming old brick.

[Charles Montgomery] A person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.

So why do we make this mistake? Drawing on the work on psychologist Daniel Gilbert, Montgomery explains that it's a matter of us thinking we'll get used to cmmuting (an experience) and won't get used to the nicer living environment (a thing).

The opposite is true. While a bigger garden and spare bedroom soon cease to be novel, every day's commute is a little bit different, meaning we can never get quite used to it. There is a direct linear downwards relationship between commute time and life satisfaction, but there's no linear upwards correlation between house size and life satisfaction. As Montgomery says, "The problem is, we consistently make decision that suggest we are not so good as distinguishing between ephemeral and lasting pleasures.

[...] We maximize our chances at happiness when we prioritise our experience of life instead of acquiring things to fill it with.

The Membranes - "Breathe In, Breathe Out"

 fun song. but also, their other stuff is not bad. bit post rock?

Beth Singler - "Why is the language of transhumanists and religion so similar?" (Aeon magazine)

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar

 'Orthogenesis assumes that variation is not random but is directed towards fixed goals.' [Peter Bowles, Evolution: the history of an Idea, 1983] So evolution isn't something that happens to us; rather it is what we make of it, and how we make our selves. Taken a step further, orthogenesis can be read to imply that intention is what brings about change.

This view of human history has a distinctively modern flavour. It stands in contrast to an older, more cyclical model of time, in which 'history waxes and wanes like the moon', as the historian Keith Thoams puts it in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Because everything moves in cycles, Thomas argues, 'the highest aesthetic and ethical virtue lay in imitation, or rather emulation'. Here an inventor becomes someone who finds what has been lost, not omeone who comes up with something new. But there was a growing grasp of change in Europe from the 16th century onwards, Thomas argues; people developed a fresh awareness of the differences between their world and that of their ancestors, based on data-points as simple as the dates of publication in books, fresh off brand-new printing presses. Such shifts led to the belief that knowledge was cumulative, not cyclical - which is the mindset of the scientist and of the ultra-rationalist. If time marchs on, then of course religion becomes old, vestigial, to be replaced.

Religious worldviews often retain something of the cyclical view of history, where old books are not relics but the foundation stones of knowledge.

A god-like being of infinite knowing (the singularity); an escape of the flesh and this limited world (uploading our minds); a moment of transfiguration or 'end of days' (the singularity as a moment of rapture); prophets (even if they work for Google); demons and hell (even if it's an eternal computer simulation of suffering), and evangelists who wear smart suits (just like the religious ones do). Consciously and unconsciously, religious ideas are at work in the narratives of those discussing, planning, and hoping for a future shaped by AI. 

Occupation

 Scifi about aliens invading a small Australian village. Strange jumping story, not a real plot line, over the top slowmotion.

M. John Harrison - "You Should Come With Me Now"

Some interesting and really strange stories (about the man trying to escape from a prison), some of them less interesting. 

Train From Busan

 amazing zombie film. Gets everything right; the action, the logic, the pathos.

The Fall

 series with Gilliam Anderson as detective

Daniel Mason - "A registry of my passage upon earth"

 Collectin of short(er) stories. Few of them actually grabbed me. 

That, he said, was why he no longer trusted his counselors, who ahd the intelligence of a fiteen-year-old bride, with none of the advantages.

(from "The Miraculous Discovery of Passmetichus I")

Miracle Workers

 fun series with Steve Buscemi and Daniel Ratcliffe about Heaven Inc trying to get two people to fall in love. Based on a book that wasn't so special (based on just the sample I read)

music from iggy pop

• noveller
• myrkur - scandinavian, like death can dance, loreena mckinnit
• messer chaps - (Russian?) instrumental surf-y

Years and Years

six part series by Russel T Davies about the future, from 2024 to 2034, roughly. Pretty dystopian, how Britian gets a terrible prime minister, Vivian Cook, an amazing role from Emma Thompson, creates concentration camps, Trump gets chosen again, the world is on fire.

Of course, it all ends in the usual Russel T. Davies style - gotta make 'm feel good! - as he always shies away from daring to take the final steps (Charlie Brooker from Black Mirror could teach him a thing or two) to make it truly impactful. But oh well. Nice nonetheless. Lots of Mancurian accents.

Peter Schjeldahl - "77 sunset me"

poet and art critic. Wonderful essay in the New Yorker of 2019-12-23, basically a small autobiography, although he described failing writing one.

The Girl with all the gifts

Nice horror film where "second generation" zombies - embryos from zombiefied people - turn out to be different and not completely zombie like. Enjoyable.

Lawrence Wrigth - "Crossroads" (the New Yorker, July 20, 2020)

Before retreating from Caffa, the Tartar general, Khan Jani Beg, ordered the diseased bodies of dead warriors catapulted over the city walls, in one of the first instances of biological warfare. Panicked citizens took to boats [...] A dozen ships made it to Sciliy, in October, 1347.

Sicilians were appalled to find on their shores boats with dead men still at their oars. Other sailors, dead or barely alive, were in their bunks, covered with foul-smelling sores. The horrified Sicilians drove the ships back to sea, but it was too late. Rats and fleas, the carriers of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the [black] plague, quickly infested the port of Messina. By January, Italy was engulfed. Ships arriving in the Venetian vassal sstate of Ragusa - present-day Dubrovnik - were required to sit at anchor for quaranta giorni, or forty days, which is where the term "quarantine" comes from.

War of the Worlds (series, 2019)

Good adaptation. They do a good job keeping the aliens away from the viewer from the most time (as in, the master aliens, because the robo-dog thingies - with their idiosynchronous but strangely mechanical noises - are just the guard)

Jeff Vandermeer - "The Astronauts"

Enjoyable enough short story of the three astronauts in the world of "Borne".  More mythical and abstract.  Some great sentences, but there seems to be little plot.

Behind The Curve

Amazing documentary about flat earthers.  At the end they kind of accidentally prove the earth is round.

The Straight Story

David Lynch tells the story about a man going to visit his brother by traveling on a lawnmower.

Donald Knuth interview

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/

A person's success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you ca do something really well but there are other things at which you're failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you've got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.

Lilith and the Draconcopes - Maiden-headed tempters from the Talmud to Boccaccio

Interesting enough article about why the snake so often has a woman's head with long blond curls. How Lilith was Adam's first wife, not from his rib, but as equals, thus banished, then became the snake.

hapox legomenon, a word that only occurs once in the Bible

No County For Old Men

Again, good.  Forgot that technically we don't know if the hitman survives.

The Old Guard

Enjoyable action/fiction with Charlize Theron (?) as very-old god with a small band of other immortals who cannot die and thus fight to right wrongs. Obviously, in hollywood wishes, a first of many. Enjoyable film.

Richard E. Nisbett - "The Bugs in Our Mindware"

http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/the-bugs-in-our-mindware-rp

Stereotypes include "introvert," "party animal," "police officer,", "Ivy Leaguer," "physician," "cowboy," "priest." Such stereotypes come with rules about the customary way that we behave, or should behave, toward people who are characterized by the stereotypes.

In common parlance, the word "stereotype" is a derogatory term, but we would get into trouble if we treated physicians the same as police officers, or introverts the same as good-time Charlies. There are, however, two problems with stereotypes: They can be mistaken in some or all respects, and they can exert undue influence on our judgments about people.

It's sad but true that you're actually more likely to get a correct read on [her] if you know her social class than if you don't. In general, it's the case that upper-middle-class children perform better in school than working-class children. Whenever the direct evidence about a person or object is ambiguous, background knowledge in the form of a schema or stereotype can increase accuracy of judgments to the extent that that the stereotype has some genuine basis in reality. The much sadder fact is that working-class Hannah starts life with two strikes against her. People will expect and demand less of her, and will perceive her performance as being worse than if she were upper middle class.

We know about spreading activation effects because conitive psychologists find that encountering a given word or concept makes us quicker to recognize related word and concepts. For example, if you say the word "nurse" to people a minute or so before you ask them to say "true" or "false" to statements such as "hospitals are for sick people," they will say "true" more rapidly than if they hadn't just heard the word "nurse."

Incidental stimuli that drift into the cognitive stream can affect what we think and what we do, including even stimuli that are completely unrelated to the cognitive task at hand. Words, sights, sounds, feelings, and even smells can influence our understanding of objects and direct our behavior towards them. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending.

Which hurrican is likely to kill more people? One named Hazel or one named Horace? Certainly seems it could make no difference. What's in a name? Especially one selected at random by a computer. In fact, however, Hazel is likely to kill lots more people. Female-named hurricanes don't seem as dangerous as male-named ones, so people take fewer precautions.

It's possible to make fewer errors in judgment by following a few simple suggestions.

Remember that all perceptions, judgments, and beliefs are inferences and not direct readouts of reality. This recognition should prompt an appropriate humility about just how certain we should be about our judgments, as well as a recognition that the views of other people that differ from our own may have more validity than our intuitions tell us they do.

Be aware that our schemas affect our construals. Schemas and stereotypes guide our understanding of the world, but they can lead to pitfalls that can be avoided by recognizing the possibility that we may be relying too heavily on them. We can try to recognize our own stereotype-driven judgments as well as recognize those of others.

Remember that incidental, irrelevant perceptions and cognitions can affect our judgment and behavior. Even when we don't know what those factors might be, we need to be aware that much more is influencing our thinking and behavior than we can be aware of. An important implication is that it will increase accuracy to try to encounter objects and people in as many different circumstances as possible if a judgment about them is important.

Finally, be alert to the possible role of heuristics in producing judgments. Remember that the similarity of objects and events to their prototypes can be a misleading basis for judgments. Remember that causes need not resemble effects in any way. And remember that assessment of the likelihood or frequency of events can be influenced simply by the readiness with which they come to mind.

Christophe André - "Proper Breathing Brings Better Health"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/proper-breathing-brings-better-health/

Cardiac Coherence

The method was developed based on the understanding that slow, deep breathing increeases the activity of the vagus nerve, a part of parasympathetic nervous system; the vagus nerve controls and also measures the activity of many internal organs. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, calmness pervades the body: the heart rate slows and becomes regular; blood pressure decreases, muscles relax. When the vagus nerve informs the brain of these changes, it, too, relaxes, increasing feelings of peacefulness. Thus, the technique works through both neurobiological and physchological mechanisms.

Cardiac coherence's stabilization of the heartbeat can dampen anxiety powerfully. Conversely, patients with overactive heartbeats are sometimes misdiagnosed as victims of panic attacks because their racing heartbeat affects their mind.

A typical cardiac coherence exercise involves inhaling for five seconds, then exhaling for the same amount of time (for a 10-second respitory cycle). Biofeedback devices make it possible to observe on a screen how this deep, regular breathing slows and stabilizes the beats.

[They] showed that 20 minutes of slow breathing exercises (six respiration cycles per minute) before going to bed significantly improves sleep. Insomniac participants went to sleep faster, woke up less frequently in the night and went back to sleep faster when they did wake up. On average, it took them only 10 minutes to fall asleep, almost three times faster than normal. The investigations attributed the results both to the calming mediated by the parasympathetic system and to the relaxing effect of focused breathing.

Therapists often suggest the "365 method": at least three times a day, breathe at a rhythm of six cycles per minute (five seconds inhaling, five seconds exhaling) for five minutes. And do it every day, 365 days a year. Some studied even suggest that, in addition to providing immediate relief, regular breathing exercises can make people less vulnerable to stress, by permanently modifying brain circuits.

Six Techniques for Relieving Stress

• stand up straight - facilitates the free play of the respiratory muscles
• follow your breath - observe your respiratory movements: be aware o each inhalation and exhalation
• abdominal breathing - breathe "through your stomach" as much as possible
• rhythmic breathing - near the end of each inhalation, pause briefly while mentally counting "1, 2, 3" and holding the air before exhaling. Can also be done after exhaling. Induces a beneficial slowing of the breathing rate.
• alternate nostrils - breathe in and out slowly through one ostril, holding the other one closed using your finger, then reverse and continue by alternating regularly. Variation: inhale through one nostril and exhale through the other. Research shows that what's most important is breathing through the nose, which is somewhat more soothing than breathing through your mouth.
• think reassuring thoughts while breathing

Jef Vandermeer - "Borne"

Cillian Murphy mixtapes

• Dan Sheenan - Evidence Of Living
  not sure what to think of this. I think I like it.
• 
  

Colin Benders - live synths

Dark (s3)

Fortunately there was a recap. Things are still confusing but manage to follow some of the main threads.  Had forgotten how they use a song and silent cuts, one in each episode. Must definitely check out this playlist. (ep 3 has a good one, ep 4 as well)

Giri / Haji

Good series about Tokyo and London police, yakuza and family. Tokyo cop goes undercover in London to retrieve his brother who killed a yakuza member. His daughter follows him.

Akame Ga Kill

Amusing enough anime about Tatsuro joining the "Night Guard" (?), opposing the empire using Ancient Weapons.  Not terribly gripping, but okay.

The Sinner

Impressive series about a woman murdering a guy on the beach in daylight and admitting to the murder... but nothing is what it seems.  Although not as moody as True Detective, a good watch.

Blick Bassy - "Ake"

From Cameroon.  Haunting and slow.

David C Krakauer - Will brains or algorithms rule the kingdom of science?

https://aeon.co/essays/will-brains-or-algorithms-rule-the-kingdom-of-science


interesting essay about epistomolgy and ontology, neural networks and learning.





"Solving chess solves chess, not thought"




Gödel discovered that in every strictly formal mathematical system, there are statements that cannot be confirmed or refuted even when tehy are derived from the axioms of the system itself. The axioms of a formal system allow for the possibility of contradictions, and it is these contradictions that constitute the basis of the experience of paradox. Gödel's basic insight was that any system of rules has a natural domain of application - but when rules are applied to inputs that are not of the same structure which guided the rules' development, then we can expect weirdness.

Thirteenth

Terryfying gripping documentary about the history and current-day state of institutionalized racism in the United States.

Platoon

Had seen it, but still good.

Sylvia Plath - "Ariel"

Morning Light

one cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and florid

Uncut Gems

Crazy busy fast-paced (dialogue'd) story of Adam Sandler as jewel salesman and conman trying to sell a large stone, constantly borrowing things from friends which he then pawns.  Too fast almost.  I missed the depth to his character. Yes he breaks down. But who cares?

The Gentlemen (2020)

Latest Guy Ritchie film.  The usual British crime stuff. Nice.

Adam Kay - "This is going to hurt"

Very easy and enjoyable read about a junior doctor's experiences.  Funny.  Fluffy.

Hannah Gadsby - "Douglas"

Great show.

To be fair, it did not have the emotional impact of her "Nanette" show. (I seem to have missed recording that here. That show was fucking phenomenal.)

That does not matter. She is amazing. She makes "The Curious Event of the Dog in the Night Time" in a standup comedy routine. With sad sad moments. Where we all laugh. That's comedy. That's true talent. You're laughing and simultaneously you go "wtf"

Da 5 Bloods

Why the triumphant music during the fighting scene when their helicopter goes down?  This is not a glorious battle. Spike Lee is a great director; this is a *decision* (thanks Hannah Gadsby)
Writing this while still watching. Wondering if I'll get it later on.

The Vast of Night

Amazing continuous shots. Not just technical, they reinforce how the small town, the people, the radiostation and the switch board, are all connected.

The storytelling is good. And the writing.
"I've seen good people go bad, and smart people go mad." (Mabel Blanche, when she tells Everett And Fae (? the girl radio operator) about her life.
Her monologue is amazing. how "they" made people focus on stupid things, on losing weight, on fashion, on anything, not realizing they were being controlled. How thus, "they" made wars happen.


Some great guitar music.


"Cut the gas, you were a mile wide!"  [not even close]

"You are on the stick with me tonight!" [exasperated, you're driving me crazy / making things difficult for me?]

Señor Coconut - "El Baile Aleman" (A Latin Tribute to Kraftwerk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGnFF5w5sro

Octavia E. Butler - "Bloodchild"

short eponymous story and others, including a few essays.

Good writing.  The short story about how people cannot talk anymore was interesting. Her afterword after each story made it particularly interesting.

Upload

Enjoyable series about a virtual digital afterlife "Upload" where boyfriend falls in love with his tech support "angel". Bit over the top, to the point where they don't take themselves seriously. Took me a moment to get that.

Max Porter - "Grief is the Thing with Feathers"

poetry, novella?

Amazing story of a mother who has died, leaving Dad and Boys behind. And Crow. Chapters alternate between them. Who Crow is, is left to the reader. Mystical, mesmerizing.

Amazing read.





But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.




We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.





BOYS

She was beaten to death, I once told some boys at a party.
Oh shit mate, they said.
I lie about how you died, I whispered to Mum.
I would do the same, she whispered back.




Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.

Warren Ellis - "Because I Was A Girl"

Moses Sumney - "also als also and and and"

Spoken word. Haunting synths and synthetic saxophones with spoken word.

Quite X-Rated style. Nice.

Shadow

Enjoyable enough wūxiá style film, about three warring kingdoms over Jing City. All black and white in a neverending rain where only the blood runs red. Bits of it ar a bit boring and seem to make fun of the genre. Particularly the king is a bit irritating. But the ship slowly sailing towards the city is nice, as is the ensuing battle.

National Theatre plays Coriolanus with Tom Hiddleston

(Marcius) You shout me forth in acclamations hyperbolical; As if I loved my little should be dieted In praises sauc'd with lies (Marcius to his wife) Wouldst thou have laugh'd had I come coffin'd home, That weep'st to see me triumph? (Marcius) Oh world, thy slippery turns!

Julia Phillips - "Disappearing Earth"

Thirteen loosely interlocking stories, starting with the disappearance of two girls. We follow their mother, loose acquaintances, almost random people, but all connected. Situated in Kamchatka, far removed from Russia, with their own native people I never heard of before. I had trouble following the connections between the chapters (each chapter another group, another main character). As such, it was not as gripping as I hoped it was. The doctor came close enough that they could smell each other: the doctor sharp with antiseptic wipes, cold circulated air, the waxed fruit flavor of lip balm tucked underneath, and Valentina slippery with nervousness. Everyone looked better at a distance. Everyone sounded sweetest when you did not have to hear them talk too long. After her husband hung up, Natasha skated past her brother at the wall, their mother cleaning her glasses beside him. Loving someone close-up - that was difficult. He let out a goose's hiss at that, kkkh, air forced from the back of his throat. She had no time to pause and take her panic in hand, so instead she rode it, shock turned to speed in her legs. No one in this world cared enough about what Oksana treasured, but only Anton's disregard ended up feeling like love. It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No. You want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter.

Homecoming (season 2)

Enjoyable enough. Slow paced story telling, but okay.

End of the F***ing world (season 2)

Still enjoyable. Took a little while to get into it. Never realized: it takes place in England, but they give it a really American backdrop; empty roads. Small road side restaurants. Dont' remember that from the first season. Also, the guy who did much of the score / soundtrack, Graham Coxon (he's from Blur?) has some nice swamp rock stuff.

Malcolm Gladwell - "Talking to Strangers" (as audiobook)

Interesting enough about spies and, unfortunately, inbred racism. Levine - "Duped" - we trust people by default. Only when there are triggers, we start to doubt. Supposedly, we need "enough" triggers or red flags to not believe someone. Saying in hindsight "how did you not pick up on that [red flag]?" is the wrong question. The question is: how many red flags were there?



Finished.  Enjoyable listen, but he often seems to love his own theory too much. There are lots of interesting issues and stories here, but he loves the simplicity of people "just not" knowing how to talk to strangers. Ignoring inbred racism, lust, evil.

Ip Man - Ip Man 2 - Ip Man 3

Nice "wūxiá" style (like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) films, based on a true Chinese martial arts expert popularizing wing chun ("Chinese kung fu"?) Stories made more popular of course, but still. Ip Man 3 - particularly liked the duel between Ip man and Evil Tattoo guy; different styles but obviously equals. They use "shifu" a lot: https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&text=%E5%B8%AB%E5%82%85 Shi = 師 = teacher Fu = 父 = father

The People vs OJ Simpson

interesting. and harsh to see in the current George Floyd death context.

covid-19 madness

parodies Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Eo9M4-BrJA Michael Jackson - Billy Jean - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygdB-ZE0daY Taylor Swift - ... that one famous song - Do Re Me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMBh-eo3tvE John Lennon / Beatles - Imagine - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7GAn7s3c0k Everything I learned about COVID-19 from horror films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUdV7Xf9sT4

untools.co - tools to help you tackle problems

interesting. must look into this. https://untools.co/

Carrie Fisher - "The Princess Diaries"

While somewhat entertaining, it's a very superficial account of her work on the first Star Wars films and her affair with Harrison Ford. The writing style is light hearted, but it becomes a bit of a trick after a while. Listening to her is okay, but too often exclamations out of surprise! wonder! fear! uncertainty!! Very American?

music - bbc6 - gideon coe

Castles in the Sky has created the "Isolation Cassette Tapes" and the "Isolation Tapes Compact Disc" Heard a few tracks and seems amazing, particularly * ffion - "This Limbo" * Imperfect Stranger - "Hymn To The Sun" Now, live again, Lewsberg - "Through the Garden" Misty in Roots - "Peace and Love" (BBC session 15/09/1980)

Philip Larkin - "Aubade"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDr_SRhJs80 Aubade By Philip Larkin I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Camilla Bruce - "You Let Me In"

Dark sort-of fairytale of a girl who has a faery friend Pepperjack: he drinks her blood, he makes love to her. Her family tells her she's mad, but all through her life she keeps believing. And gruesome deaths happen in the family. Quite dark story about child abuse and the mental walls/worlds the human mind pulls up when threatened/abused all through their life.

Tennessee Williams - "A Streetcar Named Desire" (play, book)

Gripping story of Blance DuBois, who has lost her Belle estate, goes to her sister Stella since she has nowhere to go, being driven out out Laurel after indecent behaviour with many men and a 17 yo boy. Read the play. Harrowing. Saw the Young Vic recording with Gillian Anderson, amazing. But harsh.

Octavia E. Butler - "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents"

Amazing story about post apocalyptic America. People being addicted to "pyromania", or "ro", and wanting to burn everything. Neighbourhoods with large walls around them. Main character has to flee when her neighbourhood gets raised. She is writing "Earthseed", basically a new religion, about God being Change, to make mankind reach the stars. Enjoyed the second book as well, although the pace of the first half of the first book is nowhere to be found. "It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their faear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach themm, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching." All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund, Understand this. Use it. Shape God. Pray, But beware, Your desires, Whether or not you achieve them Will determine who you become

Steven Poole - "A Word for Every Day of the Year"

Entertaining, though not every word is great. 20th of May: Quodlibetarian: "people who express half-formed opinions on any subject under the sun. [...] one willing to talk, as though knowledgeably, about anything at all."

Wind of Change

Amazing podcast investigating whether "Wind of Change" by the Scorpions was written by the CIA to further the opening of the cold war East Europe. Wonderful facts. About the Glomar expedition, where a fake mining ship grabbed parts of a Russian nuclear submarine. Asking the CIA for information resulted in the very first "we cannot confirm or deny"... Being glomarred, it's now called. About how the CIA, via front companies, made musicians go to communist countries. Maybe even Nina Simone, without her knowing it (she hated the USA, denounced it, calling it the United Snakes of America)

"Maniac"

Series on netflix. Not yet sure where this is going. retro-future situation. Old screens and VHS tapes, and yet mind altering drugs. Girl's sister: same girl as from Ozark. Great series. Bit saccharine at the end? Who cares. Not too much. "If an addict dies, do you think it's suicide?"

Unorthodox

Amazing short series about a girl fleeing from her orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Williamsburg, NY, to Berlin. Main actress... Sira Haas? Something Haas.... She's amazing.

The Sound - "Skeletons" (From the Lion's Mouth)

Bit like old fashioned The Cure

Emily St. John Mandel - "Station Eleven"

Amazing post-apocalypse story, after a pandemic "Georgian Flu", how fitting, has wiped out most of mankind, of Kirsten who travels with the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors performing Shakespeare for the few communities left in America. Great back and forth between the post apocalyptic scenes and pre-pandemic moments where she was a child actor, supporting a main character who is basically dead all throughout the book, actor Artur, his three (ex) wives and his friend and laywer Clark, who she meets at the very end, as he has been stranded in an airport since Year One. Beautiful character building and story telling. Strange to read during covid-19. How things we take for granted, are not. How little attention we pay the world around us. Jeevan lay on the sofa, entertaining flashes of random memory and thinking of things like cappuccinos and beer while Frank worked on his latest ghostwriting project, a memoir of a philanthropist whose name he was contractually forbidden from mentioning. Jeevan kept thinking of his girlfriend, his house in Cabbagetown, wondering if he was going to see either of them again. Cell phones ahd stopped working by then. His brother had no landline. Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall. As Jeevan walked on alone he felt himself disappearing into the landscape. He was a small, insignificant thing, drifting down the shore. He had never felt so alive or so sad. He bought another tea, because the first one had gone cold, and also he was beset now by terrible fears and walking to the kiosk seemed like purposeful action. Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn't noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn't yet known that everything was coming undone.

Bright Eyes - "Persona Non Grata"

Bit Placebo like in voice, though way more muted guitar wise.

Chelsea Peretti & Reggie Watts

Fun songs about Oat Milk and being late with coffee. (Reggie Watts, him of fuck-stack...fuckstack)

N. K. Jemisin - "The City We Are (Great Cities Trilogy)"

Written wonderfully and I'm quite enjoying it. One thing that currently slightly irks me is the wishy-washy description of power and city-ness. There's multiverses. Sure. Cities squash through planes. Okay. Cities have power, and the Enemy can't fight them after they are born, but can stop the birth from happening. Okay. But where do they get their power from. What are the rules? Currently it seems the moment one of the boroughs, Aislyn (State Island), Bronca (the Bronx), Brooklyn, Manny (Manhatten), Padmima (Queens) "tap" into their power, they can just expel the Enemy. Is it that easy? I wonder if we will learn more of the rules, the backdrop, those infinite planes and multiverses (why do born cities squash through thousands of planes?) and I hope we get a deeper glimpse of the characters of each of these people.

creepy / swing / cabaret / piano

nice playlist on spotify This Way To Egress - "Rogue Trip" (like a slow sad Gogol Bordello)

The Bullfight - "The Death of Martin van Dongen" (La Chasse)

Wonderful honkytonk piano piece.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

www.anceintmarinerbigread.com

Tara Westover - "Educated"

Immensily gripping rooted in autobiography story of a girl growing up in a conservative Mormon family. Particularly how her dad assigns every action to God and his angels, how he hurls iron bars and other heavy objects in the junkyard towards the pile where his daughter stood, not caring whether the thrown junk would hit her "because angels guide us". Or how she got pierced by metal and fell down. How twice they crashed with their car after driving at night. The feeling I had when she described how she didn't know the word "holocaust", or how her brother kept dominating the family. It was gripping until the very end. For two days I tried to wrestle meaning from the textbook's dense passages, but terms like "civic humanism" and "the Scottish Enlightenment" dotted the page like black holes, sucking all the other words into them.

Ewun - "Phone Tap"

industrial with phone sounds.

DEVS

Enjoyable scifi series about a super-magicky Googly-ish company that developed a quantum computer able to simulate basically everything, thus being able to see both backwards and forward in time, all because its founder (played by Nick Offerman, him of Parks and Recreation and the best "There's only one thing I hate more than lies, and that is skimmed milk. Which is water lying about being milk.") lost its daughter. Lots of discussions about multi-vs-single world. Nice, but... geeks don't all know fibonacci sequences by heart. That's not what coding looks like. There's technical illogic (why can't she reinstall dead boyfriend's phone from the cloud *again* after it has been wiped?) Where are the Russians? They don't care one of their operatives & handlers just disappears? (oh they do. sorta) I didn't like the end. Suddenly they run simulations as a world? And why is there no DEVS machine in the simulation? That would make it really interesting, and make the jump to "we are living in a simulation" ourselves. 6 out of 10, I'd say. Also, had a bit of a Utopia feel to it. And I did like some of the visual tricks to show multiple worlds.

Lucio Battisti - "E penso a te"

The original of Tanita Tikaram's "And I think of you". That one was from 1996. The original from 1970...

"Contemporary British Short Story" (edited by Philip Hensher)

Mr Philip Hensher has strong opinions when it comes to short stories. I liked some, but have not properly kept track of which ones. Except that I remember Lucy Wood's "Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict" as beautifully haunting and melancholic, about an elderly couple living close to the beach where more and more waste keeps turning up.

the Dead Don't Die

Typical Jim Jarmusch film. Bill Murray, small role for Iggy Pop. Enjoyable and as strange as to be expected.

diary

glansrijk verpatst. Alles waar ik uit klom. Ik proost op troost... maar niet op herbegin. Wende - "Gin" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Iy-AQ2rMkQ Serge Reggiani / Ramses Shaffy / Wende - "Laat me" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFSlSsldk94 Jacques Brel - "Voir un ami pleurer" / "ne me quitte pas" Stef Bos - "Wodka" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEhS9Y9HYjU

to try to play piano

Amanda Palmer - I want you but I don't need you - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IpiAt3JXt4 Amanda Palmer / Dresden Dolls - "Missed Me" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o53x9DBwU2I Dresden Dolls - "Coin Operated Boy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLmT4cWGQw0 Jean Ferrat / Wim Sonneveld - "La Montagne" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4LTGBTha14 (TERRIBLE)

videogames / trailers

That took me too long to find this one. Archive - "Bullets" used in the trailer for the game "Cyberpunk 2077"

sleep / dreams / imagery rehearsal therapy

Some interesting articles on sleep health https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/why-we-dream-sleep-stress-anxiety-insomnia-a9470686.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/how-to-sleep-better-9226717.html

kink 1500

random songs from the kink 1500 playlist on spotify. * Rage Against the Machine - "Bombtrack"

random shit i should listen to

A perfect circle Quimby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_UFqw3vm0s&feature=youtu.be Post modern jukebox Lorn - "Anvil" French 79 - "hometown" I am Kloot - "To The Brink"

dance/ dnb

bladerunner -intensity bladerunner & nectax - the fall

"Your name here"

short video on Aeon about a spoof of self realization from the 1960's that rings too eerily true. https://aeon.co/videos/from-dream-to-reality-the-1960s-spoof-that-marked-the-dawn-of-self-aware-advertising

Frank Stallone - "Far From Over"

Sylvester Stallone's brother! If you need an 80's pick me up, this is it.

Ozark

Good series about a guy whitewashing the Mexican mob's money, having to flee to the Ozarks with his family while continuing his business.

God's Kingdom

Intriguing short about a pastor and girl fleeing from what seem to be the devil's men. Great credit song by Michael Malarkey, him of the Vampire Diaries, "scars".

The platform

Intriguing Spanish film about a man waking up in The Hole: dozens (hundreds) of levels where magnificent food gets lowered from the top, each level with two prisoners, eat what they want, so lower levels have only the scraps that the upper levels leave. Or not even that. Does not give many answers. Good balance between story and fable-like tale about society and classes.

Gian Marco Castro, Matthew S., Pietro Roffi - "Daydream" (and more)

instrumental, accordeon and lower-echelons instruments... beautiful. Somehow via the Westworld Soundtrack? Also: frank sartain - "evening view" - amazing.

Rebecca Solnit - "The impossible has already happened; what coronavirus can teach us about hope"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit

George Orwell - "Why Socialists don't believe in fun"

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/socialists/english/e_fun Utopias are now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. We cannot write this off as merely a silly remark. For one of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world. All ‘favourable’ Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness. The Cratchits are able to enjoy Christmas precisely because it only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because Christmas only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because it is described as incomplete. All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures.

Mairead Small Staid - "Reading in the age of constant distraction"

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/08/reading-in-the-age-of-constant-distraction/ As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.”

Jordana Cepelewicz - "How the brain creates a timeline of the past"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-creates-a-timeline-of-the-past-20190212/ For us, time is a sequence of events, a measure of gradually changing content. That explains why we remember recent events better than ones from long ago, and why when a certain memory comes to mind, we tend to recall events that occurred around the same time. Tsao and his colleagues were excited because, they posited, they had begun to tease out a mechanism behind subjective time in the brain, one that allowed memories to be distinctly tagged. “It shows how our perception of time is so elastic,” Shapiro said. “A second can last forever. Days can vanish. It’s this coding by parsing episodes that, to me, makes a very neat explanation for the way we see time. We’re processing things that happen in sequences, and what happens in those sequences can determine the subjective estimate for how much time passes.”

Jimmy Maher - "The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up"

Wonderful article about the history of Amiga. https://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine/ https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made-amiga-they-fucked-it-up/ Everyone Morse and Miner spoke to agreed that “Hi-Toro” was a terrible name that made one think of nothing so much as lawn mowers. Morse therefore started flipping through a dictionary one day, looking for something that would come before Apple and Atari in corporate directories. He hit upon the Spanish word for “friend”: “amigo.” That had a nice ring to it, especially with “user-friendliness” being one of the buzzwords of the era. But the feminine version of the word — “amiga” — sounded even better, friendly and elegant maybe even a little bit sexy. Miner by his own later admission was ambivalent about the new name, but everyone Morse spoke to seemed very taken with it, so he let it go. Thus did Hi-Toro become Amiga. The Amiga was stuck in the past way of doing things, thus marking the end of an era as well as the beginning of one. It was the punctuation mark at the end of the wild-and-wooly first decade of the American PC, the last time an American company would dare to release a brand new machine that was completely incompatible with what had come before. Its hardware design reflected the past as much as the future. Those custom chips, coupled together and to the 68000 so tightly that not a cycle was wasted, were a beautiful piece of high-wire engineering created by a bare handful of brilliant individuals. If a computer can be a work of art, the Amiga certainly qualified. Yet its design was also an evolutionary dead end; the custom chips and all the rest were all but impossible to pull apart and improve without breaking all of the software that had come before. The future would lie with modular, expandable design frameworks like those employed by the IBM PC and its clones, open hardware (and software) standards that were nowhere near as sexy or as elegant but that could grow and improve with time. Miner continued to tinker with his chipset. Out of these late experiments arose one of the most important capabilities of the Amiga, one absolutely key to its status as the world’s first multimedia PC. In the Amiga’s low-resolution modes of 320 X 200 and 320 X 400, Denise was normally capable of displaying up to 32 colors chosen from a palette of 4096. Miner now came up with a way of displaying any or all 4096 at once, using a technique he called “hold and modify” whereby Denise could create the color of each pixel by modifying only the red, green, or blue component of the previous pixel. He hoped it would allow programmers to create photorealistic environments for flight simulators, a special interest of his. When he realized that HAM mode updated too slowly to offer a decent frame rate for such applications, he actually requested that it be removed again from the chipset. But the chip fabricators said it would cost precious time and money to do so, and since it wasn’t hurting anything they might as well leave it in. Thank God for those bean counters. While it would indeed prove of limited utility for flight simulators and other games, HAM would allow the Amiga to display captured photographs of the real world. As advertisements for Digi-View, the first practical photorealistic digitizer to reach everyday computers, would soon put it, “Digi-View brings the world into your Amiga!” It’s that very blending of the analog world around us with the digital world inside the computer that is the key to the multimedia experience that the Amiga was first to provide. HAM mode stands as a classic object lesson in unintended consequences of technological innovation. The Amiga’s claim to historical importance would have been much shakier without it.

Jon Allspaw - "Fault Injection in Production" [ACM Queue]

Why testing failure in production is important https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2353017 building resilient systems requires experience with failure, and that we want to anticipate and confirm our expectations surrounding failure more often, not less often. Shying away from the effects of failure in a misguided attempt to reduce risk will result in poor designs, stale recovery skills, and a false sense of safety. Why production? Why not simulate this in a QA or staging environment? First, the existence of any differences in those environments brings uncertainty to the exercise, and second, the risk of not recovering has no consequences during testing, which can bring hidden assumptions into the fault-tolerance design and into recovery. The goal is to reduce uncertainty, not increase it.

Cal Newport on Surviving Screens in isolation

https://www.gq.com/story/cal-newport-screen-time-coronavirus Interesting article on how to deal with screen time during isolation. [S]olitude is absolutely crucial. Time alone with your thoughts is how you structure your experience, and on those structures you can understand where you are in your life and where you want to go. Without that you're just adrift. You're basically just being pushed around by winds and attention economy contraptions. Where you are, what you are, what you aren't and what you want to be—that just takes thought. Now we're forced to do a lot of thought, because there's only so much we can, in our apartment, look at the same screen before our eyes bleed. One question is: what are you trying to efficiently do? What is it you're trying to speed up? What's the benefit function here that makes your life better? Efficiency devoid of a particular objective is a metric adrift. A computer scientist would care about the efficiency of an algorithm because you have a lot of things to want to use the processor, and you don't want to spend more time than you need using a processor. There's something you're trying to gain there. It allows more to happen on the machine. [...] If I took the two hours I spent incredibly efficiently yelling at public figures and I spent them doing something else that was maybe a little bit slower but felt more rewarding, I might be building towards a solution that's going to be more beneficial. I like the optimization mindset because once you're thinking about and trying to make this the best day possible, trying to optimize this goal, it just makes you much more critical about your individual behaviors.

Nintendo's product philosophy: lateral thinking with withered technology

Interesting article how the design philosophy of one man - Gunpei Yokoi - made Nintendo the successful company it was, after the trading card game crashed in the 60's (and they even branched out into taxi's and love hotels!) Basically: don't use new technology, use the existing one but create innovative products with them. Thus the Gameboy with its black and white screen won from the fancier but battery-eating Lynx handheld from Atari. more reading: interview with Gunpei Yokoi - http://shmuplations.com/yokoi/ http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_87/490-Searching-for-Gunpei-Yokoi

DnB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMDOF1yPHbo&feature=youtu.be Hospital Records Drum & Bass Classics Classic rave, featuring lots of those good old skool samples: Danny Byrd ft Tomahawk - "Hot Fuzz" (from the album "Rave Digger")

Lucky

Last film of Harry Dean Stanton. Slow moving, somewhat funny, slightly introverted and philosophical cowboy at the end of his life.

the Blinders - "Forty Days and Forty Nights"

Good punky song.

Wende - "Hey"

So fitting for covid-19

Jared Diamond - "Collapse"

Finally started reading it properly. Yes, desperately needs an editor and the personal stories about Montana people... that doesn't work for me. But the Easter Island description is interesting. Hope the remaining chapters will be as well. Thome of a book detailing how past and current civilisations failed. Interesting but he repeats a lot and sometimes lists things up way too long and too much. Also, things he at first admits we cannot know he is certain about a couple of pages later (such as whether the Vikings met the Inuits initially in a friendly or hostile way).

Picard

Love it so far. Wondering whether my postulated plot of Borg being a Romulan invention, aka the terrible secret of the Romulan Tal Jahar (?) , is true. Good writing. "You know Jean Luc. The parts of him that are not ego are rampant id" And Romulan slang "Round ears"

Mark Maron - "The Endtimes fun"

Amazing comedian. Must look into his WTF podcasts.

Altered Carbon - Resleeved

Short animated Altered Carbon story, with the "sleeves" of bodies and "stacks" of computerized individuals. Enjoyable but nothing special.

Patrick Stewart reads a sonnet a day until COVID-19 is over

https://twitter.com/SirPatStew Sonnet XII When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prie, And sable curls, all silver'd o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the heard, And summer's green all girdled up in sheaves, Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard; Then of thy beauty do I questino make, That thou among the wastes of time must go, Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake And die as fast as they see others gro; An nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. Sonnet XIII reminds me of memcache: So should that beauty which you hold in lease Find no determination: then you were Yourself again, after yourself's decease,

Why the EAX register is called that

https://keleshev.com/eax-x86-register-meaning-and-history/ Fun read

Knives Out

Quite enjoyable whodunnit with Daniel Craig as the detective, although I hated his (Kentucky?) accent.

I love Dick

The series. With the amazing Kathryn Hahn. Haven't read the book, but quite a good series. Made me think of writing again. Kevin Spacey as Dick works quite well. Also, I want his farm.

Deadman Wonderland

Great series about a prison where prisoners with special "sin" power are made to fight. Strange ending. Last episode seemed a prologue.

Kiki's delivery service

Ok anime. Bit of a boring story. But hey, Ghibli.

"On the Metal" podcast ft Jonathan Blow

Podcast about the gaming industry and hardware implementations regarding graphics and game engines in particular. Great podcast.

Sarah Maria Griffin - "Spare and Found Parts"

Enjoyable young adult novel about a post apocalyptic event ("The Turn"), supposedly caused by humans afraid of computers, that left a lot of people dead, a fear of code/computers, and people with mechanical limbs. Protagonist has a mechanic heart. It's very explain-y. I wonder if this is caused by its target audience. A post apocalyptic world should be explained through showing, not through telling. There is too much explicit explanation, even in dialogue; creating a stunted feel. Also, logic wise things jump. Suddenly Nell, the protagonist, wants a computer. Suddenly she takes people into confidence. It all happens haphazardly. It's an enjoyable read though if you want to forget about the world for a moment.

Michael Ondaatje - "Warlight"

Wonderful story of two children who, left by their parents, find their way through teenage and young adult life with various colourful characters such as the Moth and the Darter. There could have been a bit more about the father, his death was explained away in two sentences when not given any attention. Also, why the infatuation with the mother, and less so the father? Because the mother stayed behind a bit longer? We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I havw achieved, but by how I got there. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe about the Moth? Who made me move from just an interest in "characters" to what they would do to others? But above all, most of all, how much damage did I do?

Charlie Jane Anders - "All the birds in the sky"

Deadman Wonderland

Enjoyable anime about a prison and guys fighting with "sin", their blood.

Deap Vally - "Gonna Make My Own Money"

Raw, bit like Janis Joplin. Rock and screaming.

Once upon a time ... in Hollywood

Enjoyable enough Quentin Tarantino film.

Ariana

Scandinavian film about a ship set out to Mars that gets thrown off its course without being able to return, following its inhabitants over the years. Enjoyable.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - "Children of Time"

Amazing book about a broken earth whose civilization set out on large ships like Gilgamesh, trying to see the universe with human life.

Gilgamesh clashes with a planet that was terraformed, but a nanovirus aimed at speeding up monkey evolution, did this to porta labila, jumping spider. The world of spiders and the world of a desintegrating space ship are beuatifully told and intermeshed.

Jojo Rabbit

Wonderful funny film about a young boy growing up at the end of WW2, blind fanatical nazi, with an imaginary Hitler next to him, who discovers his mum has been hiding a Jewish girl in their attic.

Fun, silly, weird.

Same director as "Hunt for the wilderpeople".

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Very 70s. Found through Nick Cave's "The Red Letters". Reminds me of proper "Queen I" and "Queen II"

Their "Delilah" is fun.
"Next" is almost cabaretesque!

Black Box Recorder

Bit like Nouvelle Vague in style; soft sultry female voice, strange Eels-like lyrics ("life is unfair / kill yourself or get over it")
Enjoyable but a bit repetitive over time (or if you're not really paying attention.)

Mid90s

Okay film about young boy joining a skater group in LA.  Nothing really special, but enjoyable.

How to deliver constructive feedback in difficult situations

https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf

Really good read on difficult conversations and how to distinguish perception vs observation, &etc.

essay - "How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral"

https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/

Short essay about purity spirals, where everything is relative - purity only exists in comparison to non- or less-pure - and how unchecked, these spiral out of control.

Sad takeaway? This is not gonna change.

Twin Temple - "Satan's a Woman"

The looks of a goth/death metal band, the sound of rockabilly.
Pretty amazing.

Robin Sloan - "Mr Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore"

Typical "blogger style" 35-ish old writer book.  Okay so far.

His description of Google and hackers irritates the fuck out of me. You cannot spread a compute job to all of Google "for three seconds". That does make zero sense. Fuck sake.

Sex Education

Great series, and some great music.

Chip Tayler and the new Ukranians - "Fuck all the perfect people"
Louis Armstrong - "A kiss to build a dream on"

Denis Johnson - "The largesse of the sea maiden"

The semi-autobiographical stuff is not great. It's not bad. I'm just not that interested. But there are beautiful parts in the early stages of the book.




This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life - the distance I have travelled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to refresh itself in novel forms - that I almost crashed the car.



She said how much she'd been hurt, and how badly she wanted to forgive me, but she didn't know whether she could or not - she hoped she could - and I assured her, from the abyss of a broken heart, that I hoped so too, that I hated my infidelities and my lies about the money, and the way I'd kept my boredom secret, and my secrets in general, and Ginny and I talked, after forty years of silence, about the many other ways I'd stolen her right to truth.

1917

Breath taking film by Sam Mendes about two boys in WW I who need to find a regiment and stop the attack as to avoid a trap set by the Germans. Mostly continuous shot, amazing camera work. The scene where he runs through a night city only lit by flares repeatedly send up is amazing.

Simply beautiful.

Amy Hempel - "Sing to it"

Same style as previous books; short stories.

Again, really well written. But also; things become familiar now. Too familiar. "They know us as..." about the dogs in the rescue center. Have read too often about this now.

Scarface

Finally saw it. Good stuff.

Unbelievable

Heart wrenching story of a girl being raped who is not believed by the police. Only through sheer luck is her case - and that of other girls - finally resolved. True story but reenacted.

Kate Fox - "Watching the English - the Hudden Rules of English Behaviour"

Enjoyable enough book about what makes the English so quintessentially English.  I'm bothered by the lack of scholarly facts; many things are claimed as English while they do exist elsewhere as well. This part is often overlooked.
But I'm learning things I didn't know about, such as the Shipping Forecast.

Right now, have started to read fast-skipping.




The Shipping Forecast ritual illustrates a deep-seated need for a sense of safety, securty and continuity - and a tendency to become upset when these are threatened - as well as a love of words and a somewhat eccentric devotion to arcan and apparently irrational pastimes and practices. There seems also to be an undercurrent of humour in all of this, a reluctance to take things too seriously.



... you should strike up a conversation by making a vaguely interrogative comment about the weather (or the party or pub or wherever you happen to be). This mustnot be done too loudly, and the tone should be light and informal, not earnest or intense. The object is to 'drift' casually into conversation, as though by accident. Even if the other person seems happy enough to chat, it is still customary to curb any urges to introduce yourself.



The 'invasion of prviacy' involved in gossip is particularly relevant to the rather inhibited English, for whom privacy is an especially serious matter. It is impossible to overstate the importance of privay in English culture. Jeremy Paxman points out that "The importance of privacy informs the entire organisation of the country, from the assumptions on which laws are based, to the buildings in whcih the English live." George Orwell observes that "The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosy Parker."
.... privacy rules significantly enhance the value of a gossip.



There is a more or less universal rule whereby people almost unconsciously try to achieve some degree of symmetry or balance in their conversations, such that if you tell someone something about your own 'private' life, the other person will feel obliged, if only out of reflex politeness, to reciprocate with a comparably personal disclosure.



The etiquette governing the print exceptions applies equally to the internet; just because your English Facebook, Twitter or forum 'friends' plaster intimate revelations about their private lives all over the internet does not mean that they will be happy to discuss these matters when you meet them face to face. In fact, they may take great offence if you so much as mention them. The English are by no means alone in finding cyberspace a disinhibiting place, nd this disconnect between online and 'real life' communication applies in other cultures as well.



On their own, men gossip, with no more than five per cent of conversation time devoted to non-social subjects, soch as work or politics. It is only in mixed-sex groups, where there are women to impress, that the proportion of male conversation time deovted to these more 'highbrow' subjects increases dramatically, to between 15 and 20 per cent.

On further questioning, however, the difference turned out to be more a matter of semantics than practice: what the women were happy to call 'gossip', the men defined as 'exchanging information'.

Many of the women complained that men failed to adopt the correct tone of voice, recounting items of gossip in the same flat, unemotional manner as any other piece of information, such that, as one woman sniffed, 'You can't even tell it's gossip.' Which, of course, is exactly the impression the males wish to give.



Although, though, I suspect that English self-mockery is rooted in a rather smug complacency, if not outright arrogance. And this was evident in other aspects of the opening ceremony: there were some globally recognised, positive images of England and the English, but the chaotic display also featured dark, even deliberately ugly, unflattering moments, and was full of obscure parochial references and whimsical in-jokes that were incomprehensible to a global audeince. Indeed, even the most delighted, admiring commentators from other nations found much of it 'baffling', 'odd', 'bizarre', 'impenetrable', 'weird', 'bewildering', 'insane' and 'What the f***?' Others were less polite. The majority of English people loved it, and didn't much care whether the rest of the world understood it or not. In fact, many were probably secretly pleased that they didn't. The degree of self-mockery, self-denigration, obscure self-reference and self-indulgent eccentricity exhibited in that ceremony required a breathtaking disregard for the opinion of others - in this case billions of others - which can only stem from a deep sense of superiority.



Royal events are brief episodes of what anthropologists call 'cultural remission' or 'festive inversion' - like carnivals or tribal festivals, where some of the usual social norms and unwritten rules are temporarily suspended and the English do things we would never normally do, waving national flags, cheering and dancing in the streets, and even talking to strangers.



Is it acceptable to switch your phone back on during the business lunch? Do you need to give a reason? Apologies? Again, my observations and interviews suggest a similar pattern. Low-status, insecure people tend to take and even sometimes make calls during a business lunch - often apoligising and giving reasons, but in such a self-important 'I'm so busy and indispensable' manner that their apology is really a disguised boast. Their higher ranking, more secure colleagues either leave their phones switched off or, if they absolutely must keep them on for some reason, apologise in a genuine and often embarrassed, self-deprecating manner.



Bikes and horses give the inhibited English something to talk about and, even better, an excuse to avoid making eye contact while we do so. We talk 'through' the bikes or hoses, facing them, not each other, looking at them, standing back and admiring them, touching them, asking questions about them.



What exactly do estate agents do? They come to inspect your house, look around it with an objective eye, put a value on it, advertise it, show people round it and try to sell it. What is so terribly offensive about that? Well, everything, if you replace the word 'house' with 'identity', 'personality', 'social status', or 'taste'. Everything that estate agents do involves passing judgement not on some neutral piece of property but on us, on our lifestyle, our social position, our character, our private self. And sticking a price tag on it. No wonder we can't stand them.



... the standoffishness that foreigners complain about - are all characteristic features of negative politeness. What looks like unfriendliness is really a kind of consideration: we judge others by ourselves, and assume that everyone shares our obsessive need for privacy - so we mind our own business and politely ignore them.

Katherine Arden - Winternight trilogy ("The Bear and the Nightingale", "The girl in the tower", "The Winter of the Witch")

Amazing writing of Russian folklore, with a immense fight between Christianity and the chyerti, the house gods and the old gods.

First book saw Vasilia meet the Frost demon, who rescues her from his brother (The Bear).

Second book sees her dressed as a boy, running on her horse.




To the west a little light lingered, but in the east the clouds mounded up, bruise-colored in the living dusk, bucking with unfallen snow.



Waiting-women, clustered nearby, nodding like blossoms.



Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.




Vasya sat, "I am sorry," she said. "I was only curious."
"The more one knows, the sooner one grows old," snapped the domovaya. "Hold still."



They swam together in the lake at Midsummer; he whispered his promises in the autumn twilight.

IT - chapter two

Okay. The end fight is silly but as one review stated correctly; it stays close enough to the original material to be enjoyable.

Zomebieland: double tap

Second installment of Zombieland. Enjoyable, though not as much as the first.

Beats

90's, Scotland. Crowds with the aim of listening to "repetitive beats" are forbidden (the criminal act)?

Film, staged as documentary, follos Johnno and Spanner, two teenage boys desperate to escape their lives.

Enjoyable enough (Scooter!), although some parts are a bit slow.

Sorry to bother you

Kinda insane (Bollywoodish?) film about a guy joining a telemarketeer company and, using his "white voice", manages to go to the upper echelons, where the largest customer is a very Amazon-like "we control your life" company. Gets estranged from girlfriend etc.

Then suddenly, equisapiens: the company is turning people into half horses so they are stronger. wtf.

Quite entertaining.

Midsommar

Great horror film, slow though, about sacrifices in Sweden. Enjoyable though not scary.

Best In Show

Somewhat funny mockumentary. Better watch drunk with friends.

Jason Bourne

Fourth installment of the Bourne series still with Matt Damon (there was one non-Matt Damon inbetween three and four).

OK, but losing its appeal. Too incomprehensive, too easy the clues.

Fleabag

Series written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Nervous, missing her dead friend with whom she ran the guinea pig café. Amazing dialogues and good fourth-wall breaching.

Katherine Arden - "The Bear and the Nightingale" (1st in Winternight Trilogy)

Wonderful story about 17th century Rus'. Writer has studied Russian folklore and fairytales. Just started but it is quite captivating.

First book was amazing. Fairy tale themes but harsh. Step mother dies, but father too. And the priest... Now reading the second book.