random music stuff

(pandora works with VPN!)

Greg Brown - "Hey Baby Hey"

Nancy Sinatra - "Bang Bang"

Darrin James Band - "Had Enough of Me"

Tom Waits - "How It's Gonna End"

Julia Stone - "What's Wrong With Me" (from the Memory Machine)
    I knew "This Love", but "Winter on the Weekend" is the haunting one

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 –(Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sampl, Noah Vawter)

Fun book examining the Commodore 64 Maze oneliner against history and philosophy.

In unicursal mazes, the navigable space is bounded and a single path is set; users have no directional decisions to make, save to follow the meanderings of the path, leaving their attention, mind, or emotions free to wander or focus elsewhere, while continuing to the end at the center of the maze or to a unique exit. The unicursal maze sometimes allegorizes temporality, offering a spiritual and contemplative space to the walker. Unicursal mazes can be traversed repeatedly and ritualistically for peace and spiritual comfort. In unicursal hedge mazes the hedges often limit one's vision to an immediate and foreshortened horizon, suggesting enclosure and protection.

Multicursal mazes, by contrast, ask to be solved. Instead of following the unicursal maze's predetermined path, visitors to a multicursal maze run the risk of getting lost as they attempt to find the exit.

The Knossos maze is best understood in terms of Theseus' narrative path through it, not as the space of the labyrinth itself. This transformation from multicursal, unknowable confusion to a marked and bounded pathway reflects the mastery of any system, from challenging, mysterious, threatening, and deadly to easy, known, mapped and tamed.

Church mazes are usually meant to be walked or crawled on the path to penance. The names of these include Labyrinth of Sin, The Path to Redemption, and The Path to Jerusalem. These pathways symbolized paths to Christian salvation, relating a Paschal instead of a Minoan mystery.

Mazes are usually imagined as architectural, material, and fixed, but cultures have long noticed that they can correspond directly to a human activity, dance. In The Iliad, Homer credits Daedalus both with a dance floor and a labyrinth. Kern speculates that the labyrinth was a choros, which has the double meaning of dance and dance surface. Given that no labyrinthine buildings survive in Crete, the depictions of labyrinths on coins may indicate the path of a dance–particularly since maze dances have survived.

The first maze constructed for rats by researchers was built in the late 1890s–but it was not originally used for testing the creatures. Willard Small of Clark University built a maze environment to allow rats to eat and exercise when they weren't taking part in experiments. Small wanted the environment to simulate the burrows that rats inhabit in nature, but he modeled the first laboratory rat maze after the Hampton Court Palace maze (Lemov 2005, 25). The restorative maze is quite consonant with the purposes for which the Hampton Court Palace maze was built, although Small was attending to the constitution of rodents rather than royals.

Since a random occurrence is "hap," the root of happy, it might seem that "random" would have a happy etymology. This this is not so. In centuries past, before the philosophers and mathematicians in the Age of Enlightenment sought to rationalize chance, randomness was a nightmare. Likely ancestors of the word "random" are found in Anglo-Norman, Old French, and Middle French and include randoun, raundoun, randun, and rendon – words signifying speed, impulsiveness, and violence. These early forms are found beginning around the twelth century and probably derive from randir, to run fast or gallop)

Four fundamental categories of games [...] Whereas agon are competitive games dependent upon skill, games of mimicry are imaginative, and ilinx are games causing disorder and loss of control, the alea are games of chance. [...] Taken from the Latin name for dice games, alea "negates work, patience, experience, and qualifications" so that everything depends on luck. 

Malaby presents a useful framework for understanding indeterminacy based on four categories. The first category is formal indeterminacy, or what is commonly referred to as chance. This is any form of random allotment, which often can be understood and modeled through statistical methods. Malaby argues that the ascendancy of statistical thinking in the social sciences has so skewed our conception of indeterminacy in gambling (in particular) and in our lives (in general) that formal indeterminacy has become a stand-in for other types of indeterminacies. The second category is social indeterminacy, the impossibility of knowing or understanding someone else's point of view or intentions. A bluff is a type of social indeterminacy. The third category is performative indeterminacy, that is, the unreliability and one's own or of another's actions, say a fumble in football game or misreading the information in plain view on a chessboard. Finally, the fourth category Malaby describes, cosmological indeterminacy, refers to skepticism about the fairness and legitimacy of the rules of the game in the first place at a local, institutional, or cosmological level. Suspicion that a game is rigged, for example, is concern about cosmological indeterminacy.

Duchamp, like the other Dada artists with whom he associated, saw "logical reality" as a failure, epitomized by the horrors of World War I. Satire, absurdity, and the embrace of indeterminacy seemed to the Dadaists to be the most "reasonable" response to modernity.

Yet, centuries ago, long before Mallarme provided his assurance that a throw of the dice would not abolish chance, ̈Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of this event as apocalyptic:

    Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
    In every city and in every town.

Fortune's wheel and what Paul Auster called  The Music of Chance have long been considered a matter of life and death.

Ian Bogost - "How to Do Things with Videogames"

https://www.berfrois.com/2011/10/do-things-with-videogames/

Proceduralist games are oriented toward introspection over both immediate gratification, as is usually the case in entertainment games, and external action, whether immediate or deferred, as is usually the case in serious games. The goal of the proceduralist designer is to cause the player to reflect on one or more themes during or after play, without a concern for resolution or effect. The use of identifiably human yet still abstract roles in these games underscores the invitation to project one’s own experiences and ideas on them.

Rob Boddice - "Pain is not the purview of medics. What can historians tell us?"

https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us

Interesting read on how pain is not (just) nociception (?), as experienced physically, "through tissue", but has many shapes and forms, is personal.

Take, for example, the concept of grief in ancient Greece: ἄχεος (ákheos). It is one of the key terms for grief or distress at the heart in the Iliad, but it is also one of many words in Greek for pain/suffering. Despite the association of Achilles with other passions, it is grief-pain that he embodies in his very name, and it is in the name of this pain that most of Achilles’ violent actions are carried out in the final books of the epic. You might object that Achilles is a fictional character, a demi-god; that this pain is merely literary, not literal, and not human. Yet the Iliad framed ideas and practices of virtue, belief, warfare and ritual for centuries. It was key to Greek self-fashioning in the classical period. It was the central intertext of Plato’s Republic. If Greeks learnt how to do pain, they learnt it, in part, through Achilles.

the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch understood the potentiality of wordlessness and of the blank face. The blankness of his own pain(ted) visage demonstrates another sign of ineffable, emotional pain, that is nonetheless expressive and learnable. Fuelled by the Danish philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard’s angst and mired in grief, poverty and suicidal thoughts, Munch was plunged into fortvilelse, a mixture of despair and violent grief.

Munch transfigures, in these words, the experience of a physical, humoral pain – his melancholy, his pain under the heart – into the pain of the world, where the sky bleeds and nature screams, not audibly, but sensibly. The inadequacy of Munch’s description of his own pain is marked by his erasure of the lines that attempt to express it. And while all the words would be eliminated entirely in the final painting, the erasure of the personal and physical embodiment of pain is mapped on to the painting. The face of the figure, leaning against the fence, is featureless – not an absence of expression, but simply nothing in the place of a face: not a mask, but deletion. The pain is mapped instead on to the sky. If, for the man, pain was ineffable, one needed only to look up to access it. This profundity of suffering put the pain everywhere. Munch’s language of pain, ultimately, was paint. The concepts required to express it are in evidence. They are situated – melancholy and angst, mixed with the bruised city and the bloody sky – and distinct. To access this pain requires cultural knowledge.

The greater the stimulus, the greater the pain. The more serious the wound, the more serious the pain. It is one of those apparently obvious correlations that have no foundation. The experiences of the war-wounded on a grand scale provided doctors with a wealth of empirical information that inconveniently disconnected damage from pain. Large wounds did not always hurt.

These mysteries pointed researchers to the dynamics of nervous signalling: the traffic was not just in one direction, from the periphery to the centre, but also from the centre to the periphery. How a sensory stimulus feels is mediated by appraisal, and that appraisal is situated in terms of the personal experience of the individual, the degree of attention applied to the wound, to the immediate occasion of the injury (danger, fear, reassurance, safety) and to the cultural repertoire of pain concepts that provide the framework for expression. 

Anthony Lane - "The Shock and Aftershocks of 'The Waste Land'"

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land

Eliot would lean toward the second. "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood," he wrote, in an essay on Dante. "It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship." What he sought, as both a writer and a reader, was "some direct shock of poetic intensity." True to that quest, "The Waste Land" is a symphony of shocks, and, like other masterworks of early modernism, it refuses to die down. (Go to MOMA and let your gaze move across Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," from west to east. If you don't flinch when you reach the faces on the right, bladed and scraped like shovels, consult your optician.) The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless: 

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor 

In our empty rooms

I happen to think, for what it's worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of "The Waste Land," are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double "o" of "rooms." And the word "surrender" could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will face that overwhelming question: "What have we given?" It is something that each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.

Souls

Not yet sure what it'll be like, but an interesting German series with different timelines about a boy thinking he was the pilot of crashed Flug 2205, a future with a guru, a current day with a woman experiencing groundhog day (or is that past, yes, that's the past) of her husband, the pilot, flying and while she tries to stop him, she's never able to.

Half Bastard & the Devil Himself

Interesting series about the son of a blood witch, which are always fighting with "fairborn" witches. while initially he is the outcast, things change when they travel to France to meet a colony of blood witches.

Nope

Jordan Peele - scifi - commentary on entertainment industry... which I certainly did not get.

The fact that the flying saucer became a fantastic beast, ok

but some of the explanations I read online I would never have guessed.