Amazing documentary about Disco Elysium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH6mUTHZ5C4 

 

explaining not just how the game came to be, but its context and background

amazing stuff

 

Sinners

Vampire horror in the south around the 1920's, where music brings the devil forth. 

Interesting scene where music removes the walls between past, present and future. As well as a proper From Dusk Till Dawn scene.

 

Stephen Graham Jones - "The buffalo hunter hunter"

Starts slow, about a manuscript found in modern days (why this?) from a (great?) grandfather, who was a pastor, writing down the story of Good Stab.

Tricky, bit tiresome with all the names of animals, "long-legged," "dirty face"

 

 

It was my firs tstep into the darkness, Three-Persons. My first step into this long night I live in now. When I waded into the cold waters of that pond, I was walking away from my life, my swift-runner, and I could never go back, no matter how hard I tried. It's like if you tore down your dead-man-cross up there and dragged it through the street, then burned it, and made water on the ashes. Your god would leave you, then, and your whole world. That's what was happening to me, and I didn't even know it, was only thinking about a many-shots gun. 

The Roses

Current-day version of "The War of the Roses", with Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman.

Wonderful stuff. They are amazing. 

Gentlemen

Fun Guy Ritchie romp, Matthew MacCounagh etc

Mark Forsyth - "Rhyme and Reason"

wonderful overview of English (British) poetry over the centuries.  How centuries ago, *everyone* wrote poetry, just to enjoy, to write letters, etc.

how slowly it became something "difficult" for the upper class 

Foundation

Amazing, both story and the visuals

 

s3 becomes a bit unhinged.  Got the feel the whole mental part, both The Mule as well as the girl "controlling people" became easy but also plotholes

Then again, the progress of Demelzer was good, and seeing elderly Empire "Dusk" rage and refuse to die, was a good switch.  As well as the hologram Hari Seldon who wanted a real body.. He's living in a "4 dimensional object, projected in 3d space" but can't get himself a body?

 

Also: "the prime radiant breaks down when taking us (girl and The Mule) into account!" yet that's what they have been doing all along.

 

Bit weird.

s1: amazing

s2: good

s3: weird, bit meh, but quite OK for the last two episodes 

Eddington

Gripping "modern western", which starts as an uncomfortable reminder of the Covid years, the craziness, the police killings and following mass protests... then suddenly turns quite a corner.

 

Sad, but good. 

The Beast In Me

Strong series with Claire Danes as a grieving mother and the dude from that Russian spy series as her new evil neighbour who slowly unravels.

Companion

"horror" about a female robot companion a few friends try to make the murder suspect.

Okaysih.

Rollerball

Watched after listening to its Rewatchables podcast.

Still good.

Marco Giancotti - "Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder"

https://planktonvalhalla.com/20240227-boundaries-are-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/

 

 

 human language gives you the impression of being able to categorize things with names

 

 

Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ” — but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! — Look, for example, at board-games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. — Are they all ‘entertaining’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games, there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck, and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of singing and dancing games; here we have the element of entertainment, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way, can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: similarities in the large and in the small.

Ludwig WittgensteinPhilosophical Investigations: 66 (

 

 

 

 

 the words we use define boundaries for things, giving us handy ways to tell things apart, but those boundaries are not universal. They’re not “in the world”, they’re practical shortcuts that exist only in human heads. If you look really closely, or if you look at the science, there is no strong reason to draw those lines one way or another. 

 

 

First, the fact that they have their own names can’t be a reason to separate them in that unique manner. We could give a name to the whole subject of the picture, say, “gadorblk”, that from now on we can use to refer to woman-touching-flower-carrying robots whenever we see them. Not very useful, but not prohibited either. You hear of languages that have words for weirdly specific things like “the effect of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, creating a dappled pattern of light and shadow” (komorebi from Japanese) and “the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water” (mångata from Swedish). Why shouldn’t a language have a one-word noun for the content of this picture?

As for the idea that we need to count three entities because each of them—the robot, the flower, and the woman—independently has consistent properties (an “identity”) of its own, the question then arises: why not more than three, then? Why not count each panel and screw of the robot separately? You could distinguish each garment worn by the woman, and each petal of the flower, each with its own independent uses and properties. All these things are “attached” to each other by physical forces that, when you look closely, are the forces of atoms pushing or pulling at each other. Just like the atoms of the robot and of the woman’s hands are pushing and pulling at those of the flower.

 

Marco Giancotti - "Is There Anything Untranslatable?"

https://aethermug.com/posts/is-there-anything-untranslatable

 

 

 

fitting native word simply doesn't exist that works as well as the foreign one in that situation. I often have conversations like this:

Marco: I'm looking for a date spot, have you been to that restaurant before?

Friend: yes, it's great.

M: nice and cozy?

F: yeah, especially very... shibui.

M: perfect, she'll love it then.

Shibui (渋い) means, in this context, quietly refined in an austere way, without pretenses, almost stoic. Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps the most famous story about translation in Japan is an urban legend featuring Natsume Souseki, considered by many to be the greatest Japanese novelist of the early 20th century.

When he wasn't writing future classics, he worked as an English teacher. One day—the story goes—his students were trying to translate the English phrase "I love you" to Japanese. They knew the translation for each of those three words, so naturally they constructed a grammatically valid sentence with them. How hard can it be?

When they asked Souseki to check their translation, however, he told them they'd gotten it all wrong.

"Japanese lovers don't say things straight to each other's face like that," he said. "You'll do better to translate it as, isn't the moon beautiful tonight?"

The story itself may be apocryphal, but the message rings true. There is a side of translation that has less to do with the meaning of individual words than with the intention of the speaker. You forgo a literal translation in favor of one that uses different words, but achieves the intended meaning more closely. This approach—usually called "free translation"—exists for all languages, but it's especially important when the two languages in question are very different. Japanese (to/from) translators are forced to do this kind of work all the time.

 

 

 

 

When a surgeon turns to her assistant and says “Scalpel,” this one-word linguistic act—we might call it a command or a request—is, first and foremost, an instruction for mutual coordination. The key to understanding this is that when you use language, you are never just saying something. You are doing something. With words, you act on those around you, to help them, influence them, build affiliations with them.

— Language vs Reality, Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists, Nick Enfield

 

 

 Translation is achieving the goals of the original text in a different language.

 

Marco Giancotti - "The Beautiful Dissociation of the Japanese Language"

https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese-language 

 

 

  

It uses kanji characters for writing (more on this later), and it uses a whole lot of them. Depending on who you ask, there are four, five or more thousand characters in use, and you can't read a newspaper if you don't know at least 2,000 of the more common ones.

There are also two syllabic scripts (syllable-based alphabets) in use, called hiragana and katakana

 

 

 

The Japanese scholars-aristocrats began repurposing the Chinese characters, which they called kanji (for, well, "Chinese characters"). Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation. By ignoring the original content of a kanji, they could string them together to form almost any sound.

 

 

 

Over the centuries those "sound-only" kanji, called man'yougana, evolved into something else entirely. They became simpler, more streamlined, and more standardized. Where the symbols were originally composed of many short strokes, they gradually lost detail and complexity. Where the scribes could choose between a slew of different kanji for any given sound (for instance, the sound pa could be represented by any of 20 characters), later the number of options dwindled and eventually settled to two.

That's how the two syllable-based alphabets in use today, hiragana and katakana, came about (collectively kana).

 

 

furigana. These are tiny kana characters showing you how to pronounce a difficult kanji. 

 

 

 

My favorite are all the versions of the word "cousins" meant in a reciprocal sense, as in "she and I are cousins (of each other)". In spoken language, you just say itoko in all cases, and that's it. In written language, you use the appropriate combinations of the kanji 兄 (ani, older brother), 弟 (otouto, younger brother), 姉 (ane, older sister), and 妹 (imouto, younger sister), preceded by the kanji 従 (shitagau, accompany), to specify the exact genders in the relationship. (These are also jukujikun, come to think of it.) 

 

 

Gikun is the replacement of a kanji's or word's normal pronunciation with something else through furigana. Novelists and manga-ka use it to inject an almost subliminal layer of meaning beyond what is afforded by the words and kanji. It achieves an effect similar to a textual voice over, at the same time as the actual text you're reading.

You see it a lot in manga: the actual kanji say something, but the furigana, instead of giving you the true pronunciation of the word, give you something else entirely. Sometimes it's a synonym of the word with a more pungent nuance

 

 

 

The author of the excellent gikun explanaton on japanesewithanime.com clarifies the context:

Todoroki Shouto 轟焦凍 has both cold and heat abilities, which come from the sides of his body: from the right comes cold, from the left comes heat.

Here Shouto, the protagonist, is telling the flame-y man "during combat, I won't use my heat power for any reason at all." Being a kids' comic, all kanji have furigana. But the kanji for "heat" (highlighted in red) comes with an unexpected reading. Instead of the official netsu, the furigana reads hidari, which means "left".

So the reader gets two messages at the same time: the character says "I won't use the left", but the text is saying "I won't use heat".

 

ROSÁLIA, Björk, Yves Tumor - "Berghain"

gothic song, switching through many styles

Task

Stark series, set in a small Delaware (?) city, between a motorcycle gang, and its antagonists, a man whose brother was murdered by them and who tries to take revenge by hitting their stash houses.

Tiny bit of a magic ending with the fenthanol suddnely having been sold, setting Robbie's cousin Maeve and his children up for life, but still, very good. Solid role from Mark Gruffalo.

Gen V - s2

fun stuff

Longlegs

Intriguing horror featuring Nicholas Cage as an nearly-unrecognisable associate of the devil, haunting an FBI agent Lee Harper, whose mother is more familiar with him than she realised.

Charlie XCX ft John Cale - "House"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgp7wlBfASA&list=RDXgp7wlBfASA

amazing stuff, haunting.  Bit like Einsturzende Neubauten?

Dua Lipa -"Bloed Zweet Tranen"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxZBxpeWf1E&list=RDkxZBxpeWf1E&start_radio=1

zo goed!

Ling Ling Huang - "Natural Beauty"

Good story about a Chinese-American girl who, supporting her parents, starts working at a fancy "Holistik" health clinic.  And of course shit is fucked.  And of course there are human remains in the products they sell.

I remember when she would come home with a new perfume sample she had gotten from a store, how she would dab it on the same place on our bodies. Even though they had so little money, my parents always managed to provide me with not only necessities but even luxuries. It hurts that I am failing them now when they need me.

By the time Margot comes back for me, I am standing outside my parents' room, looking as if I have just left. I want to complain to her about the pungent urine smell; they aren't being changed often enough, and their skin is so dry - are they getting enough water? But I can hardly make demands with the amount of money I owe. As I leave, relief floods my body, followed quickly by shame. Seeing them is always more difficult  than I want to admit. I had always assumed love carried itself easily through varies permutations and disintegrations. Now I find myself disassociating them from the people I had known my parents to be.
    I can't decide which is worse, coming up against the limitations of their souls or the limitations of my love.

The Substance

very solid body horror featuring Demi Moore

Amsterdam Empire

new Netflix series starring Famke Janssen.

Good stuff. Bonnie St Claire's - "Dokter Bernard" is now constantly stuck in my head.  Oh, and Ron Brandsteder!

Sicario

amazing stuff, every time

The Big Short

about the 2008 housemarket crash

good to get the inside, finally understand it a bit better

Downsizing

People can get 13cm.  Then disaster strikes.  Kinda ok.

The Woman in Cabin 10

whodunnit on a boat, journalist, dead wife of millionaire

meh.

invention of lying

"dark" rom com with Ricky Gervais where he's the only person who can lie.

Was ok, nothing special. Funny at times.

Eva De Roovere - "Fantastig toch"

zo fijn

Andre van Duin - "Bim bam" (tres cloches)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHVG399QUw8&list=RDkHVG399QUw8&start_radio=1

Racoon - "We willen meer, meneer"

Amazing Stroopwafels - "Ome Kobus"

 https://genius.com/Amazing-stroopwafels-ome-kobus-lyrics        

perfect <3

so glad I saved this

Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta- Snake Eater

Great stuff.  Not sure I can ever go back to the original.

suckerpinch - "Harder Drive"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio 

pingfs and other insane stuff.  So good.

The Diplomat - s3

was ok. Watched while sick, and good stuff for that.

Paul Biegel - "Tuinen van Dorr"

Nog steeds mooi.

Maar "Dis" komt er niet in voor.

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue

Really wanted to like this "Lost vs Agathe Christie" series

fine for first three episodes, then became too unhinged

The Guest

bbc series, ok, bit silly in the end

Marvel Zombies

more fun if you know the marvel cinematic universe (MCU) but still enjoyable

Alien:Earth

Amazing series

blade runner vibes, but still no discrepancy

weird dual over composition, and it really works

rock songs that are amazingly fitting (but WHY)

the sheep is amazing. 

Jurassic World: Rebirth

meh

zero logic

Jurassic World (2015)

okayish

Jurassic Park (1993)

 samuel l jackson!

Cormac McCarthy - "Blood Meridian"

(just started, but again, the language so amazing)

struggling a lot more getting through this than, say, "The Road". Turns out, as called out by The Guardian recently, his narrative style switched significantly at some point.

 

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again.  He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that comunal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

Glanton's eyes in their darks sockets were burning centroids of murder and he and his haggard riders stared balefully at the kid as if he were no part of them for all they were so like in wretchedness of circumstance.

The man in the floor began to move. He had one arm lying in his groin and he moved it slightly and pointed. At them or at the height from which he had fallen or to his destination in eternity they did not know. Then he died. 

 

 

 The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The flames sawed in the wind and the embers apled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be. By and by the judge rose and moved away on some obscure mission and after a while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that i tmay well have been so.

Yazz Ahmed - "La saboteuse"

Christina Henry - "Alice"

Interesting 'sequel' to Alice in Wonderland, where Alice and "the Hatcher" escape from a mental asylum, only to end up in the old city.  Abuse, mutilation, rape, their world is grim. 

Really well told.

    Hatcher nodded. "Yes, I told you. I can't go back there. I can't abide the thought of four walls closing around me again. And they would separate us, Alice. No more comfort through the mouse hole.  They would keep us apart, and I can't bear the thought of that any more than being trapped. So I'll sure, if there is no other way out, that I still have a way out. And I can do it for you too."
    She knew what he offered. He would kill her first, with the gun or the knife or his fists if he had to, and make certain she was never trapped in that cage again. From another man this might be terrifying, that he would so blithely consider murdering his companion. But she understood that from Hatcher this was tantamount to an offer of marriage. This was what he could do for her, how he showed he cared.

    "The knife for the Jabberwocky," she said. "The Magician's knife."
    Hatcher looked from Alice to the Rabbit. "That was the knife you used on his eye."
    She nodded.
    "What happened to it?"
    "I threw it in the river," she said. "It melted."
    The Rabbit stared at her. "You threw a priceless Magician's artifact into the stinking river?"
    "Yes," Alice said, "And now the Jabberwocky rampages through the City, and only the blade could stop him."
    The Rabbit threw his head back again, and mirthless laughter poured forth. "Then it matters not if you will have mercy on me, for we are all dead."

William Gibson - "Count Zero"

third book in the Neuromancer trilogy.

Gautam Bhatia - "The Wall"

A city eternally encircled by a Wall.  Something the Builders did to punish or protect?

It was okay. I didn't get into the hallucinatory parts. Ending was nice because it never gave an answer.

Samanta Schweblin - "Fever Dream"

Indeed feverish, a long dialogue between an old woman (not his mother) and a boy (not her son) about souls switching bodies to avoid dying...??

    Why does she do that?
    It's a routine she's gotten into here. She runs two or three times around the house at every lunch.
    This is important. This could have to do with the worms.
    When Nina passes the kitchen window, she presses her face against the glass and we smile at each other. I like her burst of energy, but this time her running makes me anxious. My conversation with Carla pulled the rope that ties me to my daughter even tighter, and the rescue distance is shorter again. How different are you now from the David of six years ago? What did you do that was so terrible your own mother no longer accepts you as hers? These are the things I can't stop wondering about.
    But they aren't the important things.

    What's happening with the rescue distance?
    Everything is fine.
    No.
    She's frowning.
    "Are you okay, Nina?" I ask her.
    She smells her hands.
    "It's really gross," she says.
    Carla comes out of the house, finally.
    Carla isn't important.
    But I walk over to her. I think I'm still trying to dissuade her from the walk.
    Don't leave Nina alone. It's happening right now!
    Carla comes over, carrying her bag and smiling.
    Don't get distracted.
    I can't choose what happens next, David. I can't turn back towards Nine
    It's happening.
    What is, David? My God, what is happening?
    The worms.
    No, please.

    His face was red, his eyes swollen from so much crying. He was digging up dirt with his plastic shovel. Its broken handle was lying on the ground to one side, and now he was digging with only the spoon part of the shovel, which was only slightly bigger than his hand. The duck lay to one side. Its eyes were open, and stretched out like that on the ground, its neck seemed longer and more flexible than normal. I tried to figure out what had happened, but at no point did David look up.
    I want to show you something.
    I'm the one who decides what to focus on in the story now, David. Doesn't what your mother is telling me strike you as important?
    No.

Claire North - "84K"

Good stream of condolences. Makes it harder to read at times. Lot of London +England references (places) which makes it quite enjoyable. "Children of men" done in a quiet version of trainspotters prologue / Death Flag Blues.

Around one third, a bit of a struggle to keep going. I got a bit tired of Theo's passive stance. Maybe that was intentional, as later things kept moving and his actions never felt out of character.

Quite a dystopian story how money is everything, every crime can be bought, measured in money.

Theo, meassuring the killing of his former friend. Trying to find his daughter.

    howled!
    And in the darkness the others answered and shrieked their darknesses to the sky, the sound echoing off the water, the cry of the hunter, the predator that drinks the hot fresh juices from a still-beating heart.
    hoooowwwwwwwwllllll!!!

    Around the business school, the security men shut their students in and told them to wait until the buses came, secured with metal plates against reflective glass, a driver who kept a stun gun lodged between handbrake and gear stick.
    hoooooowwwwlll!!

    Neila did not sleep, and neither did Theo.

    At 1 a.m. they met each other, both going to the kitchen sink for a little more water.

    Theo said, "There's a queen of the patties. They say she was one of the first, the oldest - the first woman they ever condemned to make burgers on the patty line. Half the meat they use is wasted anyway, but it doesn't matter. The government subsidises the companies that run the prison, to make sure they make a profit so they can carry on being efficient rehabilitators, says it's better that way, cheaper in the long run, so the companies don't worry if they waste stuff. There's mountains of minced meat at the back of the yard, the flies are so thick it looks like a living thing. My dad died on the patty line, but the contracts say that the government can't sue for negligence and why would they? Only a patty. Only another patty."

    The discretion clause worked its magic. When you weren't allowed to talk about a thing, sometimes it was just easier to ignore it, pretend it had never happened. Theo Miller vanished and people wondered where he was, and those who knew . . .

    . . . did not answer.

    They boy went back to halls, began to pack, not sure where he was going, not sure what he was meant to do now.

The next morning there she was, with Andy. She was going to dump him. She knew she would. It was just . . . really hard. Because once he was dumped, what was she supposed to do?

    What was she supposed to do?

    Their eyes met, and he walked on by and did not look back.

    Went to the train station.

    Threw his phone out of the window.

    Took three trains and a bus.

    Back to Oxford. Back to the safe place that had always been a lie, he never should have been there, he was never going to make it. Some mad fantasy of his patty-line dad, some hilarious criminal's joke.

    Made a big deal of consuming it, every last bite, licking his lips, wiping his face with a napkin, spreading the detritus, putting the napkin down, picking up a single, skinny dry chip from the basket by him, taking a bite, half a chip gone, chewing with his mouth open, then the other half, licking his fingers, picking up another, watching Theo. His skin was the colour of monsoon earth, his hair was going badger grey at the temples and crown. His nails were buffed down to tiny, soft stubs. Two tendons stood out below his jaw and down his neck, like the lines of a suspension bridge.

    He ate chips.

    Theo waied.

    Another chip and

    another chip and

    Theo waited.

    Faris took another tchip, and didn't eat it ,but held it sticky in one hand and at last met Theo's eyes.

Knave of coins, the Devil (inverted), the Priest, sven of wands, three of coins, the Fool, three of cups, king of coins, the Hanged Man (inverted).

    Neila said, "I don't like the word 'mister'. It's weighted down with this idea, this baggage like you say 'Mr Smith', and there's this idea isn't there in your immediately of what Mr Smith must be because the word, the gender identifier, it imposes so many cultural ideas about strong and right and reliable and . . ."

    Theo made paste with spniach and mushroom sauce.

    ". . . once stopped at customs - this was when I could afford holidays - and they said 'We are going to search you' and I asked why. They didn't give me a reason, but they took me to the men's room. The men's. I was so . . . I said I'm not . . . And I begged them I was crying I was just - but what the system says matters more and I . . ."

    They ate in silence, counting down the hours until the morning. Low brick houses, white window frames, roads without trees, pawnbrokers, betting shops, a bit in the centre of town for the parents to take their kids shopping for £1 water pistols and a pot of paints that the baby would eat in the car back home. A theatre, abandoned, squatters sleeping in the place where the fly bars once had been, cardboard mattresses laid across metal beams and in the musty, mousy warmth of the orchestra pit.

    "I don't ask anything," Neila mused as they sat together by candlelight. "Loneliness is a state of mind. You have to want something, to be lonely. You have to need some sort of reassurance, someone to tell you that this is who you are. I'm not lonely. I don't want anything. I don't need anything or anyone to tell me that . . . you know that, don't you? You know that's how I . . ."

He walked into town, past the seafront apartments where the old folks had sat in long bay windows to watch the yacht club and the passing trawlers, along the shopping street of boarded windows and street lamps with no bulbs in them. Baskets still hung from some of the lamps, the soil long since washed away, the exposed roots rotted to wisps. One the wall of the local Indian takeaway someone had graffitied, WILL YOU MARRY ME? but if an answer had been given, it hadn't endured.

    "Do you regret?" she asked. "Do you look back, do you look at - when you think about the time you've had and the things - do you regret? Is that what you feel?"

    Theo thought about it.

    "I think I would," he said at last. "If there wasn't something more important to do."

Later, Neila stood alone at the back of the Hector, hand freezing on the rudder.
    The fucking cormorant didn't even bother to fly away when she flapped at it now, just sat there on the roof of her fucking boat, minding its own business in the most insufferable way.

And in the days before

    Helen sat with Theo on top of a hill as the sun set over the vales. In the town below someone was screaming, screaming, until they were silenced. Queen Bea didn't hold with that sort of thing, not in her neck of the woods, but on the other side of the valley there were the tearers the ragers the faders the zeroes the

    Helen said, "Is it enough? Theo? Is it enough? Have I saved my son?"

    And Theo didn't answer, and things dind't seem to change that much after all.

    The next day they too went to the races.

    "Blessed are her hands," whispered Bea as they trudged down the hill, coat and skirts hitched high, nose blue, ips white. "Blessed are those who break the silence."

    "Half the people we ask don't even know if the queen is real, they can't imagine it, anything changing. But the idea makes them feel better. That maybe they can do this really small thing like this up yours to the world and maybe it'll make a difference., maybe they count. That's all the queen really is. She makes people think stuff they do matters. If you take that away, we're all just fucked really. Just totally fucked."

    Well.

    Maybe it would be easier to have a puppy. Or a cat. Lovely self-cleaning things, cats are.

    I wanted to talk to you, Mr Miller.

    I thought that perhaps

    in its way

    I owed it to you. Or maybe no, not to you you aren't

    but to Lucy

    I owe it to Lucy, to this child who is

    she's only a child she's

    I owe her, monstrous though she is. To tell you, to tell her father - she's going to be all right. I'm going to, and I don't care what Simon says I'm going to 

    she's going to be all right. I'll make sure of it I'll make sure she's . . ."

Yelena Moskoving - "Virtuoso"

Weird. I read this basically two times. And the second time, I didn't remember that much. I recognised the story when going through it, but that's it.

It's enjoyable, not an easy read per sé, but some fierce language. Less a story with plot than a fierce description of "what to love" fully means, in all its ugliiness.

The wife's tears split like hairs. "Clear," the man pronounces again, the woman in uniform is squeezing the wife's forearms. The wife shuts herslef up with her own gasp and peers. The current races through the flesh to the heart and pulls the body up, chest bowing, ribs splintering beneath her skin, and for a moment, the wife thinks she's getting up this time. But the body cinches in and collapses, thump, back down into the millions of rose-colored bristles. Her shoulder blades hit the floor and spread, and the head winces then stops. The mouth inert. From her slack, parted lips, a viscous blue foam is seeping out.

Mr Bolshakov started rubbing himself off, emitting ointments of moans, all the while the springs pushing in and out o my gut till I thought I'd wet myself or shit myself or split my spleen. But he finished off and stood up and finally left the room.
    I slid out of that space, then felt it coming, so I pulled the bed cover down and vomited onto the sheet, then closed the comforter over that spot, ha ha.
    Then I went back to those army boots and reached into my pocket and got out the matches.

* 

Before the police or the school got whiff of it, I ran back to our building and pulled Janka into the bathroom with me and locked the door. She knew I'd done something irreversible. I said hush for a minute. We were squeezed in against the toilet and we waited in silence to hear if there were any footsteps in the hallway. There weren't any, so I unzipped my jeans and plunged my hand in and fished about in my cunt and pulled it out for show. Ta-da, I showed Jana the tight wad of money wrapped in plastic.
    Janka said, "He's going to kill you!" I said, "No one can kill me, I'm already an angel!" Then I kissed her. Janka said, "Where are we gonna hide this?" I said, "Where else?" and stuffed that money-roll back into my cunt.

I'll see you later though? Jana said. Later? Aimée responded, with a disbelief that felt too expansive for one evening. Yes later. Can I? The words were turning their heeavy bodies, right, left. Later, at my place? Aimée asked, her voice somewhat dulled from the question. Would that be okay, Jana replied, feeling her thumb bend into her palm, her forearm tense, her weight shift. Because I need to go and see this friend, she was explaining again.
    There was a certain relief in the act of going over each other's words, in the doorway, with no utility, there was nothing more to understand, the information was exchanged and the Uber was waiting downstairs, and they were repeating each other's words as if they could each grasp something of each other that they could individually keep, because just then, there was an urge to keep something of the other, because disbelief is expansive especially when the day is turning over its edge, and one can feel their whole lifetime in the words they must throw away at the threshold of a door.

The Dark and the Wicked

OK horror, the slow burning kind. Few good bits, where the brother Michael leaves his sister to be with his family and away from the madness, then kills himself because he has a vision of his wife and kids being dead.

But the lack of explanation was a bit of a hindrance here. Felt a bit too random.

Swarm testing

 https://users.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/swarm12.pdf

Intriguing idea where creating subsets of features to test, and intentionally leaving certain features out, produces much better results. 

Good Will Hunting

Don't think I ever saw it.

Solid stuff.  Good for a night in a hotel next to an airport.

Coherence

Enjoyable enough.

Bit silly how a comet would cause quantum mechanics, but you have to accept that.

Appreciate that they don't really "solve" the final bit.

Brian Chistian - "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions"

If you want the best odds of getting the best apartment, spend 37% of your apartment hunt (eleven days, if you've given yourself a month for the search) non-committally exploring optinos. Leave the checkbook at home; you're just calibrating. But after that point, be prepared to immediately commit – deposit and all – to the very first place you see that beats whatever you've already seen. This is not merely an intuitive satisfying compromise between looking and leaping. It is the provably optimal solution.

Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī, author of ninth-century book of techniques for doing mathematics by hand. (His book was called al-Jabr wa'l-Muqābala – and the "al-jabr" of the title in turn provides the source of our word "algebra.") The earliest known mathematical algorithms, however, predate even al-Khwārizmī's work: a four-thousand-year old Sumerian clay tablet found near Baghdad describes a scheme for long division.

"Someone at Michigan" was almost certainly someone named Merrill Flood. Though he is largely unheard of outside mathematics, Flood's influence on computer science is almost impossible to avoid. He's credited with popularizing the traveling salesman problem, devising the prisoner's dilemma, and even with possibly coining the term "software".

We think of chess, for instance, as medieval European in its imagery, but in fact its origins are in eight-century India; it was heavy-handedly "Europeanized" in the fifteenth century, as its shahs became kings, its viziers turned to queens, and its elephants became bishops.

A record of 0-0, an arm that's a complete unknown - has an expected value of 0.5000 but a Gittins index of 0.7029. In other words, something you have no experience with whatsoever is more attractive than a machine that you know pays out 70% of the time! As you go down the diagonal, notice that a record of 1-1 yields an index of 0.6346, a record of 2-2 yields 0.6010 and so on. If such 50%-successful performance persists, the index does ultimately converge on 0.5000, as experience confirms that the machine is indeed nothing special and takes away the "bonus" that spurs further exploration.

Chester Barnard, "To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been."

First, assuming you're not omniscient, your total amount of regret will probably never stop increasing, even if you pick the best possible strategy - because even the best strategy isn't perfect every time. Second, regret will increase at a slower rate if you pick the best strategy than if you pick others; what's more, with a good strategy regret's rate of growth will go down over time, as you learn more about the problem and are able to make better choices. Third, and most specifically, the minimum possible regret - again assuming non-omniscience - is regret that increases at a logarithmic rate with every pull of the handle.

... where people were given a choice between two options, one with a known payoff chance and one unknown - specifically two airlines, an established carrier with a known on-time rate and a new company without a track record yet. Given the goal of maximizing the number of on-time arrivals over some period of time, the mathematically optimal strategy is to initially only fly the new airline, as long as the established one isn't clearly better. If at any point it's apparent that the well-known carrier is better - that is, if the Gittins index of the new option falls below the on-time rate of the familiar carrier - then you should switch hard to the familiar one and never look back.

More generally, our intuitions about rationality are too often informed by exploitation rather than exploration. When we talk about decision-making, we usually focus just on the immediate payoff of a single decision - and if you treat every decision as if it were your last, then indeed only exploitation makes sense. But over a lifetime, you're going to make a lot of decisions. And it's actually rational to emphasize exploration - the new rather than the best, the exciting rather than the safe, the random rather than the considered - for many of those choices, particularly earlier in life.

debeaking chickens on farms may be a well-intentioned but counterproductive approach: it removes the authority of individual fights to resolve the order, and therefore makes it much harder for the flock to run any sorting procedure at all. So the amount of antagonism within the flock in many cases actually increases.

"ordinal numbers" (which only express rank) to "cardinal" ones (which directly assign a measure to something's caliber)

The researchers showed that simply knowing more makes things harder when it comes to recognizing words, names, and even letters. No matter how good your organization scheme is, having to search through more things will inevitably take longer. It's not that we're forgetting, it's that we're remembering. We're becoming archives.

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

 

In the face of uncertainty [...] for time management: each time a new piece of work comes in, divide its importance by the amount of time it will take to complete. If that figure is higher than for the task you're currently doing, switch to the new one, otherwise stick with the current task.

 

 [heterogeneous collection of short tasks] "interrupt coalescing"; if you have five credit card bills, for instance, don't pay them as they arrive; take care of them all in one go when the fifth bill comes.

 

power-law distributions / scale-free distributions, characterize quantities that can plausibly range over many scales.

 

Examining the Copernican Principle, we saw that when Bayes's Rule is given an uninformative prior, it always predicts that the total life span of an object will be exactly double its current age.

[...]

Bayes's Rule indicates that the appropriate prediction strategy is a multiplicative rule; multiply the quantity observed so far by some constant factor. For an uninformative prior, that constant factor happens to be 2, hence the Copernican prediction; in other power-law cases, the multiplier will depend on the exact distribution you're working with.

 [...]

 

In a power-law distribution, the longer something has gone on, the longer we expect it to continue going on. So a power-loaw event is more surprising the longer we've been waiting for it - and maximally surprising right before it happens. A nation, corporation, or institution only grows more venerable with each passing year, so it's always stunning when it collapses.
    In a normal distribution, events are surprising when they're early - since we expected them to reach the average - but not when they're late. Indeed, by that point they seem overdue to happen, so the longer we wait, the more we expect them.
    And in an Erlang distribution, events by definition are never any more or less surprising no matter when they occur. Any state of affairs is always equally likely to end reguardless of how long it's lasted.

 

 

It is indeed true that including more factors in a model will always, by definition, make it a better fit for the data we have already. But a better fit for the available data does not necessarily mean a better prediction.

 

If the study were repeated with different people, producing slight variations on the same essential pattern, the one- and two-factor models would remain more or less steady - but the nine-factor model would gyrate wildly from one instance of teh study to the next. This is what statisticians call overfitting.
    So one of the deepest truths of machine learning is that, in fact, it's not always better to use a more complex model.

 

Taste is our body's proxy metric for health. Fat, sugar and salt are important nutrients, and for a couple hundred thousand years, being drawn to foods containing them was a reasonable measure for a sustaining diet.
    But being able to modify the foods available to us broke that relationship. We can now add fat and sugar to foods beyond amounts that are good for us, and then eat those foods exclusively rather than the mix of plants, grains, and meats that historically made up the human diet. In other words, we can overfit taste.

 

 

R.F. Kuang - "Katabasis"

Literally dark academia, going to hell to get their professor back...?

To be honest she had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.

Legion (series)

Enjoyable.  Not yet sure where it's going, but each episode so far has been great in storytelling pace.

Robert Plant - "Monkey"

Found via "Legion" (series). 

Haunting. should see what the rest is like.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side"

Text rendering and rasterization

Almost too much information, http://rastertragedy.com/RTRCh5.htm by 

Also, degaussing (or deperming) started in WW II to reduce the risk of magnetic mines finding ships Germans used the Gauss as unit (not a standard at the time, so the English started to call this degaussing.

Irene Kral - "Where is Love"

William Gibson - "Mona Lisa Overdrive"

Still as good as it was then.

Claire North - "84K"

William Gibson - "Neuromancer"

Case

Molly

Armitage

Wintermute

Tessier-Ashpool

Neuromancer.

Still so good.

Thomas Ligotti - "Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe"

amazing gothic, and sometimes near cosmic horror short stories.

Amazing control of language, so many words I need to look up! Not exactly "Gormenghast", but close.

Her heels clomped with a pleasing hollowness on drab flagstones. Silver-haired, she was attired in a gray suit, a big bow flopping up to her lower chins. In her left hand was a long enveloppe, neatly cesareaned, and in her right hand the letter it had contained, folded in sections like a triptych.

The Amateur

Shit film, badly done "Enemy of the State"

Financial Times - Hot Money (Agents of Chaos)

Interesting podcast about wirecard's COO and how he seems to be a Russian spy.

U2 - "Love Is Blindness"

still as amazing

Diana Ross - Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)

star wars duel of the fates epic dialogue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp_Uuu-hIT0

Mark Lawrence - "The book that wouldn't burn" plus 2nd and 3rd

Enjoyable, the second and third version

Not as good as the first

Dua Lipa - "Bloed Zweet en Tranen"

holy shit, dit is fantastisch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxZBxpeWf1E&list=RDkxZBxpeWf1E&start_radio=1

Prodigy - "Rebel radio - Reve LaVice's Start a Fucking Riot Remix"

amazing

Design Psychocologist - Sample size

Scientists need to decide what question to ask; sometimes the question needs to be more narrow

It also depends on how strong they want their claims to be.

* effect size: something that has a small effect (traffic light impact on commute) will require more samples than something that has a large effect (car accident)

* statistically larger effect sizes produce bigger differences in outcomes, which are visible even with smaller samples

* smaller effect (small button changing conversion 0.5%) - this will need more participants to detect reliably

* how much variability exists

* how certain you want to be

* the more variable your data, the more samples you need; you need enough data points to statistically say this will be repeatable

For UI/UX, "can someone complete this form without getting stuck" does not necessarily need hundreds of people

Any Austin - "Do Grand Theft Auto V’s Power Lines Connect To Anything?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3iqVTDXK1Y

yet another amazing random video

like

* noah caldwell-gervais

* that carton box metal gear solid video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPmd9pZKTxE

28 Years Later

Amazing stuff. Gripping story of a boy trying to help his mother. Proper Danny Boyle style.

Sequoia Nagamatsu - "How High We Go In The Dark"

Amazing "time lapse" story of a pandemic impacting mostly children. Bit similar to Cloud At ast and how it indirectly tied stoires together.

I couldn't imagine being in their p;lace. I thought about the tiny body bags lining the streets in the early days of teh Arctic plague, how crying parents could be heard at all hours of the night, the white buses 

Phoebe Kildeer, the Short Straws - "The Fade Out Line"

a voice very much like Vaya Con Dios (Dani Klein, the singer)

Ted Chaing - "Stories of your life and others"

first story, "Tower of Babylon", where people are able to get to heaven, after weeks of climbing (the tower was built during generations), and start digging, they think of the biblical floods, install doors to deal with it, but the protagonist still gets swept up... and ends up on Earth.

And realises it's an endless scroll, like a cylinder pressed in clay...

Tami Neilson - "You Were Mine"

Voice and style very similar to Beth Hart, same raw intensity.

"Walk (Back to your arms)" is similar, but also more 60's swing, has that finger-clicking rhythm...!

Predator: Killer of Killers

while some illogical bits, great animation, three eras on Earth, then on the Predator's homeworld, combining viking, Japanese samurai and a world war II pilot.

Kobo Abe - "The Ark Sakura"

one of Japans most established writers... about the human condition.

I couldn't get into it. The characters are all larger than life. Their chats and reactions too weirdly direct.

Jo Harkin - "Tell me an ending"

Amazing book where a company can remove memories.  The story starts when they discover they can get those memories back as they were only blocked. Told from the viewpoint of various people, rotating, it all comes together at the end, without a cheesy or overly sci-fi ending. 

Amazing stuff.

    You see, we're all coded, we're all running programs. The goal is simplicity, elegance, orderly cooperation, to produce an effective and bug-free whole. Obviously, the human brain is more of a challenge. The ultimate challenge. When you don't know the operating rules, problems seem impossible to fix. But they aren't. To understand the underlying system, the rules, like Nepenthe does, and then them to fix a, a malfunction, in this a PTSD response - that's just a ... beautiful concept. Actually I don't think there's anything more beautiful than that.
    (She realized she'd been leaning forward and holding the edge of the desk. She let go; put her hands in her lap.)
    You didn't mention morality, Louise said.
    Well no, Noor said. Health, function - those aren't moral matters. It's not a moral matter when a program isn't working. It's a practical one.
    Louise looked at her for a long time.
    I understand, she said.
    On the train home, Noor, knowing she had the job, was able to find it a little bit funny that she'd thought she might have been asked about Helen of Troy.

Helen, thinks Noor.
    Helena.
    Elena.

The problem with thinking about forgetting things is that it always makes you think about the things you want to forget.

Noor saw the girl sunbathing topless in the garden, one Saturday. She turned away from her naked breast, fiery white in the strong sunlight. A wince on her behalf. Be careful, she wants to say to her. Please look after yourself. Then that night the two of them played drum and bass until four a.m. and she thought: I hope your tits got burnt.

Emily St. John Mandel - "The Glass Hotel"

Yet another beautiful story, about siblings, Vincent and her brother Paul. Vincent becomes the trophy wife of Jonathan Alkaitis, who runs a ponzi scheme. 

Told over v,arious years and decades, with a wonderful curling into itself, tying things up beautifully at the end. hints of ghosts, but could be just hallucinations.

When everyone was gone, the lawn seemed enormous, a twilight landscape of round tables with flickering candles on wine-stained tablecloths, plastic cups glimmering in the trampled grass. "You're so poised," Jonathan said. They were sitting by the pool with their feet in the water, while the caterers blew out candles and folded tables and packed dirty glasses into crates. That's my job, Vincent didn't say in return. Calling it a job seemed uncharitable, because she really did like him. It wasn't the romance of the century, but it didn't have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone's company, she'd been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don't mind sleeping with the, isn't that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there's respect and something like friendship? She spent more time thinking about this than she would have liked, which suggested that it was an unresolved question, but she felt certain that she could go on this way for a long time, years probably.The Fourth of July was a feverish night at the peak of a heat wave.

Arkady Martine - "Rose/House"

meh.  AI house from an "amazing architect" lets only one person in, but a murder has been committed.

Sounds nice, but failed to make me care for it.

Mark Lawrence - "The book that wouldn't burn"

Interesting book where an infinite library, spanning all worlds and times, provides both refuge and danger?

Different species see each other as enemies ("sabbers"), and the library tries to tell them history is only repeating, but that's hard to get.

Good sudden twist where Livira and Evar turn out to be separate species. Her book, which he took into the Mechanism, which is where you can live "inside" books, turns out to create a crack in time.

    "The first librarian, founder of the great library, had a younger brother, Jaspeth. Jaspeth felt that since =.their great-grandparents had lost the gods' good graces by foolishly seeking knowledge, it was hardly a good idea that just three generations later Irad was building a great palace to knowledge where all could come and partake of it. Knowledge, he said, was not wisdom. Irad, he said, was continuing the work that the devil had started. They went to war over it. Though neither of them ended up killing their own brother like their grandfather had. Instead, they formed an uneasy peace. A compromise. The library is that compromise. The knowledge - all knowledge - is there for the taking, waiting on a shelf, ready to be picked up. But it must be found. It cannot be summoned effortlessly from a ring and projected onto a wall. Not unless someone puts in the necessary work and cleverness, and then only for as long as that cleverness is preserved. All that knowledge lies there, as agreed, locked behind thee letters of ever-changing alphabets in the words of ever-changing languages. It sits there among the lies, mistakes, delusions, and untruths of the unwise. It is, to make a long story shorter, never easy."
   

Your Friends & Neighbours

Good series with John Hamm, rich market dude turned thief.

Gangs of London (s3)

Not finished yet, but completely over the top.  Sean Wallace won't die.  Giving birth and fighting off baddies...

Eternaut

Fun short Argentinian sci-fi series where most of the world dies when some mortal snow starts to fall down. 

Then there's b-movie beetles, including a b-movie villain which is a hand with too many fingers?  

Heretic

Proper horror, mostly psychological, about two mormon girls trying to convert Hugh Grant.

Well acted, including how initially I thought one of the girls kinda overacted, but it made all sense in the final part of the film where she starts to turn the table on him in his house of horror.

The Congress (2013)

Strange film with Robin Wright, who as aging actress gets a chance to get digitalized.

Even farther into the future, taking chemicals, everything becomes animated as nobody sees reality anymore, until she takes a pill and sees the decrepit "real world" again.

based on "The Futuristic Congress" by Stanislaw Lem.

Mark Lawrence - "The book that wouldn't burn"

Interesting premise of Library, spanning all of time and worlds.

A girl, Livira, pulled from her town in the Dust.

Evar, a boy born in the library, pushed into its Mechanism, only to arrive decennia later

Roger Zelazny - "The great book of Amber"

Industry (s3)

Money Heist (2025)

Spanish series, enjoyable enough so far

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

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

LTNM’s attractive coating comes in an unfortunate package:

 -   Many who support LTNM never specify whether they mean the boring 20th-century machines, today’s quite different artifacts, or the fruits of all possible engineering efforts in the deep future. By failing to answer the hard question of defining what a “machine” is — they neglect a point at the core of their claim.

 -   It locks its adherents into unsolvable pseudo-problems as to the status of cyborgs, hybrots, augmented humans and every possible kind of chimeric being that’s partly natural and partly engineered. An increasing number of mental contortions will be needed as these beings come online, to accommodate the many special cases that don’t fit into LTNM’s binary classification.

 -   It signals support for the power of evolution but fails to define its secret sauce and to explain why a process consisting of eons of trial and error by mutation and selection should have a monopoly on making minds. Why can’t engineers use those same techniques, augmented by rational design, to embody nature’s amazing properties in new ways and in other media?

 -   It sounds grandiose and universal, but rarely do its proponents say what it means for detecting life broadly, in the universe. Would they assess functional capabilities, composition or origin story as definitive evidence when evaluating the moral standing of an eloquent and personable alien visitor who is shiny and metallic-looking, and possibly came into being with the help of other minds?

Quantum doomsday planning (1/2): Risk assessment & quantum attacks

https://www.taurushq.com/blog/quantum-doomsday-planning-1-2-doing-your-risk-assessment-and-the-real-cost-of-quantum-attacks/

Experts in complexity theory have a solid understanding of the quantum speedup concept. While certain computational tasks require an exponential number of operations (relative to input size) on a classical computer, some of these problems can be efficiently solved using a quantum computer (that is, in polynomial time). Consequently, a quantum computer can transform a practically unsolvable problem into a solvable one.

But only a small fraction of computationally hard problems are susceptible to such exponential quantum speedup. Specifically, quantum computers offer limited assistance in searching for optimal solutions to constraint-satisfaction problems (see NP-hard problems). Let's repeat: quantum computers are not "exponentially faster" computers that would turn any computation-intensive problem into a swiftly solvable task.

Kirk Hamilton - "Spec Ops Writer on Violent Games: 'We're Better Than That'"

https://kotaku.com/spec-ops-writer-on-violent-games-were-better-than-th-460992384

Over the course of the talk, which Williams gave yesterday afternoon as a part of the GDC "Narrative Summit," his primary focus was the idea that any game is defined by action, and so the actions you undertake in the game will define the game's meaning. As an example, he said, if you're playing a platformer, the game will be defined by jumping. When you're playing a shooter like Spec Ops, the game will be defined by the act of killing a person with a gun. "When you're using an action as a tool, it's easy to disassociate from what that action is," Williams said. "When you play a shooter, that action is killing a person. When you sit down to play a shooter, you're essentially signing up to kill hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of the game."

Walker, the protagonist of Spec Ops, can't be all that righteous, Williams said, because he's got to kill enough people to fill many hours of gameplay. (Williams did jokingly point out that Nazis appear the only kinds of people who were excepted from this in video games. "Nazis are basically human demons," he said. Heh.) It's easy at the beginning of a game to have the killing make sense, but as the game goes forward, it becomes weirder and weirder that he's killing so many people. However, Williams pointed out, it's very easy to turn this weakness to a strength, at least for the story.

Key to that, Williams said, is having the characters themselves rationalize their actions, even the most extreme ones. They don't have to be successful at it, but they should at least try to explain themselves to themselves. In other words, the soldiers in Spec Ops should be killing people because they're soldiers, but as the game got more intense, they began to feel compelled to rationalize to themselves and one another why they were on such a violent, ultimately destructive quest. 

Anthony Lane - "The Intoxicating History of Gin"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-intoxicating-history-of-gin

Luis Buñuel suggested holding the bottle of vermouth in a shaft of sunlight, so that it would irradiate the gin without touching it: a wicked twist on the doctrine of the Incarnation. Drier still, if spiked with apocrypha, is Noël Coward’s definition: “A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.”

A novice who dives into gin, or simply dips a toe, will soon notice the designation “London Gin” or “London Dry Gin” on many bottles, and will, understandably, assume that the stuff was made in London. Not so. The word “London” denotes a method, and you won’t need me to remind you that Annex II, Section 22, Subsection (a)(i) of Regulation (EC) No 110/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council ordains that London Gin be “obtained exclusively from ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin, with a maximum methanol content of 5 grams per hectolitre of 100% vol. alcohol, whose flavour is introduced exclusively through the re-distillation in traditional stills of ethyl alcohol in the presence of all the natural plant materials used.” In other words, mix your bits together at the start and toss ’em all in the pot. Late arrivals will not be admitted.

The craze didn’t erupt from nowhere. The British have been imbibing gin, or some approximation of it, for hundreds of years. Seventeenth-century British soldiers, fighting in the Low Countries, showed a sweet tooth for the local rotgut, and the word “gin” derives from jenever, the Dutch for juniper. (Just to complicate matters, genever—a respectable spirit, sweeter and warmer than regular gin, and ideal for fending off the northern chill—is still widely drunk in the Netherlands.) Juniper had long been embraced as a curative, especially against the plague (it didn’t work), and that benign reputation lingered. We don’t know exactly what went into the “strong water made of juniper” that the diarist Samuel Pepys knocked back on October 10, 1663, but it did the trick and, he said, allayed his constipation.

No law on booze will ever surpass the ingenuity of those determined to break it, as any student of Prohibition is aware, and as any reader of “The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Captain Dudley Bradstreet,” published in 1755, can confirm. The author was on the make during the later Gin Acts, and, having studied them for loopholes, displayed both wit and élan in staying, if only by a whisker, within the rules. He realized, for instance, that the authorities, who by now were clamping down on distillation in the home, had no right to break into the home to do the clamping. So he “purchased in Moorfields the Sign of a Cat, and had it nailed to a Street Window; I then caused a Leaden Pipe, the small End out about an Inch, to be placed under the Paw of the Cat; the End that was within had a Funnel to it.” At night, Bradstreet entered the house, shut the door, and waited:

    At last I heard the Chink of Money, and a comfortable Voice say, “Puss, give me two Pennyworth of Gin.” I instantly put my Mouth to the Tube, and bid them receive it from the Pipe under her Paw, and then measured and poured it into the Funnel, from whence they soon received it.

try Samuel Johnson, whose brisk Tory tolerance had an answer for most conundrums. Asked why it was worth giving halfpence to beggars, since they would “only lay it out in gin or tobacco,” he asked, in return, “Why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?” He continued:

    It is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.

Thea Lim - "The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age"

https://thewalrus.ca/collapse-of-self-worth-in-the-digital-age/

At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”

The market is the only mechanism for a piece of art to reach a pair of loving eyes. Even at a museum or library, the market had a hand in homing the item there. I didn’t understand that seeking a reader for my story meant handing over my work in the same way I sold my car on Craigslist: it’s gone from me, fully, bodily, finally. Or, as Marx says, alienated. I hated that advice to keep writing, because if I wrote another book, I’d have to go through the cycle again: slap my self on the scale like a pair of pork chops again. Now, I realize the authors I met meant something else. Yes, sell this part of your inner life but then go back in there and reinflate what’s been emptied. It’s a renewable resource.

Brendan Keogh - "Talking is Harmful"

https://unwinnable.com/2013/04/09/talking-is-harmful/

Interesting enough essay on Spec-Ops

there was one thing that I saw and I thought, “He’s wrong on this. Do I tell him? I should tell him! No, I shouldn’t tell him! That sounds rude!” And that’s the thing. With the world being so much smaller these days, I don’t know how to interact with you in that regard.

Péter Szász - "How To Represent Decisions You Disagree With"

https://peterszasz.com/how-to-represent-decisions-you-disagree-with/

Be a Shock Absorber, not a Shield

Managers who see their role as protectors can imagine themselves as shields that isolate the team from all the bad that goes on outside. The expression “shit umbrella” does a great job of conveying this idea visually. I have multiple problems with this interpretation of the role, to sum it up: it treats team members as children who need protection, it hides useful context that could be helpful for them to accept and work with change, and puts unsustainable pressure on the manager.

I prefer a different analogy: the Shock Absorber. Ed Batista in his article here does a great job explaining this concept, so I’ll just summarize it here: cushion the blows by giving context and reframing; provide the appropriate level of resistance (to both directions!); and pay attention to your own resilience.

 Create a safe space for them on 1:1s where you hear them out without judgment. Avoid starting with counterarguments against their concerns. It’s more important to let them share their unfiltered frustrations first and acknowledge that they feel upset (without agreeing with them - you might, but that's not the point now). When they are ready, you can start discussing the details.

Darlene Forde - "Nominal Aphasia: Problems in Name Retrieval"

https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/darlene-forde/nominal-aphasia-problems-name-retrieval

Anomia is one general term for problems with word finding or recall that occurs with no impairment of comprehension or the capacity to repeat the words; the terms anomic and nominal aphasia are also used

very random music enjoying while not juggling three different summit agendas and work

• Tom Waits - "Hold On"
• Bad Omens, Poppy - "V.A.N."
• Roger Whittaker - "I Don't Believe In If Anymore"
• Madelline - "Crazy Bitch" - dance joy
• the Scratch - "Another Round" (drinking song)
• Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - "Doctor Blind" - piano, late evening sad song
• First Aid Kit - "My Silver Lining"

("very random" being "songs I marked as 'like'")

Eliza Clark - "She's Always Hungry"

Good stories about hunger.  Very different in style.  Not everything amazing, but captivating enough.

Story done purely in online reviews ("Chitaly")

Some body horror - "Hollow Bones", longer one

Min's neck gave out. and by the time she'd pulled her head back up, blood had been drawn, and was spattered across the corridor.
    She was beginning to think she'd be late for the keynote speech after all. She looked up at the ceiling and lifted her wounded hand. She pulled off her little finger, and dropped it into her mouth - easy as ripping off a hangnail.
    The skin of that finger was so thin, it fell apart like stewed meat and slide down her throat just as easily, gristle collapsing with a press of her tongue, and the bone crumbling between her teeth. She swallowed.
    Fen had grabbed the doctor by their scalp - she saw them flex their claws, and drive them into Nook's skull. There was a crunch. Fen squeezed, and Nook went limp.
    So did Min. Dark again.

Katherine Arden - "The warm hands of ghosts"

Amazing magic realism about world war 1, a Canadian nurse who tries to find her brother Freddie; Freddie has been caught under a capsized pillbox with a German, Winter.

There's Faland, the devil of sorts, asking for stories that you will forget.

Amazing book.

Mickey 17

Boy gets reprinted on a space ship bound for a cold planet with a crazy politician who wants to starts a new "pure" empire.

Bit random, overall.  Not bad, but not amazing either. 

Juror #2

Interesting film akin to 12 Angry Men, but one of them realises he is the actual murderer during the trial.

Conclave

Gladiator II

Anora (2024)

Night club girl and rich Russian boy... love story, not the usual kind.

Quite good.

Andréa Morris - "Testing a Time-Jumping, Multiverse-Killing, Conscious-Spawning Theory of Reality"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2023/10/23/testing-a-time-jumping-multiverse-killing-consciousness-spawning-theory-of-reality/?sh=554dfa85209b

In 1931, mathematician Kurt Gödel revealed his incompleteness theorems—theorems of mathematical logic that show there are statements in mathematics that must be true even though they can’t be proven. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Goodstein's theorem sometime later, made an indelible imprint on Penrose. He took from these theorems that there’s a unique property of the physical universe giving rise to conscious understanding. This is our human ability to understand truths that cannot be derived from the rules that gave us those truths. In other words, the rules allow us to ascertain truths beyond the rules. The ability to understand Gödel and Goodstein’s theorems means there’s something about our conscious understanding that is not confined to computational boundaries. Since all theories of physics are computational, Penrose believes something must be happening in the reduction of the quantum state that gives rise to non-computational understanding. “All I have are all the theories we know in physics. Computational, computational, computational. I mean, you've got to find room for this thing,” says Penrose. He confirms that this thing that physics has to make room for is understanding.

Benjamin Libet is best known for his seminal research that seems to show that our choices to act are too slow to be made consciously. The brain "registers" the decision to make movements before we consciously decide to move.

Sam Dresser - "Heidegger v Carnap: how logic took issue with metaphysics"

https://aeon.co/essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics

Interesting article about metaphysics and Heidegger and Carnap. Heidegger being a nazi-sympathisant was messed up.

Logic will not stand in his way; logic, says Heidegger, is not 'the highest court of appeals'. His point is that humans can understand things in ways that aren't strictly intellectual. In our day-to-day lives, we talk about 'nothing' all the time. ('What did you do in school today?' 'Nothing'.) We can use the concept in this way because we have a pre-theoretical idea of what 'nothing'... is, Heidegger says Getting to this 'pre-theoretical' place is the very heart of the philosophy as a whole. It means going 'beyond' logic, or perhaps 'behind' it, to appeal to the what-it-is-like-ness of being a person. Heidegger wants to show - but not really to argue for - the idea that logic doesn't exhaust what we can meaningfully say about existence.

It is through moods such as boredom, joy or anger that the world 'discloses' itself to us, Heidegger says.

Now for the twist: the reason we can toss 'Nothing' about so easily - the reason why we have an inkling of 'Nothing' even if we can't directly speak about it - is that there's a particular mood that 'discloses' Nothing. That mood is anxiety. While fear tends to have a singular object, like a vengeful spider or a murderous clown, anxiety lacks a target. It shears away meaning, revealing the pointlessness of it all, the utter, hollowed-out barrenness of existence.

Perhaps it takes a mind as subtle as Ludwig Wittgenstein's to really, truly understand Heidegger. After reading Heidegger's lecture, Wittgenstein remarked:

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being [Sein] and anxiety [Angst]. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language.

Much of the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap boils down to the notion of 'limits': the limits of words, the limits of knowledge, the limits of expression. And limits naturally prompt questions about beginnings: where to start when we do philosophy, and how does that starting point influence wherever we might be headed? In logic, Carnap found firm ground from which to launch his own philosophy, and to articulate the kind of thinking that should be classed as truly 'philosophical'. For Heidegger, logic is useful but not sufficient. There is so much more to say, so much more to question, so much more bound up with the business of being alive.