??? "My mother told me"

Wonderful old fashioned song. not a shanty, but same style 

My mother told me

Someday I would buy

Galleys with good oars

Sails to distant shores

Whitney Houston - "Star Spangled Banner"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAYKTMQl7MQ

triggered by an interview about the biopic (which seems to be meh)

this is amazing though    

have to get Chase Holfelder with his version in minor key though

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

Dolly Parton - "I will always love you"

watching her sing this, amazing.

Tim Minchin - various

• "Cheese" - still good
• "Cage-Nerd" - amazing, made me laugh so hard
• "Three Minute Song" - yeah fuck the bbc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58mE7Vy1Xrc
• "If you really loved me" - "we go together / like cracker and brie / like racism and ignorance / and bling and RnB"
• as funny as it is, I'm actually really touched by the 'you take a dreary day and paint it blue'
• he played Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar!

Smooth McGroove - "Castlevania - Bloody tears a capella"

amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AFqYeXKK3I

Martin MacInnes - "Gathering Evidence"

Not sure where this is going yet, but I like it.  Has hints of Jeff Vandermeer's "Station 11", probably because of the weird semi-future bonobo reservation.

It seems to reference a lot about how knowing everything will lead to understand everything. But one of the main characters was also frozen by that realisation in her youth.

Currently three story lines; about the Nest that tracks patterns, about scientists invited to understand the weird death of two bonobos (without the fourth expedition member, the doctor though) and a nameless thid-person guy who had an accident and who is visited by a doctor while struggling to get his memories back.

They put it in 3D printers, pacemakers and reflective lenses in glasses. They used tantalum to build platforms for virtual experiences where primary purpose was distraction from, among other things, the conditions needed to create the devices and the social, ecological and climatic consequences of the mines. The increasingly disembodied nature of programs run on this hardware - VR holograms, whispered notifications of blood-pressure targets, automatic food replacements arriving silently at the door - was deliberate and ingenious, implying the technology was literally baseless, unlimited and independent, divorced from anachronistic categories such as fuel, labour, emissions, natural resources. It was as if product design exploited latent religiosity, a nostalgia for the belief that people too existed free from bodies.

... but our own composition affected sound too, the amount of moisture currently present in our bodies, influenced by our diet and our sleep, and then by our anxiety, our restlessness, the nature of the dreams we had been having, then the heaviness of our footfalls, the angle and height we raised ourselves to, the position we turned our heads towards, our optimism, the degree to which the entire history of our lives had led us to be confident that good things would happen - this defined, presently, the position of our bodies and this too conducted and issued sound. In order to learn anything about where we were and what was around us we had to think like this, in an increasingly fine-grained manner. Every single thing, regardless of size, was significant. Everything mattered and in those first several days, tracking and, the more I learned, coming incrementally closer to my sub-group, I felt a sense of urgency, purpose and vitality such as I had never previously experienced anywhere.

[Jane] wasn't just transcribing the bonobos' calling, she was attempting to pull out the peripheral and secondary sound – bird call, the insects, the moving trees – the counterpoint, she called it, which could be instructive itself. The more she listened and brought out different aspects of the recording, the clearer picture she got. She kept describing what was happening – both what was in the sound and the way that she approached it – in visual rather than aural terms. She nodded, said something about relative constancy, stability, variation and differential pattern. I was staring at these sheets, pages and pages scored minutely, aggressively, and I must have been exhausted because I felt I saw something moving in the pages, an object, underneath the graphs and illustrations, an identity, a face, I thought, behind the scrawls and sounds.

Amsterdam [unfinished]

Couldn't really get into it.  Cookie characters and story, but... I just couldn't care much.

Martyrmade - "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem"

Amazing podcast.

How partially fear of a global dark power was intentionally instigated to pressure countries in creating a new state.

Weissman (?) who brokered the deal for Israel in the UK government.

The Arabs fighting in WW 2, sometimes against each other, as proxy wars.

How "laws" in the bible, such as a man can just pay the family of a woman he has assaulted as she'll become his wife, were necessary at the time to prevent escalating bloodfeuts between tribes or families: there was no policy, there was no system to judge.

All you had was your honour and your word. When someone was chosen as arbiter, they were chosen because of how people perceived their honour. Still reflected in current day's courts where the judge is called "your honour".

Kathleen Lubey - "What Andrea Dworkin missed about Pornography"

https://aeon.co/essays/what-andrea-dworkin-missed-about-pornography

But the women soon qualify the potency of the penis. Miss Forward finds it to be, in crucial ways, unlike the dildo: whereas the dildo remains constantly erect, the penis ‘contracts himself like a Snail’, becomes ‘mean and pitiful, sneaking and supple’ in the absence of feminine beauty. Men, the young women realise, do not in their essence possess strength and power. Rather, they require an object of desire to beckon them to action. Men’s claim to uncontested social dominance, therefore, is premised on a faulty anatomical analogy.

Richard Jensen - "A damned stupid thing to do - the origins of C"

https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/12/a-damn-stupid-thing-to-do-the-origins-of-c/

With each failure, Ritchie added features back into NB in a manner that made sense to him and Ken, and once he added structures—variables that store multiple distinct values in a related or ‘structured’ fashion—Thompson was able to write Unix in this new language. Ritchie and Thompson saw the addition of structures, which could be found nowhere in B, SMALGOL, BCPL or CPL, as a change significant enough to warrant renaming the programming language, and B became C.

Michael J Warren - "British place names resonate with the song of missing birds"

https://aeon.co/essays/british-place-names-resonate-with-the-song-of-missing-birds 

Cuckoos, like so many British birds that are threatened or extinct, would have been much more abundant in the Middle Ages. Yaxley, on the edge of surviving cuckoo strongholds in the former Fens, would have thronged to their calls. Now these places, and many like them where the birds of their names are absent, are solemnly displaced, the names creaking in the wind like dilapidated pub signs whose buildings have long since closed or fallen into ruin. We can sense that displacement in the sprawl of modern suburban environments too, which, with considerable irony, fashionably assign bird nomenclatures to roads and residential spaces (Sandpiper Drive, Nightingale Way, Lark Rise, Goldcrest Mews…) where the species named are nowhere to be seen, and perhaps never have been.

Mara van der Lugt on hopeful pessimism

https://aeon.co/essays/in-these-dark-times-the-virtue-we-need-is-hopeful-pessimism

In the early Enlightenment, of course, there were no such concerns for the future of the planet. But there were evils in existence – plenty of them. Crimes, misfortunes, death, disease, earthquakes and the sheer vicissitudes of life. Considering such evils, these philosophers asked, can existence still be justified?

This longstanding philosophical debate is where we get the terms ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’, which are so much used, and perhaps overused, in our modern culture. ‘Optimism’ was the phrase coined by the Jesuits for philosophers such as Leibniz, with his notion that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (for surely, if God could have created a better one, he would have done so). ‘Pessimism’ followed not long afterwards to denote philosophers such as Voltaire, whose novel Candide (1759) ridiculed Leibnizian optimism by contrasting it with the many evils in the world. ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds,’ Voltaire’s hero asks, ‘what on earth are the others like?’

But really, Voltaire wasn’t much of a pessimist: other philosophers such as Bayle and Hume went much further in their demonstrations of the badness of existence. For Bayle, and for Hume after him, the point is not just that the evils of life outnumber the goods (though they believe this is also the case), but that they outweigh them

Jeremiah Lowin on Negative Engineering

https://future.com/negative-engineering-and-the-art-of-failing-successfully/

Negative engineering is “insurance as code”

So, what would be a better solution? I think it’s something akin to risk management for code or, more succinctly, negative engineering. Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives. If positive engineering is taken to mean the day-to-day work that engineers do to deliver productive, expected outcomes, then negative engineering is the insurance that protects those outcomes by defending them from an infinity of possible failures.

After all, we must account for failure, even in a well-designed system. Most modern software incorporates some degree of major error anticipation or, at the very least, error resilience. Negative engineering frameworks, meanwhile, go a step further: They allow users to work with failure, rather than against it. Failure actually becomes a first-class part of the application.

You might think about negative engineering like auto insurance. Purchasing auto insurance won’t prevent you from getting into an accident, but it can dramatically reduce the burden of doing so. Similarly, having proper instrumentation, observability, and even orchestration of code can provide analogous benefits when something goes wrong.

“Insurance as code” may seem like a strange concept, but it’s a perfectly appropriate description of how negative engineering tools deliver value: They insure the outcomes that positive engineering tools are used to achieve. That’s why features like scheduling or retries that seem toy-like — that is, overly simple or rudimentary — can be critically important: They’re the means by which users input their expectations into an insurance framework. The simpler they are (in other words, the easier it is to take advantage of them), the lower the cost of the insurance.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress

Enjoyable enough anime with some Claymore elements where some humans become part zombies/monster ("kabaneri", while the monsters are "kabani") while traveling and fighting on huge trains traveling through the landscape.

And of course infighting between the humans, folks not happy with the Shogunate etc.

random music bits

Beck - everybody's gotta learn sometime

The Korgis - Everybody's gotta learn sometime – wait, this is the original??

Laibach - Tanz mit Laibach (I trieed their Novakropola album, but couldn't appreciate it much anymore. Also, the home-burned CD was rotten...)

Echo and the Bunnymen - "Crocodiles"

Unseen Guest - "Let Me In" – don't think I've heard this before. Is good. Sad evening violin lyrics.

Koop ft Ane Brun - "Koop Island Blues"

Decemberists - "We both go down together"

Harold James - "Geopolitics is a loser's buzzword"

https://aeon.co/essays/geopolitics-is-a-losers-buzzword-with-a-contagious-idea

I'm not sure I follow this completely.  The phrase was coined in Sweden around 1900, then people like Haushofer - who some think was basically the mastermind/writer behind Mein Kampf - took it and made it an excuse for "lebensraum", as later Putin would blame geopolitics on the breaking up of the Sovjet Union...?

As in the interwar era, geopolitics has become a buzzword that brings with it a contagious idea. Geopolitics should be recognised as what it is: an attempt to understand the world by people and countries that believe they are losing out. As in post-1919 Germany, it looks like an appealing way of explaining a newly chaotic world to the confused. The real danger is that this mode of thinking appears so attractive that it poisons everyone else’s politics too. The haunted world of Haushofer, and of the Hartschimmelhof, is a monument to a confusing response to confusion: and a grim warning.

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.