George Stiffman - "America doesn't know tofu"

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/02/america-doesn-t-know-tofu

A common misconception outside of Asian communities is that tofu is just an ingredient. In fact, it's an entire category of proteins. Just as a chef would never cook chicken breast like chicken feet, so too are these tofus completely different from one another. They have different strengths and weaknesses. They have different flavors. They have different mouthfeels. It's not like substituting a black bean for a kidney bean. Because these tofus are so different from one another, and from meat, each one opens up its own world of culinary possibilities.

Peter Watts - "Blindsight"

amazing hard sci-fi exploring whether sentience is actually worth it, via a First Contact situation with a ship called Rorschach.

"memories aren't historical archives. They're-improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that's not to say your memories aren't true, okay? They're an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they're not photographs. More like impressionist paintings."

"I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere."

"I'm saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands to stop the motion before your eyes come back online."

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message, only after wasting time and effort does the deception become apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
    Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
    The signal is an attack.

"One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multi-feature aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly side-cast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as ... counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables."
    I felt my jaw clencing. "And the expressions? What do they represent?"
    "Software customizes output for user."
    An agonizing gallery pled for mercy on all sides.
    "I am wired for hunting," he reminded gently.

Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans, yet orangs consistently recognize themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time. Gorillas don't self-recognize at all. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys - not the presumably "more sentient" great apes who are our closest relatives. Such facts almost suggest that sentience itself could be a phase, something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their more advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

is alright.  First half was fine, but the time warp thing etc in the second half... meh.

The Harder They Fall

Western, Black actors and settings.

(Them going into a "white town" which is literally white is just great.)

Proper Western.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

about how stories change and morph.

I thought I would love it, but couldn't care much about it.

Played this probably a year or more ago.

Gears of War and Disco Elysium essays by Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Gears of War

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_7ngJDbUQE

Disco Elysium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-gQCZL8VA8

Saltburn

With the (in)famous cum bath scene.

Parody? Satire?

I couldn't really see the point.

Genevieve Valentine - "Dream Houses"

Jump ship, crew got killed/murdered, except for one.

Novella.

The Killer

Great "slow assassin protagonist" film by David Lynch.

Negatiator - "Dark is the Night - Soviet Song Тёмная ночь"

It seems the "soviet song" part is part of the title.

Krobak - "Broken (Are Little Victories by the Ship of Life)"

It's as if Yann Tiersen goes post-rock.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais on Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring

Don't always agree with him, but as always, mightily entertaining essay.

Olivie Blake - "The Atlas Six"

Another magic novel, enjoyable so far.

Six (former) students are invited for an apprenticeship at the "hidden" library of Alexandria, ran by a guy names Blake Atlas.

Nico + Libby ("physicalists"?), Callum (empath), Parisa (telepath), Reina (naturalist), Tristan (illusionists)

Writing is OK, the story is fun, even though some parts and character descriptions seem rushed.

Every chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the six, which works surprisingly well to create a coherent narrative. 

Noah Caldwell-Gervais reviews games

• Fallout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7FLCg4KdyE 
• quite the listen, over nine hours, 
• Souls Inheritors - Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPRo4arGaSk 

Elemental

Enjoyable enough pixar film of fire girl and water boy.   Not nearly as amazing as "Inside" but enjoyable nonetheless.

The Long Walk (2022)

Interesting quiet time travel film set in Lao.

A man can travel 50 years back to his younger self. As he once saw his mother die, he now "helps" his young self prepare a tea for his mother that will kill her, as he has "helped" many other girls.

A silent girl, a motorcycle crash, who he found when he was young, accompagnies him and his younger self. 

Things start to change through his actions. Glass he breaks in the past that never was broken, now is. A girl who stays with him after searching for her mother, initially leaves for Vientiane with her girlfriend, but later becomes his captive.

The quiet girl has watched him grow old "a thousand times, but only saw him die once". Buddhism wheel of fate?

from rotten tomatoes:

An old man walks the dusty roads between his isolated farm and the nearby rural village in the company of a silent spirit whose death he witnessed fifty years earlier. For decades, the old man's regret over losing his mother to tuberculosis has bred a pathological need to ease the suffering of the terminally ill, and over the years, he has quietly euthanized several sick women. As he realizes that his spectral companion is able to transport him back in time, the old man trespasses into his own past to set in motion a plan to convince his younger self to preempt his mother's terminal suffering.

Leslie Jamison - "Why Everybody Feels Like They're Faking It"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome

imposter syndrome, the people who first coined the idea/phrase

[Jody-Ann] Burey, who was born in Jamaica, didn't feel like an imposter; she felt enraged by the systems that had been built to disenfranchise her. She also didn't experience any yearning to belong, to inhabit certain spaces of power. "White women want to access power, they want to sit at the table," she told me. "Black women say, this table is rotten, this table is hurting everyone."

Every time [Suzanne]Imes hears the phrase "imposter syndrome," she told me, it lodges in her gut. It's technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is "an experience rather than a pathology," and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it. Their concept was never meant to be a solution for inequality and prejudice in the workplace–a task for which it would necessarily prove insufficient.

The psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, in her book "Animal Joy," explains imposter syndrome by drawing on D. W. Winnicott's concepts of "false self" and "true self." She sees the anxiety as stemming from "a False Self that is so fortified by layers of compliant behavior that is loses contact with the raw impulses and expressions that characterize the True Self." Attempts to prevent the discovery of one's "true self" end up compounding the belief that this self, were it ever discovered, would be rejected and dismissed.

Dual (2022)

Curious film about a girl (Karen Gillian) with a terminal illness who creates a clone, then has to fight her when she doesn't die.

Very dry, dark humour and acting. Almost no music.

Strangely, in style somewhat reminiscent of Scarlett Johansson's "Under the skin"

Curtis White - "It's not about you"

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/freedom/its-not-about-you

As the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, by way of quoting Pliny the Elder, “Custom is the most powerful master of all things.” Montaigne expands the characterization:

Little by little and stealthily, she establishes within us the footing of her authority; but having, by this mild and humble beginning, stayed and rooted it with the aid of time, she then displays a fierce and tyrannical countenance, in opposition to which we no longer have liberty even to lift up our eyes. We see her do violence constantly to the laws of nature.

 Alexander Herzen makes much the same point in "Omnia Mea Mecum Porto":

    People allow the external world to overcome them, to captivate them against their will; they renounce their independence, depending on all occasions not on themselves but on the world, pulling ever tighter the knots that bind them to it. They expect from the world all the good and evil in life; the last thing they rely on is themselves.

Miles Davis interview with Playboy

sep 1962

https://www.erenkrantz.com/Music/MilesDavisInterview.shtml

And I remember one time when I hired Lee Konitz, some colored cats bitched a lot about me hiring an ofay in my band when Negroes didn't have work. I said if a cat could play like Lee, I would hire him, I didn't give a damn if he was green and had red breath.