Exit 8 (2025)

Based on the game. Good pacing considering how little there was they could work with. Framing from different points of view worked well.

Silent Hill (2006)

Enjoyable. Not super scary, but OK enough. Nice to see some play logic being used.

Silent Hill ƒ

mixed at first.  Opening sequence, when the choir starts and the torii in the fog is shown... goose bumps.

But... then "just" more Japanese/Asian horror.

The bit in the fields, where at some point one of the crazy scarecrows follows you, and you notice by hearing it, but it doesn't move when you look at it... perfect.

 

Slowly Hanoki (you, main player) is called a traitor, and your "friends" share their ugly truths. More and more intense moments when you simply kill them - or let them be killed while you walk away - are adding.

The moment I had a "okay wait this is something different" was when your character saws off her own right arm.

There's not much - actually none - explanation (so far, still playing), but it suddenly got a step up. 

Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake)

Never played the original, but fantastic game.

Music, the David Lynch/Twin Peak feel, the music by Akira Yamaoka...     

Both the suspense/horror effects, as well as the story horror elements, were amazing.

 

Alex Pheby - "Waterblack (Cities of the Weft)"

Quite enjoyable.  Goes back and forth, much more exposition directly to reader?? In a good way.

 

 

    The light that emanates from the City of Death, from Waterblack, shows, eventually, the edges of drowned buildings, the path of a drowned river crossed by rusted bridges, drowned streets, some wide and open, some cramped and narrow, drowned parks, the skeletons of drowned trees, tatues of the people of the past, covered with barnacles, covered with algae, seaweed drifting like hair in a light breeze, the slow progres of deep-water jellyfish in and out of the windows of cars, long abandoned, street lamps, unlit, and everywhere - everywhere - the windows of houses.
    It is from the windows of houses that the light that scarcely illuminates evertying comes, now that Nathan is so close, his pellet having entered the precincts of the city from above.

[...]

    On the windowsills of these windows, outside, sit cats. They are all dead, half rotten. The same magic that animates them allows them to remain down there, beneath the water. They do not need to breathe - no dead cat breathes - but they move as they need to move to do their work, which is to oversee the windows.
    Behind these windows, behind the glass, the dead live, acting out the scenes that led to their deaths.

 

Cate Baum - "Land of Hope"

"Hope" being the innocent girl running away with her Bill, who becomes a murderer of children...? Their own child died?  And then a pandemic strikes...

Intriguing, and beautiful in its vernacular.

 

    One maniac pulled his fat hand cross her mouth, and like magnets, her pale eyes glinted direct on mine. She'd sensed me there somehow. Often, I've seen it that when a person knows they will sure die soon, they become for a time almost magically in tune with the world.
    I felt a warm breath just then on my cheek, quiet and small to the side of me, from inside the desk shelf. I turned slow. The lad was curled tiny in the shadows of files and folders. He put one snotty finger to his mouth, shh.
    I gave a half nod back, aye, be fockin' quiet as a mouse, and then the big bastard was raping his mother, and the lad's eyes were crawling like lizards in his head, and he smothered his ears with his little hands when they slit her throat, nand I gazed curious at her wan face staring back at mine with all sorts of songs and words in it whilst she made a sound in her throat like witches casting curses.

 

 

    I should explain that Bill first left off calling me Hope when us bairn died, which was what I was baptised. 'Hope?' he'd hissed at me at her funeral, as they sank her little pink casket in the frosted hard ground. 'What's Hope to me?' I can remember how the sky looked when he said it, the churchyard's black bare trees like slashes in the whtie, as if we could see reet throug hto the void of elsewhere. The weeds that choked the gravestones, the chill, the stink of foxes in the nettles by the gate. I'd not eaten days but for the half-stale sleeping tablet of my mum's slipped between my lips in the car. So I'd nowt of substance to say on my name. Bill took to calling me Glory after that, just like this song they'd chant at his football. It was his magickal name for me, he announced, magickal with a k so as not to be confused with conjuring tricks. As if what he started to dabble in was any more preternatural.

 

 

The knackerman, he'd abe able to follow easy which. He was granted his own judgement to cull any of the don-fer ones and load the carcases in tipper and bring them back for disposal. He'd make a note of any that looked badly, and where they were, so my da could go up and have a look-see.
    The proper name for this profession when it's advertised is 'fallen stock operator,' but nobody round ours would call it that over the fence. It was a job that required the strong stomach and pallid detachment of an abattoirman.

 

 

    See, on this land, we live by a constant, and us families, we go back solid as stone for time: dependable stock, no fussing. Slow in choosing, slower in changing. We ken us place. And naw, we'd gan too quick over and caught us shins, bringing in this unknown entity for the sake of a few pennies, and shit, if we weren't bloody paying for it straight off. 'False economy, see,' Ma rattled as she moved the tea things to the sink. 'Yer da would rather scrape mould off a spoilt apple than buy a pound fresh up' market a shilling.'

The lad didn't much react; he just kept looking at the clouds, blinking. I suppose he'd meant sommat else. Maybe that all his friends were dead, and his mam too, and the pier, so exciting in the photos he'd probably seen at school, would naw be full of stinking bodies anyway, and the slot machines wouldn't be the same without all that hustle and bustle and the machines all dinging and music blaring with that edge of golden happiness when you win a line of paper tickets; that smell of sugar coming off the laughing girls' mouths, and the throng of it all he'd so been looking forward to that someone had most likely told him all about already.

 

Mocro Maffia

Leuk (genoeg, in tegenstelling tot saaie 'Anoniem") serie so far

ekphrasis

a full-scale rehearsal of a (real or imaginary) picture's form and content, trying for a wholesale transposition, a verbal equivalent

Derek Lowe - "Things I Don't Work With"

Think I finally found the blog about "lab culture" and chemistry?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride

 

God of Cookery

crazy guy thinks he's the god of cookery.  Typical Asian humour.  The food does look amazing.

 

Het Uur van de Wolf - "Drs P"

Wonderful documentary.

 

 

Who knew, Herman van Veen covered Drs P's "Troostvogel" (which he never played himself). An uncharacteristic song for Drs P, who avoided any personal feelings and connections with the topics he sang about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTsV_c85WRI&list=RDDTsV_c85WRI&start_radio=1

 

James Vincent - "Keep It Clean", discussing Dylan Mulvin's "Proxies: The cultural work of standing in"

Discusses "Lena",  the 1972 Playboy centerfold used for jpeg (and many other) algorithm verification.

 

 

One of his illustrations is the Internatiol Prototype Kilogram, used between 1889 and 2019 to define a standard for the basic unit of weight. The actual IPK is a palm-sized cylinder of platfinum-iridium alloy stored in triple-layer bell jars in an underground vault outside Paris. In order to verify this object's mass and create copies to be used as reference measures around the world the IPK had to be washed, cleaned and weighed, before being compared to six sibling kilograms. The process, as Mulvin recounts it, is beautifully ritualistic. The cleaner must soak a piece of chamois leather in a mixture of ether and ethanol for 48 hours to ensure full absorption, then rub down the IPK before washing it with steam and removed excess water with filter paper. To ensure that no impurities are left on the kilogram's body (or at least that the same impurities are left each time), every aspect of this sacrament is minutely quantified, from the amount of pressure to be applied with the chamois (10 kPa) to the wattage of the equipment used to generate the steam (350 W) and the distance of the steam nozzle from the kilogram's body (5mm).

 

'China Girls' whose faces were inserted like subliminal messages at the start of film reels to calibrate colours from the projection booth, to the 'Shirley Cards' distributed by Kodak to fulfil a similar role in commercial photography [...] In the case of the Shirley Cards, the exclusive use of white models in early calibration tests meant that the world's most popular film stock failed to capture the detail of other skin colours. [...] Beginning in the 1960s, Kodak slowly began to fix this bias in its film, but not out of any sense of racial injustice: it was a response to complaints from furtnutre makers and chocolate sellers that Kodak cameras couldn't properly capture their products' hues.

 

 

Big Mistakes

Brother who is a clergyman (Dan Levy, son from Schitt's Creek) and sister, primary school teacher, slowly get involved with Turkish and Russian gangsters.

Bit silly but a fun enough romp to watch. 

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

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

 

 

What places all these systems — living or not — on the same spectrum is the fact that all have aspects that are amenable to the mechanistic and agentic lenses, all exhibit surprises and competencies that our formal models do not capture, and none wear their capabilities and limitations on their sleeve (they must be determined by experiment).

An orthopedic surgeon should see your body as a simple, mechanical machine — they’ve got hammers and chisels, and their approach works very well for their remit. In contrast, a psychoanalyst should emphasize and help augment your growth as a free agent in search of meaning.

 

 

We need to come to grips with the fact that all our frames will miss important aspects of things, that it’s OK to say something about a system without claiming you’ve said everything, and that even the simplest of systems can exert surprising effects that reach higher on the continuum of agency than mere emergence of complexity or unpredictability.

Synthetic systems, which we might think are following an algorithm, may or may not have a degree of true mind, but that determination should not be based on their following an algorithm (any more than the reality of human minds isn’t revealed by their following of the laws of chemistry).

Tobias Rees - "Why AI Is A Philosophical Rupture"

https://www.noemamag.com/why-ai-is-a-philosophical-rupture/

What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.

 

 

The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold.

 

 

AI teaches us that this is not so. And not just AI, of course. Over the last two decades or so the concept of intelligence has multiplied. We now know that there are lots of other kinds of intelligence: from bacteria to octopi, from Earth systems to the spiral arms of galaxies. We are an entry in a series. And so is AI.

To argue that these other things are not “really” intelligent because their intelligence differs from ours is a bit silly. That would be like one species of birds, say Pelicans, insisting that only Pelicans “really” know how to fly.

 

 

The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves in ways no human interlocutor can, from outside of us, free from conversational narcissism.

 

In fact, one can push that a step further and say that AI systems appear to be capable of distinguishing truths from falsehoods. That’s because truth is positively correlated with a consistent logical structure. Errors, so to speak, are all unique or different. While the truth is not. And what we see in AI models is that they can distinguish between statements that conform to the patterns that they discover and statements that don’t.

So in that sense, AI systems have a nascent sense of truth.

 

 

Gardels: Karl Jaspers was best known for his study of the so-called Axial Age when all the great religions and philosophies were born in relative simultaneity over two millennia ago — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets.

 

 

The practice of writing created new possibilities for analytical thinking that led to increasingly abstract, classificatory nouns and to a form of systematic search and production of knowledge that was not seen anywhere in human history before.

 

 

Fascinatingly, what emerges from this learning process is a high-dimensional, relational space that engineers call latent — in the sense of hidden — space.

 

It is just, and this is the third thing, that this spatial map doesn’t have only the three dimensions — length, width, depth — our conscious human mind is comfortable operating in. Instead, it has many, many more dimensions. Tens of thousands and with the latest models, perhaps millions.

That is, the understanding an LLM has formed is a spatial architecture. It has a geometry that literally determines what, for an LLM, is thinkable.

It is literally the logical condition of possibility — the a priori — of the LLM.

For all we know, human brains also create latent space representations. The neurons in our brain work in a very similar fashion to how neurons work in a neural network.

Yet, despite this similarity, it appears that the latent space representations that a human brain produces and the latent space representations that an AI can produce are different from one another.

 

 

 

Bauhaus School.

When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, in 1919, many German intellectuals were deeply skeptical of the industrial age. Not so Gropius. He experienced the possibilities that new materials like glass, steel and concrete offered as a conceptual rupture with the 19th century.

And so, he argued –– very much against the dominant opinion — that it was the duty of architects and artists to explore these new materials, and to invent forms and products that would lift people out of the 19th and into the 20th century.

Today, we need something akin to the Bauhaus — but focused on AI.

We need philosophical R&D labs that would allow us to explore and practice AI as the experimental philosophy it is. 

Marcin Wichary - "The day Return became Enter"

https://aresluna.org/the-day-return-became-enter/

 

 

However, zipping the carriage from the right side of the page to the left was slower. That created a challenge: since teletypes communicated at a constant rate, the first letter arriving after a longer line could be smeared across the page, as the carriage return was still in progress.

Just as with early typewriters, any “smart” solution would be prohibitively complicated or expensive to make. But what if the character following a carriage return was guaranteed to be non-printing? This would give the teletype a chance to catch up. And so teletypes undid the early convenience of typewriters, and Carriage Return became decoupled from Line Feed. The former key moved the carriage to the left, but stayed on the same line. The latter advanced the paper to the next line, with no horizontal movement. 

 

 

With forms came a challenge rather similar to what word processors encountered: There was a difference between returning to a new line within a form field, and the act of submitting – entering – the entire form.

Enter Enter.  

Drew M Dalton - "Reality is Evil" / Philosophers must reckon with the meaning of thermodynamics

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophers-must-reckon-with-the-meaning-of-thermodynamics

 

 

We must start by admitting that the Universe is finite and will eventually end. Moreover, we must accept that the function of the Universe is to hasten this extinction. The laws of thermodynamics reveal, in other words, that what we might view as the generative power of the Universe is instead bringing about the annihilation of everything: the flourishing of life is always contributing to the eventual collapse of the cosmos.

 

 

Life is perhaps the most effective, albeit least obvious, consequence of and agent for thermodynamic decay in our immediate system, as the biophysicist Jeremy England has shown in his lab and the biologist Lynn Margulis has confirmed in field research with her son, Dorion Sagan. Everything in existence, including our species, both arises from and works in service to the destructive order of reality. Decay, it seems, is the ultimate essence of existence, which means that our being must be understood as a mode of unbecoming. It is but one additional way in which the ultimate annihilation of the Universe is accomplished.

 

 

No longer can we conceive of existence as something that is ultimately good. Nor can we conceive of it as something that is morally neutral, as others might have it. Instead, we must acknowledge that reality – which is organised antagonistically against all that it creates, and is the direct cause of the suffering of every entity it endows with consciousness – might be morally evil. If our existence means being forever at war with ourselves and our environs, and actively contributing to the suffering of everything we encounter along the way, then it is decidedly not good to be. Life is a moral catastrophe. To exist is to be unavoidably complicit in an order that is entirely evil.

 

 

Consider, for example, the practice of medicine that, while fully acknowledging the ultimate destiny of life (ie, death), nevertheless strives with tireless passion to delay the arrival of that destiny for as long as possible and to prescribe lifestyles that will enhance the quality of life in the meantime. This is a rather obvious good. What is less intuitive is that such efforts do not work in concert with nature. Medicine is not a way of affirming the intended direction of life and existence, and yet we think of the work that doctors do as ‘good’. What makes it good is precisely that it attempts to forestall, delay, slow down or put off what nature destines. In a similar way, every effort to work against and resist the entropic flow of reality must also count as good.

 

 

To do good is not to work in concert with reality, nor should we ever strive to live in harmony with nature. This would make us complicit in an entirely evil system. To do good is to break with that complicity – to seek ways of dismantling, resisting and reconfiguring the structure of reality to neutralise, alleviate or unsettle its entropic thrust. Only by pursuing goodness negatively, through acts of refusal and resistance, can we hope to animate a new ethics within the metaphysics of decay.

Introduction to Indian English

https://www.oed.com/discover/introduction-to-indian-english/?tl=true

In order to express scale or emphasis, words in adjectival positions can be reduplicated in Indian English. Some examples are:

    little-little things ‘many things that are little’,
    big-big problems ‘several sizeable problems’
    chubby-chubby cheeks ‘very chubby cheeks’ 

 

 

Many verbs can take the particle off to give some emphasis or add a negative meaning, e.g. ‘Let’s finish it off’. The intended meaning is ‘Let’s finish it and be done with it’. ‘Let’s hide it off’ carries the extra meaning of conspiracy among the interlocutors. 

Lauri Vahtre Blogi - "Empire of the absurd"

https://laurivahtre.ee/empire-of-the-absurd/

 

 

Worse yet. Russian rulers knew, or at least suspected, what was thought of them and their land in the West. From this state of affairs stems what may be Russian culture’s most agonizing problem – a deep inferiority complex. Muscovy rulers have always suspected that the West masks a mocking or even disdainful smirk in its relations with them  and this suspicion can bring about a dire, unpredictable reaction.

 

 

With regard to agricultural economics, Marx’s great student Trotsky, with Lenin’s blessing, set out to cure the peasants’ alleged “reactionary“ mindset and the obvious idiocy of rural life by executing masses of peasants in Tambov province during Russia’s civil war. But all this was just a trivial prelude. Marx’s other great student, Stalin, raised the destruction of peasants from mass murder levels to outright genocide: in 1932-1933 a state created, deliberate famine killed 3.5 to 4 million Ukrainians; other data puts this number considerably higher. The result: Marx’s detested idiocy was replaced by a great Stalinist absurdity called kolkhoz economy.

 

 

 

Oliver Milman - "The Cult of the American Lawn"

https://www.noemamag.com/the-cult-of-the-american-lawn/

 

 

The roots of this American obsession with a neat lawn are surprisingly shallow, initially imported from European sensibilities. Defenders of castles in medieval England and France would often cut back vegetation near the fortification to enable clear sight lines of potential invaders, an unintentional aesthetic that was later replicated in grand, sweeping lawns of aristocratic country estates.