This video is unfortunately edited in a way that’s hard to follow. If anyone has an unedited version lmk please :)

The source code for this lives here, and the home page has more goodies. Also, I really like that the contact page is dectalk.de/velopers.

Sort of an inverse of Utau voicebank, they also have a .ust-to-phoneme converter

A similar version may be found for Dectalk-Mini (repo)

For more information on DECtalk check out here

Full disclosure–I haven’t read An Omnivore’s Dilemma, but while I don’t have an opinion on the book itself I found the dialogue between different food historians informative. Did you know military policy pivoted US agriculture toward monocropping, and urban gardening used to be far more common?

It’s interesting to hear historians talk about blind spots they notice in their collective works. They take Thoreau as one example of romantically portraying wilderness and nature as a benign, beautiful ally, ignoring the hostility plants and animals have for trying to carve out a garden as a place to eat.

William Cronon also points out the rhetorical power of using the first person plural. Invoking a ‘we’, especially when employed in a narrative context, always assumes some unity of opinion and experience. This can obfuscate people who are captured within the group but who would disagree or be misinterpreted via the characterization. e.g., “How did we get to have the food economy in America that we do?” can obfuscate the history of women as domestic laborers for food, or the stories of slaves and sharecroppers.

You should check out all of this album, btw. Worms III is the first collection of songs Cudney’s played around Utah’s metal circuit. It reminds me of when Rudy Giuliani head start melting during a press conference: Sludge leaking out of a thin veneer of composure, a panicked look on the elderly, makes you curious what it’d look like dissolving a politician in acid. Good album–also my faves:

• Where is Dave
• Worms

One thing I appreciate is the interviewer asks Jonathan Dunn about Chef Boyardee, an edgelord animator who influenced a lot of the YouTube animating scene (and helped make Barkley: Shut up and Jam Gaidan). Boyardee made a synth cover for this song for the ending video of his Dilbert Trilogy, a deeply offensive, if memorable, short about Dilbert going postal. WHICH OKAY I WROTE THIS ON THE ELEVENTH AND SCOTT DIED ON THE THIRTEENTH AND THAT IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL!! I SWEAR!!

Also check out its announcement video

I am partial to Ian’s instant knot for a speedy getaway, but Ian’s secure Knot for a cautious approach.

The author Adam Phillips evokes the quote above often, and I get it. It’s a powerful description of how we live our life alongside compromise, failing to live up to our hopes or ideals.

I thought the poem was surprisingly hard to find online. I found an analysis on the poem, or Gail Mazur’s poem responding to Jarell’s, but I couldn’t find a link directly to this. Double checked just now, and it seems to only be an issue on DuckDuckGo, which admittedly returns this on the 10th link. Always thought I was good at searching for things online, but I must eat some humble pie.

I am quick to identify with the girl for squandering her beauty and athleticism by going through the motions of earning an empty degree. I am always quick to identify with squanderers.

At face value it’s easy to see the narrator as a sneering, posh, and sexist outsider. But I think a better reading is to ask what part of the girl herself is narrating this, what had to have happened that her relationship to her own ambition has come to damning self-praise. The narrator is itself a product of bad-faith. It can’t matter whether reading Kipling and Homer is better than Official Rulebook Of Basketball when you can’t make a free choice between them, when narrators in your daydreams have already rigged the game.

Re-reading the poem now, I appreciate this section more this time:

The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken / Than to say with truth, “But I’m a good girl,” / And meet his Challenge with a last firm strange / Uncomprehending smile.

I had a string of vivid dreams a few weeks ago. Among the dreams was a theme on how motivated I am to be a ‘good boy’. I often dole out to myself self-satisfaction or embarrassment based on how well I convince others that I am good-natured, that I am worthy to sink a hand into the cookie jar. In some ways, my narrative is of an adult trying to live up to being an ideal child. But I am also quick to identify with squanderers, to see boyishness as a failure to grow up and learn the things adults already know. And framing my narrative around being-a-good-boy may itself just be a bad-faith daydream of what I’ll regret doing when I’m old.

Is it a wish and a censuring of the wish? Or is the wish just what the censure made up? Or does the wish need a censure, and so it made one up? Are they both made up, a way to avoid thinking about something else more real? Perhaps to ask all four questions in a row is just an exercise in sophistry, but it hints that the two are not a true dichotomy. Maybe the practical question is: How do you walk two roads? How does a girl in a library make empty-headed blurred-eyed dog-stare fulfill what her narrator demands? How does she make the game of chastising and fetishizing classics fulfill the simple life of being a good girl?

The most interesting part of this book is learning what Phillip’s takes as worthy of questioning. He’s acutely aware that the way people take their own mind for granted prevents them from questioning it. The essays published here, the most interesting ones at least, show what it’s like to suspend what we take unquestionable about our thinking and frame it as something contingent. This framing is often pragmatic: What did we learn we could get from treating time as a parent, and what does it get us now? What about our personality is incompatible with our vision of success, what makes failure something we seek out? What kinds of forgetting are available to us, and which do we need to carry on with life?

That these questions sound gnomic is a weakness only of this review. Indeed, a strength of the book is these questions are always asked in the context of someone interesting trying to make sense of their life. The book doesn’t pontificate, and it’s refreshing how Phillips doesn’t sell out the question with self-help advice.

It is sadly not free of boring. Essays in the second half are book reviews. Some, like his review on Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests work through interesting problems or, like his criticism of Estela Welldon’s Mother, Madonna, Whore, offer entertaining counter arguments, many of them are deep into a niche I care little about.

Last year I read On Giving Up, which you should read over On Flirtation. On Giving Up is likewise exemplary at questioning how we learned to see what we do, but centered more closely around negative mental experiences. If you more interested in psychoanalytic history, or want to problematize something like success or time, then maybe start with this one instead.

Famous for recovering the thought-to-be lost soundtrack to The Fantastic Adventures of SexDick, later remixed to Some Tunes to SEX your DICK to…, I find Jada’s strongest work to be their original animations of The Lonely, Virtual Cowboy Roams the Earth with Malicious Intent and of course this terrible shit talking baby

My favorite is Papers

This is a really cool look into using meter and rhythm for practical effect. Dias offers really interesting short-hands and variations to get the iambs the way you want without needing to spend too much time on them.

I brought it up briefly in Being and Ambiguity but using meter to memorize notes from a book is really promising! And for memorization doesn’t necessarily aim for beauty, so this kind of practical advice is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

The Human Countermove is a sci-fi story about a society where a high-tech strategy game called LINE has become the singular track towards political power. Zouk Solinsen, plummets off the pro ranks as the government turns LINE clubs and tournaments into a gig economy. But when a clandestine institution takes interest in his recent play, Zouk needs to strategize beyond the game or risk becoming a pawn in another player’s game.

LINE is the main vehicle for action. The LINE games feel like you’re watching a enthusiastic chess commentator. The action scenes describe just enough of the mechanics, strategy, and move-evaluation to enliven the game:

The Elephant’s Tail inched across the halfway mark.
At move fifty-seven, I paused. My head was suddenly blank. Twelve squadrons needed to be moved, I remembered that much. Eight of them moved forward, that was easy. But the other four…My thumb rubbed at my temple. The movements were weird, neither attack nor defense. A purely pyschological lateral move that dissuaded Influence from building more squadrons.

As the reader becomes familiar with the pacing of game scenes, games take an edge of subterfuge. LINE games may end one way or another, but spymasters can plot the consequences into their control.

This moves the book into a bind–small enough to slow the pacing but remain a good book. That LINE is a gateway to political power works great as kayfabe. Just believe it works and it’ll engage you. But the political power Zouk wins doesn’t fuel the story.

The governmental status quo is undemocratic. But honestly? It’s pretty good. The worst it does is break apart institutions of art and hobbies into returns-on-investment to track in spreadsheets at a quarterly pace. But people seem fed. Industry seems well-organized. No great structural injustice shocks us into righteous anger. What’s more, the government is run by charismatic robots, some of the more sincere and rounded out personalities in the book.

Zouk accumulates political power and develops a conviction beyond his love of the game. But this conviction can only go towards incremental political reform. There’s no moment where the society feels unashamed to be a ray of hope, or even imperfect-but-dammit-its-what-we-gotta-save, so the risk of losing isn’t palpable. And Zouk is too good-natured to use his growing influence for something foolish or selfish.

Stories don’t need moralizing to be worth reading. You can have a good, monarchical, status quo characters defend. But it’s hard stay interested in a character whose political goals end with adding better data to government’s spreadsheet cells.

Again, it’s a small obstacle to an otherwise fast-paced book. While the political narrative didn’t interest me much, the ending intrigue is great. As the book expands from LINE into the consequences of winning, there are enough engines for action to keep me entertained to the end. The ending is also very sweet and a pleasant surprise to how I thought things would turn out.

Look, Logan is my friend. I want you to go buy his book, probably no matter what. But it’s convenient I can tell you I liked it. If you like entertaining sci-fi, I think you’ll enjoy this book.

The ‘Expansion Pack’ community is the best part. Other DJs have created their own little 90s mixes that you can dump into your None of this is Real album folder

This original essay is primarily on newsletters, but other web projects do not need to go on indefinitely. Completing things in limited runs gives people something interesting and reliable to follow, it gives you something people a theme they can share and categorize easily, and it also gives you something you can move on from.

I’ve thought a bit about this and how it might be nice to slate up ’limited runs’ on this blog of specific bookmarks and posts. Then I could publish the ones that feel substantial enough on its own website.

Also check out her list of Websites with Novel Navs!

If that sounds like an experiment in empathy for people you cannot help, read on. If that sounds like New Deal FDR nonsense, read on: This book is also an autobiography, treatise on aesthetics, index of belongings, nature writing, a spat with an editor, and a love note. Multiple methods of recording the truth cut each other off abruptly. Rather than feeling like several incomplete books, Agee’s writing keeps enough through-lines to cohere. One such thematic coherence: Agee-as-narrator presents as painfully earnest. In all places and genres he needs to live up to the truth of things before him, yet is entirely out of place to do it justice. It was a risk to write this way. I don’t think anyone hoped for prose as lengthy and moving as his when they commissioned his investigation. It makes me wish all reports and documentation was willing to indulge in examples of truth and beauty. Then again, it seems recipe blogs do this already. They should stop immediately.

I also appreciate how carefully, maybe contradictory, Agee writes about the tenant farmers. He does not endorse poverty, in a ’noble savage’ way or in a purity-of-heart way. But he is aware of their beauty, and that their meager objects outpour that beauty in a way words and photographs fail to capture. He neither endorses diagnosing the poor with a lack of entrepreneurial spirit nor endorses liberal interventions to play the savior. But in the book’s closing moments you may find him hoping one day no one will have to live like this.

Agee is the author. Walker Evans is the photographer. A few dozen photos are printed with the book, but for a more full collection you can view them at the library of congress website.

Sadly, the website no longer hosts its participants, but you can watch its monthly live stream here

Wikipedia also has a collection of notable shows, though my favorite will always be Big Game Home Video

Check out his published works!

If you’re interested in how the house became what it is, check out Andy Baio’s interview with it’s owner, also the cats name is Loco

I used to show friends Primus’ cover of The Candy Man as a joke, as evidence of bad music. But after listening to the moo-like drone, Claypool’s depraved line delivery, I’ve become an unironic evangelist for this album.

Like love and drugs, perverts will always have songs written for them. And look, there are a great number of releases that contend for the best of this genre. WHY’s Alopecia, Jeff Rosentstock’s We Cool?, Viagra Boys’ latest Viagr Aboys are top marks. Any pervert aficionado would agree. But what Primus’ album has no songs about perverts at all! Not even the Candy Man. It’s all delivery.

Ask me a year ago and I’d call this album a failed experiment. But today I have no choice than to recommend it to you.

My first experience with the let’s play genre was watching Deceased Crab play this back in 2009. Jeez. His channel’s old enough to vote–one of the first and longest running let’s players.

The official starting place is their introduction video, but if you are a true gamer you immediately reach for their collection of web games. Their most beloved series is Strong bad emails. One thing we missed ith the migration to YouTube are the fun easter eggs you can interact with as the cartoon plays.

(also available on itch.io)

My favorites:

• where’s an egg: inscrutable mystery game
• Peasant’s quest: Point and click adventure for the whole trog-family
• Kid speedy: While the racing is basic, the goal to achieve “not last place!” is a lesson that’s carried me through life.

The boxing narration script may be found here (credit to Wikipedia). I’m convinced people named after their parents should just have their last name duplicated instead of given a ‘jr.’

See De Cruz’ website for more of their writing across the web.

This was, around 2018, my favorite music video. Back then it had maybe eight hundred pixels. The taxidermy animals aren’t subtle, but the refined facial gestures of Pink Isaac Brock eluded me.

A friend at the time wanted to make a zine and I pitched the idea of making a review for this video. She said said she loves this one, and wanted to see me write it. I think she lied, but that’s okay. I lied about writing for the zine too.

At the time I was in a constant, low-level melancholy. The sort where the thoughts that appeal to you are of leaving town without telling anyone, moving to a new city no one would guess. Modest Mouse still appeals to me, but it resonated so much more then. World at Large reminds my why. Brock’s writing on the album Good News for People Who Love Bad News is at its strongest on the song: “The moths beat themselves to death against the lights / adding their breeze to the Summer nights”. The point of view is infectious, being able to recognize beauty in so many things around you, but feeling like an outsider. Too detached to get involved to be but too misunderstood to be stick around.

The music video stars a fox vagabond, likely down own luck, clearly lonely. Thematically it suits the song well. Scene-wise the video feels dissonant. The song evokes changing seasons and watery places, but the video is set in a yellow prairie. It makes up for it in the subtitles. The fox visits other animals, who all begin by with subbed-in silly animal noises. Eventually, though, each animal starts to speak English for the sole purpose of tormenting the fox. A favorite: “Your problems are my pleasures”. A sort of over-the-top prickliness that feels so right in a bad mood. Melancholy loves melodrama, but it hates feeling babied. Even a hint of sappiness spoils a bad mood. Stuffed boars bullying a stuffed wandering fox though? The perfect touch–the kind of self-serious goofiness Modest Mouse does well.

The directing is credited to Jason Foster. One of those damnable names that too many famous people share. If you know of more music videos he’s directed, send it my way.

Here’s my short summary of the three ways: datafication can be understood as datafied power, a new means for members of the healthcare ecosystem, like insurerers, tech corporations, and the state to dominate patients, or Data as a self-technology, through which an individual can use their health data to shape their self-image and as a instrument toward their self-ends, and data as second skin, where data collecting devices are prosthetics that present a new interface through which, like sense organs, people make sense of their body.

This last one is the most interesting to me. It recontextualizes both sensation and data-collection so that they are names of the same general category. A glucometer is one way our sensations might appear. And inversely, dizziness may just be one of the ways data-collection appears. There isn’t a sense organ simpliciter, nor is there a data-collecting prosthetic simpliciter. The unaided-human sensation and data-collecting prosthetics slip in and out of each other. They’re all varying degrees of cyborg.

I don’t think this is necessarily good. In fact I’m sympathetic to the researchers, Smith and Vonthethoff, Schüll portrays as critical, who worry that “bodily intuition is being outsourced to, if not displaced by, the medium of unbodied data”. I understand this critque as a worry that we miss something when we dampen bodily awareness for abstract data. Precision maybe, that a well-listened-to body is more reliable, or autonomy, that institutions can easily co-opt our prosthetics in a way that bodies are immune to.

But I think this objection is weak. (I haven’t read Smith and Vonthethoff, this is not a critique on their position. Just broad gesturing on my part). In the case of reliability, we risk begging the question: How do you know bodies are more reliable? Because the body reports so? Second, in the case of autonomy, I think we risk imagining our bodies are more under our own control and less uninfluenced by our society than we ought to think. Cravings for particular foods in particular amounts, for example, can’t escape the influence of advertisements, family meals, federally-subsidized dairy programs. Bodily awareness might feel more reliable, more ‘our own’ than, like a cyborg, augmenting our sensations with digital input, but I wouldn’t know how to justify that gut feeling.

This matters because, just as much as data-gathering tools are inevitably applications of eyes and ears, our self-awareness is inevitably cyborg. It’s not a matter of escape. It’s a matter of determining what ‘good cyborg’ looks like. Our healthcare prostethics are products of social values, of what we count as peak performance and disability. Inattentive, we could forget the other ways of seeing ourselves without looking through MyChart.

One last thing. If you liked reading Schüll’s article, I recommend Do We See through a Microscope?. In it Ian Hacking argues that despite manipulating completely different laws of physics than our eyes, microscopes are nonetheless instruments of sight.

Personal favorite: Datafication of healthcare

Personal favorites:

• Coolerz
• Forgetatron
• Dinner party

Great list. The only thing I’ll add is since this page’s publication, Kagi has disappointed.

I’ll write a full review of this when I’m done, I hope. But I already have comments I wanted to share.

Iambic notes

I mention in my bookmark on Anki using poetry to memorize key points of a book. This is the first book I’ve tried to memorize in this way, and I feel it’s worked pretty well. We’ll see if I find it helpful three years from now, but in the short-term it’s helped me follow along with chapters building off of earlier parts.

Early Buddhist Desire

We take three forms of Craving: pleasure, being
a certain thing, and not to be another. But
To be enjoyed the subject must continue on.
Repeatability is always also
Whats desired: Not just pleasure, but control:
a self caused singularly. Desires
To have, desires to be, desires to be not
reduce to craving persistent self

Early Buddhism as the middle way

In each occurrence, multiple causes
give rise to multiple effects.
Attachments make us wish we were exempt–
for part of reality to change, but for
ourself to stay the same. Inattentive,
we think this wish came true.
But snapshots of the image craved
do not repeat. So keep alert, and see
the desire, know it as desire, watch
it flood with craving, watch it vanish
and lead to suffering. Desire never was
your will. Thus Mindfulness, and not renouncing
and not indulging, ends our suffering
by blocking a necessary cause.
This is the early middle way

Mark / Marked argument

To be a thing–to be itself and nothing else–
must mean it has a ‘mark’, some property
distinguishing it, shared with nothing else.
but is this mark the same or different from the marked object?
let’s say the same: then just a mark’s arisen, not
the marked object. But say instead
it’s different: then does the mark ’exist’
the way described above–itself and nothing else?
No? Nothing then has been so marked.
but if so, the mark itself must have a mark
and we are back where we begun.
Existence as identity is incoherent.

Emptiness

For some coherence to be readable, it must be taken as simple.
But to be simple is to have no parts and no external boundaries.
un-changing, even, unborn and ceaseless. If true, the coherence
would never appear. So we can read coherence only as a certain thing,

Thus things can always be re-read as things which they are not.
So friends present as foes, and means are always also ends.
Whatever is excluded plays the necessary role of backdrop,
the part that makes a thing appear as some thing and not another.
Hence coherence always is dual. The proximal part, the distal part.

Thus nothing is final–no coherence can make itself always the case,
to read the same at every time and angle. Nothing, not science, god,
or nature can make anything the case. Its empty, like a mirror.

And you, you cannot read or know or act
without a fragile contract with a hidden other. And
the more that you encompass, the more the world is you,
the less is left to determine what that is.

Setup

The Android and desktop app are both free. Accounts for syncing across devices are free, and the privacy and terms of use seem more or less benign.

Advanced

• Consider enabling Free space repetition scheduler, an alternative algorithm for spaced repetition. The default algorithm tends to over-prompt you when your likelihood to recall a card is high.
• Consider using Cloze over front/back cards. These can reverse your prompts. E.g., “Neotoma -> Packrat genus” will also sometimes appear “Packrat genus -> Neotoma”
• Ankiweb provides a free server to sync your account between devices. You can run your own sync server if you’d like. I found it no harder to install than any other pre-packaged web app.

What to use Anki For

• LPCG is a great plugin for memorizing long text like lyrics and poetry.

Iambic memorization

I’m disappointed in how little I recall from books I read years ago, especially books with intricate arguments. I’ll remember agree with a controversial conclusion, but often forget the premises.

I first tried using LPCG to memorize reading notes. This failed. Reading notes are largely synopses and outlines. They are too long to put into standard flashcards, but since I just want to recall a general idea, a paraphrase at best, recalling the precise wording of my notes using LPCG feels awkward.

What works for me so far has been working my notes into a very basic poetry, usually just iambs. It’s enough to make the wording deliberate, concise, and dense, worth memorizing. After that, I use LPCG to keep the poem memorized. I’ve been working through Being and Ambiguity if you would like an example of the end product.

It’s an interesting experiment. Picking your words carefully, even if it’s bad poetry, gives arguments an air of dogma. Memorization exacerbates it. To memorize you have to recall the belief to yourself throughout the day. You get attached to the ideas. It feels anti-enlightenment, but it also feels like a spiritual practice you might find in Hadot or a self-technology.

Personal favorites:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• 1980: MUD

Their collection can be downloaded for offline use as a Windows application, but their search archive can open flash games in a Ruffle web player!

I was thinking of this the other day in relation to the Internet. It seems if anything would be a welcome addition to a studiolo it would be a WiFi-router. Yet the Internet seems to be more the antagonist of “contemplative life” a renaissance humanist would recognize.

What would it look like, and take, to make the hardware of the Internet belong in your study, and for its software a gathering of all one’s friends?

Click around enough and you’ll find a very NSFW Robocop remake

Click here to hear Citton deliver a portion of this in a lecture

I can recommend this book on several different levels: As an introduction and defence of Freud’s theories, an attempt to push past Freud’s limited view of science and the emotions, a thesis on how individuality is an achievement born out of a lovable world, and a collection of consequences to placing love as a primary force of nature. Lear’s achievement is in part his ability to make his words count, and fit so much in to 220 pages.

The Great Offline is my personal favorite.

Collee’s essay is an insightful extension of William Cronon’s argument in The Trouble with Wilderness. There, Cronon argues that wilderness is an ahistorical myth we tell ourselves about pristine nature and tainted human-touched civilization that helps us evade responsibility for the ecosystem we live in. Wilderness is a place to project ‘real life’ and ‘authenticity’ without reflecting on how our day-to-day life pervades and influence all ecology.

Likewise, Collee argues, Seeing our life as polluted by online-ness, temporarily managed with retreats to ever-shrinking preserves of offline activity where authentic, human connection can finally happen, helps us evade responsibility for the Internet. Instead, it’s up to us to manage how (not if) the Internet pervades our life.

I read this three or four years ago and think about it often.

I haven’t watched all of his music videos, but his channel is wired into something good if you want to get ahead of me.

This is my favorite track of RAW’s new album Who Are You People, but I wanted to point out that the one that follows it, samples Low’s No Comprende. Which rules. What a nice choice.

If you’re looking for micrographs, check out this music video.

Each essay is an attempt to explain how reading has transformed and where it might head to next. So far all the authors contributing have an enviable writing style that lends itself well to being interested in reading without condemning or praising what could come next.

Direct links to all essays:

• D. Graham Burnett - Reading Notes
• Sam Jennings - On Bonfire Night
• Peter Schmidt - Attention

Ambiguity is inevitable. There is no way to make a value claim–to hold an experience up against a backdrop of boring or bad alternatives–that is impervious to redescription. Survival is always also survival-and-deadedness. Insecurity is always also insecurity-and-opportunity.

Adam Philips’ On Giving Up is a collection of essays determined to illustrate how powerful and negative mental experiences can be redescribed into technique for living the life we want.¹

The titular essay about giving up is a good example: Giving up always demands explanation in a way completion does not. Giving up arbitrarily or without reflection is an abandonment, is unheroic–knavish even–while perseverance is a virtue. Grit, one might note (though Philips doesn’t), can title your best seller, a testament to the popularity of completing things if little else. One way to examine this asymmetry is to ask what our shame and anxiety about give up is for.

To re-frame a self-inflected, painful response as a method of self-protection or even self-satisfaction is Philips’ modus operandi. In the case of giving up, we learn to fear it in order to repress our anxiety about giving up entirely. Giving up locally, on this or that project or value or object of desire, feels only a step away from asking whether we should give up on life itself. Understandable, but only because we haven’t found the right way to view giving up. We can instead redefine giving up in these local cases as something like sleep, an ending that doesn’t terminate, something we will wake up from and where there is no foregone conclusion to what we do next.

The choice of topic on each essay is innovative. Along giving up, Philips has new things to say about being excluded, on not believing anything, on losing touch with stale desires, on loss, and on the conflict between survival and aliveness. His approach calls into question our initial evaluation of each topic without forcing a definitive answer. He does not claim to exhaust the richness of his questions, nor prescribes a self-help regiment. This is the book’s pragmatism at its strongest, for it redefines vulnerability as a tool one can use without making it into a cure.

At times, Philips risks carrying his project too far, redescribing to the point where it no longer seems to be talking about the original object. This is most apparent in his essay The Pleasures of Censorship. Censorship, he borrows from Kafka and Freud, is an individual’s internalized mechanism for suppressing awareness of our desires. Philips asks us to re-evaluate what we take this censorship to be doing. Instead of seeing it as a cruel oppressor, it could also be seen a guardian of our desires. Its motivation to deny conscious expression of what we most wish for is also a defense against making these desires unsatisfiable. The censor, if we take this approach, uses obscurity to make the opportunity for satisfaction possible.

I’m sympathetic to this, but censorship is redefined a great deal to get there. At the start of this essay, the censor goes from our internalized mechanism for repression to also being our tastemaker, the mental activity that forbids us from liking ‘just anything’. Going further, it becomes that which selects our beliefs, keeping us from taking just anything for granted. Even nurturing and upbringing become representations of censorship, of us developing habits of hiding desire to avoid risking a parent’s love.

I fear this causes censorship to outgrow itself. If tastemaking is censorship and so is beliefmaking and so is nurturing, what mental phenomena does censorship not pick out? What keeps it from being a vacuous term? Even something like our sources of pleasure, that which the censorship is meant to guard us from knowing, can only be viewed from a censored standpoint and thus can’t be separated from censorship itself. Later, Philips suggests that we can characterize our relationship to our self-censors as one of collaboration, working together for the kind of life we want. With how broadly applicable censorship is, it’s hard to imagine what this means in a concrete sense (at least, harder than it usually is to concretely imagine Freudian models of the psyche). At risk here is a narrative about censorship where we over-rationalize the desire being censored, treating it like a fully-explained motivation, detaching it from the archaic activity of free association.²

Though I’m skeptical of Philip’s starting place at times, his questions always feel alive, feel worth asking. This once again highlights the strength of his approach: In the book are questions that destabilize what we take for granted about our pain and anxiety, opening them to reconsideration on their lack of place in our self-narrative and maturation. On Giving Up illustrates an optimism about how we can take on the life we want; not despite of, but through, giving up.

Schüll’s book is wonderful. It’s carefully thought through, approaches video gambling from many angles, and has a thorough grasp of the history of machine-use in gambling. Above all, it doesn’t need to overreach to apply to consumer technology more broadly.¹

Take two main claims as an example: First, when Schüll interviews compulsive video gamblers, again and again they tell her they don’t play to make money. Any reward they make goes back to the machine so they can extend their time playing. What they get out of it isn’t a improvement to their well-being, it’s more time in The Zone: a state of mind where time, responsibility, even ego, can be escaped. I think this cuts directly at addictive social media algorithms. When I find myself drawn to scrolling Reddit for hours, I have no illusion that I’ll end the day having learned or enjoyed something, but I know I won’t have to be thinking while I do it. Reddit execs, of course, knows this just as well as casinos.

Second, when casino executives saw how much money they could make in video gambling, they shifted their strategy towards making video gambling the norm. When they faced demographics that disliked video gambling, preferring to play a social table-game like craps or cards, they created hybrids of social and video games. Players could stand around a shared screen or table, but have their own individual screens. Through those new screens, casinos could inject slot-machine designs to make gambling even more addictive. Players could make auxiliary side bets, or be offered special bonus games, providing them with the momentum to keep playing even when the social part of the game has slowed down.

What this shows is that slot machines are not so unique; that other software be retrofitted with their addictive reward mechanisms. It points to the devil’s deal we make when we integrate our hobbies with technology. On the one hand, if it weren’t for Facebook groups, subreddits, discord channels, how many hobbyists would find themselves unable to pursue their niche interests with others? On the other hand, it’s precisely in integrating our social life with technology that private interests can integrate addictive design patterns into it, restructuring conversations into algorithmically ranked infinity feeds, where between every reply from a person who cares, you can enjoy 10 20 200 memes in the same tired format.

There’s so much more to take away from the book, of course, but I’ll leave it there. Seriously go check it out.

Zhiyi is an eminent scholar of Buddhism who worked to systematize the long history of Buddhist scholarship into a Chinese context. He’s also a foundational author in the Tiantai school, which emphasizes an ineliminable ambiguity in all things, that there is never a final word to anything, including whether it is ambiguous.

This small text is a straightforward Mahayana prescription of a meditation practice called calming-and-insight, or samatha-vipassana meditation: A sitting meditation where the practitioner modulates between two techniques. In first described, ‘Calming’, the practitioner keeps their mind from forming attachments to ideas or things. This could be done through paying close attention to ones surroundings, or controlling the mind from latching on to thoughts, or observing the truths of Buddhism: that nothing has an inherently-existent nature, it’s all coming and going spontaneously through endless webs of causation. In the second described, ‘Insight’, the practitioner contemplates a line of thought that subverts or disrupts their desires. For example, loving-kindness, a contemplation aimed at subverting hatred and the desire to see others brought to harm.

At least by the translator’s introductory notes here, Zhiyi is writing this meditation guide for his brother at the time. It’s fair to say he views the practitioner as a monk, not necessarily a member of the laity, or for what it’s worth a 21st century American. He gives extra attention to ‘five hindrances’ that doom meditation before it’s begun: Desire, ill-will, lethargy-and-sleepiness, and excitedness-and-regretfulness. These are of such great importance that he ends the book with a:

…Solemn oath that, as for that which is practiced, it is essential to get rid of the three obstacles and the five hindrances. In the event that they are not gotten rid of, even though one might be diligent in applying one’s efforts, one will ultimately gain no benefit from it.

It’s an interesting oath. I come at meditation as a secular American, the kind where ‘mindfulness’ is recommended by cognitive-behavioral therapy and corporate mental health retreats. Neither pay strict attention to the hindrances; what you’re trying to do with meditation is left up to the individual.

Zhiyi warns the reader that meditation, gone wrong, can be damaging. The reason calming and insight are trained together is because they balance each other out. The Meditative absorption of calming meditation is easy to become attached to, for example, and giving in to the attachment could cause you more harm.

Framed in another argument, it’s fair to assume that mishandling any mind-altering substances and activities can cause long-term damage. For example, Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design argues the addictive quality of video gambling can be found in what compulsive gamblers call The Zone, a state of being where time, environment, and selfhood align perfectly with the reward mechanisms of the machine that the distinction melts away. At least at first glance, I think slot machines challenge the sort of value we usually put on meditation: If what you want out of meditation is a temporary escape from a burdensome ego, it may have the same harm as compulsively playing the slots. Of course, I’m begging the question when I say the slots are harmful, but if we take the opposite approach and say the The Zone of compulsive gambling is valuable at least at times, I think you have to ask why not just play the slots instead (Maybe because one is socially acceptable and the other isn’t)?

One last thing modern mindfulness practices miss out on is, of course, advice on handling demons. Zhiyi dutifully addresses this, and I find his advice compelling. Demons, or at least the demons he is most interested in advising us about, end up more-or-less indistinguishable from particularly powerful appetites. Demons take the form of attachments: sometimes agreeable attachments to parents or mentors or attractive strangers, sometimes disagreeable, fearful beasts, risks of great loss, sometimes neutral, confusing, ordinary phenomena. Dispelling a demon is thus a special case of the general method by which meditation keeps us from forming attachments to illusions.

I think highly of this manual. As a historical document, it reveals the sort of questions practitioners of meditation were asking themselves about their tradition. It makes us ask, when we find our own questions diverge from Zhiyi’s, what we think we are doing when we meditate. Meditation, if it is a living tradition, can’t be simple replications of some original, pristine moment when we imagine it was done correctly, but we likewise can’t pretend we don’t feel the pressure to reckon with Zhiyi’s questions and his own answers, to ask why we think demonology is obsolete, and why meditation doesn’t require us to take the cloth. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we find we can’t without changing how we see things.

Lyrics borrowed from He is Quiet and So Am I by Mahmoud darwash

I love the disruptive flow of clauses. I love the ambiguity of ‘unwhispering’. I love how ‘caustic’ alludes to ‘white falling flakes’ in a chemical sort of way. How cyclical burning and attraction are. How the brightness of the won logic, the noonday stage of youth, and the still, imploring flame seem to be identical, only born under different circumstances.

I like Fludd’s black square so much I wrote a poem about it

For a more concentrated look at Camillo’s Idea Theater, check out Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory

Book of Hours is in most ways an open-ended puzzle game, where puzzles reward you with 1) more pieces and clues to use in other puzzles and 2) A short paragraph or two explaining a secret history of the world: The shape and powers of certain occult principles, The struggle against or between the Hours–Transfinite personalities that stake their ambits in both the waking and dream world, and the biographies of humans that have investigated these secrets before you.

It’s a sequel of sorts to another good game, Cultist Simulator, where you play as an aspirant plotting to warp the secrets of the Hours for personal gain. In this one, though, you play as a librarian, who works as a foil to the aspirant. Aspirants move aggressively, burning up forbidden knowledge for control. Librarians move in their own time, taking advantage of good weather when they find it and using bad weather as an opportunity to re-organize a collection. Novice aspirants, who fail to learn how to metabolize the toxins of dangerous speed, will die. Novice librarians, who fail to learn how to index their collection, may need an extra day to get their plans in a row.

Most of the librarian’s puzzles share the same core mechanic: Each challenge in the game, e.g. repairing a room of a library, understanding an occult book, crafting a particular tincture, takes a certain number of cards representing things like memories, pieces of the soul, ingredients, flowers, etc. Each kind of card contributes a certain score to a particular principle, and if you can match the challenge’s score requirement, you succeed. The puzzle produces another kind of card you can use later, and you’re granted an elusive, tantalizing piece of the lore.

For example, To understand Six Letters on Necessity, you must accumulate four Moth, the principle governing chaos and longing. Maybe by engaging a part of your soul that governs longing called trist, or using a special tool discovered within the library like barber’s clippers (snip snip snip), or having learned an occult skill from an earlier book, like Solutions and Separations, or knowing how to conjure a fleeting feeling of impulse. If successful, you will learn that “Even the Sunne can be divided, though it require the Forge of Dayes for its division”. Reading it offers a skill for future challenges. Returning to it again offers a sense of foresight, which can be used to channel Forge, the principle governing forceful, premeditated change.

Since rewards decay or get used up, the player needs to remember the recipe for generating a special outcome. The game feels like a memory-matching puzzle with a tight feedback loop. One puzzle’s reward becomes another puzzle’s resources. The feedback loop, like any good game, rewards you like a slot machine rewards you: Each round is a closed system of decisions, each with variable rewards. All actions have them, and a player-set clock speed means rewards are always fast. Any actual cost is obscured as an opportunity cost. A bad round means you play more. A good round means you play more, faster. I mean this slot machine comparison to be positive, because Book of Hours has that zone, that rhythm of play where a player, trance-like, moves in sync with the game, something only a slot machine can give.

This created a tension in the way I played, however. On the one hand, the part of the game that sticks with me has been its writing. In particular, I appreciate how it maps mental states like souls and moods into a system of opportunities. But on the other hand, the game has the slot machine zone that cuts against perusing the text for non-gamified elements. Maybe that’s my failure as a gamer, so I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about a bit on what’s stuck with me after I played the game.

I think playing Book of Hours engages a wish I have that the promises Hermetic orders and Theosophists made are true: You can be an architect of a great mental citadel, filled with wheels of combinatorial certainties and amphitheaters metered out by the spheres of planets. You can order your surroundings, your mind, your mood, to generate an occult method of investigating the hidden realm. And these skills amount to more than omphaloskepsis (I don’t need a game to help me play that out). They are a technology whereby trees may be made to blossom divers colours, and attention may be sent to wander down invisible grains.

The writing in Book of Hours is short form. Passages rarely reach beyond four or five sentences. Very few directly declare a piece of lore. It’s in interacting with dozens of pieces that a history begins to recur. None of them stoop to disambiguate, nor are any so weak to actually describe how a librarian could come to great, occult skills. And yet each passage was only readable because the librarian became more equipped. Apophatically, every passage that leaves you, the player, in the dark, indicates an unambiguous step toward power for you, the librarian.

Over time, the tasks of the librarian–managing an index, paying attention to the texture of a fabric or the scent of a flower, rehearsing a bad memory, beach combing, shelving books by author first & topic second–start to also feel like ironic paths towards hidden powers. They all unify into the mental projects of what I pretend is the librarians inner world. And I, after all, play as the librarian. It’s my mental project to imagine what the librarian imagines. So fulfills the wish, that the mind can dictate reality without needing to obey its rules.

Were I the Hush House Librarian

The game’s writer, Alexis Kennedy, wrote a pretty great list of influences in this blog post. Here’s my list of what I would put in the Hush House Catalog

• 🔗 He Is Afraid and So Am I | ⚓ my notes
  Rock song with massive, blaring horns, set to a poem of paranoia and dopplegangers
• 🔗 Sylvia Plath - Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams | ⚓
  Plath’s short story about a servent of a malevolent force cataloging the dreams of the infirm
• 🔗 Works of Sascha Schneider | ⚓
  Russian Symbolic artist whose work visualized male erotics and the crushing weight of demons
• 🔗 Legend - Hart Crane | ⚓ my notes
  As silent as a mirror is believed / Realities plunge in silence by…
• 🔗 Et Sic in Infinitum | ⚓ my notes
  Review of black ink as a vehicle for magic
• 🔗 Occult Chemistry | ⚓
  A theosophical investigation into the shape of atoms via Yoga
• 🔗 Camillo's Idea Theater | ⚓ my notes
  Giulio Camillo’s description of a theater used to recall knowledge, organized in occult and esoteric categories
• 🔗 Computational Imagination | ⚓
  Essay on the history of calculating knowledge–from Llullist memory wheels to Leibniz’ calculation machines
• 🔗 Riddley Walker | ⚓ my notes
  A story about the vulnerability of language under violence
• 🔗 Saviors of God - Askitki | ⚓ my notes
  Visceral, long-form poem on the struggle for humans to become free, unified, and begin to create God.

Found from the description page of Saucy Postal’s excellent video, No Longer Newman

I link to the Kongregate version because, while ad-infested, you can right-click to download the .swf for archiving :)

Also, I’m giving this idea away for free: I don’t think there’s a puzzle game like this right now and I would play the shit out of a daily version that uses the Wikimedia Commons’ Picture of the Day or something. I have it as a goal of mine to make this puzzle game, but if you beat me you get to have all the glory.

Update: Sorry you late birds! But I have made this game now! The only thing left for you to do is play mine! Or make a much better version lol

I almost feel like this was influenced by Jaakko Jarvinen? Is that an insane thing to say?

The link above is only a summary of the original source, which I have yet to read.

I share ATVBT’s conclusion that it’s a sort of jarring idea that works as an exercise in having preconceived notions challenged, and while implausible the theory deserves a small degree of belief, instead of binary treatment of true or false.

In Part 5 he says “In the dream, the dreamer plays all parts” as if it’s a common phrase he expects us to know…Does anyone know where this is from? Please reach out if you do! So far my internet searches have come up with nothing. Well, except this kickass psych-pop tune, but I doubt that’s the original source either :(

A 2020 analysis on the non-replicability of Thinking Fast and Slow. This evening I was picking out a book to read. I usually avoid pop-science, but Fast and Slow seemed dry and rigorous enough to be worth reading. Sadly, its Wikipedia page has “Replication Crisis” written in big bold letters. All popsci books once again end up citing the same source

To Kahneman’s credit, he replied to an earlier post by Schimmack et al. accepting their conclusions and agreeing the book placed “too much faith in underpowered studies”. Admirable!

Riddley Walker is a young boy living in “Inland”–Kent that’s undergone 2000 of degeneration since the One Big One brought in an apocalypse. He speaks a transformed dialect of English. While his story is short, understanding the dialect is a slow, gapful task. Words are often etymologically ironic, referring to several different stories or contexts now lost to Riddley. To deliberate and lay out ones plans is, to program and pirntowt. To speak of Harts is to speak of the organ, of ‘chard coal’ furnaces, the inner wilderness of a forest, and the mythical stag where the Little Shynin Man was ripped apart when Eusa (Eustace? USA? Us?) sought One Big One.

Riddley, like us, takes for granted the traditions of inheriting and passing down language, though the distance from our time and Riddley’s sheds for us light on the mortality of tradition. It’s natural to mourn with Riddley the permanent loss of knowledge, but how often, for example, do you attend to the etymology of the words you use? To see what once-flourishing traditions now resemble a city’s underground ruins, built on top of and restructured as sewers? Does the word ‘context’ hint of books, of the words that precede and follow a passage? Does it hint of something older, of textile fabrics, woven in interdependent patterns? What speakers first decided to divorce ‘context’ from fabrication?

Traditions of creating and passing on knowledge, too, rise, struggle, and collapse. The start of Walker’s story begin the epicycles of the old arriving to the new and laying down its life. Riddley kills the last boar in Kent, the unnoticed end of shepherds and nomads, the Black Leader of feral dogs decides to die by Riddley’s spear, and Riddley watches his father crushed under a winch-and-pulley, placing him as his village’s next connexion man–a social role defined in conflicting ways. As the connexion man, Riddley is both responsible for interpreting the signs and portents of his village, while also an agent in the propaganda of The Ram, which uses puppet shows to establish fealty while they revver newit–collect taxes.

The transmission of knowledge, I think, is what I appreciate most about Riddley Walker. ‘Transmission’ here is ambiguous: On the one side, connexion men transmit knowledge like passing a book hand from hand. There are stories and myths from generations ago, some so old their language feels archaic, that explain the system of the world. On the other side, connexion men receive a transmission like a radio. Walker receives blips of background radiation emitted from ruins and omens, and is forced to reckon them into some sort of language. There’s this sense that the world doesn’t wait for academies and laboratories to demand representation, even in the post apocalypse.

That Riddley relies so heavily on myth and portents to guide his narrative–and does so with some success–I think we can take in two ways. We can say Riddley is only so sensitive to the supernatural because his impoverished language deprives him of the careful thinking we take for granted, or we can say that Riddley has recovered something in his language that ours lacks, some ability to take poems unironically, something we now only encounter in marvelous and erroneous dreams.

External sources

• Rowan Williams’ Gifford lecture references the use of language in Part 5
• Eli Bishop’s Annotated Pages
• Essays hosted on the russellhoban.org

Portals are an odd piece of Wikipedia, not without controversy. The now-failed guidelines page for writing portals has a few links for those curious on portal’s reputation among editors. Those who write them tend to appreciate them as part of a shrine page to their interest, but others wince at the cost-benefit to the number of people actually looking at them and the tedium endured keeping them up to date.

I for one like them as capstones to a particularly established piece of the site. In fact they’re sort of exemplary of the kind of blog I want to write. Over time, I would love different pieces of my website to build up into established sections with category headings and recommendations.

If you like Random, and you have a favorite Wikipedia category, you might also consider using Random-in-Category

Their monkeys are not to be overlooked.

The samples used in this are just nuts. Most impressive is the spearmint gum commercial. Sgt Talby does a good job visualizing how these samples are cut, and more can be found in this playlist

You should also check out the liner notes to Last American Hero, which reads like a beat poem about erotic love for F-150s and ‘worlds of adrenaline infused reality…’

In the public domain too!

I read half of A Season in Carcosa a year or two ago, and this is the only short story I remember with any detail. It’s edgy in the derogatory sense, but it’s such a creative interpretation to frame The King in Yellow as a video tape that I feel the need to share it. The story, for those who won’t read it, is about a father trying to bond with his sadistic son over watching obscure horror movies, only for his son to watch the maddening King in Yellow, “directed by Rodger Corman, starring Vincent Price”.

This framing of The King in Yellow as a 66 horror b-movies re-contextualizes it as something secret, not because it’s forbidden, but because it’s overlooked. Nowadays it’s rare to stumble into a book you have heard nothing of before, much less a play, with the intent of reading it cover to cover. Discovering a cursed movie hidden behind reels of un-digitalized tape, however, happened to anyone growing up with cable.¹ It brings up the childhood feeling of catching a movie on broadcast, too young to know where it came from or what context it’s in. You’re even too young to know if it’s supposed to be good or bad, and its syndication is too obscure to talk with your friends at school about it. It could be evil–to children many things can be evil–and if you’re unlucky new inhabitants will occupy your closet late at night, and in your dreams your soul will have to fight off the obscured forces of darkness. This backdrop makes a video version of The King in Yellow feel palpable, haunting.

Video tapes also evade the damning trope of treating The King in Yellow as a magician’s grimoire. Forbidden knowledge, in my opinion, is at its weakest when it sets up action heroes with loud, garish powers. There are no VHS-spellbook tropes to take as influence. Instead, its closest kin are snuff films, which are psychically damaging made by insane, anonymous people, and experimental films rumored to curse its audience, like Un Chien Andalou, which Wikipedia claims was rumored to cause miscarriages (citation needed). This frames The King in Yellow as a danger less because the inhabitants of Carcosa might come and attack you or give a madman super powers, and more because it curses you with an irreversible knowledge of black stars and pallid kings.

It is unfortunate no editor pruned the gratuity. The villain didn’t have to be a nazi and an incestuous rapist. Making it happen before he watched the cursed tape garbles up the theme of corruption. Making the mother complacent and negligent–bad short-story economy since the father is also such–is a missed opportunity to make at least one female character into someone more than a victim. I wouldn’t read it for the plot is what I’m trying to say. If you should read Movie Night at Phils, it’s to learn from its creative experimenting.

(Spoilers lol)

I can’t help but compare this scene to James Cameron’s Interstellar, in no small part because Hans Zimmer riffs so much from Glass’ score here. Where Interstellar is filled with optimistic sci-fi tropes about human ingenuity and bravery in the face of disaster, Koyaanisqatsi is such a bleak counterpoint. Technological progress alone cannot save us. Stars and planets do not await for us. Our rockets will burst inside the atmosphere and the wreckage willl keep falling for minutes before turning to vapor. How more direct can you be?

Worth mentioning if you’ve heard a Simpsonswave song on Tiktok, it was probably him.

Kazantzakis is a master of using spiritual language without superstition. You can’t reduce Kazantzakis’ God to a humanist metaphor, but there is no God whatsoever outside of the human struggle for freedom.

I particularly like the ‘descent’ form of the poem, where earlier sections build up into a dramatic conclusion, only to be recontextualized as a limitation from which we must break through.

Here is a pleasant catalog card from the University of Thessaloniki

Click here for my reply

It feels odd to say, but this poem played a role in convincing me to be vegan. I don’t think I could really explain to anyone why a poem should convince that a point of view is correct…but here we are?

I would say it’s hard to pick a favorite, but Owuor Jack’s photo of Tantalus monkeys ‘playing’ mid-air is such an incredible shot nothing else compares.

Not to detract from the monkeys, which are very good, but I was curious where that tantalus monkey photo is used in Wikipedia. Turns out its only place is a WikiData site for…Sex Predator? Oh no now I feel bad liking these monkey so much :( …Oh wait hang on, This used to be a page for Indonesian motivational speaker Julianto Eka Putra, who one can only assume is the Brock Turner of the Indonesian motivational speaker circuit.

Brian showed me this video when I was in middle school and it blew my mind. I still consider it an all-time great for YouTube. The pacing makes great use of the small runtime and it’s fun to see people react to some of the twists in the puzzle. As its aged the old YouTube layout sort of makes it feel like a ‘creepypasta’ (should I call this that?) can’t tell a story like this again.

Update: There’s a director’s commentary to this video now too!

As an aside, idk how to link to a series of Reddit posts, so I’m just using the Reddit user handle here. Sure hope he keeps posting the good stuff!

Really liked this one. I hadn’t considered before what Dickman calls “question eliciting questions”, or how certain questions become shared through our ability to respond to them as questions. I also particularly liked his ideas about passivity of questions–that the difference between an answer and a question is you have to be asking a question to understand an answer, but to for questions, asking and answering is one and the same.

The Show met its sad fate over the fact the hosts hated it and the premise, frankly, is a joke. Little did they know this is the exact kind of oddball series I return to when my life feels like one great finals week I keep procrastinating. Up there with Griffin’s Amiibo Corner for oddball shows that couldn’t have gone any longer than they did.

• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Off-air cancellation

For my notes on this book, see here

Chapter 18 should give you a sense of the humor at play.

Worth noting that the Wizard People’s Wikipedia page is oddly detailed. It used to be even longer, though the moderators felt the lengthy analysis on its humor and writing style was a bit much.

The animation, though rough, has a large range of expression that Neely uses to great effect. Take, for example Coffee line. Visual gags overlay the already funny punchlines in the script, but at times the little animations show some somber and serious moment, pushing the bit into a dark humor that feels earned.

“He’s nice. He’s funny. I think we’re too busy to chat” – The magic words that will pop in my head every time I decline a phone call until I die

My particular favorite is Amber A’Lee Frost’s Adderall House Style, where she talks about the very specific kind of writing style authors on speed produce. Once she points them out, it’s hard not to notice it in many essays.

Personal favorite section: microsites

I really like several of the design decisions Trombley made while chafing against others. I love the non-chronological linking, which emphasizes using the tags or subjects to navigate the directory. It avoids the annoying over-emphasis so many websites have on displaying the ’new’ at the cost of burying old but worthwhile things.

I also love how inviting the homepage for wandering around. Compare this to something like Archive.org which doesn’t give a sense of direction to the user. On Archive, you have to already know what you want and what Archive can offer before you can roam around. BarnsWorthBurning, though, is built so that every collection is available on any screen, and individual items have cross-references and related content sections. The blurbs and details for individual items are organized in a way that bleed into each other. It’s an efficient way of display the work put into curating links and topics.

It’s also incidentally functioning as a public directory which limits how usable it is for others. The structure emphasizes excerpts and connections between things like a zettelkasten. Some links are not annotated while others point to small excerpts with no link to the source. While the tags passively contextualize pieces together, they often lack a deliberate editorial decision that explains the context. A tag like ‘architecture’ doesn’t distinguish between ways of designing buildings, pieces of architectural buildings, appreciation for an exemplary building, or a school of thought behind a building. It also doesn’t give space for the curator to explain what point of view they take in selecting these links against others, or in what way these pieces are in dialogue with each other.

This is expected out of a personal zettelkasten, so this limitation stems from extending it passed its intended use. That said, I highlight it because editorial work is what distinguishes this website from a search engine or a sloppy subreddit. What it ahs, yet needs more of, is that authorial intention which unifies links into something greater than the sum of their parts. It would be difficult to do so without cutting against its well-crafted design.

I think BarnsWorthBurning is an excellent representative of the opportunities involved when we curate the web by hand instead of using algorithms and crawlers. Timelessness becomes a possibility, and users can discover something of value without knowing how to look for it beforehand. Where its experimental layout struggles is taking these building blocks and crafting an anthology.

Pragprog is a pretty reliable publisher that offers their books on sale often and without DRM. It’s worth a purchase. The publishers label this as ’expert level’, but really the only prerequisite is you know how to use the command line.

The problem this guide is helping you solve is maintaining the content of a blog as its piece grow more complicated. Maintain your html in one place, rename a page url and have the old url redirect, keep a RSS up to date, and more.

I, a motivated reasoner, was already pretty attuned with the idea that arguments have limited effect and it’s a bit shortsighted to believe that their the main vehicles of persuasion. That said, I’d like to call this convincing but I mean, did it convince me if I was primed for it :D

Wiegman promises a second post on this. When is it coming out?? Your readers are dying to know what they already agree with!

A fun episode to start with is this Cheap Jeep

Reruns of this show used to run on Saturdays 10 pm on the PBS channel. When I was around 7, I was rarely allowed to stay up late enough to watch this, so it produced this mystique of Grown Up Humor, the kind that as a kid you’re eager to see because you want to mimic it as closely as possible, even when you don’t understand. Around 13 I would start watching it, followed by Black Adder at 10:30 and the David Tennant Dr. Who. Come to think of it, all three of those shows starred aloof, witty-if-oafish men, also around the age where I really wished to be a witty and aloof man. If you swapped out Dr. Who and Black Adder for like Car Talk and Hot Gear if the three combined would have made me into a gearhead instead of a melancholic?

If you like this music video, you should check out this interview with Dan Streit where he describes the process of acquiring and editing this footage. I think this highlights the techniques of found-footage, how the conventions of ‘real-life-footage’ can make a piece feel authentic in a way that something unedited can’t be. Like, the amount of cuts between entirely different scenes should tip me off that these are paid actors, but it paints such a human face out of the clothes the actors share between shots that I can’t help but see a human actually suffering in all of this.

If you’re looking for lightweight analytics for your website and are hosting it on your own webserver, you should consider learning Goaccess. I might write a guide on my configs, but for now I found these two really helpful:

• Goaccess: a detailed tutorial
• Tweaking Goaccess for Analytics

So far most episodes are on Daoism. I like their casual tone and reflection on each topic. The discussion between the hosts does a good job framing the episode’s theme in a memorable way.

Personal favorite episode was their episode on persuasion, where they dive deep into a story about different ways you can (fail to) persuade others, ultimately about different ways you might engage with your own opinions

Lai here presents Daoism as an alternative to taking a rigid stance on how to live well and how to value things that one might find in Confucianism or Mohism. This stance opens up new risks to the way one lives, but at the same time new opportunities for mitigating risks.

Of particular note is her really interesting exigesis on the stories about the wheelwright and the cicada trapper. She conveys this really subtle open-endedness and vulnerability to misinterpretation

Though I haven’t listened to it yet, she follows this lecture up with one about Zhuangzi and Disability

Ziporyn introduces this cool analogy of the perspective the Zhuangzi is arguing for as a sort of wildcard: A perspective that can adapt and bring value to any perspect currently in play, even as the cards in play change.

He has also published supplementary material on the first and second chapters here

Moeller introduces the Zhuangzi’s political implications. Namely, how its stories interact with themes of domestication, and its appeal as an alternative to regimes of sincerity

Ziporyn offers an account of the kind of self embedded in the stories of the first two chapters of the Zhuangzi, and what it means when it says “the sage has no (true) self”. His explanation of the first story of the Zhuangzi, where a little fish transforms into a giant bird, sets a great start to book as a whole

Ziporyn interprets the Daodejing as a book pointing out the dichotomies involved with how we perceive the world and then subverting them. For example: a sculpture vs. the scrap left after sculpting, or beauty vs. the ugly riffraff from which it caught your eye. He calls these A/B Structures, and through them highlights some really cool implications of the riddles the Daodejing offers.

Ziporyn has had a lot of practice lecturing on the Daodejing in a way that teases out an overview of some of the key concepts, namely how The Dao ends up being this ironic word for whatever we’re not paying attention to at the time–stuff like noise, trash, unhewn scraps–and how subverting what we want with a desire for this trashy Dao opens up a spiritual way of interacting with the world

I’ve been using Buku import bookmarks across my phone and browser. I prefer having many small programs do things than many big ones, and managing things locally than through an account and cloud service. This has been good enough at its job–adding new bookmarks has a very low barrier, and I really like being able to pipe the bookmark URLs into other programs. The features for filtering by tags are tricky, though, and I wish I could track several different tables of bookmarks (maybe I can I just haven’t looked).

I’ve thought about starting to use Pinboard or AreNa, and I think this tool would work pretty well with their API. If you have already done something like that, let me know!

I found this pretty convincing. In particular the amount of dominion and entitlement we feel we’re allowed to take because bees are smaller and cognitively simpler creatures. Truly shocking that we just kill 50,000,000,000 (billions!) of bees and write it off as part of doing agriculture

I really like the privacy features Shynet allows you to keep on your site while still figuring out who’s linking your site and what place people visit. Unlike Google Analytics, Shynet is locally hosted. so your visitor’s data isn’t shared with anyone, and you don’t use cookies or let third-parties add their own. Visitors can also opt out altogether by setting Do Not Track on your browser. The tracking script they use is minimal too, so there’s not really a performance overhead

Here’s what you see:

• Your IP Address
  • Shynet by default associates this with a country, but I guess you could look up the IP details myself to find a closer location.
• What pages you visit, how long it took to load, how long you visited, and what URL you’re coming from
• Your user-agent stuff (browser, OS, Mobile vs Desktop)

Setting it up was painless. If you have access to a webserver, the installation guide was very easy to follow. With Caddy, I found this guide by Olly Britton to be super helpful.

Ultimately, I decided to disable it and use goaccess instead. Goaccess has a lot less overhead for my tiny server, and the simplicity of just consolidating my server’s already existing logs into readable data is too irresistable. So far I haven’t found anything to miss about shynet–not even the cool graphs, which Goaccess can share as an html page! If I managed multiple sites or sites that weren’t hosted on the same server, though, Goaccess wouldn’t be a possibility. If that becomes true, I’m definitely going back to shynet

The length of this film is mindblowing, given how much attention goes into the animation of each scene. The transformations across different eras of history are surprising on the first watch. My favorite thing about it though, is the theme of futile hope while watching humanity repeat cycles of bloodshed and greed.

This was sampled as an AMV to Jack Stauber’s buttercup

This piece has a great twist in the middle that took me by surprise (spoilers ahead). The first half commiserates with a lot of complaints I make myself with regards to enterprise work on software, largely about finding non-programming tasks like marketing or resume-bullshitting beneath me. The second half, though, pushes back on these ideas because, realistically, the kind of work that gets code actually written and actually making money is not the kind you learn reading a technical manual on algorithms. The fact that it summarized the complaints so well is what convinced of his point: How convenient it would be to pretend you can code your way out of any problem, shame it doesn’t happen that way.

This podcast has been a great avenue to learning some of the basic advice a professional writer might already know, but an amateur like me would otherwise learn the hard way. In particular, things like how to stay motivated, how to keep quality from killing quantity, and different techniques of editing has been a huge help.

As of writing this, Write While True has entered a new season dedicated to organizing writing to create a pamphlet. If that interests you, be sure to check them out.

The movie is Baraka (1992), and the song is Stone in Focus off of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, but unreleased on the CD version.

This is a new fan video based on this original. I like the scenes added to this new one, but the original has that kind of bizarre comment section that happens where some people share their deep platitudes while other people reminisce on their strange, difficult, or lonely life.

For the DRM thing, this plugin is required

Arch wiki has a good and distro-agnostic guide to set it up

The official website is https://newsboat.org/

Also available on the play store

I followed this tutorial when setting up my first web server! I think you already have to be a little in the FOSS rabbit hole for this to be helpful and it seems to not have updated in a year or two. Where it shines is giving you new directions to start looking closely at the software you use

personal favorite: Pursuit of Happiness, A Thing for Me

Personal favorite: the tv show

There’s a different music video for this song that inexplicably has higher views but is much much worse. The bed theme in this is so trippy and is completely missing from the other one, where Kid Cudi just wanders around a preppy frat party. I wouldn’t care but I fucking love watching this video high and I end up too stoned and turn on the wrong one every single time :(

I used to love Cracked.com–A sort of juggernaut of the listicle/clickbait/“Top ten mind-boggling things that will end your faith in the presidency!” web genre. I found this video on one of their lists (probably this one…The Good Lord does not want you visiting that website with adblock disabled), I saved it in my ’likes’ and forgot about it. Then several years later I spent an hour or two searching through my entire likes folder in the hopes of finding it again.

It’s a dense and long book, but it culminates into this wonderful defense of deriving our understanding from our experience with language, over and against seeing method as the only justification for truth, and truth as only facts abstracted away from any point of view

For another interview, one that’s a bit more charitable and wandering, see her appearance on Gregory Sadler’s Ideas that Matter podcast

I owe a lot to this essay, as it introduced me both to Lear’s insightful view on the emotional complexities of being human, and his defense of Freud’s work as genuinely therapeutic. It also, of course, changed the sort of emotional stance I take when feeling out climate change.

Part two and part three are also available, and extend Lear’s argument in interesting ways. The second one argues that Freud’s somewhat failed and arrested attempt to cope with watching Europe fall into war reveals a certain kind of positive, healthy conception of repetition. The second argues for a sort of view of what it means to take other people as examples and what work they actually do in our psyche.

See my thoughts on this song more here.

(hint: you have to care about the answer)

The best part is a bunch of children on Roblox think the author is a creepypasta, so he’s at war with a gang of online seven-year-olds.

Hansen presents an interesting overview of how the word “way” works as a key metaphor in classical Chinese, and how it eventually achieves a sort of ironic association in Daoism. He also goes into detail in the way ancient Chinese’s grammar conveys a part-whole association that isn’t always obvious in English

Hansen also contributed two really good SEP articles, both of which go into much further detail around this same topic with an excellent bibliography: article on Daoism, and an article on The Zhuangzi

I’ve so far enjoyed Mary Beard’s excellent lectures on how we historicize the ancient world

Other videos in the series:

• Whiteness
• Lucretia and the Politics of Sexual Violence
• Them and Us
• Tyranny and Democracy
• Classical Civilization?

Part 2 may be found here, and a seminar regarding the talk may be found here

Wonderful introduction to Paul’s work in Transformative Experiences

If you like this, MacIntyre elaborates on this argument in his monograph Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Wordpress site hosting many of MacIntyre’s articles as shorter-form works

Reeve is a world-class scholar on Plato’s works, and one of the first translators you should turn to if you want to read the dialogues.

CDC Reeve is a incredibly good philosopher and translator of Aristotle. Part of what makes this lecture so special is Reeve frames each concept of happiness as an answer to particular questions its originating culture is asking about what it’s like to lead a good life. This framing gives his account the strength to really challenge certain conceptions of happiness. So Ancient Greek eudaimonia, which frames it as a habitual achievement determined by how a life as a whole is lived, both poses a challenge to and is challenged by the contemporary view of happiness as an emotional state of endorsement, engagement, and attunement. And by sticking so close to the questions that contextualize each view of happiness, Reeve manages to be remarkably charitable to every view he considers.

BitBurner’s an idle game, whose core mechanic is access to points are accessible via a JavaScript API. You usually progress in cycles of manually managing the “make money / make money-making easier / make money-making stronger”, which is very easy but is very inefficient. Then you make a really bad algorithm that can manage the full cycle which is probably worse than just clicking, but scales pretty well, then you start fine-tuning it until you’re virtually clicking every button in a perfectly scheduled sequence.

Above the programming loop is the upgrade loop. Once you have enough money, you can buy upgrades that give you a raw numeric bonus to money-making. Upgrades scale really well with both bad and good algorithms, so most of the game is spent budgeting for which upgrade to get next. The obstacle is that upgrades don’t take affect until you reset all of your progress, except your scripts, and each upgrade multiplies the cost of the next one until you reset progress. This makes scripting your only permanent progress.

These two loops combine to give a player experience not a lot of games get correctly. Automating a piece of the game away is tough, but the effect feels permanent. Once you’ve written a inefficient algorithm, you’ll never need to manually click buttons again, and writing an efficient one means move much faster through the early pieces of the game. Other games have this sort of aspect too, where part of the fun is learning how to permanently remove an obstacle from the game but then fail to give the player anything new to set as a goal. In Stellaris, another game I’ll binge, you’ll spend several hours designing your game state to explode with power, get about 15 minutes of elation as you watch numbers go up on your screen, and then delete the save and install a blessed, janky late-game mod to give you something to do.

What BitBurner does differently is the permanent solution only looks permanently solved until you get better at scripting. When starting the game, it’s easy to take pride in an algorithm that just throws all your resources at a single target. As you wait for things to finish, though, you’re free to think about what it might take to allocate resources across multiple targets. You get that done, then you figure out you can probably cache common information into a text file. You do that, and feel great, but then learn what a JSON is, which would clean up so much of your code, or you learn how much cleaner a reduce() is compared to a for-loop, or you want to batch commands together in a schedule to lower wait-times, and so on and so on¹. Even when you make something good enough to move at a high speed, eventually the game gives you qualitatively new methods of getting points while dampening the power of your previous algorithms. So your over-tuned money-making script ends up being weaker than manually managing a new game loop, which you learn to automate.

On top of that, the theming is cute if you like cyberpunk. Mechanics are built around tropes like infiltrating mega-corporations or overclocking your body with biomechanical augmentations. Some of it makes for interesting interpretations of the genre, which I don’t want to spoil, but they often require making add an entirely new scripting mechanic. Sometimes, though, the theme feels like a coat of paint over number-crunching. Understandable, but a little disappointing. Something like, “This play through I want to be a tech-ninja!” is thematically coherent in the game–you can focus on things that give you verbs and nouns that describe things like infiltration and crime–but ultimately you loop through the same upgrades, same scripts.

I’ve played enough where I’m starting to get a bit bored of my main save, but this is only after 100 or so hours. The fact a free incremental game could hold my attention rules. I’d recommend this game to people who have an interest in programming, even if they lack experience. It has a pretty low skill-requirement for making a good program, but pushes you to rethink your code and learn how to manage more complicated game states. I think if you have an interest in designing roguelikes, you should also check out this game. Making progress across resets feel permanent without making the game feel dull is a particular challenge in that genre. Interpreting the code-heavy BitBurner loop into something like combat or map-traversal would be really interesting.

If you’re into Cyberpunk, there are several radio plays based on the classic stories (Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition)

The second short story was modified into this excellent AMV, if you are interested

Collection of Constantine Cavafy’s poems and metatext in Greek and a translated Latin

I find it endearing that outside of YouTube he is either despised for posting early on as the “angry video game nerd”, adored but only on an asmr subreddit, rate your music fan group, or a steam post on the other AVGN’s game. He was makes a brief cameo in a paper about a bug-reporting summarization model

Highlights, but by no means exhaustive:

• The First Attack on Titan Trailer
• Armadillo theme
• Three Cubes Triangle Truth
• SNL up to no good
• Top ten games

This anthology of essays covers a wide array of topics, some broad, others focused. Each is written by an expert in the question at hand, so while simplified, it won’t be to the point of inaccuracy. The best part? Each essay provides a a helping of valuable references so you don’t need to settle with the introduction.

The Tanner Lectures are a long series of annual lectures on human values. The lecturers chosen are often both thoughtful in the questions they pose and in phrasing it for a general audience. Several of them are accessible by .pdf on this website, but you might also have luck finding the lectures recorded on YouTube. Two favorites are Jonathan Lear’s To Become Human Does Not Come That Easily and Rowan Williams’ Paradox of Empathy part 1 and part 2

Sententiae Antiquae has a particularly special set of posts of a passage written in both the original ancient/classical language and a translation into English. It captures a breadth of topics, concerns, jokes, and thoughts one can find in ancient records. My particular favorite is their piece on the dog Tauron, which helped me mourn the loss of a family dog last year.

One of the more valuable texts you can find online are commentaries and guided readings. Christensen, who also owns and works on Sententiae Antiquae, has written a great series of readings involving the Iliad.

A massive index of ancient studies resources published online, many of which are published under a CC-license. The editorial quality for the index is impressive. I’ve found particularly helpful its list of Open access ancient language textbooks, OERs, and Primers.

Garbage day highlights the incredibly online while still remaining down-to-earth. They’ve crossed the point-of-no-return for many different Internet subcultures, but somehow are still capable of contextualizing each as a small part of a much, much larger internet with a long and fast moving history. If that sounds impossible, you should check them out. Worth noting the lead reporter, Ryan Broderick, however, was fired from Buzzfeed for being a plagiarist, so take some of their flippant change of mind or pacing to maybe be a repeat of that

Kennedy writes blog-posts that all implicitly start with a, “hey–wait just a minute”, sometimes in the sense that his posts are critical of poorly-defended but popular ideas, sometimes in the sense of “eureka!”, struck by a interesting if not entirely finished idea. Casual in tone, with a great balance of tongue-in-cheek arrogance and tongue-in-cheek humility.