Small birds stitch the edge of the tide, then vanish,
And the day holds,
briefly,
like a cup cooling in hand.
Turnstones
I can’t belive its MAY. It feels like only yesterday that I got back from Sri Lanka. With every passing year, it feels like life is accelerating, but then again, so are events.
It’s Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK, so projects are on hold. The GF went to Scotland on Friday to see some friends for two nights, and rather than be on my Jack I went back down to The Chalk. I was only at home a couple of weeks ago for Easter, but in between then and now, my parents have been to Hong Kong and Taiwan and back to see my younger brother. So we had a lot to catch up on.
When I got back on Friday mum asked me what I wanted to do whilst I was home, and the two things I wanted to do were; sit on the beach in the sunshine and, go for a walk along a specific part of the coast. So we did both!
Very nice! Also saw some Ruddy Turnstone’s along the sea wall as the tide was coming in:
Today being bank holiday Monday, I’ve done a bunch of domestic things around the house. Once i’ve posted this I’m going to read my book with a cup of tea.
SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror
This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print, material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5.
Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand stamped twice, copy number and FOG logo. This is remaining stock after the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they’re gone, they’re are gone. £18 + shipping worldwide
CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Drafted the spine / argument of the whole of Episode 303 of permanently moved. Just need to write it now.
- Had a long workshop/call about the idea of ‘industrial coordination arbitrage’. Meaning there’s a competitive advantage to re-engineering or figuring a potential customer (or competitor’s) AI model provider and the system prompts of the business. “I know I can sell to you better if I know your infra’s thinking patterns” Inspired by this article on how LLMs prefer to sniff their own farts
Terminal Access
Woke up this morning to a pingback from Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden on this fantastically hypertext dense post: Aura through the Cult of Self: opportunity creates authenticity. It’s very much worth your time, i came away with a lot of thoughts and seeds of ideas.
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks@1/quoteback.jsIn our modern, individualist culture, self-expression has become “not just a moral requirement, but a teleological one,” writes Tara Isabella Burton. “It is what we, as human beings, are for.” Rather than inheriting our identity from our roles in society as we did in the past, today we are each responsible for constructing our own identity. And so, writes Byung-Chul Han, “the production of self becomes a permanent activity.”
Importantly, we must construct our identity both for ourselves and for others. In On Photography, Susan Sontag explains that our culture believes that “images possess the qualities of real things,” but viewers apply this logic in reverse and “attribute to real things the qualities of an image.” Because of this interpretive transference, we can use images to create our selves online, irrespective of physical reality or ownership.
Dipping the Stacks
AI Slop and the Cultural Elite
However, I am observing that a book that thousands of young women read and loved, part of a genre of books that hordes of young women are reading and loving, while everyone else cries about a reading crisis, is being branded “AI slop” and in “bad taste” by the tastemakers of the publishing industry/literary world.
A Dot a Day Keeps the Clutter Away — Scott Lawson
The simplest organization system I’ve tried is a sheet of colored dot stickers. It’s also the best.
The Original E-Girls, from Playboy 1996
On the Internet, no one knows you’re a babe.” So begins the below pictorial from April 1996 based on one far-flung premise: women, believe it or not, are online. And some of them are hot!
The Slow Death of the Power User
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.
That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care.
The machines are fine. I’m worried about us.
Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I’m a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: “What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there’s the real danger.” Herbert was writing science fiction. I’m writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small.
Reading
I’m reading Henryk Jurkowski’s Aspects of Puppet Theatre right now. This book is a ‘classic’ and is on most theatre and puppety syllabi. and i can see why. It’s so interesting! and is one of those books that has totally exploded my thinking into all different directions. No wonder it’s so influential
Still reading The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete. Alan Chapman told me to read it after a conversation last year, and now I’m beginning to understand why.
On the recommendation of a few friends, I’ve started Listening to Will Of The Many by James Islington. I’m about half way though… its not the book i was expecting… it’s very good, it’s just… had I read the blurb, I wouldn’t have read it.
Music
Denonbu – Ultrarhythm (Single)
I have just discovered Japanese producers Denobu, who have a whole J/Hyper-pop transmedia thing going on. An anime world full of story and key characters combined with a the music side which involves dropping a new single every week on a Thursday. They have an enormous back catalogue and i’ve only scratched the surface so far, but this track is a banger.
Remember Kids:
Because the words are printed on a page, eyewitness accounts may seem confusingly similar to newspaper articles.
The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood
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