other people's stuff
bookssongs
albums
films
quotes
readings
search this site
"To the carnival is what she said
A hundred dollars makes it dark inside"
-Tom Waits, Jockey Full of Bourbon
March 25. I'm still burned out on social issues. So today, some metaphysics. Frost Flowers on the Windows is a strange short book from 1899, in which the author investigates correlations between the shapes in frost on windows, and what's going on inside.
Alberg proceeds to conduct an "espionage into this secret branch of nature". He finds tropical plants reproduced on the frosted glass of a saloon serving punch made from coconut and sugarcane; pineapples in the windows of a Greek fruit dealer; cereals, vegetables, and even a shopgirl's lace apron on the panes of a Swedish restaurant; and, at a small grocery, celery stalks are again cast across the glass.
Language creates an altered state of consciousness. By "language" the article means words, and the idea is that the altered state of consciousness that you might get from advanced meditation or psychedelics is actually the normal consciousness of the whole wide universe, and that it's humans who have entered a strange mental state through words. "Ultimately, language is both an enhancement and a constraint, a double-edged sword that structures thought while simultaneously obscuring other modes of being."
I've been lurking on the Manifestation subreddit, and this is a good thread, I Tried Manifestation as a Joke... and Now I'm Freaking Out. It's often said that all you have to do is "believe". But that word points to different things. I totally have the propositional belief that reality is a dream, that the out-there physical world is a sort of gameboard that we're all reconstructing every moment, when it could be anything. But the kind of "belief" that actually does stuff is not propositional but practical, and very difficult to get the hang of.
March 21. All my blog ideas are half-baked, so more links. This is a long Ask Reddit thread with some good answers to the question, What's the purpose of our life if we all are going to die in the end?
A short thread on Ask Old People, Who was the oddest or most unlikely couple that you ever met?
From the Spirituality subreddit, a strangely helpful answer to a question about dealing with mistakes, that you can view all your possible actions as states of an electron. "To say something is a mistake would be like picking out a random point in the infinite potentials and saying 'this point is invalid.'"
Surprising link between cannabis use and cognitive decline uncovered. If they say it's surprising, it must be a negative correlation. "Specifically, in their most comprehensive analysis, cannabis users showed about 1.3 IQ points less decline than non-users."
And a nice new album of psychedelic ambient,
Flamenca by megabasse
March 17. More links. An essay in Aeon about Martha Nussbaum, a social philosopher who is still active and has done some careful thinking and writing about what's good for humans and what the state should do about it.
From the London Review of Books, a review of a biography of the Brothers Grimm. I always thought they went around the countryside getting the tales from peasants, but "the Grimms obtained most of their tales from middle-class folklore enthusiasts, many of whom were women." And the review points out that the one thing forbidden in fairy tales is any hint of the middle class. "So if you stop being a princess you become a kitchen maid. You can't ever become a librarian or a tax collector."
This Time Portal uses AI to show scenes from a time and place in history, and you try to guess it, keeping in mind that AI will get some of the details wrong.
And a fun thread from Ask Old People, Do you have any secret hobbies or interests that you never really shared with other people?
March 13. More links. Why Not Mars is a two year old post on the Idle Words blog: "If you think rockets, adventure, exploration, and discovery are more fun than counting tumors in mice, then the slow and timorous Mars program will only break your heart." And a new post, The Shape of a Mars Mission, about what exactly it would take:
The extreme requirements for autonomy, reliability, and automation I've outlined are old news to designers of deep-space probes.... But no one has ever tried attaching a box of large primates to a deep space probe with the goal of keeping them alive, happy, and not tweeting about how NASA sent them into the vast empty spaces to die.
Scientists issue dire warning: Microplastic accumulation in human brains escalating. No one is safe, but you can greatly reduce your own exposure by not drinking bottled water, and not heating stuff in plastic in the microwave.
How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree is about the ecological role of old rotting trees, and how clever arborists are carefully damaging young trees to make them act like old trees. (If that link doesn't work try this one.)
Beavers are coming home, soon to be re-introduced to the UK to manage wetlands.
Why climate activists are turning to sabotage instead of protest. Because long prison sentences for public protests are making it a better idea to do stuff in secret. "The STS activist who spoke to the Guardian did not see the group's actions as more extreme than the kinds of things already carried out by other groups. 'The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested.'"
March 10. Stray links from Reddit. People with autism, what did you think was normal until a neurotypical person told you otherwise? By the way, I think "maladaptive daydreaming" should be renamed to "adaptive daydreaming", because that's how it's actually used, as an adaptation to make this world tolerable.
What's your theory that you can't prove, but that you think might hold up if someone were to do some real, legitimate research on it? This is basically a high-end conspiracy thread, with some fascinating stuff and some dumb stuff.
Another great thread removed from Ask Old People for no good reason, Who here has caught a glance in the mirror?
Lifelong heavy drinkers, how have your alcohol habits affected you? Answers range from "They all died" to "Alcohol is an insidious, clever and patient demon that will happily wait out your vigilance for as long as it takes." I'm so lucky that I don't like being drunk.
Also from Ask Old People, How accurate is Mad Men? It's dead on accurate, except there was a lot more sexual harassment.
Doctors of Reddit, what do we not know about the human body? The top answer is that we still haven't found the natural molecule that binds to the place that Xanax and Valium bind to.
March 7. I've posted part 4 of The Days of Tansy Capstone, a picaresque novel in a somewhat utopian and mildly magical postapocalpyse. I expect it to have seven or eight parts, and I hope to finish this year. Also, I've rewritten the CEVs chapter in part 1, and done various small edits. This is my favorite bit from part 4:
They say real courage isn't being fearless, it's being afraid and doing it anyway. Whatever, I don't have real courage. But one thing I do, that I don't feel like doing, is helping other people. They sure need it! Supposedly we are all one. I can't see it, but I have to trust the experts, just like with germs.
March 5. Positive links! From Ask Old People, What's one thing you like about Gen Z? From the top comment:
I work with a ton of Gen Zers and am often struck by how they just do not give a shit about authority or traditional standards. They will happily call the CEO an asshole in an all-company meeting with a couple of thousand attendees, they'll tell you they can't make a meeting because they have to go to therapy, they'll go into a public Slack channel and post that they got literally no work done all week because of stress.
Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information. It's about the volunteer tagging system at Archive of Our Own, and I think volunteers are better than non-volunteers at almost anything. Human motivation is the most powerful force in the world, and right now it's being suffocated by the motivation of giant blocks of money to keep getting bigger. If we ever get a UBI, it will eventually make a day and night difference in how well society operates.
Hacker News thread, Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar. Blender is a free and open-source graphics software tool. From one comment:
I did not find Flow to be a technically impressive movie. The animation was very imperfect. The rendering (especially shadows and textures) were off. The whole movie looked like a video game cut scene. But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. My 7 year old and his friends sat raptured through the entire movie without any slapstick, pop music numbers, or even dialogue!
Harvesting the sun twice, an article about agrovoltaics, in which crops partly under solar panels do better than crops in full sunlight. Related: Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops.
Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice. I know we can't bring back woolly mammoths without also bringing back their habitat, but this is still really cool, and genetic tinkering has already done at least one great thing: Pink grapefruits were created by bombarding seeds with gamma rays.
And two positive political links. Right to Repair Laws Have Now Been Introduced in All 50 US States
And I can't remember the last time the Democrats did something this inspired, a Reddit thread about congressman Ro Khanna holding town hall meetings in Republican districts. The fact that Republicans are reluctant to meet voters in their own districts, suggests that they're already feeling the squeeze between serving their leader and serving the public.
March 3. Negative links that are not directly about politics, starting with three from Ask Reddit. Americans who go on road trips: what little town gave you the most creeps?
What's the most annoying thing about rich people? Basically they're clueless and don't know it.
A removed thread about disturbing content on Instagram, with several comments arguing that it's psychological warfare with the effect of normalizing a more violent society.
The housing theory of everything, arguing that housing shortages "drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates." At least falling fertility rates will eventually solve the problem.
A scientific article about Firearm-related lead exposure. Adults going to shooting ranges, and bringing trace lead home to their kids, "may be one of the greatest influences on elevated pediatric blood lead levels."
A Hacker News thread about Firefox selling user data. It's still the least evil major browser and I'm going to keep using it, but the economic rules of this society seem to create a black hole of evil that eventually pulls in every organization above a certain size.
February 28. Music for the weekend. I've been listening to Bill Fay, an obscure folk singer who I only heard about last week when he died. He did two pretty good albums in 1970 and 1971, on which the most timeless and perfect song is Be Not So Fearful. Also great, and weirder, are I Hear You Calling and the apocalyptic Plan D. And if you're a fan of Big Star's third album, check out Don't Let My Marigolds Die, which had the same sound a few years earlier.
Also from the same period, I was listening to Melanie Safka's amazing cover of Ruby Tuesday, and my ears perked up at 3:05. I'm not saying Phil Collins copied it, but that is absolutely the "In The Air Tonight" drum lick, ten years sooner, by a drummer named Barry Morgan.
February 26. The Alpha Myth: How Captive Wolves Led Us Astray:
In their natural habitat, wolf packs operated nothing like the prison-yard dynamics he'd observed in the zoo. Instead of hierarchies maintained through aggression, he found family units guided by experienced parents. Leadership wasn't seized through dominance - it was earned through nurturing, teaching, and protecting the collective good.
...
The irony is that in attempting to model human behavior on what we thought was "natural" wolf psychology, we instead normalized the very behaviors that emerge from unnatural confinement. Just as captive wolves exhibit exaggerated aggression and dominance, humans operating within rigid hierarchies and crushing social expectations often adopt similarly distorted patterns - what we might call "captive male syndrome."
Supposed "alpha behaviors" are seemingly identical to toddler behaviors to me. I think it's ironically non-masculine to be so terrified of how you appear that you play act as basically a belligerent child incapable of compromise, teamwork, or navigating disagreements with dignity instead of being yourself.
Now I'm wondering, if alpha behaviors only emerge in captivity, then why do we have billionaires behaving like alphas? Are billionaires in captivity? My answer is yes. That's how deep humans are in social dysfunction, that even our masters are just high-level slaves.
So what would an actually free human society look like? I see two angles to approach it: observed low-tech and speculative high-tech. A good example of the former is the book The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott. A good example of the latter is the essay The Economics of Star Trek by Rick Webb.
February 24. Today, politics. While I don't want to dwell in negativity, this sure is an interesting time to be alive. I keep thinking of the Warren Zevon song, "I was in the house when the house burned down."Talking total nonsense, but then yanks are saying "oh he came across well". I realised then that Americans react to tone of voice and might not actually understand basic language. Like dogs.
I think Trump's tone of voice is literally magical. I remember some comedian telling this joke around 1990, where a guy kills his whole family because he heard voices telling him to do it, and it turns out it was just his practical joker buddy. "Ha ha, I really got you this time Bob, I made you kill your whole family!" It's funny because, why don't crazy people just not do what the voices say? The serious answer is, the compulsion must be happening on a deeper level than words.
February 22. Two similar quotes on metaphysics. From the novel Lanark by Alasdair Gray:
God, you see, is a word. It is the word for everything not speaking when someone says 'I think.' And by Propper's Law of Inverse Exclusion (which enables a flea in a matchbox to declare itself jailor of the universe) every single 'I think' has intimate knowledge of the surface of what it is not. But as every thinker reflects a different surface of what he isn't, and as God is our word for the whole, it follows that all agreement about God is based on misunderstanding.
And from Lore of Proserpine by Maurice Hewlett:
Who knows what his neighbor sees? Who knows what his dog? Every species of us walks secret from the others; every species of us the centre of his universe, its staple of measure, and its final cause. And if at times one is granted a peep into new heavens and a new earth, and can get no more, perhaps the best thing we win from that is the conviction that we must doubt nothing and wonder at everything.
The latter is a strange 1913 book by a novelist who claimed to see fairies. It's a great companion to Dora Van Gelder's The Real World of Fairies, and I've just added it to my books page, along with Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, which I'm now reading for the third time.
February 20. Have you ever seen a goth downtown? is a thoughtful blog post about the polishing-down of style. Between this post and the Hacker News thread, the idea is that the most authentic freaks are in small cities, because in small towns you'll get beat up, and in big cities, the larger number of more casual observers "steers you towards 'conventionally edgy'". There's also stuff about AI, which is becoming more eye-popping, but in more predictable ways.
The Fremen Mirage is a multi-part series of history posts, about the popular idea that having a hard life makes people more badass, and these tougher populations inevitably conquer the soft and "decadent" populations in the more civilized areas. The author patiently explains why this is not the case. And I put "decadent" in quotes because the way the word is being used lately is not about decay or corruption, but about an educated cosmopolitan culture that rankles authoritarians.
I still think society is collapsing through misguided progress, but the cause of the weakness is not urbanization or soft living. It's the abundance and seductiveness of cognitive pitfalls, easy ways of thinking that lead to bad decisions. And the deeper cause is that we've defined "progress" as replacing the non-human-made world with the human-made world. This is something Jerry Mander wrote in 1991 in In The Absence of the Sacred: that the correct biological metaphor for modern technology is not evolution but inbreeding.
February 17. Quick note. A reader has started a Ran Prieur Rap discussion page on Lemmy Today, which is an instance of the Lemmy social network, an alternative to Reddit, and part of the Fediverse, a decentralized network of social media not controlled by big tech. Thanks Eric!
New subject, politics. I continue to think the best metaphor for Trump is a fire. John Mulaney had a bit, during Trump's first term, comparing him to a horse in the hospital. That's no longer valid, because a horse has no idea what it's doing, and this time Trump knows exactly what he's doing. But this part is still important: "You go to brunch with people, and they're like, there shouldn't be a horse in the hospital. And it's like, we're well past that."
I imagine the world like a big building, and in one room of the building, there's a fire. It's not the only fire. There are other fires in other rooms, but this one is the scariest. And I don't want to make any specific predictions about how far it's going to burn, because I don't have a clear sense of how burnable the world is. But what I do know is, a fire doesn't hold back because of human ethics.
I'm optimistic because culture is very hard to undo, and most of the progress of the last fifty years has been on the level of culture, rather than law. You could argue that the Democrats played it perfectly: They spent all their political capital pushing the culture left, and while they obviously went too far on a tactical level, they didn't go too far on a moral level or a strategic level. There was going to be a backlash anyway, and now they've framed it so that the backlash won't go as far back.
The Dems were fully on board with runaway wealth inequality, because there's a limit to how far that can go. Capitalism only works with cheap energy and an endless supply of suckers. Orwell said the future is a boot stomping on a human face forever. But forever is a long time, and the world has now passed the peak of people willing to get their face stomped for the promise of one day getting to do the stomping. Right now there are a lot of resentful people putting on boots. But when this is over, the survivors will have a good opportunity to do things better.