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Shawn Huckins. Amazon Web Services are having issues. Which means half the internet is off. I’m okay with that. If I wasn’t buried in finishing a delayed job and it wasn’t forecast to monsoon out there, I’d say fuckit and walk to the deli for a glass of wine and a charcuterie board. But I AM in fact buried in putting an end to this job. Therefore I am indoors. But a music PR just added me to their press list, so later on I have some new music to listen to, for which I am grateful. So this is…
Amy Casey. TELEMETRY: A killer opening to a piece that is actually about Kraftwerk playing a gig in Bournemouth: “I remember the shock at discovering that Marlene Dietrich was still alive in 1992. She lived long enough to have raised a glass with Brecht and listened to all but one of Kraftwerk’s albums; and if she hadn’t been careful, ample time to take in Klaus Kinski and The Scorpions as well. Perhaps sensing that contemporaneity would eventually kill her, Dietrich wisely locked the door and…
1938 photo of archaeologist Manuel Esteve wearing a freshly unearthed ancient Corinthian helmet while casually smoking, creating a surreal blend of ancient artifact and modern Habit Substack https://substack.com/@armenikus/note/c-260375385?r=48lpsr&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action TODAY Marjane Satrapi died, age 56: ‘“Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” a statement from close friends and family…
Marisa Aragón Ware. All year I’ve been reading about taste. Someone somewhere identified that one of the things AI can’t do is “taste.” Now it seems a certain part of the world can’t stop talking about taste, and much of it is trying to define taste, presumably to boil it down into a useful prompt. This is a bit of a shift from the prevailing notion of “you’re allowed to like stuff,” which turned into “can’t we just let people enjoy things,” which quickly warped into “you have to like…
Craig Hubbard. Searching hard for my motivation today, because I am not particularly in my body or particularly with it. Not enough coffee in the world, everything is kind of wavy, and I really need to wipe down the boards and reset things. And also start backing things off this machine in prep for the arrival of the new one. But a musician has been sending me raws of her new music videos and maybe I’ll just sit and watch them for a while. Received in post, a gift from the author as routed…
After losing several hours yesterday to running every fix and check I could think of, I came to the sad conclusion that this laptop, a T580 from 2018, is now starting to fail and therefore must be sent to live on a farm. This machine has had its keyboard replaced twice over the years and kept on chugging, but now its chipset is dying. So I caught the end of the Lenovo May sale by a whisker and ordered a new ThinkPad. I doubt the new machine will have the durability of this faithful monster,…
Will Stovall. There is, for me, a weird pleasure in taking a night to wait for an idea to drop by touring the mental terrain I’d like it to drop in. It’s somewhere between setting intentions and going for a walk in a space where I hope to see something wonderful – and if I don’t, then I’ve still had a nice walk. TELEMETRY: Alice Rohrwacher, one of the best filmmakers working today, has started production on her adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel “Three Incestuous Sisters,”…
Doom is the prefix du jour. Doomscrolling, doomposting, doomsplaining, doomspreading, doomgooing, and doomliving dominate discourse. (Ok, I made the last two up.) Doom joins other recent meme morphemes—the suffixes -maxxing, -pilled, and -slop—in giving our discussions about a contemporary life an overtly negative cast. Doomspending, in particular, has become synonymous with the declining fortunes of young Americans. Sean Monahan…
I needed a new belt in a shade of brown, to match the brown straps on two watches I’ve recently bought. Just for the hell of it, I added “vintage” to the search string on eBay, simply to see if it threw up anything interesting. This showed up, a Sergio Cerruti Roma leather piece. It’s from the 1990s. Vintage. 1990s. I need to go and lie down. OPERATIONS: yesterday was an utter clusterfuck, so today is all scriptingSTATUS: Made an ice cream base using 300ml of coconut cream, as I’m still trying…
A couple of days after it reached town, I went to see the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel PROJECT HAIL MARY, directed by Lord & Miller and written by Drew Goddard. Goddard wrote the screenplay for the other Weir adaptation, THE MARTIAN, directed by Ridley Scott, in which Matt Damon once again has to be expensively rescued from something. (Someone once calculated that, in total, it would have cost some $900 billion to rescue Matt Damon from shit all those times.) Weir wrote another novel…
Tony Cokes. Well, the heatwave is here. Today is linen trousers, thin socks and one of the 100% cotton popover tops I get from from a manufacturer in Tibet, which are remarkably durable. Today begins a much less connected season, in a way. I managed to read the top ends of four newspapers and four news/magazine sites this morning. (If anyone’s keeping up, the current stack is: The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Economist, BBC News, Politico and Foreign…
After all, one did not write a book for other people. Any more than one wrote it for an already existing self. One wrote it, in fact, to renew one’s own self in the process of writing, and creatively go beyond its previous limits. Or in other words: to transcend oneself. Thus it is not for others that each person transcends himself; one writes books and invents machines that were demanded nowhere. I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I will read fewer books this year, because the ones in my…
I can feel it today. Sumer is icumen in. I have had an incredibly unproductive week so far, at a very bad time in my schedule to be out of juice, so I am taking the long bank holiday weekend to get back on track and reset and prepare. I need to get sixty pages out, reply to a ton of emails and messages, deal with a shedload of life stuff, put the fucking phone down for a while and actually get around to finalising and enacting my small plans for this website. Today is St Helena’s day, patron…
Faig Ahmed. OPERATIONS: ALL THE THINGSSTATUS: inbox 175, rss 1000, everything is out of controlREADING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) By Christmas 1975, the CIA’s optimism about the broad political situation in the Middle East was accompanied by a relatively sanguine view of the threat from terrorism too. The December edition of its monthly summary of international threats ended with an unusual warning. On the night of the 24th of the month, the agency said, a ‘new organisation of…
Annoyingly, this is just a quick logging, as I lost yesterday to trying to figure out new accounting software I’ve been told to use which doesn’t seem to want to work for me, inbox is at 160, I have three unopened packages, and I’m a few days behind on work production. So on Saturday afternoon I went to the Jazz Centre to see blues guitarist Chris Corcoran play. And on Saturday evening I went to Konsztrukting Soundz, which I’m going to try and note in a separate post at some point, but one of…
I spent last night looking at cheap vintage watches on eBay. Usually I come up empty – nice things that I don’t necessarily want to spend the asking price on, or broken junk. Turned up some fascinating things in my self-imposed price bracket last night. Expensive watches are nice, but the fun for me is in finding a bargain-priced weird thing I have never seen before that I love. The watch has to say something to me. There’s a terribly beaten-up 80-year-old Swiss watch I have a bid on, just…
He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were. This is a cracking little book. Vladislav…
Politics in Britain has returned to high psychodrama, the kind you normally find in failing states. Just noticed I haven’t set the date window on this watch! 8C with a feels-like of 4C, which explains the pain in my hands and wrists this morning, and the sky to the east has turned black. View this post on Instagram Today I learned “mechatronics” is an actual word: Just a few hours before the Orion spacecraft crossed the sky en route to the moon on
Another cold snap. Had to take a rootbound acer out of a pot yesterday and plant it in the ground, sowed some seeds around it, so of course I woke up today to discover the local wildlife turned over the ground and tried to dig the acer out. New newsletter went out yesterday, in which we are trying something new. Found on Taco Bell Quarterly: I think looping and iteration are very much a part of the creative process. Often I find myself starting with a feeling or an idea. I know I want to get to…
Offline.
Yesterday was a braindrain day, so my plan is to mostly check out for the next couple of days and just get Sunday’s newsletter done. New material coming in that newsletter. READING: HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Le Jardin S4 E9
Alex Senna. Public Domain Review. “Internet Cinema” at DO NOT RESEARCH Accessions: OCEANINE, Jolanda Moletta: digital-only for me, as the only other offering is vinyl, but necessary. Oc
Picked up a smaller sling bag for those days where I just need the phone, earbuds or MP3 player and card wallet. Denim/kapok blend long-cut chore jacket from MUJI turns out to be the perfect weight for a mild spring day. I like the big pockets, too. AI has gutted the booming Chinese microdrama video space. I’m actually interested in vertical microdrama video as a creative form, and have been hoping some more risks are taken with it in the West. “Podslop” – thousands of AI-generated podcasts…
This is going to be a fig. I am very much sick of people sticking -maxxing on the end of words, just like I’m sick of -punk as a suffix, but the looksmaxxer pentastack is worthy of note, the “enhancement” cocktail consisting of Adderall, dextromethorphan, pregabalin, ketamine… and an industrial solvent called BDO. Cellular rejuvenation for life extension may actually have some possibilities 4000 year old magical texts from Syria preserved on clay tablets! There’s an anti-witchcraft ritual in…
Potatoes. Haven’t been able to do anything in the garden all week, and things don’t look great out there – but things are growing, too. New newsletter is out. Back at this properly tomorrow, I think. OPERATIONS: work pressure is real nowSTATUS: 8hrs 40m sleep! Sleep isn’t cumulative, but lack of sleep is, and I’m hoping I’ve handled the sleep deficit from the last six weeks now.READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)LISTENING: THE MEDIEVAL DRONE SOCIETY III, Laura Cannell LAST…
Accessions: Somehow missed this one on release. Showed up on a Kindle sale. HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+) PREVIOUSLY: They Caught And Drowned God: PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES, Olga Tokarczuk DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, Olga Tokarczuk And I was given a late birthday present: THE NOMA GUIDE TO BUILDING FLAVOUR, Rene Redzepi etc (
I hate these “recalibration” weeks where I have to reset routines, intents and diet back to zero. Headline: Scientists Say They’ve Figured Out a Way to Get to Alpha Centauri in Just 20 Years. Actuality: it’s laser propulsion again, and it currently only works at the microscopic level. Takes me back to the days of Leik Myrabo and his “lightcraft” laser launch system, which didn’t scale up beyond the size of a coaster and got seventy metres up before they fell off the laser or melted. The actual…
New newsletter up: People in UK spend fewer years in good health than a decade ago, study finds. Has truthiness: walking around my town, you feel like the place should be renamed Pre-Existing Conditions Dark matter “could be made of “relic” black holes that survived the deaths of previous universes.” Pair that one with my THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT. God, I wish we’d had this story when I wrote the show.
Trifid Nebula. Anduril, Palantir and SpaceX are changing how America wages war. the Trump administration is turning to a new clique of defence upstarts that are reimagining how to wage war. They are led by Palantir, a software giant providing intelligence systems; SpaceX, whose Starshield satellite network provides reconnaissance and connectivity; and Anduril, an up-and-coming favourite that makes air and sea drones alongside anti-drone weaponry. This trio of so-called “neo-primes” have close…
I have two “AI” devices in a drawer. I’ve tried various different forms of AI. AI tops every Google search now. I still have Perplexity, which I use for a particular kind of deep research – it speeds up sourcing, like a good search engine was supposed to. It doesn’t get used often. I’m sure I could use AI to make myself various kinds of digital tools, but I personally would much rather buy them from the people who made them. I could use coupons to obtain polyester clothes from Temu if I didn’t…
