justing.net

Week Notes No. 40: Media et al

By Justin G. on 25JAN29WED

My tour through the quiet corners, and the loud, of this strange land called the internet, and some dead tree media too.

This week was a lot.

Media

1. Books
   • Continued reading City of Saints and Madmen by Vandermeer. I’m not convinced this book is for me. I do hope it engages a bit more soon; the opening chapters are rather slow. I’ll read another chapter and if it’s not working, I’m giving Finch a shot.
   • I’m not going to beat around the bush here, I’ve given up on City of Saints and Madmen, for now.
   • Theft by Finding continues to be interesting and well written. A couple of quotes:
     • “may you fall down where you live” and
     • “real trouble has a bad complexion and a windbreaker”
   • The first pages of Circe (by Madeline Miller) are building with quiet intensity; I’m engaged.
2. Reading
   • Zvi’s Monthly roundup. Some wild stuff in there. Life expectancy is 95+ and increasing in 20 years? Anything could happen in 20 years. Well, almost anything. Is it just fantasy? Who can say.
   • Ezra Klein opinion on Zuck’s transparent and unprincipled attitude of “it’s all about the money” toward Trump. He wants chaos? Give ‘em chaos.
   • Garbage Day:
     • American mirror that pairs with the Panic World podcast below. “Thanks to TikTok, America finally saw itself and it scared us.”
     • Full Stack is a framing of this first week. “In a dire situation, running away is the best strategy,” well it is when that is an option.
   • Mike Monteiro’s Good News: How to survive online. Via Kottke.
     • “The only way to defeat a narcissistic sociopath is to starve them. Protect yourself from their bullshit, of course, but move away from it. Let them have their stage, but refuse to be their audience.”
     • Be less online.
   • Interconnected; it’s not synchronicity or anything special. Like you said, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. When a lot of different things happen randomly, sometimes you get unexpectedly linked combinations like that. It’s just the math. And it seems like more because looking back over history compresses it and our brains desperately want to see patterns.
   • This mefi comment on (maybe) separating posts from platforms, and this note on distinguishing the art from the artist are vibing. Manuel Moreale is also in this conversation, and brings up some movies that I did enjoy. The analog of this same problem extends to other areas: everything is connected, and many things are compromised. Purchases online and off, sports, heroes, just to name a few. I’ve never seen the practical ethics of these day to day decisions articulated clearly. Isn’t there some pithy wisdom to help? Perhaps before now it’s always been limited to a small blast radius, and not, you know, genocide. It’s a hard problem and deserves more careful thought.¹
   • Kottke’s post How To Weathering the Storm is useful; it refers to and samples several others (some of them already linked). I’m going to work on my critical ignoring skills, which I think are ok, so-so, maybe mid? They’re going to need to be much better.
     • “Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content.”
   • Guy Tal had good words in the June ‘24 issue of LensWork that I took to mean basically “pay attention while experiencing art to your experience of it, and avoid introspecting about how it was done.” He didn’t say that you can do that investigation later, but obviously you can. It was good.
   • I mentioned it in the days of the week already, but Craig’s suggestion to disconnect landed this time.
   • Gary Marcus on several recent AI drops from China. Some astonishing progress in the last month, for apparently far lower costs, from a few different groups.
3. Podcasts
   • Panic World Meta Doesn’t Care Anymore. This seems not good. Like FB is bringing home the attitude it has in the rest of the world. Maybe adding the internet to the world just fundamentally alters it and there isn’t anything we can do about that but adapt to the new landscape. Regulation is a form of adaptation. Just sayin’.
     • This TechDirt article is related.
4. YouTube
   • Catching up on Maigomika’s New Year post.
   • Another Death Valley Discoveries, this time in Smoke Tree Canyon. Thanks, Steve Hall, for sharing these.
   • I’ve been watching a few Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t: Cactus parasites and urban river inventory. This guy knows a lot of natural history things.
5. Television
   • Brooklyn 99 (Netflix -> Peacock) continues to be a ridiculous escape.
   • Saving these audio The X-Files mini seasons for later.
   • Severance (Apple) S1E6 and E7. Enjoying this weird mystery.
   • More of Dark (Netflix). Finished S1 and it was a puzzle. In a good way.
     • Almost done with S2 and new theory: they’re all the same person and it’s all going to collapse into a blackhole.
6. Movies
   • I will have to seek some better movie inputs. Nothing appeals right now, which probably means the right things are not passing before my eyes. I tried this top ten list (slyt), and tbf they all look pretty bad. Really bad. Everything is just unnecessarily too intensified. Even the list is intensified. It’s kind of shit.
7. Music
   • Marsh @ Printworks, London Marsh @ Natural Bridge SP Best of Marsh
   • New Royksopp announced, True Electric, comes out 25APR11. Pumped for this.
   • Ambients:
     • The Rosen Corporation Impromptu Ambient Session is good.
     • I tried a few of these folks, Jacek Szymków, and RE: Analog, and Asano Record. They’re vinyl based, often skew more toward jazz or jazz-adjacent, and usually include one or two tracks with vocals. I’m glad there are alternates out there, but only some of it really worked for me.
     • ilyandily and ilyandily was a good new discovery this week.
     • ilyandily and RE:Analog were added to the Reading playlist.

Info

1. Words
   • mān: wicked, false. This from the Old English Wordhord. I didn’t expect the word to mean this. I don’t have any good reason to have expectations about these things, yet I am still surprised.
     • Since this was the word on inauguration day, could it be just coincidence?
   • calque: a word that is loaned and translated into English.
2. Quotes
   • “The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.” MLK via Daring Fireball
   • “I’ve said it before but we’re just apes! We shouldn’t have to navigate all this…” by mefite tiny frying pan.
3. Links
   • Do I really think now is the right time to get more into vinyl? These record players do look cool though. But do I want to become a cliché? Is it really worth it? It might be.
4. Facts & Ideas
   • Vaccines for several types of cancer are in trials. Just remember: cancer is not one thing, it is a thousand things all called cancer.
   • New kind of magnetism: altermagnetism, and it could be important for superconducting materials. See also Nature, via Live Science via Damn Interesting.
   • Sony has ended production of Blu-Ray disks (and mini-disks). I didn’t realize this was so close at hand.
5. Open Questions
   • Why are there not more free range drones out and about in the city or suburbs? I think it’s probably the batteries. Or the expense? Another possibility is social norms. Skill requirement seems to be solved by software. There is the line of sight regulation, and a bunch of other rules, but I’m not sure how much that is really constraining people.
6. Panics & Tripwires
   • Is Meta blood diamonds? Maybe it has been for a while (the whole time) and I didn’t look closely enough.
7. Bets
   • I’m placing a bet that Apple will make an AI fitness coach, announcing next year (2026). How can they not when they have all that data about workouts and heart rates, etc. My betting partner is taking the position that they will announce it this year (could release next year). If they make no announcement (or unheralded release) before the end of 2026, we both lose the bet. The wager is the usual amount.

Even just the things I noticed this week were a lot. Here is a moment of (chickening) zen for chilling out.

Email me the good stuff.