12/1 – 12/7
take it as a testament to astronomy that mariners knew their positions well enough to record them all.
understood spam through elderly person’s experience on electronic device. confusion over which boxes accord with what they’ve opened explicitly, how the advertisement in front of them got there. you and i, who generally understand the construction of the web, identify attention intrusion. but in the internet experience of the elderly, no recognition of scurrilously sourced screens. preying on unsophisticated users wastes the time of us all.
read ocean vuong’s second person on earth we’re briefly gorgeous (2019).
a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. from the latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the old friend to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. to be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once
the shots are held by arms that belong to men who will soon cut open the macaque’s skull with a scalpel, open it like a lid on a jar. the men will take turns consuming the brain, dipped in alcohol or swallowed with cloves of garlic from a porcelain plate, all while the monkey kicks beneath them. the fishing rod cast and cast but never hitting the water
“no, madame,” i said to the woman in my esl english. “that’s my mom. i came out her asshole and love her very much. i am seven. next year i will be eight. i’m doing fine. i feel good how about you? merry christmas happy new year.” the deluge was exactly eighty percent of the language i knew at the time and i shivered in pure delight as the words flew out of me
they were playing in the backyard. not a game, exactly, but an embodiment of vague excitement, the kind known only to very young children, where delight rushes through them simply by running across an empty field not yet recognized as a tiny backyard in a shitty part of town. from their shrill cries, they were no older than six, an age where one could be ecstatic just by moving
“how else to repay the boy who gave me my first pizza bagel but to become his shadow?”
the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?
the way you pronounce spaghetti as “bahgeddy”
salat al-fajr: a prayer before sunrise. “whoever prays the dawn prayer in congregation,” said the prophet muhammad, “it is as if he had prayed the whole night long”
i miss you more than i remember you
the word dying is nothing like the word dead
12/8 – 12/14
remember when username became real name. some time in the early 2000s, humanity decided we would mostly use our truthful names on the internet. before that, everyone was a masked stranger who wore the same distinct-from-other-strangers mask, in the form of an alias or username.
watched michael shermer discuss pattern-seeking behavior burnt into our dna.
if you squint, you can still see the face. and when you’re squinting, what you’re doing is you’re turning that from fine-grain to coarse-grain and so you’re reducing the quality of your data. and if i didn’t tell you what to look for, you’d still see the face because we’re programmed by evolution to see faces. faces are important for us socially.
read..
refinery operations have discharged hazardous substances into all these bodies of water with beautiful names: moss lake, bayou verdine, bayou d’inde. according to the complaint, which was filed in federal court, this includes naphthalene, slop oil, ethanol, zinc, nitrogen ammonia, chlorine and phenolics. there are now warnings posted along 350 miles of the river, with instructions that swimming should be avoided, that women of childbearing age and children younger than seven shouldn’t consumer fish caught in the river, and that contact with the riverbed sediment should be kept to a minimum because of the risk of exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs), which cause liver cancer, gall bladder cancer, biliary tract cancer, gastrointestinal tract cancer and brain cancer
water has to be accepted and accommodated, as it is in places like amsterdam and rotterdam
(2) animals put food in their bodies, but fungi put their bodies in the food
this explanation is speculative and may well engender skepticism, but sheldrake’s question raises others about fungi and the notion of the individual. in the malheur national forest, in eastern oregon’s blue mountains, a single mycelial network of honey fungus, or armillaria, stretches for over three square miles underground and is at least two thousand years old. like all mycelial networks, it is made up of an interconnected mat of fine filaments, capable of transferring messages and coordinating movements across its entire mass. it is considered the world’s largest organism. but is it a single organism or is it a collective? what about the plants it is intertwined with?
(3) the batture settlement on the rim of the new orleanian bowl
the collected precipitation of the middle third of the country
if new orleans survives the century, it may be as a true island
(4) burkina faso, country of honest people
a continent that by 2040 will have 60 percent of the world’s people under thirty
12/15 – 12/21
read the mesoamerican chronology entry. jaguar-worship began before christ. they illuminated codexes, potted potbelly sculptures (barrigones).
the city-state of teotihuacan dominated the valley of mexico until the early 8th century
the olmec culture represents a milestone of mesoamerican history..state organization, the development of the 260-day ritual calendar and the 365-day secular calendar, the first writing system, and urban planning
many of the olmec figurines and sculptures contain representations of the were-jaguar
maize, beans, and squash, the mesoamerican agricultural trinity
base 20 number system
the use of nails in architecture
quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent
the aztec empire dominated central mexico for close to a century before the spanish conquest
Kartika Upadhyaya 