11/1 – 11/7
praised simple days. find it minor league amazing that life in its first moments did not age. died only due to damage, injury.
view the internet as an invitation into the lives of other humans. accept at your own peril. like any drug, dangerously grants the opportunity to forgo living oneself.
wonder when ai text generators will get good enough to justify their plagiarism on artistic grounds.
sampled new music. bluegrass > bilingual alt r&b > death metal. stick to this for now:
early last century, we thought physicists would rule the world. late last century, that torch passed to neuroscientists. today, computer programmers hold the flame. don’t be fooled, nobody’s driving.
stayed home friday. committed two out of 19 crimes, pled guilty to pour taste.
cleaned cobwebs. as stress dissipates after death, more recent battles with infirmities can overpower memories that built the original bond. interrupt these thoughts with gratitude. consider acts of preciprocation in shared days of health, plenty.
from then to now, the toll of loneliness, not so bad, not so bad. sometimes, overpowering. shared laughter is the goal, save the world as an afterthought.
read..
(1) like a stroke of calligraphy
the version we know best comes from hans christian andersen. his rendering is more heavy metal than ours: a group of young storks are taunted by a cruel child, so their stork mother tells them she knows the pond ‘in which all little babies lie, waiting till the storks come…we will fetch a little baby brother or sister for each of the children who did not sing that naughty song.’ but for the cruel child ‘there lies in the pond a little dead baby who has dreamed itself to death. we will take it to the naughty boy, and he will cry because we have brought him a dead little brother.’ this bit of the story is left off greeting cards
in 1694 the scientist charles morton suggested in deadly earnest that the stork, along with the swallow and crane, wintered on the moon. then, in 1822, a stork arrived in a german village with a thirty-inch spear in its neck. the spear, metal-tipped, rising up through the bird’s breast and out of the side of its neck, was identified as coming from central africa
the masters of infinity
in the orbital plane shared by the earth and the moon, there are five lagrange points, where the combined gravity of the two bodies allows for objects to be suspended, relative to both, without using thrusters (which otherwise maintain a spacecraft or satellite’s position in space)
controlling the mineral and energy resources of asteroids may also be an attractive prospect. the entire mass of the asteroid belt is only around one thousandth of the mass of the earth, but around half of that is contained in just four large asteroids: ceres, vesta, pallas and hygiea. unlike planets, asteroids have no atmosphere and much less energy is needed to lift materials off their surfaces. in december, a japanese mission returned to earth with the first samples taken from below an asteroid’s surface. nations have fought plenty of wars over shitty little islands. fighting over shitty little asteroids is not implausible
in space, linear distance is less important than the energy required to travel between two points. thanks to the gravity wells formed by the planets, far more energy is required to travel from the earth to the moon than from the moon to mars – a distance 150 times greater
the soviet almaz space station was mounted with a machine gun
a recent paper in nature noted that in 2020 the weight of human-made stuff exceeded living biomass for the first time. (it was just 3 per cent of biomass in 1900.) while trees and other vegetation weigh in at around 900 gigatonnes, buildings, roads and other infrastructure add up to 1100 gt (animals contribute 4gt, half the weight of plastic on land and sea). there is now more concrete in the world than any other man-made material. after fossil fuels, it is the largest source of carbon dioxide, contributing 8 per cent of emissions, which puts it ahead of aviation and agriculture. each of its ingredients has a calamitous footprint
watched softcore porn disguised as a francis ford coppola film. performances ranked in descending order: gary oldman, gary oldman’s pince-nez, keanu reeves’ dialect coach.
civilization and syphilization have advanced together.
11/ 8 – 11/14
watched american gangster (2007). russell crowe always just got out of bed.
he looks like your uncle but not as handsome.
so more like your sister.
that’s funny. you two should take that show on the road.
i’m taking you shopping
i went shopping.
i can tell.
never, ever come into this city again, unannounced. you come in to see a fucking broadway show, you call ahead first, see if it’s okay with me.
11/15 – 11/21
stayed employed, curious. consider friendship, at its core, an unspoken agreement to enjoy the minutiae of each other’s lives.
drunken, question-sodden conversation until daylight. retained only the last hour. note to self: talking has many connotations, hobosexual just one.
read the key by junichiro tanizaki. mid-fifties husband and mid-forties wife uncork their sexual repressions via journaling.
he’s supposed to be on a vegetarian diet, but to cope with me he eats beef every day.
rather than slim, foreign-looking legs, i have always liked the slightly bowed ones of the old-fashioned japanese woman, such as my mother and my aunt. those slender pipestem legs are uninteresting. and instead of overdeveloped breasts and buttocks, i prefer the gently swelling lines of the bodhisattva in the chuguji temple.
it’s true i detest that man, but when i think how infatuated he is with me, i have an urge to drive him into paroxysms of desire… so eager to seduce him that before i know it ive seduced myself… i watch him gasp as if he’s losing his mind, and i’m intoxicated by the skill of my own technique.
after bathing, i had put on my earrings. i got into bed, purposely lying so that he could see my jeweled ears. as trivial a thing as that, the merest novelty, is enough to arouse him. he calls me sex-mad, but i’m sure there’s no other man so obsessed by it.
watched passing (2021). james van der zee portraits brought to life. ruth negga resembled 2013 beyonce.
surrendered halfway through red notice (2021). cleansed eyes with wonder woman (2017). indelible soundtrack, opening sequence.
is this what people do when there are no wars to fight?
this… and other things.
what things?
well, they have breakfast. they really love a breakfast. and, um, they love to wake up and read the paper and go to work. they get married, make some babies… grow old together i guess.
what is it like?
*pause* i have no idea.
11/22 – 11/30
read milan kundera’s book of laughter and forgetting.
the only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. they are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
they made him feel like a grandmaster who has just finished off two opponents on adjoining chessboards.
she also tried to conjure up all the pet names he had ever called her. her real name he used only for the first two weeks or so. his tenderness was like a machine for churning out terms of endearment. as quickly as they seemed to wear, he would make up new ones for her. during the twelve years they had known each other, she had had twenty or thirty of them, each one belonging to a definite period in their lives.
she can remember the days after her mother’s death, for example, when, as if trying to wake her from a dream, her husband whispered her name into her ear with great urgency (her name at that time and that moment). that name she remembers perfectly, and she can enter it with confidence under the year 1964. but all the other names are soaring freely, madly, outside time, like birds escaped from an aviary.
watched trouble in paradise (1932). triumph of sexual awareness.
he walked into the bank of constantinople and walked out with the bank of constantinople.
that’s the trouble with mothers. you finally get to like them, and then they die.
i am gaston monescu. the police will be delighted to verify my identity.
sought infinite security. true friends fill up widening cracks in self-assurance like soothing shea butter.
7/18
agreed smartphones scatter consciousness, polio eradication feels like strangling jello to death.
engorged ourselves on chonkiest chip cookies with jaw detachment of satisfied snake before chasing tequilas with black russians. congradulonces from bartender on escaping 27 club hasta las once. VAR bar penalty fight hasta las dos. tapped out hasta luego, drunk as fiddlers’ bitches.
should tattoo red club entry stamp on back of hand so everyone thinks i’m a cool kid last night every night.
caught up with daksha.
hey you. / oh wow! it’s midnight here. / happy turkey day. or kangaroo, rather. / i had kangaroo once. / i thought you were vegeta – / it almost jumped off the plate. / *pause* stick to journalism.
nobody captured reality of childhood like watterson. one of the insane ones.
listened to ellen stofan advocate for venus over mars.
all of these planets are actually the earth
was there a time that mars and venus were habitable? for mars, definitely yes and for venus, maybe yes.
the 460° C surface temperature on venus is largely due to a runaway greenhouse atmosphere.
given its distance from the sun, it should only be about 10° hotter than earth
how many chances did life have in our solar system?
read..
(1) umami: a short cut to deliciousness
for 1200 years meat had been banned in japan
parmesan (the umamiest cheese on earth)
a nice bit of hashtag lobbying persuaded merriam-webster to preface its online definition of ‘chinese restaurant syndrome’ with the note: ‘dated, sometimes offensive’
mouthfulness
use kokumi to make the biscuit biscuitier
(2) wildfires in western north america
like an atomic bomb went off
a 1 degree celsius rise in the average temperature could bring up to a 600 per cent increase in the median area burned every year. there are feedback loops to worry about
the conservative party of canada recently voted against recognizing the existence of climate change
(3) solving everything for whom
‘type a’ brute force programs would investigate every possible line as thoroughly as they could, given the limits of time and computing power, and evaluate each move in order to select the best at any point. ‘type b’ programs would play more like humans, concentrating on the most plausible lines and dedicating their resources to those.. for artificial intelligence, this was disastrous. researchers abandoned type b approaches altogether
by the time ibm’s deep blue beat kasparov in the famous 1997 match, joe hoane, the principal software engineer on the team, said: ‘it is not an artificial intelligence project in any way…we play chess through sheer speed of calculation and we just shift through the possibilities and we just pick one line
computers programmed to play weakly tend to alternative between world-champion-level moves and ridiculous blunders, as if finding themselves utterly at a loss as to how to let you win
owls have the night pretty much to themselves, as far as birds are concerned
by posing as an intruder, an observer equipped with speakers can quickly bring an aggrieved male into view.
(5) michelangelo’s ninety years
because all creative people start out as young people, we have a tendency to ascribe creativity to youth itself, but mature masters like michelangelo remind us that the urge to create has nothing to do with age or the lack of it, but rather with that inventive spirit both he and vasari called ingegno—inborn wit, cleverness, genius. The spirit often manifests young, but like wine and wood, it depends on age to reveal its full complexity. when michelangelo turned seventy… he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work.
watched memoirs of a geisha (2005).
to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.
it is useless to push a cart sideways.
Kartika Upadhyaya 