Los Angeles, April 2024

Home, April 2024.

I’m happy for this guy and wish him the best, but this blurb does not mean what he or the author think it means:

“Omarion does what few others from his generation cannot do: display range on a main stream R&B level that enables him not to feel he’s chasing relevancy.”

Is there a word for writing like this, which is written to sound impressive first and for coherence second?

Bread, April 2024

Putting a pin in this anti-astrology Daring Fireball post, “ECLIPSES SHOULD BE CELEBRATIONS OF SCIENCE, NOT PSEUDOSCIENCE." I want to know more about these tech-y, atheist-y, liberal dudes who hear someone (a woman) talking about magic and just spit with venom!

See:

Astrologers horning in on the excitement about the eclipse is scientific sacrilege.

See:

Actual science is the great accomplishment of mankind. The antidote to ignorance, superstition, religious zealotry, and nonsensical beliefs in general. An eclipse exemplifies, to even the lay-est of laypeople, just how advanced modern science is.

See:

So here’s my “by the way” retort to Montúfar’s aside: how many astronomers today — not in “ancient” times — are also astrologers? Spoiler: the answer is fucking zero.

I’m forced to ask: Bro, who hurt you?

But also—tell me you’ve never been in the cone of totality without telling me you’ve never been in the cone of totality. A full eclipse is a chance to encounter the sublime, in all its terror and splendor. To touch cosmic infinity. The moon blotting out the sun makes rational sense, sure. You can describe it with numbers and equations, yes, and people have done that for millennia. But an integrated life contains more than calculus. An eclipse can transcend the rational. It can destabilize and re-enchant your experience of the world. That’s why people are excited about the eclipse.

Back to John Gruber’s post: it’s not alone in feeling aggrieved about astrology, around the eclipse. For instance, “Mom who pushed kids from moving car was astrology influencer disturbed by eclipse” describes a terrible tragedy that likely had less to do with astrology and more to do with postpartum psychosis, racial oppression, and the wellness-to-conspiracy-theory pipeline—all of which the article spends orders of magnitude less space discussing than it does astrology, which comes in for special ridicule and discrediting.

See:

In 2017, NASA published a webpage dedicated to debunking various myths surrounding that year’s eclipse. One was that eclipses are prophecies of major life changes or impending events.

‘This is a common interpretation found in astrological forecasts, which are themselves based upon coincidences and non-scientific beliefs in how celestial events control human behavior,’ NASA’s webpage says.

NASA notes that it’s only human psychology that ‘connects eclipses with future events in your life.’”

Not as shrill as Gruber, but equally, emphatically anti-magic.

What does this brittle defensiveness mean? Can one be so bold as to hope that it portends a correction-in-progress, the restoration of science to its rightful place alongside rather than above magic?

I’m skeptical of “101 Pieces of Advice” thingies, and this one like so many is fat-phobic here, capitalism-pilled there. But as a thirty-something who struggles to make new friends, I thought this was interesting:

43. The best way to make friends is by working on a large and intense project together. This could be a conference, a camp or a startup.

Los Angeles, March 2024

In half-homage to a half-as-old self, I’ve been on a Justice kick. Tonight, I sat down to write and put their self-titled album on. In my AirPods—what was to hand. Lasted like one song before tearing them out and finding my fourteen-year-old Bose cans. There it was: the remembered pleasure.

Is there anything quite so audacious and relatable as a bug coming out of nowhere and flying directly into your mouth? As if it thought, Hooray, a dark little cavern, let me in!

Here I thought lassitude characterized a lippy broad, but no, Webster’s 1913 be like

A condition of the body, or mind, when its voluntary functions are performed with difficulty, and only by a strong exertion of the will; languor; debility; weariness.

Languorous, with its long syllables and proliferation of palindromic vowels (“uorou”) has to be near the top of any list of words that look and sound like what they mean.

With, you know, curt and sussurus and polysyllabic and twee.

Finally baked some loaves I’m basically pleased with.

Sourdough baking occupies this nether space between classic baking and home cooking—you need a formula but you also have to develop and trust your intuition.

There are ten thousand courses and special programs and tutors that promise to help your child excel academically—but all I want for my kid is for them to be kind, quick to laugh, and alive to the world.

Last night I was thinking about this shopping list I found twelve years ago on the back of a twenty, and I realized that “lettuce” might be code for marijuana.

Reading an email newsletter about AI all I can think is, Did an AI write this?

My generation of students got A’s or D’s on the basis of our ability/inability to skim big chunks of text. Is it any surprise our big technology is a type of machine that artlessly condenses and expands text?

Damn Gene Cernan, a little mid-mission moustache and the glow of having just taken the final moonwalk really got you looking good here.

Yasssss

Thunder storm over Fairfax High.

As a Californian, I’m pleased that our voting code insists on proper illocutionary acts. Can you imagine how disappointing it would be if the folks running a polling place didn’t loudly announce the openness of the polls?

Gotta hand it to him, Richard Scarry killed it with Cars and Trucks From A to Z.

THIS is the transit future liberals want.

I’ve always obeyed the law: the longer it takes me to respond to your email, the brillianter and lengthier my reply must be. But what if the better law is the opposite, the longer I put you off, the less I owe you? After three months, a paragraph or two. After two years, four sentences.

Found this copied in an old notebook:

Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them) but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic.

Ursula K. Le Guin of course. I wish she was still alive today, if only so I could read her blog posts about “AI”.

My sister-in-law is a theater director, and she once told me that a common note she gives actors is: Stop acting out your dialogue and instead just read your lines.

There’s something like that in writing, too: Stop telling the reader what the story means and instead just tell the story.

Boring tech update: on desktop I use MarsEdit to post to Micro.blog and thereby to Jasperland and Mastodon; on iOS I’ve been using the Micro.blog app. But this app is a minor cognitive hazard: when I open it to post the feed often sucks me in. So now I’m posting from Ulysses. So far, so good!

Only just now realized that “no pun intended” is self-refuting, just like, “I’m not arguing with you” and “I’m humble.”

Oh really? Is that so?