Putting a pin in Relax, Electric Vehicles Really Are the Best Choice for the Climate to send to those relatives (you know who you are) who keep talking about going electric, keep turning towards internal combustion.

HondaLink over here giving strong “graphic design is my passion”

Boomer climate doomerism comes down to this, I think: fear of the unknowable. Now, yes, it’s true, none of us know for sure what the unfolding climate crisis will hold. But for younger folks, we can expect to find out. We’re in it. Contrast the dull dread of foreseeing an apocalypse one won’t meet.

Went to a “holiday lights botanical garden” this eve. It was, as advertised, dreamlike. But after almost two hours wandering through the LED wonderland, I started to remember that nightmares are a type of dream, too.

A neighbor left a pile of old Gourmet magazines out on their stoop. After a few days walking by them, I took this issue home. And I keep studying that cherry pie cover. What is it that makes it so incredibly great? A platonic ideal of image and text coming together.

2007, baby. The good old days.

High school me: There was once a genocide, a terrible aberration that must never be forgotten.

College me: Another genocide came before the famous one + inspired it. More should know.

30s me: Genocide happens all the time, there was one in my hometown, my country is supporting one this very minute. Fuck.

West Hollywood, September 2023

My idea of the kind of dull task perfect for AI: collecting the programming schedules of all my favorite radio stations and collating them into a TV guide-style picker. Someday, maybe.

(The other night, I asked the AI where I could stream Barbie for free, and it very confidently gave—you know it!—the wrong answer.)

Highland Park, November 2023

Art by my wife, 1994

Just ran into an old post of mine about Mohsin Hamid and writing other subject positions. It includes this line:

I of course want and love transgressive fiction, but I don’t want it to transgress against people, and especially not against oppressed people.

Makes me think: are there two types of transgression? Transgression against taste, and transgression against people?

I guess my model of the right way to do it is The Story of the Eye. A giant middle finger to taste, the Catholic church, and common decency. But not actually hurting anyone!

When I watch videos of modular synths (for instance: Benn Jordan’s video about tape delay) I always think: in another life, this is absolutely how I spend my days.

(Connected: Robin Sloan’s synth-included short story, “In the Stacks (Maisie’s Tune)")

COVID vaccine #6, a jab in my right arm at around 4pm yesterday. This morning, arm sore, body achey. Around noon a headache. Now, laying in bed, working on laptop, feeling that feeling that before the ‘VID vaccines I never knew what it was: the immune system rallying, on high alert, in every inch of my body.

There’s something so fun and frantic about working under a print deadline, realizing all the hundreds of little decisions that remain to be made, knowing you’ll now be making most of them over just a handful of days, hoping you mostly get it right. (Also: exhausting.)

Los Angeles, November 2023

Thinking more about my previous post, I have a new, even more terrifying theory: does the PT in ChatGPT stand for pterodactyl?

Wake up sheeple! It’s only a matter of time before ChatGPTerodactyl takes to the skies!

Does the PT in PT cruiser stand for pterodactyl?

In England do men say things like, “Myself, I’m more of a bosom man”?

Ma-le’l Dunes, Arcata, October 2023

Hilarious that the killer app for the “Humane Pin” is that its little camera surveils your food and then an AI chatbot negs you about calories. (Hallucinated, no doubt.)

Then you see the founders and you’re like, oh yeah, mad diet-culture-pilled.

The Thin Pin (TM)? Get lost.

My brother declares that he’s a pioneer of the digital frontier—and that I’m a digital homesteader. Which, I might quibble with “frontier” as concept, as needful of settling. But mainly it’s sweet. I like the vision of tending my garden, out beyond the fortress cities of FB and TW and YT and LI.

Ma-le’l Dunes, Arcata, October 2023

In representative democracy, the votes of citizens determine the rulers. The implied question—who is a citizen?—has given democracy its most foundational injustices, from Jim Crow to the dispossession of Indigenous folks to women’s non-suffrage, from Israeli apartheid to the murder of climate refugees in the Mediterranean.

Can we imagine democracy without borders? Without non-citizens?

Our neighbor was tossing old Gourmet magazines. I took one from 2007 with a glorious moody shot of berry pie on the cover. Inside: a profile of a farm/inn in the San Juans, fresh caught fish, fires on the beach.

A postcard from a simpler world, a time before the climate nightmare got fully underway

Longtermism’s basic formula seems to be: short-term pain … long-term gain.

The main criticism I’ve seen focuses on the ellipsis: longtermists are hilariously confident predicting the coming centuries, and discounting the present.

But look closer at the formula and see: it’s a diet. Longtermism is diet culture applied to the scale of an entire species.