I’ve decided to experiment with cross-posting image-only posts from Jasperland to Instagram. Definitely playing with fire: I’m a like-addled social media junkie, 7 years sober from the ‘Gram. Initial impression: woof, that timeline has become absolutely choked with ugly auto-playing videos and ads.

Platforms may cannibalize what came before, but eventually they generate their own formats:

• • Spotify started with CD culture, ended with bland “mood” playlists full of 90-second vibe-clones

• • Google started with the open web, ended full of bland, SEO-optimized pap

• • Amazon started with books, quickly added 100% of physical culture, and ended with endless fake-sounding SEO-optimized pseudo-products

• • Ebooks started with the vast catalog of all books ever written, ended with direct-to-ebook authors cranking out 6+ novels a year to keep their speedreading fans satisfied

Of course the cannibalized thing usually persists, impoverished but still alive albeit continuing to be cannibalized. How interesting, though, to look directly the formats generated specifically for and by these platforms. We should pray that the places we go for culture in the next twenty years call forth formats that feel less hollow, less joyless, and less “optimized” than these.

Mendocino, August 2023

One of my favorite things about public school classrooms is the way particularly cool print objects persist over the decades, passed from one teacher to the next, to the next. I was extra delighted to find that my dad’s late-70s map of Mendocino County persists in a 6th-grade classroom in Mendo:

A writer in this weekend’s workshop expressed a pet peeve against the word “that”. Said she searches her draft for the word and excises it. She called me out for being a big “that”-er.

Huh?!

“That” is one of the great pronouns, a key glue word, a ligament. It’s indespensable. And that’s that.

I love writing essays and poems, but maybe it’s just because I’ve figured out how. Or because they reward a try-hard like me. Writing in the literary forms of this century—“blog voice,” “Twitter voice,” “newsletter voice”—feels more challenging. Is it because they require a hard-to-fake breeziness?

Great explanatory power in Talia Lavin’s latest, “The Christian Right’s Deal With the Devil”:

Political attitudes and policies that can seem inexplicable and monstrous from the outset always have their reasons, their own internally coherent logic, even if those reasons seem outrageous to outsiders.

If we want to understand today’s religious right, Talia argues, their actions make a lot more sense when you realize that for millions, the Satanic Panic never actually ended.

I have a confession. I am the “J” who recommended this story about Florida’s free Wikipedia content hiring someone to move massive blocks.

The singularity, it is near.

Grateful for “Fatphobia is the literary world’s final frontier” by Emma Copley Eisenberg. Like anyone, I love a good literary typology. But also, man, becoming aware of fatphobia both internal and societal is such a gauze-lifting-from-eyes experience. (One I want to write more about myself.)

Stroud, July 2023

Noyo, July 2023

London, July 2023

Leave behind your ego,

Of superego be rid.

Only bring government-issued

You—unbridled, real id.

Did I just get fat shamed by a literal PAPER BAG???

Yesterday we drove from LA to Mendocino. Stopped in Petaluma for burritos, and noticed: more than 50% of the men in line were wearing shorts, and not athletic shorts or swim trunks but tailored shorts with belt loops and zippers.

NorCal I missed you!

I of course was wearing shorts myself.

Need an LA retelling of Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Give a Cop a Helicopter

Someone fashionable spends a lot of money on clothes. Someone stylish dresses in a way that accentuates and complements their beauty and personality.

West Hollywood, June 2023

“we did it Joe”

The three years we’ve lived in our apartment, every Saturday has featured the same event: the neighboring building’s gardeners using thunderously loud leaf blowers. Today, something new: an electric leaf blower, quiet as a vacuum.

This is it! Proof that society can actually evolve for the better.

Vanilla ice cream with stewed peach and olive oil.

Eaten, of course, in the bath.

You might think that being a writer has the occupational hazard of constant papercuts, but, thankfully, no, it doesn’t. Or so I thought! Yesterday I sliced deep, right across the pad of the middle finger on my left hand. My booboo still hurts today, too. Writing is dangerous folks, be careful.

I love the vibe of mechanical keyboards. And, I mean, how cool that they’re back, just like film. A few weeks ago I broke down and actually ordered one, a bluetooth number. It came in Monday, and, well: I immediately hated it. Too much travel. Too easy to mis-type. Using it feels like work, unlike my usual ugly $29 Logitech keyboard, which feels like a telepathic port connecting my brain to my computer. This keyboard feels like a hurdle my brain and fingers have to leap over to reach the screen. Rarely have I gotten such a quick and firm no.

Just then my partner came in and was like, Oooh, what’s that? She quickly made off with it, and now it’s her daily driver. So I get to see and hear its handsomeness all the same, just don’t have to use it. Hooray!

Just realized that “passive income” and “rent-seeking” are synonyms. One is just parasitic capitalism dressed up for the digital nomad set.

Watching Marquese Brownlee on his podcast talking about the shortcomings of FaceTime on the new Apple headset, doesn’t it seem like like the wrong approach to use AI to turn a facial scan + infrared eye tracking data into an uncanny avatar?

Way better to play up how unreal it looks, and make a stylized hologram or other transparently digital but cool-looking representation. (Distressed VHS, mid-oughts home security system camera, recovered Super 8 reels, etc.)

Would anything be improved by Leia looking all uncanny valley as she says “Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope”? Nah.