Jasperland
About Archive Photos Also on Micro.blog
  • Meditation, David Lynch, L.A.

    A few months back, I started meditating twice a day.

    None of my previous meditation practices had ever stuck. I always saw it as a matter of will power. I’d beat myself up: you’re too lazy to stick with something as wholesome as meditation. I rode myself even when I meditated: you’re getting distracted, your mind isn’t blank enough, you should be better at this already. I tried, and I failed.

    This time I’ve had a different approach: a method called Natural Stress Relief that emphasizes that it’s okay, that you don’t need to try, that there’s no result you’re trying to get. And the technique could hardly be simpler: eighteen minutes, morning and afternoon, sitting with your eyes closed, silently repeating a syllable. I believe the technique to be much the same as the much more well-known Transcendental Meditation (also known as TM), except that instead of costing $1000+ to get trained you can download the materials for $25 and train yourself.

    A few months in, I’ve become curious to learn more about meditation. I’m reading a collection of short essays put out by Shambhala, and my partner got me the classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I’m also re-reading David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish. (Lynch is maybe the most famous TM practitioner out there.) Lynch’s book is a bit autobiographical and a bit philosophical, but these qualities are elevated by the format: a sequence of short, pithy essaylets.

    Here’s Lynch’s essaylet titled “Los Angeles”:

    I came to Los Angeles from Philadelphia, where I had lived for five years, attending art school. Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, but when I was there, it was a hellhole. There wasn’t a lot of love in that city.

    I arrived in L.A. at night, so it wasn’t until the next morning, when I stepped out of a small apartment on San Vicente Boulevard, that I saw this light. And it thrilled my soul. I feel lucky to live with that light.

    I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places. The light in Philadelphia, even in the summer, is not nearly as bright. It was the light that brought everybody to L.A. to make films in the early days. It’s still a beautiful place.

    This captures so much of what I love about L.A. And it shook loose a memory, maybe one of my oldest.

    It was before my brother was born, so I was maybe three, maybe a little less. We flew to L.A. to visit my grandma. Since divorcing my grandpa, she lived in a condo with a pool just a few blocks up the street from the Hollywood Bowl. But my memory is from before we made it to her place. We had gotten on the plane in foggy San Francisco. It was probably the first plane ride of my life. And when we landed in L.A. they had us disembark on the tarmac. (They still do for intra-California flights.) It was just after sundown, and we waited for the other passengers to get off. As we came up to the front of the plane, the cockpit door was open and my dad asked if the pilot would show me the controls. I looked on in awe at what must have been over a hundred back-lit buttons, together a gleaming constellation. Then we stepped off the plane.

    The sky was pink and pastel blue. The air was warm against my arms. It was a quality of light, but it was also a feeling that thrummed in my small chest. I pressed it between the pages of my memory, only to retrieve it a quarter-century later, as I mark five year as an Angeleno, as my L.A.-born child nears the same age I was when I stepped off that plane.

    → 10:14 PM, Jan 5
  • → 10:24 PM, Jan 4
  • Making Funky Little Winter Greeting Cards

    Spent the evening folding up winter greeting letters and stamping our return address onto envelopes. The letter is four pages of photos and drawings and words—two sheets front and back—all taped up and copied off on my beloved color laser printer. I’m stamping the return address with an old linoprint I made when we moved to this address. Its prints have a pleasing woodblock roughness. There’s more left to do: printing address labels, writing little personal notes on each letter, stamping, mailing. Maybe we’ll finish this weekend.

    The experience of slowly assembling this mailing feels opposite to using a Shutterstock template to blast out a little card with some photos and a scrawl of pre-made calligraphy. I’m glad to get those from other people—don’t get me wrong—but I can’t overstate the pleasure of making my own funky thing.

    A photograph of a stack of folded letters that say “winter greetings from the nighthawks“ atop some envelopes, with a hand, barely in frame.
    → 11:37 PM, Jan 3
  • Bitcoin mining is SETI@home for assholes.

    Arecibo lies in ruins but they’re reopening Three Mile Island to power a chatbot.

    Dystopia, sure, but does it have to be this stupid?

    A photo of the Arecibo Radio Telescope after the tower collapsed.
    → 9:34 PM, Nov 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • Is part of the popularity of Substack and other newsletters simply the absence of pop-up banners, autoplay videos, and all the other crap that make online news sites nearly un-useable?

    (Thinking of this article on wooden satellites: amazing story, painful to read.)

    → 10:27 AM, Nov 7
    Also on Bluesky
  • A drawing of a red dinosaur

    Nothing but respect for my president.

    → 8:35 AM, Oct 27
    Also on Bluesky
  • → 11:39 AM, Sep 29
    Also on Bluesky
  • Can’t believe some world leaders wake up and think, Seems like WWIII might go rather nicely for me. I wonder if there’s anything I could do to trigger it?

    We need a worldwide peace movement to be rid of these Putins and Netanyahus and Bidens and MBSs and Xis.

    Peace! Not WWIII.

    → 11:42 AM, Sep 25
    Also on Bluesky
  • Grudging respect for this bougainvillea bush that has now twice snatched my hat off my head as I try to run under it.

    → 10:24 PM, Aug 24
    Also on Bluesky
  • Hydrangeas, England, July 2024

    → 11:23 PM, Jul 16
    Also on Bluesky
  • Google’s decision to align itself with a government determined to strip its citizens of access to safe and timely healthcare is entirely in line with the deprecation of their former motto [‘don’t be evil’]…

    – “Google Delists DIY Hormone Therapy Sites”

    The ever-popular “pivot to evil” strategy.

    → 8:28 AM, May 8
    Also on Bluesky
  • … trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest… Dissent must never lead to disorder. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to a democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.

    – President Biden.

    We’re in so much trouble. “Dissent must never lead to disorder” !!

    Biden: committed Zionist, author of ‘94 Crime Bill, lied about marching in Civil Rights Movement, hates protesters. HISSS!

    → 10:53 AM, May 2
    Also on Bluesky
  • To watch (per JC):

    • Brief Encounters
    • Sunset Boulevard
    → 9:34 AM, May 1
  • To Watch:

    • Poor Things
    • The Sympathizer
    • Shogun
    • The Dark Crystal (again)
    • The Rats of Nimh (again)
    → 6:33 PM, Apr 29
  • Nine years ago I wrote 1/3 of a near-future science fiction novel. The time frame? Roughly 2024. I just reread the opening, and sorry to say, I not only predicted ChatGPT, I predicted how it would feel to use:

    ... there was something incredible and thrilling about typing in a writing prompt and receiving a product so quickly. He changed the command to read, 500-word story, and five seconds later it flashed onto his screen... he spent most of the night reading Hemingway stories about the Raw Paleo Diet, Osama Bin Laden, and Stuart Little.

    Checks out! I called the software LinkFace Writer.

    → 10:31 PM, Apr 26
    Also on Bluesky
  • Los Angeles, April 2024

    A photo taken at night with a flowering tree in the foreground and a billboard showing a cheeseburger in the background.
    → 1:15 PM, Apr 24
    Also on Bluesky
  • Home, April 2024.

    A photo of items on a desk, with distortion through a water carafe.
    → 12:41 PM, Apr 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • 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?

    A photo of a billboard showing an artist named Omarion crouching in a glamorous pose, surrounded by blurbs praising his music.
    → 9:54 AM, Apr 13
    Also on Bluesky
  • Bread, April 2024

    A photo of a loaf of homebaked bread with a nice, open crumb and a deep caramel crust.
    → 9:44 AM, Apr 13
    Also on Bluesky
  • 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?

    → 4:02 PM, Apr 12
    Also on Bluesky
  • 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:

    1. 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.
    → 9:37 PM, Mar 25
    Also on Bluesky
  • Los Angeles, March 2024

    → 9:59 PM, Mar 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • 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.

    → 9:54 PM, Mar 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • 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!

    → 9:43 PM, Mar 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • 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.

    → 7:17 PM, Mar 12
    Also on Bluesky
← Newer Posts Page 2 of 16 Older Posts →
  • RSS
  • JSON Feed