Sitting at my computer trying to funnel 10,000 details produced by 50+ people into one coherent, high-quality magazine, I’m flooded with the sense memory of being 16, in the computer lab at Fort Bragg High School, trying to turn out a new edition of The Howl. I’ve been doing this most of my life.

There was this trend, the last two decades, to justify literature’s place in our lives via neuroscience (“develop your amygdala”) and self-help (see: Blinkist)—all so cringe. The thing is, we do need a theory of “Why Books.” I say books should seem as fun as a latte, a bath, or a walk in the woods.

Something tells me the publicity department behind The Eternal Audience of One by Remy Ngamije realized what books they’d be shelved by and decided, What the heck, let’s use the Viet Nguyen color scheme and lettering style. Yolo.

Reading the essay, “Why Content is King”, and this passage trips me up:

Why should people care if anyone else has seen their favorite show? Because shared experiences are the basis of mutual understanding. Even if we’ve never talked before, I can learn something important about you when we talk about our complex feelings towards Harry and Ginny’s relationship. You can send me a reaction gif with McGonagall giving “the look” and I will know exactly what you mean.

I read every Harry Potter book. Between age 9-12 I was quite obsessed. Yet now have zero memory—these details mean nothing to me.

A friend told me she traded her smart phone for a dumb one which only calls and texts. (T9, baby!) Part of me wants to follow her lead.

Listing the reasons not to, the first reason is, strangely: dictation. It would be awful not to dictate directly smoothly into notes or texts or anywhere.

Love a good webinar.

Webinar. Whoever coined that one must have been like, ‘Oh yeah!’

The sidewalks in our neighborhood in LA are overrun with cutely designed four-wheeled food delivery robots. Their nametags say, like, “Francisco”. Shocking nobody, these VC-funded cameras-on-wheels are funneling camera footage to the LAPD.

Who is Laura Chanel

Hydrangea, Noyo, September 2023

Some children’s books make me feel like I just ate mushrooms.

Pursuant to possible forthcoming leaps in VR, I’m reminded of the sweet idea my dad had a few years back to make deeply immersive multi-hour audiovisual recordings of natural beauty and then bring them to nursing facilities to share with the elderly and infirm.

Sure, some might say replacing times spent in nature with VR sounds dystopian. But some people (many people?) already live at a dystopian remove from nature. Would denying them this incomplete solution really make the world a better place? Injured of the world, don’t hate the bandaid, hate the knife!

(Of course under capitalism the knife vendor and the bandaid salesman are often the same wound-maxing megacorp.)

Stay well, San Francisco.

Here in our corner of Los Angeles, a key local fixture is this art truck always parked on Willoughby, which features an evolving array of flowers, furniture, found objects, newspaper clippings, and more. I especially enjoyed this recent message about the false panacea of social media.

Whereas bad things come in threes, and

Whereas we have been treated to wall-to-wall, unceasing, multi-decade, hotdog-eating-contest-style media attention focused on Donald Trump and Elon Musk,

It is resolved that… Oh god, will there really be one more?

When I feel bad at posting, I remind myself that these other freaks have been going at it 280 characters at a time for literal decades. Their angel-headed tweets are living evidence that the 10,000-hour theory is true.

B. S. High, the doc about the fake Columbus high school that was really just a sketchy football team, is low-key a cult documentary. The “coach” masterminding the thing, keeping the con alive for years, has that same manic creep charisma as Keith Raniere or especially Larry Ray.

Football, a cult?

Watched the documentary Whirlybird expecting to learn more about the history of helicopter news reporting in Los Angeles. And I did learn a lot about that industry and how it intersects with the carceral state and systemic racism. But the documentary is also an unexpectedly harrowing portrait of intimate partner violence, cycles of abuse, and the way societal transphobia causes harm that radiates through families and communities. It’s an intense text to grapple with.

And to think, we picked it mostly because it’s scored by Ty Segal. Not the worst reason. The score is in fact really good!

I spent part of tonight migrating my passwords from LastPass to 1Password and changing the passwords for all my remotely important accounts. What a pain in the neck. LastPass you had ONE JOB!

The saving grace is that 1Password is a clearly superior piece of software.

West Hollywood, September 2023

Easy to forget that, after a fallow period, returning to any activity—blogging, running, writing poems, regular contact with a relative—involves awkward first attempts. Which can be lame, even discouraging. Yet soon enough it’s part of your mundane life again, a thing you do, for better or worse.

All these memory-core podcast nerds be like, “That seems impressive but did you know that in his second season, Dominique Wilkins led the NBA in…” while over here my silky smooth brain can’t remember a single blessed detail from Wheel of Time Season One.

With AI tips like these, we may have finally reached the AI hype cycle phase where expectations are properly tempered:

ChatGPT can suggest loads of (mostly terrible) ideas. Somewhere in there might be a germ of a good idea that you can run with.

That should be your expectation for ChatGPT, Will said

(from the Washington Post)

If you’re looking to replace your doomscroll with a wholesomehole (?) I heartily recommend Jack Cheng’s See You on the Bookshelf, a podcast from 2017 where the author interviewed the people at every step of publishing his middle-grade hit See You In the Cosmos. So sweet—and surprisingly informative!