oh i almost forgot
2021-03-10
i did another record
Ferlinghetti
2021-02-23
And I may write my own
eponymous epitaph
instructing the horsemen
to pass.
existence
2020-05-28
i have a backlog of single link draft posts that i haven’t gotten around to fleshing out to a state that is publishable by my minimal standards. you would think i was busy. hah.
i’m going to go ahead and post this video though because what it describes is very close to my own philosophy, if only i would make good on it.
https://youtu.be/sg3h3gy2IE4
pretty much sums it up
2019-08-12
This isn’t scary socialism. This is self-protection by protecting the social contract within which we live, and just giving a damn about people.
just read Harry August this summer and it was very good.
Gene Wolfe
2019-04-25
Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art
On April 14, 2019, at the age of 87, Gene Wolfe dies of heart disease at his house in Peoria, Illinois. The obituaries are appropriately admiring. But there’s an undertone in some of them similar to the undertone that sometimes creeps into reviews of his books. His books are so singular, so challenging, and so out of sync with any conceivable mainstream that critics sometimes seem to be asking “What kind of great book is this?” His life is so quiet, so meandering, and so far removed from literary grandeur or drama that eulogists sometimes seem to be asking “What kind of life is this for a great writer?”
I know the answer to both questions. It is this kind.
Anyone unfamiliar with the term “geek” should seek out and read William Lindsay Gresham’s now-classic 1946 novel, Nightmare Alley, for the most chillingly accurate description ever set in type. A geek is usually a wetbrain; that is, a young or old man so far gone into alcoholism that his brain has turned into prune-whip yogurt. When he sweats, he sweats sour mash. A gilly locates a skid in whatever town it’s in, and carries him to the next stop, and as many stops as it can get out of him before he either dies or wanders off. For the splendid honorarium of a bottle of gin or two a day, the skid will dress in an animal skin, go without shaving, sleep in a cage, and on cue wallow in his own shit, eat dead snakes, bite the heads off live chickens. No reputable carny will carry a geek. It is a terrible thing. It plays to the basest hungers and most primal fears in the human repertory. Anyone who could derive enjoyment from watching a debased creature, seemingly only half-human, scuttling across the floor of a foul, stinking pit or pen, smearing itself with feces, rubbing its privates on the gnawed skin of a dead rattlesnake, moaning and rolling its eyes as it devolved before one’s eyes, reverting to a stage of subhuman existence not even Cro-Magnons knew… such a person is beneath contempt, lower even than the poor bastard in that cage.
I have seen hordes of rural goodfolk, pillars of their communities, churchgoing Christians and advocates of the Protestant Work Ethic, who devoutly enjoyed watching a geek. Stand behind the tent flap. Watch. You’ll learn more about human nature than you ever wished to know.
— Harlan Ellison, “Gopher in the Gilly”, 1982
New manifesto
2018-01-04
On my temple in Delphi there are two words written: Know Thyself. It’s good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.
Programming language stuff
2018-01-04
The market for new programming languages, as I write this in 2017, is competitive but not impenetrable — but like a freshly minted Ph.D., no one seems to be sure of Perl 6’s market prospects, and like a just-turned-in dissertation, no one seems to know whether the fruit of many years’ labor is actually worth a damn.
It is now possible to glimpse a future in which all that code is written in specific C replacements with strong memory-safety properties. Go, or Rust, or Cx – any way you slice it, C’s hold is slipping.
The big break in computer languages
The largest trend driving development towards [Garbage Collection] languages haven’t reversed, and there’s no reason to expect it will. Therefore: eventually we will have GC techniques with low enough latency overhead to be usable in kernels and low-level firmware, and those will ship in language implementations. Those are the languages that will truly end C’s long reign.
January
2018-01-04
I Hate New Year’s Day, Antonio Gramsci, January 1, 1916
That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigour.
Žižek
2017-12-20
These contradictions don’t show that ideology is “irrational” — the problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too many reasons supporting their views. Žižek argues that these piled-up rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on.
Have been a Slavoj Žižek fan follower for a while. Maybe i should read one of his books soon. Ha.
