however, the spruce seem to think everything is fine
during the Q&A i congratulated myself on not having said the word 'capitalism' during the entire talk, and the audience suddenly applauded. (whereupon we then proceeded to discuss capitalism for the remainder of the session.)
smoke travels two thousand miles, coloring moonlight
no rain, fire warnings, freeze alerts, all together
interspecies anxiety, dawn breaks again
"We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations."
- Anna Tsing, A look inside The Mushroom at the End of the World [web]
(attempting to revive forgotten pathways as i've lost my notes)
woo - when you find your love (1990)
laurie spiegel - the unquestioned answer (1980)
jessy lanza - going somewhere (2016)
[mp3] - 14:48
"The claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible."
- Ted Chiang, Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? [web]
ólöf arnalds - ævagömul orkuþula (2006)
a silver mt. zion - 13 angels standing guard 'round the side of your bed (2000)
broken social scene - anthems for a seventeen year-old girl (2003)
[mp3] - 13:30
enlisted an older drawing for our friend's music project tshirt. [web]
for a long moment, kitten lost within interior structure of walls and interconnected betweens of old building, physically near but practically a different dimension, despite all previous attempts to close gates, and somehow there may always be yet another entry point
mushy boundaries. have tasks in two languages that differ in a way that has me questioning basic reality in somewhat boring ways (and i am here to tell you about it i am so sorry).
zero-based numbering [web] is a certain way of thinking about arrays (tables of numbers): the first element is zero, not one. this makes sense for various reasons we will not explore.
every morning i grind coffee for what i imagined to be thirty seconds. granted the tempo slides all over the place and i usually lose count and estimate but i absolutely positively always START at 1 and triumphantly END at 30. if i actually believed thirty seconds elapsed, with perfect timing, i'd still be wrong.
it'd only be 29, because i'm starting at one, not zero. i'm counting the intervals between announcing each boundary, and as such come up one short if one is the start.
granted, counting is often not about precise time, but maybe if we knew to start at zero we'd be less angry on reaching 10, or our friends might find better hiding places.
suse millemann - patterns (1988)
jean-luc ponty - computer incantations for world peace (1983)
eye to eye - nice girls (1982)
[mp3] - 13:51
"... how people become products themselves, deriving a reliable form of recognition when other kinds of social practice have been undermined. If you strive to be the product, you can believe that you are for sale on your own terms, that you’re evading exploitation, that you’re not being deceived. It feels necessary for survival, as when people used to insist that having accounts on all the platforms wasn’t optional if you didn’t want to be left behind, if you wanted to be employable, if you wanted to come across as a normal person. But it remains a form of collusion with the forces of reification rather than a form of resistance or counter-cooptation."
"Social media offered sociality for a society without solidarity."
- Rob Horning, Identitätszwang [web]
peonies, barn swallows, japanese larch
arrival of spring makes
computers even less compelling
imagine, rather than accepting the doubling of processing speed, we celebrated the halving of power consumption as progress.
that we understood "fast enough" and took great pride in optimized code.
where we knew what came before and remembered and carefully considered new propositions.
and we worked together.
luke abbott - brazil (2011)
boards of canada - dandelion (2002)
roy and the ravers - emotinium (2015)
[mp3] - 17:38
how to bind a book:
- start a synth company, move to a farm
- house an intern to help figure out extremely random ambitions, make a friend
- wait at least ten years
- start an art store that hosts classes
- invite even-more-accomplished friend back to teach book binding
- take the class yourself
thanks burgess! [web]
april heatwave, pouring buckets of water on early shiitake in the night to help them overcome the dry dry air, and somehow the internet says snow in a couple days
didn't finish engineering school: switched to art after two years. then went to art grad school and did a lot of... engineering.
maybe this is why every few years (remember, thirteenth redesign of the grid) i panic after not being confident that the LEDs are on the right way and cannot for the life of me remember which side is anode or cathode and how that relates to the schematic diagram. it's like forgetting basic geometry (which i also do).
so, here, enshrined:
ANODE (+) -|>|- CATHODE (-)
go forth into the light, may you also employ millions of LEDs with great certainty
wholesaler rejected our application because our website "looks fake, like spam or a scam"
we're assuming this hilarious accusation was simply due to the (rather modern) monospaced font and stylistic lack of capitalization. we've since instituted Georgia and Capitalization at luckdragon.
perhaps media illiteracy will lead to deep suspicion of poetry typed on mechanical typewriters. i mean, it must be fake by the communication standards we've all lovingly embraced, standards imposed through corporate homogenization and the numbing education of professional creatives.
ursula le guin and todd barton - heron dance (1985)
james holden - inter-city 125 (2013)
enya - epona (1987)
[mp3] - 10:56
awash and drowning yet
quantifying and accumulating despite
what we learned the time before
"Inevitabilism is a cheap rhetorical trick. 'There is no alternative' is a demand disguised as a truth. It really means 'Stop trying to think of an alternative.'"
- pluralistic.net, Cory Doctorow [web]
"We mostly only close materials loops when it’s ‘economically viable’ to do so. By and large, what that means is that it takes less energy to recycle the material than it does to create it in the first place, which is true for aluminum, steel, and glass, but not for materials like plastics or concrete. But the promise of access to renewable energy is that it changes this equation, putting processes that are intrinsically energy-intensive, like recovering the carbon from plastics for reuse or desalinating seawater to make it potable, on the table. It doesn't matter how much energy a process needs if it is inexpensive, doesn’t limit the energy available to others for their use, and is non-polluting. There's a virtuous circle here too: the faster that renewable energy systems are up and running, and the closer we can get to achieving this potential, the more that we can apply that clean energy to repurposing the materials of our current technological systems to build out the physical infrastructures of our new ones. Not beating swords into plowshares, but recycling cars into electric trams. We live on a sun-drenched blue marble hanging in space, and for all that we persist in believing it's the other way around, that means we have access to finite resources of matter but unlimited energy. We can learn to act accordingly."
Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization, Deb Chachra (2022) [web]
...
i'm skeptical about recycling (this [book] is a good summary) but i realize part of "it's impossible" is based on the current/prevailing economic definition of "impossible." Deb's vision is not technoutopianism--- it's not the same as sociopathic fuckwit billionaires doing geoengineering for profit in the name of saving us all from their own past transgressions. i read this as the best version of solarpunk--- a combination of resourcefulness and cooperation.
know your woodchips: beginner woodcarver, expert carver, pole lathe, power lathe, dull chainsaw, sharp chainsaw, table saw, router, wood chipper, felling axe, beaver, squirrel, porcupine-- they are all different.
these here are from a spoon blank, cut rapidly by an expert, with an axe forged by another expert, friend of the first expert.
(i am none of the experts above).
free as in beer
free as in freedom
free as in mattress
free as in puppy
(not new but new to me)
aphrodite's child - aegian sea (1971)
jo johnson - orbit (2023)
deerhoof - giga dance (2004)
[mp3] - 14:07
snow melt underwater meadow
my dear friends, wait no longer. [behold!]
enya's carribean blue (1991) [wikipedia], the first few intro bars, looped for ten minutes.
if you find yourself disappointed upon arriving it's conclusion, i highly recommend downloading the file and using mplayer [1]. run from the command line you can use the left bracket key to slow it down. 0.83x really lands. but you'll still likely be sad when it ends.
[1] [wikipedia]. you can also use mpv with the --audio-pitch-correction=no option. or maybe i should just upload the slow version. [2]
[2] update: [ok here] via ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -af atempo=0.83 output.mp3
operating theatre - eighties rampwalk (fanning session) (1982)
múm - the land between solar systems (2002)
burial - forgive (2014)
[mp3] - 18:36
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co