Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained exclusively on public-domain text from the Victorian era.

On Procedure ⚓︎

I watched Apollo 11 the other day. Holy shit! All that pre-launch footage! And rocket interior shots! It’s incredible. Seems like it was heavily cleaned-up, but still, so beautiful, filmed (at the time) and edited (now) with such great taste.

The doc made me think about regimentation. It’s something I don’t think about often, because pretty much everything I do in life can either be improvised (music) or planned with a lot of flexibility (tours, a mini music festival, writing).

Further than that, I’ve deliberately stayed away from strict procedures and planning, because as a teen, I realized I can take it too far. There was a (thankfully brief) time where I wanted—for no reason other than misguided mental gratification—to have everything in my calendar. So I had things like “Brush teeth” in there. A lot of Type A-ish people or semi-diagnosed OCD sufferers can probably relate to that. I came away from those experiences feeling like regimentation is dangerous and too easy to take to extremes.

But there are clearly some things that we can only accomplish with a high degree of procedure.

Landing on the Moon, apparently, is one of them. Planned to the second. Each stage requiring sign-off from a department head (“EECOM go! FIDO go!”). Checklists, tolerances, and instruments. It was enthralling to watch people orchestrate a process like that and succeed. And it made me think, maybe some of the things I want to accomplish with music and writing could withstand a little more regimentation.

One way to look at it is, you plan and you prepare so that spontaneity and improvisation can take place. For Apollo 11 improvisation was a matter of life-or-death problem-solving (e.g. how to deal with those 1202 errors); for music it’s kind of our lifeblood at the center of things. Either way, we set up a structure, we build a rocket, and we put a beating heart inside of it.

The Tweedy band is on Jimmy Kimmel Live! tonight!

Don't Play the Song at a Tempo That Doesn't Exist ⚓︎

It’s not a good idea to imagine other tempos while you’re playing a song.

It can be tempting, when you’re the drummer, and kinda sorta de facto in charge of how fast everyone is playing, to ask yourself, “Are we in the right spot?” and kinda imagine a different version of the song while you’re already playing. Needless to say this takes a lot of brain processing power that is already in short supply if you’re a drummer (inherently buffoon-like). You might not crash the whole computer but you’ll make everything run a little lopsidedly. So it’s best just to truck along, stay committed to where you’re at, and let the group feel it all out together.

The only version of the song you need to listen to is the one you can hear.

I didn’t know you can see song credits in Apple Music until recently. Been using that a lot. Tap the ellipsis, then View Credits. Not as fun as the gatefold packaging of my forebears but I’ll take it!

I gotta say, I love being on tour. I really do.

New favorite encore chant: “MUSIC! MUSIC!”

So happy for Ratboys. They’re such sweet people.

Is psychopathy a “zombie idea”?

The irony of high-tinkerer nerds setting up OpenClaw virtual assistants to help them with complex tasks is that they’re the type of people with a large appetite for complex tasks in the first place.

(I’m one of those nerds.)

If you’re gonna know anything, know this: Nobody Knows Anything. NKA.

This post is beautiful. And it reflects me at age six, opening every single system menu and setting on a PowerBook with no ethernet connection, pre-wifi.

Migraines are like a little timer in your body telling you when you haven’t slept enough, eaten enough, drank enough water, or therapized enough.

I consider myself to be decently smart, but I still eat a sandwich so fast that it gets stuck in my esophagus at least once a month.

The situation on the street in downtown LA is so very, very fucked.

It matters (1) for the people who are suffering there, (2) for everyone else, walking among piss and shit, around people whose flesh is falling off, and (3) for a Left that has to be able to credibly tell the country that we don’t abandon our cities to become wastelands.

Another insightful interview with Hallie Bateman.

This roughly reflects my experience (spending more time setting up a virtual assistant than saving time). But 1) it’s been fun, and 2) holding out hope, like a man playing against the house, that it’ll make my work-work more palatable/humane at some point? It already has, in some ways. Crumbs from the casino.

I saw a shirt that said “Maybe Today, Satan.”

This is fun.

The Twilight Override tour continues in the Western US this month.

Sarah Silverman has a bit about: if you want your girlfriend not to overreact, you should treat her pain like it’s a big deal. (It’s a basic human courtesy, anyway.)

Jason Fried has a famous blog post about “the other token.” In customer service, if you act like the customer’s problem doesn’t matter, they scream at you until you pretend like you believe it does. If you act like it does matter, then, well… they act more sanely (usually).

These concepts can be applied to anyone, anytime.

I’m at my happiest when I’ve got a good level of input and output: reading and listening, writing and musicking. Like a human HEPA filter, or a water wheel.

Letters to a Young Creator in the Steve Jobs Archive.

Pablo Delcan’s Prompt-Brush 2.0.

I wanna see these glass flowers someday.

This unique collection was made by Leopold (1822-1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857-1939), a father and son team of Czech glass artists. Over fifty years, from 1886 through 1936, the Blaschkas produced 4,300 glass models that represent 780 plant species.

If you watch closely enough, everything is a speaker.

An interesting perspective on (and process with) AI, from an 82-year-old artist/poet, Dr. Daria Dorosh.

I don’t know if we can really say AI “has no agenda” as she does, because it’s planned and steered by humans (organized in corporations) with agendas. But in some formal sense, it’s true; it has original designs, and we, end users, apply them in a certain way. Of course those planners update the designs periodically, and we can’t see exactly how they’ve updated them.

More than anything I appreciate how Dr. Dorosh’s use challenges herself—to understand her own work, to create more work, to “meet it as the inquisitive five-year-old that you once used to be.” “Treat it like a sandbox that you used to play in,” she says. “Because that’s what it is. It’s there for you, every grain of sand.”

Taylor Levy in the CW&T newsletter, “Things Are Different Now”:

When I was a teenager my Dad told me about the time he first saw Michaelangelo’s David. It was hard for him to find words to describe the occasion, but it filled him with awe in a way that was completely outside of anything he had previously experienced. He couldn’t say why or how or pinpoint exactly what made it like this, but knew something was far from usual. When he told me I was probably like yeah yeah, sure whatever. Years later when I saw it myself for the first time, I immediately understood what he attempted to describe. The enormity. And even with warning, I felt utterly unprepared for this indistinct newness. My world shifted. Things are different now.

In the airport on the way home from tour, a woman with Cheeto dust fingerprints on her white pants butt, carrying a bag of Munchies.

And me, asking the Customs area guide: “Is Global Entry open?” Her shouting so all can hear: “Closed due to Government.”

“Davina Furbert Cleans For Free… In a Hazmat Suit” ⚓︎

People helping people.

In London, a kid walks home from school with his mom, reciting a litany of complaints about a classmate that concludes with the greatest offense: “He laughs when other kids cry.”

As usual one of the things that floors me the most about being in Europe are the Great Doors. We simply don’t have great, big wooden doors like you see in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Geneva (and countless others—those are just the cities we’ve been in this month so far). Painted, unpainted, stained, decaying, preserved. Ten, twelve, sixteen feet tall. There are perfectly understandable reasons we don’t have Great Doors in New York and Chicago, let alone Peoria and Los Angeles. But boy do I love to walk past and look at these Great Doors.

To our credit, I love and miss (when I’m in Europe) the (largely) accessible sidewalks, the spaciousness, and the Burnham grids of our country.

Paul Ford Relaunches Blog ⚓︎

Paul Ford, twenty-nine-year blogging veteran, accidentally relaunches his blog. “Once I saw that text box I had to type into it.”

Instantly full of so many new gems.

I’ve seen so many writers try to escape writer self over the years. They lift weights and work hard for amazing forearms. They climb mountains. They pivot to video. They leave their families. They even schedule haircuts. Never matters. They have the stain. Many years ago, my dad came up for my college graduation. He had retired a while ago but had taught creative writing at a state college for decades. We were in his car, parked outside the dorm. My friend and her father walked in front of us. Normal-looking guy with a beard. I’d never seen him before, but I knew my friend’s father was a poet who taught poetry at a college in New Jersey. My father didn’t know that, though. Didn’t know the girl, either. Looking straight ahead out the windshield, he said, “Look at that fucking English professor.”

And:

Unless we tesseract the city, geology will have its way, and that is how it goes. I think constantly about that. The train tunnel is just a stack of geologic eons through which we push our little bodies. Far-future scientists, finding our bones, may prefer to study ferns. Anniversaries are sweet—even ones where you can’t go upstairs—but the world craves to turn us into something very thin and mineral. At some level you need to welcome it.

This was a really cute way to announce an album. (A fuller picture is in Fire Talk’s newsletter but I can’t figure out how to link to it.)

Sometimes I feel like: you don’t work hard, you worry hard.

When I’m spinning my wheels… thinking about what needs to be done, not doing it, and feeling busy all the same.

I love this font.

Adulthood ⚓︎

There’s your Bar Mitzvah. There’s your driver’s license. There’s your eighteenth birthday. There’s your thirtieth birthday. And then there’s the day you buy yourself a winter coat for the first time, instead of wearing a hand-me-down.

From Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket:

“You are a practical people, Americans, everyone is either some kind of inventor or at least a gifted repairman.”

My mom’s dad was an inventor. My dad’s dad was a gifted repairman.

Kevin Kelly:

Today human drivers are actually very good. They create a collision causing an injury only about once every 1 million miles, and they cause a fatality only about once per 100 million miles driven. In terms of injuries human drivers operate at 99.9999% safety, and for fatal collisions their performance is 99.999999% if measured per mile. …

Yet Waymo today [with human minders] is actually 90% safer than humans [alone].

Relationships are an endurance art ⚓︎

To state the obvious: relationships are an endurance activity. (I wanna say “sport” but they’re not a sport. More like an art.)

It should be easy, but also you should work at living well together.

When you’re young and you have a sleepover, you usually want to run away from your friend by the end of it. You’ve driven each other crazy.

Heading in to a million spousal sleepovers in a row (if we’re lucky), wanting to run away from each other isn’t an tolerable outcome, so we give each other space, maintain our patience, and, I dunno, prime our minds for extended enjoyable cohabitation.

Robin Sloan: Language models are a fundamentally manic technology ⚓︎

The “ideal” setting for a brain (or an economy?) isn’t necessarily straight down the middle. A dip into the realm of mania can be useful, sometimes revelatory. I don’t know if many creative projects would ever get started if our brains didn’t sometimes relax the standards by which they light up.

Yet for a human mind and a human heart, one really good project is more nourishing than ten cruddy ones; that was true a hundred years ago, and it’s true today. The AI coding companions will never ever say: “Hey … whatever happened to that other thing you were working on?”

Around this time of year I think of a neighbor my family had when I was growing up: Jack, a round old man, kind of shaped like a jack-o’-lantern, with just as many teeth. He sat on the stoop of his ’20s brick bungalow, in a blue button-down and suspenders, scowling at kids by default (resting scowl face). The bush in front of his house was home to a family of raccoons. The raccoons came and went from the premises and tended to them more than Jack did.

We never knew much about him, other than that he lived alone. And at some point he came to symbolize loneliness for me. A particular wintry, sun-is-gone, Chicago type of loneliness. Something adjacent to Charlie Brown’s nighttime Christmastime. When the city is so dark and quiet that the stars seem to make noise, however few we can see.

I don’t know if Jack was generally sad or happy. Maybe he loved his life. But I find myself wishing he were around, so we could check.

Kevin Kelly: How will the miracle happen today? ⚓︎

“One might even call the art of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.”

Hallie Bateman's plea for the new year ⚓︎

I also loved Hallie’s recent essay about her eating disorder.

Chris Arnade: Modern life is good, actually ⚓︎

We could quibble with any individual point or stat in Chris’s essay, but this rings true to me:

It’s interesting that the people most bothered by technology in the West, and most drawn to a prior lifestyle, are the highly individualistic and idiosyncratic intellectuals—not the “normies,” who when given the chance to choose overwhelmingly want the lifestyle anti-modern elites believe is so destructive.

Van Gogh: "Just slap something on it" ⚓︎

You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.

This inspired me a little today.

Via James Edward Dillard.

“Ewald’s curiosity regarding the evolutionary process of infections was sparked by a bad case of diarrhea he had in 1977.”

We Used to Talk About Russia Joining NATO ⚓︎

In December 1991, Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia, sent a letter to NATO asking it to consider accepting Russia as a member of the alliance sometime in the future …

During a series of interviews with filmmaker Oliver Stone, President Vladimir Putin said that he suggested Russia joining NATO to President Bill Clinton when he visited Moscow in 2000.

Putin said in a BBC interview … in 2000 that it was hard for him to see NATO as an enemy: “Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world.” …

On 5 March 2000 … asked if Russia might ever join NATO, [Putin] replied: “I do not see why not.” …

In response to a March 2009 suggestion by Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski that Russia join NATO, the Russian envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said … “Great powers don’t join coalitions, they create coalitions. Russia considers itself a great power.”

The medal that the Soviet Union awarded to servicepeople who contained and cleaned up the Chernobyl disaster depicts alpha and beta particles and gamma rays over a drop of blood.

Clean-up of the site is scheduled to be completed by 2065.

Chernobyl Cost Over 900 Billion Dollars ⚓︎

Also, Russia hit the New Safe Confinement structure—which keeps radioactive contaminants from spreading—in a drone strike in 2025.

Saw one of last summer’s tomatoes in the Chicago semi-thaw.

Leonardo da Vinci, Prankster ⚓︎

“[Giorgio] Vasari described how Leonardo took a lizard captured by an assistant, pasted on a beard and wings, and kept it in a box to frighten his friends. He also took the intestines of a steer and ‘made them so fine that they could be compressed into the palm of one hand. Then he would fix one end of them to a pair of bellows lying in another room, and when they were inflated they filled the room in which they were and forced anyone standing there into a corner.’”

(Isaacson, 176.)

R.A.P. Ferreira's Auctionhaus Findings ⚓︎

Remember MBWYT: Men Be Watching YouTube.

We’re still cashing Reagan’s checks. Luckily, this one‘s a good one.

After an initial agreement between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project emerged; construction of the complex began in Cadarache, France in 2013, and tokamak assembly began in 2020.

Caro Arnim on courtship with her husband, physicist Ted Taylor:

We whistled themes from Beethoven symphonies, from Handel, from Bach. We tried to remember them. For people who are shy, that’s not a bad way to start, if you have trouble talking.

On the bow of a sinking ship, a delusional captain shares a nugget of wisdom:

Very often lawyers, or people in general, want to make every conceivable argument, and you get in the situation where, by making every point, you essentially make no points. I’m a big believer that you have to figure out what your winning argument is.

100 Trillion Neutrinos ⚓︎

Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles that are famous for passing through anything and everything, only very rarely interacting with matter. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second.

Now, scientists have demonstrated that the Earth stops very energetic neutrinos—they do not go through everything. These high-energy neutrino interactions were seen by the IceCube detector, an array of 5,160 basketball-sized optical sensors deeply encased within a cubic kilometer of very clear Antarctic ice near the South Pole.

(From 2017.)

It makes me sad that heavy metals are so hard to avoid in our drinking water, baby food, protein powder.

I love Fresh Farms… so much. Best produce, widest array of international products I’ve ever seen.