Good morning. Hello. How are you? #806
Pasta efforts, emotional overload, you can(t) go back, Man Ray, AI allergies, Nabokovian epiphanies.
Good morning! Hello, there! How are you? Did you have a lovely weekend? Did you get MLK day off? I hope you got MLK day off. I got it off. We give it off to our employees. I spent some time yesterday trying to explain Martin Luther King Junior to Jane. It was fun. A bit of a challenge. Mainly because I’m not really ready to talk about racism with her yet. Is that wrong? It feels right. I feel like she needs to feel a secure base, to have confidence and faith before we start introducing the evils of the world to her. Because that base will help give her the confidence and optimism that these things can change. I’m doing my best to not pass my Gen X cynicism along to another generation. It really should just die with us.
Woah that took a turn.
Anyway, I made some pasta with my new Kitchen Aid and its pasta maker attachments. I made semolina flour and water pasta, as opposed to egg noodle pasta. I did it with Jane. She is a good kneader. I did not use the dough hook because I feel like I need to learn a bit more about that. So hand-kneading it was. With my daughter. It was lovely. Unfortunately, I endeavored to make long spaghetti with water-flour dough and I didn’t use enough flour to keep them from clumping at times, but all in all, it was a fairly solid first effort. Yesterday I ate the left over noodles in some tom yum bone broth that I made and my god, it was delicious. Yes, the tom yum bone broth is back. I haven’t made it in… two years? Three? And I forgot some key ingredients, like the rice vinegar and the chili peppers (whoops), so it’s really more of a thai-inspired chicken bone broth, but it’s still really tasty and I’m very happy. I missed it.
Oh before I forget: I recorded a new podcast this weekend! It’s been over a month. It had been too long. Here is the link, and here are the topics we go over. If you’re new here, the podcast is much more media intensive. It has maybe 20 minutes or so at the beginning that is sort of GMHHAY ish, but then rather than delve into the minutae of, say, wire hanger hook lengths, it goes through all the media I’ve consumed in that period.
I had a super-intense work day Friday. I’d made it so I had no meetings on Friday so I could concentrate on a VERY INTENSE slide presentation I need to do this week. And it was just brain-draining. Like intense thinking while I made slide after slide and made sure everything was comprehensive and comprehensible and clear and the kind of brain work you know is just burning so many calories and you’re in the zone for hours and hours and when you finally come out you’re simultaneously elated and exhausted and incapable of relating to anyone. Been a while since I felt like that. Especially from slides! Usually I get it from writing.
After a bit of a mental reset and a lot of sleep, I was decently productive this weekend. Shredded a lot of cardboard, installed and got the hang of my new pill dispenser (which is not near as fun as the one I envisioned in my dream) tended to the compost, put a lot of things away (always putting things away), ran some errands (Jane did not want to come with me it was sad), bought a bunch of $9 cartons of eggs, did Jane bedtime Sunday and Monday night.
Spent a lot of time with Jane. She’s been going through some stuff. She’s been a lot more moody lately, couple old-fashioned screaming fits. Last night was hard. She demanded attention and for me to play with her for the entire evening. And I don’t know if it is my lingering covid or what but I was just so tired all day yesterday. I had gotten plenty of sleep, maybe nine hours, and I’d napped a ton in the afternoon. Just dozing off on the couch while trying to watch a scintillating game of Civ 6 with the new BBG Babylon. So by evening I really should have been capable of devoting all my attention to her and be awake for it, but.. it was hard.
I was also feeling pretty intensely emotional last night. Had gotten some bad news from a friend. Was watching some Low concerts on the Youtube in the background while I played with Jane, a game involving “momentum” and “gravity” (I’ve been trying to teach her some basic physics) and bouncing a ball on a pillow and an absurdly complex system of scoring points that I couldn’t decipher. First I watched a late concert - Low’s recent Primavera appearance. Low’s strong suit to me has never been the outdoor festivals. But they did a great job, closing it out with “Nothing but Heart” and “Canada” which is exactly the two songs they should end a big rock show with.
I was thinking about Alan’s long hair and Mimi’s short hair, then Youtube auto-played a 1996 Low concert for ACL and oh my god it took me back. They looked like such babies. Alan with his short hair, Mimi with her long hair. I had never thought of Low as aging, I’d thought of them more or less as timeless. That is, until Mimi got her cancer, but I had a good friend die of cancer in her early 20’s so I don’t associate cancer with aging automatically. Babies. They were babies.
So we have exhaustion, we have the bad news from a friend, we have Alan’s loss and Mimi’s passing and the cruel onward march of time.
Then I started reading about all of my friends that went to Man Ray’s soft re-opening on Saturday and it was just so crazy. Several — several! people talked about how much they loved it, which made me ache with desire to go again, but also about how they got a little caught up again in petty dramas from twenty years ago! My god! I mean… has there ever been as… perfect? strong? dead-on counter-example to the statement that you can never go back? You can go back! Man Ray is back! People went back! It is crazy! It makes me want to move back to Boston so bad I can’t even tell you. Not rationally, not realistically, but emotionally? My god. It is so crazy.
I’ve only ever felt this once or twice in my life before. It’s like some lunatic couple who dated in high school and then marry in their 60’s or something. Crazy stuff that never happens. Man Ray is back. It’s so wildly improbable it is incomprehensible.
So then we have exhaustion, and the bad news from a friend, and Alan’s loss and Mimi’s passing and the music of Low and cruel onward march of time but then a little sliver of light that mayhaps the cruel onward passing of time can, once in a great while be mitigated.
Oh and then I started reading some weird-ass Twitter review of the movie Lamb and its implicit commentary on the trad movement, which I am dimly aware of as some hokey kid thing where they pretend to be “normal” and think it’s important or something and I just felt so tired keeping up with these stupid-ass navel-gazing faux political trends and I just felt so old.
That was a lot to take in while Jane is filled with boundless energy and bouncing all over me ten minutes for bed.
It was a lot.
A nice, long talk with my wife covering all this ground, and a healthy dose of Zevia Ginger Ale mixed with cheap Malbec calmed me down. That’s my new drink and it probably tastes terrible to everyone but me but I stand by it.
Nick Cave continues his redemption tour of my brain as he wrote a gloriously scathing review of ChatGPT in his Red Right Hand files. Poor guy has had all these fans sending him ChatGPT-written parodies, pastiches of his songs and it just must be the most depressing experience to have people keep doing that to you. They are, unsurprisingly, really bad. Starting with the obsurdly obvious problem that ChatGPT can’t get over the concept of poetry or song lyrics that don’t rhyme, because once they don’t rhyme, ChatGPT is adrift for form and content because it has no soul.
I’ve been so off of all AI for so long that these last few months have been hard for me. I’m like Cayce Pollard in those William Gibson books (the ones they didn’t adapt for TV sadly. Or maybe not.) She had an allergy to brands on her clothing. A pysical allergy. I have a physical allergy to AI. It’s just the worst. ChatGPT is the worst. Midjourney is the worst. Apple “helping me” take a good photo to cover up their cheap asses not giving me a decent physical camera in my phone is the worst.
Here is my heuristic: “Computer” in Star Trek vs Data. Algorithms = fine, AI = bad. Anything that helps us make “Computer” in Star Trek is algorithms and fine. Anything that helps us make Data is AI and is bad. Sure, Data is a great character but have you noticed how many times freakin Noonien Soong and his ancestors and descendents all almost accidentally (or intentionally!) destroyed a planet while pursuing AI? (And actually they totally DID destroy one planet!) Have you noticed AI doesn’t exist in the Star Trek utopia? We don’t need it! It is bad!
You can blame this on me being old, and maybe that’s true. But I was six years younger when I did, mind you, undertake the first (and as far as I know, still the only!) comprehensive survey of public opinion and superintelligence! I am not alone! People don’t want this! Stop the madness!
Semi-relatedly (well, to writing and ChatGPT) I had a major Nabokovian epiphany this weekend. It almost bowled me over. Here it is:
It just occurred to me that Nabokov almost certainly didn’t come up with “Leavesdropping” at the spur of the moment. Well, I’ve known this for a while. But he also almost certainly did not come up with it while deeply thinking about the perfect word to describe a man hiding in a tree while overhearing a conversation. I have pictured this for decades. Nabokov wandering around for days and weeks trying to find the perfect word to complete an already-started sentence in an already-started tableau.
But it just occured to me on Sunday, in the laundry room:
That bastard probably thought of the word first, then concocted that whole scene just to use that word!
What a cheater!
Nabokov, not putting in the work.
Synthpop playlist for you today. All new I think? Yeah. Really love the new M83 song nice and anthemic and synth shoegazey which I love. Oh. The Other Two is older. Stephen and Gillian from New Order, from back when I read vol. 2 of Stephen’s autobiography.
Four-day week! That is promising. So much to do this week. Here we go.