Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
(After more than two weeks the still-unexplained usage "02025" still
bugs me. The convention with which I'm familiar is that the leading
0 flags it as an octal number, equivalent to 1045 in decimal.)
  

    
I'm thinking Bruce is sensitive about the Y10K bug:
<https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_10,000_problem>
  

    
Well, we better get on that. We have less than eight millennia to
figure it out. 
  

    




Michael Brockington writes:



I was walking around downtown Vancouver a few days ago, and encountered a
message in foot-high letters on the side of a van:

SECURE
DESTRUCTION
YOU CAN TRUST

OK, it was only a mobile document-shredding service... But it also struck me
as a plausible political slogan for 2025.  A little off-kilter, sure -- the
sort of thing that might be generated by an under-trained chat-bot.
  

    
Good one, Michael Brockington!


Slippage somewhat, in re:
<phred> and his two posts #179 and #190: I read tip to tail all
three articles linked there and found John McPhee’s the most
compelling as I think about what happened to my neighbors to the
North of here, in Western North Carolina (WNC) during Helene..his
article in the New Yorker was a tour de force when it comes to
explicating the myriad mechanics of debris flow and the how of the
current fires LA is presently experiencing..the difference between
the San Gabriel mountains and Appalachian mountains is that the
Appalachians are the oldest mountain range on the contiguous
continent so they do not have the issues that the San Gabriel’s
have..the debris flows down the mountains in WNC were epic, to say
the least and this was not the first time

“The most notorious occasion fell in July of 1916, when waves of
record-breaking precipitation piled up. The first week of the month,
the remnants of a Gulf Coast hurricane soaked WNC, and the rains
never seemed to stop after that. Then, on July 16, a hurricane from
the Atlantic brought an additional onslaught. At one local weather
station, 22 inches of rain were recorded in 24 hours.“

“ A key lesson learned, he adds, is that while we’re accustomed to
thinking of flood damages coming from below, in the form of rising
waters, “some of the greatest devastation came from above, with the
landslides on many steep slopes.” Building on such peaks, he
counsels, can remain risky today, even with modern improvements in
construction. Landslides stemming from the September 2004 storms
were a testament to that, he says.

“How can we apply our history to our present and future?” Weintraub
asks. “We are building on some of the same scars that were caused by
the 1916 floods. I hope we can better understand how to live with
nature. We live in a flood-prone area. The question isn’t if it will
happen again, but when.”

<https://wncmagazine.com/feature/unforgettable_rampage>

I have put John McPhee’s book, “Control of Nature” on my list of
next books to buy..

In re: <jonl>‘s post about Austin’s incredible increase in
population..he cites when he moved there, it was 256,000..I lived
from 1976 to 1979 in Austin and according to the interactive chart,
Austin’s population was 356,000..back then, it felt small and
friendly..today, I do not know if I would recognize it

<bruces>: fascinating posts about Christiana (sp).thanking you for
little excursion 
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming 
  

    
Five-digit years are a Long Now Foundation thing. I decided to check
what's up with them. From their website, it seems they're still
active and have a continuing schedule of talks [1] in 02025.

But what I really wanted to know was, what's up with the clock?
Danny Hillis wrote a FAQ [2] with a bit of a disclaimer:

> Long Now has never used its own funds to construct the clocks, nor
have we taken on the responsibility of owning and maintaining them,
except for what we display at the Interval. You might expect we
would want to take responsibility for their long-term maintenance
and display, but caretaking requires a different kind of
organization with significantly different skills.

So, they don't own it. The obvious next question would be who does
own the clock? And that would probably be Jeff Bezos, who is
mentioned once in the FAQ.

So I guess that means that the Texas clock doesn't have a proper
website of its own and Jeff Bezos's crew (if there is one) isn't
supplying updates? It's a rather private, offline clock.

[1] https://longnow.org/talks/

[2] https://longnow.org/clock-faq/
  

    
odd (for 2025, odd) sci-tech media startup

https://www.corememory.com/p/so-begins-core-memory-a-new-sci-tech


with this as the killer graf:

We’re going to approach all these stories with our minds open and
our curiosity churning. In other words, hating technology/activism
is not our starting point, as seems to be the case with much of the
media today.


an appeal to um, certain kinds of funders?
  

    
Edgar Maddison Welch, who was the QAnon-inspired "Pizzagate Gunman,"
was shot to death by American cops in his traffic-stopped car in
North Carolina.  Of course Edgar had a lot of guns with him in his
car.

Edgar didn't drive headlong into a New Orleans New Years party or
detonate his Tesla outside a Las Vegas condo, but he was one of that
demographic, and now he's similarly no longer with us, for similar
modern reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

Nobody deliberately aimed Edgar at that innocent pizza joint, but in
Russia, elderly, gullible people are somehow being persuaded to set
fire to Russian public buildings because "the FSB told them that
they had to do it."  This is some new hybrid-warfare variant of
social-engineering, stochastic terror, and eldercare fraud.  Oh,
also it's a Gray Ooze marsh of senile paranoia, hijacked
state-terror, arson and sabotage, but that may be too many
overlapping Venn Diagram circles for me to get away with in public.
  

    
In this scientific-romance apocalypse movie from 1916, the villain
knows that the Earth is doomed, so he spreads fake news about it,
corners the stock market, cashes out, and then tries to hide with
his wife in a coal mine.

https://youtu.be/RQCn5tfafPc?si=mRa_EMEDdDPhsV5F

If you're a futurist, you sometimes wonder, "what will people think
of this stuff I'm creating 109 years from now?" and I'll be lucky if
it's this good. 
  

    
Here's an essay I wrote to mark New Years' Day.

https://medium.com/@bruces/some-public-limits-of-everyday-weirdness-2025-75455
1c54a2d

It's something like a "design manifesto," because it has a lot of
design-speak in it and has some sense of harangue-the-public
urgency, but I'm concerned about the *form* of this essay.  It's
about pastiche, appropriation, re-use and cut-up, but the *essay
itself* is a pastiche, re-use and re-assemblage, because it lacks
any proper, "normal" essay format.

Its's diaristic, confessional, changes tonality a lot, blue-skies
and handwaves, gets super-specific... topics are superglued
together, the narrative lurches forward and backtracks....  it's
quite a "Gray Ooze" piece of text, even though it's visibly
struggling to clarify something rather than trying to obscure
anything.  Artificial Intelligence has nothing to do with its
gray-oozy qualities, it's an innate gray ooze within the writer
himself, and you know, maybe Gray Ooze has some positive qualities
that we might notice and champion.  Maybe it could be like curative
group-bathing in hot volcanic mud.
  

    

*Here are some WELL SoTW guest remarks from experimental musician
"Gryphon Rue."

*The wife and I commonly listen to rather a lot of Gryphon Rue,
mostly because, given enough time, "whatever happens to musicians
will happen to everybody."

https://gryphonrue.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/gryphonrue-music
https://www.youtube.com/@gryphonrue
  

    

Gryphon Rue:

 I’d like to share something that disturbs me.

Stating the obvious. We are in a permanent battle for attention. A
stressful, profoundly annoying battle. Living under these permanent
conditions, it's expedient to change our individual habits.

There’s a moment in the film "Tar" when Cate Blanchett, who plays a
brilliant, egomaniacal conductor of the Berlin Symphony, says
something to the effect of, “What does a conductor do? She starts
time. The orchestra cannot play without me – I say when the clock
starts.” Likewise, a great jazz drummer "makes" time – determining
how we as listeners experience the many, often abstract, effects of
time – its stretching, acceleration, caving, collision, etc. 

People make time. The phenomenological act of making time
corresponds to reading, and daydreaming (which is profoundly in
decay). Sometimes it feels deliciously greedy to read, when there
are so many trivialities demanding my attention. Should I feel
guilty? Never. The poet Ann Lauterbach points out that attention is
"attending to" something. We attend to reading, writing, recording,
singing... We make the time for it.
  

    

Gryphon Rue:

The Metaverse values our attention more than anything (creative
potentialities and imagination? forget it).

As an artist I’m actively working on productivity and boundaries.
The decay of attention, the mockery of it really, is so explicit
now. Interruptions make or break the creative act; the sensual
experience of having constructed something, the payoff of
accomplishment, is easily destroyed. Strategies for maintaining
boundaries so this break does not happen are crucial. A Swiss
composer friend of mine turned me onto this clock, I recommend
checking it out:

https://www.buchmann.ch/de/tfa-timer-visual-120-min-mit-restzeit-anzeige-buchm
annch-p-347171.html?language=en

A lot more could be said on this huge topic.

Gryphon 
  

    
Paying attention.

I've been thinking about this idea of attention as currency to be
spent or "paid." And it's true, we only have so much attention to
spend. Most of us have an attention budget, whether we realize it or
not. 

Over the past decade some humans have paid huge sums of attention
currency to soft and hard forms of political propaganda, leaving
precious little for anything else. Politics is sanest when it's not
very interesting. It's been very interesting lately, especially
since a morally compromised developer and game show host dropped
into politics, all hype and lies, and managed to build a substantial
enough cult following to have a power base sufficient to frighten
any of his potential opponents into submission. He learned from
others, and others learned from him - so weak men pretending
strength in various countries manipulated citizens in supposed
democracies to take power and create authoritarian governments sorta
like the ones you see in comic books. Most of us were reading those
comics and identifying with the superheroes, but these guys idenfied
with the supervillains. "Thanos is a 'way powerful badass, I want to
be that guy." They miss that all of those villains, every one, are
tragic figures so completely corrupted by their powers that they've
lost any claim to essential humanity. They're anxious and miserable
even when they're winning. And eventually, they're brought down - no
so much by their many opponents, but by their own inherent weakness.

Maybe in the current instance, at least regarding our own
dictator-in-chief, he'll be brought down by lack of attention. Okay,
he's brute force winning his battles, maybe just barely, but he's
been winning. But he's like a television series that's run its
course. The ratings are dropping. Nobody wants to listen to him
anymore. Though he's a serious threat, it's hard to take him
seriously - he's gone off script to the extent that he's babbling
insanity.  He's said a lot about what he'll do and some people
actually believe him, but what gets done over the next four years
will be whatever's politically realistic - and so much of what he's
gone on about is politically impractical. He'll play golf for the
limited time he's got left, and let others to the work of
governance. And the other's he's gathered to do that will succeed
only to the extent that they can co-operate in the business of
governance - questionable whether that's possible. 
  

    
Incidentally today is the final *official* day of the State of the
World conversation. The topic will still be here, Bruce and others
are welcome to keep posting. Meanwhile tomorrow we'll begin a two
week discussion of "State of the News" with a distinguished panel of
journalists.
  

    
I suppose the opposite of "laurakampfing" would be the recipe?
That's a do-it-yourself activity that scales, provided that it only
requires tools found in a reasonably-stocked kitchen and ingredients
found in grocery stores.

Recipes are memes, bits of culture that spread in various ways, in
people's heads and in scribbled on scraps of paper and in cookbooks.
On the Internet, they've become the raw material for SEO struggle,
as various websites compete to get people's attention. In that
realm, whether anyone actually makes those recipes seems somewhat
besides the point. Written recipes and the recipes that people
actually cook with aren't the same, though there is overlap.

I wonder if anyone would trust an AI to give them a recipe? What it
would take to win that trust?

I aspire to make useful recipes for software and musical
instruments. So far I've only amused myself, though, and a few
people who watch my YouTube videos.
  

    
<https://deannalack.com/2019/04/03/hey-wiretap-do-you-have-a-recipe-for-pancake
s/>
  

    

There's been a lot to say in this particularly-alarming and
justly-anxious SoTW, and I still feel that I have a lot on my chest.
But likely I've said enough.  There's always next year.    To hope
is our duty.

"Tragedy ends in a funeral while comedy ends in marriage."   If this
ends in a comical marriage-party then everybody deserves a drink.

So  I will briskly recommend a brand-new, up-to-date cocktail called
"The Quarter Century."
  

    
The Quarter Century has got a lot of Campari in it.  Campari is an
acquired taste, but I hang out in Italy, so I acquired it.  It's
also got cava in it, or maybe prosecco,  something fizzy, cheerful
and cheap, with plenty of climate-wrecking carbonated
carbon-dioxide.  Also it has apricot liqueur, which is weird stuff
(because 2025 is so weird).

Also absinthe.  Absinthe is really slippery, treacherous booze. 
Absinthe is the Green Fairy and the blue ruin, it's the Gray Ooze of
liqueurs;   no manufacturer's bottle of absinthe ever has any
rational, logical continuity or  consistency with anybody's else
semi-legalized notion of absinthe.  Also to become a wormwood-addled
absinthe-addict is the nadir of bohemian horror; you gulp too much
absinthe and you're promptly like some derelict from a Van Gogh
sketch.

THE QUARTER CENTURY COCKTAIL RECIPE 
1/2 oz. (15 ml) Campari
1/2 oz. (15 ml) Giffard Abricot du Roussillon
1-2 dashes St. George Absinthe Verte
4 oz. (120 ml) Albrecht Cremant D’Alsace Brut
Expressed lemon oil
  

    

So the "Quarter Century" has a good combo of active ingredients. 
This newly invented cocktail,  created just for 2025, is actually a
darn good potation.  It's definitely growing on me.  I'm thinking I
might be drinking it all year.   It's one of those cocktails where
you quite enjoy just one, but they're fussy to make and also burpy
and weird-aftertaste-ish, so you won't be tempted to recklessly
guzzle a liter of them.

This cocktail's bartender-inventor, "Anders Erickson," he's my
favorite YouTube bartender.   When his bar was shuttered due to the
pandemic, he joined YouTube social-media just to keep publicly
mixing his drinks, and that was ingenious of him.  Although Anders
is merely the virtualized, streaming video image of a bartender, he
comes across like a hip and sociable bartender-raconteur; he's got,
like, a proper bartender schtick.  

Also, Anders Erickson is generally well-dressed and groomed and has
good lighting and nice set-design, because his girlfriend and
bargirl-sidekick, "Azusa Inaba," is his YouTube cinematographer and
digital video editor.

https://youtu.be/S7DGgeFsjyE?si=2voryx9hGUsO3XlR 
  

    

So, to conclude my upbeat modern character-sketch here, after years
of being  quite an obvious on-Youtube-video item, these two
social-media celebrities, Anders & Azusa, they went and got married.
They "eloped," they "made it official."   I don't know why they
chose to do that in an epoch like today's, but, well, why the hell
not?   Married life, it's swell!   That's a great institution,
marriage.  It turns your faces jointly forward.  It draws a firm
line between tomorrow and yesterday.   Half of you can even legally
transform your own name if you want, "Azusa Erickson," that might be
a great name for a character in a cyberpunk story.

So Cheers! Saluti! Zhivali!


And now, enough with the typing and back to the wire and bamboo.
  

    
Via email from Michael Brock:

Thank-you to everyone for a most stimulating discussion!

A few thoughts on Trump as things wind down...

Trump strikes me as the revenge of third-party politics in America. 
I think there's a substantial block of US voters that are desperate
for change.  They're sick of voting Democrat, sick of voting
Republican, don't see much daylight between them.

Yet the 2 established parties have a stranglehold on the political
system, such that voting for a third-party has been a hopeless joke.
The only way a third-party candidate could ever get elected would be
by taking over one of the main parties, which is exactly what Trump
did.  He was no Republican; his contempt for the establishment
candidates when he first ran for the GOP nomination was palpable and
it made him unbeatable.

The Democrats were more successful in fighting off a third-party
takeover by Bernie Sanders, to our great misfortune.  One of the
strange polarity reversals in this era is how the Democrats have
become the staunch defenders of the status quo.  As a side note,
it's kind of interesting that Trump couldn't win as an incumbent,
but only in opposition to a status-quo Democratic party.

Many are probably familiar with the political science studies about
the relative influence of elites vs the people in modern America.  I
think the key study by Gilens and Page dates back to 2014, and
showed that the political preferences of the masses -- even ones
held by wide margins of the electorate -- only influenced
legislation when those preferences happened to align with those of
business elites.  Small wonder that many people think it makes
little difference which of the 2 major parties is in power.    

I think that's why Trump was able to evoke such passionate belief in
his narrative of a stolen election.  The details of his story were
bogus, but I think many people have an intuitive sense that the
entire system of democratic representation has been stolen from
them.  In some sense every election has been stolen, going back
decades, irrespective of anything so mundane as voting.

So what's quite interesting in this current moment, is seeing how
the corporate elites are kowtowing to Trump.  Blackrock, with
something like 12 trillion in assets under management withdrawing
from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative.  Bezos, refusing to
allow the Washington Post to issue an election endorsement. 
Zuckerberg, promoting GOP partisans to top positions, and basically
capitulating to Musk's Twitter/X model of content review.  It's a
rare window of time where it doesn't feel like corporate America is
driving the bus.  That is so different from what I'm used to seeing,
which was basically a middle finger to government, regulation,
inconvenient laws, etc. 
 
So isn't this a bit closer to what democracy is supposed to be? 
Rather unfortunate, though, that the democratically elected
commander-in-chief is a malignant authoritarian.
 
Still, I find I have no sympathy for the familiar cry of the
overwhelmed liberal: 'I'm moving to Canada!'  For one thing, it
seems like that might not be far enough, given Trump's recent
rhetoric.  (Although, as a state, Canada would be pretty deep blue,
and why would Trump want to mess with the numbers in the electoral
college and Senate when he's got such a good thing going?)    Bruce
Sterling's earlier comments about the demographic withering of rural
areas suggests it would be far better for fed-up Democrats to move
to a select handful of fly-over states with small populations and
disproportionate influence.  A convoy of RV's to North Dakota might
conceivably turn the tide.  In the post-pandemic era of
telecommuting, that doesn't even seem like such a huge sacrifice,
and California and New York could certainly spare the voters. 

Perhaps these observations are old hat.  To be honest, I try to
avoid paying too much attention to Donald Trump.  After all, the
first law of an attention economy is that you get more of whatever
you click on.  It's too bad, though -- the internet knew the
solution for creatures like Trump almost from the start: "Don't feed
the trolls!"  It's too bad the mainstream never got on-board. 
Understandable, though -- the sight of a giant orange troll shoving
raw meat into his bottomless hunger-hole makes for excellent
ratings.
  

    
Great summary. Join the WELL, Michael! :-)
  

    
I have a friend who DID move back to Canada. And a locally prominent
friend who just moved to Panama .. because he no longer felt safe
with proud-boy magas in flag-laden white trucks slowing down as they
passed him on the freeway. 
  

    
I suppose I should offer a last few words here, too, as we wrap. Our
two weeks streaked by, there'll be so much more to say. Maybe I'll
start blogging again. Maybe we should all commit more mindshare to
blogs as an alternative to toxic social media platforms. Twitter no
longer exists, replaced by the sinister X - always makes me think of
the UK scifi horror film "X The Unknown," in which American Dean
Jagger plays a scientist confronting a malicious radioactive blob
from somewhere within the earth. The blob is melting stalwart UK
citizens as it keeps growing and seeks more cobalt to feed its
growth. It's not so much malign as indifferent to the lives of puny
humans. It's a force without care, all hunger, no empathy.

Maybe that's a metaphor for the Muskrat's platform... many metaphors
and narratives feeding our heads these days. Fear is as seductive as
pleasure. I suppose we spin our delusions to keep life interesting.
Where I live we have non-human intelligences around us. We have a
rather jumpy, paranoid cat living in our house, rescued years ago
from Hurrican Harvey and probably from fear-inducing human cruelty
along the way - she still hasn't quite calmed down. We have a family
of cardinals, one of which became cat food a couple of years ago.
Busy squirrels are all over the fence and yard, recently gathering
nuts for the winter and creating a commotion in our chimney leading
to an expensive repair. Raccoons and possums live here, but they're
stealthy. Many deer wander the neighborhood. There's a few dogs, but
we don't know any of them - we see them walking their humans from
time to time.

But the point I'm getting to is that these creatures, intelligence
optimized for survival according to their context and capability,
have no clue about human perceptions and narratives - they know
nothing of the left, the right, the media, influencers, writers,
hackers, poets, pundits, clowns and comics, serial killers, mass
murderers, pedophiles, censors, experts etc. They just survive,
doing what their kind have done forever to live as well as possible.
I suppose at one time we lived in harmony with these creatures and
the natural world, though now they're "outside" and we're "inside."
We may see them as nuisances, or fun-to-watch. Some become "pets" -
we think we own them, and sometimes (if they're not cats) they might
agree.

Almost everyone I know has been mired in the politics of the moment
for years now, many or most of them followiing a steady media diet
of outrage on the one hand, hope on the other. Taught to be Good,
we're outraged that Bad people not only exist, but persist and
prosper. We hope that the Good will eventually prevail over the Bad.

Those animals I mentioned don't know Good or Bad, they just do what
they do to stay alive.  Some humans say we're better than the
animals. I wonder.