- The Truman Show ✶
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It’s a visually stunning, spiritually powerful conclusion. It is the point of The Truman Show that we don’t know what world he is stepping into, and can’t follow him to see what happens next. This is about more than just turning off the TV, or setting down a smartphone; it’s about someone making the difficult choice to be himself outside the context of what others see and expect of him.
What a strange time we live in. Keep bringing more graphite, paint, and paper, musical instruments, and non-phone cameras to life.
Via Jank.cool
Saturday, 22 August 2026
- ♫ Just in Time ✶
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Nina Simone live at Casino Kursaal, 16th June 1968. Remembered this one while thinking about the Before trilogy of films.
Friday, 21 August 2026
- Self-playing games ✶
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Games that play themselves are like using AI for writing, drawing, and thinking, or, at the risk of making many people angry, watching others playing with balls on TV instead of playing yourself and rediscovering the pleasure of physical movement.
Wednesday, 19 August 2026
- AI hysteria’s effect on global decision making ✶
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Hoping it ends soon 🤦
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
- Writing using large language models, artificial intelligence (AI) ✶
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If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?
This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice.
Saturday, 25 July 2026
- You matter more than you think ✶
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This text by Karen O’Brien with beautiful pencil and watercolor drawings by Tone Bjordam will almost certainly be added to my list of best books once I finish reading it.
Our beliefs about the nature of reality influence our relationships, including our relationship to nature. For many of us, our relationships to concepts and ideas such as self, other, and nature have been influenced by a classical, mechanistic view of the world. Relationships within a quantum system are characterized by entanglement, uncertainty, indeterminism, and potentiality. In quantum systems, there is nothing that is “apart” or fully separate, and if we consider the universe to be one large quantum system, this includes humans and non-humans alike. When we consider Karen Barad’s concept of intra-actions, together with Alexander Wendt’s perspective on language and linguistics as quantum social phenomena, it becomes clear that who we are, what we do, and how we relate and communicate matters. In short, [I/we] matter and the words and metaphors we choose and use have the power to transform both our relationships and our shared reality.
There’s also a free audio book version.
Wednesday, 22 July 2026
- Ten steps towards happiness ✶
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By Peter Hintjens. See also, The Cretan Method, which talks about many things, including learn-play-work-teach vs the unfortunately more common play-learn-work-die.
Sunday, 19 July 2026
- Placid Lassie Douglas C-47 N74589 ✶
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Just saw this plane fly by, probably headed to Oshkosh.
Friday, 17 July 2026
- Noita 65, Reanimal, & Vein demos ✶
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The smoke is clearing and I’m slowly getting back to the games. Played a bit of Noita and the Reanimal and Vein demos with my friend Artwo.
Vein seems like a 3D Project Zomboid.
Reanimal brought to mind Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and Munch’s The Scream, which may be a “sign of the times.”
I may return to it, if I muster enough courage to play it alone, but I think it’ll be another game. (You won, Kojima. But I have something up my sleeve for the music.)
- Do it yourself (DIY) air cleaners ✶
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Looks like the current administration here has not completely destroyed the Environmental Protection Agency yet.
Might want to get some weatherstripping insulation tape for the fan edges, too, and get going with that solar installation you’ve been putting off.
Tuesday, 14 July 2026
- Nature, society, economy ✶
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If the economy collapses, society and nature might still survive.
If society falls, it takes the economy with it yet nature can still survive.
But if nature: the ecosystems of the planet, the biodiversity, and the climate as we know it today collapses, then everything falls apart.
The social and economic systems we have built cannot exist independently from the environment. Therefore, in a conflict between these three systems, nature must always come first.
- Earthset ✶
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Photograph by Christina Koch, taken aboard the Integrity capsule of Artemis II in 2026, 58 years after Earthrise.
Sunday, 12 July 2026
- Streetwork ✶
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The explosion of the school into the urban environment is the primary concern of this book. It views the town as the educational resource in a new approach to environmental education, and shows how this ‘streetwork’ can be put into practice by means of fresh educational techniques: perception studies, town trails, environmental games and simulations, and streetwork centres. This valuable study includes much practical classroom advice, and will be of interest to those who are concerned about the pupil’s involvement, particularly the non-academic secondary-school pupil, with the world outside the school. Streetwork has a message, too, for everyone who wonders how public participation in environmental decision-making is ever to become a reality.
Added a book by Colin Ward to the to-read list.
Friday, 10 July 2026
- The end of reading ✶
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But what if you consistently replace one kind of action (reading a word) with another (watching an Instagram Reel)? One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.
I love reading and writing on paper, and do read and write quite a bit on computer screens. Phone screens are too small and uncomfortable.
But there hasn’t been a TV at home for two decades, and even videogames, which I love, have been less interesting lately unless they have good cooperative modes, unusual gameplay mechanics, or excellent sound and story.
Nowadays I lean towards learning to play a new instrument, which has felt like a present from the gods, and having read McLuhan and Lanier, and the above article, I do worry about the future, but am hopeful young people will indeed rebel.
Monday, 6 July 2026
- Exanima episode 10 ✶
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Sound buzzing issues from the prior episode of my Exanima series are now fixed. They were caused by a forgotten compressor filter that had been turned on in the audio routing setup, and probably some electromagnetic line noise that is hopefully fixed. Still testing, but last night’s stream sounded alright.
Saturday, 4 July 2026
- On the Declaration of Independence ✶
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I was a ‘pocket-constitution’ kind of fellow in college, but one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about how their government functioned or what the ideals of the framers were and one is regularly disappointed, but very much not shocked, by the endless parade of political entrepreneurs looking to exploit that gap in knowledge.
I will also note, for my international readers, that I think the exercise of looking at these documents is valuable, for the same reason I’ve made my students read Magna Carta or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: these are documents of world-historic significance (hardly the only ones, of course, but they make ready examples). At some point, particularly in leftish circles, it became trendy to dismiss the American founding as a mere ‘bourgeois’ revolution in favor of later revolutions in Europe and I think this is a mistake. There quite possibly is no French Revolution without the American one; the cross-pollination of ideas is obvious. The American Revolution (and thus the Declaration) therefore must also play a role in 1848 and it very obvious plays a role in the advance of democracy in Europe after 1945 and again after 1989.
The Declaration of Independence was recognized as a radical, potentially explosive document at the time of its issuance, as we’ll see. And it was explosive: the world of 1775 was one dominated by monarchies with just a tiny handful of traditional republics (which we should not ignore!). It took a long time for the seeds of the declaration to spread, but the world it helped create is one where liberal democracies, while hardly universal (more people have always lived in unfree societies than free ones) represent the most economically and culturally dominant bloc in world affairs – something that had never happened before. The Declaration, in its way, remade not just the Thirteen Colonies, but slowly, surely, as water seeps through the cracks of rocks (or my floorboards, alas), it remade the whole world.
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And I must admit it was in this sense that I have been thinking about this document for the past year, because, as I have argued before, I think we are facing a government not merely that I disagree with – that’s not at all new and democracy must mean losing elections as well as winning them – but rather a government, particularly an executive branch, which does aim for “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” in a way that is peculiar to any administration, democratic or republican, that I can think of.
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