“If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.”
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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….and it was super underwhelming. The goal was to watch ten movies that were reminiscent of Unknown Armies, an occult themed role playing game focused on obsession and Jungian archetypes. But the only genuinely excellent movie on the list was Ghost World. That movie is stellar, may be one of my top 30 favorite movies of all time, and made this journey to watch 10 films reminiscent of Unknown Armies worth it. But that was it.
An honorable mention goes to Bubba Ho-Tep, which was weird and unique, and led to an interesting thought: “were the fifties the weirdest time on earth, because technology produced global screen gods?” But Bubba Ho-Tep gave me more of a Savage Worlds vibe and it didn’t move me, nowhere near Ghost World.
The rest of the films were a mish-mash that were sometimes interesting, sometimes boring, mainly produced flat emotional reactions and worst of all, didn’t give me the Unknown Armies vibe I was looking for. Maybe that’s because the source list was huge and I chose the wrong ten movies, or maybe it’s because I’d already seen the good movies from the source list so I didn’t choose them. Either way, Ghost World was the only true standout.
The movies I watched were: Hard Boiled, Bubba Ho-Tep, John Dies at the End, eXistenZ, Barton Fink, To Live and Die in LA, Wild at Heart, Ghost World, The Fisher King, and Stranger than Paradise.
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My Obsidian inbox had 40 fleeting notes (fragments from books, podcasts, conversations, and half-formed ideas). In the past I would set aside time to make them into proper Zettelkasten notes for my vault with 1000+ notes. I know that this is an important part of the Zettelkasten, but in the spirit of experimentation I wanted to see how AI could help with it. I tried delegating the process to AI, and it worked better than I expected.
Here’s the process I used.
- I started with a steering file. Before touching a single note, I wrote a steering file that defined exactly what a good note looks like: one idea per note, written as a direct timeless claim (not “this article says”), a headline that states the idea rather than the topic, five tags maximum, up to three cross-links to related notes, and a source field. The steering file also defined when to create a Map of Content (only when five or more notes cluster around a coherent theme).
- I let the AI read the inbox, then write to a separate folder. I’m not yet ready to test something new on my full Obsidian vault, so I limited the AI to a single folder with a test batch of 40 notes. I kept the folder read-only (so I could check work) and asked the AI to write notes to a separate folder. Claude read all 40 notes in one pass, identified which ones contained multiple ideas, and wrote each cleaned note from scratch in the Zettelkasten format. Three long research documents became seven separate notes. Four Maps of Content emerged naturally from the clusters that formed.
The result was 40 notes processed in one session, properly formatted, tagged, and linked. What I’m looking for ultimately is not the note rewriting, it’s the cross-linking and the ability to see patterns within notes. So I expect to continue testing beyond this first batch to explore that idea.
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When people rhetorically ask, “why does everyone like Taylor Swift so much,” or, “why do people fall for conspiracy theories,” they are often displaying incuriosity about the shapes of others. Take a second to be curious.
— Read on usefulfictions.substack.com/p/do-you-know-your-default-shape -
I’ve never played the roleplaying game Unknown Armies, but I’ve read the book, and it’s a fascinating read into a system of magic (essentially) based on the works of Carl Jung. It’s paranoid and interesting, with magic built on obsessions made real.
I stumbled across the ruleset in a Reddit discussion of the movie Under the Silver Lake. That movie captures a very specific flavor, of a world hidden within the world, conspiracy and paranoia humming just beneath the surface, buried in pop culture. A descent into the underworld, but the underworld is Los Angeles with Egyptian undertones.
I wanted to find something like it. I needed a movie list.
So I built one by drawing from several online sources, ending up with a recommendation of about 50 films that evoke that same uncanny frequency, the feeling that something vast and strange is organized just out of view.
I’ve already seen a chunk of them, and now I’m working through the ones I haven’t (not all of them, just ten or so).
I’m three movies in, and I have to be honest, they have been, without exception, bad. Some have been vaguely interesting.
Still, a quest is a quest. And a quest has a decidedly Pilgrim vibe. The remaining titles look interesting:
- Lord of Illusions, Barton Fink, Ghost World, Layer Cake, To Live and Die in LA, Wild at Heart, The Stepford Wives, The Machinist, The Limey, The Fisher King, The Cooler, That Obscure Object of Desire, Stranger than Paradise, My Own Private Idaho, Klute, Lost Highway, and Blue Velvet.
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These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person…wants to please, impress, or enrage.
— Read on american-innocence.com/p/kundera-hegel-and-the-ais -
The more scientists study the Red Planet, the more they find unusual objects and patterns scattered across Mars’ surface. Here are some of the most baffling.
— Read on www.livescience.com/space/mars/32-things-on-mars-that-look-like-they-shouldnt-be-there -
Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely to be polluted by bad science. The merely odd, purely curiosity-driven research is less likely to be tainted. Incestuous as it might seem, the people best placed to hand out funding for basic scientific research are other scientists.
— Read on timharford.com/2026/04/the-usefulness-of-useless-knowledge/ -
Casual sex and drugs are things a lot of people enjoy and utopia should have space for them, but if that’s the vision the whole thing orbits around, you’re leaving a lot of people with other tastes out, you’re not making it clear where you put the LARPers and the woodworkers and the people who like sports for some reason, and utopia should be roomier than that.
— Read on thingofthings.substack.com/p/interview-with-alicorn-on-how-story -
…think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back.
As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become over-optimized around a single person (or generation), no matter how talented, in ways that sacrifices the long-term trajectory of the institution or future generations.
— Read on www.aaronrenn.com/p/boomer-succession -
One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here’s a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans).
— Read on www.atvbt.com/youre-weirder-than-you-think/ -
The hunger for wargaming fell off after World War I and World War II. You also make this point about that one thing pushing Dungeons & Dragons, which comes from the same lineage as wargames, in the direction of the medieval and fantasy setting is that there’s a lot of anti-war sentiment because of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. D&D was instead an escape from the reality of modern war.
— Read on asteriskmag.com/issues/14/shall-we-play-a-game -
Spotting the upper class. Surprisingly funny and good natured.
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When the economist Tyler Cowen was in Chicago last month, I asked him why he keeps talking about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). He said it’s because it’s abundantly clear, after his conversations with government officials over the years, that they have files on things they don’t understand (he basically says the same thing here). So I thought it would be helpful to recap what we know so far after Trump released a portion of the UAP files:
- There are things that the government can’t explain.
- There are lots of things the government can’t explain – how to solve the common cold, how to cure poverty.
- People have started saying that UAPs are extraterrestrials or spiritual beings.
- People have always said that UAPs are extraterrestrials or spiritual beings.
- People have always believed, in one form or another, that there are higher beings around. It’s only in the last 100 years or so that we stopped believing.
My conclusion after all of this is — this is still a nothingburger without definitive evidence, but investigating it is worth the time. What do you think? Is there something to this?
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Their fate [secretaries] is the subject of this essay, and a lens to think through the implications of AI for work with a bit more nuance than “LLMs are a scam” or “white collar work is doomed.” Perhaps those all-or-nothing predictions will turn out to be right! But honestly I doubt it. Instead I think it will be messy, confusing, exciting, strange, unfair and apparently irrational, just like it was last time.
— Read on rowlandmanthorpe.substack.com/p/the-case-of-the-disappearing-secretaryTerrific, intelligent look at potential futures of work with AI. Highly recommend.
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The patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, a major figure in the drive for Italian unification, described the Italian family as the “country of the heart.” In his typically prophetic voice, Mazzini wrote, “There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter.”
The concept reminds me of the Greek idea of a household daemon, and maybe that’s where it originates. I also agree. There is a strong force in families, and why not personify it. What do you think?
From My Two Italies.
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…I came to know Kurvitz and Rostov, the creators of Disco Elysium. We were idealistic back then and wanted to live this romantic life, having an art collective and a political commune, etc. But in reality, some of us moved in together as flatmates and started a blog; it was like 2010 when blogs were huge. Because it was difficult to break into the institutions of Estonian cultural life, we created a space to share what we had to offer. And that’s where the name ZA/UM came from. It was what we called the blog, our collective, and all our shared ideas. We wrote about politics, but also published short stories, poems, artwork, etc. Even though the collective was Left-leaning ideologically, we didn’t limit it to Left-wing writers. That would have been impossible as there are so few of them in Estonia. To make up for this, we encouraged debate and discussion. We would have a writer representing one side of an issue publish their article, and then another who would argue against it. Sometimes there were 50 comments in a row.
— Read on platypus1917.org/2025/02/01/forward-looking-return-an-interview-with-disco-elysium-writer-helen-hindpere/ -
Benedict Anderson claims that newspapers created national identity.
Specifically, the development of print capitalism meant that suddenly people across the country were reading the same words over their tea and coffee in the morning, and (per Anderson) this massive shared ritual created a sense of kinship across millions of people who would never actually meet each other, therefore creating the modern sense of a nation: an imagined community, because most of the members are strangers, but no less real for being constructed
— Read on www.atvbt.com/imagined-communities/ -
…there’s a strong affinity between the pulp fantasy story and the picaresque, which is probably no accident. The picaresque is a clear antecedent of “adventure stories” of all sorts and many pulp writers latched on to the Picaro archetype as an ideal vehicle for telling lurid, sensationalistic tales set in far-away lands. I contend that it’s here that we find the thematic core of D&D and that the game was written on the assumption that most characters would come from this mold.
— Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/10/picaro-and-story-of-d.html -
“Robbie and I were sittin’ on a plane an’ like it’s first class, so you get a couple o’drinks, an’ I said to Robbie, ‘Y’know, there are these Apollonian people…like, very formal, rational dreamers. An’ then there’s the Dionysian thing…the insanity trip…way inside.’ An’ I said. ‘Youre an Apollonian…up there with your guitar…all neat an ‘ thought out…y’know…an’ you should get into the Dionysian thing.’
“An’ he looks up at me an’ says, ‘Oh, yea, right Jim.’”
— Read on thedoors.com/news/the-shaman-as-superstar
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