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  • Men in the Off Hours

    Some years ago, I saw a painting that knocked my sense of the sexes sideways. It was an 1884 work by an Impressionist named Gustave Caillebotte of a nude figure emerging from the bath — the same trope that Degas or Bonnard so often employ because it allows you to observe a woman’s naked body in motion, absorbed in a private ritual replete with sensual pleasure

    Except that the nude that Caillebotte is presenting for our delectation is male, and this gender-switch totally upends our preconceptions about masculine power and prerogatives, about who gets to look at whom doing what.

    More here.

  • Biotech companies I wish existed

    A lot of important and commercially viable pre-existing biology that can be translated into real world applications is thus ignored. Here are some things I wish there were more startups working on…

    This list of startup ideas is engrossing. Partly because Elad Gil lists what is already being done in the area, and how far along we are with some technologies that read like they’re in an episode of Star Trek. More here; the implications are huge.

  • Haunted Resonance: An Interview With Alan Moore

    Haunted Resonance: An Interview With Alan Moore

    There’s something a little odd or eccentric about the English mindset that produces some wonderful, imaginative things….I think it’s perhaps because we’ve been invaded so many times. Perhaps because of the English language itself. English is a kind of brilliant slave patois. We’ve borrowed words from everybody who has invaded us. There are just so many choices and shadings of words and meaning that are to be found in English. Perhaps this has got some bearing upon our thinking as well?

    The problem with fantasy at the moment is that most of it is purely escapist. It isn’t fantasy that’s going to tell you about the real world. It’s not using its symbols to illuminate, but give you access to another world that doesn’t have the problems and responsibilities of this one.

    More:

    It was John Dee who invented America, in that he came up with a plausible-sounding legend by which Elizabeth could claim that America already belonged to England. He wanted to create a world based upon Christian Kabbalah which had Elizabeth I essentially as a kind of moon queen at the centre of it. 

    In every way, Alan Moore is an independent thinker. More here.

  • My Instagram: We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift

    My Instagram: We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift

    I was self-banishing to Instagram, the only social media platform that did not haunt me, get under my skin, and cause me to feel shortness of breath and numbness in my fingers. I had a theory that everyone was haunted by at least one of them, and which one depended on your insecurities, the type of people who gathered there, and the style of communication its interface allowed. I surveyed new acquaintances: “When you think, ‘Social media is terrible,’ which are you thinking of most?”

    More here.

  • A hobby, not a uniform

    I rarely wear T-shirts or any other apparel that advertises my involvement in the hobby – at least not publicly. I do own a handful of such things, of course, but I mostly wear them as sleep shirts. This isn’t out of embarrassment. If I were embarrassed, I probably wouldn’t have spent so many years publicly documenting my thoughts on obscure RPGs, old AD&D modules, or the ins and outs of Tékumel. At my age, I’m quite comfortable with who I am and how I enjoy spending my free time. Even so, I don’t define myself by my hobbies, let alone feel the need to broadcast my interests in them through textiles.

    This is a personal preference, of course. But I do find there’s something just a bit strange and even a little off-putting about wearing one’s enthusiasms like a uniform. It can feel, at times, like a kind of branding, as though we’re walking billboards for our subcultures. I understand the appeal: there’s comfort in signaling shared interests, especially in a world that, particularly in recent years, feels increasingly fragmented and alienating. For many people, these shirts and hats and pins are conversation starters or community badges, small ways of affirming, “These are my people. I belong here.” I can respect that. I really do. It’s just not for me.

    This set off a great conversation in the comments, and it applies to many hobbies today.

  • America, the beautiful

    The US, compared to the rest of the world, is optimistic because it is still the land of possibilities. You can remake yourself here, because we are generally forgiving, and provide everyone many chances to reclaim who they are. We don’t only give second chances, we give third, fourth and fifth ones. 

    Some of that is because of our size — there are many different Americas in the same nation, and if you fail in one, you pick yourself off the mat, move to another America, and try again. Some of that is from the Judaeo-Christian notion, baked into our nations culture from birth, that while humans are fundamentally flawed they are also gifted with free will and capable of transformation. Nobody is perfect, and while perfection can never be achieved, not at least here in the city of man, you can, and should, work towards it. The US, with its wealth of possibilities, provides many different routes you can take.

    From the very perceptive Chris Arnade. Read more about his travels through America here.

  • When we design our identities from scratch

    “Perhaps it’s just nostalgia, but despite having “little to hide,” I recall a better way to use the internet. My interest in the internet as a kid was entirely exploratory, rather than performative. Bored out of my suburban small-town mind, I wanted to play Starcraft and learn random things and chat on IRC with new people around the world who shared my interests. The content-clout-access-alpha treadmill that Packy McCormick smartly observes did not yet exist.

    “Why was that pseudonymous presence on the internet better? Social media platforms have made all of us minor celebrities, and celebrity is an unpleasant thing. Celebrity psychology is fundamentally anxious, burdening us with constant performance, self-consciousness and self-censorship. We all become shades of Princess Diana, looking over her shoulder for the paparazzi. It limits our sense of self, and our self-expression.

    “There may be a light at the end of the tunnel for anyone that seeks an escape. I believe we are going to see the opposite of the context collapse of the internet today. I call it identity dispersion, where individuals control the creation, separation and unification of their multiple online selves.”

    I think this topic will become more and more prevalent as the years go on, and we develop tools to manage our online selves.

  • She’s so hot I wanna clean her room

    There’s no aesthetic neutrality here. These rooms are loud, lived-in, layered. Some lean towards the soft and hyper-feminine, others erupt with anime iconography, but all are united by a sense of unapologetic presence. shelestvetrovki also 3D scans them. The result is a digital fossil of entropy, preserved with all its chaos intact. “Girls always have so many little things,” she says, “the usual camera wouldn’t work here.”

    Really neat. Make sure to click the video in the article.

  • Only I know the secrets: Breaking down Under the Silver Lake

    At the story’s outset, he already believes…that “there are people out there…more powerful and wealthier than us, that are communicating things, and seeing things in the world that are meant for only them and not for us.”

    And once his glamorous neighbor, Sarah (Riley Keough), vanishes on the day they were meant to consummate their acquaintance, Sam becomes obsessively focused on his theory that her fate, and now his own, are linked to a vast and deadly conspiracy that’s solvable only by scrutinizing the specific pop culture ephemera with which he surrounds himself….Complicating things slightly, of course, is the fact that Sam is correct.

    If you haven’t seen Under the Silver Lake yet, do it. It’s a paranoid nod to Reddit culture and in fact, the movie itself is an embedded real-life code that has yet to be solved. Read more about it here.

  • To Organize the World’s Information

    Is this the best we can do? Are we done organizing the world’s information?

    No.

    And we’re not even close.

    One question may point us in the right direction: what can’t you google right now?

    Sure, you can google anything you want, but what kind of query can’t you expect good results for?

    If you’re interested in information, there are still problems to solve.

  • Different Kinds of Smart

    I like this list of different types of intelligence; it reminds me of the Bear Stearns letter about MBA grads.

    “Smart” is the ability to solve problems. Solving problems is the ability to get stuff done. And getting stuff done requires way more than math proofs and rote memorization.

    I’ve always thought that the best definition of intelligence was the ability to accomplish your goals. Which is similar to the ability to solve problems, stated differently. Read on for a comprehensive list of ways people can be smart in solving problems.

  • Long campaigns vs. short campaigns

    One of the greatest joys of roleplaying games, at least for me, lies in the continuity of a long campaign: the way characters grow, change, and accumulate history over time; how a setting deepens and acquires texture; how throwaway details from early sessions suddenly take on new meaning months (or even years) later. If given the chance, I prefer to settle in, to put down roots, and see what emerges over the long haul. That’s usually my goal when I sit down at the table with friends. I want a campaign, not a fling.

    A home campaign with friends, by contrast, is more like choosing to live somewhere. There’s an implicit commitment. We’re investing in something meant to last. That shared commitment changes everything. When I play with friends, I generally don’t want the game to have an expiration date. I want room to build, to wander, to return to familiar locations, to interact with recurring NPCs, to watch the slow accretion of detail and consequence. 

    From the always fun Grognardia. Read the whole thing.

  • Why is America so exceptional?

    Why is America so exceptional?

    The USA is different than other countries, other people have seen it. Also, how the USA really works and what people were listening to when they fought the British. A July 4 collection of USA links:

    But why is America exceptional?

    How should the federal government operate?

    Popular Music of the Revolutionary War Period

    An outsider witnesses America

  • How did the USA get guns during the Revolutionary War?

    The Revolutionary army got weapons from the French, which secretly smuggled them to the USA to destabilize the British, and the Frenchman who did the work was one of the most fascinating people in history. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais not only wrote The Marriage of Figaro, he played a pivotal role in the American Revolution:

    Beaumarchais was given the go ahead to form a company as a front to cover the clandestine activities. Roderigue Hortalez and Company was “set up as a ‘black’operation” to buy munitions from the French government on credit, sell them to the Americans, and then reimburse the government, thereby disposing of its surplus equipment at a tidy profit.

    As a result of Beaumarchais:

    Armaments and supplies arrived for the Continental Army, which was largely clothed, provisioned, and armed from the supplies Beaumarchais was able to procure. Historian Simon Schama referred to Beaumarchais as the “startlingly aggressive and enterprising propagandist for the Americans,” who “fitted out an entire private navy and armaments for the rebels and whose own pocket made up the difference between the escalating cost of French assistance and secret royal disbursements.”

    Read the entire thing here, or if you’re particularly interested, read Improbable Patriot, a fascinating biography of the life of Beaumarchais.

  • The USA’s Declaration did something no other document had done to that point

    The Declaration of Independence was:

    the first successful declaration of independence in world history, [and] its example helped to inspire countless movements for independence

    The founders wrote the Declaration as a long argument, establish their rationale for forming a country. First, they listed principles that they recognized as self-evident, which they used as a framework for making their claims. Then they listed grievances against the king as their justification for independence. This was astonishingly dangerous. In fact, they had to declare independence, because:

    if they organized themselves into political bodies with which other powers could engage, then they might become legitimate belligerents in an international conflict rather than treasonous combatants within a British civil war.

    The odds of winning were stacked against them.

    no people had managed to secede from an empire since the United Provinces had revolted from Spain almost two centuries before, and no overseas colony had done so in modern times.

    By declaring independence, the writers set off a chain of unprecedented events leading to the present day:

    More than half of the 192 countries now represented at the United Nations have a founding document that can be called a declaration of independence. 

    The entire article is excellent and strongly recommended.

  • Mort Garson’s electronic magic

    Mort Garson’s electronic magic

    This Canadian-born composer was not only a mere innovator but went on to make some of the most deliriously strange and wondrous electronic compositions (and cover versions) of the 20th century. Just the fact that the phrase “occult-pop” has been used as a descriptor of his work should give you just a tiny hint of this man’s wholly unique genius.

    At some point during the mid-70s, Garson seemed to have stepped out of our shared timeline and gone drifting through parallel universes, Moog in hand, like some sort of velvet-robed cosmic surveyor. His work stopped sounding like music and instead like the inside of a haunted lava lamp filled with dead satellites and broken View-Masters. 

    Why not take a break from the algorithm? Read more about Mort Garson and his pioneering work in electronica here.

  • Have US cities really recovered from COVID?

    Overall the results are mixed (76% average recovery post pandemic) with better results in entertainment areas like Las Vegas and worst results in areas reliant on office workers, particularly workers who can work remote.

    Transit ridership is also down (<60% of 2019 levels in major downtowns like Chicago, Philly and SF), which impacts recovery.

    Best recovery is Las Vegas (103%) with Oklahoma City, Miami, and Phoenix at 90%+. The worst are San Francisco (32%), St. Louis (34%) and Portland (40%).

    Downtowns in blue states have on average recovered slower (NYC – 65%, Chicago – 62%, LA – 60%, SF – 32%) than downtowns in red states (Miami – 92%, OKC – 93%, Phoenix – 89%, Las Vegas – 103%). This is due to a variety of factors – people are leaving blue states for red ones, blue states stayed shut longer, and are more reliant on office jobs, which can be remote.

    The long term trends on what makes a city stay “cool” remain to be seen, although one thing is clear – you need exciting downtowns.

    The key takeaway — we haven’t bounced back yet, and cities with office populations will need to do additional work. Not sure what that is in the age of the remote worker — maybe rezoning and retrofitting office buildings?

    Statistics are all from Perplexity, so I’m not even sure how to cite them!

  • How to lose yourself in the “megastructure”

    If you want to get lost in an expansive megacity, check out Blame! an artwork-driven anime. Its pages of architecturally rendered pages tour the “megastructure,” an impossibly large city (the size of Jupiter’s orbit). The city is constantly being built by out-of-control builders. The way to stop them is supposedly lost.

    You’re dropped into a world that seems allergic to explanation. No names, no maps, no exposition panels. Just page after page of impossibly vast corridors, monstrous machines, and a lone, near-silent figure named Killy trudging through it all. It’s sci-fi stripped down to its steel bones. Cold, cryptic, and mesmerizing.

    But behind its wordless panels and oppressive silence, BLAME! is doing something quietly brilliant. It’s building one of the most ambitious fictional worlds in manga—just not in the way we’re used to.

    Blame! It’s everything this article suggests. Read more about this interesting manga here.

  • You can make ordinary trips more extraordinary for low cost – here’s how

    When I think of low cost trips, I think about cutting corners on something I really want and settling for a subpar experience that is more difficult and less relaxing. But what if making the trip difficult is the entire point?

    Hickman’s Hinterlands makes trips complicated on purpose, resulting in a low-cost experience that reveals the real world as it is, instead of a series of well-worn and curated travel routes filled with Instagrammers and tourists.

    outside of the most dire emergencies and the most mundane sorts of tasks, it is always my policy to choose the least convenient, most ridiculous, circuitous route to travel from point A to point B.

    For a trip through rural America, he set out to cross the distance entirely on public bus routes. This is not easy, and required pre-planning and the type of inconvenience more suited to explorers than vacationers. Rural bus routes in America aren’t well utilized, and therefore don’t easily link up. Yet they are used, and they are very much a part of America. The fact that many people can afford to bypass them doesn’t make them any less necessary.

    On the bus that took us from Watertown to Lowville, the driver openly marveled at what a strange and unorthodox idea it was for anyone to attempt what we were doing. Yet, by the same token, she seemed pleased at our ardent enthusiasm for rural public transportation —

    Kurt Vonnegut said that “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” It’s something I earnestly believe, because if you’re getting an itch to try something that is really unique, something is calling to you to break free of a bubble. And in the case of rural bus routes, it’s certainly an inexpensive bubble to break.

    Read about the rural public transit odyssey here.

  • Do righteous paladins still exist in today’s modern world?

    I define a paladin as a righteous fighter engaged in a quest, oblivious to anything but the completion of that holy quest. And yes, they absolutely still exist. Even at low levels.

    Back in the days of spam phone calls, strangers would deliberately interrupt you with unwanted conversations, and would be really pushy when you tried to exit politely. My brothers and I learned that it was really catastrophic if spam callers had long sales calls without conversions. So we would answer the calls, ask questions and let them talk for sometimes half an hour before declining.

    Looking back, that was immature, but we were 16 year olds without the internet who viewed our work as righteous vengeance against a faceless system.

    Paladins come in all shapes and sizes.