Today fell apart in many ways, and I'm currently gearing up for an early snooze so I can record at 1am tonight.

But I did get to connect with a nephew going through a rough time (moved out at 16, brimming with difficult feelings), and let him know that the line of communication was always open, non-judgmental, and full of love between us - without undermining his mum at all.

I do get tired of this world sometimes - but we belong to a human chain that needs us even at our weariest.

Hold on. 💙

Silly silly silly brain.

All right. Enough dawdling.

Lots of little tasks and some big ones to catch up on today.

Be kind, and do good crimes!

Today I saw someone casually describe their latest depressive episode as "having a menty b", and I aspire to that revisionist energy. Make your existential crises as fun as you need them to be! Steal a golf cart. Hiss back at a goose. Take up an alternate identity for park sits halfway across town. Vibe with an inflatable tube man at your nearest car dealership. Bring down the markets with your hacker collective.

WHATEVER IT TAKES.

Have the menty b you need your menty b to be, to survive. 💙 🕊️

I'm chuckling at how quintessentially US-centric eclipse conspiracy theories are.

Colombian newspapers recently suggested a city six hours from Medellín where people might get a sliver of the view, but also pointed out that people can "just" wait until 2044, when one will be visible here.

But if an eclipse is happening over 'Murica, THAT'S IT. That's the bat signal for the apocalypse! 🤣 If you do plan to ascend, though, please be sure to keep the rest of us in mind when writing your wills. 😘

The only kind of dicks I like to see on my timeline. 👍

#YMMV

#Essays #AI #Technology

Rob Horning’s latest offers a key meditation on what data even is in a world covetous of new algorithmic possibilities. Is “data”, like “AI”, losing its meaning when applied to the breathless hype cycles concentrated around certain forms of machine learning and large language models?

"The dataset is a quantity that becomes a quality, a totality, a piece of discrete property that can’t be reduced to the trillions of pieces that compose it."

https://open.substack.com/pub/robhorning/p/so-called-well-meaning

I'm having a rough day, but reminding myself that this is because I was up too late.

My brain always thinks it has purely intellectual reasons for feeling awful.

I've worked hard to add emotional vocabulary to my life, and to distrust the self-deceiving rhetoric of "rationalism", which misrepresents how we humans process anything.

But buddy.
Dude.
You utter meatball of a noggin--

Chill the eff out with the grand internal dialogues, and remember that you're just a bunch of tired synapses, OK?

#MediaLiteracy is always a challenge - but in times of great conflict, we especially struggle with different ideas of what the news "should" do.

What we currently have is a corporate-conservative legacy system, which will prioritize what sells, even if it upsets more than empowers. That sucks.

But citizens also don't always understand that a robust democracy requires *pluralist* media, which will not always align with state PR. It's important to ask what a thriving democracy looks like to you.

#StarTrek #SFF

Apparently the last season of DISCO is going to go deeper into the Progenitors from TNG's "The Chase". I guess that makes sense, so the show can lean hard into an ultimate lecture delivered by Burnham about our commonality and shared destiny in the final episode.

It's a shame that the show always struggled with its Trek identity - far too individual-saviour-driven for the franchise in earlier formations - but hey! It gave us Strange New Worlds. So that's something, at least.

Next week, easier and shorter posts.

In under the line for Thorough Thursday, but today’s was a tough ending to a tough week of topics.

Here, I reflect on the wide range of emotional responses to war that are sometimes masked by appeals to “pragmatic”, “rational” thinking about the “cold, hard science” of conflict.

These too are stories we tell to cope with the spectacle of violence. We are all affected by it—whether we think we have a lock on its histories or not.

https://mlclark.substack.com/p/realpolitik-and-other-highly-emotional

Today's piece (still in progress) is as scattered as our world.

Currently reframing it around an historical touchstone, and hoping that this will help to re-center the rest - which addresses forms of emotional response to war that are often shrouded in claims of pragmatic/Realpolitik thinking.

More soon, but--

Good grief, we are all so very wounded by the times we're living through.

Speak out firmly on injustice.

Remember the complexity of collective psychological damage all along the way.

We could VERY EASILY have a reality-TV economy that trains viewers to see local communities less as helpless, hopeless rubes, and more as untapped bodies of regional expertise: people who know their distinct communities' needs better than anyone else, and who usually just need more everyday capital to be able to mobilize for effective and lasting change.

What a nicer world we'd have, if so many folks didn't turn on the telly just to gawk at content edited to make everyone else look like fools.

I was just listening to Maintenance Phase, which today addressed Jamie Oliver and a form of foodie activism that would note systemic problems, then try to offer individual solutions that often failed because they were short-term stopgaps at best.

But the episode raised an excellent point. What if such TV shows weren't about saviours coming in teach people we're supposed to view as ignorant, but to distribute budget increases and film how local groups expand social outreach programs to match?

#Essays

Who needs a comfort read on the end of #AI? 👀

"AI companies face a kafkaesque bind where they can't improve a tool for automating the creation of content without human beings creating more content than they've ever created before. ... Ironically, OpenAI's best hope for survival would be to fund as many news outlets as possible and directly incentivize them to do in-depth reporting, rather than proliferating a tech that unquestionably harms the media industry."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/

Why yes, it IS "nope o'clock". 🙃

And in this household, we celebrate with a walk away from our computer screen, while trying to screw our head on right again.