I’m posting this here so I won’t forget all these interesting publications I’d like to learn more about.

1. Drift - It’s about wandering the streets aimlessly, cup of coffee in hand, and learning more about what a place has to offer, whether you’ve been there for 25 minutes or 25 years.
2. Orion - Their argument is that literature grounded in the natural world is really literature about lives lived in places. Fiction, essays, poetry, visual art, conversations, ecology, culture. It’s also nonprofit and ad-free.
3. Apartamento - Its ostensible subject is interiors, but its actual subject is how people live.
4. Emergence Magazine - Its explicit philosophy is “slow consumption.” Online it publishes long-form essays, films, interviews and photo essays about our relationship with the living world; once a year it makes a lavish physical volume of several hundred pages with essays, poetry, art and photography on varied paper stocks. Think less “outdoor culture” and more attention, ecology, temporality and ways of inhabiting the world.

I adore the word scrimshanker.

Scrimshanker likely derives from the term scrimshank, which is believed to combine “scrimp” and “swanker. This term is often used to describe someone who avoids work or duty.

• Scrimp: To be frugal or to avoid waste.
• Swanker: An old military slang term referring to someone who works hard.

I’ve been thinking about using this word as a compliment rather than an insult to describe someone who is the opposite of a hustler.

Maybe use “scrimshanking” as a verb for being deliberately lazy.

A fellow parent and blogger deathmtn shared this earlier today:

The guy has started sleeping twelve hours a night in the past week. The adjustment to school hours is gonna be really rough.

Yeah.

(Solidarity, bro.)

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

It occurred to me the other evening that the bingewatch and the doomscroll are the same thing: a symptom of having given up control of your life.

Yeah.

Note: I realize I link back to Warren Ellis, and a few other people who produce work I enjoy. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Ellis posts often, and posts a lot of stuff I think is interesting.
2. I use this space (my blog/open notebook) as a way to capture things I want to remember.

Recently, my five-year-old kid saw a DeLorean, and he thought it looked really cool.

I told him it was in these really cool movies called Back to the Future.

He asked me what the movies were about, and why they were called Back to the Future . This audio is me trying to explain thfrist two films to him. It’s actually kind of hard to explain these movies to a five-year-old! (Well, it was hard for me.)

Below is a quote from my ridiculous explanation.

 When he goes back in time, the car kinda runs outta gas, and he has to find a way to get more gas to make the car go back to his present, which is the future in the past where he is, which is very confusing.

Transcript

What would it change?

I read this today on Ganzeer’s blog.

Random thought: The whole simulation theory that seems to be increasingly trendy these days actually isn't at all at odds with any of the traditional religious beliefs of old, the ones that imagined God as an anthropomorphized king on a throne in the clouds. Because simulation theory by definition implies the entire universe being created by someone somewhere

I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing, because I’ve been talking about it with a few people.

When I say “this kind of thing,” I mean big questions like:

• Does God exist?
• Is the universe a simulation?
• Do we have free will, or do we live in a deterministic universe we experience in a way that allows us to feel like/believe we have free will?

I’ve noticed that in the conversations I’ve had about these questions, some people have really strong opinions which they will argue for fervently. They will get really worked up.

I tend to enjoy the conversations, but I don’t get worked up, because I keep thinking to myself, for me, the answers do not change anything.

• If God exists, what would I do differently? Nothing.
• If God does exist, what would I do differently? Nothing.
• If God exists in a way that human beings can and never will understand, would I do anything differently? Nope
• If the universe is or is not a simulation, would it change how I live my life? I don’t think it would.
• If free will is an illusion, would it change how I live my life? Again, I don’t think it would. (Though after watching the show Devs, which I learned about when a friend talked about it in one of these free-wheeling conversations about all this stuff, I’m not as sure about this one.)

As I reflect on all this stuff right now, as I write these words, I wonder if I’m being a little too sure of myself. I don’t know the answers to these questions. They are mysteries, and I think that’s why they are cool and fun to think about or talk about. But maybe if I could know the answers to these questions, if they stopped being mysterious, it would have some massive effect on who and what I am. If I did know the existence status of God, or that I was/wasn’t in a simulation, or that free will was/wasn’t an illusion, all sorts of stuff about how I live my life would change.

I don’t know.

I guess I like not knowing.

Not knowing is fun.

The national mantra

From John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog

“Fuck you, make me” is, to me, the founding principle of this nation. That was our message to King George III, a tyrant descending into madness...

Then from another post

This is how you handle a bully: “Fuck you, make me.”

Yeah.

I’ve got a ton of stuff I want to get done today. I’m off to a good start… Hoping to maintain momentum. Here are a few things on the pile of stuff I want to get to at some point (I don’t think I’ll be able to get to it all).

• Work on the next episode of Artificial Analysis
• Work on the essay that I’ve been trying to finish on conditioned arising and psychoanalysis
• Catch up on the back-end business-related paperwork stuff that I’ve let build up
• Get a good walk in at some point

Tried working on an essay that I’ve been working on for longer than I expected. I could not get into the right mindset and sustain my focus in the way I needed to. Random thoughts about all sorts of other things kept getting in the way. I’m going to trust my unconscious and assume that today just isn’t the day to write this thing.

When the day has a certain vibe, the best thing to do is listen to Joe Frank’s voice.

From On Writing, Content, and Art, by Manu:

This is clearly writing and, therefore, I am a writer. But in that case, we’re probably all writers. We all text and send emails and post online. Are we all writers? What makes a writer a writer? The medium? The length? The meaning? The time spent?

Fun to think about those questions, eh?

From Warren Ellis’s newsletter Orbital Oppositions:

Feeling good, doing what you like and taking pleasure in things isn’t a luxury. […] here’s the takeaway: live your life like it’s worth living. You’ll feel better. Wear your favourite clothes. Cate Winter, a wiser woman than I will ever be a man, once said to me; don’t save things for that perfect time, because that time will never come and what you’re saving will either go bad or never be used at all, so enjoy them now.

Yeah.

From Midnight Radio: A Toarchlight Shining at the Bastards by James Reeves.

Where he writes about this amazing brass pirate lamp his grandfather owned.

For decades, this brass pirate lamp stood on a workbench in my grandfather’s basement that smelled of spider poison and Saginaw Bay.

That, whoever is reading this, is one hell if a sentence! I wish I wrote sentences that good.

Anyway, James talks about how when his grandfather was moved into a retirement home.

To help residents locate their rooms, the nursing staff encouraged each patient to place a memento on a shelf next to each door. Plastic flowers, birthday cards, family snapshots, and woodland figurines lined the halls because it’s easier to remember a picture of your grandchild than room 27B.

That got me thinking about memory, and our relationship to memory. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as of late. Don’t know why.

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

Very quickly filling up a notebook with bad ideas. Which is the only way I know of to get at the better ideas.

Yeah.

Over on the Disquiet blog, Marc Weidenbaum will post 30 seconds of an interesting sound he encounters just going about his day. (This one is of buzz saws.)

Today, I was walking to the park with one of my kids, and I noticed this small thumping sound, which turned out to be acorns from the oak trees dropping to the ground. I liked the sound and recorded 1:00 min of it. There are is also the sound of lawn mower and birds in the background.

I think this is a small tree growing up through a hole where some rebar is coming through a parking brick.

I thought this was pretty.

I wonder if it will last, or if someone in the future will cut it down or pull it out.

Via Tetragrammaton:

[Bern] Porter spent much of his ninety-three years on the far margins of American life, an irascible iconoclast who insisted that art was something to be found, lived, and distributed without ever asking for permission.

Yeah.

I’m watching the TV miniseries Devs on Hulu. It’s super good.

Great soundtrack! Very interesting ideas. Compelling story.

Just found the site Write That Blog. Lots of fun, interesting stuff here. Too bad I don’t have more time to read it all!

It’s very humid today. I’ve spent a lot of time today trying to play schedule Tetris for when my kids are back in school. The result is, I can’t fit in everything. Trying to let go of some stuff that I give time to is difficult for me…

I’m writing this post in iA Writer, which remains one of my favorite things to use for writing and thinking.

I’m going to try to post this to my micro.blog.

Hoping it works.

“Dad, don’t know what a Nelson class ship is?” Asked my kid.

“I known Nelson is a kid in the Simpsons.” I replied.

The kid thinks for a moment, then says, “so you don’t know.”

This is a test post from Obsidian.

From Chris Arnade’s Substack:

Culture has two components, thin and thick. Thin culture is the surface stuff—fashion, food, music. Thick culture is deeper: What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?"

Yeah.

Looking back at what I’ve posted and podcasted about recently, I see a theme of me now looking back on the young me and seeing him as rather judgmental. What’s interesting about this is that I now see myself then as judgmental, which is a judgment.

What should I make of catching myself judging a younger version of myself for being judgmental?

When I think about it right now, I see a fundamental difference. The way I remember it, the young me was very sure of his judgments. Additionally, the young me felt rather righteous and self-important.

I still judge (obviously). I can’t get divorced from making judgments all the time about everything.

However, I hope I’m much more prone to questioning my judgments and less quick to trust them. I also hope I don’t take myself as seriously as I did in my younger years, because it seems to me that taking oneself seriously breeds feelings of self-righteousness and self-importance, which in turn lead to impulsive, often regretful actions.