La Nausée

Aug 19
Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Simone De Beauvoir at la Coupole in Paris, 1969, as photographed by French photographer Bruno Barbey.
Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Simone De Beauvoir at la Coupole in Paris, 1969, as photographed by French photographer Bruno Barbey.

It’s hard to love Nausea but easy to see why it’s a seminal work. Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist (?), is insufferable. He suffers through life, disgusted with his existence and existence around him. He wallows in the mundanity of being alive, and we get to (have to?) do it with him. Next to nothing happens as he moves from library to cafe, painfully detailing the world around him.

Which is the point. What makes it instrumental is that you feel seen. From the first person, a number of times, Sartre’s descriptions, asides, and observations via Roquentin are the same thoughts I’ve had and that, most likely, you’ve had. In a well-examined life, it is inevitable one would arrive at the paradox of being. And having experienced the void of what it means to be alive, the use of “nausea” to detail its procession from nowhere to comprehensive seizure is unerring.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that is all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been traveling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: You never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. … The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you being to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Link Jul 31

The P.T. Barnum Of Tech

Sam Altman, "The P.T. Barnum Of Technology"
Sam Altman, “The P.T. Barnum Of Technology”

Sam Altman needs you to believe that AI will kill us all or going to destroy all our jobs and that he’s a little bit scared of AI, because if you think for even a second about what this man is saying, you’ll realize that he’s not an engineer, he’s a lobbyist and a liar.

Edward Zitron

Starting Out

Jul 19
Jessica Anthony, author of The Most
Jessica Anthony, author of The Most

I hated it when authors would say things like, “I didn’t know what the character was going to do.” It shattered my belief in fully-formed narratives, that genius is complete, self-contained.

Likewise, I hated it when authors would say things like, “I let the character tell me what to write.” This is hand-in-hand with the above. I wanted Gods; I was getting free will.

I have written a book now, so now I understand where my ignorance was coming from. When making a movie, actors get to use their experience and background narratives in bringing life to the characters. But when writing a book, it’s just you. You have to invent the personas and inhabit them when required in the text. I was ignorant of this before I had to do it.

Ignorance firmly displaced, it now gives me great comfort seeing that other writers just… write, which is what inhabiting the characters is actually about. Start somewhere and let them lead you.

Jessica Anthony wrote a book called The Most, a novel where protagonist Kathleen Lovelace “decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.” A great hook, and:

I only know that when Kathleen got up and decided to go for a swim, she didn’t know what would happen to her that day because I didn’t know.

Jessica Anthony
Interview with Chloe Norman on The Dirt

It turned into a psychological thriller that shifts perspectives between Lovelace and her husband set over the course of eight hours in a day, but the hook was all the seed she needed to begin.

A friend of mine, Michael Kearns, helped me edit the first few chapters of my book. He’s a writer himself. As he was working with me on my book, he told me over lunch he was inspired but that the only thing he had was one line: “Jesus walked into a bar.”

Less than three months later, he sent me a full manuscript based around that one quip. He didn’t know where “Jesus” was going to go, but he went and Kearns wrote.

I get it now. It doesn’t have to come out fully formed. That’s not how babies work.

Instead, you just have to start.

Black Gloves

Jul 16
Tommie Smith, left, and John Carlos, Olympic medal winners
One pair of black gloves split between two black men, and it would be just a coincidence that both black men had each hurt their hand?

One of the best, most incredible photos that has ever existed. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, first place and third place in the 200m dash, respectively, Oct. 16, 1968, Mexico City. Wearing black to represent Black America. No shoes, black socks to represent the poverty in which American Blacks lived. As a representation of lynching, Smith wore a scarf and Carlos a bead necklace.

But they also wore black gloves.

They only had one pair, so they split: Smith wore the right, Carlos the left. But the man who put the medals on their necks, Lord David George Brownlow Cecil Burghley, was blissfully ignorant. When asked later what he had thought of the gloves, he said: “I thought they had hurt their hand.”

Throwing Shade

Jul 10
The cover was designed on a 150-by-150-pixel canvas at 72dpi and is scaled up regardless of application.
The cover was designed on a 150-by-150-pixel canvas at 72dpi and is scaled up regardless of application.

Charli XCX tested 65 shades of green before settling on “the most ultimate brat green.”

“Imagine AI coming up with this. It would never.”

Max Ottignon

More great commentary from Ottignon on the campaign.

“We designed the album at 150px/72dpi then resized for whichever format we needed it for in the earlier days of the campaign. It then became a daily task for someone at the studio to have to communicate to a printer that the low res was intentional.”

SPECIAL OFFER, Inc.‘s Brent David Freaney

The Man in the Mirror

Mar 15
An Inmate From The Joliet Correctional Center Shows A Battered Nose (At Left) And, Two Years Later, The Results Of His Cosmetic Surgery
An Inmate From The Joliet Correctional Center Shows A Battered Nose (At Left) And, Two Years Later, The Results Of His Cosmetic Surgery

Dr. Michael Lewin, born in Poland in 1909, was encouraged by his uncle to go into the field of cosmetic surgery. At age 25, he moved from Poland to the United States. That was in 1934. A few weeks after arriving, he joined the house staff at Beth Israel hospital in New York, but by the time he was ready to pursue a private practice, World War II had overcome the U.S. medical field. Lewin became a Major in the Medical Corps and served dutifully until the war was over.

Following, his list of accomplishments and titles would be extensive: founder, chief, director, sometimes all three. Post-war, he could do as he pleased. But among all his responsibilities to this professional work, he pursued a number of special projects in reconstructive surgery. One of those normally would have become a footnote in his career; when Lewin passed away, he was actively a member of 23 separate medical societies and the aforementioned list could fill volumes. But in 1963, he had decided to take up the mantle for a social idea: If we physically altered the look of inmates, would that change their futures?

Read the Full Post

A New Form Of Regulatory Capture

Mar 14

“The most disgusting pro-monopoly thesis yet … Government should support Big Tech monopoly maintenance, because Apple and Google can more strongly reinforce US control over information …”

Tim Sweeney, Twitter/X

It used to be about protection: “We will protect you” as the trojan horse for monopoly. “Who controls my data?” is the latest.

It is not a binary decision. It’s a false dichotomy. As Ryan Broderick recently wrote:

White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan asked reporters yesterday: “Do we want the data from TikTok — children’s data, adults’ data — to be going — to be staying here in America or going to China?”

What about, uh, no one? What if nobody had… our children’s data?

Broderick, What if nobody owned our children’s data?

The Top 18 Movies Of 2023

Dec 29
The Top 18 Movies of 2023
The Top 18 Movies of 2023

18

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

I didn’t think I would be tearing up at a climax involving a 12-year-old getting her period, but here we are.

17

The Killer

David Fincher’s work is a creative muse for me.

16

Anatomy Of A Fall

Some obvious metaphors cheapen the script, but the deliberation and in-depth character study save it. An especially great performance by Swann Arlaud.

15

How To Blow Up A Pipeline

I mean, they did it. Might sound wild, but I didn’t think They would let them do it but they did it.

14

May December

The real star of this movie is Marcelo Zarvos and Michel Legrand’s soundtrack.

13

Bottoms

Rachel Sennott is one of my favorite people working in movies right now.

12

Thanksgiving

The very reason I have a filmmaking degree was because of horror movies, and Eli Roth wrote Hostel. It’s not easy to make slasher films patently un-camp even with lines like, “There will be no leftovers.”

11

Maestro

Includes the second best scene of the year.

Read the Full Post

The Top 18 Songs Of 2023

Dec 12
Let's Do This, 2023: Emarosa, Face Yourself, Better Lovers, CHVRCHES, Rosalía
Let’s Do This, 2023: Emarosa, Face Yourself, Better Lovers, CHVRCHES, Rosalía

18

“Red Dot Sight”

To The Grave

The face you make at the breakdown.

17

“Sunshine!”

Beartooth

Caleb Shomo is one of the modern kings of melody without sacrifice.

16

“What Was I Made For?”

Billie Eilish

I think I read somewhere from some critic that this song was a disappointment because it was too on the nose for its release for Barbie. Dude. What an existential cogitation.

15

“Yo Preferi Chambear”

Chino Pacas

Most of Peso Pluma’s stuff slaps — and Mexican Regional or corridos tumbados common to Sinaloa and the Guadalajara area where he’s from has been internationally chart breaking for a couple of years now. Now, Peso Pluma’s winning VMAs and Billboard Music Awards. Chino Pacas isn’t from the same region as Peso Pluma — he’s about a four-hour drive due east in Guanajuato — but the Regional Mexican influence is fire and whatever coattails it took to get this 16 year old to this song, I’m in.

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Not For The Glory Of War

Oct 17
The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras by Elizabeth Thompson
The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras by Elizabeth Thompson

This painting is called “The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras,” painted in 1875 by Elizabeth Thompson. It hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

It’s a war scene, but to me, it’s muted. The primary color comes from the soldiers’ uniforms, and it’s a dullish, blood red as if the blood had been spilled an hour before and has already oxidized. The sky is colored by a sunset horizon — we can see the colors peeking through — but the sunset is covered in greys from the clouds. Squint, and it looks exactly like the ground.

I love the way Thompson draws our eye up and back down through the implied pyramid at the center, rooted on the protective stance of the lower soldiers merge into the sphere that surrounds the English regiment in position.

The English opponents have either fallen or are falling or… non-existant? There are only about four enemies despite myriad British soldiers. The troops’ faces are all stoic.

Except for this guy. Thompson put him dead center, one of very few soldiers in this painting she even chose to give an expression. And he’s the one in the strongest position of the pyramid:

Hidden within the lifeless faces and quintessence of war is this guy. He is having a blast.

Lady Butler said, “I never painted for the glory of war, but to portray its pathos and heroism.” But occasionally, heroes love blood.

There Is No Mystery

Jun 14
Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

Yesterday, Cormac McCarthy died of natural causes at 89.

McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian, the best book of all time. I have always loved to write, but after reading Blood Meridian, I felt like I could never write again.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

He wrote with with three- and four-word phrases that devastate and demand: “See the kid.” “A legion of horribles…”

Not six months before his death, he published his final novel and an accompanying novella. His biblical writing never waned.

If birds couldn’t fly they wouldn’t sing.

His truth was profound to me in nearly everything he wrote, simple and direct, honest and unflinching. He made me think about how I fit into a world where “the Earth is a globe in a void the truth there’s no up nor down to it.”

He loved mathematics and physics and saw the beauty in them. He wrote extensively about them in some of his work, while also seeing the beauty in landscape, something that was alive to him, seeing its magnificence even in cataclysm.

He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

He reminded me that every day you get up is a fight worth fighting.

What’s the bravest thing you ever did? He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

Until there are no more days.

And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?

Quote Mar 2

“To ride the zeitgeist successfully you have to know when it’s turned,” says Marc Andreessen. Just kidding, that’s a quote from Tina Brown in her 2017 memoir, The Vanity Fair Diaries, which chronicles her time editing Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. … “It should be a sound, not an echo.”

Daisy Alioto in “The Taste Economy” quoting Tina Brown
The Vanity Fair Diaries
Permalink: Earth Chamber

An American Socialist

Jan 31
Growth at all costs
Growth at all costs

In one of the best parts of Triangle of Sadness, a yacht is being torn to shreds by a storm while the Captain — who remains drunk and in his room for most of the journey — and a hyper-wealthy foreigner find common ground trading barbs about socialism and capitalism. The captain, an American socialist, and the traveler, a Russian capitalist, drink each other under the table.

One of the quotes the Captain says to the traveler represents an important tenant of my investment philosophy, shaped by my work with Golden Section. Andrew Smith, one of our executive directors, recently said to me:

It’s that type of thinking we work against, to go and spend all the money and then go and raise more. You could be in a position to never have to do that again and be just fine! Sometimes it’s doing a lot of reorienting with founders, to realign with them their actual goals.

I recently went to a lecture featuring (a local Houston) company, and (their co-founder and CEO) was like, “Look, you’re over here worried about giving up 5% of your company or 10% of your company? It doesn’t matter, you just gotta grow.” And I’m like, that is like the exact opposite — the polar opposite — of our view. It’s not the way we like to operate. People like that, right, they’re just trying to grow at all costs and hire and do all that rather than be worried about how their business runs and be worried about building something that’s sustainable over the long term. You lose sight of the business itself and just become the guy that’s out raising money all the time. You should be known as the guy that’s growing your business. 

Andrew Smith

In the movie, the Captain shoots back at Dimitry:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Edward Abbey.

Link Jan 19

Try Harder

I often say that “everything is securities fraud,” that every bad thing that a public company does can be characterized as securities fraud, because public companies do not disclose all of their bad actions in real time. Do 10% of public companies do undisclosed bad things each year, things that would lead to securities fraud lawsuits if they were discovered, but that mostly go undiscovered?

Matt Levine
“Slicing Cash Flows For Better Ratings”

If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.

Link Jan 10

Evolution and Quantumania

This raises an important question: What is the goal of human knowledge? As I see it — and as Breiman sees it — the fundamental objective is not understanding but control. By recording which crops grow in which season, we can feed our families. By understanding that germs cause disease, we can know to wash our hands or get a vaccine, and lower our risk of death. In these situations, knowledge and understanding might be intrinsically satisfying to our curiosity, but that satisfaction ultimately pales in importance to our ability to reshape our world to our benefit. 

Noah Smith
The Third Magic

Control is survival evolved.

(B)eing able to predict the economic growth of a few city blocks 10 years into the future with even 30% or 40% accuracy is leaps and bounds ahead of anything I’ve ever seen. It suggests that rather than being utter incomprehensible chaos, some economic systems have patterns and regularities that are too complex to be summarized with simple mathematical theories, but which nevertheless can be captured and generalized by AI.

Noah Smith
The Third Magic

Let’s say it’s 100% accurate. What happens we do predict ten years into the future, and then, ten years into the future, it’s observed and it’s not 100%? Do we say that the model was right but the inputs changed? Or do we have a way more intriguing phenomenon going on that mimics existential questions in the quantum realm?

The Top 13 Movies Of 2022

Dec 23
Luca Guadagnino Directing Bones and ALl, The Banshees of Inisherin, Top Gun: Maverick, and X
Luca Guadagnino Directing Bones and ALl, The Banshees of Inisherin, Top Gun: Maverick, and X

13

Blonde
Watch on Netflix

A true tragic figure, born to die.

12

Bodies Bodies Bodies
Watch on YouTube

“Our friend is dead. So if you could just, like, not escalate the situation, that’d be great.”

“I’m not escalating. You’re holding the knife and you’re moving your hands while you talk.”

11

Fresh
Watch on Hulu

The overly prosaic first half of the movie purposefully sets up a satisfying second act.

Read the Full Post

The Best Albums Of 2022

Dec 19
Charli XCX, The Weeknd, Orville Peck, and Oceans Ate Alaska
Charli XCX, The Weeknd, Orville Peck, and Oceans Ate Alaska

6

Disparity

Oceans Ate Alaska

What a relief to bloom and feel whole again

“Sol”
Oceans Ate Alaska

5

Crash

Charli XCX

You call it art but you pulled out my heart
And you twisted it into a new shape

“New Shapes”
Caroline Polachek

4

Dawn FM

The Weeknd

And if I finally die in peace
Just wrap my body in these sheets
And pour out the gasoline
It don’t mean much to me

“Gasoline”
The Weeknd

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The Top 19 Songs Of 2022

Dec 12
The Top Songs of 2022
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Ethel Cain, Paramore, Khruangbin, and The 1975, writing some of the best music of the year

19

“Stained in Rot”

Ov Sulfur

Ov Sulfur continues their noise parade, building on last year’s Oblivion EP, releasing two singles in 2022 that demand your attention for as long as you can stomach the beat down. “Stained in Rot” is a beacon for their up-and-coming full-length debut.

18

“Demon King”

Brand of Sacrifice

Ever since their second album, 2021’s Lifeblood, Brand of Sacrifice has been slowly releasing singles with collaborators: Underoath’s Spencer Chamberlain, We Came As Romans, and, on this track, Ryo Kinoshita (who, at the time, was Crystal Lake’s vocalist). The effect of the collaborations have yielded some serious metal songwriting alongside a unique flavor to each new work. The band dropped “Exodus” — notably, with no collaborators — right before the end of this year, so here’s hoping something from a new album ends up on this list next year.

17

“Pistol”

Cigarettes After Sex

Ask me at the end of next year, and I’ll look back at this list and say this song should have been higher.

16

“Diet Coke”

Pusha T

“Yesterday’s price is not today’s price.” That’s right. Pusha T can charge more now than ever.

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Sex Positive

Oct 3
Verizon banned porn on Tumblr
It’s a Puritan’s world, we’re just living in it

Matt Mullenweg wrote WordPress. (It powers this website alongside an absurd number of other websites to the estimated tune of 40% of the entire internet.) The software is free to use, but, in order to make money, he founded Automattic as a consulting group to help with… well, WordPress, among other things.

Tumblr was founded in 2007, right as the first iPhone was bringing the internet to your hands. WordPress was almost five years old by then, and the two platforms grew up alongside each other, both gaining significant market share as browsing the internet moved from “reading news at a physical computer” to “doomscrolling social sites standing in a line somewhere.”

WordPress never stopped its ascent, as evidenced by its 2021 market share noted above. Tumblr was also on the rise, walking alongside heavyweights like Reddit, and one of the major contributors to Tumblr’s rise as a unique, irreverent, and thriving website community was its safe-haven for adult-related content.

But in 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr, which, in 2017, was inherited by Verizon after its acquisition of Yahoo. So, naturally, in 2018, Verizon subsequently banned all “adult content,” a purposefully vague term that torpedoed Tumblr’s numbers.

If I were to attempt the impossible task of distilling the importance of adult content to Tumblr, I would do it with this quote from Vice:

Tumblr’s decision to effectively ban adult content has led to the erasure of stories, history, and communities of often marginalized people who made homes on Tumblr’s platform over the years. Archiving is a way to preserve that history.

“Archivists Say Tumblr IP Banned Them For Trying to Preserve Adult Content”
Vice

It was clear the new owners wanted nothing to do with it. It was more a thorn in their side than a cornerstone of the future for the communications company, which, after typing that out, feels incredibly inadequate. But, as the leader of a group that has spent his life creating online communities, Mullenweg spearheaded Automattic to step in, which bought the property in 2019 for a rumoured less-than-2% of Yahoo’s purchase price. It brought a small part of the internet full circle, and many had high hopes its new owners would reverse course on the porn ban.

I get the feeling Mullenweg wanted to, but it’s a near impossibility.

I’m not writing this to litigate the politics of sex work and what the ban did to the thriving adult community. I do want to be on record as pro sex work, though, and I understand the incredibly difficult nuances of running a website that allows for user generated content at scale; it’s a literal impossibility to moderate every image to ensure it’s legal prior to its posting.

I’m writing this because I found it fascinating what a grip credit card companies have on the adult industry. They all refuse to legitimize it, Mullenweg notes this in his addressing of the porn ban, and it’s why I feel like he wants to do something about it but can’t. Actually, the only reason I wanted to write this entire post was to note his quote (from that linked post) on what it would take to truly run an adult business online in 2022:

If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs. 

“Why ‘Go Nuts, Show Nuts’ Doesn’t Work in 2022”
Photo Matt

It’s a Puritan’s world, we’re just living in it.