Not exactly related, a friend recently told me that calling someone a "spaz" who acts absurdly or with an excess of enthusiasm, is no longer (/ was never ?) appropriate. My boss and other boomer (ok technically gen-xer) coworkers use this term liberally, as does my boomer mother and myself and others of my cohort.
I do not want to dwell on correctness of this term or of prescribing / proscribing language, only to share that this is the sort of the thing I had thought the article would be about.
Readit Newsguggalugalug commented on Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid frontiersin.org/articles/... · Posted by u/limbicsystem
An uncle of mine loaned me his abridged Vonnegut shelf, including Galapagos. Sirens of Titan also is good. Very strange.
For people who do not read much but are desirous of learning more, I'm unsure of the best approach. Maybe Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat's Cradle?
Vonnegut deals in Scenes. It is why we love him. Like Fitzgerald, he wrote of a Movie Age. And so I evaluate him based upon his individual scenes, not books.
My favorite is from Breakfast of Champions. Kilgore Trout, who I believe was a trucker or maybe only a hitchhiker, walks onto the tarmac of a strip mall used car dealership. He has somehow warped thru various dimensionalities. He looks down at the ground.
It reminded me of my father's description of walking the sidewalks of nyc after eating a brown paper bag of buttons: kicking a suddenly kaleidoscopic shard of glass. Or as Pynchon would say, you see "the warp and woof" of things.
guggalugalug commented on TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone wired.com/story/tiktok-ph... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
This really is a feature I seem to lack. Standing in a line without at least listening to music makes me really uncomfortable. I don't know where to look, what to do etc.
It is tough. I feel you.
Your hands suddenly, are very large; where do they go, or what do they do?
But turn the music off.
Take a breath. No one is talking about you, nor do you even exist; except as another human body cohabiting, briefly, space with others.
Your identity consists of your instantiation in space; you can relax, allow your body-vessel to idle, and crunch through non-present problems. Or just relish the ambient hum. Maybe someone else who is unplugged has made fleeting eye contact, and asked you about the weather.
guggalugalug commented on The Age of PageRank Is Over blog.kagi.com/age-pageran... · Posted by u/darthShadow
"With the inevitable advancement of our civilization"
unless advancement is understood as necessarily attendant upon linear time unspooling, it is no ways inevitable
guggalugalug commented on TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone wired.com/story/tiktok-ph... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
I'm finally in a place where the only website I religiously check is HN. Because of it's nature, for me, it never takes up more than a few minutes every couple of hours.
It took hard work to get there. I use Nextdns to block domains of websites and apps when I realize I spend too much time on them. Could I just allowlist domains, sure, and sometimes I do that when I need to look at something on Reddit for instance. But it's easy to just not cheat.
I stopped checking news sites at all and it's been an absolute blessing. Very little that's in the news actually matters to me or my family. Even the publicly funded media is full of clickbait and sensationalism, just not worth it.
I use local public radio to stay somewhat informed about things I should know, legislation for example that's relevant to us. Radio works because it's a limited resource so at least in my case, the signal to noise ratio is acceptable there, at least every now and then.
I've been doing that for a little while now and I feel much happier. I use my phone much less frequently and for less time now. I love it.
Amen. One easy step anyone can take towards this direction of intentful filtering is to refrain from pulling the phone out of the pocket when standing in line. Just stand there. Look around. Watch other people. Think. Listen. The world exposed via your pocket device will not miss you. And after a while, you will learn to not miss it.
I just got my first iphone. A 3rd gen(?) SE. I love the device.
I'm not a big computers guy, but have used two different mac book pros and most recently a household imac for personal since 2008.
On mobile, after BlackBerry, I went samsung / android in large part to intentionally fragment my device / os ecosystem, not put all my eggs in one cart. Samsung devices are very clever. They do not have the same cozy feel as apple, but they are smart.
Now my work buddy texts me a twitter link, and it shows on my desktop when i open up safari to check my mail. I don't like that, I don't want that. Maybe I am not ready for ambient computing?
I love apple devices, but the os increasingly seems openly confrontational if not hostile. In part I finally switched to apple on mobile because i was tired of android bloat, but it has followed me, just in a different form.
A lot of the angst in this thread seems to be borne of the competing incentives of hardware, software, and services. Apple used to be more of a walled garden than they are today. And that, before they were a trillion dollar concern, maybe gave them latitude to execute purely on creative vision.
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guggalugalug commented on On the cheap, like a local, and without a lot of luggage walkingtheworld.substack.... · Posted by u/brandrick
> And like good fiction, travel changes you. For the better. Mostly.
Fiction changes you? For the better?! Mostly?!?!?!? I need some expansion on this. I have been living in the non-fiction darkness.
Great literature -- not airport bestsellers, of course. How could a deep, intimate window into another part of our shared human condition _not_ change you? Mostly for the better.
guggalugalug commented on How do you make an enduring toy? thewalrus.ca/how-do-you-m... · Posted by u/herbertl
I recently was at a birthday event for my niece, whose family is fairly affluent. Most of the toys were quite expensive things for a 3 year old, complex computer looking workstations made of plastic or faux kitchen accessories.
We gave her a small soccer ball (kid size, but well made). Once she opened it, she stopped unwrapping presents and wanted to play with the soccer ball. She ignored everything else the rest of the afternoon to kick the ball around the picnic tables. She threw tantrum when they had to pick up the ball to go home (even though she was still holding the ball).
Something well made, the function and form of which has proven the test of time. Buy your kid a baseball, not an apple watch.
In another time and space, we used to say, style trumps fashion.
But my god, Pynchon has an astounding mind. The breadth of his cultural interests is vast. His wit is seemingly unending, almost to a fault. Bleeding Edge is good - I don't think tech folks are his primary audience, but it's great to read it with some software background because you can parse a little bit more of the BS, of which there is a lot. Pynchon is really interested in the line between reality and conspiracy and if you have a tech background and are interested in his work more broadly I think that reading Bleeding Edge could help make his more challenging works more approachable. At least that's what I'm hoping for myself.
Still, his best novels have got to be Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. Those are the monsters. But you get out what you put in.