...audioslave?
the work problems i was ambiently dreading having to figure out for the start of my monday i found, on holding my breath while opening slack and checking my notifications, had already been solved for me by teammates before i started work, unblocking me. posting a post for them in our gratitude channel (lmao). lately, i don't have any meetings at all on mondays or tuesdays or fridays, which reminds me of being in college and trying to schedule my classes so i always had three or four day weekends. i've been trying (and doing pretty okay at) working on ignoring slack and focusing, partly for my efficiency as a worker/need to get shit done but also for my mental health and trying not to fragment my fragmented consciousness any more than it is already always being fragmented.
i posted a poll in slack (at the tech company where i work) about how despite so much of my life and work involving using a computer, i almost never have dreams that involve me using a computer, and whether that was true of others and like 90% of people say they never dream of using a computer. there were various theories—mine was the "cinematic" theory, that so much of how we think about/remember/narrate our dreams is drawn from movies and TV and computer usage and extended sequences of computer usage are rare because they are not considered to be particularly cinematic, but the one i liked best was the "trans-humanist" theory another coworker shared, basically the idea that we think of these devices and what they can do is so integrated into our sense of self that inside we don't think of them as separate from our bodies (and so don't dream of them that way).
the novel after world by debbie urbanski, which is about an AI trying to narrate the life story of the last surviving human on a future Earth based on diaries and recordings and is so good!!! high-concept formally playful sci-fi with rich world-building that also really hits on the sentence and character level (a rare jewel) and the style of the narration from the AI (/its "characterization") rings against and rhymes with the current chatbot experience in interesting ways). recommended especially if you liked the ministry for the future or aurora or station eleven (which we still need to go back and watch the TV show for).
the Suno AI app, which is the most fun you will have with AI today (if you are person who has fun with AI—i understand if you aren't, but i am!). it's a music generator that in terms of the coherence and quality of its output (you can either give it a prompt or provide lyrics and a description of the sound) is head and shoulders above anything i've ever seen, a step change. i'm thankful, as someone whose "thing" at work is making novelty songs for my coworkers, to feel threatened but also (as with most AI things that in some way might threaten me and my future (see also)), i also can't help myself from being amazed at the magic and wanting to play with it.
on saturday we were all up in the attic taking turns sharing our tiktok feeds with each other and in my feed, which heavily features skateboarding videos, classic/alt rock/indie live performances, and competitive eating, an early seventies live video of wings playing "live and let die" showed up and t asked k who the band was (knowing she wouldn't know) and k said, gamely (but totally unsure), "...audioslave?" and t and i laughed very hard. then k telling me yesterday that this has spawned a new bit in their household where anytime any music comes on, k asks t if it's audioslave.
watching the real world: homecoming, new orleans (rental, amazon video) after (as recently mentioned) rewatching the real world: new orleans (streaming on netflix and paramount+, rental on amazon video), which i thought was going to just be boring and soft because of their age but there is still tons of drama and it's fascinating! i'm thankful that the producers worked out licensing for contemporary songs and at one point the needle drop was "sex and candy" by marcy playground, a song/video that i loved and remember vividly during its peak waiting every afternoon on TRL to hear some (often abridged, if it wasn't in the top slot or if it was but a previous live segment went too long) version of, and i asked deborah if she knew it and she said yes and that she thinks primarily from a commercial for one of the NOW compilations (turns out it was the inaugural one) and we both reminisced about those commercials, which in the last lights of the pre-Napster era were a crucial delivery mechanism for music, the short song hooks distilled down further and further to the essence of their pop.
Previously on this day:
- 2016 (from fsa) (_dreams of new orleans, )
- 2017 (from fm) (the weekends i don't work in a bar, solo cinema trips, salsa dripping from our fingers)
- 2018 (various tweets)
- 2018 (2) ("leftovers that last the whole week and that you don't get tired of eating")
- 2019 ("i’m thankful d and i can hold each other, since when we don’t, and when we’re fighting, it’s so easy to reduce the other person to an idea, a concept, some words and a tone of voice, but when we hold each other, even though it isn’t a cure-all and we still have to deal with the conflict, the issues, the physical contact is grounding (like a wire against lightning), stabilizing (like sandbags against flood), it holds a trace of all of the other times we’ve held each other, on so many good days and nights, and i’m thankful that though it doesn’t fix the broken thing, if we do it for a little while it means something and sometimes that thing is the difference we need to keep going.")