008: SYNCHRONICITY (not the Police album)
Llora flecha sin blanco,
la tarde sin mañana,
y el primer pájaro muerto
sobre la rama. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca, "The Guitar"
First, COMPILATION.
Sometimes I wonder if I care too much about formatting, they say, at two thirty in the morning, after punching newsletter WYSI(not)WYG html in the face for the past hour and a half. At this point I almost don't even remember what the actual content was.
Inbox Zero
One thing I don't think gets brought up enough in poly circles is envy. Not jealousy, the thing where you don't want to share what you have, but envy, that thing where you want what you don't have. What I mean is, your partner has, gets, or is something you don't, can't, or aren't. It's not something I can explain more in-depth, but it's very much a FOMO/grief sort of feeling. I wish we talked about that more in an arrangement style that is specifically predicated on differences in fulfillment and experience. (I also wish we, as a society, correctly labeled "jealousy" and "envy" more often.) This insight brought to you by Several Weeks of Depression.
Me: Alright! Two hours of brain spinning up, lets get dressed and head out for errands!
The weather: haha fuck you and your errands! it's gonna be a MOIST HEAT and you're gonna HATE IT HAHAHAHA
I had originally posted this, which is from the book Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, to Facebook and Instagram five years ago. At the time... and now, I suppose... I was heavily interested in the sheer amount of data the world generates, and how all of that has to be processed, by the brain and by people. It's also why I'm amazed by people like my spouse, whose memories are basically bulletproof, as compared to me, whose brain vaguely remembers that things happened at some point, but could have been last week or 1996. Like I need an outside reference to place almost everything else in time.
It's mostly personal experiences that I have this problem with, but:
What happens is I'll remember something happening, or needing to recall when something was. Instead of remembering it in some kind of linear fashion, I have to narrow it down by part of life (high school? college? which one? elementary? which one?) and then try to cross-reference it with details and poorly-remembered timeline details from there. I basically have to reverse engineer linear temporality (brb writing that down) (okay back) and create what is my *best guess* as to how and when things happened.
This creates problems for certain things like remembering how and when, for example, a partner and I met, or when something happened at an internet forum, or which game of Magic a certain thing happened, but it extends to things like people I was with, the years things happened, the order of certain events, and so on. My memory is fucking Swiss cheese, and furthermore it's organized really poorly thanks to trauma, depression, alcoholism, and ADHD. And for as much as I worry about losing my mind/memory, I have to wonder all the time about whether I had it to begin with, or if it was just a lot of test results that didn't account for a living person.
I think a big part of my fascination with machine learning, organization, and data in general is that I'm always trying to figure out how to make my brain actually work the way I always thought it was supposed to.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- The most recent single from Billie Eilish, "Happier Than Ever". There's breakup songs, and then there's Billie Eilish breakup songs.
- Allison Krauss and Robert Plant have a new album coming up, and the lead from it is on the youtube. I really enjoyed their first album together, and this one seems to be most of the same creative team.
- Speaking of YouTube, I've spent the past week or so just devouring more car content. I happened upon Donut Media, and like any good YouTube empire, they have a fair number of weird personalities, but the info in a lot of their videos is solid. I'm a particular fan of the Wheelhouse series, which are basically video essays on car shit. Here's one I really like. Honestly, YouTube has been one of the biggest drivers (heh) on my return to cars and sports (through SB Nation/Secret Base, which is a similar nerd factory just about sports. Jon Bois is a genius.) One thing about car YouTube specifically is I really need to get out of the white cismale circle and start looking for more BIPOC and queer creators. I never thought I'd give myself YouTube homework before...
Fourth, PROMOTION.
This is the part where I talk about my book, A Void and Cloudless Sky, which you can order here. The book itself is up for sale on Amazon and BN.com now, too! I assume they'll ship out ASAP, but I haven't seen any copies from my publishers, but whatever. Do you want a FREE Advanced Reader Copy? All I ask is that you review it on either/both of those sites and/or Goodreads. Let me know!
And as usual, if you'd like to support this whole endeavor more directly, you can check out my Patreon, where I post poetry, notes to poems, the occasional essay, and whatnot. At upper tiers I even write poems FOR YOU!
If you like what I do here and don't have the scratch or the inclination to do the above, please share this newsletter with you friends. I like making words wiggle people's brainjuices.
Last week I talked about structure and a bit of influence. As it turned out, Kieron Gillen's newsletter last week had this bit in it, where he's talking about designing an RPG:
There’s a sense I’ve had that my game design is somehow an extension of my criticism (in the same way my comics writing has). The point of my games is to essentially render myself obsolete. It’s not enough to write a story. It’s to write a structure which allows you to make your own version of that story at home. I understand it enough to explain it well enough so you can can do it yourself, and then go on to do whatever you want. I’m trying to explain a magic spell and/or a demonic summoning ritual. You do this, and will create something. What, I can’t be sure, but it will be magical and yours.
That's what I mean about structure. Mr. Gillen and I were apparently on the same wavelength last week.
I also want to take a second to cite Damien Patrick Williams, whose newsletter was also a huge inspiration for starting my own, particularly on the COMPILATION section. Damien's newsletters are, effectively, his Twitter threads compiled and annotated and expanded, and it's such an interesting and simple concept that I feel silly for not having thought of it before. (And of course, others have done it before him, but his was the one that made me really think about doing it.) Damien is a social scientist and futurist in the field of AI, and his threads are often some extremely deep dives into the ramifications of algorithms and the people who create them on the people who use them, and the places, spaces, and communities who will be most harmed by them. He's a genuinely brilliant dude, and I suggest following him if you do the Twitter thing.