Welcome to Season 8
Hello again. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m going to try writing weeknotes, vaguely inspired by Buttondown’s recent return to weeknotes and Gina Trapani’s...
Bare Minimum Skincare Routine
I’ve belatedly taken up a skincare routine, after much badgering from friends and loved ones. I found skincare overwhelming, but it turns out a “bare...
On Self-Deprecation
Recently, I picked up Quimby Mouse, which collects some of Chris Ware’s early Acme Novelty Library strips. Ware is arguably the greatest living comics...
If The United States Is Conscious, Then Why Not An LLM?
One of Jean Baptiste Vérany’s chromolithographs of cephalopods I recently realized I may be one of the only people on Earth to hold this philosophical...
Good Old Fashioned Linkblog
It’s been a while since I’ve done a good-old-fashioned link blog! So here’s some things I’ve been reading recently: “A cheat sheet for why using ChatGPT is...
Automating the Personal
Is there really value in personal automation? I wrote a whole essay on Raycast and I’m still not really sure. Even though xkcd has a helpful chart for how...
Time to Read the (Eastern) Classics
As promised last time: more classics! To keep this one manageable, I’ve kept it to just East Asian classics, which makes up the bulk of the non-western...
Time to Read the (Western) Classics
No more LLMs this week! Back to my usual beat... whatever that is. During the pandemic — a time that even now takes on the tinge of the historical — I...
Let’s Think Step-by-Step
Sorry, another LLM newsletter. I promise next week I have a different topic. (But first, some ideation for zine 4!) Recently there’s been some Discourse™️...
But What Is It *Good* For?
Today I’d like to talk about AI again. Feel free to come back next time if that doesn’t interest you 🙂 ‘Leibniz’s Calculating Machine’ from Theatrum...
Micromarriages
By popular demand: micromarriages. In risk analysis, a one-in-a-million chance of death is called a micromort. A skydiving jump, for instance, gives you 8...
Matcha Lattes
Lately I’ve been making a lot of matcha lattes. Here’s the recipe I’ve settled on. I heat 8oz (1 cup) of water to 180°F in my beloved OXO adjustable-...
Best of the Rest
After my list of best films of 2024, here’s the best of the rest of media in 2024. Books My reading this year tended more towards non-fiction than previous...
That Was The Year That Was in Movies
In 2024, I watched 68 movies and 20 seasons of television. Here are some of the standouts. Imagine that each one gets a little statue of me saluting them 🫡...
Farmers & Foragers
Have you ever noticed that some writers and thinkers always seem to be arguing, while others are more comfortable raising questions without answering them?...
How to Take Pills
Hello from the second week of a pretty awful chest cold.1 I cannot particularly recommend getting sick. 2 I’ve been relying on Mucinex the last two days....
List of Mysteries
Here’s a few things that I personally still find mysterious. If you have recommendations to read up on any of these, let me know! What is the origin of...
Generic High Fantasy
I was watching the second season of Arcane recently and realized it’s canonizing new “defaults” for the (high) fantasy genre. If you think of the most...
A Cancer on Liberalism
Fascism is eternal. In surveys of the twentieth century, fascism and communism are often presented as twin ideologies — two alternatives to liberalism that...
The Art of Gathering
Mission Bay's new Bayfront Park is now open! Apropos of nothing, here are event or icebreaker ideas I want to pursue: Write all the attendees’ names on cards...
