29: They hosed down Iceman
Hose it all down.
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I started to write something for dear aliens with the hope of getting it done and sent by the end of April. It’s a different kind of writing. I have to physically mail it out which means I can’t ADHD my way through it with a reliance on footnotes, asides, and hyperlinks. I need clarity. And efficiency.
Meanwhile my usual writing here is expectedly all over the place and struggling to stay contemporaneous as decades pass in a week. And it’s mostly about AI bullshit so, uh, next time.
Speaking of sending things through physical mail, I enjoyed this piece (substack warning) about the mail Panic gets (and sends back): The amazing mail sent to a video game publisher.
Similarly, I came across these photos from Tokyo being published in a zine. Sorry, I can’t spend $130 on a zine but I appreciate the photos and the physicality of them, both their printing and how they were shot. Or if you prefer, a zine about 1960s Penguin Crime Novels. Or if you prefer, the amazingly titled Shareware Made Me Trans by Anna Anthropy.
Support Canadian Independent Bookstore Day this weekend. If anything, do it as a counter to Anthropic destroying 2 million books to train its model.
I’m trying to get rid of some books and magazines. Without destroying them! If you want a surprise box of books and/or magazines respond to this and we can arrange a mail out. I’ll cover the postage as long as it’s not ridiculous.
A Canadian tourist was killed by a gunman at Teotihuacan this week. Turns out the shooter was a right wing radical, a nazi (yes these exist in Mexico), a fan of US school shootings, and an AI enthusiast. Probably a groyper. The Canadian media is all over this, though not so much about the ideology of the actual shooter as much as framing how dangerous Mexico is ahead of the World Cup.
Buddy, if you’re worried about getting shot by far-right radicals there’s a World Cup host country that I would be worried about and it’s not Mexico.
I’m not going to dwell too much on the narrative of this but I did want to highlight one very specific point of hypocrisy. A week prior a Canadian was killed in another country and the media hasn’t been as vocally critical of it. Why? Well, you can guess: the killer was a state actor committing ethnic cleansing, a right wing national state, a fan of school bombings, and an AI enthusiast: Israel. He was killed by a drone while trying to help another man hit by a drone.
Canadian Foreign Affairs has put out comments about both and what it’s doing blah blah but just compare the wording on the Minister of Foreign Affairs’ tweets. The Canadian in Mexico was “killed” by “a horrific act of gun violence” (xcancel.) The Canadian in Lebanon, she was informed had “died”, and something vague about diplomatic solutions and disarming the only resistance in the area (xcancel.) Motherfucker, how did he die?
I get that Canada is trying to invest in innovation, but can it do it without supporting innovations like fucking quadruple tap strikes or new ways to deploy white phosphorous?
Meanwhile at home the corrupt Toronto Police Service is randomly showing up to harass movie screenings and comedy shows because they’re tangentially related to Palestine. They must have been exhausted from policing a promotional block of ice.
Related Links
Just cause I’m thinking about writing, I saw this relinked a while ago and it’s funny that her award winning book started as basically a joke with her reading a generic writing guide: The 90-Day Novel. If it worked for her, maybe it can work for me!
Our uncritical reverence for metrics allows for what Nguyen calls “objectivity laundering” – bureaucrats disguising their agency in decisions regarding our schools, hospitals and wellbeing, by evoking “the numbers” as impartial arbiters. Those in power choose which metrics to champion, then claim actions driven by those metrics somehow transcend ideology.
GDC Vault - How Tabletop Design Helped Shape 'UFO 50'
Not super related but I enjoy this talk about how physical board games informed some of the games in “UFO 50.”
Listen to this
“Blasé Saint” by Matryoshka. A really fantastic album of fuzzed out nostalgia, down tempo dubs, trip hop, all smothered in aquatic ambiance. Honestly, listen to this on repeat over that first new Boards of Canada single in over a decade. Unfortunately, I don’t think this one is on streaming so Bandcamp it is.
Where to from here,
sometimes.