Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one,
Like drops within the social river;
Oh, make us now together run
As swiftly as thy shining flivver.
Come, Greater Being, Social Friend,
Annihilating twelve-in-one!
We long to die, for when we end,
Our larger life has but begun.
The other day I was at a restaurant in Waterville Valley NH after a trip skiing, and the dinner conversation dipped political for a moment. A childhood friend of mine expressed a viewpoint that I had not heard or thought about in some time:
“America does everything for the world. We help everyone else out, but the second we call for help the rest of the world goes silent.”
Every American has a little WWII soldier in his heart hoisting up the American flag over Berlin. What happened after WWII, though? We don’t like to think about that part.
I think our sense of the world is naive, and I include myself in that American we. I don’t actually have a single clue what Chinese people or Russian people think about Americans, but I think we are less important, and certainly less lauded, than we desperately want to be. We make up, what, 5% of the global population?
Another friend of mine, Josh Hoffman, gave me a figure once that stunned me:
During the 1850s, around when Americans were gearing up for the Civil War, the Chinese were going through what is known as the Taiping Rebellion. Let’s say half a million people died in the American Civil War. The Taiping Rebellion lasted over a decade and 20 million people died, a figure that Wikipedia likens to the first world war. Those numbers don’t really make sense to us. Think about how impactful the American civil war remains to us even centuries later. We still feel the aftershocks and the resentment. Other countries feel that kind of shit too on scales that we literally cannot imagine. We are so utterly consumed by our own story that we ignore and even reject the histories of other nations.
There is a lot of history out there. A lot of this history is bigger, older, and longer than our own. We should seek to understand this world rather than shred it to bits.
“Your fish speakers aren’t an army, they’re a police force.”
“By my name, I assure you that’s not so. Police are inevitably corrupted.”
– ACAB Leto II, the God Emperor, to Duncan Idaho
Of all the stupid shit I have created over the years, this half-assed meme hit a nerve. You can attack Republicans. You can attack Democrats. You can attack Communists and you can attack Nazis. But, when you start to point the finger at the mirror, and suggest that something like the American appetite might be responsible for bad, you hit something unsettling.
Ron DeSantis talks about wanting to make Western History a required course in higher education. He is wasting his time; Americans have a grandiose sense of their place in the world already. Each and every American, from their first Fourth of July, feels that they stand at the vanguard of Democracy. No matter how many decades pass, I think we look at old pictures of WWII soldiers and feel we see a piece of ourselves. And I think a lot of us have this unfaltering sense that the world owes us something.
Now, reach into your pocket or across your desk or whatever and pick up your smart phone. Wow! That technology is the stuff of dreams. Ask yourself, Where was it made? Who made it?
Try to put yourself as an American and as an individual in perspective. Blow that perspective way up, let your mind wander across the globe to all these places where the magic things come from. That’s all I am trying to do with these memes.
We live and breath Western History every single day of our lives, Mr. DeSantis. Americans need to wake up and see where the rest of the world stands.
Americans convincing themselves that they don’t hold the entire deck of cards every time they make a geopolitical decision.
700+ Military Bases World Wide Baby!
Content Warning: major Attack on Titan spoilers!!!!!
You can tell a particular event is gripping when both the New York Times and Fox News run headlines on the same subject. “The wonders never cease!” A couple of days ago, a balloon floating above Montana escaped the media current to capture our nation’s attention. The balloon was polarizing from the start; it came from China. Theory building began immediately, with the Pentagon and military community arguing that it is a Surveillance Balloon that they have been tracking for days as it rode the air from Alaska down to the Western USA. China and others argue that it is a civilian craft created for observation. My quirky little gamer reaction, of course, was this panel from Attack on Titan:
Attack on Titan is so awesome because the story’s twists are constantly redefining the context of the world as the reader knows it, especially technologically. At one point, it is revealed that the world within the walls is governed by a CIA-esque, highly secretive wing of the military police. At one point, the main characters interrogate a police higher up and learn that the royal family has been purposefully killing off anyone that creates technological innovations that might threaten the power structure… or escape the walls. Strikingly, a couple that managed to create a balloon are taken out.
This scene elicits a lot of frustration from me. It is a dramatization of a real life instance of Germans escaping East Berlin during the 20th century cold war. People want to be free! And what is more free and weightless and mobile than a balloon catching the current of a cloud? I feel a similar frustration regarding the Chinese balloon now hovering over Montana. The balloon could very well be a CCP surveillance device sent to take pictures of military bases. Regardless, decades old satellite technology can apparently already accomplish the same thing with a lot less work. What’s more, I can’t help but feel the Pentagon is trying to feed us another Gulf of Tonkin incident to inflame American tensions against our codependent geopolitical adversary across the Pacific. The military has been monitoring this thing for days, yet the information was only made public when it reached Montana and public outcry made the object impossible for the government to ignore. When one studies history, one becomes painfully aware of just how often foolishness repeats itself. Going to war over a harmless (even if illegal) camera balloon is not my preferred timeline.
On a more important note, however, (one that transcends politics) I think this balloon phenomenon highlights an urgent human problem facing our modern world. Look at this marvelous thing we have created: balloons! They ride the air without propulsion or engines or flapping wings. They captivate our children. We have the technology and the aptitude to send these things across the sea to people far away. A spy balloon is an affront to national security and our nation’s sovereignty, but a civilian device created to study the world and see new places? That is a marvel, and I think it is worth missing the political spectacle of shooting the thing on the off chance that this balloon is innocent.
I think an adequate response would be to send balloons back. Let’s play with these tensions and see if China is being frank with us. At worst, we lose some balloons. At best, we make a connection with people that we have yet to understand very well. We should expand this gesture of peace to China’s neighbors as well. Whenever North Korea decides to test missiles in Japanese airspace, we should respond by sending a fleet of balloons into Korean airspace laden with hard drives and books and chocolate. Send them Elden Ring and a computer capable of running it. Porn. Fuck it, send them a couple ounces of weed. Kim will shoot them down and we’ll keep flying them out. Wouldn’t be the most wasteful thing we have ever done, and the off chance that somebody living in the shadows gets to glimpse a larger world is worth it. America’s power is in the freedom and sheer creativity of our culture. Our sharpest weapon is our ability to think freely and respond to strangeness without hostility (if we try hard enough). Somebody in China has already captivated us with this balloon. Why not play along?
Technology is supposed to set us free. So often, we use it to build prisons. We put up walls across borders. Our laws build invisible walls in the sky. Our technology creates walls within our minds. It is tragic that our governments prevent us from communicating with one another by balloon. I think it is important that we do not use this incident as an opportunity to build our walls and prejudices even higher.
To be free like a balloon!
(To see what my aquarium looked like over a year ago, click here)
(If you want to see how it started, click here)
Two years on and my filterless biosphere is alive and supporting life. It has persisted and continued to grow even during long months of my absence. The only maintenance I give it is occasionally topping up the water (using tap water that has sat long enough to lose any chlorine, if any existed in the first place). I also feed it now, because I have four little fish swimming around in there.
I am not sure what type of fish these are, but I think they are rasporas. They are TINY. Only a couple centimeters each! I put a lot of faith in my aquarium to support these guys, and I was right in the end. I don’t test my water anymore–haven’t been motivated to do so. In this case, two+ years of ecosystem building paid off. There is more than enough of a biological filter to sustain my small school of fish. Even when I was not actively feeding the tank with flakes, the cycle sustained itself on snail poop and rotting plants. If there is any nitrogen left over, my pothos clipping likely sucks it up. I *should* probably test just to make sure there isn’t a slow buildup of some harmful substance, but for now the tank seems completely stable.
I got these fish back in December, so they have survived a whole month at this point. The little fishies were pretty nervous when I first added them. They zoomed around the glass perimeter and stuck together like a cabal. Now, they venture freely. They like to stay near the top of the water column, probably in search of food. They peck at little specks that pass them by, but I do not know if there are any microorganisms for them to actually eat. Every few days, I feed them crushed fish flakes that my grandmother left when she stayed here. The fish are so small that even a single crushed up flake provides a feast! The fish dart to the surface like sharks and yank the floating debris from the top of the tank. No names have been given to them.
The tank itself is overgrown. At first, I tried to prune any shoots that wandered in front of the tank, but the plants kept marching even after I left. Huge fronds now block the central “stage” of the tank, but I am not sour about it. The tank looks more natural now, and the rock is still visible behind. The gravel bottom is covered in a hairy film of algae that the shrimp and snails seem to ignore in favor of easier food. Most of the val leaves are covered in tiny white specks which I imagine are either snail eggs, bite marks, or dust. I wonder, do the rasporas eat the snail eggs as a supplemental snack?
The floral inhabitants of the aquarium has changed as species die off, but the diversity remains. The old lamp bulb died at some point, so I replaced it with another I had on hand that wasn’t quite the right wattage. It seems too intense, but I really don’t know. Either way, the all the duckweed turned white and died. I now understand why some people hate duckweed. Though the plant has died, the corpses remain. Skeletal white eyesores clinging like a film to everything at the top of the tank… The horn wort, which once grew incredibly thick and expanded constantly, turned brown and shed its needles. That is gone too. The last of the hornwort needles are breaking down at the bottom of the tank. My primary clump of dwarf hairgrass grew up huge then turned brown and died away. It exists still, but less vigorous. Strands of blades still poke out of the gravel in spots, though it seems to enjoy growing right up against the glass. In fact, a lot of the plants seem to prefer trailing the sides of the tank. I have two theories for this: the wandering shoots either bump up into the glass and remain, or the gravel next to the glass has more pockets so it is easier to send roots downward into the soil layer.
To replace the fallen species are a few new plants. A hitchhiker algal vine that looks like a fuzzy stem has been weaving itself throughout the tank. It came with one of the animals, possibly the amano shrimp. I also have some floating frogbit to replace the lost hornwort. I picked up the frogbit alongside the rasporas, and it has already grown two new floating islands! Some of the leaves are already yellowing, however, so I am afraid it may meet the same fate as the duckweed. The store I picked it up from had a canopy of frogbit covering most of the tank, and there were crabs living on it. I would LOVE to build a crab tank with a lush floating island of stems and plants.
A pothos clipping placed against the tank has sent roots all the way downward into the soil. The terrestrial side of the plant doesn’t grow too much, so I wonder if nitrogen is a limiting factor. Maybe the plant can detect that it will fall out of the tank and die if it gets too top heavy?
In short, all is well. I am moving out of my parent’s basement again in about a week, so the tank will be left to its own devices. I am going to ask my brother to feed the fish, but I do not have much faith honestly. In the meantime, I will try to give these fishies the best life possible. Maybe I will run and pick them up some brine shrimp to hunt?
新年好!
I miss you every day. I hope you are well, and I hope you find ways to make the passing days feel special. Your time has come!
I originally came on to AI generated art because of an article published in the NY Times a few days ago. In the article, Frank Pavich, director of the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, shows a series of images that look like they are ripped directly out of an amazingly costumed and fantastically designed Tron move from the 80s. He then reveals that these images came from a movie that does not exist–an AI generated them! And apparently, the fake scenes were created using Midjourney, the same generator I have been using.
I tried the keywords “Jodorowsky’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” To get something a little more beautiful, I will need to describe a specific scene or setting. Obscure media is sometimes lost on Midjourney, however.
Stålenhag-esque subject and composition.
My favorite aspect of AI generated art so far is the ability to specify an artist. If the AI recognizes the artist’s name, it will attempt to render the piece in that artist’s style. Jean Giraud Moebius, for example, gives amazingly crisp landscapes with bright, almost cell shaded colors. Others work less well. I tried “Van Gogh” and got a shitty aproximation of the artist’s brushy pointalism. It looked like a child’s rendition. Perhaps with some refinement on my end, however, I could select the right keywords to produce the desired level of style. I haven’t tried to specify specific eras or real pieces as points of reference yet. If the AI is sophisticated enough, those details could produce something work looking at.
My adventures in Midjourney have revealed to me vistas beautiful and strange.
“You cannot write for children. They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.”
Maurice Sendak
from Muddy Colors!
