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Jacobin: We’re Still Living in Don DeLillo’s White Noise:

To consume is ultimately a passive experience: receiving something from outside the self. And our consumption is not limited to the products we decide to purchase. Without our choosing, we absorb what Jack calls “waves and radiation” — the chatter of television, the messages of advertising, the chemicals in the air and water. The control that we feel at the mall and the supermarket conceals our greater powerlessness against the white noise of consumer society. “The flow is constant,” says one of Jack’s colleagues. “Words, pictures, numbers, graphics, statistics, specks, particles, motes.”

Greil Marcus: A Brief History of Chez Panisse in Four Parts:

It would be a little French restaurant where people would meet, find inspiration, renew old friendships, establish new ones, talk, and discover. There would be work for people to do, and while it might barely pay the rent, it would be more fulfilling than any work they had done before. People would leave their tables with a feeling of surprise at how good something could taste. The way a peach or even a green salad could taste so fully of itself, as if it were both a thing and the idea of it, would suggest that other parts of life, outside the restaurant, could achieve the same rightness.

Inspired by the conversation between Gruber and Kottke on The Talk Show, I kicked off a weekend project: a simple script that would cycle through my blog archives, extract every URL I’ve ever linked to, and then load them to see if those pages are still up. My hypothesis: more than 50% of the URLs linked to more than 10 years ago are gone, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics.

It’d been a while since I’d written any Ruby, so I fired up Chat GPT and asked it this prompt as a starting point:

can you help me write a ruby script that will loop through a folder of markdown documents in order to build a CSV with columns for date (pulled from YAML frontmatter), date (also pulled from YAML front matter) and URL, where each row in the table is every anchor HREF tag in the body of the document

And, of course, the response wasn’t perfect out of the box, but it was pretty damn good – and it included a description of how the script works! As I’ve been tweaking it, debugging regex bullshit, adding functionality (follow redirects, anyone?) my robot overlord has been with me all along the way, a patient teacher with perfect context of our whole conversation. And it will be there tomorrow when I pick this weekend project back up.

I know this isn’t exactly the freshest of news or the hottest of takes, but this is just a reminder that AI tech is making computers fun again. And when tech feels fun, tech has a high likelihood of getting weird. This shit’s gonna get really, really weird.

Pitchfork gives the new 100 gecs record (10,000 gecs) an 8.2:

On the surface, gecs are the least serious group this side of early-’90s Ween, always game for a deceptively asinine good time. That the few samples on this album come from Cypress Hill, Scary Movie, and Lucasfilm, in the form of the THX Deep Note, tell you all you need to know: The internet is an earwig that has broken millennials’ brains. 10,000 gecs sounds like being hit in the face with pies for approximately 26 minutes, two best friends having the greatest time throwing all the dankest shit from their musical file cabinet at you while you accept your ridiculous fate.

I saw them last summer at Outside Lands, and though I’m not a millennial, they absolutely broke my brain in the best way possible.

On the other end of the spectrum, and something that feels a bit more age approprite, A24 announced that they’re releasing a newly restored 4K version of Jonathan Demme’s 1984 masterpiece, Stop Making Sense. It’s wild to rewind and read through a contemporaneous review of the film; here’s part of Pauline Kael’s take:

Byrne has a withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality, and though there’s something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun. He gives the group its modernism — the undertone of repressed hysteria, which he somehow blends with freshness and adventurousness and a driving beat. When he comes on wearing a boxlike “big suit” — his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys’ large suit of felt that hangs off a wall — it’s a perfect psychological fit. He’s a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.

Can’t wait to see this in theaters. Again.

Nicola Twilley, in the 2023 Tournament of Books, on her “HBO-induced Emily St. John Mandel bias.”

If the painfully earnest members of the Traveling Symphony are only the kind of people who survive a pandemic, I would prefer not to. This makes no sense, because I actually enjoyed Station Eleven in book form, and the TV series doesn’t even follow the source material, but these kinds of prejudices don’t, necessarily.

And then…

I say all of this because I firmly believe that novels and their characters are extremely particular in who they speak to, and even when. Yes, good fiction can and should be able to strengthen and expand its readers’ empathy muscles, but the kind of magical experience that comes from really relishing the company of the characters and the world they live in—that’s an individual thing. In other words, I’m not even trying to be objective as a ToB judge, because I don’t think that’s how reading fiction works.

Emphasis mine. And note, she picked Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility over R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.

Jennifer Egan, on the Collective Conscious device in The Candy House.

I gleaned this device and its various properties more from first-draft material that I started writing in those early years, from 2010 to 2013. So, for example, in “Lulu the Spy,” the chapter that you published as “Black Box,” Lulu is spying for the U.S. government and transmitting a record of her mission via a device implanted in her brain. So there’s already this possibility of mental content being shared technologically. Little by little, I began to get a sense that in the twenty-thirties, which I was writing into, there’s the possibility of thought sharing. And that was how I began to have a sense of what this machine was. And the device I eventually came up with allowed me to do a lot of things. It allowed me to write both from the perspective of looking back at the past and from the perspective of the future. It allowed time travel within the book. It allowed me to do certain narrative things that I knew I wanted to do. One of those, for example, was to write a story in which people can find other people whom they’ve glimpsed only once, whose names they don’t know.

Here’s the original “Black Box” story; I blogged about it back in 2012.