a screenshot from "Pokémon the Series: The Beginning" episode "A Tent Situation" showing a Lickitung standing with its long and wide tongue stretched out and its two cute little arms raised up
"he put out his wide and long tongue which reached upward to the Brahma world. he emitted innumerable and immeasurable colored rays of light from all his pores and universally illuminated the worlds of the ten directions."
the computer is NOT conscious. until you put googly eyes on it
Who is Tim?
wired: the eternal september
tired: the eternal sloptember
uninspired: the eternal hypertember
valentine's day isn't just for couples, it's also a day to celebrate love. for instance, i would love it if housing prices came down.
"Braiding Sweetgrass" was a key part of how I stumbled over backwards into Shin Buddhism and its account of 信心 ("faith") as a universal gift relation encountered in/as the collapse of self-willed/contrived faith; and I love Kobayashi Issa (e.g. as in www.ull.es/revistas/ind...), a Shin Buddhist poet
The spiritual dimension of Robin Wall Kimmerer's book "Braiding Sweetgrass" was transformative for me as someone who grew up in Michigan under the shade of Maples, and Kimmerer's emergencemagazine.org/essay/becomi... is maybe my favorite essay for the rhythm of its ending.
me at 13: dear diary,
me today: dear gay people in my phone,
It’s called ‘vs code’ because the code is an enemy you are fighting
the hungry ghost
it destroyed its jar
yes
YES
the ghost is out
a lot of authors talk about wanting to write the representation that they didnt have in the fiction they read when they were a kid. and thats good. unfortunately, what i want is for everyone to experience the alienation i felt reading books as a kid.
woe. estrangement be upon ye.
"Uber for Dogs" is OUT "Theranos of <Whatever>" is IN!
We had a good run
gen z sysadmins be like rm -fr
programming is just the art of adding bugs to an empty file
OH: "LinkedIn is really just Business Grindr"
You (a fool): The LLM is an all-knowing oracle, on its way to godlike intelligence
Me (dumber): The LLM is Indra’s Net, each fundamentally empty token a multifaceted jewel in whose surfaces the reflections of every other jewel arise in mutual interdependence
The LLM: You can eat that rock
honey wake up new sentence just dropped
to paraphrase something I heard, every hole you touch you change / every hole you change changes you
RIP to everyone killed by social media for their hubris but im different. and better. maybe even better than the posting gods.
Why do they call it model view controller when you view the controller viewcontroller model control the view model?
I can still fix it.
the very hungry caterpillar superimposed on an illustration of gregor samsa from the metamorphosis as a beetle
one morning, when gregor samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a very hungry caterpillar
between Cha, Liu, Hanayama - a 心 eternal, illumination of truth, the 無礙光 of unyielding peace. noticed after ordinary words, or ordinary beings, are collapsed by the weight of light, or the dead, returning to pervade all darkness. to show us a way home.
"[...] They take from you your tongue. They take from you the choral hymn. But you say not for long not for always. Not forever. You wait. You know how. You know how to wait. Inside MAH-UHM fire alight enflame." (from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, on her mother as exilee in Manchuria during the occupation)
+ also, in Cha's "Dictée": "But your MAH-UHM, spirit has not left. Never shall have and never shall will. Not now. Not even now. It is burned into your ever-present memory. Memory less. Because it is not in the past. It cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts. It burns. Fire alight enflame. [...]"
if people could feel embrace from something beyond the horizon of the "innocent/forgiven=reward, evil/sinful=punish" moral paradigm, might we better face history? Curley (in translating/reading Hanayama) & Liu consider idea of liberation through an aspiration to take responsibility for the past...
+ surprising resonances w/ Melissa Curley's "Prison and the Pure Land: A Buddhist Chaplain in Occupied Japan" (blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethi...), of how Hanayama Shinshō narrated war criminals' death row as a call for his readers to remember them & take similarly total responsibility for the war.
I think its presentation, as a science fiction story styled as a documentary (but based on real-life quotes+text!), deepens its reflections on how to represent/communicate such history. maybe this narrative device serves as a way to ease into facing the brutality & "open wound"ness?
Ken Liu's "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (kenliu.name/binary/liu_t..., cw for graphic descriptions of 731 atrocities), dedicated in part to Iris Chang, was really powerful and moving for me as my first exposure to this horrifying history beyond a passing mention in a bioethics class.
