Nicholas Bate –

Choose:

1. Love
2. Effectiveness
3. Reading
4. Wellness
5. Creativity
6. Music
7. Mountains & Coast

and things can only get better.

Obviously, we need a good debate recap right about now. And who better to moderate it than Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

Joe really comitts to this bit and the song is kind of catchy.

Signing her post as “Childless Cat Lady,” music megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I was impressed with her eloquent and clear writing. In the post, she explained how she’d been alarmed by seeing an AI video of herself saying something she didn’t say. Do celebrity endorsements matter? MAGA thinks so since they are freaking out. Also, Elon Musk is just freaking weird.

Kamala Harris beat the shit out of Donald Trump in their first (and likely last) debate.

She destroyed him.

She broke him.

She killed it.

She shattered his glass ego.

It was the strong performance that Democrats had hoped to see. Every time, Trump took the bait and looked like a “raving loon.”

Even Fox News wasn’t feeling their man’s performance—“Make no mistake” about his “bad night,” said one presenter. It looks like the beginning of the end.

The Washington Post says this is the fifth biggest victory out of 25 debate polls dating back to 1984. Also, shares of his company are now tumbling following the awful performance.

It really was a terrible, no-good performance. Of course, when he “loses,” the blame is on everyone but himself. When he doesn’t get exactly what he wants, it’s unfair, rigged, somebody cheated, and everything he did was perfect. This act is tiresome.

I totally agree with John Scalzi about Trump.

Donald Trump was at the best any of us will ever see him again. This was the one place and time where he was meant to be prepared, coherent and presidential, where he was not surrounded by handlers, coddlers and sycophants. This was meant to be the one place and time where he was meant to keep his id and his ego in check, put voters and Americans first, and make a case for a second shot at the presidency. This was the one place and time where his worst and most self-indulgent impulses were supposed to be reined in. This was Trump on his best and most decent behavior, or at the very least, the best and most behavior he is capable of. We see how that went.

It’s unlikely Trump will do another debate, because Trump doesn’t like being a loser, and he lost this debate even more comprehensively than he lost the 2020 election. From here he’ll retreat into the safe little world of right-wing media, where even his most unhinged pronouncements are met with respectful nodding and agreement. He’ll double down on his hate and his ranting and his inability to censor even the most embarrassing of thoughts. And if, after all of that, he’s still rewarded with a second term, then all his resentment and seething inadequacy will find a focus on anyone and everyone who ever made him feel a fool, and this time, he won’t bother having anyone around him who will tell him no.

Last night is the best Trump will ever be from here on out. At his very best, then, he is a loser, a fraud, a racist, a criminal and an embarrassment. He has no plan other than to avoid prison. He has nothing to him but anger and cowardliness and revenge. It’s impossible at this point that anyone doesn’t know this. No one who is voting for him at this point can pretend they are voting for anything other than that. No one who is somehow still “undecided” at this point can be under the delusion that he will somehow improve.

I’m a huge fan of Tycho and his electronic ambient instrumental style. The artist uploaded his annual Burning Man Sunrise Set 2024 to Soundcloud. If you don’t have Spotify, you can check out more of his music on his Soundcloud page.

Right now, I’m jamming to his brand-new album, Infinite Health.

Patrick Rhone –

How to write a book…

Think very, very deeply about something for a very long time.

Write it down once your head gets too full to keep it in anymore.

That’s my experience, anyway.

John Cassady, multiple Eisner award-winning comics artist, has passed away at the age of 52.

I loved his work on Astonishing X-Men. However, his work with Warren Ellis on Planetary was transcendent.

Damn.

I keep seeing this image online, so I thought I’d take a minute to make some checkmarks.

I’ve used a rotary phone, a floppy disk, a typewriter, an encyclopedia, a phone book, and a paper map. Check. I’ve taken pics with a film camera, listened to music on a CD and a Boombox, made a mixed tape, owned a Walkman, watched a movie on VHS, and even rented some from Blockbuster. I’ve learned Cursive, played an Atari, sent and received Faxes, ordered from Columbia House, accessed the Internet via dial-up, sent a postcard, and uncurled a telephone cord. I still own a couple of dictionaries, and I infrequently write checks.

The two things I’ve never done from that list are have a MySpace account or an AOL address. I did have a HoTMaiL address, so that should count for something. Consequently, I’m old, at least by the standards of whoever compiled this list. If so, I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to see most things on this list be replaced by something newer and better.

That thought makes me smile.

James Earl Jones, famed for his deep, powerful voice and commanding screen presence, is dead at 93. Deadline reports that he died at his home in Pawling, New York.

I had forgotten he was an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winner. He was Darth Vader, Mufasa, King Jaffe Joffer, the voice of CNN, and a host of other characters.

Some of his best-delivered lines.

His speech in Field of Dreams echoes in my brain.

He will be missed.

abundantmusic has compiled a track listing for all 114 volumes of Now That’s What I Call Music! and turned them into a single, 4500-plus-song-long Spotify playlist. That’s almost 300 hours of music.

While guesting on the podcast “Park and Recollection,” about the TV show Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt discussed how he thinks each president’s personality “sets the tone for the pop culture.”

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This video cuts off at Obama, but here’s the rest –

"And then there was a rejection of [Obama], with Donald Trump, which I think was a combination of a white reaction to having a black president, quite frankly. But it's also this thing if you notice, because Trump's whole thing is, like, Well, what is reality? What is truth? And now everything is all about the mutliverse [e.g., the Marvel multiverse] and "Everything Everywhere All at Once," or "Russian Doll," where nothing's really real. There's no actual set truth anymore. And everything is amorphous."

I wonder what the pop culture will be when Harris wins? Joy?

Linkin Park is reunited with two new members: Emily Armstrong as co-vocalist and Colin Brittain as drummer for the first time in seven years. Their new album, From Zero, will be released in November.

Here’s the new single and the announcement concert.

I was never a huge LP fan, but this is cool.

According to his keys to the White House model, American University professor Allan Lichtman calls the 2024 election.

Here’s the video. Spoiler alert: he says it’s going to be Harris.

Here’s the latest trailer for Megalopolis and it’s visually interesting, but I have no idea what’s going on.

Karsten Runquist has seen the movie, and I appreciate his review. In short, he calls it “a big, beautiful mess.”

Emma Beddington, writing for The Guardian, has written a fantastic piece with tips and tricks on how to sort out one’s life.

All of these ideas are great. I need to start implementing a few, though.

Seth Godin –

Perfect is useful. It’s an absolute measure, a north star, a chance to improve our work.

But it’s also a shortcut to persistent dissatisfaction.

Compared to perfect is helpful when we’re creating something.

But it’s also worth noting that perfect is unattainable. What’s on offer is never perfect, but what’s on offer might be exactly what we need right now.

There I Ruined It provides a fantastic mashup of John Denver singing a Country Roads/War Pigs rendition.

What a perfect mash-up.

Ted Chiang with a thought-provoking essay on “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:”

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

In the past few years, Chiang has written and talked often about the limitations of LLMs. I can’t help but wonder how his views and thoughts regarding LLMs may one day affect his future fiction.

Matteo Wong, writing at The Atlantic, disagrees.

There are all sorts of reasons to criticize generative AI—the technology’s environmental footprint, gross biases, job displacement, easy creation of misinformation and nonconsensual sexual images, to name a few—but Chiang is arguing on purely creative and aesthetic grounds. Although he isn’t valuing some types of work or occupations over others, his logic leads there: Staking a defense of human labor and outputs, and human ownership of that labor and those outputs, on AI being “just” vapid statistics implies the jobs AI does replace might also be “just” vapid statistics. Defending human labor from AI should not be conflated with adjudicating the technology’s artistic merit. The Jacquard loom, despite its use as a creative tool, was invented to speed up and automate skilled weaving. The widespread job displacement and economic upheaval it caused mattered regardless of whether it was replacing or augmenting artistic, artisanal, or industrial work.

Chiang’s essay, in a sense, frames art not just as a final object but also as a process. “The fact that you’re the one who is saying it,” he writes, “the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes [art] new.” I agree, and would go a step further: The processes through which art arises are not limited and cannot be delimited by a single artist or viewer but involve societies and industries and, yes, technologies. Surely, humans are creative enough to make and even desire a space for generative AI in that.

Rolling Stone has published a list of the 100 best television episodes ever, and of course, there are all kinds of things to nick pick about it. That’s also the point.

These lists are entirely designed to get people fired up and engaged and to provoke nasty comments about why their favorite television episode was overlooked.

These lists only provoke a minor despair that I can’t watch them all.

Seth Godin –

Here’s a useful habit that’s more than a hack…

The next time things are going well, when a project is about to launch, when a meeting has been successful, when the sun is shining… take your phone and go for a walk.

Hit record on an audio app and make a twenty-minute audiobook. Talk about what you know, what you see, what you hope for. Talk about the change you seek to make and how you’re going to get there.

And then save it.

Save it for when you need to hear from that person who recorded it.

It might become the best audiobook you own.