Fantastic video essay on Steven Spielberg's MUNICH, which I haven't seen since the first watch when it came out. Definitely due for a rewatch if for nothing else but the truly unparalleled masterful camera work alone.
Spent a full day assembling Ikea furniture and another full day breaking up all the boxes. I really hope it's the last time I crack open an Ikea box ever again as I am somewhat traumatized by the sight of anything Ikea after all the relocations made in the U.S. and the obligatory Ikea visits that would soon follow.
Though, realistically, I will soon have more Ikea in my immediate future; they somehow discovered on the day of delivery that certain items were out of stock. Items relating to some of the stuff that was actually delivered. Like say, the armchair's cushioning. I now have the frame of a chair assembled in the studio, completely unusable as a chair until its cushioning is restocked towards the end of the month, yay.
Alas, the dream of kicking back on a reading chair will have to wait for a while. Speaking of reading, I moved on to Tochi Onyebuchi's GOLIATH after dropping Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS. Paul Graham Raven sent me an article by Alan Jacobs that perfectly summarizes my feelings about the book (before even finishing it), and I suspect those same feelings are likely to be carried on throughout Banks' “The Culture Novels” were I to embark on diving into them, which I won't. I think I'm good. Unless new knowledge or insight is attained when experiencing a supposedly entertaining piece of fiction, it actually isn't all that entertaining imho.
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Still in house-planning mode; found myself measuring all the things I'd like to have stored away that presently have no place to live and are thus resulting in abundant clutter. The purpose of these measurements, of course, is to design and build adequate storage space for all the things.
Does anybody else do things this way?
Ikea order incoming today, all things that will require assembly. So today will be a big “home stuff” day. Though I do have a few important emails to send out as well.
Awoke at 6:30 am despite falling asleep at 1:30 am. I've been waking up at 6:30 am on the regular for a few days now, no alarm clock save for the biological one. Which is a good thing, I guess. Just need to get my ass to bed earlier if I'm to give my body the rest it needs.
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Today, we really shall dedicate the day to tidying up because the studio is in such a mess and in dire need of cleansing.
Two clocks above the drawing table now, one denoting the time in Houston and the other in Cairo. May need to get a few more clocks for other time-zones: New York probably, maybe Berlin, and possibly Seoul/Tokyo.
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Today was supposed to be my day of tidying up to the sound of soft music, but I ended up getting sucked into planning and designing all the things I'd like to have built at the home studio. Which is... a lot.
So much time is spent at the studio that not having it in tip-top shape just gets in the way of optimized living and working. Or so I like to tell myself only because I'm a slut for pleasant environments.
But also, Cairo is so insane and haphazard that having one's own delightful and impeccably thought-out refuge becomes a necessity to achieve any degree of mental sanity. Or so I like to tell myself.
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Drafting tomorrow's newsletter. Not ideal, because today has announced itself to be Migraine Day. The cause, I know; woke up yesterday at 6:00 am and didn't get to bed till 3:00 am! Despite which, I awoke today at 7:30 am! Running on little over than 3 hours of sleep here and cannot shut my eyes no matter how hard I try.
There really was no burning reason for me to pull a 21-hour day yesterday, it just sorta happened.
I may be stressing over the abhorrent amount of dough I dropped on a massive Ikea order the other day. But, I have been without a sofa or reading chair or adequate lighting or storage solutions for well over a year now and I just can't take it anymore. It's true that I may have promised myself to shun Ikea, but it still offers the fastest and most practical solutions to too many things, and Egyptian craft/handy men have broken me good.
In other news, I am officially a cat daddy now. Little fucker wouldn't stop following me around, crisscrossing between my legs and often tripping me in the process. So I figured: fine, I'll let him inside. But not before bathing him which I figured would make him hate me to death till the end of time.
Nope, he made himself comfortable in my arms and let me lather away without the slightest bit of resistance. Even purring in the process! At which point, I completely gave in to the prospect of being his obedient slut for life. Because if you know anything about cats, you know that that level of trust seldom comes easy.
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Season 3 of SILO ended with the media equivalent of being blue-balled.
Got around to watching PROJECT HAIL MARY with my significant other for the first time, and we might as well have put on a Disney cartoon.
Halfway through Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS, and it's fun and entertaining enough but I'm honestly a little surprised it's talked about as some great touchstone of sociocultural commentary and forward-thinking ideas. But perhaps I ought to wait until I finish it before jumping to any conclusions.
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Someone at the conference took a jab at TRANSCENDENCE, a film I had never heard of and thus decided to watch despite its horrendous ratings.
I quite enjoyed it! It does falter terribly in the third act, but its first half is pretty darn good. It is almost certainly every delusional techno-optimist's wet dream; It isn't hard to picture our feudal tech overlords frothing at the mouth through most of it (it's even got a 2-second cameo of Musk). But, there is something there.
In other news, Xi Jinping landed in Egypt yesterday, a visit that was much publicized and can likely be taken as a clue of what's to come. Interesting times.
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One of the great things about attending scholarly conferences—aside from all the really smart people you meet—is the treasure trove of book recommendations you get. Now adding to my tbr pile:
- GOLIATH — by Tochi Onyebuchi
- GRACE — by Barbara Boswell
- MUTE COMPULSION: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital — by Soren Mau
- MORE AND MORE AND MORE: An All-Consuming History of Energy — by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
That last one, I cannot even count the number of times it was mentioned or cited.
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I guess it's a facet of being in your 40s; childhood memories you had long forgotten come back in fragmented chards. I remember growing up not far from the airport, looking up at planes coming and going, and dreaming of growing up one day and traveling to faraway places. This was in no way a realistic dream, for traveling was not something that was common or easy in my circles.
Despite several things not going my way in life, and indeed increasingly challenging in recent times, I realize how blessed and lucky I ultimately am. To be able to have gone to all the places I've gone and met the wonderful people I've met is nothing to be taken lightly.
How many people can claim to have gotten beautiful dick art by a German barista?
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Bootlegged THE SOLAR GRID!
Imre Szeman, author of FUTURES OF THE SUN and one of the scholars on our THE SOLAR GRID panel at Petrocultures 2026 in Dresden, printed out the digital edition so he can read it that way in preparation for his presentation/commentary (which was so smart and immensely insightful). He made sure to have the pages printed on both sides, so his experience of the work would be the closest approximation to the intended format. And my, it's a big-ass motherfucker of a book, innit?
This is how I did much of my comics/graphic-novel reading in my late teens and early twenties, when my preferred comics-material was all too hard to come by in hardcopy formats in Cairo of the late-90s/early-2000s. So I have a strange affinity for that spiral-bound bootlegged home-printer aesthetic.
The panel was awesome! Super insightful (and embarrassingly humbling) presentations, great Q&A, and many exciting conversations thereafter. Several professors mentioned their plans to include THE SOLAR GRID in their teaching syllabi.
The air is refreshingly crisp in Dresden this time of year. Nothing quite like a midnight smoke out on the balcony in nothing but your underwear and a good German pilsner in hand.
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