You know things are messed up when the person responsible for the monitoring and censorship of anti-genocidal material posted across Meta's platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), a userbase of almost 4 billion people worldwide, is Jordana Cutler, a person who once worked as a strategy advisor in Netanyahu's 2009 election campaign and later as his Advisor for Diaspora Affairs.
Was planning on penciling some TSG today, but the whole day was lost to scanning all 200 pages of THE MEANING OF DEATH before shipping it off to its buyer.
I note that the vibrant pink pigments I used on quite a few pages (including the one pictured), barely turn up at all in the scans. Interesting.
- Egypt Sends Somalia Military Aid: Looks like Egypt has found the perfect pretext to enter into military conflict with Ethiopia, in actuality over Nile water disputes which have been brewing for some time.
This wouldn't be the first time Egypt enters into military conflict with Ethiopia. An attempt to annex Ethiopia was made by Egypt in 1874, which really didn't go very well for Egypt.
Things may get messy because Ethiopia has some sort of military agreement with Turkiye and an arms deal with Israel in addition to a major mining deal too.
Moved my most-read blog post, THE PALESTINIAN PROBLEM, to the main dot com, and also populated a few of the sections with some work I hadn't yet uploaded. More of that over the next few days.
Penciled one page of TSG and will attempt another right after I break for some excercise.
THE SOLAR GRID #1 is completely sold out. Issues #2-8 are still in stock. I'm sure the time will come when I look upon these single-chapter editions as the strange time capsules that they are.
Started THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus. This being my third Camus, it's now very evident that Camus' writing appeals to me. Adequately sparse, just the right words in exactly the right places in a way that evokes more than what is being said. Something I don't find entirely true of most contemporary authors who lean towards the extra telegrammatic. The buildup of eerie over the first 30 pages in THE PLAGUE is really perfectly paced.
I'm sick of both U.S. presidential candidates popping up on my screen several times a day to ask for money. Is there any other place on Earth where rich politicians not only expect your vote, but have the gall to ask you to pay for it too?
Mangal-Media: Istanbul-based micropress with great looking books.
Matt Alt argues that the TV series Shogun's appeal in America is because” our socio-politically fractured era resembles a culture-war version of Japan's era of warring states.”
Anne Carson: Life is Not Fair – The Louisiana Channel
Stuck: Dana Omar is only $3,200 away from reaching her pilot's production goal, and only a few hours to go until her campaign ends.
Matt Madden on discovering Oulipo.
Right-wing influencers duped to work for covert Russian operation – Or, Russia utilizes America's capitalist tendances against itself.
USPS is rolling out their own fleet of electric trucks apparently.
Free Faces: Free open-source typefaces.
Rain Poems-Ottmar Liebert: Beautiful acoustic guitar instrumentals.
Alleged fraudster got $10 million in royalties using bots to stream AI-generated music that he uploaded.
Newsletter scheduled to send in a few hours from now. This will be issue #213 and its title is The [Inherent] Evil of Techno-Optimism, and just as it says on the tin, its main feature is a [partial] takedown of Marc Anderseen's horrendous The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.
Inbox 63, RSS 311
A snack and dishes before tending to those. Would like to kick the weekend off with a clean slate. Sumud for Palestine tomorrow.
Genuinely surprised there isn't more reporting on Israel remotely detonating handheld devices across Lebanon, and how news of this is not seeping into tech news. This takes the notion of weaponizing handheld devices against its users to a whole new level. Truly terrifying, and we're only seeing the very early stages of its implementation.
Image via Newsmap.
Comp copies of DEEP DREAM from MIT Press arrived, a handsome collection edited by Indrapramit Das.
From Indra's introduction:
I’m humbled by the stylistic variety and talent on display in these stories, by the generosity of these skilled, award-winning writers from across the world in imagining a future where our self-destructiveness as a species cannot ever entirely win out, because we have the memory of the beauty we made.
Vajra Chandrasekera’s dazzling metatext “The Limner Wrings His Hands” brings the politics of art (and of his home country, Sri Lanka) to the forefront with an intricate hybrid of fiction and essay, testing as he often does the limits of our definitions of genre. Samit Basu brings levity to the proceedings with a nimble, humane satire of, “The Art Crowd,”, exploring the dynamics of artistic power in an authoritarian future India (and a protagonist) shared with his brilliant novel The City Inside (Tordotcom). In “Immortal Beauty,” genre legend and co-progenitor of cyberpunk Bruce Sterling strays from his roots to imagine a post-capitalist future shorn of most tech, in which a Court Gentleman wanders a Europe of city-states and warring aesthetocrats under the eye of distant celestial computers.
In a number of moving stories, there is a recurring theme of art as a framework medium for processing grief—unsurprising in an era of mass trauma from both the unraveling of our tenuous social and ecological stability and one of the most devastating pandemics in history. Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s “Halfway to Hope” takes us into the personal struggle of a VR engineer who helps patients in a near-future Bangalore recover from their pain by visiting virtual worlds, but must contend with a horrific tragedy that forces her to the limits of what her craft can do. Cassandra Khaw’s “Immortal Is the Heart” follows a poetic keeper of memories wandering the American Midwest in a world ravaged by global warming, finding a tenuous hope for, and in, the outcasts of our present society in its ashes. Aliette de Bodard’s beautiful “Autumn’s Red Bird” shows us how a sentient “mindship” might grieve in the wake of unimaginable loss, and share this experience with one of her human passengers, whose art may yet bring them succor. Renowned Egyptian artist Ganzeer gives us a vision of a U.S.A. where the production of art is forbidden in “Unauthorized (Or, The the Liberated Collector’s Commune),”, bringing his vibrantly playful counter-cultural sensibilities to the beloved science-fictional story of robots given to identity crises by the existence of their human creators. Visionary writer and artist Sloane Leong’s “No Future But but Infinity Itself” delivers a mysterious dream of art reflecting humanity’s monstrosity and empathy in a post-apocalyptic future, diving deep into both the intimacy and vastness of its creation and import. The incredibly prolific and creative Lavie Tidhar takes us further into the future with “The Quietude,”, a tale of high high-pulp poetry that imagines art forms never before seen in a human-settled solar system brimming with cultures old and new. And recent Hugo nominee Wole Talabi takes us further still, to distant extrasolar spacetime, in “Encore,” following a sentient AI ship wandering the gulfs between stars while trying to fulfill its purpose as artist to the various life forms in the galaxy.
In these ten stories, our writers both embody and visualize the future of art.
Not quite a collection of short fiction as much as it presents blueprints for approaching fiction, often very grand, interestingly-structured fiction. The reviews of fictitious non-existent books are my favorite in the collection, but there are only a handful of those, and the rest is mostly pretty straight fiction which I didn't get much out of. Not that I didn't like them... Full review of Borges' FICTIONS over at Ganzeer.Reviews.
Day lost to migraine. Will attempt to turn in early tonight and get a fresh start tomorrow.
In other news:
Lionsgate Inks Deal With AI Firm to Mine Its Massive Film and TV Library — The Hollywood Reporter: A new age of schlock is upon us.
Society of the Psyop — E-Flux: Wherever there's the smoke of a conspiracy theory, you better believe there's fire.
Michael Chabon on Israel's latest attack on Lebanon:
