gratitudes, christmas, analog social media, no to ai, books i am reading
yesterday i was grateful for the company of friends at our potluck lunch...
today i am looking forward to yoga with anne...
december 1... the countdown to christmas begins... my first christmas movie of the season was silver linings playbook... christmas adjacent is probably a better description... like die hard is christmas adjacent... there will be lots of christmas movies before christmas arrives...
over the weekend and this morning i have been thinking about ai... years ago i did a talk on ai at the new york society for ethical culture... i called it alternative intelligence... since so many smart people were saying it could become its own separate intelligence... i was ambivalent about the good and bad of it... that was a decade ago... i am no longer ambivalent... i have decided that i will have as little to do with it as possible... not because i think it is a bad thing in and of itself... but because of who is currently lining up to control it...
i have had enough of the tech bro domination of the world and society... i am unplugging from or modifying how i use technology in a lot of ways... i am working on setting up separate devices for writing, playing music and making pictures... i have been disengaging from social media for a long time... i want to unplug further... recently i have been telling friends, family and acquaintances that i am choosing analog social media, which i think of as any getting together with people, face to face, in the same physical room... coffee dates... parties... public performances... coffee shop regularity... i want my interaction with people to be in person and i want the majority of my social time to be in person sociability...
books i am reading...
i just finished queen esther by john irving... i enjoyed it though i have strong and fond memories of the world according to garp which left me with the under-toad concept and a number of visual images that have lodged deeply in my brain... not so much with queen esther, which tackles sexuality and procreation and human wierdness in similar ways... women who want nothing to do with sex, or men, or raising children in partnership with men... the antisemitism and the jewish post world war two condition are also main themes of the book... i am glad to learn about that but less able to identify with it since i am a wasp... and male... i do wonder why a male author has such interesting visions of motherhood without fatherhood... it appears that irving's books are autobiographical... his central characters modeled on himself... and his family...
i am starting the mountain in the sea... a quote from the novel in the linked guardian review...
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler – how to speak octopus | Science fiction books | The Guardian
As the novel’s version of Dr Frankenstein says: “The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”
exactly...
some photographs...
