Tom Lehrer drops all his lyrics into the public domain. I wonder what that’s all about. I grew up with Songs by Tom Lehrer, and can still sing every lyric off the top of my head. Lehrer is still alive, though he’s 92. I wonder if this is a decision made as the end approaches.

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Here’s a story (which I’ll never write) about a comedy AI, a levity machine. It’s a variation of Monty Python’s “World’s Deadliest Joke” skit (which I only realized after the idea popped into my head). Story: I ask my upgraded AI to tell me a joke. It’s pretty good. The AI calibrates my response and after a few jokes, it gets better at finding what makes me laugh. I ask for another joke. Hey, this is pretty good! Keep going, AI. And it does. But then, I start laughing so hard, I can’t catch a breath. I can’t tell it to stop. Ahhhh, the humor, it’s killing me!

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Ugh. Still avoiding the most significant problem. Rosen mentions it, and immediately sets it aside. Nothing changes in modern journalism until the ‘commercial pressures’ change.

“When you look at the American news sphere as it stands, two big things influence political journalism. One is extremely well-known: commercial pressures. We can call it ratings. We can call it clicks. We can call it the industry of attention. All these are names for the same thing, which is using news to generate an audience, and then selling that audience. And, of course, Trump assists with that. That’s why the words of Les Moonves, the former CEO of CBS, are so revealing: ‘It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.'”

News, journalism, the media, whatever you want to call it, is profoundly, fundamentally broken. And it has been for a long time. In many ways the internet didn’t create the problems with the ‘news’ so much as reveal them.

The left stands loyally behind institutions of journalism when Trump derides them as ‘fake news’, but it wasn’t that long ago that Al Gore was going back to j-school as a professor to educate up-and-coming journalists how ‘fake news’ torpedoed his chance at the presidency.

In my lifetime, accuracy has never been top priority. It’s always been about capturing the most eyeballs.

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NPR and the Corporate Criminal Element: “Ever wonder why you rarely hear serious discussion on National Public Radio (NPR) about corporate crime and violence?”

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Eight short stories of Africanfuturism.

W.T.F?

I saw a branch had fallen, and went out investigate. At first I thought the branch had done this, or maybe the shower we had this afternoon.

But that was no branch. Some evil critter got in my garden and went crazy on the peppers.

Out of 18 pepper pots, maybe 5 will survive. Gardenin’ is hard, y’all.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year images at the UK’s Natural History Museum.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen interviews Adrian Tomine for the Paris Review.

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I just finished Allie Brosh’s Solutions and Other Problems (it’s terrific!). This Rolling Stone article explains where she went when she vanished from the internet for six years.

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Whatever happened to quicksand?

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Gloria Steinem interviews Dorothy Parker in 1965 when Steinem is 30 and Parker is 71.

She fondly remembers Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, and Scott Fitzgerald. She found disagreeable, Ernest Hemingway, George Kaufman, and Harold Ross. She also speaks highly of James Baldwin and Edward Albee.

According to the demographics given in the US census I live in the most diverse neighborhood in Tampa. That’s one of the reasons we chose this neighborhood to call home.

It typically trends blue. Tampa’s a mostly blue city in a sea of red, and we’re a mostly blue neighborhood. Four years ago I was disappointed by the number to Trump yard signs I saw. Very few for Hillary, too many for Trump.

Starting in mid-March, I began regular walks through the neighborhood. These days I do a five-mile walk, three times a week. On my walk there is one house that has had some form of Trump banner flying for the last four years. Otherwise, I’m happy to report there are many Biden signs.

Other than the family flying the banner, I spotted my first Trump sign last week. Today, there were two more Trump signs, but there are scores of Biden signs, and some have been up for over a month.

Anecdotal, and it doesn’t really mean anything, but it’s nice to see that all those people who showed support for Trump four years ago via yard signs, are no longer so eager for their neighbors to know where they stand.

Only two more weeks. If you can vote now, vote now.

UPDATE: Highly Informed Voter Has Spent Weeks Studying Trump, Biden Yard Signs

It was great! Definitely the right choice.

A month ago I put myself on a Twitter lockout for a month. I made the right choice.

Technically, the hiatus ended yesterday, but I don’t think I’m going back to using it the way I did before. I’m not exactly sure what my new relationship with social media will look like, but I’ve pretty much shut down all avenues for doomscrolling.

I like blogging. Getting back into the regular flow of keeping this blog updated brings me a sense of satisfaction and joy that I never get on any of the social media platforms.

For the next month I’ll try posting to Twitter (including linking to these blog posts), but not scrolling through the feed. Maybe that’s the solution I’m looking for.

Is there a global underground subculture that attempts to cross every national border without proper authorization and papers? I want this to be a reality TV show.

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The Attorney General should have to wear an electric collar that shocks them everytime a cop kills someone.

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If you’re unfamiliar with John Rawls, this interview with Katrina Forrester (who wrote an in-depth study of his work) is a good entry point.

“The basic idea was to imagine what kind of society you would want to set up, if you didn’t know where you would end up in it, or who you would be.”

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Fashion as resistance – Juxtapoz interviews Carla Fernandez.

The future is handmade.

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Just Security has started a series of “Good Governance” proposals. With any luck a Democratic majority will embrace some of these over the next couple of years.

“Regular invocations in the mainstream media of formerly obscure corners of the law such as the Hatch Act, Insurrection Act, and the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution, as well as norms such as the independence of the Department of Justice or the non-partisan administration of the security clearance process are evidence of an urgent and widespread desire to see our government recommit itself to good governance, public integrity, and the rule of law. Many commentators have identified and offered analysis of one or another means of pursuing this goal. The Good Governance Papersseeks both to expand and render more concrete this discussion by collecting in one place a ready list of non-partisan, carefully crafted, specific reform proposals.”

The progress is incremental, but I’m happy that I’m getting creative work done every week.

For a minute, I thought I’d do NaNoWriMo again this year, but I dug around through their site, and I guess I probably won’t. It turns out what I really loved about NaNoWriMo was the little blog widget that charted my progress over the course of the month. They dropped those widgets in their re-design a couple of years ago.

My current creative project is a complete re-write of a novel I did for NaNoWriMo in 2014. Whether it will be any good or not, I don’t know. What I do know is I have a much greater understanding of what I’m doing with a project of this size. The current goal is to have it posted in ebook form by the end of the year.

Looking through past NaNoWriMo projects it looks like my peak years were 2010-2015. I skipped 2016, and completed a novel in 2017. Of those seven, I think four of them might be suitable for substantial revision and ebook production.

As an aside — I don’t want to rule the world, I don’t want to be the biggest boss that ever bossed the world around, but at least one line of this song has been a constant refrain rolling through my brain since the early days of the pandemic.

Little by little, bit by bit.

I think Ohmme is the last band I added to my music rotation. Here’s their Tiny Desk gig. In the video below they cover the B-52s. More people should cover the B-52s.

I liked that so much it made me want to watch the original.

Is Afrofuturism for Africans?

Afrofuturism: Ayashis’ Amateki – an essay by Mohale Mashigo

“Afrofuturism is an escape for those who find themselves in the minority and divorced or violently removed from their African roots, so they imagine a ‘black future’ where they aren’t a minority and are able to marry their culture with technology. That is a very important story and it means a lot to many people. There are so many wonderful writers from the diaspora dealing with those feelings or complexities that it would be insincere of me to parrot what they are doing.

“My story, as an African living in Africa, is this: I lived (as in, under the same roof ) with white people for the first time when I was a nineteen-year-old student. My television screen showed stories populated by black people speaking indigenous languages, so I have never suffered from a lack of representation as such. Was I, though, still living in a country where my culture, language and presence were considered a nuisance? Absolutely!”

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I just subscribed to Weird Horror.

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You know that cool future holographic internet where people just wave their hands around and we can see from the graphic overlay that they’re interacting with 3D graphics? Well, what if you don’t have hands? Or arms? Dots asked these questions and developed an inclusive interactive system.

“As the world is entering this hand-gesture controlled future driven by machine-learning, we realize it will be difficult to accommodate disabilities, due to a lack of datasets. While we may use thousands of people’s hand-motion video to train one model, it is almost impossible to find two people with exactly the same form of disabilities. Disability is often highly individual, which is not reflected in machine learning. Can we imagine asking an upper limb amputee to use Hololens?

“Dots is an inclusive interface for future spatial computing, which empowers the disabled person to design their way to interact with Mixed Reality and Internet-of-things, based on their body conditions.”

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The gap between expected deaths and real deaths suggests that COVID-19 has been more deadly than the numbers currently reported. It may be 33% higher (if we’re approximately 210,000 right now, the likely number of dead due to COVID-19 is probably closer to 280,000).

Used to be if you allowed 300,000 US American citizens die through neglect and disinformation campaigns you’d be persona non grata in the states. Now, the Republican Party will ask you to be their standard bearer. Is this what Freud meant by ‘death drive’?

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If you are into SFF scholarship, the latest issue of Studies in the Fantastic (No. 9 – Summer 2020) looks to be available as open access. Included is this interview with Sofia Samatar.

S.S.: Yeah, well, my scholarship and my creative work really move hand in hand. Every chapter of my dissertation produced either a short story or a section of a novel. 

This topic came up at happy hour on Friday. Is it OK to wish someone die?

I don’t know the answer. All I could do was sing this song in my head.