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I was greeted by an explosion of autumn colors at one of my jobs today. It was a building just around the corner from where I live. Even though I’ve passed it many times, I’d never had the chance to see the courtyard.

It made me think of a conversation I had with a friend yesterday. He asked how I plan my days when I’m traveling. I told him that I don’t.

No planning, no lists. Just my two feet and an open mind.

That’s how I like it. That’s also how I’ve discovered some of the coolest places and stumbled upon the most interesting people and situations.

One example I mentioned was when I once saw an abandoned building while out walking in Chiang Mai. It didn’t look like much, but I decided to take a look down the alley. It turned out to be a graffiti goldmine, with beautiful pieces of art covering every wall.

I saw a guy taking photos, so I went up and talked to him. He turned out to be a photographer documenting street art from all over the world. He even gave me a quick, on-the-spot lesson about the artists behind the pieces we were looking at.

That’s just one small example of something I would’ve missed if I’d been busy ticking off things on a list. There are so many wonderful things waiting to be discovered — even just around the corner from where we are.

We just need to stay open, both in mind and in sight.

The world is full of magic, if we only care to look.

 

I’m trying to spend as little time as possible on any social media. I’m finding it difficult.

I started posting over at baty.blog again for some reason.

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I code sites for a living (allegedly), and I honestly cannot overstate how uninterested I am in all these new browsers. Because these are not new browsers: these are Chromium frames with AI slapped on top.

The thing I found more interesting about the whole OpenAI announcement was Sam Altman tweeting: «10 am livestream today to launch a new product I'm quite excited about!». This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work, where we’ll all have a super intelligence always available in our pockets, ready to dispense infinite wisdom.

And yet he’s quite excited about a fucking Chromium installation with AI slapped on top of it. I guess building an actual browser, from scratch, is still a task so monumentally difficult that even a company that is aiming for super-intelligence can’t tackle it.

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Question came up on TPM as to whether the blogosphere might reboot in Substack. The author concluded it can't, and I agree. Here's why. "One thing the blogosphere had that Substack can’t have is all parts were replaceable. You could use any blogging tool, and any feed reader and still be part of the world. Substack is a single company that has raised VC money. Vastly different incentives." And this has been tested. You have to use their editor to publish in their enviroment. They're unable to let you see their product as part of a toolset, it has to be the whole thing.#

You know how the AI companies are all doing browsers. Why don't they have a local url that I could put into an <a> element that pops up the result of a question asked of the chatbot. Something like this. When you click on the link you find out what the Mets did. #

I'm okay with Trump destroying the White House step by step. We're going to need a lot of new things once he's done. There's going to be a lot of broken stuff that needs fixing. Feces covered monuments. Probably a new cemetary somewhere for his victims. But you know how when the Mets were defeated by the determined Yankees in Shea Stadium in 2000, we tore down the old stadium and built a new one. Same thing. The old White House will have served its purpose. We shouldn't even build a new White House on that location, just like we shouldn't have built a skyscraper in place of the World Trade Center. I wanted to see a mosque and a synagogue, a new football stadium, perhaps. A nice park. A place for a camp fire. Anything but an indestructable office building. We have so many of them. But where are the spaces for kids to play and learn and be friends. No, in place of the White House, I want to see a gorgeous public library. A place of learning. And a softball field and a nice swimming pool. We can tell the kids that once a bad old man lived here, and we decided it'd be more fun to have a big playground instead. #

Really, the only thing I wanted to say about it is that as someone who lives in a city the federal government desperately wants to depict as war-torn and -ravaged but which responded to such by instead assembling a motley crew of inflatable animal costumes—and calling up the wonder and joy that is #BananaBloc—that all began with an expressly antifascist frog who got shot in the vent with pepper spray, I greatly appreciated the fact that the people of Staten Island when faced with the first-ever Purge experiment mostly just seemed to throw block parties.

(If you’re been reading me for awhile, the idea of inflatable antifascist animal costumes and brass bands dressed as bananas should seem familiar to you.)

As in The First Purge, if the authorities here in the real world want to depict a city as riven by violence they will find a way to do so. In the late afternoon and early evening after Portland’s wildly successfully No Kings protest this past Saturday, federal officers and agents at the ICE building in South Portland did their damnedest on two separate occasions to generate footage of the street billowing with smoke, almost as if Dog-Killer Barbie had ordered war footage with which to deny that the events of No Kings had been peaceful.

Anyway, The First Purge went over well here, so I might or might not start making my way through the rest of them, although so far no one has answered me when I’ve asked them if the others in the series (and I guess there was a season of television, too) also are worth watching.

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