I inhale and exhale.
When drafting a new blog post after some years, it’s mandatory to begin it with some form of mea culpa . I actually made a New Year’s resolution to start writing more blog posts; after the dissolution of my company last year, my head was stuffed with all sorts of technical knowledge I needed to shar...
I often think of this essay by Baudrillard, and always have a hard time finding it. It’s from Screened Out , first published by Verso in 2002, translated by Chris Turner. The book itself was first published as Ecran total , by Editions Galilee, in 2000.
In the 1978 edition of “The Aleph and Other Stories,” written by Jorge Luis Borges, edited and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, there’s a throwaway line in the final section titled “An Autobiographical Essay” :
There’s a theory called linguistic relativity which postulates that the language you speak modifies your comprehension of the world. That a word does not exist in a language does not mean that the concept itself doesn’t exist; only that it is harder to express, and therefore, a source of potential b...
From a tweetstorm !
Jon Yu was the one who got me tuned into The Chris Gethard Show with a humble tweet:
On May 25, 2016, around 8am PST, tired and bored, I bought a Super Nintendo console from eBay, with the explicit intent of coming up with some kind of art project for it. When it arrived, I opened the case up, got an idea for something to build, then made absolutely no progress.
By all accounts, 2016 was an absolute mess of a year. The deaths of David Bowie and Carrie Fisher bookended a long stream of miserable events, not the least of which being that the US elected a fascist and my seven-year relationship was ending. In comparison, 2017 fared marginally better: I made a c...
A few years ago, I noticed a trend in the ethnicities of characters that needed to be weird, vile, or both.
I have been looking for an excuse to learn Rust for some time now. Although I had read several tutorials and ran through the Exercism.io problems , I am incapable of learning anything new unless I actually get a chance to build something with it. But I didn’t have any good ideas!
I still regularly watch cartoons. Kids these days are so fortunate to have the cartoons that they do.
There’s a petition being passed around amongst people working in the tech industry, http://neveragain.tech/ , which aims to ensure that any signer vows to resist designing systems that would “facilitate ethnic or religious targeting”. Such a collection of information would allow nefarious powers to...
For as long as I’ve been able to vote, I’ve lived in the blue parts of California. Regardless of who I ended up casting a ballot for, my counties, cities, and state have almost always swing to the Democratic Party. There have been a few exceptions to that–we did elect Schwarzenegger after all.
About a week ago, I moved to San Francisco ten years ago. I didn’t intend to make a big deal out of it—it’s a random day in a random year that happens to coincide with the moment when I got an opportunity to move—but the concept of 2006 San Francisco is so bizarre to outsiders that I felt the urge t...
I can tell you with excruciatingly embarrassing details how I became interested in Japan as a teenager. But after I was a Japanophile, I was an Anglophile. And I don’t remember how I became interested in England at all. Maybe I was trying to impress someone. Maybe it was the least foreign foreign co...
As part of an entire suite of 2016 changes, I’ve decided to give public blogging another try.
Two years after I first heard about it during my Bolaño craze, I have finally started Javier Marías’ “Dark Back of Time.”
It’s not a city of lost souls. It’s not a place where the hopeless end up. From its origins San Francisco has always been a city for the certain few who know that life can be lived in better ways. The early settlers panned for gold, hoping to establish their security through labor and luck; for them...
“I say this not to deny my debts to him, which are many, but to lead you back, and to lead myself back, to a principle that I think is fundamental for all those who have taken part in this conference, certainly for me, and certainly for Borges: this most important point is that books talk to each ot...
"I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by little, not inherited, fallen one after the other off the tree of time. Tonight I found a candle on a table, and as a game I lit it and walked along the corridor with it. The breeze stirred up by my mot...