Front page

Something I noticed re-reading Roger Zelazny's "Doorways in the Sand"

Monday, July 15, 2024

I recently re-read Roger Zelazny’s “Doorways in the Sand,” which I last read when I was a teen-ager. I loved it as much today as I did then. One of my favorite Zelazny books, which makes it one of my favorite books. In that novel, a character in his 60s is looking back on his life and says that the world goes through one massive change after another—but they happen one at a time, spaced out at long intervals, and after each change life goes back to pretty much what it was before, so you can convince yourself nothing has changed.

Continue reading →

Saturday, July 13, 2024 →

The mystery of consciousness is deeper than we thought [Philip Goff / Scientific American] — We lack even the beginning of an explanation of how the brain produces our inner world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes. A thought experiment with “pain-pleasure” zombies illustrates the mystery.

Thursday, July 11, 2024 →

The small, prosperous Parsi community of people in India leave their dead out naked in the forest to be consumed by vultures. [99percentinvisible.org] — Learning about this tradition horrified me at first — but only for an instant. The Parsi tradition is no weirder than burying dead people, burning them up, or chucking them in the ocean. The Parsi tradition just seems revolting to me because I’m not used to it.

Wednesday, July 10, 2024 →

Om Malik: The future of writing: How AI will shape our tools.

AI doesn’t write for me, but it helps me write and I expect more of that.

37Signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY, is introducing Writebook open source software for publishing books on the Internet

Monday, July 8, 2024

37Signals co-founder and CEO Jason Fried: You know, it’s really easy to publish short form content on a variety of social platforms. And individual blog posts on a number of other platforms. These are solved problems. But it’s surprisingly challenging to publish books on the web in nice, cohesive, tight, easy-to-navigate HTML format. A collection of 20 essays can be a book. Or a company’s handbook can be a book.

Continue reading →

Sunday, July 7, 2024 →

What Catholic priestly vestments symbolize and how they connect to the significance of clothing for everyone.

My new newsletter is ready for signups

Sunday, July 7, 2024

Sign up, if you wish to. The newsletter is a daily digest of all my posts here. I’ll give it a week or so to make sure all the bugs are shaken out, and then migrate all the subscribers of my old newsletter to the new one. But I’m pretty sure all the bugs are out now. Subscribers to the old newsletter won’t notice much change. New layout. New email “from” address; it’s now “MitchW@hello.

Continue reading →

“Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.”

Friday, July 5, 2024

Living in a Lucid Dream. By Claire L. Evans. Guided dreaming beats lucid dreaming because lucidity spoils the experience of dreaming and turns dreaming into a kind of virtual reality game. Imagine sitting across the kitchen table from your deceased parent. “You don’t know it’s a dream,” [Adam Haar Horowitz, a dream researcher and cognitive scientist], said. “That’s the beautiful thing. You’re sitting with them. Why would I want to be in a dream and know it’s a dream?

Continue reading →

Thursday, July 4, 2024 →

Tonight’s movie. Brings back much of the top cast of the 1984 film, and stars new faces. Predictable, charming and enjoyable. I like that Eddie Murphy lets other people steal scenes. Now do 48 Hrs.

Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV

Thursday, July 4, 2024

They’ve just announced casting for Molly. Elsewhere on the Internet, I’ve been involved in a discussion of anachronisms in the book, which was published in 1984. It’s a very 80s version of the future, with challenges for bringing to the screen today. The opening line of the book is, ““The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s a great line, but you’re gonna have to explain that to anybody under 50.

Continue reading →

I'm switching newsletter hosting to Micro.blog

Thursday, July 4, 2024

I’m in the process of moving the newsletter version of this blog to to the same company that hosts the web version, Micro.blog. A big part of the reason is that Mailchimp, the company that currently hosts the newsletter, is owned by Intuit, which is not a nice company. I’d just as soon not be affiliated with that company any more than necessary. This is still a work in progress, but I hope to complete it within days.

Continue reading →

Wednesday, July 3, 2024 →

On Ask a Manager: Great reply-all email catastrophes.

Ask a Manager is a website where I can get lost even worse than on TV Tropes.

When I get stuck on a reply-all chain, I perpetuate the catastrophe with feigned innocence.

Tuesday, July 2, 2024 →

Private places to cry?

On Reddit:

I had to make a tough decision today and need someplace private to let my emotions out. Is there a good place to do so with having little chance of stumbling upon other people? Home is not an option.

Explained further here.