During a human expedition to colonize space, Mickey 17, a so-called “expendable” employee, is sent to explore an ice planet.
I’d say a pretty good adaptation of the book that keeps key scenes but creates a better length movie plot that isn’t dragged down by the repetitive cafeteria scenes of the book.
“All political, historical and cultural information is received in the same – at once anodyne and miraculous – form of the news item. It is entirely actualized — i.e. dramatized in the spectacular mode — and entirely deactualized — i.e. distanced by the communication medium and reduced to signs.”
— Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (pdf) (as quoted in)
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“What we are surrounded by above all are redundant photographs… every day new illustrated newspapers appear on our breakfast tables, every week new posters appear in shop displays. It is precisely this permanently changing situation that we have become accustomed to: One redundant photograph displaces another redundant photograph.”
— Vilém Flusser, “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” (pdf) (as quoted in)
Highlight of the week: two fellow consultants / former colleagues sent me referrals for potential projects 🥰
Looking forward to: baking lime pie this weekend
The metropolitan area of Tehran is home to nearly 17 million people — almost as many as the New York City metro area… and it looks like this:
Unless this war goes nuclear, this image will be the face of it. pic.twitter.com/5nhnpqeERT
— Shiv Aroor (@ShivAroor) March 8, 2026
We are still dealing with the consequences of the time New York City looked like that.
The oil is flowing into the sewers and the streets are on fire in Tehran pic.twitter.com/00vKSORe5D
— Conflict Radar (@Conflict_Radar) March 7, 2026
The Desire for Terror by Timothy Snyder:
War crimes do not win wars. Instead they provoke further war crimes and other retribution.
A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse by David Graeber
One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest … that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years. It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. […]
The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives. And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. […]
What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?
Win of the week: actually did my PT exercises every day 🦾 (and have the sore neck to show for it 😣)
Looking forward to: Banff Film Festival!
I was chatting with my friend about video games as aesthetic experience* and they made the point that tedium is used as negative space in gameplay (for example, forcing the player to walk over to another NPC instead of porting there).
In writing, the on-page density of sentences and paragraphs creates visual white space… but I hadn’t considered before a textual equivalent of negative space.
When the New is Worse Than the Old by Daniel A. Kaufman
“For the average person who knows nothing about a subject, a well-curated library is far superior to internet searches and especially AI, which is nothing but an aggregating tool that routinely gets basic things wrong. […] The sheer amount of what is available on the internet may be of utility to those who are already experts on a subject, and the ability to instantaneously access well-curated libraries other than one’s own is probably its greatest virtue for scholars. But it is the libraries that are of value to the research, not the internet, which simply provides a quick way of reaching them.”
I wish that more Wikipedia pages were written as introductions to a topic, but too often they blister with minutiae while eschewing narrative and contextualization. (To be fair, those are both difficult to write and often opinion-based… but they’re what I want 😎)
Win of the week: hit 3000 public posts on this blog! hesitated for a moment before publishing the 3000th to consider whether I cared it was a “good” post, but this site is a tool so I said eff it… hence my latest aura post I’ve been chipping away at since Thanksgiving is post #3001, not #3000 😉
Looking forward to: reading at least two maybe three books this weekend
Digital works can be cloned indefinitely. By this affordance, digital media is meant to be replicated… and distributed. Online culture relies on reproduction — of memes, of quote tweets, of embedded media. Digital authorship is often non-exclusive, and remixing is valued almost as highly as original creations. The Cult of Media rejects authorship as an important measure of authenticity.
Trust rests with technology, not the author. NFTs replace trust in the author with mechanized proof of work. The digital file’s authenticity is verified by the blockchain, so copying its visual imagery does not impact the art’s originality. As GenAI becomes increasingly realistic, cameras may begin to cryptographically sign images to prove a photograph’s veracity. Generative AI summaries and “answers” have quickly replaced traditional source-based research, and even authorship-inclined readers run text through “AI detectors.”
Rooted in manufacture rather than labor and object rather than maker, authenticity in the Cult of Media comes from the art’s format rather than its form. The appearance of a digital (or digitized!) artwork is flavor text; the medium is the message, and the only medium online is digital. We judge the authenticity of art online by the same standards we judge anything else online, because digital files are all alike and because the way we encounter images online — through the feed — flattens everything into interchangeable content. Digital aura is now how we interpret all cultural content, not just what we’ve traditionally called art.
I have a couple window doors that reflect greenery, and we’ve had at least one bird strike (fortunately it recovered within an hour but we never want it to happen again 😢). Since then, we’ve kept the blinds down permanently, but that blocks our view, so I’m investigating other options.
To prevent bird strikes, US Fish & Wildlife says (pdf):
Vertical stripes or patterns (at least 1/4 inch-wide, maximum spacing of 4 inches), or horizontal stripes (at least 1/4 inch-wide, maximum spacing of 2 inches) are effective at preventing window collisions for most birds. To reduce hummingbird collisions, closer spacing is necessary (2 x 2-inch grid). Dark colored patterns may be difficult for birds to see if dark colors reflect on the glass. Patterns applied to the outside of windows will prevent more bird collisions than inside.
American Bird Conservatory says: