Patrick Rhone –

How to write a book…

Think very, very deeply about something for a very long time.

Write it down once your head gets too full to keep it in anymore.

That’s my experience, anyway.

John Cassady, multiple Eisner award-winning comics artist, has passed away at the age of 52.

I loved his work on Astonishing X-Men. However, his work with Warren Ellis on Planetary was transcendent.

Damn.

I keep seeing this image online, so I thought I’d take a minute to make some checkmarks.

I’ve used a rotary phone, a floppy disk, a typewriter, an encyclopedia, a phone book, and a paper map. Check. I’ve taken pics with a film camera, listened to music on a CD and a Boombox, made a mixed tape, owned a Walkman, watched a movie on VHS, and even rented some from Blockbuster. I’ve learned Cursive, played an Atari, sent and received Faxes, ordered from Columbia House, accessed the Internet via dial-up, sent a postcard, and uncurled a telephone cord. I still own a couple of dictionaries, and I infrequently write checks.

The two things I’ve never done from that list are have a MySpace account or an AOL address. I did have a HoTMaiL address, so that should count for something. Consequently, I’m old, at least by the standards of whoever compiled this list. If so, I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to see most things on this list be replaced by something newer and better.

That thought makes me smile.

James Earl Jones, famed for his deep, powerful voice and commanding screen presence, is dead at 93. Deadline reports that he died at his home in Pawling, New York.

I had forgotten he was an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winner. He was Darth Vader, Mufasa, King Jaffe Joffer, the voice of CNN, and a host of other characters.

Some of his best-delivered lines.

His speech in Field of Dreams echoes in my brain.

He will be missed.

abundantmusic has compiled a track listing for all 114 volumes of Now That’s What I Call Music! and turned them into a single, 4500-plus-song-long Spotify playlist. That’s almost 300 hours of music.

While guesting on the podcast “Park and Recollection,” about the TV show Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt discussed how he thinks each president’s personality “sets the tone for the pop culture.”

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This video cuts off at Obama, but here’s the rest –

"And then there was a rejection of [Obama], with Donald Trump, which I think was a combination of a white reaction to having a black president, quite frankly. But it's also this thing if you notice, because Trump's whole thing is, like, Well, what is reality? What is truth? And now everything is all about the mutliverse [e.g., the Marvel multiverse] and "Everything Everywhere All at Once," or "Russian Doll," where nothing's really real. There's no actual set truth anymore. And everything is amorphous."

I wonder what the pop culture will be when Harris wins? Joy?

Linkin Park is reunited with two new members: Emily Armstrong as co-vocalist and Colin Brittain as drummer for the first time in seven years. Their new album, From Zero, will be released in November.

Here’s the new single and the announcement concert.

I was never a huge LP fan, but this is cool.

According to his keys to the White House model, American University professor Allan Lichtman calls the 2024 election.

Here’s the video. Spoiler alert: he says it’s going to be Harris.

Here’s the latest trailer for Megalopolis and it’s visually interesting, but I have no idea what’s going on.

Karsten Runquist has seen the movie, and I appreciate his review. In short, he calls it “a big, beautiful mess.”

Emma Beddington, writing for The Guardian, has written a fantastic piece with tips and tricks on how to sort out one’s life.

All of these ideas are great. I need to start implementing a few, though.

Seth Godin –

Perfect is useful. It’s an absolute measure, a north star, a chance to improve our work.

But it’s also a shortcut to persistent dissatisfaction.

Compared to perfect is helpful when we’re creating something.

But it’s also worth noting that perfect is unattainable. What’s on offer is never perfect, but what’s on offer might be exactly what we need right now.

There I Ruined It provides a fantastic mashup of John Denver singing a Country Roads/War Pigs rendition.

What a perfect mash-up.

Ted Chiang with a thought-provoking essay on “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:”

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

In the past few years, Chiang has written and talked often about the limitations of LLMs. I can’t help but wonder how his views and thoughts regarding LLMs may one day affect his future fiction.

Matteo Wong, writing at The Atlantic, disagrees.

There are all sorts of reasons to criticize generative AI—the technology’s environmental footprint, gross biases, job displacement, easy creation of misinformation and nonconsensual sexual images, to name a few—but Chiang is arguing on purely creative and aesthetic grounds. Although he isn’t valuing some types of work or occupations over others, his logic leads there: Staking a defense of human labor and outputs, and human ownership of that labor and those outputs, on AI being “just” vapid statistics implies the jobs AI does replace might also be “just” vapid statistics. Defending human labor from AI should not be conflated with adjudicating the technology’s artistic merit. The Jacquard loom, despite its use as a creative tool, was invented to speed up and automate skilled weaving. The widespread job displacement and economic upheaval it caused mattered regardless of whether it was replacing or augmenting artistic, artisanal, or industrial work.

Chiang’s essay, in a sense, frames art not just as a final object but also as a process. “The fact that you’re the one who is saying it,” he writes, “the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes [art] new.” I agree, and would go a step further: The processes through which art arises are not limited and cannot be delimited by a single artist or viewer but involve societies and industries and, yes, technologies. Surely, humans are creative enough to make and even desire a space for generative AI in that.

Rolling Stone has published a list of the 100 best television episodes ever, and of course, there are all kinds of things to nick pick about it. That’s also the point.

These lists are entirely designed to get people fired up and engaged and to provoke nasty comments about why their favorite television episode was overlooked.

These lists only provoke a minor despair that I can’t watch them all.

Seth Godin –

Here’s a useful habit that’s more than a hack…

The next time things are going well, when a project is about to launch, when a meeting has been successful, when the sun is shining… take your phone and go for a walk.

Hit record on an audio app and make a twenty-minute audiobook. Talk about what you know, what you see, what you hope for. Talk about the change you seek to make and how you’re going to get there.

And then save it.

Save it for when you need to hear from that person who recorded it.

It might become the best audiobook you own.

Evan Puschak, at Nerdwriter1, hypothesizes that, unlike movies, TV is not the right medium to tell Tolkien’s stories. He makes some interesting points, but I’m not sure I agree.

However, I admit that I did not finish the first season of Rings of Power because I was bored and didn’t really like the various stories presented. For me it was the story, not the medium.

I’m tired of the news organizations asking her response to Trump’s race-baiting, misogynistic, and quite frankly stupid statements that aren’t worth the American people’s time. It’s obviously one of the reasons she hasn’t done a sit-down with the news media until now. Everything is geared to her reactions to whatever shit Trump has said. She ain’t got time for that.

Nicholas Bate:

1. Write every day.

2. Write fast.

3. Write when you do want to.

4. Write when you don't want to.

5. Write a lot. Edit a lot. From quantity produce beautiful quality.

6. Write anyplace.

7. Write from keyboard.

8. Write with pencil and paper.

9. Write stuff.

10. Write thoughts, things and themes.

11. Got writer's block? Write about how it really is annoying you.

12. Write now. Write tomorrow.

13. Write as the sun comes up, as the sun goes down and as your chai tea cools.

14. Write.

Rick Beato outlines the latest practice in popular music…interpolation.

It’s all bullshit, though. It’s just a term that lawyers came up with for stealing. I mean, the Dua Lipa riff on INXS is so ridiculous. I’m glad the band got a writing credit. Still, all of these examples are just stealing. It’s a one-half step away from sampling, which is almost always stealing unless the artist gets permission i.e. getting the original writer(s) credit.

It’s time for some football.