A nice review of Castle in the Sky was published in The Fader earlier this month:

With enough curated cheeriness and kitschy synth work, any artist worth their salt can emulate an ’80s sound. But Castles In the Sky takes on the much trickier task of blending the era’s capitalist excesses with its radical elements — art that arose as a response to the brutal injustices of austerity and imperialism masked as American exceptionalism — and projecting the whole mess onto our current technocratic dystopia. Jennifer Vanilla’s dimension of origin is an eternal ’80s, one in which the decade’s false promises are suspended in midair like floating castles. But Grant’s critical eye complicates the premise, letting the weight of the future seep ever so slightly into their avatar’s perpetual daydream.

Walking through Highland Park, a flock of starlings swarmed overhead.

Caught a replay of this mix on The Lot Radio this afternoon and noting it here for the archive :)

I’ve been trying to use social media less and this site more. The hope is to keep a more thorough, short-form log of stuff I’ve read, watched, made, eaten, thought about, etc. However, since the site is a Jeykll-backed static site, I previously had to be at my laptop to post a new entry.

While there are more sophisticated options for managing Jekyll sites, I really just wanted to simple webform to post a new entry which I could access from my phone.

After a few hours of hacking, I put together a simple FastAPI endpoint which performs the following operations:

• Accepts a title, list of categories, post body, an image or video, and an API key for security.
• Pulls the latest version of this site’s repo from GitLab.
• Resizes the image and/or video using ffmpeg
• Generates a jekyll-formatted markdown file and writes it to the appropriate directory.
• Commits the changes and pushes them back to GitLab.

Since this site uses GitLab CI to publish new changes, the new post shows up in 1-2 minutes.

Some things I’d like to add in the future:

• Auto-dithering of images to reduce page size like lowtech magazine. (On the note of reducing page size, there’s some pretty minimal Javascript running that uses JQuery which I could probably scrap).
• Add an “edit” button to each log entry so I can fix typos, or even have log entries that grow over time.
• Some sort of comment-via-email functionality? (this is half-baked).

Here are links to the form and the source code.

Watched Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Enjoyed the intro sequence with Ivan’s voiceover teamed with the fact that he only interacts with Pepa via voice messages (including their shared work dubbing English films in Spanish) until the end of the film. It’s as if some men treat relationships as nothing more than a series of cliché lines cribbed from pop culture. I saw Almodovar’s recent short with Tilda Swinton, The Human Voice, earlier this year and it clearly drew upon this earlier film, including the vibrant palette of reds, greens, and blues.

Watched Marty last night, a low-key story about a lonely butcher in the Bronx. I loved the back-and-forth between the title character and his friend trying to figure out what to do on a Saturday night, the characters of his mother and aunt, and this line:

Ma, whaddaya want from me? Whaddaya want from me? I’m miserable enough as it is. All right, so I’ll go to the Stardust Ballroom. I’ll put on a blue suit, and I’ll go. And you know what I’m gonna get for my trouble? Heartache. A big night of heartache.

Quote from “Langley’s City Directory” about commuting in San Francisco circa 1867. At the Cable Car Museum.

I initially came across this article through a citation in Software Sustainability, a collection of articles on the topic of “Green in Software” - generally how to make software more sustainable by reducing its carbon footprint. The article referenced “Wirth’s Law” which is:

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

This can be contrasted with “Moore’s Law”, the better-known observation that the complexity of computers doubles every two years.

Together, these two “laws” form “Jevon’s Paradox” as appled to computing, in which increases in the energy efficiency of computers (defined as the proportion of processing power outputted to energy inputted) have lowered costs and thereby increased demand, negating the efficiency gains. This paradox was initially observed after Watt’s steam engine, which made coal more cost-effective, led to the increased use of steam engines, and therefore coal, as well.

Been having fun making drones with my electric toothbrush. Opening and closing your mouth while using it functions kind of like an LFO/low pass filter.

Sitting in the seat of empire tonight, I rest comfortably in my quiet home, under the soft glow of dimmed lights, listening to music, cuddling my cat, drinking fresh water, and staring at a flat plane of glass informing me of a genocide in progress. Like many sitting in the the seat of empire tonight, this feeling is all too familiar. The window into this atrocity is smaller, the voices reporting it are those of my friends, the pleas to politicans are automated, but the sense of powerlessness remains.

I scroll through social media until my device tells me I’ve reached my daily limit. I call my representatives and Cisco Systems tells me their inboxes are full. I make donations which my credit card flags as fraud. I march in the street and am surrounded by police in riot gear. The systems of power which secure my comfort, which provide me with food and water and entertainment, also prevent me from taking meaningful action. The systems of power which secure my comfort are committing genocide on my behalf, without my consent.

What is there to do? What can be done? I tell myself to not give up hope, to not look away, to follow the guides and click the links in the Google Docs. I dream of walking door-to-door, like some trick-or-treater dressed up as Thomas Jefferson, pleading with my neighbors to “Free Palestine.” I fantasize of standing on a busy corner holding up a sign or writing an urgent call to action in my company Slack. Maybe I’ll even change my profile picture.

Tomorrow, I will wake up, lying in bed, and thousands of Palestinians will be lying dead under blood-stained sheets. Maybe I shouldn’t sit so comfortably in the seat of empire tonight.