I skipped a week to recover from St. Louis and then got sick and forgot to follow up the next week. Whoops. But now I'm back.
what i'm reading:
Blood Meridian
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well, ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way, and not some other way.
I found a used copy in a record store in St. Louis. A while ago I told my therapist about my Dennis Cooper and snuff films phase and he recommended I read Cormac McCarthy for a similar experience. I was like 'bet'. But I ended up liking All The Pretty Horses, even if it just felt like Clint Eastwood for pseudointellectuals.
Blood Meridian is just incomparable to anything else from this millennium. It's a modern epic poem. The things McCarthy does with sentences in here... I'm ruined for anything else.
what i'm listening to:
"Loat"
https://m.soundcloud.com/0o0o000o0oo0-423770279/sets/loat
Side A sounds like a chorus of melancholy cats in the belly of some groaning Blame!-ian megastructure.
Side B, clocking in at 41 seconds, comprises a chopped-and-screwed industrial hellscape before pierced by layers of wailing. 10/10
what i'm watching:
Pizza Guy 8
The greatest movie about a she/they pizza man propelling themself out of the narrative on the force of a murder spree ever. Blood-soaked, nonsensical, hilarious.
I had the opportunity to ask Tate Hoffmaster what their inspirations were for the movie, and I was hoping they would come up with some Vinegar Syndrome underground indie pedigree, but they surprised me with Reefer Madness and The Toxic Avenger (1984). Then I got Hoffmaster to sign my DVD. Epic.
what i'm playing:
Team Fortress 2
I got covid and had to stay home for a week. After replaying Half-Life 2 on Hard i craved more mindless killing in the source engine and reinstalled TF2. I felt the 1000 hours I put into it in middle school flooding back into my muscle memory. But the memory was bad because I suck at video games.
what i'm working on:
I made a custom element to display a little playlist of youtube videos. my intention is to use it for my oc profile pages.
something i liked:
taking a bath
i took a bath for the first time in years. lit a candle, played an ambient noise album, sipped on some white wine. I got out feeling completely relaxed and wavy. Then I immediately blew it by getting mad at video games.
something i hated:
UFO AI-Slop
I just learned about The National UFO Reporting Center. It's entertaining to read some of the encounters, especially the older ones. They also have a gallery section for illustrations of encounters. Unfortunately, there's a bunch of shitty GenAI slop in there. It feels so contrary to what's intriguing about UFO culture. See below.
a picture:
NUFORC UFO Sighting 177646
This is my favorite entry in the NUFORC gallery. The sighting itself is brief and eerie-- "time loss" is one of my favorite UFO tropes, perhaps because of the unheimlich loss of autonomy in altered states. I also think it's funny that it takes place during the author's pathetically short 10-minute break, making the whole thing an implicit critique of wage labor. Like, you go out for a smoke, have an ineffable experience, then it's suddenly time to go back to work. And you just have to pretend nothing is different for you.
I love its extremely legible flatness, like a Bill Traylor painting-- you know exactly the who and what, and it captures the atmosphere perfectly.
The amateur handiwork is perfect for a piece motivated by a desire to communicate a personal experience that exceeds words, but there are also very thoughtful compositional choices. The muddy green-brown grass gives way by sudden horizon to a vibrant sky blue, which even has a subtle gradient into a deeper blue to depict atmospheric perspective. The sketchy strokes on the tree bark identify it as birch.
There's a detached impersonality in the offset of the observer and UAP on the vertical, as though the object is an element of the environment indifferent to human presence, like a spider in its web or a sunbathing lizard: an entity with an inconceivable, or, if you will, alien, umwelt. If, by contrast, the observer and UAP were centered together, the the piece would be overwhelmed by the imposition of an interpretive framework.