friendmeat

weeklies #48 - the norteñapill

2026-06-13T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

Hobbes' Leviathan

I got a marked-up, dog-eared paperback copy for $2 at a yard sale.

My favorite thing about reading psychology is when the author asserts something as universal which is totally fucking bizarre:

...[I]n all cases, both Laughter, and Weeping, are sudden motions; Custome taking them both away. For no man Laughs at old jests; or Weeps for an old calamity.

How much are you willing to bet on that Thomas? Have you never met the Sullen Weeper?

what i'm listening to

Flaco Jimenez

I've been norteñapilled by this documentary on the founder of Arhoolie Records.

See also this incredible performance of "Maria Elena" with Flaco, Ry Cooder and George Bohannon. It's hard not to be jealous of boomers listening to something like this.

what i'm watching

Les Barbouze (1964)

A firmly middle-of-the-road French comedy. Lots of stuff that goes over my head cuz I'm not familiar with mid-century French politics.

Unfortunately weirdly racist towards the Asian cast. There's a dozen-plus Japanese grunts and they don't even get ex-post-facto credits on IMDB. And in all their scenes, the soundtrack is replaced with a morse tone, as if they're drones being controlled via radio. Which reminds me of the racist dehumanization of Chinese communists as "brainwashed" as discussed in the season of the Blowback podcast about the Korean war.

Modern films don't have the bravery to cut the soundtrack awkwardly in the middle of a scene. Get those fuckers back in the cutting room with scissors and glue.

Project Hail Mary (2026)

Ryan Gosling should've fucked that rock.

what i'm working on

boss said we should finish the last room we need to install equipment in before the end of the fiscal year. by 'we' he meant me and by 'before the end of the fiscal year' he meant in the 9 days I have before I leave on vacation.

something i liked

got a nice shirt second-hand.

something i hated

my palms still fucking hurt from trying to unscrew some pipes.

a picture:

saul universe

saul universe.

weeklies #47 - ganbare! foreign sovereign immunity!!!

2026-06-06T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

"When the Sovereign Contracts: Troubling the Public/Private Distinction in International Law"

My jaw dropped when I read this paragraph:

...[A]bout fifty percent of sovereign-debt crises involve litigation, and most of such litigation involves a hedge fund plaintiff. These hedge fund plaintiffs are not the original creditors of the sovereigns. Instead, they purchase “distressed” debt—debt that the debtor is unlikely to be able to repay in full—on the secondary market, for a fraction of its original value. By suing for full repayment on the original terms of the bonds, they can make profits of up to 300%-400%. These suits usually take place in U.S. courts, and specifically courts in New York such as the District Court for the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.). This is because more than half of debt contracts between private creditors and developing nations are governed by New York law.

The article is about the principle of Foreign Sovereign Immunity, which is the inability of a plaintiff state to hold a foreign state accountable to the plaintiff's rules. But there needs to be some exception when states act in a commercial capacity, like taking out loans from banks or buying military weaponry. This is the 'commercial exception' to Foreign Sovereign Immunity.

The author argues that the commercial exception is applied unequally, and is overwhelmingly used against Third World states where their commercial activity is heavily tied with domestic development and therefore with questions of that state's sovereignty.

The question is way out of my purview, but the idea of a hedge fund extorting an entire country for profit so nakedly is crazy to me. But AFAIK the whole system is like this. I'll defer to Mia Wong's primer on shadow banking for the It Could Happen Here podcast.

what i'm listening to

mazzy star

I've been on a mazzy star kick since The Sopranos used "Look On Down From The Bridge" as an outro needle-drop.

As much as the band is better known for their yearnful dream-pop hits, I also really appreciate the off-kilter psych-jazz of the title track from She Hangs Brightly.

what i'm watching

The Paper Chase (1973)

Timothy Bottom is an extinct species of 70s guy. The stupid sideburns, the mop of hair, the underwhelming physique. It feels, these days, that even the most mundane of dramas needs a leading man with muscles bursting from his tailored Nordstrom T-shirt. What are those for? You're a table waiter.

Ganbare, Nakamura-kun!

Slop, utter fucking slop.

There's something melancholy about queer love stories set in the past. (Nakamura-kun isn't explicitly historical, but the appeal is that it's evocative of the Tezuka style of the 80s). I had the same experience reading Lavender House by Evander Mills. They're a kind of reparative reading of the past.

Heather Mills in Feeling Backwards talks about a reading of history that tries to rescue its queer subjects from the past. That kinda hit me when I was watching Patlabor in 2021 and projecting gay and lesbian readings on characters.

The lesson is that the only real queer media is the thing you re-watch so many times you unlock the secret queercoding.

what i'm working on

boss liked my demo so i'm continuing work on the sign-in kiosk from last week.

something i liked

11,000

that's the current word count of my undisclosed fiction project. that's a lot of words to have written. and yet not enough.

something i hated

rum

this shit is so scary how am i already this tipsy

a picture:

what would neil young do

Probably smoke weed and play guitar and run a failed electric vehicle company.

weeklies #46 - pyrrhic catharsis

2026-05-30T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

"Object f(r)ictions: A case study of the Flash software platform"

The development towards ever more illusory interfaces has intensified and the same applies to the increasingly hegemonic position of programmers, which is no longer limited to the technical field, but is shaping culture in an alarmingly unregulated and undemocratic way.

The author connects the rise of Flash as the de facto infrastructure for multimedia on the internet with the contemporary regime of privacy-invading software. The "digital object" is contrasted with the relational database model, where the object model abstracts data from the end user. Flash's interjection of proprietary server infrastructure and persistent, uncontrollable client-side manipulation was the devil's bargain we made for Stick Figure Fight videos on Newgrounds.

Merkle also co-wrote Reckoning With Everything: The Becoming-Environmental of Computing, which looks interesting and is open-access.

what i'm listening to

Harry Nilsson

I've taken the Nilssonpill. What a voice, what versatility. The rhythms in "Early in the Morning" are incredible. It's incredible that this and "Without You" are on the same record.

what i'm watching

I Love Boosters (2026, dir. Bootsie Collins)

This movie does everything I bitch about modern movies not doing. It's a fun, vulgar, bloated, loudly political, multi-media celebration of human ingenuity. Corvette's development is a much-needed critique of the rags-to-riches trope. She doesn't end up with the money or the man, but instead with a stronger sense of solidarity with the world, from her fellow boosters to the global workforce whose exploited labor is intimately tied with hers.

but it actually sucks (spoilers)

The climax was such a fuuucking flop. The most radical thing the film could imagine as the apotheosis of class solidarity was 'chanting with signs'. That's literally explained as the synthesis of Dialectical Materialism. And the sweatshop-running fashion CEO is gently guided out of the story by an anonymous suit. Every film with a progressive ethic resorts to the same platitudes. I don't think it's possible for a movie out of Hollywood be anything other than brain dead slop.

This issue is thrown in stark relief by the think-tank subplot. The think tank are sellouts par excellence, having given up their own identities and literal skin to act as mouth-pieces to corporate interests, taking on the skin of grieving mothers that urge hard-on-crime policies and blue-collar workers that discourage unionization. But they take on only the mouth-pieces, and not the media itself; it's assumed that the news media in Boosters is being taken for a ride.

The think tankers are able to slot so easily into the media because of the media's role in perpetuating and instigating spectacle. It's the non-stop torrent of spectacle and shock that keeps us fearing our own Katamari-balls of wordly stress. Films like Boosters are a pyrrhic catharsis, offering vicarious revolutions, mere simulations of populist solidarity. No one's going to leave this film and start a riot.

"Ideology of Gooning/Dems on Israel-Palestine/Death-Drive/Žižek/Lacan/Lord of the Rings/The Big Other"

This made me want to rethink my life. Am I living as a reification of capitalist ideology? Shouldn't I do the hard thing I want to do instead of the easy thing I don't want to do?

what i'm playing

another fucking idle clicker game

Upload Labs is a nerdy little simulator. It was fun to start out completely confused and then slowly start strategizing and min-maxing. I upgraded too quickly without understanding the mechanics, so I ended up with a really inefficient setup. If I try it again I'll have to have a calculator open. Maybe try doing some calculus.

what i'm working on

For liability purposes, my workplace needs to keep a ledger of visitors. To fulfill that requirement my boss set up a touch-screen kiosk. People type their names or scan their IDs and get a name tag, and we fulfill our liability requirements with a record of who entered the building.

But some things have bothered the fuck out of me about it:

It's a React/Electron app
It has FOUCs. In an Electron app.
The database is never backed up anywhere.
It only runs on Windows.
The SDK for the label printer requires an internet connection
The label printer only prints about half the time.
The barcode scanner works incredibly slowly. I've had to stand with it scanning dozens of people's IDs, and the awkward amount of time it takes to work (if it ever works) is just long enough for people to start making small talk with me. This is unacceptable.

So I'm rewriting the whole thing in vanilla JS. Some improvements I've been able to make so far:

Keep the whole front-end in a single HTML file (no FUOCs)
Use CUPS and lp instead of vendor bloatware
...which also means we can air-gap it so it never touches the internet
Scanning IDs works almost instantly
Also made a Spanish translation of the UI

Some things I'm struggling with:

The USB barcode scanner just acts like a keyboard, but my keydown event trap doesn't capture everything, so scanning a bar code can result in random shit happening.
I'm not sure what to actually do with the data. Right now we just let it sit on the machine. In my wildest dreams I thought

Am I taking on this project as a self-aggrandizing reaction formation because I feel intimidated by legacy codebases? Absolutely, yes.

something i liked

coworker cafe me a gift card for coffee just for doing the job i'm supposed to be doing anyway. nice.

something i hated

It's going to take me years to recover from the devastating hit my self-esteem took last weekend.

a picture

Do you think Mozilla wants me to use their VPN.

weeklies #45 - 423 bugs + me

2026-05-17T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

"Meaningfulness in the I Ching Using a Q-Sort RNG Method"^[1]

let me say up top i don't believe any of this shit. but it's fun to think about.

Both the QAA's guys' Spectral Voyager podcast^[2] and an episode of Weird Studies^[3] have cited The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. So I looked into it and thought this article sounded interesting.

The article explains the "sheeps-goats" phenomenon in studies of 'psi' phenomena (e.g. telepathy, ESP, psychokenisis). "Sheep" are subjects with beliefs in the paranormal; "goats" are skeptics. Throughout studies of 'psi' phenomena, "goats" are associated with outcomes consistent with pure chance, but "sheep" have outcomes that suggest something more than chance.

Both Weird Studies and Spectral Voyager discuss this concept, but not by name. A certain level of openness to chance is a precondition for a 'weird' event. In Voyager's case this is 'noisy' electronics: they profile 20th century researchers tuning radios between stations and listening for voices. Weird Studies focuses on the 'set and setting' (to borrow from psychedelic studies). In the I Ching study, it's a random number generator. You need a place where things can get lost, literally and figuratively: a dark room, a noisy channel, a deep pocket, a false positive.

It makes sense, from a materialist perspective, that thought is a physical process. The firing of electricity and molecules through our brains and meat-parts gives rise to changes in ourselves and in reality. Compare our knowledge of reality a century ago to our knowledge today; it's taken for granted that a mind is affected by its environment, but could the environment not be affected by the mind in turn? Does this mean that cognition is immanent in the universe? Does this mean that reality is a simulation? I kind of don't give a fuck.

what i'm listening to

"Bad Song" - CFCF feat. Cecile Believe

The forthcoming CFCF album is already AOTY.

what i'm watching

On the Beach (1959)

Mentioned in Apocalyptic Fever: End-Time Prophecies in Modern America. In the wake of a nuclear war that depopulates the northern hemisphere, the last surviving U.S. submarine operators escape to an Australia struggling with the maintenance of quotidian life against the looming shadow absolute death.

The film centers on the love story between one of the U.S. submarine captain and an Australian government worker. Their courtship is marred by grief and terror, but in a bittersweet resolution, they decide to spend what little time they have together.

Early in the film, military radio operators detect an indecipherable Morse-code signal from somewhere in the irradiated northern hemisphere. The sequence of the officer in a clean suit scouring an abandoned San Diego for the origin, and his eventual discovery, is a haunting image and the highlight of the film.

This film is about as dark as it gets within the confines of a Hollywood production in the long hangover of the Hays code-- which is the say, not very dark. There's discussion of suicide, of humanity's hubris, but it elides the horrors of mass death: no on-screen sickness, no piles of corpses, no violation of propriety and conduct. Everyone is boringly composed up to the very end.

I'm also sure this film has nothing to do with the subtitle of Death Stranding 2, because Hideo Kojima famously has nothing to say about war or nukes.

what i'm playing

Set Yourself on Fire by @denhop

Set Yourself on Fire is a technical marvel. You can't convince me it's actually running in RenPy.

The game's strength is its holistic sense rhythm: text, visuals, and sound compliment each other perfectly. Its low-poly, restrained yet striking visuals work alongside a largely ambient-electronic soundtrack to cushion the delicately unraveling love story told in searching prose. It's a standout entry in the body of multi-media interactive fiction.

(spoilers) a critique

The characters' various personal conflicts and their seemingly cavernous differences in world-view never come to fruition. To end where it does, with their worries simply having faded away instead of coming to a head, is an implicit critique of romance: that it's a bubble buoyed by a shutting-out of the rest of the world, by fantasies of total interpersonal integration, by jealousy of one ever having a life outside the other. There's joy and tenderness in witnessing a blooming first love, but there's an unaddressed foreboding of first heartbreak. Or maybe I'm just a doomer.

Set Yourself on Fire on steam

what i'm working on

why do i always have to be working on something. can't i just be? jk. to exist is to work.

tables of contents

I added @uncenter/eleventy-plugin-toc, for tables of contents in my blog posts, as well as a fun little animation that flashes the heading you've navigated to after clicking on a ToC link.

lightboxes

Images in my 'stuff' section will now show a full-res lightbox popup when you click on them. And with no JavaScript!

Unfortunately, the implementation is not exactly how I dreamed of it. More info below in something i hated.

something i liked

got some baklava. yummy.

something i hated

423 bugs + me

As mentioned above, I've added lightboxes. When shown, the lightboxes will fade in with a subtle 'slide up' animation. In MS Edge and Chrome, you'll also see the exit animation, where the lightbox slides up and fades out when dismissed.

However, in Firefox, it will unceremoniously blip out of existence. In short, this is because Firefox mis-implements the CSS spec. The bug report has been sitting with no activity for two years. Annoyingly, the CSS property on which the bug hinges is labeled as "Baseline Available" with the sexy little check mark next to Firefox, despite the primary use case being broken.

Mozilla apparently can use AI to detect over 400 bugs in Firefox, but not to fix this very minor cosmetic bug, which is the only thing I actually care about.

a picture

SELF PORTRAIT WITH CRANIAL EXTRUSIONS

Self Portrait With Cranial Extrusions, ink on paper.

Storm, L. (2025). Meaningfulness in the I Ching Using a Q-Sort Rng Method. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 89(2), 65–93. ↩︎
The Spectral Voyager II: Timeslip Radio, "Chapter One: The Vertical Plane" ↩︎
Weird Studies, "Episode 208 – Unbridled Creation: On Kenneth Batcheldor's Theory of the Paranormal" ↩︎

weeklies #44 - culpability blast-radius

2026-05-09T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

what to do when you and your patient are fucking the same person

This advice column from Parapraxis covers a situation we've all been in: we're a therapist in a fuck-triangle with our client. Apparently the best solution is to actually just don't do anything.

what i'm listening to

This has got me white-girl dancing in my kitchen.

what i'm watching

The Sopranos On Transference

The dramatic depiction of transference in The Sopranos got me thinking about what I think my therapist thinks about me. The version of me in the mind of the version of my therapist in my mind. Basically I just hope he thinks I'm normal and honest. Which I'm not.

what i'm working on

undisclosed fiction-writing project

I'm 7k words into the first draft of a fiction project. It's a concentration of effort that's totally new to me, and the knowledge that the bulk of this draft is going to have to be cut and rewritten is anxiety-inducing. Up until college I was a single-draft, no copy editing essay writer. Then I started printing my papers, editing by hand, then re-typing the whole thing. It's a humiliating process. But now I write a blog, so there's no shred of dignity for me to cling to.

something i liked

a funeral

I was hype as fuck to go to a funeral this week. It's an excuse to call out of work, dress up and eat free food. I want to become a funeral crasher.

something i hated

peer or tool?

ChatGPT was used for copy-editing support and locating a few references.

Buried in the Acknowledgements section of an academic article I read^[1] is the above disclosure, leaving a very bitter aftertaste to an otherwise commendable work that celebrates the messy and human. I can't stop thinking about it.

There's a tension here: the narrow scope of the author's ChatGPT usage, i.e. for "copy-editing support and locating a few references," made, downplays its role to just a tool, but it follows a list of human mentors and peers in the Acknowledgements section. If the the use was so simple, why not also disclose the use of Microsoft Word's built-in spell checker, or the use of Google Scholar, or of a particular brand of laptop?

How can a glorified spell-check-cum-search-engine require both elevation and elision; both acknowledgement among human peers and reduction to "copy-editing support" and "[just] a few references". Is it a tool? or is it a research assistant?

Culpability Blast-radius

The disclosure above is made necessary because of the degree to which LLMs can fuck with your intentions. The framing of LLMs as "intelligence" instead of a tool or, more accurately, a roulette wheel, opens their users up to liability.

This comment in a thread about browser-integrated AI pretty starkly lays the dilemma of liability with LLMs^[2]:

...[I]f a user of a website clicks "summarize" on a comment of an article, such that Google's Generative AI Prohibited Uses Policy is violated, who is Google going to go after?

The user - because they clicked "summarize", which initiated the action that violated the policy, on their machine.

The author of the comment - because they wrote the content that violated the policy.

The owner of the website - because they created the facility to feed the violating comment to the user's UA's LLM.

An LLM can violate the policy, but it can't be held responsible. Instead, culpability is a blast-radius for the nearest flesh-and blood

However, the Trump administration tried to invert this argument in the lawsuit against DOGE's unconstitutional cuts to humanities grants:

[The judge] rejected the government’s argument that there was no constitutional problem because any viewpoint classification was ChatGPT’s doing, and not the government’s. [Emphasis mine]

who's to blame?

We're going to see the fallout for LLM-generated fuck-ups distributed on class lines: the overworked interns that turn to ChatGPT to write their error-filled deliverables get fired, while the CEO that skims the AI summaries of everyone's emails while he golfs gets another bonus.

The customer service agents that can't do anything lose their (shitty) jobs to AI that does less and lies confidently. Everyone's service requests go straight into the trash: life gets worse, stock price goes up.

The government and its podcaster bottom-feeders pump out industrial levels of AI slopoganda. Your grandma can't tell what's real; she gets convinced to panic-buy survival buckets of food; her bank account is subsequently emptied by AI Jim Bakker.

Teens and tweens generate deepfake nudes of their classmates; the kids get punished instead of the trillion-dollar companies pushing nudify apps to the front page of their app stores.

Confusion and exaggeration about the agency of LLMs benefits the trillionaires profiting from unfettered data-center build-outs and mass lay-offs. Delusional hype around 'AGI' justify unprecedented venture capital spending for little to no results. In exchange, we get an unprecedented consent-manufacturing apparatus, a highly centralized internet under direct government-crony control, and the death of personal computing to make way for a total SaaS-based rentier tech economy.

a picture:

my wall spaghetti

You want to touch my wall spaghetti so bad it makes you look stupid.

Kahn, Ummni, "The Uh-Oh Test: when bad erotics excite you", Porn Studies, 1-13, https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2026.2634656 ↩︎
For context, this is in regards to a proposal from Google for a standardized implementation of built-in LLMs in browsers which would require implementors to agree to Google's AI Policy. ↩︎

friendmeat

weeklies #48 - the norteñapill

what i'm reading

Hobbes' Leviathan

what i'm listening to

Flaco Jimenez

what i'm watching

Les Barbouze (1964)

Project Hail Mary (2026)

what i'm working on

something i liked

something i hated

a picture:

saul universe

weeklies #47 - ganbare! foreign sovereign immunity!!!

what i'm reading

"When the Sovereign Contracts: Troubling the Public/Private Distinction in International Law"

what i'm listening to

mazzy star

what i'm watching

The Paper Chase (1973)

Ganbare, Nakamura-kun!

what i'm working on

something i liked

11,000

something i hated

rum

a picture:

what would neil young do

weeklies #46 - pyrrhic catharsis

what i'm reading

"Object f(r)ictions: A case study of the Flash software platform"

what i'm listening to

Harry Nilsson

what i'm watching

I Love Boosters (2026, dir. Bootsie Collins)

"Ideology of Gooning/Dems on Israel-Palestine/Death-Drive/Žižek/Lacan/Lord of the Rings/The Big Other"

what i'm playing

another fucking idle clicker game

what i'm working on

a new sign-in kiosk

something i liked

something i hated

a picture

weeklies #45 - 423 bugs + me

what i'm reading

"Meaningfulness in the I Ching Using a Q-Sort RNG Method"[1]

what i'm listening to

"Bad Song" - CFCF feat. Cecile Believe

what i'm watching

On the Beach (1959)

what i'm playing

Set Yourself on Fire by @denhop

(spoilers) a critique

what i'm working on

tables of contents

lightboxes

something i liked

something i hated

423 bugs + me

a picture

SELF PORTRAIT WITH CRANIAL EXTRUSIONS

weeklies #44 - culpability blast-radius

what i'm reading

what to do when you and your patient are fucking the same person

what i'm listening to

what i'm watching

The Sopranos On Transference

what i'm working on

undisclosed fiction-writing project

something i liked

a funeral

something i hated

peer or tool?

Culpability Blast-radius

who's to blame?

a picture:

my wall spaghetti

"Meaningfulness in the I Ching Using a Q-Sort RNG Method"^[1]