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I know exactly where I am.

I am standing in the front yard of a house I have not seen in almost three years. There's fake grass underneath my steel boots. Behind me is a large hedge with the words "FREE ASSANGE" spray-painted in purple onto the leaves. Every few weeks, as the letters begin to diverge, someone comes along and re-sprays it.

In the garage, out the back, the walls are covered in posters of Playboy girls—on motorbikes, on roller skates, draped over the hoods of cars like linen. Always ready to zoom off somewhere.

Inside the house V—, who is only sixty-five but looks older, shuttles her walker between a plush leather chair in the loungeroom and an unplush plastic and linoleum chair at the kitchen table. Beside the table, the TV is tuned to SBS WorldWatch. The TV is never turned off, only muted outside the hour (9:30am - 10:30am) when they broadcast the news in Greek.

In the garage are a cage hung with wire from a rafter containing two white canaries and three yellow canaries and V—'s younger son, D—. I never see D— smoke, but the glass ashtray beside him on the wrought iron table is always full of butts. Beside the ashtray: a stereo, a packet of birdseed, an empty panettone box, and 1-3 cassette tapes plucked from cardboard boxes of AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, The Angels, and Handel.

D— is over forty, but he looks younger, with long, curly black hair down past his shoulders. I don't remember how I learnt it, but I know that when he was fourteen, D—'s father beat him so badly he went deaf in his right ear. Shortly after, he dropped out of school.

In the garage, D— doesn't look at the posters. He just watches the canaries.

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New poem

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I don't know if this is true, but let's pretend it is:

There are only two ways to create art. You can add. You can subtract.

Adding is what painters do. They add paint onto a canvas.

Subtracting is what sculptors in marble do. They subtract marble from a block.

Photography is subtraction. In taking a photo, you subtract the outside of a field of view, leaving only the centre behind. Alternatively, photography subtracts the options of changing your point of view. A viewer of a scene IRL can yaw, pitch, or roll their head. They can change the focal length of their gaze. They can move around. They can jump up and down if they want to. The viewer of a photograph of the same scene can't change what they see in the photograph in any of the same ways. Where did the options go? The photographer subtracted them.

Animation, usually, is additive. This is truest in animations made up of paintings or drawings, as in cel animation. Everything in such an artwork was added by some person. There are no accidents in these arts. We should view them as a conspiracy theorist views the world, that is, we should view everything in them as happening for a reason.

Going back to photography as subtracting options from a viewer, the same is true of film. Film is actually even more restrictive than photography. At least the photographer leaves the viewer the option of what to look at next. Film does not. A film is always ready to suggest the next thing for you to look at, i.e., its next frame. Yes, you can look away from a film, but there's no sharp line between nudges and coercion, and film is on one side of that spectrum.

Actually, I should clarify. Uncut film is subtractive. A sequence of film with cuts is more additive. An unedited sequence of film is made up of photos, and inherits their subtractive nature. An edited sequence of film is more additive. The editor, as opposed to the filmmaker, adds new bits of film to previous bits to make a sequence, like laying down a train track. As an individual length of rail is made of iron, while an entire track is made of lengths of rail, edited film is made of film, while unedited film is made of photos. Of course the editor also subtracts—cutting is subtracting—but the offcuts don't make up their own work of art.

Let me turn on myself. What about relief printing (linocut, woodblock printing)? You paint (add) a design to a block, then carve (subtract) around the design, then (add) ink (to) the carved block, then (add) the ink to the final page. I think, again, it depends on what outputs are works of art. The inked block is not a work of art, at least not unless it's hung in a gallery. The carved block is not usually a work of art, though it is a record of art-making. Only the final prints are works of art, so relief printing is additive, though what relief printers add to paper are records or images of subtraction.

Writing, so far, has been additive, though this is beginning to change. Writing is normally a process of adding words one after the other in a sequence, like I'm doing now. AI changes this. For a human, "writing" with AI doesn't start with the blank page, or the first word. It starts with something fully-formed, like a marble block, or a series of such blocks, and proceeds by cutting away, by discarding, the words and blocks of text you do not wish to keep.

For this reason, we can't be paranoid in our interpretation of AI-human hybrid-writing (though we can with pure AI slop).

As it makes no sense to interpret the outcome of a football game as expressing a single, unified will (or unified conspiracy of such wills)—who wanted the game to end in a 1-1 draw?—it makes no sense to scry the deep intent of human-edited AI slop. Like competitive games and legal trials, it is a product of compromise, contest, and circumstance. Again, though, it can be worthwhile to look for hidden meanings in pure AI writing; see Janus et al.

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New poem

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On the Origins of Human Language

In the beginning was the worm, or more precisely, worms. They all slithered happily about in a big damp confusion until one day, the blackbird came. The blackbird spoke to the assembled worms "None of you will last. I will perish you down to the last delicious cell, then ditto for the other bugs."

Hearing this, the worms were afraid, and oscillated fearfully, and vibrated nervously, and wriggled fretfully and would have gone on doing so had not one worm got the bright idea to wriggle itself into an "O", which happened to be just big enough to express a lament, and so that worm was whisked away to be an "O" on the safe, warm tongue of the widow, where the blackbird could not find him.

Intuiting this, the next two worms became an "A", which could just about manage to hold fear, or, in a pinch, wrath, and so the slimy pair were spirited in duplicate into the waiting mouths of the murderer and his victim.

And then the next six or seven worms - look, you get the idea - they became the word "zigs" in the mouth of a 1930s gangster or something. The point is, whenever you see worms arising after rain, you can be sure new words are soon to follow. More of these words, like "petrichor", should be a tribute to the worms we speak.

Oh right, the blackbird. He won't come back. Soon after he went to bug the ladybugs, some of the worms became in the mouth of a cat the sound "MEOW", and when the blackbird heard that right behind him, he was so afraid he became the night.

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Review! - In the Miso Soup

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In front of me there is a cup. Like all cups, it is extremely interesting.

When I put my tongue on one part of it, it is cool and smooth. This is true of the next five parts of the cup I put my tongue on, but not the sixth, on the lip, which is cool but not smooth, because the cup is chipped there.

Descending from this chip is a thin black fissure. If the fissure was a stem, the negative space of the chip could be a flower, maybe a poppy. Across the cup from this fissure is a real (painted) flower. Unlike the flower made of empty space, the painted flower has petals (twenty), and leaves (two) sticking out of its stem. But the petals are like petals from a sunflower, and the leaves are like leaves from an oak tree, so maybe it is not any more real than the flower made of negative space. Besides that, all round the inside of the cup its glaze is cracked with a pattern like a cicada's wing. D'Arcy Thompson would enjoy the correspondence I am sure.

When I first found the cup, it was a pregnant woman, because it was half-full of clayish dirt. But actually I suppose the clayish dirt it was full of wouldn't grow up to be a cup like its mother, probably it was the wrong kind of clay, so the cup is specifically like Angrboda, or at least Pasiphae, or maybe Mary Theotokos, but I have to be careful there, because that might be a heresy (the implied Christology, I mean). My point is that mysteriousness of embryology is quite underrated. It is one of our wyrdest and most numinous sciences, so keep up the good work embryologists, ditto to the cup makers and buriers.

On the base of the cup the words "MADE IN AUSTRALIA" are printed. Google tells me the cup was made by "Johnson of Australia" in the "1970/80's" in "Croydon", "Victoria". I did not find the cup in Croydon, Victoria. I found it with a tree root growing through its handle, half-buried in the bank of the Karuah River, which is near Monkerai, which is near Bulahdelah, which Les Murray wrote a poem about once. If you want to make a pilgrimage to the exact location where I found the cup, the coordinates are 32°16'44.4"S, 151°50'56.4"E. Do be aware those coordinates fall on private property, and also I had a pretty good look to check if there were any other cups there and I couldn't find any, so if you are just looking to get your own cup, going there is probably not worth-while. I did meet some friendly cows though. Worth saying hi to them if you're in the area.

It's often a good idea to leave people wanting more, so I won't tell you any more about my cup at this time.

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Yes… Ha ha ha… Yes!

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A certain kind of putdown works by pointing out someone's behaviour is driven by causes, not reasons. This was basically Freud's whole schtick, ditto for parts of Marx and Nietzsche. You can do this by uncovering facts about people's childhood, or worse, their adolescence. Lots of intellectual history does this. Categorising someone as a type of guy rather than an individual has a similar effect. Pathologizing as a rhetorical or political strategy works like this, e.g. calling people homophobes.

There are different names for this move. Hegel-via-Brandom talks about Niederträchtigkeit (baseness or ignobility) and Edelmütigkeit (nobility, magnanimity), where the niederträchtig person is someone who takes our actions to be caused and the edelmütig person takes them to be responding to reasons. Strawson talks about the participatory and objective stances in similar ways. There is a world of reasons, of moral agents, where you make moves like apology, resentment, forgiveness, and bargains, and a world of causes, of at-best moral subjects, where you can only explain, expect, and influence.

Weirdly, a similar split exists on certain vaguely-Buddhist views. On some understandings of the two truths doctrine there's a split is between conventional truth, the world of reasons and persons and their reason-giving games, and ultimate truth, the world of causes and conditions. Here the valence is reversed, its the world of causes that is in some sense superior to the world of reasons. On this version of the split, viewing people's behaviour (including your own) as being driven by causes, not reasons, is not an insult but a prompting to compassion.

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Could there be an equivalent naïve narrative art? What would it look like to bring an "equal accuracy to all details" in a narrative? Is it just a matter of describing the breakfast in as much detail as the boss battle? What is the equivalent of "distance from the observer" in the narrative? It could be relevance to the main causal or thematic arc. So irrelevant details are told in as much vivid detail as the "main" plot. Is Tristram Shandy then the best example of naïve narrative art?

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You ever listen to SACOYANS? They're pretty great. If you're ever in Osaka, and you find yourself on a rollercoaster called the Hollywood Dream, make sure to select the song "Osaka Lover" as your ride music. It's not by SACOYANS or anything, they're just both Japanese.

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I think minimalist UIs are condescending. They assume the user doesn't know what they want, and needs their attention directed to a pre-digested subset of visible menu options.

Minimalist UIs are a warning that someone is either trying to sell you something or sell you. There are way more words on any single internal page of a book than on its cover. The discrepancy was less stark in 17th century frontispieces.

How do conversational UIs (i.e. chatbots) fit into this?

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Most media is social media if you view your past and future selves as different "people" interacting across time. Your childhood journal is a small social media platform, it just has a weird, linear social graph.

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I've realised my poems naturally tend to be bad robert lowell impersonations, so I'll be doing bad ashbery and o'hara impressions as penance for the foreseeable future. e.g.:

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I think the fact the D-Day landings were successfully kept secret (despite involving so many people) makes complicated conspiracy theories more plausible.

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