Apr '24
This post about Hokusai’s Great Wave was interesting. It took 34 years of drawing waves to arrive at the iconic image.
Werner Herzog’s book “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” is bananas and the audio book is narrated by the author in his thick Bavarian accent.
The man has lived an insane life and a perfect snapshot of Herzog comes from his cameo in “The Mandalorian”, excerpted below:
He saw creator and showrunner Jon Favreau and executive producer Dave Filoni removing the miniature creature from set during one of his scenes with the being. They were preparing to shoot a blank slate of the sequence as a backup in case they decided during postproduction that the puppet wasn’t convincing enough and a digital version had to be substituted. Herzog, known for films about pushing the limits of human ability and endurance, could not hide his contempt. “You are cowards,” he declared. “Leave it.”
Herzog's documentaries are great, especially the ones that deal with primal forces:
• Meteors & asteroids in “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds”
• Volcanoes in “Into the Inferno”
• Paleolithic man in “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”
• Antarctica in “Encounters at the End of the World”
• Extinguishing burning oil wells in “Lessons of Darkness”
This subpage of the Dark Visitors site is a library of all the bots, AIs, and crawlers that roam the internet. It substantiates the Dead Internet Theory — an online conspiracy that asserts the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. Which is further evidenced by these articles about link rot:
According to Pew Research, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later.
According to Variety, two decades worth of MTV News content was deleted from the internet.
The Marginalian wrote up an overview of “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”. Here’s some entries that seemed familiar:
- Agnosthesia: The state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
- Zielschmerz: The dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.
- Galagog: The state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.
- Craxis: The unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life.
- Suerza: A feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.
