little surfer

In relation to the last post. This is about where the data gets stored and what people are doing about it.

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Cottage on Fire

TW for death, surveillance and a shit future.

Once upon a time I read a book about Tear Gas. It featured a discussion of states testing the tear gas for other states. So the IDF would Tear Gas protestors and then police in the USA would know what worked and what didn't.

Recently Mohammed R. Mhawish, a journalist, escaped from Gaza and wrote this about surveillance by the Israeli state.

It operated, too, through a system of watching, knowing, and collecting us: drones that hovered endlessly overhead, quadcopters that dipped near windows and entered houses, facial-recognition scans at checkpoints, movements followed through phone tracking, calls that broke with static before an air strike. The Israeli army was using artificial intelligence to generate kill lists, monitoring our social-media accounts, and storing in bulk the audio of our phone calls. Journalists, human-rights researchers, and legal scholars have mapped pieces of the surveillance apparatus in Gaza. What has largely been missing is how this technology landed on bodies, homes, and neighborhoods; how it reshaped daily life for people forced to live inside the matrix; how it reordered our minds.

Emphasis mine because Quadcopters that entered houses? And what does this do for people and how they behave?

“Nobody doesn’t have political leanings,” one man named Mohammed told me. “But I’ve killed it. I’ve prohibited myself from speaking on this. I’ve locked it with a key.”

And then.

Khaled, who worked for nearly three decades as an ambulance driver for Al-Awda Hospital, said that during an interrogation, an officer showed him a private text message he’d sent his family. “Everything we say, they can see,” Khaled said.

“Everything we say, they can see.”

By this summer, the bombardment had cracked part of the roof open. At around 4:30 a.m. on July 27, while she slept in one of the remaining rooms, Mary woke to a faint buzz that seemed to come from just beside her. “I froze,” she told me. “I could not move. I could not scream.” A dark square hovered near the ceiling. She stared at it, motionless, until it drifted out of the room and exited through a window. If they could fly a drone to her bedside, they could see everything, she told me. Weeks later, her 35-year-old neighbor was shot dead by an armed drone while drying laundry on her balcony, standing beside her 4-year-old son, Mary said. “It is not death that we fear,” she told me. “It is the terror that comes before it.”

You really should read the whole thing.

The Bottom of the Ravine at Inkerman, 1855,Edward Armitage

This here is a video about the social media ban in Australia. Campbell Walker aka struthless goes into the why and hows of the ban and does so in a very compelling matter. One part of the ban that is absolutely critical is verification of age. A topic as old as time and always hotly contested, because it leads/can lead/must lead towards more surveillance. And I guess that is where those two lines meet. In Gaza we see a possible future for everyone else. Being tested and perfected. And well, I am not sure we are actually doing anything about that.

A really good video about our times. Very much USA centric, but I think the main idea of tax the rich already you cowards can be applied universally.

Said the Gramophone is an old school mp3 blog. They don't post much, but they have a singular way to wrap the year. Their selection is always amazing and diverse. Highly recommended to go through it at least once and find something that you missed this year.

said the grammophone

belle epoque

Here are some heavy tunes that came out these last few days.

The good people of Fjort have a new record coming next year and the second single is a banger.

I wrote about the new Hiraki record earlier. This is a stripped down version of a second single.

Both of these are going to be great records. Very different but a similar wild energy. Fjort seems much more political in its lyrics. A good thing too, as Germany is taking 7-mile-steps towards the right at the moment.

Megabear is an album made up of 52 tracks. The majority of the tracks are 32 seconds long, performed at 120 bpm, in 4/4 time, & in the key of Bb. Each track is represented by a card that has been beautifully designed by Jono Ganz.

This album has no beginning or end but exists as a cyclical body of work intended to be played on shuffle. This allows the listener to find their own unique sonic narrative with each listen.

There are 8.06e+67 possible combinations to experience Megabear. It will play in a different order every time you press play. We hope you enjoy it.

And dang it is good. I love the voice, the variety, the feelings. Me Rex are a pretty dang neat band indeed. Thanks to the shuffle on this one as well.

somewhere in denmark, 2019

Once upon a time I was deep enough in radio things to be invited to showcase festivals like the SPOT festival in Denmark. Once upon a time promotion firms would pay the hotel and tickets. Wild times. Anyhow. There I met the wonderful people of the band LISERSTILLE. Excellent people.

Really great music too, if you like prog rock, self made instruments and heavy music. Nowadays LISERSTILLE is not around anymore I think.

But some of them are in a band called HIRAKI. And they just signed to a new label. They also released a new single.

This is much heavier and less spheric than LISERSTILLE. But it slaps.

lake at sunset

I spent the week at home. Had a positive covid test on Saturday that only turned negative on Wednesday. Thursday would have been such a heavy day at school that I could have gone right back to being major sick, so I stayed minor sick and at home. Now it is Sunday again and I am mostly back in my shoes. The nose will stay full. That is life with a dust allergy and no will to actually take care of it.

It was an interesting week. I was confronted with a lot of my habits and how they shape my days. With spending a lot of time in front of my PC and becoming frustrated with myself for not “really doing anything” in that time. Mind you that is the idea of being sick, doing nothing. At the end of that week I read it may not just be the damn phone and resolved to be less mean to myself.

Just let me float the thesis that maybe, you aren’t lonely and unhappy just because of your online habits – but also because other aspects of modern living made you lonely and bored and the phone is how you cope, and using it less, while somewhat beneficial, isn’t radically transforming your life the way you wish it did. It may just be exposing some holes in your life that are outside of your control to fix, as you can’t control other people or will yourself into superhuman productivity.

Next to that I spent some time watching videos by struthless. And really enjoyed them.

some tunes

Still Talk have a new record out. It rips.

The new sorry record is great as well.

Right now the shuffle presents

and I hope you have a great week.

beach on vancouver island, surfers

I feel a little cold creeping into my throat. I hate it.

Paul Beakley kicked off a conversation a while ago about ttrpg products becoming bigger and more involved in The New Novelty and a bunch of other writers responded. And it made me think about my own consumption of ttrpg books and the sway kickstarters have over me. So much of myself is caught up in “pretty books” and those ttrpg books shure as hell are really pretty. I don't even know if they are something that I actually do anything with or want for me or do I want them because I have met people who are very into the hobby and this is a way for me to connect to them? To get my foot in an imaginary door?

And then again I do have fun writing adventures for my once in a while DnD group. I love looking through these neat books, ingesting parts of them. I have a hard time “reading” rules and actually committing them to memory. It is much more likely that I will play the game and learn the rules through that and then when I run a game I just somewhat wing it. Because I don't have a dep understanding of the rules. It still works, because I am good at winging it and the people I play with don't know the rules either.

Then I see this Codex Of Old School Axioms and on the one hand I feel like an imposter and on the other hand I think “what a douche, telling me how to play anything”.

Blargh. I did back the DURF kickstarter on a whim, the art is so cool. It made me realize that fun art is okay as well and that is the art that most often comes out of me.

something real

Mike Monteiro is one of the good ones. And there are so many good lines in this. I should watch it again.

Music Corner

A new record by Dirty Knobs aka Zac Bentz who I know of because he once did Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell and also used to review japanese rock music and I found a lot of cool tunes through that old blog, that I can't find anymore. I wrote a lot of my university papers to the field recordings.

Kochkraft durch KMA have a new EP and it is excellent. Great party tunes and fun lyrics.

Frances Quinlan of Hop Along fame has a new band with excellent colleagues. Great tunes.

the rest

I made a thing. It is a little zungeon for an old school ttrpg of your choice or even for 5e. I am proud I made it. It has many faults. But heck, I made it dang it.

Regans Eye by lele

Bridge over Water, Vancouver

This one has tunes, mopes and some good reading. Let's go!

It is funny how even though Summer is festival season, autumn is when all the good albums drop. Brògeal have a new one, as do Good Luck, Rauchen as well.

I can't quite say what it is a bout Brògeal that works for me. It is not exactly new music, it has a very specific touch to it that I enjoy.

Ah Good Luck is just a really good band. And this album is excellent.

Rauchen make heavy tunes. And they have grown a bunch in between records. This is fun. And they are good people as well.

Give them a spin.

Personally I've been caught in somewhat of a loop of not being able to really connect with things. I have read some books, they were great. But sometimes it seems like my time with video games has gone. They don't grab me anymore and most often I feel like they are something I do because I am used to it and not because I want to or they bring me anything. It is weird, because I am not yet used to doing anything else and I don't know how to get there. Anyhow, this video got washed into my youtube algorithm and resonated quite nicely with me.

What to do? I am thinking about downsizing the pc. Basically only turning it on for games and moving my work parts off to another smaller machine, that will not play games and just do office things. I am imagining a smaller footprint. But who knows if that is not just a way to get another machine to fiddle with into my life?

All of that wont stop me from doomscrolling. But hey, I am also quite mopey today, because I am running in not enough sleep.

Surrender

To reject “AI” isn't to demand the restoration of some former glory of the utopian campus. There is no such place, as the original Greek reminds us; there never has been. Rather to reject “AI” involves a political and intellectual commitment to better institutions. And better institutions, better practices now not just off in some hand-wavy tomorrow.

jeffrey moro / Against Cop Shit

In conclusion: expel cop shit from your classrooms; expel cop shit from your hearts. We are educators. We are not cops. If you want to be a cop, I recommend you go be a cop. At least then you’ll wear a nice uniform that lets us know that you are not on our side.

attitudes around quitting your job | ava's blog

But the thing is: “You'll never know” goes both ways. If people stay, they'll never know how good it would have been to leave, either. I am not for throwing the towel at every slight hardship, but I think after a while, you can tell whether it is a tough but temporary phase or whether you have truly outgrown the job. One thing I learned this year is to spot that, because I mistook the latter for the former, and if I had seen the difference sooner, maybe there would be less bore-out exhaustion and resentment associated with the work for me internally.

The Great Blue

“AI” will only harm, because “AI” is built by and built for men who actively seek to harm, men who seek power and hierarchy and (in particular) revenge. They will talk about “fairness.” They will point to the “biases” and the “weakness” in human decision-making process. But what they mean is that, over the course of the last few decades, other people – women, immigrants, people with disabilities, trans folks, queer folk, non-Christians, non-whites – have been allowed (in some cases) to be decision-makers too.

Saw an amazing sunset yesterday. It was so pretty. Have a good one!