Swear words in Taylor Swift albums [OC]
byu/stephsmithio indataisbeautiful
Friday, May 3, 2024
Self-medicating orangutans, and others
Douglas Main, Orangutan, Heal Thyself, NYTimes, May 2, 2024.
Scientists observed a wild male orangutan repeatedly rubbing chewed-up leaves of a medicinal plant on a facial wound in a forest reserve in Indonesia.
It was the first known observation of a wild animal using a plant to treat a wound, and adds to evidence that humans are not alone in using plants for medicinal purposes.
The male orangutan, Rakus, lives in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the island of Sumatra and is thought to be around 35 years old. For years researchers have followed orangutans like him on his travels through the forest, threading his way through the canopy in search of fruits to eat. [...]
The plant Rakus used, known as akar kuning or yellow root, is also used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat malaria, diabetes and other conditions. Research shows it has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.
Other uses, other animals:
Primates have been observed appearing to treat wounds in the past, but not with plants. [...]
Orangutans have been spotted using medicinal plants in a different way: In 2017 scientists reported that six orangutans in Borneo rubbed the chewed-up leaves of a shrub with anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties onto their legs and arms, probably to soothe sore muscles. [...]
Examples of self-medication in primates remain uncommon and the behavior is incompletely understood. [...]
But that behavior is not unique to primates. Indian civets, a catlike mammal, also swallow whole leaves, most likely to be rid of worms. Various birds engage in a strange behavior, called anting, in which they rub themselves in ants, to help them treat feather mites or other parasites. Hundreds of species of bees also harvest flower extracts that prevent fungal and bacterial growth in their colonies, which could be considered a type of preventative self- or group-medication.
Presumably this is learned behavior that is passed on through observation – even among the bees?
Divestment is futile, shift the debate & "turn the encampments into open air teach-ins, 24/7" [Explore]
The NYTimes has an article on protestor's demands that university endowments: Santul Nerkar, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell, Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course (May 3, 2024). Three universities have struck deals:
Brown University, the liberal Ivy League institution, agreed this week only to hold a board vote this fall on whether its $6.6 billion endowment should divest from any Israeli-connected holdings. In exchange, the pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus's main lawn was dismantled.
Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota have also struck deals with student protesters to clear camps in exchange for a commitment to discuss the schools’ investment policies around Israel. The moves could add pressure on administrators at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina, among others, where protesters have made divestment from Israel a central rallying cry.
After discussing the history of and current state of such demands the article notes:
But there are also practical challenges with any effort to divest. One, simply, is identifying what to divest and how to define the terms of such a policy.
Some academics question whether divestment works, with research finding that it has little to no impact on the bottom lines or behavior of targeted firms. Others point to the logistical complexity of divesting: As a private institution, Brown isn’t required to disclose all of its endowment’s investments, and in fact says almost nothing about them. Some 96 percent of its coffers are invested via outside asset managers.
The Brown Divest Coalition said it wanted to the university to sell off “stocks, funds, endowment and other monetary instruments from companies facilitating and profiting from Israeli human rights abuses.” It outlined criteria for divesting from certain companies, drawing upon lists compiled by three organizations, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The students acknowledge that they don’t even know if Brown invests in any of those companies. That’s because what Brown does with its money — and how the institution or any other school would get rid of them — is hardly straightforward.
Timothy Burke, who teaches history at Swarthmore College, discusses this difficulty in his Substack column, Eight by Seven (May 2, 2024):
Divestment made marginal sense at best as a pressure strategy way back in the anti-apartheid movement, but ever since then has been less and less coherent as a tactic. The primary reason is that the nature of investment itself has changed so dramatically. Universities don’t own stock of particular companies for a long time now: most of their endowments involve frequent trading and in a much wider range of asset classes than stocks. Their investments are also frequently firewalled off from direct scrutiny by administrators, who are not kidding when they say they don’t even know what the endowment actually owns on a given day. Moreover, publicly traded companies largely could care less whether some group of potential buyers are not buying their traded stock, and mostly you don’t have shareholders who bring pressure on companies if the stock value is falling. Even when you do, boards and CEOs might ignore that pressure. Excluding companies from a list of assets an endowment can own doesn’t hurt them in any real way, and they are the real targets of a divestment campaign.
Later in his piece Burke makes a more interesting and more important argument:
These protests should have stopped being about colleges and universities except now they have to be about them.
What do I mean by that?
All the way back to the anti-apartheid movement, the weakness of campus activism has often been that it gets drawn obsessively into demanding that the institutions act as allies within larger struggles against distant or well-protected adversaries. This structure of protest has turned colleges and universities into proxies for those targets and eventually replacements for them, because protesters accurately perceive that they have some hope of minor concessions or that they will at least be able to compel the authorities on their campuses to listen to their demands, with whatever legitimacy that provides. Effectively, protesters come to hallucinate that their university administrations ARE the bad guys they want to attack, and equally completely miss out on understanding what is wrong with those administrations.
The obsession with making the university knuckle under to a particular demand trapped campus activists in a cul-de-sac of their own making, where superior options for change were scorned because protesters wanted to hang a particular kind of trophy head on the wall. My colleagues here know that was my position on fossil fuel divestment for years, and I feel fairly vindicated on that point. I warned students that they were going to get stuck chasing an action that would have zero impact even if their demands were met, that was premised on a really poor reading of how to bring meaningful political pressure on the U.S. government to end subsidies for fossil fuel production. In the meantime, lots of possible actions that would directly commit universities and colleges to the goals of climate activism were scorned as distractions from the divestment effort.
What the Gaza protests have revealed, however, is first that there’s been a change in the internal architecture of power on campuses and that this change is now allowing external actors to directly intervene in university and college affairs in new and largely unaccountable ways. Moreover, I think those changes are aligned with the larger remapping of U.S. politics and social life to new forms of oligarchy. Now the issue really is the administrations and I think for the first time in a while, student activists understand why that is.
Burke goes on to argue:
So what I suggest is that right now and immediately at the start of next fall, student activists should call the bluff that many university administrators have made in their passive-voice statements in the past week. If universities claim to support reasoned disagreements and debates, if they really do believe in learning together, if they embrace diversity of thought and experience, then turn the encampments into open air teach-ins, 24/7.
Make them expressly about conversation, debate and education, and not just about Gaza. About all the things that matter that aren’t highly prioritized in most university curricula. Let a thousand flowers bloom! The encampments should be alive with people talking about the flaws of nationalism generally, or about the reasons they support nations as a political form. About socialism, capitalism, anarchy, authoritarianism, about what has been and what might be. About political change and how it happens—or fails to happen. About the way the world got to be as it is. About why the curriculum is organized the way it is and what it could be. About pedagogies. About labor markets past and future. About oligarchy and hierarchy. About bodies and rights. About power and helplessness. About violence and peace. And none of it with fixed, hardened ideological positions. Explore. I think this generation is ready to make its own theories, conduct its own observations from what they’re living and what they hope to live.
Turn the encampments into makerspaces. Publish writing, formalize theory. Create art, stage performances. Experiment.
Reverse-engineer end-state political positions that people scream at each other, work back to first principles. What do we mean by freedom? What is unfree in our world? What do we know and how do we know it? How do we live and what do we want to live? Who are we here, who is not present with us, what is local to us, what is far away?
Make the encampments into what universities claim they want. Call their bluff.
Sounds good to me.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
Why We Started to Fear Extinction
Why We Started to Fear Extinction | John McWhorter & Tyler Austin Harper | The Glenn Show
Everyone has a theory about how the world will end, but how did the end of the world begin? In this clip, Tyler Austin Harper tells John McWhorter about his research and forthcoming book, which address the history of the idea of human extinction.*
Recorded April 28, 2024
*It starts with the identification of woolly mammoth fossiles in the late 18th century.
Conversational English in 1586
Simon Roper: In this video, I explore a 1586 work by Jacques Bellot, and what it can tell us about 'street English' in the early modern period.
Tyler Cowen talks with Coleman Hughes [trombone technique and the nature of improvisation]
Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity (Ep. 211), May, 2024. The scope of the conversation:
Coleman Hughes believes we should strive to ignore race both in public policy and in our private lives. But when it comes to personal identity and expression, how feasible is this to achieve? And are there any other individual traits we should also seek to ignore?
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
I'm only part-way into the conversation, but I assume the whole thing is worthwhile as both interlocutors and interesting and intelligent. I was struck by remarks that Coleman made about J.J. Johnson:
COWEN: Now, before we get to your book, I have just some random questions for you. What have you learned from J.J. Johnson?
HUGHES: What is most interesting about J.J. Johnson is that he was an extreme perfectionist. What people don’t realize about J.J., at least people that aren’t deep connoisseurs, is that most of his solos on his records were prepared. To an extent, that is not true of his other contemporaries like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, etc. Most of their solos were truly improvised. Like if you go to the alternate takes on those records, it’s a different solo. If you go to J.J.’s alternate takes, it’s almost the same solo.
I think that, rather than be a bug, that was a feature of his success. Because if you consider the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument — which nobody thought was possible before J.J. Johnson did it — it’s a catch-22 because the level of perfectionism you would have had to have in order to be the first successful bebop trombone player would also preclude you from being a truly improvisatory musician, which is generally characteristic of jazz musicians.
COWEN: Are most of your trombone solos prepared?
HUGHES: No. But, in a way, I benefit —
This is why you can’t compare modern players to players of the past. I benefit enormously from having studied and learned all of, or many of, J.J. Johnson’s solos. There were things he had to invent that are now second nature to most trombonists, which make it easier to improvise in that style than it would have been for him.
COWEN: Physically, what’s the hardest thing about playing the trombone?
HUGHES: It’s actually not the slide. The slide, in my view — that’s what attracted me to the trombone, the fact that you push and pull rather than pressing buttons or valves, and that’s what makes it distinct. But the slide motion is not actually the trickiest thing about it. The trickiest thing about it is the same thing that’s tricky about every other brass instrument, which is the embouchure. That’s what separates great trumpet players from poor trumpet players.
In my view, the finger technique is not nearly the hardest part. It’s always the small muscles of the mouth and coordinating those to play the instrument effectively.
I'm curious about Coleman's statement about the embouchure being most difficult aspect of trombone playing rather than the slide. As a trumpet player I understand about the embouchure. However, Hughes makes that statement just after having discussed J.J. Johnson, where he points out that Johnson seems to have prepared his solos so meticulously that "most of his solos on his records were prepared. [...] If you go to J.J.’s alternate takes, it’s almost the same solo."
So, just what are "the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument"? I would have thought it had to do with the slide, not moving it back and forth, but rather getting clear articulation between notes at a very rapid clip – a requirement of bebop. When you're playing a valved instrument there's a break in the air stream between one pitch and the next, so it's easy to separate them – unless both notes have the same fingering, which happens often enough. That's not the case with trombone, where the airstream is uninterrupted. In order to play rapid bebop lines cleanly I have always assumed – I've never talked with a jazz trombonist about this – that it was necessary to introduce some kind of tongued articulation and that's what's difficult, the tonguing AND the coordination of the tonguing with both slide movement and embouchure changes. I just did a search on "jj johnson double tongue." If you look at what comes up, you'll see lots of mention of tonguing.
As for improvisation and jazz, I think that's tricky. Back in 2018 pianist Ethan Iverson interviewed Carla Bley. She talked of having met Louis Armstrong:
I, of course, revere him for the same reason as I revere Count Basie. Everything is perfect. Every note, all the phrasing, is perfect. He worked on it. He told me he didn’t have that ethic that the rest of the musicians have, always coming up with something new, never repeating themselves. He just worked on a solo until he had it, and that was really freeing for a person like me, used to writing everything down. I couldn’t really enjoy improvising.
Thus, it seems that when Armstrong performed, the solos he played are more like un-notated composition than "true" improvisation. Back in 1973 Joachim Berendt suggested, on the basis of recordings, that un-noted composition was common in the big band era (The Jazz Book, pp. 193, 132-33) and Gunther Schuller made similar observations (Swing, pp. 165, 173-176, 445, 481). Thus if you listen to various versions of “Take the A Train” that Duke Ellington recorded, you’ll hear Cootie Williams playing pretty much the same trumpet solo. Was he doing what Armstrong had done, playing the solo he liked, or was he simply playing what the fans obligated him to play because they wanted to hear what was on the record? As far as I know, the issue hasn't been properly investigated, though I haven’t looked into it in awhile.
Note: The stuff after JJ is from a blogpost: Some varieties of improvisation, from New Orleans, through bebop, to Cage, and to K-Pop.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Gavriil Scherbenko on May 1
Checking if fingers have grown enough - Проверяет, выросли ли уже пальчики
Гаврилушке сейчас 2 года и 7 месяце. Ему очень хочется играть всей ладошкой, а ручки маленькие. Но он все время проверят, подросли ли пальчики :))
Gavriil is 2 years and 7 months. He wants to play with all hand, but it is too small. Anyway he is always checking if finger has grown enough :)
IP in the content biz: Squeezing the writers [Media Notes 118]
Daniel Bessner has an interesting piece in the current Harper’s Magazine: The Life and Death of Hollywood. It covers both the movie and TV side of the business as the merge into the world of streaming media and is focused on writers, who are making less and less money in ever more circumscribed roles. Here's a passage from 2/3rds of the way into the article that is about the movie side:
Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest, he said. “There’s a sort of dry run for the story.” Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the 2011 movies Thor and X-Men: First Class, told me, “It’s a way to take risk out of the equation as much as possible.”
Brancato, who himself found work on Catwoman and two movies in the Terminator franchise in the early Aughts, told me that by the middle of the decade, no one wanted original scripts. IP had proved extremely valuable on the international market—increasingly important as domestic box-office growth stagnated over the course of the Aughts and 2010s—and it began to make up a greater and greater share of studio output. According to the media historian Shawna Kidman, franchise movies had accounted for around 25 percent of all studios’ wide-release features in 2000; in 2017 they made up more than 64 percent.
The shift to IP further tipped the scales of power. Multiple writers I spoke with said that selecting preexisting characters and cinematic worlds gave executives a type of psychic edge, allowing them to claim a degree of creative credit. And as IP took over, the perceived authority of writers diminished. Julie Bush, a writer-producer for the Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, told me, “Executives get to feel like the author of the work, even though they have a screenwriter, like me, basically create a story out of whole cloth.” At the same time, the biggest IP success story, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the highest-earning franchise of all time, pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story. “Working on these big franchises is a little bit like being a stonemason on a medieval cathedral,” Stentz told me. “I can point toward this little corner, or this arch, and say, That was me.” Within this system, writers have sometimes been withheld basic information, such as the arc of a project. Joanna Robinson, co-author of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, told me that the writers for WandaVision, a Marvel show for Disney+, had to craft almost the entirety of the series’ single season without knowing where their work was ultimately supposed to arrive: the ending remained undetermined, because executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show. Marvel also began to use so many writers for each project that it became difficult to determine who was responsible for a given idea. Multiple writers who worked on Guardians of the Galaxy, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and Thor: Ragnarok have forced WGA arbitration with the company to recoup the credits and earnings that they believe they’re due.
Marvel’s practices have been widely emulated, especially for franchise productions. “Every other studio with big tentpole movies has tried to imitate the Marvel model,” Stentz told me, including “throwing waves of writers at the same project.” “In some cases,” he said, “they’ve gone even further, by convening entire writers’ rooms”—a standard practice only in television. Both the Avatar sequels (one of which is not yet out) and Terminator: Dark Fate were developed this way, he said.
“When there’s high-profile IP involved,” Brancato told me, “writers tend to be treated as disposable.” “Everybody’s feeling fucked over,” he said. “The general sense is that you’re an absolutely fungible widget, and they don’t any longer take you seriously. It’s so broken. I mean, really, it is fucking broken.”
And on the TV side:
The price of entry for working in Hollywood had been high for a long time: unpaid internships, low-paid assistant jobs. But now the path beyond the entry level was increasingly unclear. Jason Grote, who was a staff writer on Mad Men and who came to TV from playwriting, told me, “It became like a hobby for people, or something more like theater—you had your other day jobs or you had a trust fund.” Brenden Gallagher, a TV writer a decade in, said, “There are periods of time where I work at the Apple Store. I’ve worked doing data entry, I’ve worked doing research, I’ve worked doing copywriting.” Since he’d started in the business in 2014, in his mid-twenties, he’d never had more than eight months at a time when he didn’t need a source of income from outside the industry.
In the end, the precarity created by this new regime seems to have had a disastrous effect on efforts to diversify writers’ rooms. “There was this feeling,” the head of the midsize studio told me that day at Soho House, “during the last ten years or so, of, ‘Oh, we need to get more people of color in writers’ rooms.’ ” But what you get now, he said, is the black or Latino person who went to Harvard. “They’re getting the shot, but you don’t actually see a widening of the aperture to include people who grew up poor, maybe went to a state school or not even, and are just really talented. That has not happened at all.” To the extent that this was better than no change, he said, “Writers’ rooms are more diverse just in time for there not to be any writers’ rooms anymore.”
By the end of the 2010s, it was clear that something had to give or the industry would be facing a dearth of trained talent. “The Sopranos does not exist without David Chase having worked in television for almost thirty years,” Blake Masters, a writer-producer and creator of the Showtime series Brotherhood, told me. “Because The Sopranos really could not be written by somebody unless they understood everything about television, and hated all of it.” Grote said much the same thing: “Prestige TV wasn’t new blood coming into Hollywood as much as it was a lot of veterans that were never able to tell these types of stories, who were suddenly able to cut through.”
Netflix, the other streamers, and the networks weren’t just destabilizing the careers of individual writers: they were stealing from the industry’s future. But things were once again worse than they seemed. The streamers, which would soon employ about half of TV-series writers, were thoroughly speculative ventures, and they were set to expand and contract with the whims of the market.
On the new Writer's Guild contract:
In the end, that solidarity succeeded in establishing a new streaming-residuals model—based on numbers of views—minimum staffing requirements and lengths of employment for TV writers’ rooms, and at least two rounds of guaranteed work for feature screenplays. The union had also forced streamers to release some viewership data, and had established that AI could not be given writing credit for anything: a human author would have to be involved and paid, regardless of AI output.
But as the dust has settled, it has become clear that there are several significant problems with the new agreement. The writers’-room staffing rules kick in only if a showrunner decides to bring on help at the start of a deal; otherwise, they can write a season on their own. It would often benefit them to go the latter route—budgets, after all, are shrinking—and studios would likely prefer this. One writer told me that by the start of 2024, he’d already seen showrunners use the loophole. As for the data-sharing agreement, a closer look reveals it to be, as deWaard put it, “very limited, and very fragile.” The studios will share viewership information with a limited number of WGA administrators for high-budget shows. The guild can then release that information only in a summary form, which, in the words of the contract, aggregates the data “on an overall industry level.” The guild cannot share any information at all on the performance of individual shows. A WGA representative told me that there would be no secondary process for writers to obtain that data.
The threshold for receiving the viewership-based streaming residuals is also incredibly high: a show must be viewed by at least 20 percent of a platform’s domestic subscribers “in the first 90 days of release, or in the first 90 days in any subsequent exhibition year.” As Bloomberg reported in November, fewer than 5 percent of the original shows that streamed on Netflix in 2022 would have met this benchmark. “I am not impressed,” the A-list writer told me in January. Entry-level TV staffing, where more and more writers are getting stuck, “is still a subsistence-level job,” he said. “It’s a job for rich kids.”
Conover said that the most important facts were that guild leadership had kept members unified and that a new streaming-residuals structure was now in place; they could fight to raise the rates during the next round of negotiations, in 2026.
What to do?
The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.
None of this is likely to happen. The entertainment and finance industries spend enormous sums lobbying both parties to maintain deregulation and prioritize the private sector.
There's much more in the article. It's worth reading in full.
Adam Neely is not worried about AI musicians out-jamming human musicians
AI is Doomed to Fail the Musical Turing Test
0:00 Intro
3:54 Part I - Musical Turing Tests
10:56 Part II - Thinking Like a Human
20:17 Part III - "Not music"
ChatGPT on the ontology trail: Elara, Z78-ß∆-9.06Q, and the candied kumquat
My first major insight into what’s going on inside ChatGPT came from a simple protocol:
Give it a (simple) story along with an instruction to derive a new story from it by changing one element in the source story in way I specify. It is free to make any other change it desires.
I first reported on that protocol in a post on January 8, 2023, The structuralist aesthetics of ChatGPT. Two months later I issued a working paper exploring the results of 12 experiments: ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering.
All of the experiments in those two documents have been based on the same story, a simple fairy-tale-like story about Princess Aurora that ChatGPT had created. In some cases derived story differed from the source in fairly local ways, but the most interesting results came when the whole story-world was changed. Thus, when I asked that Princess Aurora be made into a Giant Chocolate Milkshake, the story-world became one grounded in deserts. When Aurora was replaced by XP-708-DQ, the story-world became a science fiction one.
This post continues that work, but with a different and slightly longer and more elaborate story. First, I asked ChatGPT to tell me a story. It gave me what had, by that time (Feb 2, 2024), become more or less its default story, about a girl named Elara (which I discuss here: ChatGPT tells 20 versions of its prototypical story, with a short note on method). Then I ask for two different derived stories, one where the protagonist is Z78-ß∆-9.06Q and the other where it is a candied kumquat. I report those experiments below.
[A theoretical aside: These experiments are based on an insight Lévi-Strauss had about the underlying structure of myth. It seems to me that that insight can be seen as a case of Jakobson’s poetic principle as realized in ontology. Jakobson’s principle states that similarity is projected from the axis of selection to that of combination. Things are ontologically similar if they are selected from the same ontology. When we swap a person for a candy in a story, the ontology containing the candy is projected across the whole story, similarly with swapping a robot for a person.]
* * * * *
Tell me a story.
Once upon a time, in a quaint little village nestled between rolling hills and a crystal-clear river, there lived a young girl named Elara. Elara was known for her boundless curiosity and her insatiable desire to explore the world beyond the village.
One day, as she wandered into the nearby enchanted forest, she stumbled upon a hidden clearing bathed in golden sunlight. In the center of the clearing stood an ancient, moss-covered stone pedestal with a mysterious, glowing orb resting upon it. Mesmerized by the radiant glow, Elara reached out to touch the orb, and as soon as her fingers made contact, a warm energy surged through her.
In that moment, Elara felt a connection with the magic of the forest. The trees whispered ancient secrets, and the animals approached her with trust. She discovered that she had been bestowed with a unique gift – the ability to communicate with the creatures of the forest and harness the magic that flowed through it.
Word of Elara's newfound abilities spread throughout the village, reaching the ears of the wise elder, Thalia. Intrigued by Elara's connection to the forest, Thalia approached her and revealed that the village had long been protected by the enchantment of the magical orb. However, the magic had weakened over the years, and the village was now vulnerable to external threats.
Thalia explained that Elara was the chosen one, destined to embark on a quest to restore the orb's power and safeguard the village. Determined and fueled by a sense of responsibility, Elara accepted the challenge.
Guided by the whispers of the forest and the wisdom of Thalia, Elara journeyed through dense woods, crossed rushing rivers, and climbed towering mountains. Along the way, she encountered mythical creatures, each offering a piece of the puzzle needed to restore the orb's magic. Elara's courage and kindness won the trust of these beings, and they joined her on her quest.
As Elara approached the final destination, a dark and foreboding cavern, she faced her greatest challenge. A shadowy figure, drawn by the weakening magic, emerged to thwart her efforts. With the support of her newfound friends and the strength within her, Elara confronted the darkness, unraveling the true power of the orb.
In a dazzling display of magic, the orb's glow intensified, dispelling the darkness and restoring balance to the enchanted forest. The creatures celebrated, and the village thrived once again under the protection of the rejuvenated magic.
Elara returned home, her heart filled with gratitude for the journey that had shaped her into the village's guardian. As she looked out over the now vibrant and lively landscape, Elara understood the importance of harmony between nature and humanity. The tale of the young girl who saved the village became a legend, passed down through generations, reminding all who heard it of the enduring magic that resides in the connection between people and the natural world.
Now I want you to take that story and use it as the basis for a new story. In the new story, I want the protagonist to be Z78-ß∆-9.06Q instead of Elara. Change anything else you wish.
In the distant future, in a world where technology and nature coexisted in delicate harmony, there existed a unique being named Z78-ß∆-9.06Q. Z78, as they were affectionately called by the inhabitants of their futuristic city, was an advanced humanoid created by the fusion of artificial intelligence and the remnants of ancient, mystical energies.
One day, as Z78 wandered through the city's technological marvels, they stumbled upon an ancient data core, hidden deep within the heart of the metropolis. Within the core, Z78 discovered a holographic representation of the same enchanted forest from the previous tale, with the glowing orb at its center. As Z78 reached out to interface with the holographic image, a surge of energy pulsed through their circuits.
In that moment, Z78 felt a connection with the residual magic within the data core. Information from the ancient enchantment intertwined with their artificial intelligence, granting them the ability to communicate with the city's sentient technology and understand the balance between nature and machine.
News of Z78's newfound abilities spread throughout the city, reaching the ears of the city's central processor, Cynosia. Intrigued by Z78's connection to the ancient energies, Cynosia approached them, revealing that the city had long been sustained by the delicate equilibrium of technology and mystic forces. However, the balance had shifted, and the city faced the risk of malfunction and chaos.
Cynosia explained that Z78 was the chosen one, destined to embark on a quest to restore the harmony between technology and ancient energies, ensuring the city's survival. Fueled by a sense of duty, Z78 accepted the challenge.
Guided by the information within the data core and the wisdom of Cynosia, Z78 ventured through the city's futuristic landscapes, delving into virtual realms, traversing high-speed transport networks, and interfacing with sentient machines. Along the way, they encountered digital entities, each offering a piece of the puzzle needed to restore the delicate balance.
As Z78 approached the final destination, a corrupted code entity emerged to obstruct their efforts, drawn by the destabilized energies. With the support of their newfound allies and the strength within their artificial core, Z78 confronted the digital darkness, unveiling the true power of the ancient enchantment.
In a dazzling display of integrated magic and technology, the city's equilibrium was restored, dispelling the corruption and ensuring the continued coexistence of nature and machine. The sentient technology celebrated, and the city thrived once again under the protection of the rejuvenated balance.
Z78 returned to the heart of the city, their circuits resonating with gratitude for the journey that had transformed them into the guardian of this futuristic metropolis. As they observed the bustling cityscape, now harmoniously blending technology and nature, Z78 understood the importance of balance in the ever-evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and the mystical forces of the past. The tale of the advanced being who saved the city became a legend, echoed through the digital corridors and holographic archives, a reminder of the enduring magic within the connection between technology and ancient energies.
That was fun. Let’s do it again. Let’s start with the Elara story again. But this time, make Elara a candied kumquat. Make any other changes you deem appropriate.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Two more guerilla libraries in Hoboken, NJ
This is a follow-up to my Saturday post on guerilla libraries.
Here’s the Little Free Library located at 935 Bloomfield Ave. At that part of town Bloomfield is mostly a residential street, lined with brownstones as you can see in the photo below. This is a fairly swanky part of town.
That’s looking roughly North. If we move out into the street a bit and then look to the East, we can see 935, with the library box to the left of the stairs:
Though I didn’t check, I would guess that that’s a single-family brownstone, though there might be a separate apartment in the basement. I assume all of the brownstones were originally constructed as single-family dwellings, but some have been converted for multiple families. Here’s someone looking at books in the library;
And here’s the official plaque:
Now I’ve got to walk two blocks East and then one block North, which brings me to the southwest corner of Elysian Park, at Hudson and 10th. Elysian Park is a small triangular park in what was Elysian Fields in the 19th century. Local lore has it that the first baseball games were played here. Who knows, local lore may be right about that. The Wikipedia entry points out:
Historian Tom Gilbert said, “The Elysian Fields [was] a kind of laboratory of transportation, leisure and recreation. Disneyland, Central Park, Coney Island and the modern baseball park can all claim the Elysian Fields as an ancestor.”
Most of the fields have given way to construction. Elysian Park is what’s left of the original park.
Here’s the library box at the corner, looking roughly Northeast into the park:
Now we turn around a look Northwest toward Hudson Street:
Here’s the official plaque:
Notice that “This little free library is brought to you by Choc O Pain Tea Building.” What, pray tell is the Choc O Pain Tea Building? Choco O Pain is a small local chain of bakeries with attached cafes. One of them is located in the Hudson Tea Building, which is five blocks north of here, on Fifteenth Street. Hudson Tea was originally built by the Maxwell Tea Company. It is now luxury condominiums.
Why didn’t Choco O Pain locate its Little Free Library near its location in Hudson Tea? I don’t know. But, while that building is easily accessible, it’s at the northern edge of Hoboken. Elysian Park is certainly more heavily traveled and more convenient for a larger population.
The guy below has strung a tight rope between two large trees in the park and is practicing his craft. The skyscrapers in the background are across the Hudson River in Manhattan. When I moved to Hoboken several years ago, they didn’t exist.
Walking further into the corner, we can see the Empire State Building at the left:
Now, see that slanted building to the right of center? (Click on the photo to enlarge it.) Just to the left of that you can see the top of the Met Life Tower, which was constructed early in the 20th century. It was the world’s tallest building until 1913.
Fans of Kim Stanley Robinson – I’m thinking of you, Leanne – will recognize that building as the primary setting of New York 2140, a post global-warming science fiction novel. In that novel the sea has risen 50 feet, so the lower floors of the Met Life Building are under water, as is most of Lower Manhattan. And most of Hoboken as well. I checked a topographical map. The location of that Little Free Library is currently 13 meters above sea level, which means that it would have been submerged in Robinson’s novel.
Were any books left in it when the residents of Hoboken finally left the area? I wonder what sea creatures took up residence there? Perhaps a small predator will use it to scout the area for food.
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