🍿 Orion and the Dark (2024) is Charlie Kaufman’s go at writing for children, and he did a marvelous job. Early on it declares itself as a literal bedtime story, and thus follows the logic of every improvised bedtime story ever told, from Alice in Wonderland to whatever tall tale you told your own kids most recently. So it runs on feeling more than on plot, but then which Kaufman movie didn’t? A David Foster Wallace mention and a Werner Herzog cameo are cherries on top.
Whisper on the Mac and iOS devices is stunningly good for both English and Serbian transcription. I use superwhisper on the Mac because its more extensive support for different prompts, but Aiko is more affordable, available for both macOS and iOS, and works brilliantly on Apple Vision Pro.
Not two weeks have gone by since my lament on infrequent posting and lo, there is a new — short! — article from Applied Divinity Studies: On the Experience of Using a Guest Pass at an Elite Gym. I’m not sure it is about an actual gym experience, but the lesson is broadly applicable.
🏀 Another home loss for the Wizards last night, by 8 points. Their usual style is to trail by double digits and close the gap near the end. This time they were actually in the lead for much of the game only to loose the thread in the last quarter. Is a single home win too much to ask?
🏀 By the way, Jordan Poole has confirmed last night that he was epically bad: 0 points and 6 fouls after 24 minutes in the game. The trade deadline is today — maybe the Wizards can pay someone to take him?
Alex Tabarrok gives name to something we’ve all experienced:
Ironically, just as measles can induce immunological amnesia, vaccines can induce social amnesia about the severity of diseases, thereby making society more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.
“Vaccine-induced social amnesia” is a good way to describe it. See also: people who ex post claim we never needed covid-19 lockdowns when the truth is in fact the opposite.
I was also given some language changes to consider, so I might sound less like chatGPT to reviewers.
Being accused of using ChatGPT to help write a manuscript was not a second-order effect of LLMs that ever came to mind, but of course it would happen. Yikes.
Late last year I mentioned several podcasts I would be trying out. The first one — Who Killed JFK — did not work for me. The production values were too high for the slight content it presented, and I like my podcasts on the raw side. Fortunately, a friend recommended the seven-part span of The Rest is History that covers much more than just the assassination, and I can absolutely recommend it. Even better: those were episodes 392–398, so I am now looking forward to hundreds of hours of two historians spitballing about various people and events, from Anthony and Cleopatra to the Hundred Years’ War.
I wish King Charles the best in light of his cancer diagnosis. Reading some of the old coverage of his health issues I noticed that both of his parents had “old age” listed as the cause of death. Any certifying MD that tried to pull that over here would have had the paperwork returned in an instant.