Monocultured

Was it ten years ago that I startet excercising? Around my 30th birthday I gave up smoking (for the first time) and began following the C25K jogging program. After a couple of months I could run five kilometres without dying completely, but some years later my knees were giving me jib and I started in on strength training based on my doctors recommendation – reading up on Starting Strength and joining Göteborgs Kraftsportsklubb where I pushed some plates around next to some very strong people.

Fast forwards another couple of years and I’ve given up on powerlifting as well as jogging – it got boring once I plateaued and couldn’t motivate myself to shift the training around, and my knees where as annoying as ever. Biking became the only excercise I did, and once we got a car even that was relegated to short excursions, where before I used any excuse to bike for an hour.

Last summer I had an ambition to use my 10 week vacation to get into powerlifting again. I’d just set a personal best deadlift of 150kg, and had a long term goal of at some point pulling 200kg. For some reason the summer turned out to consist mostly of beer though, and I didn’t visit the gym once in that whole time, so spent fall 2019 trying to catch up to where I’d been.

Spring 2020 has been a mixed bag – mostly because of real life and sickness in the immediate family which has taken time and a mental toll – but the last two months or so I’m back on track, hitting the gym at least three times a week with some running and/or squash in between. So far I’m free of injuries, and am seeing some progress – although I’m not following a powerlifting program this time around, but a hypertrophic upper/lower split setup from Styrkelabbet. If I keep this up I might shift the training more towards a deadlift focus in fall – but let’s see if I can keep this up.

Going through a bunch of “read later” tabs I’ve had open for a while, I finally started reading the exrx.net texts on training, and the no-bro information is a great resource:

It is plausible that overall progress may be greater on a generally lower volume training regimen by keeping training more consistent over many years through greater long term program adherence and lower incidents of layoffs due to overuse injury. Any small increases that might be gained with continuous high volume training are potentially lost, soon after the first incidence of an overuse injury, if not the attrition due to burnout.

ExRx.net: Most common weight training mistakes

I would like to find an app (or printed training diary) which allows for randomized volumes & intensities – trying to keep the body confused and avoid the Repeated Bout Effect. Althought it might be bro science, it seems a good idea to vary the volume/intervals/tempo for exercises, as well as including variations on the themes every once in a while. (Not doing silly crossfit wearing-oneself-out stuff, but measured changes building on previous skills). Even if I try to change the volume & intensities up a bit, as long as I’m not following a program I know I’m liable to cheat – picking exercises which I like rather than those I ought to force myself to improve in.

And as for my goal of deadlifting 200kg – I’m the first to acknowledge that it’s a completely arbitrary number to aspire towards. I might as well have lift 50kg 100 times in ten minutes or do 10 x 2 x bodyweight pullups. But deadlifts have two things going for them:

1. You can’t really cheat to get gains
2. It’s the exercise which allows for the absolute heaviest weights

So let’s see where I am next spring. Hopefully I’m able to run 10k non-stop without dying as well as be above 150kg deadlift again, closing in on that 200kg goal.

Take efficiency, for example: It is common for new technologies in games to increase efficiency, which is almost always presented as unambiguously good. But while increased efficiency tends to either increase production or require less work, the practical downside is rarely modelled in games: the former increases the consumption of resources, the latter depresses wages. 

Vice – Gabriel Soares: ‘Civilization’ and Strategy Games’ Progress Delusion

I want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.

Nikina Tonsky: Software Disenchantment

Write a chapter of a book by hand – you know that’s not what will get published. Start designing a poster with a sharpie, instead of the latest high-tech illustrating program. Create a working prototype for your first product that you’d never ship to anyone else. When you know that you don’t have to make the greatest thing ever right from the start, it’s easier to start. And then it’s easier to continue.

deprocrastination.co: 3 tricks to start working despite not feeling like it

Next, you might ask yourself how the other side perceives your demands. What is standing in the way of them agreeing with you? Do they know your underlying interests? Do you know what your own underlying interests are? If you can figure out their interests as well as your own, you will be much more likely to find a solution that benefits both sides.

Jace Grebski: The Art of Bargaining, Positional vs Interest-Based Negotiation

Now, in addition to the perennial challenge, we face an immediate crisis. In the past week, COVID-19 has started to behave a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about. I hope it’s not that bad, but we should assume that it will be until we know otherwise.

Bill Gates: How to respond to COVID-19

Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN.

Anna Wiener: Uncanny Valley

For more than a decade now, people have been spending fortunes building platforms and algorithms that rely on ever-increasing user ‘engagement’, often without really knowing what that is. As it turns out, conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement.

Hacker News: The Internet of Beefs

Kristin hopes she has designed the perfect environment. Most FTD patients aren’t so fortunate, if you can call it that, to wind down their lives on a personalized estate with a staff dedicated to keeping them safe and calm. Their families don’t always have a choice in how involved they want to be. Still, all the money in the world can’t answer the question of who, really, is living in that house.

Wired.com – Sandra Upson: What happened to Lee?

Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed. All I know is whether someone was a member of an organization or not. Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown’s subjects. I have been asked, on the basis of this poor information, to present some names for our field agents in the Colonies to work with.

Kieranhealy.org: Using Metadata to find Paul Revere

These are strange times and I have an odd taste in my mouth. The past couple of days I’ve been feeling tired and sluggish, and I don’t know if it’s allergies, stress, Corona, whatever – I just know that everything has a taste of tart cardboard and I don’t feel like doing anything.

The past months have been strange the world over – everyone is hunkering down in response to the pandemic – and Sweden has been an outlier in that we’re not quaranteeing or sheltering-in-place but are rather encouraged not to cough on each other and keep our distance. Fair enough, but we’ve ended up with Schrödingers flu and until proper vaccins and tests are made available most stuff is in limbo.

Working from home since February means that I’m sitting in the same chair at home most days of the week – I’m climbing the walls a bit so am trying to excercise more often just to get out of the house. But the powerlifting has stalled, and I’m resetting everything into a arms/legs split with a powerlift focus – I’m further from reaching my deadlift goal this year than I was last summer, and it’s a bit annoying.

In a bout of self improvement and/or masochism I gave up snus three weeks ago. The first two weeks were horrible and nicotine withdrawal had me jittering like a methed-up Nick Cage. Being physically addicted is demeaning, and I spent the days having a constant feeling of something missing – jaw working, eyes scanning, hands fidgeting – and if I could have satisfied the crawing without giving in to the craving (if that makes sense) I would have done anything.

So I’m thinking that my lack of taste – or change of taste – might be my tastebuds readjusting to a life without a constant stream of snus saliva.

A year or so ago I had a few sessions with a cognitive therapy person which didn’t amount to much – cbt seems mostly about breaking patterns and helping people out that can’t manage their day-to-day life, and whatever my problems are, it wasn’t a good fit. I’m still on SSRI:s but am hoping to drop those as soon as I get some breathing room, but I’ve also started meeting with a honest-to-goodness lie-on-a-couch therapist.

It’s an exciting process and offers a challange to my recursive introspection. His axiom is that most problems stem from conflicts, and identifying those conflicts – be they internal or external – can allow me to get a better understanding of myself as well as be used as a tool to avoid the traps of overthinking and negative spiraling. In a sense, everything is borne of a choice at some point, even if it doesn’t feell like it in a moment of anxiety.

I don’t have any principled objection to medicating my problems away – the psylocybin/ketamin experiments with depressed persons seem promising – but if I can learn to manage my mind better using only my own body, I’ll be more resilient regarless of what other tools I’ll have at my disposal.

I start this post on January 2nd – both I and Sara are under the weather so spend the time watching movies or reading. So why not start the new year with another post outlining what I’ve read? Third time in a row, here’s the stuff I’ve read this or given up on.

Halfway through the year I decided to plow through my ebooks in alphabetic order – regardless of my mood I’ll start in on a biography, poetry collection or treaties on thin film manufacturing. As a result, I’ve quit more books than I usually do. This is a good thing since I have more books than I’d be able to read in a lifetime, accumulating more each week.

Printed matter

Johanna Gillbro: Hudbibeln. Saw a blurb about this in the magazine Filter and it seemed up my alley – an academic dermatologists explanation of skin and skin-care. Easy to read and good disposition, but requires a second skimming with a notebook if I’m to make use of the lists of good & bad ingredients in skin care. It does a good job of demystifying creams, serums, exfoliants and whatnots.

Carl Otto Mattson & Johann Lang: Bin till nytta och nöje. A beginners guide to keeping bees. With all that I’ve heard about colony collapse, and the general state of environmental damage and insect die-off, keeping bees might be something actually useful to learn – especially if I and Sara move out into the country someday. Haven’t decided on how this relates to my animal rights & vegan convictions, but now I can have a more informed think about it.

Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar: This is how you lose a time war. A mostly epistolary story of two agents from warring factions which battle for supremacy over a vaguely outlined multi-dimensional/temporal world. Intimately written and a beautiful love story.

M.R. Carey: The boy on the bridge. A prequel to The girl with all the gifts – which I haven’t read although I’ve enjoyed the movie twice. The book is a bit meh, with none of the pathos which the movie had.

Annalee Newitz: The future of another timeline. There’s a battle raging through time over women rights (or lack therof) – research activists travel through time using one of five ancient time machines no-one fully understands. Nice mix of stoneage-scifi and headaches induced by time edits. Slightly different take on continuity than Permafrost, but a nice comparison.

Sofia Åkerman: Zebraflickan. Swedish autobiography of a young girl who spends many years in and out of mental institutions, battling eating disorders and self-harming. Starts out with an attempted suicide and keeps going. In my library copy someone had underlined some passages – perhaps trying to find clues to how to deal with someone similar? Insightful writing on the insidiousness of mental illness.

Epub

Sylvain Neuvel: Sleeping Giants. Parts of a giant robot are found spread over the globe and we follow a Man-in-black as he schemes to assemble it and learn more of its origin. Reads like a teenage outline for mecha fanfic – i.e. I’m not going to bother with the sequels.

John Carreyrou: Bad blood. A rollercoaster of sociopaths and the folly of venture capital. I read this before I saw the movie [the Inventor] and it’s a fascinating read on the rise and fall of Theranos and the people behind it. A bit on the nose sometimes, but an easy and fascinating read.

Bill Owens [ed.]: The art of distilling. I’ve tried my hand on brewing beer and cider with less than stellar results, but didn’t know much about distillation before reading this book. It covers different kinds of stills and resulting liquids, and I’m curious to try it out for doing tinctures and such.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein. One of the earliest, if not the earliest, works of sci-fi and surprisingly readable still. The language is stilted as all heck, but not enough to put one off reading. Later reimaginings of Frankensteins monster as a dumb brute does a disservice to the original though – I much prefer the brooding creature presented here.

David Wallace-Wells: The uninhabitable earth. Holy moly Jesus on a stick – this is one depressing and dreadful read. List after list of the ways in which humanity has fucked up the climate, accompanied by list upon list of how this will impact the same humanity – however unevenly. The premise of the book is unapologetically anthropocentric, but combined with our knowledge of ecosystems it draws a map of what we’ve completely fucked up and what we might still save. A must read and what I’ll buy everyone for Christmas this year.

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall. My friend Andreas recommended this if I wanted to read court intrigue, and boy am I glad he did. It was so very long ago that I read something so well crafted, with such a commanding language and compelling characters. I actually gasped a few times when encountering passages that were cleverly written – that hasn’t happen for quite some time.

Hilary Mantel: Bring up the bodies. Started in on this straight after Wolf Hall, and it’s more of the same – in a good way. Immediately after finishing it I put in a preorder for the last part of the trilogy – I’ll have it sometime in spring and am looking forwards to it immensely.

Mikhail Bulgakov: A country doctor’s notebook. A collection of short stories all concerning doctors in the Russian/Soviet countryside. Reminded me of David Sedaris – similar neuroticism, imposter syndrome and general feebleness of character. At first I thought the stories were autobiographical, but once the main characters had different names I caught on.

Annalee Newitz: The future of another timeline. Feminist struggle through time travel – two fractions competing for dominance through time edits which will ripple through history and change womens rights for good or ill. Basically mens rights movement vs. riot grrrls. Not as insightful as Autonomous, but still worth a read. How do we remember futures which never happened, and how can we create the future we want?

Audiobook

Jon Ronson: Them. Following (mostly) religious extremists around with a nervous eye – entertaining book but I’m not certain what the takeaway is. Ronson is great fun though, and his frantic escape from suspected Bilderberg spies is a lol moment.

Philip Pullman: La Belle Sauvage. It’s great being back in the universe of the Golden Compass, and the story of how clever Malcolm Polstead navigates an increasingly theocratic adult world is tense and written with a gentle hand. Looking forward to the next installment.

Lev Grossman: The Magician King. [reread] Darker than the first book and still entertaining – everyday magicians doing their stuff in fairy land.

Lev Grossman: The Magicians land. A great finish of the trilogy, and the irreverent tone when dealing with gods, magic and the fabric of reality makes for a fun read.

Annalee Newitz: Autonomous. A future where patent law is violently enforced, sees protagonist-cum-biohacker Jack, trying to undo the damage her pirated copies of a productivity drug have caused. Well written and with some inspiring thoughts on what personhood means for artificial intelligences.

Martha Wells: All systems red. Yet another written-for-being-optioned scifi. Some cute scenes, all told from the point of view of Murderbot, but I’m hard pressed to remember what it was about.

C. Robert Cargill: Sea of Rust. Scavenging sentient robots experience their own post-apocalypse – having previously brought about the human apocalypse. Some interesting scenes, but this would have been a better comic than it’s a book.

Timothy A. Pychyl: Solving the procrastination puzzle. I don’t know how many of these books I have to read or listen to before I actually commit, but the advice usually comes down to: Commit to doing something, split it into small actionable items and then do it.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of time. Humanity is extinct except for a few remnants who’ve set out into deep space in search for a new home in a generational ship, and their only option seems to be a planet on which a biological experiment has given rise to intelligent spiders. Interesting take on exobiology and how cultures might evolve differently in another species.

Alastair Reynolds: Permafrost. A messed up future takes over peoples bodies back in time in order to mitigate the coming disaster. An ensemble story which reads in parts as a techno thriller, in parts as drama. Some interesting ideas about time travel and paradox, but other than that rather forgettable.

Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas. Revisiting the Culture again – always a treat. The world building is compelling and envelopes me like a snug blanket.

Iain M. Banks: Player of games. A story of a gameplayer blackmailed into carrying out a mission on behalf of Contact – told by an unreliable narrator. Not the strongest novel in the series and hasn’t dated as well as I remembered, but still good.

Abandoned stuff

Mark Manson: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. There might be some wisdom in the book, but it reads like bro-mindfulness and I can’t overlook the humblebrag, sexism and poor writing enough to finish it.

Johanna Frid: Nora eller Brinn Oslo Brinn. This is good and I’m going to read it later on, but I only had it on short loan from the library and wasn’t keen enough to finish it within a week, even though it’s doable. Well written story of the insanity of jealousy.

Daryl Gregory: Spoonbenders. Well written, but I just can’t get into it. Gave up after an hour of so.

James Patterson: 17th suspect. Trite – gave up after 15 pages.

Ken Follett: A column of fire. Having read Wolf Hall, this story set in the same time pales in comparison and I didn’t want to taint my appreciation of the Mantel book

Today was the first time in a good while that I stayed behind at work to do something myself – I spent two hours on the lathe and turned something which resembles a short, splintery dildo.

I’ve been watching a bunch of wood- & metalwork videos lately, and needed to try my hands at it. It’s too easy just to live vicariously, and at some point it’s just not healthy. So, equipped with some Youtube “skills” I set to sharpening a few tools and turning wood, which let me tell you is much more physically difficult than the videos make apparent.

Other than that I’ve had a slow half-year since last I posted. Just before summer I deadlifted 150kg which was a personal best, but then I compensated by not doing anything other than drinking beer for two months during summer. Going back to work also got me back to the gym, and I’m slowly building up my strength and good habits again.

Speaking of which, I had my longest non-drinking period since my teenage years and kept away from the devils brew for 8 weeks or so. I noticed a slight improvement in mood and cognitive ability, so I can see the appeal. Although I can’t really see the appeal while living in Gothenburg, which for six months has nothing to recommend it besides alcohol and a karaoke bar.

There’s some illness in the family and that keeps me worried – not the proper time to quit the SSRI in other words – but I’m hoping that between myself and Sara we’ll get through it. There’s Christmas at moms to look forward to, as well as my brothers marriage in January, so we’re not totally lacking for distractions. Things to look forward to in the short term are important, I’ve learned.

As for the photozine I’m nowhere near completion. I’m very aware of the New Years deadline approaching, but It’ll be done when it’s done. Right now I just need to focus on turning some more wooden dicks and improve my deadlift.

I’m in a dream, and in the dream I’m running towards the horizon in a dried out landscape – like one of those Australian cracked up dirt vistas – and I don’t know why I’m running. Suddenly, appearing from under some bushes, there’s a knee-high critter which looks like a toad/tortoise combination, and it tells me “I can kill anyone you’d like and make it look like an accident.”

It starts running after me, and I’m frightened because if I don’t have anyone to kill, how do I know it won’t kill me to keep its secret? No matter how fast I run, the creature keeps up and is gaining. Finally, it’s at my heels and I turn around and try to kick it as hard as I can so that I can stun it and hopefully get away.

This is where I wake up because I’ve just kicked Sara in the shin really hard. I mumble an apology and try to fall back asleep, but when I close my eyes I still see the desert and it frightens me and startles me awake. Goddamn hitman toads man.

At work we’re going through an organisational review thanks to a work grant from TRS, and we’re having workshops at least once a month – not counting the planning Skype meets and such. It’s easy for me to forget that I am paid to be there, but most everyone else who attends is a volunteer member who is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or similar organ.

My own engagement with volunteer organisations has been flagging lately. Laborator – the biohack lab I was starting up – has died of consumption, listlessly fading away underneath the varnish of neglect. Other than that I haven’t put in any time into stuff that hasn’t been work – be it paid or my own.

So it’s inspiring to take a step back every once in a while to realize that much of what is good in the world is still happening because people see a need and step up to get it done.

I’m working on publishing two issues of a photo magazine this year. Not sure if “artist book” or “fanzine” is the better term, so let’s just stick with “zine” for now. For starters, I’m just using my own images, and it’s straight up photography – I’ve amassed enough pics that I ought to be able to put together at least a few interesting issues.

Part of the drive here is the distrubution model. I’ll keep the production costs down as much as possible and will at least initially print it using newsprint paper, which will allow me to be more frivolous with the copies since I don’t have to keep track of costs as much.

I had a dinner for a few friends who are in the art book scene a couple of months ago, and the recurring theme was the difficulty of finding a new audience. So an idea I have it to try to create an audience from scratch. I’ll do a limited run of each issue (let’s say 100 copies) and they’ll be numbered and signed like any work of graphic art, but I’ll post them to random and semi-random recipients, encouraging them to send some money if they’d like to receive the next issue. If they don’t send anything, no foul – I’m sending the mag unsolicited after all – but if they do choose to send money I’ll have at least a subscriber for one issue.

I’ve set up an instagram @monocultured (which to my amazement wasn’t taken yet) and as one does these days I’ll post the progress there. Let’s see how it fares if I don’t market it at all.

It’s odd going through the tens of thousands of images that I’ve accumulated to try to suss out something meaningful. It pretty much amounts to a completely new work – what I thought when I took the picture, what I’ve used the image for previously, none of that matters. It’s now a selection I’m doing in 2019 and trying to coax some meaning from.

I’m going to work on this using diptychs for now – pairing images up and play on their interaction. An analogy close at hand is that of binaural audio, where the resulting sound is created in the mind of the listener, rather than the creator. When you leave two images next to each other they relate to each other, and understanding them isn’t predicated on you knowing their origin, but rather on your interpretation of how they reflect each other. Perhaps a better analogy would be the Kuleshov effect – but the interaction of images in those examples still hinge on interpreting the scene as a whole, not as two seperate, equal, images.

One practical problem I had when starting out selecting images was that I had no easy way to quickly match up different images and make a selection of good combinations. Lightroom, Bridge, all DAM:s and specialized apps I tried fell short. I posted this on ask.metafilter.com and user tomp from London threw together an app which did exactly what I wanted! It’s still rough, but it’s unmeasurably better than any other solution I’ve tried, so if you’re in the same predicament I’d recommend you to try it out.