The NASA Voyager Recordings
Music and bands are the dullest conversation topics 99% of the time with that 1% for actual musicians and people engaged in courtship seduction rituals. These conversations tend to quickly veer into the realm of status posturing and one-upmanship.
“Oh yeah, well have you heard of this stoner-core, emo, noise, dark ambient, anti-rock, Bolivian band?”
Blah. Who the fuck needs it?
But that said, I feel the irresistible need to share my latest musical obsession with you all: the NASA Voyager recordings. Five hours of pings, whirls, whoops and whistles mixed with persistent hums and the occasional shrill squawk, much of it stemming from non-audio data such as radio waves trapped in a planet’s atmosphere and particles bouncing off of a magnetosphere. Not to mention plasma and other junk distorted by pressures beyond imaging. The audio is actually just a way to make the data comprehensible, much like the colors on most space photography doesn’t exist unless you start fiddling with the data and making radio waves and the like visible.
Anyway, I recommend this stuff and say give it a listen.
And remember the best thing about ambient music, is that even when you turn it off, you’re still listening to ambient music.
A Heap of Random Thoughts
Love books. Love reading. Don’t love a genre.
The fact that the number of SF authors who would have sex with their cats is not zero is disconcerting to say the least.
Ishmael Reed should be as popular Kurt Vonnegut.
You can judge how healthy a relationship is by how well its members can work together in a kitchen.
Heavy metal is good. Louder heavy metal is better.
Mental incontinence might be more destructive than mental incompetence.
Some folks are ignorant chuckleheads more in love with mansplaining and the sounds of their own voices than in actually saying something worth acknowledging.
The best thing about writing by hand is the sense of accomplishment one feels when one’s pen runs out of ink.
“He cried like some high school twerp screaming emo at the world because the mall’s book kiosk didn’t carry Naked Lunch.”
Some folks think of books as entertainment. I prefer to think of them as mind-altering substances.
Your Children Are Mutants
Seriously, they are.
Not only do they have warts, topical skin conditions, various physical tics, and other minor abnormalities, but their thought processes are different. They see things you don’t see. They hear things you don’t hear.
They think things you don’t think.
If its a physical thing, you might be in luck. Remember that kid in your class with the deformed ear, or the unsightly mole, or crooked teeth? Childhood is the great era of corrective surgery, braces, and the lasering away of unsightly blemishes. They’ve had that shit taken care – because doing so helps them blend in and walk among us with their weird, mutant thoughts.
It might be your world, but they’re adapting to it. And soon it’ll no longer be your world.
It will be theirs.
Today’s Question
Are you really taking a break from the internet if you don’t go online and tell everyone you’re taking a break from the internet?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Shit We Know Nothing About
There’s this way people think about things that I always find surprising and more than a little pernicious.
In general it goes like this: Person A is doing something about X and actively engaged with it. Person B is not engaged with X, but thinks they know something about it because they once read an article/saw a movie/watched a youtube documentary on the subject. So while Person A has experiential, nuanced knowledge of X, Person B believes they have just as comparable and useful knowledge without really ever experiencing anything first-hand about X.
Another way of putting it is like this: when people say they know about X, what they actually know about it tends to be three pictures that they think about when they think about X.
So, for example, when I talk to most other Americans about South Korea, their knowledge of the country is pretty much the Korean War, Kim Jung Un, and kimchee; a weird incongruous mix of 1950s world events, current cable news, and a pop culture reference or two. As if at this moment I lived amid a ruined city under North Korean siege with tanks outside my window while Psy gungnam-styled all around.
But, like I said, I find this way of thinking to be pernicious, where we mistake our thin veneer of knowledge about something, for actually knowing about it. I’d rather people, myself included, admitted to ignorance and say, “I don’t know.”
More to the point, I think it gets interesting when we start to see where those pictures originated and how they got inside our heads. What purpose is served by their being there? Maybe they say more about us and our own assumptions than they do about the thing we believe we know something about. Maybe we’d be wise to learn how to discern actual knowledge from the billboards we put up to cover our ignorance.
Journey Planet 15
I have a short piece in issue 15 of the fanzine Journey Planet. Click that, scroll down, and download the free PDF. It’s the “write stuff” issue edited by Lynda Rucker and includes articles by Lynne Thomas, Jason R. Ridler, Kameron Hurley, and plenty of others.
My piece is a dandied up version of this blog post. For the record I’m no longer reading slush in any fashion.
North Korea, Our New Couch, and Me
I think my mom has emailed me more this week than she has in all the years the Internet, she, and I have existed on this planet together.
The US Embassy sent out an email yesterday that opened with:
“The U.S. Embassy informs U.S. citizens that despite current political tensions with North Korea there is no specific information to suggest there are imminent threats to U.S. citizens or facilities in the Republic of Korea (ROK). The Embassy has not changed its security posture and we have not recommended that U.S. citizens who reside in, or plan to visit, the Republic of Korea take special security precautions at this time.”
I forwarded that on to my family.
And while my morbid nature is curious what the “Get the fuck out now!” email will read like (I imagine its tone will resemble the Tony-voice from The Shining: REDRUM! REDRUM!), I’ve been in South Korea long enough to have witnessed other instances of saber rattling, and this one appears to be more of the same. None of my coworkers are behaving like this is anything out of the ordinary. There are no tanks in the streets and the USMC hasn’t evacuated service-member families from the base here in town.
I told my mom that we bought a couch and the thing Jin and I are most worried about right now is where to put it: against the wall nearest the window or the one with the 60s space-age wallpaper. My aunt, being an interior decorator, after hearing the couch was beige, said to put it against the 60s space-age wallpaper and then get some throw pillows that’ll match the colors in the wallpaper. Being open to the advice of sages, this is what we will do.
And that’s one way to react to all this saber rattling, and how we are choosing to.
But…
Of course there’s a “but”, because I can’t discount all my fears. I know what a “black swan” is and lived in Jersey City and worked in NYC on 9/11. Horrible shit happens when you least expect it. A stable system built atop dynamic forces can collapse into complete chaos. And that’s where this gets tricky. How long do I want to spend thinking about worst-case scenarios? Give me an hour and I could spin you several dozen. Do I prepare for each one, only one, or none? How paranoid do I want to let myself be about this?
Most of the expats in town aren’t worried and are quick to dismiss fears that this is anything different. To suggest taking steps to prepare is met with hostility of a veiled sort, and it’ll be funny if my last thoughts in the .00000005 seconds before a North Korean nuke’s detonation and my vaporization is “I told you so” – at least it’ll be funny to my forcibly disassociated atoms in a cosmically ironic way. But I’m a big fan of brief focused bouts of productive paranoia.
If you’re constantly worried about something, it’s often best to set aside a proscribed time to obsess about it. Think of what steps you can take to prepare, do them, and then once they’re done and the time limit’s over, stop thinking about it.
So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve done all the minor things we can like register with the embassy, put together an emergency bag, and talked about meeting places. Both Jin and I are children of the 1980s and the late Cold War. The prospect of Nuclear Annihilation is something we remember from being kids. The city where we live now is an early target in any sort of open conflict. The city where Jin’s parents live is similar. In that situation all the bottled water in our emergency bag means doodley-squat. In any one of the baker’s dozen of alternative clusterfucks that might result, who knows, maybe those extra water bottles will come in handy.
But what we both really expect is that the bottled water, the folded-up map to the Marine base, the emergency bag, will all gather dust in the gap between the wall and our washing machine, and whether we can find blue, green, and orangish throw pillows here in town is what we’re really worried about.
Checking In
Here’s some stuff:
Jin, my wife, got interviewed for her translation work on the Witcher game over at this gaming site. Of course it’s only in Korean, but Jin had a fun time working on the project and doing the interview. Did you know if you image search Witcher 2 in the USA it gives you all the monsters you can fight, but if you image search it on the Korean web it’s mostly pictures of the women you get to sleep with? True fact. Or at least maybe it is.
Two weeks back I inherited a load of books from Gord Sellar. I think it was a ton or so. I had to hide the boxes behind a tree in order to get a cab to stop for me because I made the mistake of having the boxes delivered to my school. But I schlepped them home and put them on my shelves and now I have a near complete run of the Korean spec-fic magazine Fantastique (pictured above) among a bunch of other stuff. Fantastique deserves a blog post all its own. The magazine was kind of legendary for its high production values, and it’s weird flipping through the magazine – oddly nostalgic but also a bit perplexing. How could anyone expect to keep such an enterprise afloat? Anyways, that’s a post that needs to be written.
One of these days…
Brand New Silver
We reach the place after wandering. It’s her favorite place she tells me. It wears its history like thrift-store treasures: a trellis railing from its years as a Hof bar, stained and worn coffee lounge couches with mismatched cushions, its roadstall tables and chairs. The stove’s chimney pokes out from a hole above the wooden door — shiny and silver. We sit. We order. “The table’s are big,” she says. “I come here sometimes to work.” The owner talks to someone in a room beside the kitchen. A young woman comes out and leaves. A man comes in. Sullen and alone. He disappears into the back for a bit. Another man comes in, leans over the kitchen counter, peering at the work area. We eat – beansprouts in soup flavored with pink briny shrimp the eyes still on them. The men take seats, one in the room’s corner, the other beside the stove. He spreads his legs, pointing himself right at the heat. We eat, pay, and go. “You have to be in the mood for it,” she says. I tell her I’m always in that mood.
Yesterweird 