Seth Grant's World Series — Glass
What's the point of a portrait?
glass.photo
autumn leaves, a Series by Uwe — Glass
contractually obligated annual status report: it has started 🙂
glass.photoWeather has been good and it’s really pretty outside.
Speaking of pretty, this movie is magical
Exit Party by Emily St. John MandelThe award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches ...
I’ve been joking with my wife that we must be stuck in a weird parallel universe—one where Trump has been president (twice!), AI happened, and pickleball is somehow the dominant sport.
Then I picked up Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Exit Party, and my suspicions were confirmed 🙂. Mandel’s book follows characters who actually fall into parallel realities and have to navigate what it means to lose their identities and rebuild them. It’s a rich canvas that lets Mandel explore relationships, parenthood, and trauma. As always, she is a compelling storyteller and a master weaver of tangled lives and the strange coincidences that shape them. The two political realities described in the book are pretty bleak, and close enough to our own world that a slide into either feels disturbingly plausible.
I made peace with the fact that at work I will probably be a pug. It’s more efficient organizationally and it is expected of me. At home, I have the choice, and I like to think that I will choose to be a collie at least some of the time.
The mighty wolves were presented with a similar choice a long, long time ago when they encountered Stone Age humans. Some of the wolves made a decision to throw in their lot with the humans, and their descendants now live like this:
We can also give in to the ease and comfort of AI. Soon, our only choice will be “the color of the day”.
In the same vein:
The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding
Slop, Alienation, Deskilling, and Team Fallout
distantprovince.substack.comPretty long and surprisingly personal talk. Very important subject and something we should never take for granted. It can slip away very easily (and has started to slip away recently to a concerning degree).
Let’s end today with more autumn leaves