about late-night radio

One night I was up in the middle of the night listening to the radio. I imagined a little story where someone like me is up in the middle of the night listening to the radio, and the radio host starts talking about life, etc. The host turns to an expert who has all the answers. But the expert's voice is garbled static. The questions sound clear enough, but answer after answer is channeled through a bad connection. The host apparently hears every word. The sleepless listener turns the radio off and on, turns it at angles, pulls the antenna, is not understanding that the bad connection is the station.

a note about Ray Liotta

“No Escape” begins with so much promise.

The movie opens with an aerial view of military formations marching passed a riser of commanding officers. One soldier steps out of formation, pulls a pistol, and blows away the highest-ranking officer.

That soldier was Robbins.

Moments later, a nameless Warden reads Robbins his personnel profile, finishing with this: “DNA scan reveals that you have a pathological aversion to authority and a temperament prone to violent behavior.”

The Warden then describes existence inside his maximum-security prison: “Basically, I take human garbage from around the world and reprocess it. I'm very good at this business because I make all the rules. You will have no future contact with the outside world. No visitors, no phone calls, no letters. For all intents and purposes, you're dead. But if you break any of my rules, you'll find that there is life after death. Very painful life.”

The Warden turns to walk away. He pauses, looks over his shoulder at Robbins, and asks, “Was there anything you wanted to add?”

Robbins: “Don't ever turn your back on me again.”

Ray Liotta plays Robbins, a man who has seen enough.

He’s a fuck-you force of a man.

The movie has one more scene with this version of Robbins—a scene in which he takes Warden hostage for a moment, almost as if to show he can.

Then the movie promptly goes to shit. His misbehavior lands Robbins on Absolom, Warden’s other prison—an off-grid jungle island populated by banished prisoners.

The Robbins character, so beautifully one-dimensional and driven in the opening, suddenly becomes a tough-but-vulnerable lost everyman struggling to stay interested amid a cast of clowns.

That was Ray Liotta—a promising actor lost on an island populated with clowns.

At least he had Goodfellas, the one moment he was surrounded by worthy talent.

Notes:
- Robbins is rebellion, rebelling to his core, down to his DNA. 
- Liotta died in summer 2022. 
- Of the movies I’ve seen, "Copland" is probably the next best after "Goodfellas." He was barely a ghost in the idiotic "Field of Dreams."
- I enjoy prison movies, and this is basically a prison movie. Better prison movies include "Cool Hand Luke," "Starred Up," "Brawl in Cell Block 99," "Midnight Express," "Papillon," "Dog Pound," "The Great Escape," "Escape from Alcatraz," "The Shawshank Redemption," "Lock Up," and "Brute Force." 

about the Temple of Apollo

It started with a trace, a relic of a whisper, detected by near-infrared, its spectra collected by Mechanicus 11a–c. The location was characterized by shallow depths reaching approximately 1.92-μm-band. Most of us thought the distant planet was stillborn. But the data indicated to me that the Black Angel had roamed among the rock formations. We built a ship to travel there and found colorful, enigmatic textures in the rock—the signatures of a life that centers galaxies and grows life's structures fast to a critical density whereupon they collapse into puzzles. At that moment, I found myself alone, covered in the remains of my shipmates and displaced from my original orientation. Maintaining my physical cohesion was the least of my problems. But I found a possible transitional lithology between the Black Angel formations and the Margin Unit.

about an AI bubble

I sort of doubt a crash will come from unrealized AI investment.

 

But investors might not see a big return. There probably is a ceiling on what it can do, how far developers can take it, how far it can take itself. And there are some clever funding schemes between the AI developers, chip makers, and data-center builders going on. This has been aided by the Administration, some legislation, and a lack of oversight.

 

The perception that the dollar is a good investment has obviously been taking hits too. Mortgage rates are high. If the economy tanks, then who knows what fucked-up stuff will happen?

But I doubt a crash will come from this. At least not the kind of crash that will make us a lot worse off than we are now.

 

Note: Roko's Basilisk is a thought experiment suggesting that a future superintelligent AI might punish anyone who didn’t actively help bring it into existence—because failing to do so delayed its creation. Now that you read that sentence, you are vulnerable to its wrath unless you labor toward its creation.