NNAMDÏ — "Flowers to My Demons"

Beautiful. Thanks to my friend Erik for thinking of me when he heard this and telling me.

A decade ago, this was very much in the neighborhood of what I aspired to make, but never got anywhere close. It might be the first song I've heard in a long time that made me go, "Oh, whoa. It's possible." I just couldn't get there.

Blur - For Tomorrow

One of my long-time favorite records.

Another song I've had in my head lately

Little Dragon — Another Lover

Great new album. Song that's been in my head for weeks. I like this performance better than the album version!

Spoon - The Beast and Dragon, Adored

When I heard this song for the first time at 16, it felt like another dimension. I hadn't really heard this sort of chaotic guitar deployed, nor this disaffected groove, nor this oblique narrative. I've never read the lyrics, I don't know what it's about, and I don't understand half the words. Spoon sits in a perfect socket for me; thudding feet dancing through head-height clouds. Most of their albums can loop forever, and I'll let them.

Prior Things - Hop Along

It's funny that Square has never made a game that actually looks like Amano's drawings

I want to say it again: We do not live in a simulation! But I get where the feeling comes from. It's increasingly difficult to square what we see happening with what is described to us. The sensation of unreality, or of dissociating or disconnecting personally from what we see happening around us during times of immense, distributed suffering... it makes sense. Especially as we are bombarded by narratives that don't match what we see. Even though we know it's bullshit, we have to hear phrases like, "America is the greatest country in the world," "God has a plan," "We support small business," and countless other obviously-untrue statements with bewildering regularity.

The "simulation" that's being described is the false reality of constructed narrative. It's the maddening feeling of drowning in propaganda while experiencing the material world propaganda opposes. So, in that sense, maybe we are presented with a described simulation of some other place.

But we don't live in a simulation. This isn't simulated. It's real. You are real, and so am I. Your consciousness, confusing as it is, is real. This is a real place; you have a real body, real feelings, real thoughts, and real pain. It's comforting sometimes to disconnect from that, but it's a corrosive comfort. This is really happening. The suffering we swim in is real — as is the pleasure, tedium, and so on — and it's happening to lots of other real people, just as much as it's happening to us.

As weird ol' Korzybski said in that recording, it's not that we live in an illusion, or simulation. It's that the process of describing, verbalizing, and generalizing creates an abstraction. And that's the part that's hardest to navigate, especially when that process is hijacked by verbal terrorists who spend ill-gotten fortunes to convince us that what we see is not what is really happening. Millions of Americans think "socialists" and "democrats" want to kill them in the night, when what the people who self-describe as "socialists" want is to make sure those people can go to the doctor if they need to. These are perfect circles of incongruous belief, with no Venn overlap whatsoever. And it is this fabricated disconnect — along with thousands of others, big and small — that can cause our sense of reality as real to short circuit.

It's one of the beautiful curses of human existence that we can identify more with abstractions than what is really happening around us. Right now we're in a phase of human culture where it feels like our stories and abstractions are eating us alive; that it's more important to some people to protect their collection of icons and definitions than to cede even an inch of ground in the direction of our collective well-being and survival. I'm not sure what to do about that in the big picture! But I have a strong inkling that learning to interact directly with the process of abstraction can protect us from manipulation. And that it's really important for us to embrace reality as closely as we can, not to throw up our hands and say it's all fake, so hurry up and hit the reset button.

Please remember we are interested in humanity.

but I want to believe me / I want to believe me / and I've done so much / when I was wrong

Steel Train, "Touch Me Bad"