photos instead of paintings (all this was later removed):
this is one of my favorite image parings to show people. in person when you swipe back and forth you can sometimes see it rewire something in their brain about america. same room in the white house, before and after:
if i were making a positive argument for the change (i am contrarian), i dug up two images of the red room from the same exact angle, before and after. you can notice the same doors, fireplace position, etc:
i will also plug the fact that most of the cool (imo) design work in the above images was done by louis comfort tiffany. here are a few random images from him (first two images are the same church in ohio)
these are some of my favorite sketches of his. part of my interest in his work is that american aesthetics, on some other alternate timeline, could have gone more down this road:
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
oh yes. it is time for… our second annual children’s book recommendation thread.
the last one changed amazon’s suggested products list forever. such power we wield.
we take childhood reading very seriously here. allow me to send you some book ideas from the cyclops family hut.
the last recommendations thread was done around our first kid’s book release. that thread is below.
we have another kid’s book dropping before the holidays - presently, the main thing we are pumping is that i have all my books together as a package now. scope-able on my profile:
last intro note: premise. a normal person might describe my wife as a “crunchy mom”. her vibe is in the mix here. books clearly affect a kid’s spirit and psyche so we tend towards things we feel will nurture the brain-spirit in some way. basically, we are the bottom of this meme:
apathy about other people that you come into contact with is really a form of contempt. if you dont care what a person thinks, you obviously dont think very highly of them.
i have this. its the best and worst feature of my personality. recently, i tried to figure out why.
[…]
in some ways, its served me very well. it allowed me to get through basically anything as an artist. if you go down the “whole path”, inevitably you get some harsh critiques or insults. if you don’t care what other people think, you’re just immune. it doesn’t affect you - at all.
on the flip side, the slight contempt for normal people (you see this online here, “normies”) or others in general is caustic. its rarely articulated - you never say it or consciously think it, you may not even notice it, but it forms the subtext for your social interactions.
i’d like to discuss christian and mormon orientations toward knowledge.
for a variety of reasons, mormon theology has been a large topic on X recently. this is one of my main areas of interest, but its difficult to briefly hop into.
so, i really enjoyed reading perelandra:
perelandra is the second book in the space trilogy by c.s. lewis. obviously there will be some spoilers in here.
in the book, there’s a few characters that are obviously proxies: a woman is eve, one figure is the devil. the narrator is obviously, to me, a stand in for the author
ransom, the narrator, who i just read as lewis himself, finds himself in an analogy for the garden of eden. he is observing the devil slowly tempt eve, basically. he’s able to get involved and argue a little bit but, he has to sleep, the devil doesnt - he cant stop the process.
parenting has this odd social dimension where youre always actively engaging with how other people see you.
so i go to this street fair. my son (3) gets stung by a wasp. never been stung before. freaks out. i take him out of the crowd and put him on some grass. he’s fine.
[…]
i also just so happened to have obtained an extremely large gyro seconds before this. in my haste and preference for my own flesh and blood, i abandoned the gyro.
when my son is injured, he just wants things to be normal. he personally insists i go back and re-obtain the gyro.
he doesnt want to talk about being injured, doesnt want any attention, he just wants everything to stay normal and not orbit around him so he can deal with it. great. so he wants me, his dad, eating his food like normal, on this patch of grass while he recovers from a wasp sting.
in the 1977 film ‘wizards’, one of the oddest movies ive seen, the earth is split between two opposing forces: one side uses technology, and one side has forbidden technology and instead uses magic. i thought this was an interesting lens to view the present AI discussion through.
the term “magic” gained its present english meaning at a time when our society was entirely religious. so, obviously, socially dominant religion with its hierarchy, history, and institutions used the term magic to denote what was outside it: witches, the occult, and such things.
however, we no longer live in that world. today, if we remove the baggage from the word magic, we have to be slightly honest and admit that talking to superhuman beings, items with supraphysical holy influence, casting out demons - this is all “magical”, as opposed to scientific.