The View From Out Here

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

Ozzy Osbourne is selling samples of his DNA online for four hundred and fifty dollars a drop.

A woman made an entire new career out of saying the words “hawk tuah” on camera, and now she will forever be Hawk Tuah Girl. She released a cryptocoin, $HAWK, the thinking apparently being that the attention given to a woman saying “Hawk Tuah” translated into financial value. It did not. She is being sued for fraud by people who bought a digital token imbued with the intrinsic worth of a woman saying “Hawk Tuah.” The internet that gave her her new life then pivoted to claiming she’s a Mossad asset performing a psyop.

A new dating app requires you to upload your entire browsing history in order to join and participate.

The 21 centimetre signal is an energy signature from just one hundred million years after the Big Bang. In studying it, we are on the road to understanding what’s often called the Cosmic Dark Age.

AI chatbot-speak is starting to affect the English language: linguistic styles and phrasings baked into chatbot outputs are now showing up in human speech in the US.

Spacecraft photograph each others’ lunar crash sites, and create little local total solar eclipses to photograph.

Global birth rates are dropping, but the owner of messaging app Telegram has at least a hundred children he’s aware of and is preparing to divide his $13 billion fortune between them.

An app based genomics service allows IVF users to select their preferred embryos for intelligence and looks at a cost of $6000.

A couple of different sources suggest we are entering “the Synthocene Era.”

A film industry survey suggests the “traditional cinemagoing experience” has less than twenty years left.

OpenAI has expressed concern that its forthcoming models will be highly effective in enabling amateurs to create novel bioweapons.

It seems likely that X will soon offer a physical debit card with your X user name on it, because that seems safe. Imagine handing that card over at Costco and the cashier says, “Oh, you’re barglemygalls.”

Honda now has a working reusable rocket. Honda.

Collision-detecting phone software triggered 700 emergency services calls from a moshpit at the Download Festival last year.

I have read the words “designer wellness lounge” and now you, too, are infected by them.

And that was my reading on one single morning this week.

Followed up by being introduced to this:

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Currently listening:

I caught this one five-minute piece on Late Junction this week and I thought it was magnificent: Zelenaia Dubrovonka by Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko. Saienko uses her voice as an instrument, adapting traditional Ukrainian styles, and it absolutely soars. Amazing.

Music For Solstice by AHRKH WAGNER is exactly the sort of crackling cosmic ritual drone you’d expect me to listen to, and I’m pissed off it’s not on CD.

Currently reading:

I decided that spending a summer with books would be the nicest thing to do this year, so I’m heading into the dark depths of my to-read list.

• FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t read Hemingway in years, and returning to his weird, attenuated, crackling prose somehow still always has a shock to it. This one has a weird trick in it, where he renders the translation of an old Spanish dialect as old-fashioned English, all thees and thous. It’s the story of an American tasked to blow up a bridge during the Spanish Civil War, but Hemingway’s bitten-off. withholding prose, the source of most modern thriller writing, makes it bigger and more mysterious. As ever, a model to study. (UK) (US)

They offered tribute to strangeness because it was strangeness that they appreciated most in the world when they were alive.

• THE SHORTEST DAY, Colm Toibin. A long short story, good for a single sitting. A professor who’s been studying an ancient Irish stone tomb is returning to it just before Christmas, curious about the tale he’s been told about what happens there on the shortest day of the year. The ghosts in the tomb dread the possibility, as it may block the light - the only light they receive all year, and which they subsist on for the next year. Really nicely turned. (UK) (US)

A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. "You’ve ruined my life for ever. Thank you."

• GINGERBREAD, Helen Oyeyemi, is a weird contemporary West London folk (or perhaps folk-horror) tale that is, so far, about family, history, fairytales, tradition and poor choices. Or maybe curses. Oyeyemi is a witty writer - her prose is fun and funny and she likes messing around with the reader. It hurls a lot of mad ideas at you with conscious maximalist abandon. (UK) (US)

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And that’s me this week. Hold on tight.

W