John Shirley Blog

The trick is to be paranoid without pathology. Keep suspicion sitting on your arm like a trained falcon but don’t send it after wrens and moths. Paranoia should be like a well polished lens. Don’t let it get blurred. Paranoia is a skill.

If you loathe billionaires, Big Pharma and animal testing, as I do, you should see this Netflix limited series THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. It’s from Mike Flanagan, who did that good miniseries take on The Haunting of Hill House. This, though constantly referencing Poe in names and imagery, has very little to do with Poe’s tale of Usher, despite throwing in a premature burial. But it turns out that doesn’t matter.The “lemons” speech, the speech about animal testing…!

The writing in this Fall of the House of Usher is very good, though not as literary as the writers suppose– but that’s okay, this cinematic revenge eaten cold is quite effective. Compelling social satire is being served…

It draws on Eyes Wide Shut, and perhaps A Clockwork Orange, and, yes, even The Crow. But it sure makes it’s points. The horror is effective. The Masque of the Red Death bit I saw coming but they sure carry it off well.

My youngest son Julian bought a Tesla for 35 thousand dollars cash (and I mean he gave the guy a bag of cash!) and I took a ride in it with him. Lately it’s been upgraded to drive itself with no driver control whatever, if that’s chosen, on any street. It scared me by seeming to dart around too rapidly—but I learned after that my son had programmed it to go 20% faster than any given speed limit (yes it knows all the speed limits wherever it is). It navigated successfully but it was all quite eerie. Has a bullhorn feature where you can set it to amplify anything you say from the car to the world so I yelled a few rude comments at random that echoed down the street from the Tesla. Comments included, “Fuck Trump!” The Tesla can be programmed to “aggressive” or a sort of meek self-driving. I much dislike Musk, who’s gone totally far-right and antisemitic, and who is oppressive as a boss, so I wouldn’t have a Tesla. The self-driving cabs being tested in San Francisco are appallingly problematic. But I would purchase a self-driving car of some non-Muskian origin IF it were shown to be really, truly reliable and safe. Thus far–they aren’t.

We, like all organisms, are designed for planned obsolescence. Aging seems built in, no accident of nature, and I suspect it’s not just for population control, but serves the general interests of the perpetual experiment that is evolution. The churn must keep churning. This means more births, and removing earlier variants, in a perennial, persistent way, to produce newer experiments in evolution. DNA seems to be varying itself, yet carrying a message into the future.

A passenger jet taking off, 200 tons of steel, plastic, vinyl, & fuel, sucks its way into the sky, the real lift provided by air pressure. It’s an oxymoron: an ordinary miracle.The passenger feels the atmospheric density kicking in as lift, remembers that air–which we stride about in as if it’s nothing–has weight. Remembers windstorms; remembers that destructive floods are held in the sky as fluffy clouds, before the air lets it fall, soft water become a hammer swinging to knock houses away…

Used to be that if you didn’t vote for Democrats you were creating a vacuum filled by conservatives. Now if you don’t vote for Democrats, locally and nationally, you’re permitting the takeover of fascists. The choice really is that stark now. I hear anarchist & Marxist friends saying, what about us? What about our systems and non-systems? You can have anarchism or socialism–locally. You can create communes and communities, and demonstrate locally how it works. A display of that alternative. Meanwhile vote against fascists. Register to vote and vote for Democrats. Then work on starting your own political party and building it up.

One strange thing about consciousness is that it doesn’t know what consciousness is. That is, most discrete consciousnesses do not know themselves. Consciousness is baffled by consciousness. It’s like a blind man that can feel and smell but can’t see itself in a mirror. If consciousness increases its level of consciousness it can see itself and know what it is. Til then, this disability will prevent programmers and developers from understanding that AI cannot become conscious.

Writers who respect copyright, intellectual property, and writers’ dedication to their art will *not* use programs that scan published text to help fake “writers” work up material through AI programs. I sent a cease and desist to prosecraft.io to take down their use of my novel Stormland, 1000 words of quoted prose, and end their usage of it. There are class action suits coming, against these outfits. They took down the Stormland theft soon as I mentioned lawyers.

People who use programs, AIs especially, to create “art”, visual or in writing or musical form, are hurting not only the culture–but themselves. They’re weakening their own creativity. Because creativity must be stretched and developed through effort in order to flower. They also enfeeble their own experience of art. They will lose capacity to grow as artists. A pretty picture etc is easy–and it will atrophy their creativity. And what they do produce will soon be a bore to everyone.

I saw SISU. This movie is cinema at its purest. I seem to see cinephile references to Dr Strangelove and possibly even Indiana Jones in this–in a way, it’s about if Indiana Jones became a monomaniacal killer. (Just killing Nazis.) A Finnish Indiana Jones who only says twelve words in the whole movie. Naw, forget Indiana Jones. It’s kind of like a Spaghetti Western but way better than most Spaghetti Westerns. Quentin Tarantino vibes. In a good way. Believable? Don’t worry about it. Jalmari Helander wrote and directed it.

I saw a SPIDER THROW A TWIG yesterday….I watched Brunhilde the garden spider repair her web after a windy night. I don’t generally like watching spiders as I have primeval-fear issues with them (I suspect, and I am not joking, that some of us have DNA memory from proto-anthropoid ancestors who were at risk of being caught and eaten by giant Shelob-scale spiders) …but I became interested in this very large, bulbous-rumped gold and black garden spider, who was repairing her web in my front yard. I got so involved I gave her a name, Brunhilde (the ones in the big webs are females).

I noticed she was working deftly to disentangle a very small twig from her web; I watched her unfasten it and I was stunned to see her *throw it*, using two forelegs, almost like throwing a spear, to get it clear of her web. I didn’t know they did such things.

She then went about repairing damage to the little radial connectors between the circular webbing. She did something else I didn’t know they did, then–normally, spiders seem to build up webs by extruding them directly from the spinnerets on the tips of their abdomen. But as I looked closely–my face just six inches from this large spider!–I saw this one dip the very tip of a tarsus, the end of her leg, into the glue pot of her spinneret.

She then stretched the web goo *from the tip of her leg* to replace short connective links between two web circles. It was like a paintbrush sort of movement with the tip of the foreleg, or like the use of a brush from a glue pot, but it stretched a short line across. I was impressed with her deftness. And seeing her in the sunlight I had to admit she was rather pretty.

I spent enough time watching that I became rather caught up…as if in a psychological web…and hence named her, and then found myself worrying about her last night during a bit of a rainstorm we had. Then I laughed at myself. Worrying about a spider! What a dolt!