I loved this essay by Jonno Seidler, which uses Kanye West’s 2010 song “All Of The Lights” as a metaphor for what being ~elevated~ with bipolar feels like. I’m not a Kanye super fan, but I do have a shared experience and immediately got it. The song is flows effortlessly, but there’s so much going on. Synth horns! Get Rihanna in here! Fuck yeah, distort the drums… this needs a choir with Alicia Keys and John Legend… no, what this needs is Elton John! Yes, YES! Car headlights, cop car flashing lights, shooting stars, strobe lights.. don’t you see they’re all connected?
“Bipolar is a superpower, but these superpowers need management. Sometimes it’s like I can’t press the eject button as the Batmobile is about to crash into a skyscraper; other times I can’t even find the energy to get into the suit. There is a difference between accessing stardust and living on another planet. At some point, those of us lucky enough to have dealt with this pinball personality long enough realise how to flag when the rocket looks like it might be leaving Earth. We know we have to use it sparingly, lest we inadvertently burn the atmosphere around us.”
“Scientists who’ve probed the inner workings of artbots have documented some truly odd inner states of these machines. Recently, two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently discovered that DALL-E 2 generates apparently gibberish phrases that, within the model itself, appear to have some sort of consistent meaning. They noticed the model generating the phrase “Apoploe vesrreaitais” — and when they fed that back to DALL-E 2 as a prompt, it drew birds. Similarly, “Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons” gets it DALL-E 2 to draw bugs or pests. “Wa ch zod ahaakes rea” produces pictures of seafood. Why? How did the model generate this weird, internal new language? The scientists have no idea, though it seems like some stray artifact of the adversarial nature of the DALL-E 2’s text encoder.”
— Clive Thompson, The Psychological Weirdness of Prompt Engineering
On love 💍
L and I got engaged a few months ago. It was a very low-key deal: L is a very low-key person and we’ve been married in our hearts (and in the eyes of the bank and the ATO) for a while now. I’m on the hunt for inspiration for my vows and wedding speech that reflect the dynamic we have. We’re less “two halves who have merged into the same whole”, and more “two very independent people who actively and joyfully choose to be together.” Here are some things that have resonated:
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
— Kahlil Gibran
“M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic.
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won’t listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.”
“Love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many, many beginnings—all in the same relationship.”
More
“Risks, rising costs and ‘relentless demands’: why so many musicians are cancelling their tours”
I loved Maya Rudolph’s new show Loot, which is a comedy about a jilted billionaire’s wife who decides to get actively involved in the charity founded in her name
I’m alternating between historical romance novels and the 33 1/3 book series — both of which I’ve spoken about before.
Work thoughts
“Executives are struggling. Their jobs, in many ways, have been rewritten, and I don't think this is enough of the conversation. It's oftentimes executives versus employees, but executives are trying to figure out what the best path ahead is. The challenge, though, is that executives are reverting back to returning, returning to how things used to be. The three reasons that they cite are productivity, culture, and connection.
What we see from the data, especially among those who are working flexibly, is that culture's actually better when you're working flexibly … That's a shift — there's the grind culture, the hustle culture that so many leaders have embraced, and that's how they've gotten to the place that they're at. It's meant sacrificing time with their family and friends and their health. When I was in business school, the piece of advice I got as I was graduating was, burn the candle on both ends until you're in your 40s and then reacquaint yourself with your family and friends.
— Anne Helen Petersen & Sheela Subramanian, Why Are Bosses So Miserable?
“One of my favorite operating norms we’ve adopted is “silence is dissent.” If someone isn’t commenting on your work, presume they 1) disagree 2) don’t think it matters or 3) don’t understand until proven otherwise. Silence rarely means alignment.”
Music
Aka Parkway Drive corner for the second month in a row.
Earlier this year, Aussie metal band Parkway Drive cancelled a US tour and began group therapy to save the band and their relationships with each other. The ABC’s Australian Story did an episode on this, and it’s left me and everyone else who loves the band reeling. I won’t spoil it, but there’s one event that really shakes the band’s external image of five Aussie mates treating each other as equals. It’s still a great watch if you’re not a Parkway fan — it gives an unflinching insight into the psychological impact toxic masculinity has on Australian men and male friendships. Hearing their bass player say that he’d been friends with the other guys in the band for more than 20 years and had never heard them say a nice thing about him, to him? Horrible. Anyway, you can watch it on ABC iView, or at YouTube via the link below.
Press Club’s new album is their best yet. I loved this live video of them playing in Melbourne’s Forum Theatre amidst the lockdowns.
Shania Twain has just released a documentary on Netflix, and it’s a must-watch if you were a kid in the 90s, or are a fan of songwriting and stagecraft. Being one of those 90s kids, I didn’t appreciate how pioneering she was, or how huge she was. I had no idea that she closely controlled the editing of her music videos and her styling, nor that most of her hits only have two writers: Shania and her then-husband, Mutt Lange.