“Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I may say I am unborn…”
—Henry David Thoreau, 7/19/1851
Jesus next door
We are the robots
This is a particularly weird time to be raising a kid who is obsessed with robots, because the whole culture is obsessed with them. Bots. Drones. AI. Blade Runner. Stories about robots (at least the ones I know of) are almost always stories about what makes humans human and what it means to be one. That, I think, is also exactly what Owen is trying to figure out: by learning what a robot is, what it doesn’t have that he does have, he’s figuring out his body and his emotions and what he is. (Do robots poop? Do robots get scared?) How interesting to have a kid trying to figure out, essentially, what the wider culture is trying to figure out: What are we? What are we good for? Are we machines? Can we be replaced by them? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
HushMoney™
“I have a penny for your thoughts / If you can keep them to yourself”
–LCD Soundsystem, “change yr mind”
I was bumping American Dream in the car and I remembered my idea for a Patreon-like crowdfunding service to shut people up. How it works: an artist, “thought leader,” politician, etc., names the monthly price at which they will not do their terrible work or release anything new. As long as we can hit their monthly target, they promise to disappear from public life. I mean, how much would you pay a month to never hear from a certain person ever again? I think this idea could make me my millions…
Talking books at Texas Book Festival
I’ll be interviewing Tom Gauld and Will Schwalbe at the Texas Book Festival on Sunday, November 5, at 12:45 PM in Capitol Extension room E1.016. I’ve been following Tom’s work for at least a decade, but I’m brand-new to Will’s, so it should be really interesting. Baking With Kafka and Books For Living are both books about books, so we’ll be talking mostly about — you guessed it! — books. More details here.
PS. This will be my tenth year of attending the Texas Book Festival. Here’s my 2007 sketchbook, recent-ish interviews with Peter Turchi and Josh Shenk, and me showing off my new son in 2012. Time flies…
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