In the window of a bookstore in Kanda, a 1982 first edition of Araki’s Midori. The store is not open. I know that if it was, and I worked up the nerve to go in and ask the price, whatever the figure, that I would be forced to pay it. (How much would it
People tend to associate Thomas Pynchon with post-modernism, however, I don't think he wrote about post-modernism in a hopefull way. I think he wrote about post-modernism to warn society of the pit that it is descending into. His novel,V., is in my opini
Even in the summer, Onoterusaki seems to be in perpetual gloom. The trees block the sunshine that the apartment towers do not. Except for a few days in late August, the shrine’s dirt yard is never completely dry. Several safe paths are laid out in flat
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their houres,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the ayrie towres,
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o'erflow with wine:
Let well-tun'd words amaze
With harmonie divine.
Now yello
8
I had already moved out of Kanagawa by the time news broke that a twenty-six year old man had stabbed nineteen people to death. But I knew the area, generally if not specifically. Maybe that is why I paid closer attention. I suspect most people
The reflexive greeting in the elevator is a comment on the weather. “It is raining today.” “It’s very cold.” “The typhoon will hit soon.” “It might snow today.” There are subtleties that I don’t appreciate, so I believe it’s best to echo the forecast:
I moved my TV out to the balcony. It serves as a windbreak, stopping the blast of the air conditioner’s compressor from knocking over the slender beanstalks that I have already propped up with plastic straws.
It stopped working. When it did, I only fl
When first published in 2005, many reviewers seemed caught off guard by Cormac McCarthy's latest book No Country for Old Men. Is this Lee Child, or the author of Blood Meridian we're talking about? Is he angling for a movie deal? Did the old man decide t
aka, "some people suck but urbit has tools to begin to discourage shitty behavior" month.
The impetus for this post is the recent update that Urbit just rolled out: naive rollups for Azimuth, the public key infrastructure (PKI), of the network. If you
Not having anything better to do, I walked north to Minowa.
The rainy season has finished. Now, there will be a month of grey, humid days.
I bought a paper sleeve of kakiage with pickled red ginger and ate it in the park that abuts the shopping ar
Why is inflation so high, and what does the powers that be plan to do about it? Let's start our attempt at answering these questions by looking at the supply side, to which we have plenty of negative shocks in recent years. In particular since the discov
Similar content available at networked subject_
Updated June '22 with v3
The release of layer 2 rollups for Azimuth means planets can be spawned very cheaply – so cheaply, in fact, that Tlon is picking up th
In contrast to the PhD's in charge, the US yield curve (i.e. the difference between the 2y yield and the 10y yield on US Treasury bonds) has a fairly long history of being predictive of economic recessions. M
The news marveled for one day at the details from a Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office white paper: sixty-five percent of men in their twenties are single, forty percent have never been on a date, and the number of marriages has slipped to a record
For the ten thousand years of history before the internet, if an entrepreneur built a brick and mortar business—a general store, a blacksmith’s workshop, a widget manufacturering factory—they could touch and feel and deeply understand what they owned, an
IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, 5
As if
When Josef von Sternberg got the offer to make a film in Japan, he was already on his way out.
He couldn’t make the kind of movies that he wanted to make. The sumptuous pictures he made with Marlene Dietrich seemed like artifacts of another time. The
"I want to do all of these things at once—be called a writer, be a rooted family man, be a tribal elder, be an outcast shaman—and this is ludicrous, impossible. Art that doesn't come from pain is just entertainment. And what does that mean for a man with
The Imperial Palace is below, and so is the national road system's kilometer-zero terminus marker. Everything emanated out from here.
All the energy, manpower, and expertise for imperialist expansion turned inward at the end of the war and was directe
This book is perhaps the best starting point for anyone who is interested in learning economics from a behavorial and social perspective. Basic Economics is a simple, straight forward book that is very easy to read. However, don't let its simplicity turn
A street performer had set up under the railway overpass at Yurakucho. He was juggling long, dull knives. When he got down, he gave a heartfelt speech about the life of a busker. Two police officers watched as he solicited donations.
I could see that
Welcome back to The Stack. This week
I insist on writing about enka. I know that nobody is interested. This is a challenge to the reader to get through the next thousand words and try to get something out of the performances I'm talking about. But it's also a reality that few people under t
"It's a beautiful day. In all our lives, we may not have many like this - so perfect", said Honda, stirred by some premonition.
"Are you talking about happiness?" asked Kiyoaki.
"I don't remember saying anything about happiness."
_"W
This entry is brief. I am still testing the limits. I am not sure what to do with the medium, first of all. The freedom is scary. In order to restrict myself thematically, I have confined myself to writing about a city—Tokyo—that I am not in love with. I
I started this traditional mead (my first) on 25 May 2021. I scaled up the "Beginner Traditional" recipe from r/mead to 3 gallons from their initial 1 gallon. Other changes include use of Fermai
This essay about Misora Hibari begins in Beijing in 1966.
It begins with Zhang Chengzhi, who was the original Red Guard of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He came up with the name. “Red Guard” was what he signed on a May of 1966 poster cri
I am leaving Osaka tomorrow.
I had no particular reason to stay past the weekend. I figured I could get some work done, if nothing else, shut up inside a hotel room. I moved to a nicer place. There is nobody around. Unless there is a wedding rehears
Is technology political? The answer is a resounding yes! All technology is political, though some technologies are more political than others...
In society, we see a trend of increased polarization, there is talk about filter bubbles, and more and m
Original post by ~mopfel-winrux on 20220305 at
Preserved Lemons are salt pickled lemons that can be used to add a rich lemon and acid flavor to nearly anything.
Original post by ~lidreg-dillut on ~20211204 at
Risotto is a great side for many dishes, as well as a reasonable dish on its own. Below is how I make it, with appropriately vague instructions.
(for about 3 adults)
Original post by ~dozwyc-hosrum on 20210427 at
Nattō is a traditional Japanese food made from soybeans fermented with Bacillus subtilis var. natto.
Making natto is very
Original post by ~patnes-rigtyn on 20200705 at
For me the key to good lamb is that charred salty fat on the outside, and tender rare meat on the inside. This recipe is rediculously easy. Here you go:
Bring lamb loin to room temp. Any size wil
Original post by ~rivpyl-sidfyl on 20200508 at
A great party trick.
For this you will need a decently-sized loaf of bread.
_Disclosure: I took a course from Robert Shiller, which I paid for, and had lunch with him once, which he paid for. This post also contains affiliate links from Amazon as well as materials understood by the State of California to cause concern in even
US inflation has recently been surging and is now "trotting". From Gerald Feldman's description of Germany's inflationary episode a century ago, one is struck by many similarities with today...
US CPI inflation recently hit 7.9% - not only is this a 40-
Hello CCFers, this is ~libhut-samwes . Stand by for NEWS!
From the Old Country you came
having grasped the last straw
to corral your people on the outside
of a fence even one more time.
They cursed your name & stirred
up calumny & assassination.
Degataga, you spat in their eyes
to wrest again a
I can’t remember the last time I saw Disney’s Mary Poppins, if ever. It may be cancelled with Br’er Rabbit now, so far as I recall. We heard all the Br’er Rabbit stories from my second grade teacher. She was the only Irish teacher in our school. Or o
Pascal’s Fearful Calculating Machine
In 1951 the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges penned a short essay called “La esfera de Pascal,” rendered into English in 1962 as “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal.” The essay begins, “It may be that universal h
Bitcoin is a technology for decentralized consensus about global value allocation; often accompanied by the saying fix the money, fix the world.
Smart contracts are economically-incentivized, programmatically-enforced contract law; thus the saying `co
The Limelight
What are computers for? It’s a question that may seem unanswerable on the one hand, and on the other hand painfully obvious.
It might be unanswerable, or at least not worth answering, from the standpoint of an enthusiast who knows ju
Martian Code
In September, 2010, the three chairs of the Workshop on Self-Sustaining Systems received a highly unusual submission for entry into their annual conference, to be held that year in Tokyo. One of the three admitted that the paper they r
We Are Giving Back to Our Community
Danny J. Hall was an Instagram early adopter. A software engineer himself, as well as a fine photographer, he was in the perfect position to see the appeal of a service that let a smartphone-user display photos in
The date is January 1, 2050. The place, New York City. The vibe . . . subdued. Back in 2020, you made a note to yourself to take stock of the world around you here at the half-century mark. And now the time has come. What do you find? The air quality is
A Software Psychoanalyst
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
--Final Stanza of Wallace Stevens's "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"
Even a non
July 7, 2021 Update: As I noted in the group feed, the scope of this project has expanded. The way I see it now, Chapters 8 and 9 of Ab Urbit Condita will continue along in an expository, technical (though not too technical) vein. I'll then release
I Decided to Listen Less
On September 25, 2013, a fast-talking, but otherwise unassuming man in a button down gray T-shirt and jeans stood before an audience that could not have numbered much more than a dozen or so, and made his pitch for the compu
Lost and Found
In December of 1922, a young woman named Hadley Richardson decided she would give her husband, Ernest Hemingway, a surprise. Hem was over in Switzerland to report on the Lausanne Peace Conference, and Hadley had been planning a train
Behind the Throttle.
In 2021, it would seem that most of us are able to fill out the rest of the story by ourselves. Jobs & Woz, Gates & Ellison, Zuck & Jack. It’s a triumphalist story, in which the computer revolution spreads across the globe, for
Total Aesthetic Environment, Redux
Of course, nasty rumors and yellow journalism antedate Facebook. And media manipulation has been around at least since the time of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who declared that information from every age before him was