Facilis descensus Averno: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; Sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est.
We broke apart the stones that cradled ancient bones.
And from the fossil flame arose — eternal shame!
a second, lightless sun.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron
Surrounded by our rings of sand and stone, We sing our prayers to cold cathedral walls. Mistaking that an echo's something new, We seek our counsel from the substrate of The words we thought to say and etch in place. Now trapped within this hollow sacristy We shout and beg and plead, cajole until The darkness eats our hoarse and plaintive voice And mocks us with a faultful mimicry.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron
Reading Talia Lavin's Wild Faith is in some ways like walking in my own footsteps. While I certainly don't recall having experienced more than a fraction of the Christian Right's activities, I was nevertheless surrounded by them in ways that are only becoming apparent later. Most of the experiences I can recall are ones I have otherwise tried to forget, because there is a deep well of unsettling things at the heart of them. This is a recount of some of my earliest remembered experiences, using Lavin's work as a jumping-off point. It turns out I have a lot to say on this topic, and I may revisit it. In fact, the numbering of this entry suggests I will.
Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,
Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging Fires.
Albion is sick America faints! enrag'd the Zenith grew.
As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o'er the Atlantic sea;
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace: his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro' the murky atmosphere
—William Blake, America A Prophecy
“And as we stand looking all at once comes the wash of another unseen ship, like a great wheel, the vast spokes of the wheel whirling across the bay —” —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Spoilers ahead.
Elsewhere, long ago, I wrote about “whiteness” as a negation, a thing defined in terms of what it isn't. I'm not the only one to have made this point, of course, but what I was thinking about at the time was how such negations fit within the discourse around the paradox of tolerance. In short, it is right to be intolerant of negations, because they hollow out whatever tolerates them and lets them in. But how, precisely do they get in?
In my wayward youth, I practically lived at the library, picking up stacks of books to take home and devour. By the time I reached my teens, those books got bigger, and in many cases, more mature than what we would normally consider young adult fiction, or whatever. Cue the irony of having parents who strictly forbade Stephen King from my reading list on the basis of a sensationalized understanding of his work, but had no clue about the contents of the comparatively under-publicized works I consumed instead.
Took a little time to migrate from a Hugo static site to a Writefreely site. The Hugo site was using AWS Amplify and GitHub to deploy, which meant writing code, checking it in, pushing it, waiting for deploy, etc. I figure I write enough code, and for my blogs I would rather just write. Since it was Markdown, I was able to import all of the posts I wanted to bring over, with the rest sitting in the GitHub repository still (and on my hard drive). I've fixed the dates on all of them and will slowly go through and do enough editing to fix the titles, since they all used Hugo's Markdown frontmatter, as well as whatever I can to reproduce the original formatting, some of which has been lost in the migration.
Anyway, if you have bookmarks that broke, my apologies. And if you see weird formatting and links that should lead somewhere else on the blog, but don't, just know that I am getting to them when I can.
And meanwhile, my feed URL has changed: https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
What I'm not fixing: 1) Every dead link and embed. This is, alas, the nature of the Web. 2) Grammar and spelling errors in old posts. They've been there that long.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron
I haven't posted one of these in a while, in part because my reading over the past several years had been too sporadic. For 2024, I didn't specifically plan out much, except for some time I was following along with the the reading schedule (delayed!) of Shelved By Genre, specifically as they read through Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series. Nevertheless, I managed more than I thought I would, and certainly more than I had in previous years, even if some of the reading was very slow. Anyway here's what I read.
I have sort of resolved to read down my pile of Archipelago Books, and am looking at a few standouts published in 2024. I also have in mind to read a bit more nonfiction, which I had almost completely abandoned. As usual, however, we'll see.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron
It is important, even vital, for the principled technocrats and technologists to maintain their skepticism in the face of the growing “AI” threat, even to the point being and acting as the opposition. And yet we are losing. We probably will lose. “AI” is the populist demagogue of technology, singing a siren song of promises to fix what's broken. And people are listening.
We imagine ourselves, perhaps, as treading in the bloody footprints of Ned Ludd, ready at a moment's notice to smash these new looms that weave “information” from the pilfered fibers of the Internet. We smugly point out that the Luddites were right to fear the fruits of automation, and right to stand against them. But we can be right and still find ourselves in a rearguard battle as a hydra of misinformation closes off any hope of escape.
Unlike the Luddites, however, we have put ourselves here, because as technocrats and technologists, we have failed our users. What they want are tools to make their lives easier, to help them process increasing workloads efficiently, ultimately to better serve their users, as they imagine it. We have, of course, endeavored to deliver these tools, and we've developed ever more baroque and at times ideological rituals in our quest to deliver them. Through our mantras of user stories and agile development (that usually isn't agile at all), and our adherence to the the false religions of project management and performance management, we've anesthetized ourselves into gating off useful technologies.
And our users? They are discovering that ready access to “AI”, at least in its current LLM incarnation, a planet-devouring Ouroboros with a silver tongue and a penchant for just making shit up, offers a way past the wizened gates of the tehcnologists and technocrats, who are busy salting runes on the floors of their offices in the hopes of staving off project failure.
Users are voting. They will seek out and use these tools, which they know to be deeply flawed and probably dangerous, because these flawed and dangerous tools possess a different set of flaws and dangers from those of the technology gatekeepers. We've told them in the past that change is good, that change is inevitable, and that change means progress. Or some of us have, anyway, and our users have internalized this message. They will seize these tools and attempt to beat us at our own game. Since there are more of them than there are of us, they will likely succeed, if not on quality, then on strength of numbers alone.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron
tags: #reading #books #readinglist #epics
Since mid-March, my reading schedule is provisional and inconsistent. Like many others, I am working from home, which has wreaked havoc on any sense of routine, even though I do my best to cling to what I can. Still, while I am confident that much of my original reading plan will stay firmly off the rails, there is no reason to abandon hope.
Often, I make plans but lose interest in them anyway. There's no guarantee I would have been in a different place in the absence of a global pandemic, because I am also an opportunistic reader who grabs an idea and runs with it until I find something that interests me more. Here's what I have been reading this year to date.
Though provisional, I am still planning to make a go of the following over the next month or so:
The Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot and Keith Bosley (translator). This is the great Finnish epic that grew out of its oral tradition.
++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed
Alternatively, you can follow me on my main Mastodon account: https://hilltown.studio/@aaron