Media from my weekend, if you count Monday morning

Monday media drop? //

A 3-song mini drop by TOPS

I've spent all morning listening to this TOPS release (ahead of the album they'll drop in August). It's three songs: Falling on my Sword  / Chlorine / ICU2, and I love all three. It sounds really fucking good.  And I think it's pushing their music in a direction I'm really excited about — very Magdalena Bay. Lyrically solid. Also visually fun! They come to DC in August and they'll be at Union Stage. 

(My favorite of their previous work is I Feel Alive.)

Two songs from Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter

I don't have much to say about Love Takes Miles / Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed) off of Heavy Metal, Cameron Winter's solo album, mainly because I think the sound is genuinely hard to describe. Something like sweet and wavery, optimistic and encumbered, like a walk on a humid day. 

The collab of the summer

Headphones on and full volume or car speakers all the way up for The Field by Blood Orange, The Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek, and Daniel Caesar. 

An especially good episode of Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain

Listened to the new episode of Anything Goes on underestimated relationship red flags in the shower last night and fell asleep to it (sue me). I still have this reflex to defend me watching Emma Chamberlain, but I don't think I actually need to. She's brilliant and anyone who pays attention knows that she observes deeply and thinks rigorously about the design of a good life. And she and I share a lot of proclivities and inclinations in relationships and life in general, so of course I'm biased to like what she has to say. 

What stands out to me about her approach to this episode though is how she manages to deliver these things decisively while getting me to feel comfortable, related to, and crucially: not judged. She has this humility and approachability but she also doesn't seem... sad? Like, you don't pity her. Maybe it's that she demonstrates a healthy amount of self-respect. Anyway. I agree with most of the red flags she listed; I've experienced most of them myself. I'm going to listen to it again when I get into the shower! But here are the two flags that I remember from this morning's listen off the top of my head:

1. Not arguing ever: you don't know each other that well if you aren't arguing. 
2. You feel your creativity decline around this person (past the honeymoon phase). 

A video about finding motivation no matter how you feel about the political and economic state of the world

The importance of still showing up for life even when it feels like the the world is crashing out. This one is about tragic optimism, a new-to-me phrase, borrowed from Victor Frankl's essay, The Case for a Tragic Optimism. 

Another Rajiv Surendra banger

Watching Rajiv's videos feel a little like going to a therapy appointment — you know it's going to force you to reflect, and what you find there might be painful, but it ends up being so relaxing, gentle, and valuable. You end up using it to reframe the next few weeks. I knew I probably needed to watch this one on how to be your own friend at some point, and I did, and I think it played for me at just the right time. And while I don't think I need to live a life of nearly as much solitude as he does, a lot of his points stand for me. 

It's a Sunday and my brain is out of fuel

I'm at my favorite cafe yet again, waiting for my matcha to kick in, slowly digesting the overpriced breakfast sandwich I had for lunch. I subbed the pork sausage for turkey sausage, and after waiting 21 minutes to order I didn't feel like coming up with another breakfast plan when they said it would be $15.30. The sandwich slinger had great tattoos in bright red ink and this great curly mullethawk, and he had tied a bandana around one of his legs right above the knee. It was a good look.

I was feeling shitty about my Saturday, about not getting much done, and then I remembered that I actually got a lot done. I spent the morning on the phone catching up with my dad, then on the phone with one of my favorite people, and then on the phone with another dear friend, talking about things that mattered a lot. My dad helped me work through a problem that's been on my mind, and I did that for both of these two friends. Very much worth the time. 

I took myself to Georgetown for a phone repair after that, which was annoying but productive; replacing the back glass was only $29 under AppleCare+. I will never not have AppleCare+. 

While the blue-shirted employees had my lifeline in their clutches I walked to a nearby vintage pop-up and bought a mesh tank top covered in colorful beading and embroidery. I've been gaining weight, mostly due to the recent PCOS problems, which has unfortunately started to interfere with my self-image, but it's been so hot recently that I feel like a tank top is all I can wear some days. I bought it. 

On the way back to the Apple Store, I stopped in at LA Burdick, a chocolate shop that uses old-world sculpting techniques to produce their signature chocolate mice and chocolate penguins, which enclose a hazelnut suspended in ganache with milk or dark chocolate. They are so cute and yummy. And then I stopped by a luxury optician that sells handmade artisanal frames. It seemed like they didn't think I would be a serious customer at first, because I asked about VADA frames (I've lost mine tragically), but then I showed them my glasses. They realized that while I looked like a kid with no money, I was actually genuinely interested in what they had. They replaced the nosepads on my frames and tightened the hinges for free. (I also think they cleaned them subtly and didn't tell me, which was really nice.) 

I also went shopping for the ingredients of a salad I love and miss but can no longer buy — it was last summer's seasonal salad from Tatte, which consisted of: arugula, nectarine slices, blueberries or blackberries (can't remember; maybe both?), toasted pecans or almonds, roasted chicken, goat cheese. Maybe there was mint? It was so refreshing. 

Like I said, I'm sitting now in a cafe, and my coworker is here to work on something we're both supposed to finish before tomorrow, so I should get back to it, but my brain is so fried from yesterday. I have had very poor sleep for the past two nights because random things keep waking me up (a phone call, an odd amount of sunlight). 

Deconstructing my platonic ideal of a summer and pretending I'm 90 years old

Silver Lake Reservoir //

I had to send my friend a movie trailer this morning, which I watched back fully, and at the end of the video came a recommendation for one I'd seen before: How to Have a Summer Before It's Over by Caroline Winkler, YouTube's good chaotic Millennial design aunt. Design in the literal sense, yes — she's an interior designer — but I see her as essentially having dedicated her media career to helping people understand the design of a good life, both in the meta and mundane.

(It delights me that Blogger hasn't updated the aspect ratio of its video previews from 5:4 to match 16:9) 

The framing of the video is kind of funny to me; I never romanticized summer as a kid, because I hated being alone. I didn't live near my school friends for any summer of my life — I was a private school scholarship kid whose parents usually drove them in from afar. When I finally made it to public high school, I made friends in the farthest parts of the district from me, and none of us had cars. And then I transferred to boarding school, which was easily the worst arrangement. 

The idea of having a summer didn't resonate with me until college, when I started taking summer internships in cities away from where I grew up. I spent a summer in San Francisco, a summer in LA, a summer in New York City. I fell in love in one of those summers. I started to associate the warm weather with good things, with freedom.

After I left college and worked at a small, somewhat disastrous job, I quit and I flew to Europe for the first time. I met up with one of my dear friends in Oslo, from which we flew to Vienna, then took the train to Geneva. I spent over a week in Switzerland, living at her apartment while she traveled elsewhere, and another friend came and joined me in Geneva. We took the train to the alps and hiked; we got lost and ended up in Zurich; and we took the train to Lyon and Paris, where we met up with my then boyfriend. After we flew home to LA, and the first thing I remember doing was play catch at the Silver Lake reservoir at dusk. I was having a summer. I finally got it. 

Now, summer consists of absorbing the sun, accepting the rain, listening to music, drinking coffee slowly, little raspberry tarts, and laying in the grass with people you love. Feeling unabated adoration. Adventuring, roving, shiny tan shoulders, making art, stone fruit.

Caroline said three things that stuck with me: 

1. Play back the movie of an idealized summer in your head. Then break it down into its constituent parts — what are the things you look forward to on your dream vacation? Waking up early, having a special coffee, eating good fruit, yadda yadda. You can pick those out and just do them at home for a lot less effort and cost. Just do them for yourself now. Give yourself as much many pieces of summer as you can manage to design into your day without disrupting it. 
2. A lot of people feel like they can't grant ourselves a summer because of the things in our lives we haven't yet figured out. I've been telling myself that now is the time to grind, to catch the wave before it leaves me behind. But one day we're going to look back on this period of our lives — all the uncertainty, all the solo adventuring — and yearn to be in it again. Close your eyes and pretend you're your 90 year old self (advice I've heard in a lot of places recently), and imagine someone comes by and asks if you want to be teleported back to the time when you were young and curious and facing uncertainty. You say yes and open your eyes and you're here. You can live it with so much more romance, so much more love toward yourself. 
3. Stretch every day, at least once. For your later self.

I took this at dinner on one of the last nights in Paris. These two men came to dinner separately and ate quietly by themselves, observing the rain. 70 and 20, perhaps.

KOSS headphones are the sickest things I've seen in so long

 

Koss ad //

I came across this ad on Pinterest earlier this evening when I was looking for a picture of DC that I could use for the last post — looked up the company and hadn't heard of them before. 

The headphones in the ad, the Porta Pro, go for $55 and come with colored earpads. My dad is an audiophile, so I texted him about them — apparently he had these in high school. He was 13 when these came out in 1984. 

texts with my dad

I really like the look of the PRO4AA, the pair from 1970, but people say they're kind of uncomfortable for long listening sessions, and I love the way the Porta Pros are portable, foldable, and lightweight. Also wired headphones are necessary for a cool girl walk. I will absolutely be getting a pair when it gets a little cooler out and I can wear these with my mom's college sweatshirt. (I'll also get to wear them with my 100% authentic and strenuously assembled Domino's pizza delivery driver costume.)

John Koss himself wearing the PRO4AA

My dad also says he had the KSC75s, which are ear clip headphones that would probably be ideal for running or something. Those go for $24.99. I'm flabbergasted that Koss has kept prices and designs for these items so low, and that they continue to produce all of their legacy products. It's just bananas to me that they've committed to their history and legacy in this way. 

It also makes me want to collect all of them. Why? I don't think I actually have much utility for most of the other retro headphone collection outside of making period-accurate outfits or Halloween costumes or putting historically accurate music experiences (maybe that's a crazy good idea for a music event actually).

Notes from my study abroad in the capitol of the world's empire

The DC Metro //

AI stuff

I'm learning about AI legislation and the AI race — not because I necessarily want to, but because I have to for work. Here's what I learned after asking a battery of very basic questions to my coworkers:

• There's this vague but powerful meme of the AI race between the US and China, but no one can tell me what we're racing toward. "Superhuman AI" or AGI (artificial general intelligence) or something of that sort probably. AI doomers (people who are pessimistic/fearful of the future of AI) think we could be tending toward something with negative potential close to the scale of a nuclear bomb. Americans want to win the AI race, which I will refer to from here on out as Calvinball, because I think we're acting like it's some sort of game we're all playing in the abstract and doesn't have an actual goal.
• We reaaalllly don't want China to win Calvinball because we're worried about how Chinese AI companies will handle "alignment," which really just means that we don't trust Chinese AI companies to build AI with humanistic values. (This strikes me as pretty racist, haven't seen any evidence that China would build AI that is any more misaligned with human flourishing than what we're building in the US. Nonetheless probably a useful set of fears to employ if you're working on AI in the US and want to be part of leading the world in AI.)
• US and Chinese companies need American chips to develop yoked AI models. The companies with the most advanced AI models are winning Calvinball on behalf of the country they’re based in. 
• Last year, Chinese companies smuggled 140,000 chips (worth $5-7B) into China through e.g. Malaysian shell companies. The Chip Security Act is a bill that we can pass to give Congress’ one more big blunt tool to prevent China from doing more of this in an effort to win Calvinball. A bunch of people I know are trying to get the Chip Security Act passed, but it's kind of a republican bill, which means that they need to win over democrats.
• I was wondering if it's actually true, or just a cultural delusion that the US creates the best GPUs in the world, but apparently it's a fact, and the US is big-dicking everyone else into not being able to catch up:
• They can’t build semiconductors, which they need to stay competitive.
• ASML, a company in the Netherlands, produces semiconductor manufacturing equipment, big machines that are used to make chips.
• TSMC has big plants in Taiwan that make the chips for Nvidia and other American chip design companies. They have a sick ass logo
• The Netherlands and Taiwan are US allies, and the US has set powerful rules called export controls that determine who our allies can export their computing products to. Taiwan and the Netherlands are now forbidden from exporting chips to China, so China has to resort to smuggling to stay competitive.
• I did ask: How the FUCK did we set these rules? Who let us do this? And the answer is that we kinda just can. Will probably do more digging on this later.
• Nvidia and other chip design companies make money by selling chips to American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Mistral in France, cloud computer providers, distributors, etc. Chinese companies can use the obscurity in this distribution network to their advantage and find clever ways to obtain chips through shell companies and cloud-based services. An important first step in thwarting smuggling is figuring out where chips are once they leave the country.
• Smuggling is a real problem
• We can use location verification technology that's already built into chips as a way to figure out if chips that we've exported have ended up in suspiciously dense clusters in China

DC culture

• I think that the broad strokes of the Scholar's Stage post comparing the respective intellectual cultures of SF and DC are pretty accurate. 
• No one here really dances at concerts?

Policy vocabulary that I'll define later

For better or worse, I've noticed a lot of incel speak. "There's so much alpha in WSJ op-eds explaining AI safety concepts," said my coworker today. 

• memetic
• memeplex
• meta- literally anything
• def/acc or literally anything /acc
• EA (effective altruism)

Songs for a girl who needs to be submerged in water (Songs for frogs)

Water is medicine. Maybe. Definitely. My mom's first question is always whether I’m hydrated. 

You lay me down in green pastures; you lead me beside quiet waters. You restore my soul. 

My best friend in college used to throw her head back and groan, “I need to be by a body of water,” and drive us to the ocean in her Honda Civic, which had a cutout of Harry Styles dangling from the rearview mirror. Baptism, transformation, purity. Wash my spirit clean.

The Eternal Moonshine, Claudia Keep

Night's Impossible Burden, Brian Kershisnik

Blue & gold montipora

Wash Me Clean - k.d. lang

The Field (feat. the Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek & Daniel Caesar) - Blood Orange

re: "The Field"

Escape / Find The Melody - Junaco

Where Does It Go - Junaco

Do You Feel It - Slow Pulp

I Feel - The Sundays

Peace - Dave Bixby

Girl - Sam Wilkes, Dylan Day, Thom Gill, Craig Weinrib

When I Can Read My Titles Clear - Sam Wilkes, Craig Weinrib, Dylan Day

Music for indigo - Adrianne Lenker

Incomprehensible - Big Thief

The Bug Collector - Haley Heynderickx

It's Only Love That Gets You Through - Sade

Come Back As A Flower - Stevie Wonder

Water is not always enough. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. (Many Waters is my favorite book title, short of A Wrinkle In Time. Thank you, Madeleine L’Engle.)

Songs for a sunny morning on the train and for a sunny train ride home

On the way to work:

Spring - Saint Etienne
Nothing Can Stop Us - Saint Etienne

Trilly flutes, springy step, green, wind gusts pushing pollen, silly birds, snap peas, silk

Wood Cabin - Saint Etienne

The sweet keys and the drums, the trumpet, all the little touches and frills. It’s a melancholy stride at dusk.

Stephen Thomas and Tim Sendra described Saint Etienne as "skillful sonic architects;" those are the words I use for one of my dearest friends. That's the name of the position I want him to fill at Family Friend.

This Must Be The Place - Talking Heads
Mercury Girl - The Cleaners from Venus

On the way home from work:

For Phoebe Still a Baby - Cocteau Twins
Language of Flowers - Pale Saints
When I'm Thinking About You - The Sundays
Young World - Slow Pulp
The Worst Taste In Music - The Radio Dept.
I Can't Stop (Holding On) - The Cleaners from Venus

Music for working

Metal Fingers Presents: Special Herbs, Box set Vol. 0-9 by MF DOOM (previously mentioned)

Favorite tracks: Coffin Nails, Podina, Kava Kava Root, Camphor, Valerian Root, Mandrake, Devil's Shoestring, Red #40, Who Me?, Monosodium Glutamate, Wormwood, Yellow Dock, Nettle Leaves, Datura Stramonium, Cedar

We Play Human-Made Lofi in a Blossom Park by @Yellow Cherry Jam

Outside of the girl staring kind of lovingly at the camera, this feels really good to me and my brain. Something really nice about knowing that a human is making this stuff in somewhat realtime too

Dopamine?

I have gradually formed this hypothesis about myself and the way I metabolize information and dopamine and it goes something like: Every little micro-expression of love I receive is something I munch on immediately, I get a sugar rush, and then a few hours later when it's not flowing it's nearly impossible for me or my body or my brain or my heart to remember that I had a morning completely flush with messages from people I love, and I feel tremendously lonely. And I think having some way to stabilize the production of dopamine and serotonin would maybe keep me more regular or something, or maybe I should just write shit down?

A couple videos about designing a good life or pursuing love, which could be the same thing actually

About designing a good life:

I live in a city where almost none of my closest friends live, so I spend a lot of time on phone calls. The subject of how to design a good life has felt especially salient in conversation recently, though if I really think about the last seven years, this a constant fascination for me and my closest friends (I have my theories on why, but that's for another time). 

A few years ago I watched a Leena Norms video (I think it's this one?) in which she talks about about organizing life into several venues for conducting science about yourself. 

A few weeks ago, I ended up accidentally watching this video of neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff giving clear instructions about how to do this: 

On the surface, it might sound like a "work-life-balance/self-care" or worse, a Atomic Habits/James Clear video, and it's neither of the two. 

It's about how to live a vibrant life characterized by deep engagement with the world around us, led by curiosity, wielding simple mental tools for making sure we're doing things we feel good about. 

It's also given me the language and principles to justify pursuing some of the bigger risks I've been preparing for in my career — not to tamp down ambition, but to channel it well. And it’s helped me take the electrical charge out of procrastination and inconsistency. Instead, Le Cunff suggests treating both things as information.

I strongly recommend watching this with a notebook and pen (literally) or taking out a laptop and opening up a document to take notes.

I shared this with like twenty people this month, and a lot of them found it valuable, too:

Relatedly, here's Jeff Buckley talking about grace for 2 minutes.

About finding love:

You Don't Want Love — You Want to Be Picked So You Feel Worthy by @pearilee

One of the lenses through which I've been thinking about designing a good life has been teamwork —  partly in the context of friendship and community, but mostly in the context of love. 

My friend just got married and she was telling me about how freeing it feels to be part of a financial team, about how two incomes make it possible for one of them to rest if they need it. I completely forgot about that aspect of partnership. Of course, she married for love, and so will I, but this video smacked me in the face with an elegant but forceful takedown of the fallacies I unconsciously use to shape my approach to love on a daily basis. It unfortunately feels true that I've been designing my life around the performance of a few key vectors for perfection, acceptance, interestingness, creativity, etc. 

I sometimes wonder if these creators have ever felt like they didn't know if the things they've made will be valued — something I struggle with whenever I make anything; these videos have been essential to me.