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Life In Code 2003-2004 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-30 14:50:06
Edited:
2024-09-10 00:55:59
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

3 Essays about what it means to be a person.

Next week 3 more chapters.

TOMORROW AUG 31st ZOOM TOWN HALL @ 4:30pm EST! I'll post link tomorrow morning.

....::..:.:>..>;;>.;>:>...:::::::::;;;

Is Sadie the Cat a Trick? (2003)

Needless to say I would die for Sadie

"First of all, how rude to sneer at a grieving cat-widow." (p. 163)

I was just taking care of an older cat for a friend this past week, a cat I know well and that knows me. The section where Sadie loses control of her bladder really broke my heart. I can see the vivid mammal honesty and communication, I've had some interactions like that.

"Sadie was peeing. She looked up with an expression I can only call alarm. I say this because of what I saw in her body, head coming abruptly erect, feet scrambling over the side of the bed as she threw herself onto the floor to reach the box." (p. 164)

The Franz Wright poem has me needing to find and cuddle this old lady kitty immediately. Not ready to feel those emotions yet. Which is good because it is not yet time.

Companionship, familiarity, expectation, mutual recognition, bodily comfort: if this is not a definition of love between aging creatures, I don't know what is. (p. 168)

I appreciate Ullman's honesty in communicating her relationship with Sadie with all of their fighting and the random violence and imperfection.

I saw a creature at the peak of its power: the energy, the speed, what seemed to me, in my human words, the delerium of being alive. (p. 169)

{{{{{{{////////++++-----

Memory and Megabytes (2003)

Not many notes but no complaints either. longtime advocate for unreliable eye witness testimony being indistinguishable from our creative human superpower.

The only memories that endure unchanged, it seems, are those we never think of again. (p. 177)

...let me thoughts rearrange themselves in accordance with the shifting, sifting rules of memory. (p. 179)

I needed the unreliable retellings of memory, the balm of revision. (p. 179)

<<,<<<^^^^^^^'^^>>>.>>>

Dining with Robots (2004)

It didn't occur to me to question the usefulness of comparing something humans absolutely must do to something machines never do: that is, eat. (p. 182)

One of the recurring themes of this work is how a consciousness that did not eat, go to the bathroom, or experience pleasure would find massive swaths of human knowledge incomprehensible. Every step of a regular dinner recipe explodes into a history lesson, revealing that you can't just slot foods into an atomistic binary index, these things aren't just objects in a library, they are dripping with meaning.

I tried to imagine the program one might write for this recipe. And immediately each of these phrases exploded in my mind. How to tell a computer what "important guests" are? And how would you explain what it means to "have to" serve them dinner (never mind the yawning depths of "entertain")? A "nice brown," a "rosy center": you'd have to have a mouth and eyes to know what these mean, no matter how well you might translate them into temperatures. (p. 185)

This also veered into one of the areas of my research, which is 20th century dinner party etiquette. For real. Something about having all those formalities and rules and rituals makes my postmodern digital brain yearn to bring it back. Give common identity and shared aesthetic knowledge and acts that bind us to ourselves and each other, teachable repeatable skills.

I knew I would never want to go back to the manners of the 1950s, but all the same I suddenly missed the world of her dinner parties, the guests waving their cigarettes as they chatted, my mother so dressed up, queenly by the coffeepot, her service a kind of benign rule over the table. I put the pot in the corner of the hutch and thought: It's no good trying to explain all this to my robot guest. The chain of associations from just this one piece of china has led me to regret and nostalgia, feelings I can't explain even to myself. (p. 190)

Unfortunately I am now hungry.

Unreliable Memories & Cat Violence Below!

Files

Comments

SkateLouis

I cried in "Is Sadie the cat a trick?" since the first paragraph until the end. What a way to proof our emotions and empathy actually exist and are not just some programming

Josh Milburn

Warning: sad old cat stuff We just put down our elderly cat 4 weeks ago. In one of those inconvenient but ineffable cosmic coincidence, it was 2 days after coming home from the hospital with our first child. She was a freaking tank; lived the last 4 years of her life with no teeth, and survived severe heart and kidney disease long enough that we were wondering if she was immortal. We essentially had her on kitty home hospice because her estimated life expectancy was a couple months, but that started 2 years ago and she kept on truckin'. What shoved in our faces that it was time was this moment where she hopped off a couch, hit the floor and just fell flat on her side with the saddest dull thud before slowly limping over to the water bowl and just staring at it. It's still a pretty fresh wound, but the passage about Sadie's body betraying her absolutely obliterated any scab that had started forming over it.

Chandler Sterling

Serendipity seems to be the word of the week when it comes to these chapters. Each one has found me at a time and place where I was able to intertwine my thoughts with Ullman's and completely lose myself in each essay. I am usually much more conscious of the fact that I am Reading For Book Club, but that all faded away here. Instead, I was Reading without any need of Something To Say for this section. Here's how each chapter spoke to me in this disarmed state. Warning: If the essay "Is Sadie the Cat a Trick?" was something you couldn't handle, you might just want to skip the next paragraph. "Is Sadie the Cat a Trick?" has come to me a month or so after losing a family cat that I've known since I was 7. He was a black and white tuxedo cat, and one of the most chill animals I've ever known. He was unbothered by anything as long as he was fed. I met him as a stray outside of my grandmother's house, and I sat outside for what my child brain thought was hours (but was probably 10-20 minutes) just trying to coax him over to the bench I sat on. He was shaky and thin (the only time I ever remember him that way. He was a LARGE cat; like I said, he just wanted to be fed), but when I finally convinced him to sit next to me, he curled up against me and purred. A robot wouldn't have needed coaxing. It wouldn't have known the need for touch and comfort. Something about need is necessary to connect and empathize with other animals, and a robot knows no need that I can understand. I am touched by the way that Ullman needs to remove the altar to Sadie before it loses its meaning. The robot cat does not spark a need to protect their relationship. It can mimic all the motions, but that doesn't make it alive and connected to us in this tangle of desires. I also have been dealing with raising a cat for the first time in a while, and it was strange to see so much of him in the descriptions of Sadie. I feel more appreciative of all the fights I already get into with that little kitten thanks to the foresight the chapter has given me. I rarely listen to music when I read because it is usually the worst of both worlds. I can't retain everything I read, and I can't enjoy everything that I hear. It's the curse of someone addicted to "multi-tasking" to know deep down that you're just doing both things worse than you would do one of them alone, so I try to be good and really take the time in silence to just read. For whatever reason though, I was drawn to listen to a vinyl record while I read "Memory and Megabytes", as if someone was guiding me towards a more fulfilling experience of those words. It paired well. The discussion of the way we tend to discard old technology in the rush for whatever is newest seems to have looped around into a weird nostalgia for that old tech again. It's really new old tech though, in the sense that we aren't refurbishing old items but creating newer, "better" versions that have the prerequisite shine and Bluetooth connections. The imperfection of a physical item like a vinyl record and the fine tuned grooves which precariously cradle the needle remind me of the human brain. If you are looking for a perfectly repeatable experience or the ability to recall any song you want in a second, streaming will always be preferable, but there is something lost in that perfection. I have to care for this inanimate object if I want to hear the music I like. I have a tenuous relationship with it that makes me like the album more. It's more than just the experience of the music, its the reminder of all the effort I put in to hear it again and again. The album was the Tron: Legacy soundtrack which added its own layer of serendipitous magic. The monologue by Jeff Bridges during "The Grid" sounds to me like how Ullman might describe the experience of being literally sucked into the machine. (Give it a listen if you like! The drop after, "And then... one day... I got in," floors me every time! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lILHEnz8fTk) I really hope Tron: Ares is good or at least enjoyable. They got Nine Inch Nails for the soundtrack which is the only acceptable replacement for Daft Punk, but they also got Jared Leto so things are looking unfortunately lukewarm on this one. Like a cup of tea I forgot on the counter, probably better if it just wasn't made in the first place. I hope I live to regret that comparison. With October barreling towards me faster than I'd like, I've been considering whether I should try to throw a Halloween party this year. I've tried in previous years and it's always either too hard to get people to commit to coming or too annoying to get people to actually dress up and participate in anything outside of drinking and talking in a corner. I used to love Halloween (it was my favorite holiday), but it's become so entangled with this messy history of half failures and half successes that I wasn't sure what I thought anymore. "Dining with Robots" was a reminder that the messy nature of things like cooking and throwing parties is what makes them so fantastic and human. "By the time the last friend had left, it was 2:30 a.m., the tablecloth was covered with stains, dirty dishes were everywhere, the empty crab shells were beginning to stink, and the kitchen was a mess. Perfect." (pg. 192) The "Perfect." sucker punched me in the face because I wasn't in disagreement. Everything about the description sounds like it would be a nightmare if I just woke up one day to find my house in that state, but knowing that it was all preceded by a party makes it all bearable and even strangely preferable. These are the things that make the malleable human memory beautiful. Every cup you pick up, each dish you clean, every trash bag you take to the street is a chance to bring back a memory of that night. You are picking through forensic evidence of the good times had, and you get to relive them while you work. I think the only other place this image has been evoked so well for me is unironically "New Year's Day" by Taylor Swift. I am admittedly on the fence about the idea of going back to the old days of arbitrary party rules. I understand in concept how they could contribute to a better party atmosphere, with clear worldbuilding and roles for each member, but I don't find that to be a good enough reason to bring back those unspoken rules. Instating more half-spoken societal norms for me to decode sounds like an absolute nightmare scenario honestly. I think as long as we understand that the rules were there to give structure to a social event, we can do without them. I'm all for making things more explicit; if every party requires its rules and worldbuilding to be established upfront instead of relying on preset standards, I think that only improves the experience. I'm clearly having troubles throwing parties though, so I'm more interested in seeing what everyone else thinks about the idea. I am quite easy to persuade. Anyway, I'm going to go hang out with my cat while listening to a vinyl record and brainstorming Halloween party themes.

Josh Foreman

"The only memories that endure unchanged, it seems, are those we never think of again." I think I've always intuited this, and It's why I rarely visit my favorite art. Lord of the Rings is 10x better than any other movie to me. I've watched the trilogy 4 times since it was released. I only let myself listen to October Rust in the month of October. And I only listen to Virgin Black ~every 4-5 years. I play Shadow Of The Colossus every 7 years. Each time, these artifacts change me in some way. In ways that stuff I like a lot, and engage with a lot, do not. I think it is this act of remembering causing distortions, doing violence to reality while providing sustenance to the Self that I'm continually building. The more you remember a thing the less it reflects the original encounter as it conforms to your predilections. So, for me, there is a trade off between accuracy (which you attain by continual interaction) and the soul-nutrition that comes from incorporating the personalized take-aways that memory provides by cherry-picking the elements that speak to your values with the most resonance. (that comes from long abstinence from the work)

D.S Films

Was reading this section at a friends place in Scotland, escaping the static quality of boredom to the dynamic quality of adventure. I know that's a wrong book reference but I'm currently catching up on Lila as well, and I feel like the context of my thinking and state in life is important in understanding my interpretation of the book, as it does with any interpretation really. As I say, I don't know if it's just my exciting surroundings but I am really enjoying the section of this book. It's been fantastic to return from the wildlife to the cosy house with another essay from Ullman to read. Each essay had it's own unique focus but provided unique intimacy and insight, from the granular work of looking after an aging cat, to the ritualistic nature of dinner that is so richly layered in context and history, computers would never undertand it all. Even if us mere mortals and unaware of the context of a meal, I believe we can still taste, which is something that machines cannot do. I also found the conclusion of 'Dining with Robots' to provide a scary foreshadowing into today's world of heightened social media. We are bringing ourselves to the machines level, instead of the machine to our level. The question is now not can a computer feel, but can us humans behave like a computer, in a subtle, almost unseen way. Now the desire is for us to perform in a way that strips the ritualistic data of context and history, to a short ten seconds that can be consumed by anyone, anywhere with any amount of context. Only for it to be stared at through the pixels on a screen, and never truly tasted.

azalea water

this is a mangy, old animal appreciation post ---------------------------------------- I’m not a cat person, but a few years ago my childhood dog died at the age of 9. This September will mark three years since she passed. She was a mangy Irish terrier, thick as bricks and loveable for it. When I was a teenager, I’d wake up to find her weighing down the end of my bed like a fluffy paper weight. I had to try and shuffle my legs out from under, all the while trying my hardest not to wake her. She died of cancer, slowly, and reading how Ullman describes Sadie’s death brought up a lot of those moments. Some of them seem uncanny: “At one point, I had to hold her over her bowl so she could eat” (page 167), “ She was bone thin, her fur matted with concrete-hard clumps I could not cut even with scissors.” (page 166) I want to meet whoever told Ullman “that cat didn’t love you”, and ask her if she’s ever had a pet – because there is an undeniable electricity between a pet and their owner. I remember how my dog used to sally up to someone sitting down, push her nose into their palm and flick it over her head to get stroked. Whenever she did that, the person stroking her would just sit there mystified, staring into this terrier's eyes like they had the world in them. I want to see Ullman’s insulter stroke a dog and tell me that there’s no relationship. A pet’s death is strange. It’s not like a human death, when you remember the good and develop complicated feelings on the bad. With a pet, you tend to remember the bad with far more intensity than you do the good. Irish terriers are people-first dogs – they’ll die for anyone who gives them food. But they are tiny demons when it comes to other dogs. They go into attack mode, rear up, and bark like there’s a war on. It used to annoy the daylights out of me and my family when she was alive. But now we remember her outbursts more fondly than we ever did her good traits. I hope Ullman’s had more cats, and I hope they had good lives.

Just Connor

i loved this whole section, including last weeks chapter, i really needed these ideas. i already was very inclined to feel this way about life, sentience, and robots, but now i have some concrete beliefs and thoughts. i enjoyed Sadie. i love cats but am sadly allergic. i dont really have anything to add. i like the clean slate attitude of Memory and Megabytes. Sometimes you just need objects to represent an era of life, and sometimes you need them to feel like you are new and fresh now. "The world, the actual world we inhabit, showed itself to be too marvelously varied, too ragged, too linked and interconnected, to be sorted into any set of frames or classes or problem spaces." too many platypuses? there was always this sort of connection to the people obsessed objectivity and the people pushing for ai life, from what ive felt. Lila wonderfully uses the concept of a platypus to destroy the idea that we can have all these objective frameworks and categories and not expect them to go awry. this quote from Dining with Robots, has this same platypus energy and i love it. honestly the platypus chapter was one of my favorite parts of Lila, and i was delighted to see this quote lining up so perfectly with it.

phil e the theyby

It was EXTREMELY rude of Ullman to have written a chapter about condensing the fullness of food into packaged, robot-intelligible barcodes, that I happened to read on an evening where I ate fucking CEREAL for dinner after wrapping up the Kill the Internet Book Club Zoom town hall. Very rude indeed, Ellen. The Sadie chapter made me really sad on multiple levels. I was super sad over the description of Sadie’s decline. I was also kinda of heartbroken at people who feel the need to reduce the kind of bonds we feel with animals to a simple mechanical process. I’m fairly non-romantic in many ways, but I still find it pretty alien to think that there’s nothing more meaningful to my bonds with my cats (or, taking it further, my bonds with my kids) than simple computer inputs. Speaking for myself, I think the times in my life where I’ve tended to view the world the most mechanically and been unable to see the magic in anything have been times when I feel deeply alienated from other people, the world, and myself. And I just feel like a lot of this viewing of affection and affiliative behavior as “tricks” comes from a place of real hurt. And to me, the problem isn’t that people imagine our feelings of love or intimacy or connection as resulting from our evolutionary history. I think they almost assuredly do. I think the problem is when people think it’s any less MAGICAL because of that, and when they scoff at other people experiencing magic in the bonds we have with other people and animals. I don’t have much to add about the other two chapters (although there were brilliant and I took a lot away from them), but I will say that the end of “Dining with Robots” terrified me. I’ve already had not-thoroughly-explored uncomfortable feelings around how alienated we are from our food, but the idea of us packaging our food, along with the relationship we have with it in our lives, to the logic of how machines operate, was DEEPLY chilling and uncomfortable. And discomfort isn’t a bad thing (I think it’s a good thing when it comes from us more accurately perceiving our reality), but I was curious if anyone else was pretty shaken by that conclusion.

Silver

“It was funny to look at; it was terrible to see.” (p. 164) I am always fascinated by the difference between looking and seeing. There shouldnt be a difference in principle but there absolutely is. You look and its just your eyes, no thoughts, no context - you see and everything goes through the whole apparatus of body, emotion, memory, thought. If you respond to someone's elses explanation with “i see” its a notion of empathic understanding; you are directly, with your soul, involved with the matter at hand - if you just look at something you are detached, uninvolved, uncritical, distanced Idk just smth i think about “How can such a creature, so different from me, also share this thing called life?” (p. 167) The realisation of ones pet actually being a real living creature with a life as rich as ours and completely separate from ours is something that is always equipped to crash my brain for a moment. Every time i consciously look into my dog’s eyes.

Megan S.

[seen people are doing these setting prologues. I like them. It’s a lovely a way to ground something ephemeral in time and space] writing this on my phone, in the tub. I definitely prefer to write these on my laptop and treat them like an academic/writing project (in that I treat them with care and make them Good). This is a noble goal, but also I want to actually participate and not fall behind because of school/creative writing/being a human ect ect. Anyways. The water is hot. The cats are Outraged that the door is closed, and the phone is terrible medium for thoughts, but it beats not getting thoughts down at all] [Coming back to say the phone isn’t a terrible medium for thoughts, it’s just different. Downside to writing on the phone: I get pulled into loops of non-consensual distraction despite not having social media. Upside to the phone: I delete my sentences less. The laptop is the realest form of writing to me. It’s where finished work goes. The notebook is for ideation. The phone feels like it doesn’t matter (this isn’t true, but my brian hasn’t internalzied that) and this, if nothing else, is useful for getting words on the page. That being said, I ended up typing the vast majority of this post at the local library. 10/10 highly recommend Is Sadie the cat a trick “There was a time in my twenties when everyone I knew had a cats, or cats, and conversations centered on nothing but there charms” (165 internet archive) There is something comforting about seeing an older person describe and experience you are currently having with an air of gentle nostalgia. I am in my twenties, and my conversations do indeed center on the charms of my two tiny criminals. “Second, she’d never laid eyes on Sadie. How the hell did she know what Sadie thought of me?” 165 This does feel like the appropriate response to monstrous disregard. She doesn’t know. She has no idea. She has not experienced the physical reality of this tiny being, and even if she had she would be completely unable to look past her pre-conceptions. What a need to maintain a feeling of rightness in her body—what we humans call dignity. 166 The sections about Sadie’s body shutting down are genuinely heartbreaking. I don’t know what else there is to say, aside from the fact that Ullman affords Sadie a great deal of dignity through her writing, the dignity of being seen as complex and fully realized creature. Sadie probably wouldn’t care (although how would I know? I’ve never met her), but it is such a human expression of love to make art about those who are gone. How could such a creature, so different from me, also share this thing called life? 170 And here it is. I was talking with my buddhist priest about the joys of owning pets, and he said that he felt like cats were always a little bit beyond our understanding. He said he understood dogs, but having cats always feels a little bit like having something just barely domesticated living in your house. I laughed, and said my cats are extremely domesticated (Artie prefers to spend at least 2-3 hours a day on someone’s lap, and they’ve both trained us to make blanket forts). Still, looking back, I don’t know if I’d call this domestication. There is something to a cat. Something primordial that lives on. Ullman wrote that there are parts of Sadie that had nothing to do with her, and..yeah. That’s what having a cat is. It is loving a creature bursting with contradictions: fiercely independent and interminably needy, ever unbothered and steadfastly picky, I could not imagine them surviving in the wild and yet the wild survives in them . It reminds me of a passage from The dispossessed. The creature had short legs, an arched and supple back, glossy dark-brown fur. It was the first uncaged animal Shevek had seen close up, and it was more fearless of him than he was of it. The white, sharp teeth were impressive. He put his hand out cautiously to stroke it, as Ini insisted he do. The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. “Ammar,” Shevek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being—“brother. (Le Guin, pg 151 in the kindle addition) Cats are very good at catching our gaze across the gulf of being. In the Town Hall yesterday, CJ was talking about the idea of God having a face. I listened to this conversation on the way home from work, and joined half- way through so I apologize for 1. not knowing who asked the question, and 2. any inaccuracy in my recounting. They pointed to the fact that while picturing God as only being human isn’t where we want to be, we wouldn’t get that same emotional resonance if we thought of Them as, say, a bird. I find this really compelling, even if it doesn’t fully align with my spiritual experiences. I don’t consider myself a buddhist (yet? I haven’t committed to the five precepts and I’m very conscious about not misrepresenting it), but what I think what I find so compelling about the concept of inter-being or “God as the universe” as CJ put it is that it does force you to look across that gulf of being. Memory in megabytes The N key was completely worn bare—I think I say “No” very emphatically when software offers up stupid options” I like how Ullman doesn’t press no or type no, but says no. The machine shows the character of its user through all of these tiny imperfections. Again, Ullman is drawing us back to the physicality of the machine. This is not separate from the real world,from her, this is her world, at the very least it is part of her world. It is the machine she spent five years writing a book with. Of course it bares her mark The current scientific view of memory is that it’s something like an evolving dream -178 Fuck this line took me out. The only memories that remain unchanged, it seems, are those we never think of again -179 When writing the second book, I’d remembered (or thought I’d remembered) that writing the first one had been easier. -Apparently writing a book has the same amnesiac effect as giving birth. Makes sense. We probably wouldn’t create as much if we accurately remembered the difficulty in creation. If we could not continuously reinterpret the past—could not turn experience over and over, and so interweave it with hope and unknowing—memory would be a tyranny. It would be unbearable, a torture, a bad recurring dream. Like data spinning away on a disk: forever the same, the same, the same. -182 I’m currently writing a novel in which inherited/transferable memory is a big theme, and I’ve been struggling with balancing the unreliability of memory and the need to have my characters receive accurate information. So obviously, reading this passage was incredibly revelatory and exciting. I won’t go too in depth because it isn’t related to the text, but Fuck Yes We love it when the Patreon Book Club serves the muse. Eating with robots I don’t have a ton to say on this chapter (this is a lie, but I already spent an hour of my writing time rambling about God and cats so I need to end this post) but as always, Ullman’s writing goes very hard. These are a few my favorite lines: “What we hold in our minds is not abstract, it turned out, not an ideal reflection of existence, but something inseparable from our embodied experience of moving about in a complicated world.” 185 “ To make my machine an intelligent recipe writer, I would have to reproduce in code the equivalent of the complex, labile synaptic connections we hold in our minds.” 187

BethiePage42

I am finding all your reactions to these pieces so surprising and compelling, that I am becoming reluctant to influence the discussion in any way. But, having committed to full participation, feel required to honestly portray my own thoughts. So here goes. Are we all a bag of tricks? Cool combinations DNA that have were "locked in" thousands of generations ago? Obviously yes, but it still begs the deeper question of why. We all learn that evolution is just diversity that finds it serves a purpose: survival of the fittest. But to what purpose? Just one rock in the vast cosmos with trees and cats and fungi and ecosystems for each? Is Earth a bag of tricks that has gotten out of hand, or does it take a whole universe to distill a trick from a very straightforward periodic table? This tricky little planet of ours has been special for millennia. Making these special tricks obsolete with mass extinction events, and then starting again from near scratch. Is it because life is looking for something specific to climb out of the primordial ooze? Personally, I like the idea of God as light. All the colors of the rainbow travelling parsecs across the universe to unfold wherever they land: Feeding trees or illuminating pages of learning. All things are possible with light. Maybe the purpose of evolution is to create the most complex light reflection boxes. Beings capable of disseminating more specific information, as light must hold all information at once. But, maybe I'm just wasting time trying to understand the tricks around me; I'd probably be happier if I just got a cat.

Leo V.

IS SADIE THE CAT A TRICK? This was inevitably going to be one for personal stories about animals, but that’s okay — it’s interesting to see just how much sway a personal story about a pet can have on a reader. I brought up rats for the last chapter, and how they go out of their way to help their cage mates. I’ve had pet rats during lockdown, and I must be the billionth person to say this, but they are incredible animals, and I am always delighted by their intelligence. Ullman briefly talks about recognition between us and pets in the previous chapter: “We look at each other and know we are separate beings who nonetheless communicate. This is what people mean when they say they can talk to their dogs or cats, horses or bunnies: mammals reading each other. We don’t go looking for this in ants or fish or reptiles; indeed, when we want to say that someone lacks that essential spark of life, we call them “reptilian.” What we mean by this is that they lack emotions, the ability to relay and read the emotions of others; that they are, in short, robotic. If sentience is a mammalian trait, and what distinguishes mammals is the capacity for social life, then sentience must have its root in the capacity for rich social and emotional interchange.” (p. 153) Rats are stoic with their body language (in comparison to a person), but if you understand it, a lot starts being put into context. I’ve had rats react to me crying — stopping everything they were doing just to lay down physically close to my face, occasionally licking a tear or two away (rats groom you if they consider you one of them). I’ve had rats stop and listen attentively to me playing guitar. I’ve had rats react with visible shock to seeing me again after a long absence. Many situations with these guys have fully pulled the rug from under me. On the day of my rat Disco’s death, we had taken her to the vet to be put down. While waiting for the vet, I held her in my hands and pet her gently. She had surgery a week before and could barely walk apart from brief moments of alarm where she would snap back to consciousness and stumble on her own legs trying to get up; at one point she gathered all of her energy and started climbing up my shirt to eventually nestle on my shoulder. Pet rats will often climb up to the shoulders of humans they trust, because it’s a vantage position where they feel comfortable. Me and two other friends in the room were at first startled, and then sobbed in recognition — this is where she wanted to die. “Sadie provided companionship, of course. Before I met Elliot, she would sleep with me. Runt of the litter as tiny Sadie must have been, she liked to be crushed a little; everyone who ever held her noticed it. She would fall asleep in my arms, not minding—liking it?—if I lightly rolled over on her for a bit.” (p. 170) There’s an element to the body when a pet dies. The necessary maintenance of grief — by the fourth rat, I had learned that it was cheaper to ask for the body back from the vet instead of cremating it, that if you want to bury them you have to dig pretty deep into the earth, otherwise predators of small animals will dig up the remains, and you’ll have a bad time waking up to that. When we did cremate them, it was the first time I got to enjoy a funeral: casting the ashes to the wind, making deliberate time to process loss in my own terms. Rats, unto stardust. Eventually, the memories you had with the animal matter infinitely more than their body. Which is why you have to let the body go. And it’s why you can forget a robotic toy on a shelf for so long. That plastic body has no sway on a conscious self, or a soul. When we interact with a simulation — like a cute robot or character-driven AI — I think it’s facetious to conflate our ability to recognise these exchanges *on a simulation* with a robot’s own internality. We do the same visual recognition with movies. I remember when my nephew was very young, he looked at Finding Nemo playing on TV, pointed to it and said “The fish is sad…”. Translating even half of the original roots of that experience into code should not be simple, by any means. “There were parts of Sadie’s life that had nothing to do with me. After finishing some apparently satisfying business in the litter box, she would come racing out, flying madly around the room, up and down the stairs, then around the room again. This was not behavior specific to Sadie; everyone who has a cat sees it. (…) I saw a creature at the peak of its power: the energy, the speed, what seemed to me, in my human words, the delirium of being alive.” (p. 171) How do we program the delirium of being alive? You could start with a rat, but I know a lot about them, so maybe I’m biased. Did you know that rats have a “random setting” in their brains in case they don’t know how to react to a situation? THAT is a survival mechanism. And I don’t mean an RNG string of code between previously programmed states of being and not being. Rats don’t know what they’re doing either. Not even they know what they’re capable of. You may be able to simulate the apparent randomness of a rat, but you cannot code the experience of not knowing what the hell you’re doing.

Leo V.

MEMORY AND MEGABYTES I have some gripes with this essay, but I need to go dig a little deeper to back them up. If anything, it’s been a good starting point to go research a little further. Intuitively, I want to finally sit down and make it through The Body Keeps the Score. I have a very different experience from Ellen Ullman. My machines have been wiped several times, or I lost access to them entirely. My budget was always too short to buy the hard drives to back things up. There is evidence of my past that I will never recover. My brain has still been the more reliable storage, along with a couple of scrapbooks and a box of tiny sentimental objects with stories attached to them (I fully stole that idea from Amelie). Just seeing the object makes me link an entire network of context to it. I used to do the same with music: I realised that a piece of music playing during a moment, event or action will make me remember a web of extremely vivid details around that situation — my perception tends to latch onto narrativisation, playing things out like a theatre stage, from internal thinking all the way to physical events. I tried something out for a couple of years, where I logged every piece of music playing around events I wanted to remember (“diegetically” — if this was a stage, that is). It worked: if you played any part of the playlist, I could instantly recall where this was, what time of year, what people were present, names and faces, sequences of events. It reinforced the emotions and details of a memory through a learning pattern, while they were only in tenuous glances before. The recall of the memory, if anything, reinforced it. I’ve run into this idea of memory degradation over continuous recalls before — so I looped it across someone with more qualifications related to learning behaviours than me. They said that this is not how it works. This is the kind of thing I can’t pull out a citation on, but I do remember checking it. You have many layers that make up a memory — factual sequences of events are quite different from their emotional component, which in turn are quite different to the kinesthetic aspect. When you learn how to draw as a 5 year old, and you never draw again until you’re 30, you’re going to pick back up exactly where you left off. It’s the same as riding a bike. You might need to dig a little deeper for your previous training, sure, but your kinesthetic memory does not degrade across that timespan — even if your physical abilities do. Learning languages is a constant process of remembering. The less you put in the work of memory recall, the more you forget — which also applies to your native language, after enough time of disuse. The errors of recollection at police interrogations mentioned here do happen, sure, but who’s to say that this has to do with memory for the most part? During lockdown, I had terrible memory recall of about 80% of my life, genuinely thinking that my memory was being obliterated by an undiagnosed condition. After some much needed medical care across different problems, I gained access to a lot of memory recall, as well as being able to dig up quite a lot of old memory; though I would say some of that recall happens in variable layers between events (things happening in the environment) and kinesthetic (things I interfaced with). When people have constant anxiety, they have horrible memory. In situations of abuse your memory recall goes to shit. So who is to say that it wasn’t stress and trauma that hindered those details, two things that go hand in hand in the formation of difficult memories, or say… a police investigation? Equally, the “clarity” of novelty is not clarity. It’s reactive impact. Your brain is still adjusting to a brand new stimulus. If your memory is degrating, would it be that you perfectly recreate routines and behaviours when seeing stimuli? Pavlov’s dogs salivating when hearing a bell come to mind. Why would you know a family recipe or gymnastics choreography or even riding a bike or driving a car almost as a background process, just by virtue of muscle memory? Or consider even when you go back to your hometown and people assume behaviours from you like you’d never left. Like you were frozen in time. I don’t buy this argument. And it betrays Ullman’s own considerations on the body being relevant to your mind. There are a lot of points in this chapter about the shifting unreliability of your emotional reactions, but this strikes me as having more to do with contextualising, in your mind, the shifting emotional picture that you create. You have grown. Your full picture of a situation will have developed, because the new input into your learning behaviours would’ve informed it. But it will not change the original recall of the event. If you encounter objects, places or people who condensated and froze a prior version of yourself, your brain will revisit what it was like to exist back then. Hence the replaying of old traumatic tapes when you run into triggers. ““If we could not continuously reinterpret the past—could not turn experience over and over, and so interweave it with hope and unknowing—memory would be a tyranny. It would be unbearable, a torture, a bad recurring dream. Like data spinning away on a disk: forever the same, the same, the same.” (pp. 182-183) Yes. That is how post-traumatic stress works. Your first run-in with a traumatic event might not even register as bad as it will eventually get. It can recontextualise in healing ways later down the line, of course. But there is a difference between the bias of a narrator vs. the relationship between the subject and the experience — the latter is the part that gets stored. Perception in the material space is the closest and clearest picture of an input, but it’s not “memory”. It’s just perception — input, not storage. Your perception of events will get logged that into your head as a memory, and the more often you dig it out, the closer it stays at the top. So it is a little more like a filing cabinet, but one where files are stacked up in vertical piles, until the lowest file in the pile gets eradicated. As far as I’m aware, that account does not degrade the way it’s stated here. But take this with a pinch of salt.

Leo V.

DINING WITH ROBOTS I haven’t properly gotten in the weeds of pragmatic philosophy, but when I do, I might start with food as a comparative hook. This chapter is a great demonstration of how food is never just about an itemised list of ingredients. It carries with it the entire history of how they came to be and our relationships with them, and their geographic variations, and uses. “Women used to serve coffee at table, I thought. But my own guests would walk over and retrieve theirs from the automatic drip pot. My mother is now ninety-one; between her time as a hostess and mine, an enormous change had occurred in the lives of women. And, just then, it seemed to me that all that upheaval was contained in the silly fact of how one served coffee to dinner guests.” (p. 191) Memory!! The inability to eat immediately culls an extremely important part of sentience. As it currently stands, a machine would not even begin to prioritise the social memory of food as something important. We have no idea of how this incomplete simulation could exist as a living creature; it would immediately gravitate to different priorities to survive. But it’s interesting to consider, with curiosity, the rapport between two sentient beings, where one survives through order and mathematical patterns. I don’t know that human beings can spend their survival instincts guided primarily by order. There is pleasure in tidying and arranging too, of course. But just as importantly, there is a sort of challenge and delight in smashing up your expectations of being the smoothest, cleanest organiser. I think of that “delirium of being alive” again — there is just as much stability to be found in the killing and surrender of your ego to something primordially chaotic as there is to the purgatory of refinement. “So challenged, I spent a long time thinking about the interior life of a robot. I tried to imagine it: the delicious swallowing of electric current, the connoisseurship of voltages, exquisite sensibilities sensing tiny spikes on the line, the pleasure of a clean, steady flow. (…) What pleasure they will take in being fast and efficient—to run without cease!—humming along by their picosecond clocks, their algorithms compact, elegant, error-free.” (p. 193) We could consider the common ground found between these two creatures; but realistically, this conversation might be more applicable between two people than it would be between a tool hyper-optimised for a specific purpose and the complexly layered being it was designed for. Once again, it speaks a lot more to a human being’s ability to personify as a jumping off point than it does to the actual possibility that a robot has an internal life. There is a reinforcement of the argument in Programming the Post-Human; of needing to think of the bodily experience to even be equipped for considerations like “entertaining guests” or “wine pairings”, which don’t map out onto “if / then / else” statements. This chapter further develops a good observation about about language and meaning: just because you latch onto an analogy, it doesn’t mean it will perfectly overlay with pragmatic reality. These kinds of analogies are one of these fun approximations that humans do, to try and convey clarity in communication. But there’s a trap in just thinking in analogies — not considering your own biases, or not looking beyond yourself enough, or at the very least with a top down view. Ullman tends to sidestep analogies in favour of comparisons, or breaking steps down in favour of incredibly clear language. It makes me consider if it’s because she sees the pitfalls of inventing these analogies without exercising self-reflection first. * * * “Anyone in our culture understands such things as how to sit on kitchen chairs, swivel chairs, folding chairs; and in arm chairs, rocking chairs, deck chairs, barber’s chairs, sedan chairs, dentist’s chairs, basket chairs, reclining chairs … since there seems to be an indefinitely large variety of chairs and of successful (graceful, comfortable, secure, poised, etc.) ways to sit in them. Moreover, understanding chairs also includes social skills such as being able to sit appropriately (sedately, demurely, naturally, casually, sloppily, provocatively, etc.) at dinners, interviews, desk jobs, lectures, auditions, concerts… At dinners where one has to entertain important guests … in a hurry … serving them beef in a French version of Stroganoff … with buttered potatoes … and a good red Bordeaux.” (pp. 189) This is where Dreyfus and Ullman best illustrate the variables you overlook when boiling something as physical as food to internal, platonic essence or pure intention.… until you make a point of bringing that oversight to the forefront, the way she does here. * * * “What scared me now were the perfect limes, the five varieties of apples that seemed to have disappeared from the shelves, the dinner I’d make and eat that night in thirty minutes, the increasing rarity of those feasts that turn the dining room into a wreck of sated desire. The lines at the checkout stands were long; neat packages rode along on the conveyor belts; the air was filled with the beep of scanners, as the food, labeled and bar-coded, identified itself to the machines. Life is pressuring us to live by the robots’ pleasures, I thought. Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren’t becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them.” (p.195) Thirty minute dinners have limited mileage. The higher the cost of living has risen, the more I find myself turning to dinner in community. The collective contributions of a dinner with friends and family will always cost less for a much bigger payoff. The inconspicuous grocers near the main road always have bigger food for cheaper than the supermarket, and the cafe near the laundromat with no allergens listed, terrible lighting and rated two and a half stars on Google Maps is still cheaper and more sentimental than the place across the road, franchised across hundreds of towns. I don’t think that perfectly sectioned off food aisles will win as long as we keep these things alive. But only for as long as we seek them out and care proactively.

halley

--- is sadie the cat a trick? --- just a few minutes into reading this and I was already sobbing. I told my husband afterwards that I cried remembering the kitten I don't have yet that I'm going to get someday soon and eventually have to say goodbye to. I realized I sounded silly when he teased me about making myself cry and I tried to explain something about how it's happened, it will happen, it's happening right now, but I'm not sure he really got it. some of you get it, right? in february I moved to a new house and had to say goodbye to buzi, my adopted wild outdoor cat who belonged to the streets more than to me. he had his community there and it would have been cruel to relocate him. still, since the first day he showed up in the village we bonded super intensely. he roamed the whole village but spent most of his time in our garden. sometimes when it was really cold I'd let him sleep inside to keep me company, and I knew his different purrs and what they meant. my husband said he purred differently to me than to him. he sat in my lap and let me pet him during some of my worst times, and I made up songs for him in my best. in the end, he was a wild male cat who was getting more 'feisty' as time went on, especially as the weather got warmer. due to his territorial dominance in the village-cat-social-structure I knew he probably wouldn't have a long lifespan anyways. I tried to comfort myself by saying that at least this way I wouldn't have to deal with the pain of losing him one day. I would just leave, and he wouldn't understand I was saying goodbye. I could always imagine he's out there still, living his best life, wild and free. it's a tired familiar feeling- home is somewhere new now. I don't really miss that old house, just buzi. I wept when we drove away. I have moved so often, and thinking back on places I used to call home I feel nostagic not so much for the places themselves but for who I was during the time I was there, the versions of me these places held. --- memory and megabites --- I'm a terribly sentimental person and if I could I'd probably be some kind of hoarder, but moving so much (with just a backpacking pack's worth of posessions for a few years) has made me be more particular with the things I carry with me and hold on to. I still have too much in storage in my parent's garage and it torments me to think of what to do about that. it's too expensive to take most things overseas and most of it really isn't necessary or useful, but when I've tried to sort through it I just get overwhelmed. what do I do with the boxes of journals and sketchbooks I've filled over the years, collections of the art I've made since I was young? when I look through them (rarely) I remember a me I'd forgotten about, memories frozen through this intentional physical evidence. I took a few journals back last time I visited and I haven't looked at them since, but I like knowing they're here. "what they held was not 'data' but experience. and I knew they should be saved the way you save those other records of experience, journals, which is to say carefully but not ceremoniously, neither thrown away nor read too often, opened only on those mysterious days- and they are indeed mysterious- when you can bear, and suddenly need, the shock of remembering." every time I get a new phone or laptop I end up dumping all my photos on some SD card or hard drive so I know they're safe and I can bear to make the switch, but I rarely end up looking at them again after that. when I met my husband 5 years ago we had a very eventful first month/year together, and I made some short films with footage from the different places we lived that we still love looking back on occasionally. a few years ago I was in a new-years mood and spent a january putting together another video collage of all the videos on my phone from the year prior, none taken with any intention of making this, edited to a few songs I'd listened to the most. I did it again last year and I found the process so exhilarating- once I got in the flow it was so satisfying how pieces fit together and fit the music as if there was a way it was meant to be. this year I still haven't been able to make one for last year, mostly because there's too many videos of buzi and it made me sad last time I tried to work on it. what's special about these films is that I don't post these videos anywhere public because it's too personal- I want to see the reaction and be there with the person experiencing it. I can only show them to close friends in person on those rare occasions when the time feels right. we get to relive those periods of our life together instead of letting the memories languish in memory cards. --- dining with robots --- "human beings need food to survive, but what drives us to choose one food over another is what I think of as the deliciousness factor. evolution, that good mother, has seen fit to guide us to the apple instead of the poison berry by our attraction to the happy sweetness of the apple, its fresh crispness, and, in just the right balance, enough tartness to make it complicated in the mouth." reading this I was instantly reminded of michael pollen's 'the botany of desire', which is basically a whole book about this exact concept but flipped- suggesting that by preying on our fundamental human desires, plants have domesticated -us- by persuading us into cultivating and spreading them, using the examples of the apple (sweetness), the tulip (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and the potato (control). and THEN with this in mind, Ullman finishes the chapter with these lines, sending chills down my spine: "life is pressuring us to live by the robots' pleasures, I thought. our appetites have given way to theirs. robots aren't becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them."

valentin

short thoughts because I am busy in London this week. - is Sadie the cat a trick? - no. - memory and megabytes - buying a new laptop soon, because my old one is slowly giving up. I'll probably be moving from windows to apple. the process of converting files and data from one laptop to the next has been streamlined and made convenient to a point of unusefulness. do I really wanna take all my files and folders as they are right now with me? not really. Ullman describes the act of going sorting through your old files, throwing out the obsolete ones and reminiscing about the time of their creation with such beauty that it made me want to do the same. - dining with robots - beautiful explanation on why our senses and body are so important for our own cognition. how to explain life to someone who doesn't shit? In poor things (second mention this book club, very relevant to this chapter) our main characters drive around in a motorized carriage, a car effectively. but it still looks like a carriage and even has a horse head at the front of it as to not alarm other people/horses. I found that kind of beautiful in an inexplicable way. sometimes you are so far ahead of the curve that you gotta slow yourself down on purpose. sometimes we forget we are already living in the future. a lot of people have a roomba, a literal robot. it just doesn't look like in the movies so it must not be the real thing. investigate your surroundings! be in awe of the futuristic technology we already have, don't yearn for something that might never arrive. we have biometric passports, contactless payment on public transport, we can even (almost) predict the weather!!! the future is here already/will never come. both are true.

capybyara

Had a good time reading these chapters, they felt really intimate and personal (even more so than the other chapters so far. Maybe I'm just starting to feel closer to the author idk.) The memory in megabytes part reminded me of how I can't help but record at least a few songs on my phone during every concert I go to, even though my storage is now permanently full and I have never once rewatched any of the videos. I just can't stand the thought of maybe forgetting the experience of hearing those songs live. It feels like unless I store evidence of the memory in my digital gallery, it may cease to exist someday. Like I don't fully trust my own brain to keep the memory safe. Weird.

reva

i REALLY loved these chapters. the first and third were so delicious, i just sat and thought about each of them after reading. they both felt like an argument delivered through storytelling that i had to sit and digest to fully understand, and they were all the more impactful for being delivered in that way. i really liked the absolute disrespect of calling the robotic cat "useful as a bookend" after such beautiful descriptions of sadie. and the ending of dining with robots gave me chills. you are not a gadget!!!!! memory and megabytes reminded me of when my own old computer stopped working suddenly, and i lost all of my data (took it to the local tech store and they couldn't extract it, it got corrupted or something). i was really sad for a while about all of the things i lost (still sucks that i lost my original celeste file, since i had downloaded the game off of itch.io) but i also felt a sense of relief. no longer would i have to be weighed down by all of these files from when i was in middle school and highschool. at best they were surreal and reminded me of a time when i was much younger, at worst they were diary entries seeped in so much misery they were very hard to look at (honestly very similar to ullman's files). and it was really freeing to know that i could start fresh, and i didn't ever have to sift through all of that old stuff trying to decide which files to save and which to delete forever. i'll be thinking about julia child and the emotions of cooking and eating meals together for a while. hope you all have a fine, raucous affair of a meal in your near future. <3

Dillon

The tale of Sadie's life reminded me of a poem, or set of poems rather, written in a scrap book at the humane society where I adopted my dog. I'd like to share it with you all because I think of Bailey the cat fairly often since reading the anonymous poem several years ago. WARNING it gets sad. Nine Lives Haiku Tribute to Bailey New home, strut my stuff find food, water, litter box share birding window See plant, real? fake? bite grind left, chump right, of , goody no Mommy, I want Guests, fireplace clicks flicker, crackle, dead ahead, MOVE sniff, twirl, purr, heaven Blue harness, travel paw thigh, check gear, help steer passenger seat hog Tree gaily furnished bright lights warm red velvet skirt gift for dozing cat Scratch, scratch, paws busy pink nose burrows between sheets lump quiet, tail flicks Morning, lick, lick face lifted, pills ready, do deed open, glunk, kiss, praise, treat Tuna, milk, reject frozen stance, dry heaves, sink down IV's, liver fails Needle enters hip final pat, fur stills, eyes stare kiss, bye love, thanks. Sept. 17th, 2013 Age 21 I don't have much more to say on the chapters other than it's stoked the strong connection I feel toward other living beings, and in turn has made my stark contrasting apathy toward machines very apparent.

sepha

Something I couldn’t stop thinking of when reading Memory and Megabytes was this short story by beloved (by me) science fiction author Ted Chiang called "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling." From Wikipedia because I hate writing summaries: “The story is written as an article by an unnamed journalist in the near future, who tells his experience with a device that endows its users with eidetic memory, interspersed with a fictionalized account of an incident in which writing was introduced to an African tribe. The story serves as a reflection of how improving human memory affects people's personal lives.” “Improving memory” in the near future timeline involved the invention of a search algorithm for lifelogs (retinal video recordings), which until then had been saved but were not easily navigable due to their sheer volume. “Improving memory” in the fictionalized past involved…writing. (Ted Chiang talks a lot about how writing is a technology.) In the future, “the journalist remains adamant that forgetfulness is essential for forgiving and making personal narratives. For example, he is grateful to have forgotten most arguments with his daughter Nicole when she was a teenager. In particular, he holds in high regard a memory in which Nicole blamed him for her mother's divorce, which prompted him to work on their relationship.” (Wikipedia again lol.) However, it turns out that he had misremembered—it was HE who blamed Nicole for the divorce, and not the other way around!!! This prompted him to reassess himself and release the lifelog to the public so that they could form their own judgements. On the other hand, in the “past,” a Christian missionary introduces writing to a 13-year-old Tiv boy named Jijingi, who then begins working as a scribe. Thus begins a conflict between accuracy and morality, which culminates in Jijingi burning his written records. I found it interesting that in the story, the brain microchip shit was embraced, while the writing (which today most of us take as a fact of life) was rejected. Personally, I still prefer writing over the brain microchip (which I would be scared of), but it made me wonder if my fear is just due to human nature. So I wonder if Ellen Ullman might have been susceptible to that as well, talking about how memory is a continual recollection, and projecting the observed reality of how memory works w.r.t rat brain proteins onto how we as people store information. It’s…a leap, to say the least. Not saying she’s like, wrong, if that word is even applicable here, but her cringing at her past self doesn’t feel relevant to where she’s going to put her old files. When I cleaned up my old files, I put them all in a folder called, “Archive,” which might as well have been called “basement” or “attic.” I was not tempted to click on them. For those who would, I would recommend an external hard drive. But none of this seems that relevant to the odyssey of recollection at all. If I had a picture of my mother that I wanted to save, I would 1. take a photo 2. save it on a hard drive and 3. print them out, or if it was a polaroid or some artsy shit like that, 1. take a photo and 2. scan it and save it on a hard drive.. I don’t think physical and digital artifacts are at war here, nor is the technology at odds with the beauty and truth of humanity and the soul. Doesn’t it seem like a good, intended use of the technology, to store my mother in 4K Ultra HD, or in a separate type of truth, in the aesthetic beauty of film photography? To build something enduring when human memory is fallible? Like… Also Sadie the cat made me cry as I was supposed to be getting off of an airplane. Of course.

Lou Corben

Hello!! I’m finally catching up after a bonkers couple of months… I just finished the book and don’t have a lot to say so just going to read everyone’s comments and be brief in my own thoughts. I don't have much to say on Programming the Posthuman so plonking that here at the top.... “They were, in essence, attempting a simulation of the neocortex - rule-based, conscious thinking - declaring that to be the essence of intelligence.” I think that really just sums it all up doesn’t it? This chapter and certain parts of YANAG. **Is Sadie the Cat a Trick?** I too would die for Sadie the Cat. This chapter and several comments made me cry. “What a need to maintain a feeling of rightness in her body—what we humans might call dignity” 💔💔 **Memory and Megabytes** Tangentially this chapter reminded me of the movie ‘Lion’ where an Austrailian man who was adopted from an Indian orphanage as a small child is at a dinner party and smells some food that brings back his childhood memories of his mother flooding back and follows him using technology to find her. I think it was based on a true story. Could be a good one for movie club some time? It also reminded me of this show in which a performer uses live binaural technology to explore consciousness and follow the story of an American photographer meeting an uncontacted Amazonian community who ritualistically “reverse time” by destroying all their worldly possessions (watch with headphones to briefly experience the binaural audio effect): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKWv001zJ_Y There was a recording floating around online somewhere - if anyone happens to find it please let me know! ** Dining with Robots ** I used to long for success but now I just long to live somewhere big enough I can host dinner parties :( “By the time the last friend had left, it was 2:30 a.m., the tablecloth was covered with stains, dirty dishes were everywhere, the empty crab shells were beginning to stink, and the kitchen was a mess. Perfect.” In my more party-heavy days I always sort of used to romanticise the “morning after” - watching movies while eating bacon sandwiches and drinking tea with whoever crashed on the sofa is sometimes the best bit.