Entry 16
Alright - missed a week there, but that’s because I spent last week in Chicago! I was visiting some friends as just a general vacation, and MAN did I love it there.
Lots of space, really charming and varied architecture, and of course, PUBLIC TRANSIT. It was pretty painful to get off the plane from Chicago, after taking public transit mostly everywhere, including to/from the airport, and have to take an $80 cab home from LAX.
However, for all my immediate affinity to the city, I’m still skeptical, because I have yet to see the thing that makes everyone move away from Chicago: the winter. If Los Angeles has had any lasting effect on me, it’s a that I can no longer handle anything but moderate weather.
The last two weeks have been a bit of a whirl, and I didn’t jot down notes for much of it. However, I do have one note about getting an ad for a period blood tracker app on twitter, which made me laugh. Seems my hyper-blocking of suggested/ad content is successfully scrambling at least some part of their data-image of me.
I’ve been reading Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist. It’s a really enjoyable look at how language has changed since the internet rose. She starts off with a great point – that we’ve never really had a large corpus of informal writing in our history before the internet. People wrote letters and speeches and other things that have survived, but almost all of them are fairly mediated and edited. Outside of things like postcards and post-it notes we left for each other, there’s been very little informal writing to study.
But the internet put a smartphone in everyone’s hand and encouraged quick responses in the name of engagement. Now everyone pens plenty of informal messages a day, whether it be texts or tweets or comments. So there’s a lot to examine, and a lot has changed to warrant it.
The book really succeeds for me because the author is certainly fluent in a lot of the internet-speak she studies, which really makes it feel like an interior look, rather than an outside critiquing that newfangled SMS thingy.
Finished The Leftovers this week (finally). The third season had us cold for a lot of it– the friend I watched it with actively hated it. But while Lindelof’s writing drives me absolutely nuts, I really enjoyed the way it ended. No spoilers, but it was almost like a rom-com? Maybe it won’t hold up on another watch, but stripping away a lot of the “core” of the show for the finale helped to center it for me.
Also finished Dark Souls 3, after a whopping 71 hours. MAN it was good. Talking with some friends who were playing it concurrently with me revealed that my build might’ve been massively underpowered. I had a MUCH harder time on some of the bosses than they did. But oh well – maybe a new build will be my excuse to play it again, and these games are endlessly replayable.
Started Control today, which I’ve decided will be my game before Sekiro, which I’m hoping can hold me out until Elden Ring in January. Control looks absolutely GORGEOUS on my pc – ray tracing used correctly, in my opinion. Not just a technological gimmick.
And to close: lots of new music recently. Was really surprised by Clairo’s record, in a good way. And the two singles from Porches and Caroline Polachek are quickly becoming the soundtrack to my summer.