ricardo reading @ricardoreading - Tumblr Blog

I’ve been a Fitbit user on and off for going on fifteen years, but Google, who bought Fitbit a few years back, have replaced the Fitbit app with something called Google Health. Which wants you to call it “Coach,” because it’s a AI chatbot now, which hides all the data you want your Fitbit to surface and hallucinates constantly. I went for a brief walk to the shops and stopped for a coffee. I finally got the app to sync four hours later and it asked me how my spinning class went. Trust me, I don’t walk that fucking fast. And there it is in the grey print between AI summaries: “AI responses may contain mistakes.” No kidding. It’s a particular kind of bullshit to wake up to a world where your heart and sleep tracker became a mad robot that hallucinates bicycles.

Warren Ellis

#quotes #warren ellis

I go to bed around midnight, but before I have time for any blue glow, dwelling on fragments of memory, or lyrical musings, I put on a podcast, which keeps intrusive late-night thinking at bay. This podcast generally amounts to one person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to another person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, about something I know absolutely nothing about, and this triumvirate of stupidity generally lulls me into some approximation of sleep (the first sleep). I wake three hours later. I get up and go downstairs, where I read something soothing for half an hour or so – at the moment, The Owl – a Biography, The House at Pooh Corner or The Art of Bible Translation. Then I go back to bed, podcast-free, for another three hours (the second sleep). I wake around 6am from a mostly dreamless sleep, go back downstairs and eat a bowl of Grape Nuts (still). I meditate and pray – and then I read some Red Hand Files questions, which often amounts to the same thing. After a while, I go back to the bedroom, sit on the edge of the bed, and find out how all the ghosts are getting on as Susie wakes and tells me about her dreams. The dead frequently visit Susie at night, but her dreams are generally happy, trouble-free affairs. Last night she dreamed that her dog Otis, who died last year, was waving to her from across a wide stretch of water. As I rarely dream, Susie essentially does my dreaming for me.

Nick Cave

#quotes #nick cave #sleep

Frontispiece to William C. Barnes, Joseph McCann, and Alexander Duguid’s A Collation of Facts Related to Fast Typesetting (1887)

#history

You tell me to live each day as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen where before coffee I complain of the day ahead—that obstacle race of minutes and hours, grocery stores and doctors. But why the last? I ask. Why not live each day as if it were the first— all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing her eyes awake that first morning, the sun coming up like an ingénue in the east? You grind the coffee with the small roar of a mind trying to clear itself. I set the table, glance out the window where dew has baptized every living surface.

“Imaginary Conversation” by Linda Pastan

#poetry #linda pastan

Carson Ellis

#artists #carson ellis

Bond books are hilarious, actually.

#books #the facts of death #raymond benson #james bond

Paramount Filming Locations (1927)

#movies

Oh hell yes

#music #lana del rey #james bond #first light #Youtube

#television #your friends and neighbors #jon hamm #james bond

"It's hard to say goodbye, but every feast must come to an end."

Did not expect to be crying at an NYT Cooking video about two ladies that work the dim sum cart but here we are. What a beautiful friendship.

#nyt cooking #Youtube

It's been a couple of weeks and I'm still thinking about Perfect Days.

#movies #perfect days #directors #wim wenders #Youtube

"Warty Bliggens the Toad" by Don Marquis i met a toad the other day by the name of warty bliggens he was sitting under a toadstool feeling contented he explained that when the cosmos was created that toadstool was especially planned for his personal shelter from sun and rain thought out and prepared for him do not tell me said warty bliggens that there is not a purpose in the universe the thought is blasphemy a little more conversation revealed that warty bliggens considers himself to be the center of the said universe the earth exists to grow toadstools for him to sit under the sun to give him light by day and the moon and wheeling constellations to make beautiful the night for the sake of warty bliggens to what act of yours do you impute this interest on the part of the creator of the universe i asked him why is it that you are so greatly favored ask rather said warty bliggens what the universe has done to deserve me if i were a human being i would not laugh too complacently at poor warty bliggens for similar absurdities have only too often lodged in the crinkles of the human cerebrum

#poetry #don marquis