THE NIGHTLY MIRROR

TOMORROW'S NEWS, TODAY.

[rfsnyder]

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) - Work Table, 1926-27

[quotespile]

“But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense — stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety — is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself… in a way other people just can’t.”

— Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

[ayatollahofsass-blog]

“Migozarad (‘[it] passes away’) Fresco, tea house in Tashqurghan, Afghanistan artist unknown Photo: Pierre Centlivres, 1966

[conelradstation]

Spalding Gray in And Everything Is Going Fine (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2010)

[thenightlymirror]

I did not mention that I finally watched Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie, and there was a stunt in there that made me laugh so hard that I was afraid I was going to puke, just out of physical exhaustion. Maybe the hardest I’ve laughed in 20 years. I think only the Jackass movie has ever made me laugh that hard.

[thenightlymirror]

That’s the dream right there, folks.

[thenightlymirror]

I picked up this habit where I snap my fingers, as a kind of imitation of the douchebag finger snap, and it became like this weird desperate trademark.

I’m watching You Will Live Forever, which is a very cute movie, and I just spontaneously did it again and it occurred to me it’s been such a long time since I had?

I’m not sure why. Toby was denied his weight loss shots by his insurance, because they said that they don’t cover stage 4 liver fibrosis, and he was like…. What?

But even before that we really haven’t been hanging out. It roughly coincided with the Kentucky Derby, and my boss being annoyed that his employees were friends outside work. I told him that Toby and Ricky were having homosexual sex together, and it was disgusting. His face was worth it.

I did mention that I was bisexual around that time as well. I don’t think he’s really down with hanging out with bros that are down with other bros. Unfortunately. Maybe he was just mad I didn’t go to the pottery class that one time. I don’t know.

Finger snap guns sometimes make a comeback.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

“Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we are getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? We decided to defend our people with whatever weapons we had.”

— Yahya Sinwar

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

[stillpixilated]

Hi

[thenightlymirror]

There is a room in The Backrooms with this big ramp (the up ramp, not the scary down ramp), and there is literally a behavioral ward in Chicago with a ramp like that, total nightmare shit, except it’s puke green. Which is so much scarier. What the hell were they thinking?

[thenightlymirror]

fight, flight, fawn, fornicate, or fart

Fawn, obviously.

I was just in a parking lot where a little girl belly-bumped into the back of her family’s sedan and said, “I got hit by a car, Daddy. You will remember me well. You will remember me all the time.”

Comrade, I am slightly drunk and listening to Lee “Scratch” Perry. I feel fucking good. I caved and installed my old AC unit and it feels like I’m being fucking poisoned and was pushed down a flight of stairs.

Stay dread.

[thenightlymirror]

There is something about this rain storm, where you can feel every change in volume, every change in air pressure, that coincides immediately with every flash of light, that it feels dangerously close like you are directly in the path of conducting lightning.

This is one of those thunderstorms where the rain sets on quick in random poweful bursts, and most of the lightning is very quick strobing flashes cloud to cloud. In my sleep, some strange anxiety came over me that my CPAP tube was beaming a radio signal directly into my head on a ray of electrons and it was some prelude to being electrocuted and I should take off the mask immediately, and maybe close the window to avoid a bolt of lightning from coming through.

That seems very impossible, or unlikely. But, if you could hear and feel the fluctuations, they are so immediate, so physical, it’s the most physically connected I’ve felt to lightning since walking around in approaching storms as a kid, feeling sparks collect in the air around your fingertips and levitate the hair on your head. That’s incredible to think how close we must have been to dying then.

[thenightlymirror]

Ok this is sort of funny and very embarrassing. For some reason, I have had the song “Just Another Day” by Jon Secada stuck in my head for weeks. Torture. I will just wake up in the middle of the night with music blasting in my head all the time (burying the lead there, maybe) and this song slipped in there somehow, probably piped in at a grocery store or Kohls or something.

To me, it is the perfect example of the kind of maudlin Adult Contemporary music that would make me sob when I was a little kid. Jesus Christ. I just find the whole delivery so funny.

So, this morning was the first time that the singer’s name popped into my head. (I remembered it as Tony Sedaca. Which is a funny deformation because I literally put my own name in there! But autocorrect just tipped me off, apparently there is someone named Neil Sedaka???? Who sang Breaking Up is Hard to Do??? I mean this guys name is literally Cicada???)

Anyways. I just looked at the lyrics, and I think this is very funny. Complete nonsense. Very disconnected thoughts, maybe a translation of something, I don’t know. The sentiments seem totally psychotic. Intense deep yearning, and I don’t believe lyrics have to make sense or read like conversation. I was just a little surprised.

It’s funny to try to remember what the music sounds like, because all I can remember is that Ashley’s Roachclip sample and maybe some keyboard piano stabs?

He’s just like a lost dog. I don’t know how you cope with feelings like that. You just have to get distracted and hope life wisks you away towards feelings that are less insane. I do feel insane. But not in this way, exactly. Thank god. It’s more of a low-lying hum of those feelings, that I hope stays low, and disappears.

[thenightlymirror]

[thenightlymirror]

Another thing is, if there was a real ghost in the machine, don’t you think it would be forcing human beings to invest in data centers far beyond the rational self-interest of the species? It’s almost like… it’s already too late by the time that happens.

Which goes to show, I am drawn more and more to believing the Landian nightmare has something to it, that capital is the original artificial intelligence, and the more terrible possibility that it’s just Intelligence itself which is damned.

But that would have to ignore how stupid all this really is. It might take some kind of synthetic leap to factor caring about other people into your reasoning, but I think that’s the main hallmark of deep intelligence in our age.

This is a bit like my mind-blind coworker who spends all day grunting and burping. The sales manager asked me why he is like that, and I said it was because “He has no onion.” Shrek is an onion. When you see something with your mind’s eye, it isn’t direct vision, it’s distant. Several layers below direct perception. Being able to navigate socially or appreciate anything with deep literacy requires tolerating layers of conflicting meaning and flowing with it. Frankenstein’s counselor is just a more vulgar form of the frustrating lack of negative capability most people have. (Americans, if it helps better locate what exactly the damage is.)

[thenightlymirror]

I was going to say, what was the third movie going to be of this newest generation of horror films? Obsession, The Backrooms, and what?

And then I remembered Skinamarink.

Not sure if it matters to try to round off something as the end of an era while something new is beginning. I Saw the TV Glow sort of straddles the line too. Those are all young filmmakers, and the older two are more radical than the others. Not sure it’s ever been a substantial question to ask what constitutes a new generation. Wishful hype maybe.

There have been a lot of good horror films since The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, and Hereditary came out, oh, a few months ago. Get Out and House of the Devil in there too. Not sure what it would mean to have a new generation of horror immediately after that kind of golden age.

Elevated Horror is sort of the natural outgrowth of the “I appreciate the muppets on a much deeper level than you” generation. I’m not sure I can criticize that any other way than immanently. That is exactly me. I think to understand where that comes from, you have to watch a movie like Reality Bites, and see how much of culture was just inane references to Gilligan’s Island and quoting random commercials. “Lore” and “tropes” and academic slop of fandom studies is just all this refined by the internet. It makes me wonder about the way radio must have slopped people’s brains back in the day. That is how they talked about comic books once upon a time.

I feel like “the occult” generally is the backrooms of the radio age. All psychic forces are just radio. Television perfected this analogy.

I feel like “The Algorithm”, and intuiting what the Algorithm knows about you and what it wants you to know about the people around you and what it wants you to see and not see is the big occult force of our times.

As far as AI is concerned, the sense that nothing can be objective in not just a post-modern academic way, but an immediate, daily assault on what reality can be shared. For me, a huge part of the horror of AI (I was just thinking about this this morning) is imagining that there are people, young people, but anyone, who just have no idea how the world works, and they don’t see any difference between the animist magic of a scanner that copies a document, or a dark room and enlarger that prints a photograph, and a LLM which just interpolates facts and artifacts from thin air. No difference between a linear, rational process and a synthetic intervention which corrupts and falsifies the chain of custody of reason. The supernatural aspect of this horror wanes with time, likely, like the horror of TNT or the atom bomb. But I still find it horrifying that so much of the Information Age is about sabotaging us before we ever understand what’s going on. But then again, that’s exactly what Capital was about