Ran Prieur

April 8.

2026-04-08T20:40:07Z

April 8. It finally happened. The DeepAI Olde Model that I was using for my videos, has been quietly enshittified/upgraded. Right away I saw that something was off, and when I tested familiar prompts in familiar styles, the results were a lot faster, a lot different, and a lot worse. I knew it was too good to last, and now I have to see if I can find any beauty at all in the new machine.

April 7.

2026-04-07T19:30:55Z

April 7. New playlist! When I was making my two Spotify covers playlists, some of the best songs were not on Spotify. These songs served as the anchor for a YouTube Covers playlist, that I filled out with some of my favorites from the other two lists. They're mostly obscure, with more songs under a thousand views than over a million. There are three covers of Bob Dylan, two of The Rolling Stones and surprisingly two of Van Halen. I love the transition between two not-on-Spotifys, Larkin Poe's Southern Cross and Killdozer's Sweet Home Alabama, which have almost the same riff.

April 1.

2026-04-01T13:30:27Z

April 1. No ideas this week, but I've just posted my Goodreads review of Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine. To give it less than four stars would be infighting, but there's a lot of stuff in it that I disagree with, and I list some anti-machine books that I liked better: Saving The Appearances by Owen Barfield, In The Absence Of The Sacred by Jerry Mander, Tools For Conviviality by Ivan Illich, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman, The Final Empire by William Kotke, and Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.

Also, this is a great bit from an incredible book that I still haven't finished, James Dickey's Alnilam, describing what we might call the "flow" state, in terms of the swinging of a monkey:

Whatever the gibbon has got hold of is already something else; it's the next thing he's going to have hold of. The present thing is not being replaced by the next thing he's going to catch; it already is the next thing, and the next thing after that is already coming into place, coming at him, coming to him. There's no way that it can't come, or that he would miss it. His catching it is not only built into his body and his rhythm, but it's built into the branch or the limb or the part of a wall that he takes into the rhythm. His whole environment gives itself to him in the rhythm, it flows around him, everything is linked, everything is together for him, and is part of his motion, it's all flow and it's all him, as long as he keeps it up.