📦 S03 E01: "A Lightweight Wrapper"
life chapters, pop culture, and ai-generated art
Hey friends, happy Sunday! Drumroll please 🥁
Welcome to Season 3 of Thot's Thoughts! The time has come to grow this project and switch up the format.
For starters, I'm moving away from the monthly release. I decided on a monthly cadence early on to serve as a forcing function to make sure I actually wrote and did stuff every month. I don't think it's necessary anymore, since I've been consistently shipping this newsletter for almost a year now and I enjoy it too much to stop any time soon.
Fitting my life into neat monthly increments doesn't feel right, and that's why I'm moving more towards the notion of "life chapters" instead. An example would be a chunk of time spent in Florida for the holidays. This might span multiple months or less than one, but the general vibe of time period is the same.
Another change is that I will no longer be writing mini-posts along with my updates. I want this newsletter to serve as a lightweight wrapper around my other projects and writing, and not be content in and of itself. Though, I frequently have things I want to write about that I wouldn't consider long or well-thought out enough for full blog posts, but not ephemeral enough for Twitter. To remedy this, I've created a scratchpad on my site for this kind of content.
Here's a diagram that visually represents what I'm now trying to do. Notice that I've got large blocks for individual projects & writing, and then a newsletter sent out towards the end of the life chapter which summarizes and shares everything (including interesting things that I find) throughout the time period.
🗺 Personal Updates
I started August with a last-minute trip to Phoenix, after which I was in SF for a few weeks. I then went to Florida to spend time with family. Currently I am in Spain (Madrid) until 9/18, after which I'll be spending the rest of the month in New York City. Hit me up if you're around!
I also got Tarot reading from an unnamed psychic. It looks like I'll be going through an huge career transition within the next 6 months. 👀
My hair is reaching new heights. Crisp $10 bounty to anyone that can snap a good picture of me with a manbun.
🎨 Artifacts
Anime — I recently binged Attack on Titan (twice) and loved it so much that I wrote a blog post about anime, its origins, and what makes it so enjoyable.
Big Island Travel Journal — About a month ago, I was on Big Island, Hawaii for a week. This post is an experiment in travel writing and explores my experience, lessons learned, and some recommendations that I wish I'd had before going.
Scratchpad — Something I've not been able to figure out is how to write lightweight posts about an idea without blowing it up into a full blown blog post that consumes me for a few weeks. This is my answer to this dilemma.
Crying in H-Mart Book Review — I'll be honest. I cried multiple times reading Michelle Zauner's memoir and was sad for several days afterwards. I would recommend accompanying this book with some study of the "Diving Women" of Jeju — Mack goes into more detail in her brilliant post on the topic.
🍯 Best Finds
🎧 Joscha Bach on Lex Friedman — Joscha's two appearances on Lex's podcast have been some of the most information-dense and mind-blowing hours I've had the pleasure of listening to. Topics include free will, a formalized definition of intelligence / consciousness, the distinctions between different kinds of artificial intelligence, and the cultural context of "happiness".
✨ Wikiwand — Wikipedia is incredible, but its interface is a bit dry. Wikiwand is a Chrome (and Firefox) Extension that upgrades the user experience by converting each article into a well-formatted, aesthetic, and easy-to-read page.
👚 Worn Out —The tech bro repudiation of fashion for utilitarian purposes has always struck me as short-sided. This piece has helped put that feeling into prose in a beautiful way. It's inspired me to dive deeper into fashion in a sustainable way that allows self-expression to flourish.
🐻 Bear Nation — Spoiler, this isn't about bears. Rather, it's a fascinating exploration of the obesity epidemic and how it might be related to a diet that induces "torpor", a mammalian mechanism that is activated when bulking up for hibernation.
🎵 Happier Than Ever — I pre-emptively judged Billie Eilish and thought she just made trashy pop music. I gave her another chance after some friends with good taste and my 10 y/o sister urged me to. This album is incredible, and likely my favorite of the entire year. Highly recommend giving it a listen.
🖼 AI Art Machine — Artificial Intelligence has come quite far. The world has been blown away by the power of language models which power GPT-3 and OpenAI's Codex, but what is unbelievable to me is the ability for these models to create art. This is an AI art generator available online in a Google Collab notebook based on some open source code & models. All you need to do is input a prompt along with some other parameters and you're off to the races. Here are a few interesting things that've come out of my explorations:
"two people walking into an anime sunset"
"a jar full of rocks, pebbles, and sand in hawaii"
👋🏽 Conclusion
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of any of the links mentioned, and if you have any thoughts or ideas on the format.
You can either tweet at me or reply to this email — replies go straight to my inbox 💌
బై (see ya)
— Thot