morning computer, notebooks and such

🌐 TODAY IS TUESDAY 18jun24

• Thailand on Tuesday became the first country in Southeast Asia to legalise same-sex marriage
• Ray Kurzweil focuses here on actual use cases for AI
• Trial opens of ‘esoteric’ wing of alleged German coup plotters

📡 NOTEBOOKERY

Julian Simpson on creating in notebooks:

These notebooks may hold the key to who I was and who I am now, and if there is any substantial difference between the two. As storytellers, it is drummed into us that characters must change. Must they? Have I changed? As the star of my own movie, surely I must have some kind of an arc?

A pile of notebooks on a desk. A record of a section of my life. messages from a previous version of me, messages that, until now, I have left largely unopened…

Tara Walters.

Notebook artist Jose Naranja on Satoshi Kon.

Somewhere between dystopian and historical fiction, reality and the imaginary, dreaming and waking, sits East of Noon (2024), the second feature film by the Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy. Ostensibly a film about the spirited rebellion of youth in the face of an authoritarian regime, its narrative abstraction makes it a beguiling prospect; this work, set “outside of time,” to use Elkoussy’s own words, floats in an undefined space, both temporally and geographically, yet the world it portrays is so richly detailed and specific. This contrast makes for a fascinating tension in the film—the question “Where are we?” soon gives way to “Where are we going?”