On All Hallow’s Eve, Jennifer Lucy Allan turns the cards and listens for what they reveal, tracing sonic lines across the tarot deck. From the ghostly atmospherics of William Basinski’s Wheel of Fortune, to the arcane explorations of early electronic pioneer Ruth White and Swiss krautrock mystic Walter Wegmüller, the spread unfolds in unexpected ways, its order uncertain, its juxtapositions surprising. Expect new sounds from Argentinian artist aylu, whose spiritually-charged album journeys from personal struggle to collective resistance, as well as slow-motion noise conjured by New Zealand’s drone trio Surface of the Earth.
Wendy Red Star, of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture, and land.
A Japanese firm called NTT e-Drone Technology Company Ltd has developed a drone-laser system designed to scare wild birds and other unwanted visitors away from chicken coops, as reported by tech blog Tom’s Hardware.
The quadcopter system sports a payload consisting of a laser-grid projector not unlike those chintzy Christmas light shows from 2019. When deployed, the drone automatically navigates toward unwanted nuisance animals before blasting them with a dazzling array of red and green lasers.
A YouTube teaser reel shows the NTT drone gently shooing wild boar, stags, crows, pigeons, and waterfowl away from a desired area.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
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OPERATIONS: Yesterday was something of a fail on several levels. I have to really dig in today, and will be mostly offline. STATUS: Inbox 95 trash fire, seven and a half hours sleep READING:THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jomathan Healey (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Bloomberg Daybreak Europe
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
The mancub slept in his usual spot last night, has apparently eaten today, but is now back in his hideyhole under the bedroom sofa, because he knows in his evil little soul that today is the day I have to try and give him antibiotics. He informed me yesterday that I am permitted to feed him but we are no longer friends and I should no longer look directly at his royal personage.
OPERATIONS: Given I have to give pills to a small Tasmanian Devil twice today, I don’t fancy my chances for producing much material or keeping all my fingers. STATUS: 7hrs 12m sleep, which is not an improvement. Short term memory still not working. I’ve put the Maven watch on today, as I don’t need to be across comms quite so much now everyone’s home for a bit. READING:HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+) LISTENING: Bloomberg Daybreak Weekend podcast right at this moment.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
“Schwa is a breathing companion designed to gently guide anxious bodies back to calm.
“Inspired by a therapeutic hug, where one person’s steady breath helps regulate another, Schwa offers a rhythmic rise and fall across the chest, inviting the wearer to unconsciously synchronise their breath.
“Its quiet form blends into daily life, offering support without demanding attention. When activated, it engages the body’s somatic intelligence – not through thought, but through feeling.
“Schwa creates a moment of reconnection, restoring a sense of safety and ease. It is not a crutch, but a quiet co-regulator – a companion, a breath you can lean on.”
I was greatly amused to see this design-fiction device be named Schwa. Because, yes:
Schwa is the name for the most common sound in English. It is a
weak, unstressed sound and it occurs in many words. It is often
the sound in grammar words such as articles and prepositions.
But also, if you were around in the 1990s, it means something very different. It am SCHWA:
Schwa is the undergroundconceptual artwork of Bill Barker (born 1957). Barker draws deceptively simple black and white stick figures and oblong alien ships. However, the artwork is not about the aliens: it is about how people react to the presence of the aliens and branding, and Barker uses them as a metaphor for foreign and unknown ideas. Schwa became an underground hit in the 1990s.
I had a bunch of these, way back when:
Anxiety art!
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
Assuming progress in industrial automation, humanoid robotics, artificial intelligence, and space technology continues as currently envisioned by these industries, we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.
The Moon thus transformed will come to resemble something out of science fiction concepts of planet-sized factories or Factorio—a popular video game among engineers working on these very technologies. This level of compute would effectively turn our Moon into a planet-scale supercomputer and represent a giant leap in Man’s capacity to control our destiny.
“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”
Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. “Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”
“Very long-term – at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.”
The cost of bullshit has dropped exponentially. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) – marketed as “artificial intelligence” – has created a sort of bullshit singularity: infinite bullshit at zero-cost.
