WAKE UP!!!

The news has just been so bad lately. The POTUS sadistic behavior increasingly being normalized, the patriarchy out of control with idiotic 19th century abortion laws. So I continue with all escapism, all the time.

1st, "The Light Brigade", by Kameron Hurley, 364 pages, 2019. Military fiction, way too many exploding bodies. Some good anti-corporatist verbiage:

The corps tell us each individual should reap the profits of “their” hard work. But the reality is the corps made their fortunes on the backs of laborers and soldiers paid just enough to keep them alive. The corps did not labor. Do not labor. The shareholders and upper management sit in their glass towers and drink liquor spiked with our blood. Instead of sharing that wealth with those who broke their backs to attain it, they hoard it like great dragons.

2nd, "Perihelion Summer", by Greg Egan, a fav of the last couple of decades, 154 pages, 2019. This short novel is climate fiction, but Egan's climate change mechanism is a pair of black holes traversing the solar system and elongating the earth's orbit rather than atmospheric CO2 and methane. The main plot revolves around Australians helping residents of Timor escape an unlivable summer by migrating to Antarctica.

---

The only magazine I get in hardcopy now is MIT Technology Review. The latest issue had popped up on the magazine stack - "Welcome to Climate Change".

It had 3 sections for different phases of climate destruction: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.

So much bad news. The 1st story of the "Suffering" section was horrifying, as was the final fictional piece by Paolo Bagialuppi, I tweeted my horror, and got crickets for response.

Here's the link to the Climate Apocalypse article. Here's the link to the Paolo story. Hopefully these aren't behind a paywall.

---

Yeouch, back to escapism, pronto! Luckily I picked a short story collection that was exactly what I needed: lots of bright, shiny futures. The collection was "Infinity's End", edited by Jonathan Strahan, 364 pages, 2018. I think there was only 1 story with a slightly lame ending, other that all very good work, and much, much positivity. Thanks, I needed that!

Is Music Generative?

In my submission to the "Doughnut Economics Way #8" competition, "Money is Software", I posited that language, software, and money are all generative - you can make them arbitrarily complex, without limit. You can always add another adjective or clause to a sentence. So is music also generative?

My initial thought was "No". There are limited notes in a scale, limited number of voices you can add before music becomes cacophony. But then, I thought, "Well, you can always add another guitar solo."

So I'm voting that yes, music is generative. Notes can go from a whole note (1 measure) to a 64th note, and be on or off in every 2^6 pattern. So maybe, mathematically, music is not quite as unconstrained as the other 3 examples, but, at the level of the human mind's comprehension, I posit that it can be treated as generative.