Category: Journal

Let’s start with something good tonight. Last night, we made some country-style ribs, which are not especially rib-y, but they’re cheap and super-flavorful when cooked patiently. There’s a lot of fat, and the meat isn’t especially tender, so country-style ribs are the poster children for “low and slow”. Unfortunately, the recipe we tried last night, while aces in the flavor department, was a little to low, leaving us with grey, fatty chunklets of meat that we had no desire to eat. So, we went to the pub instead. But we did save the ribs. For lunch today, we went downstairs and finished them on a grill and…yes, this is how you want to do country-style ribs. Cooking them the previous night left them tender, or at least as tender as they get, and the grill did all kinds of good things with the fatty bits and the sauce.* Hell of a rescue of what looked like a lost cause. Speaking of lost causes, there was some good news and some bad news regarding my ongoing skin thing. On the bad side, yet another infection had taken hold so I am back on antibiotics. Hooray, compromised immune system! This isn’t new, but it also isn’t a great deal of fun and it puts one in a foul mood when you see the first symptoms and you know that the next week or two are going to be pretty lousy. However, the doctor thinks she may have come up with a good treatment. There’s a very, very new biological that is custom made for skin ailments but, unlike the others of its ilk, it doesn’t suppress the immune system. She has one other patient using this treatment and it completely cleared up their skin. There is some hope to be had there. However, you can’t simply prescribe this. I had to fill out an application, as did my doctor, and we’ll have to wait and see what the drug company and my insurance company will allow. I assume that this drug is expensive, which means that my insurance company may say “no”. We’ll know when we know, I guess. I remember when Google+ launched that the pitch was essentially “It’s like Facebook, but not Facebook.” At the time, that seemed like a reasonable thing to want from a social network. Years later, I’ve come to the conclusion that “like Facebook” isn’t what I want at all. I don’t want ads served up in a feed, or an opaque algorithm determining what it thinks I want to see. There are quite a few options out there with a variety of feature sets; surely one is a good fit. That’s a long way of saying that I’m giving the new-ish social network Vero a shot. It’s an odd little thing, in that it runs only on mobile devices and there’s no posting just text. You post links, or images, or music, or things like that, although you can add text to the post. It’s pretty sparsely populated, at least by people I know or want to follow, which is both a feature and a bug in my reckoning. I like the idea of a non-pervasive network, which means that if they get to big, I’ll have to rethink it. The fact that it’s mobile device-only seems weird at first, but I kind of like the fact that I won’t be obsessively checking it while I’m working on a proper computer. I feel like I’d be more in control of how I use it. So, we’ll see. It’s a pretty enough interface and they say the right things regarding privacy and data protection. I’m not not certain that this is the shape of a network that I want. I’ll keep you posted as events warrant. -RK * What kind of sauce should you use? Any kind you like! I have my favorites, but really, it’s about whatever flavor profile you prefer. I will say this, though: To take advantage of the high-heat grill, you really want something with a high enough sugar content to caramelize.

It’s been nice to have a few extra days off. The idea was to recharge the batteries and to cut loose on a couple of projects that I’ve been putting off. It didn’t work out that way; I have had so many things that I wanted to do I worried about how much I had to do instead of actually doing it. That’s not a productive approach. I doubt that this is one of the habits that the legendary Highly-Effective People indulge in. Of course, the specter of work was hanging over me the whole weekend* and that is a de-motivator if there ever was one. Still, at some point, I have to either stop using that as an excuse or just admit to myself that I’m not actually going to do these things and quit worrying over them. I’m sure I must have had a reason for selecting this particular panel to insert here. We watched Fight Club again the other night. It’s a really odd document of it’s time, isn’t it? The anti-consumerist slogans still have some power, but not as much as they would I would have attributed to them when I was in college. The performances are spectacular and David Fincher really knows how to shoot a movie like this. It’s just that…well, I saw a tweet a while back saying that if a guy says that Fight Club is his favorite movie, get the hell away from him. That strikes me as a pretty solid take. Heck of a movie, but what it’s saying, or, more accurately, what some people will take away from it, is not something you want to be involved with. My skin is starting to do it’s “thing” again, and none of the self-care regimens seem to be having any effect on its progress. Since the last time this happened, I wound up with MRSA, I’m having to treat each return with more respect than I have been. We’ve gone from “annoying but manageable” to “fucking scary and no permanent solution in sight”. My therapist has recommended that I meditate on it to try to discover the root cause and, while I am skeptical, it’s not like any other avenue has produced positive results. One project I made a little progress on this week was to get the gear all on the same page and playing nicely together. This turned out to be easier than I expected. The modern Korg stuff (Volca Sample, Volca Beats, and Minilogue) sync nicely and all have their own sequencers, so there was no challenge there. I’m using a Beatstep Pro to set the clock and, it had to be leaned on a little to get it to talk to the Korgs, but in the end, that worked out ok. The Beatstep also sequenced the old Korg (DW8000) and the Radio Shack MG-1, so one controller was running or at least providing the beat for five other machines. I did a little goofing on the opening riff from Radiohead’s “My Iron Lung” and it came out well. I’d have been satisfied if it had just worked, but the fact that it sounded pretty good was a bonus. For the thing I actually want to be working on, I needed some more “industrial” sounds and that took a little doing. Most of the sample packs for the Volca are aimed at trap and house music and that’s not the palette I was looking for. I wanted the sound of metal things hitting other metal things. I couldn’t find anything like that made for the Volca, but I did find this: The Warehouse by 99Sounds. Apparently, Richard Gould went to an old warehouse, smashed shit into other shit, and recorded it all. The samples are free, but they’re 24bit and my little Korg won’t have anything to do with anything that refined. I had to convert them all to 16bit, crop them and convert them to mono before loading them (there’s only 4mb of sample space on the device, so “efficiency” is the word of the day). They are, in a word, glorious. They’re exactly what I’m looking for: LoFi, crunchy, glitchy fragments of the sounds of violent things happening to heavy objects. The Warehouse is free to download and, if this is your idea of fun, I strongly recommend it. It has been called to my attention that our nation fired tear gas into another nation to discourage refugees from attempting to cross our borders. I can’t talk about it right now, and I don’t know that I have enough context to offer an informed view, but it sure as hell seems absolutely barbaric and just confirms that, as a people, we are no longer “the good guys” (if we ever were). I’ve just finished reading Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. It’s a strange little document, a list of over 100 mythical or at least made-up creatures. It’s not exactly what I was expecting in that it’s a largely straightforward, alphabetized cyclopedia. There’s no over-arching theme, let alone a story. This was my introduction to Borges and, while I enjoyed it and intend to use it as reference, I expect it isn’t really representative of his work. Next up of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. I know absolutely nothing of O’Brien or this novel save that it was name-checked by Grant Morrison in The Invisibles. If the other works referenced by Morrison are anything to go by, I expect that this will be an unexceptional, by-the-book novel with no surprises, dark overtones, or sardonic wit. G’night all, -RK * My sister’s theory on the sense of dread of returning to work is not absolute but relative. Instead of arriving the night before returning to work regardless of whether or not it’s a weekend or a week-long vacation, the dread arrives when a certain percentage of your time off remains. So, if it’s Sunday night of a regular weekend (approximately 75% of the way through one’s time off), then, if you have a week off (9 days assuming weekends on either side), the dread should arrive around the middle of Friday. There’s actually quite a bit more to the theory, but this is the most useful and easily-calculated part of it.

With the caveat that the myth behind the holiday is pure bullshit (which is true of more holidays than not), a day for thankfulness is a pretty solid theme for a holiday, is it not? I won’t try to list everything for which I consider myself fortunate as that might well use up all of the internet’s digital paper or however it stores all this stuff. My life is a good one so far, and while I consider myself bright, kind, and sporadically hard-working, even though these things have more to do with good fortune than any virtue on my part, so I have my parents, my family, my schools, and my friends to thank for much of what might appear innate at first glance. It will probably come as no surprise that I am most thankful for Nicole. She is everything to me and brings new delight to me on a daily basis. I’m biased, of course, in that I am still struggling to digest the feast she prepared and am beginning to doubt that I’ll ever eat again. Hell of a last meal, though. It was a very Thanksgiving-y day from start to finish. A little cleaning , a lot of cooking, as much eating as the three of us could possibly manage (Sophie joined us, which added significantly to the holiday atmosphere), a lot of recuperating, a very little cleaning, and then some more resting. Even the cats seem tuckered out after today. The only down note is that I seem to have lost the ability to make a decent loaf of bread. Everything is coming out biscotti-shaped. Seeing as I was doing pretty well a week ago, I’m not quite sure how to correct this. If I can’t figure it out, I’ll be out of things I can do with the oven. Bother. Pictured: A lousy shape for a loaf of bread. So, I hope y’all have a nice day of giving thanks for the good stuff in your lives, and I hope you had more good stuff than you could remember to give thanks for. -RK

The question is: What will be the next obsolete technology to break out of the hopelessly niche category and go semi-mainstream again? When vinyl became a “thing” again, I was surprised, but, if you look at it just right, I can see the appeal. Some people are convinced it sounds better, which I don’t get, but with records, you get beautiful album art, music that’s not mastered to be as loud as possible (at least for older recordings), and…that’s about it, I guess, but that’s something. Polaroids popped back up out of nowhere and found a home in…Urban Outfitters? Ok, in modern terms it’s a camera that comes with a portable printer, which is pretty cool, and the glitchy-ness of the process gives some interesting results, so, yeah, Polaroids are pretty cool and I can see why they’d find a new market. But some of the other stuff? Cassette tapes? No thank you. Even I can tell they sound pretty lousy and there’s just no romance to them. OK, you make a mix tape. Well done! Hardly anyone can play it back, so unless you’re carrying a jam box around, I don’t see much point. And VHS? Yes, VHS is seeing something of a resurgence for reasons that absolutely baffle me. Bad audio AND video in one difficult-to-play-back package. I could go on: Flip phones and analog keyboards went from hot to not to, well, not hot, but at least back from the dead in an absurdly short span of time. Analog synthesizers used to be considered garbage; now we’ve not only gone back to analog, but modular synths are huge. I think analog wristwatches are “back”, but maybe those are just FitBits and smart watches. The fact that some pretty crummy tech is on the comeback trail leads me to believe that we’re going to see more of the same in the not-to-distant-future. So, back to the question: What’s next? What tech that we thought was dead and buried is going to make a surprise comeback? I have a few guesses, but that’s really all they are: CRT Monitors Super 8 Film Word Processors 8 Track Dot matrix printers Printed zines I’ll be honest here: I don’t really think any of these things are the right answer. It’s tough to think to things that were once popular but have been thoroughly superseded by objectively better tech that would be ripe to become popular again. It’s such an odd phenomenon, isn’t it? A little bit of nostalgia, some hip contrarianism, and maybe a little “finding a ‘thing’ to be really into because it’s arcane and needlessly complicated and interesting” and you wind up seeing records outselling digital music in 2018. A side note about the oddity of the retail side of all this: Remember when the big retailers, the nationwide chains, put all of the local mom-and-pop retailers out of business or at least reduced their numbers significantly? Sound Warehouse, Blockbuster, Borders, and their ilk looked like they’d permanently change the landscape, but it didn’t turn out they way, did it? When the market receded, it could no longer support the giants chains. They’ve all been outlasted by the indie operators. Isn’t that interesting? -RK * Next Sunday, AD

I have more electronic computing devices than I probably need: A couple of desktops*, several laptops, and really good phone and a janky one for backup. I don’t have any tablets, and there’s a reason for that. While I have a specific use for each of the other devices, I can’t see how a tablet fits any requirements I have. A tablet would sit between the phone and a laptop, but not improve on either one, or, at least, not enough so to justify adding one to my constellation. I bring this up because I’m starting to think of social media in a similar way. Each platform should fill a specific need or want; otherwise, why am I wasting my time with it? What am I using the various platforms for, what am I getting from them, and what else is there that can answer the needs that aren’t being met. Here’s the current state of play: Facebook: The only reason I’m on Facebook is that everyone is on Facebook, which means it’s the easiest way to keep in touch with, well, everyone. The fact that it is easily and routinely accessed by current and prospective employers limits the amount of candor one can (or at least should) indulge in. Similarly, the fact that everyone is there encourages you to keep the depth of interactions fair light for fear of the wrong thing reaching the wrong audience. Oh, and Facebook’s interface is painful**, it’s algorithms make it impossible to know what you’ll see when, and they are really, really fucking evil. Facebook is not a lot of fun. Twitter: Twitter, on the other hand, is tremendously fun. Brevity works to Twitter’s advantages, and the pace of it makes its memory fairly short. The depth of interactions is limited by the character limit, but it makes up for it by providing a meaningful way to interact conversationally with people of all walks of life. But…they absolutely suck at providing decent tools to deal with harassment and don’t seem to recognize the problem. Nazis like Twitter and that’s not a good thing. Instagram: Owned by Facebook, so they are just as evil according to the transitive property of evil companies. I’m a pretty light user of Instagram. I usually just post weird photos without explanation (visual vaguebooking?) and the level of interaction is minimal. It’s fine for what it is, but it’s not essential to me. Those are the only ones I’m currently using. I’ve poked around Ello, Diaspora, Mastodon, and Snapchat, but…well, honestly, they might have worked out to some degree if my attention hadn’t been so thoroughly dominated by the others. I didn’t have any urge to add another social media platform and then replicate what I was doing on the others. There’s already a ton of duplicate content: If I follow the same people on more than one platform, I get the same posts over and over (he says knowing full well he’s going to post this on Twitter and Facebook when he’s done writing this piece). Which is all a long way of getting to the question: What do I want from social media, and where can I get it? I love being able to keep in touch with geographically distant friends and family, but Facebook is a terrible way to do it; the signal to noise is just way too high. I wish I could just follow their posts via an RSS reader. I could probably cobble something together with Zapier or ITTT and it might be worth it. It’d be a lot easier to avoid checking FB constantly if I knew I was getting the feeds I really wanted over RSS. In truth, I could probably force FB and/or Twitter to do what I want and interact more deeply with a pretty tight group of people. Both platforms discourage that kind of usage by making it a royal pain in the ass to set that up, but it’s doable. Of course, ideally, you wouldn’t have to jump through hoops to make it do what you want it to do, would you? So…no answers tonight. I’m still just trying to figure out. If anyone has any suggestions for networks with really good privacy controls, good text handling (as opposed to being optimized for images/videos), and that isn’t a graveyard, I’m all ears. Even if it’s something I’ve looked at in the past, I’m willing to give platforms another shot…once I figure out what I want. G’night, -RK * Laptops get a lot of grief for being misnamed, but when is the last time you saw a desktop computer sitting on a desk? ** Would it kill them to have a way to find what you were just looking at before you reload the page or it scrolls down or you click on a link and then try to use the back button, only to find yourself looking at completely different stories? The unpredictability of the interface’s behavior is inexcusable this late in the game.

Warren Ellis posted today on his morning.computer blog about his search for some widget or combination of tools that would, and I am paraphrasing, give him the functionality of some of the old-school blogging sites. As a long-time LiveJournal user, I remember the charming status/mood boxes and the way the site acted more like an online diary than anything we see these days. Jenny Lawson, the Bloggess herself, took time out to ask people to link their blogs as a show of support for this fading and/or resurgent form of expression. She was spurred to do this by an article discussing writers returning to blogging after having moved on to other things. [In this space I wrote a plausible explanation for why blogs evolved into social media and how the growing ubiquity of having an online presence changed the nature of what people wrote online, but it wasn’t what I wanted to discuss today, so I’m saving it for later. You’re welcome.] It’s something that’s been on my mind as well. The old LIveJournal blog model was more suited to personal expression than anything social media has to offer (and I understand that this was not an unmixed blessing). It was, at least for me, a way to share a lot with a limited audience which I could control (privacy tools were much, much better than anything Facebook offers) as opposed to sharing a facet of a persona that has to be somewhat curated in the event that a future employer stumbles across it. I really do miss the silly quizzes, the proto-memes, the just sitting down and writing about what I’m doing and feeling right now. I feel like this is part of whatever it is that both Ellis and Lawson are describing. The “status page”, which in the wrong hands (say, mine) would be horribly self-indulgent but could also be a lot of fun.* In fact, I’ve been messing with that a little. Over on Fill In The Blank, I made of list of “facts about me expressed as musical genres”, which ticks both the “self-indulgent” and “fun” boxes. At least, it was fun for me. I’m less convinced that it’s of any interest to a general audience but that is precisely the difference between old blogs and social media, isn’t it? It’s the audience, and the awareness thereof. Anyway, this is more of a “Wow, there are things about the old way that were pretty cool” post than a prediction that blogging will be a big thing. Even if it were to become more popular, the lay of the land is so different now that I don’t think it would ever serve the same function. So it goes. -RK * Way back in the early days of email, the company I was with used an messaging platform called GroupWise that was dodgy as hell, but it had these marvelous template which could be customized to a dangerous degree. I built my own that had drop down lists for my current mood, what I was listening to, and other highly unprofessional things of that sort. I remember teaching one of our newer employees how to build a template, but instead of creating her own, she changed the company default template and added some highly inappropriate features to it. I don’t remember how we weaseled out of that one, but I was with the company for another ten years, so the cover story must have been convincing.

Today’s been one of those days that doesn’t feel like it’s anything other than a placeholder between other days. I think I’m a little under the weather, or maybe I was just ridiculously dehydrated. Either way, my equilibrium isn’t functioning at 100% and that means I’ve done a whole fistful of nothing today. I’m about to embark on two projects, so I’m pulling in my sails a little so I can fence off some time to work on them. I’ve cut back on participation in social media and even installed one of those hateful nagging apps that will block certain sites (in my case, Facebook and Twitter) if I’m spending more than ten minutes a day on them. I’ve uninstalled a couple of games from my phone as well since they’re most go-to time wasters when I’m facing something I’m not prepared to face. To get myself in the mood, I’ve been re-reading Warren Ellis’ Planetary, which might as well be scripture to me. I’ve been listening to early Radiohead and George Harrison solo albums and trying to get my head in the space it needs to be. I’m not trying to be cool and be provocatively vague about what I’m doing; I just don’t want to go into too much detail before I’ve even started because my record of finishing thing isn’t great and the things I do finish are often vastly different than what they were intended to be. So, this one’s probably more for me than for anyone else, and I’m not sure how much value it has in the light. As a Christmas icon once say: “They can’t all be winners, kid.” -RK

Howdy, These remain difficult times, and are likely to for quite a while now. I simply don’t have enough in the tank to rage against all that is wrong with the current state of affairs, so I thought I’d share a few things that make me happy, or distract me, or are just interesting. In case you were wondering, the image above has nothing to do with any of this. It just made me smile. The Crafsman If there is one thing on this list you check out, make it The Crafsman’s YouTube channel (linked above). The Crafsman, as you might imagine, makes videos about making crafts, but that description seriously undersells the appeal. He’s often compared to Bob Ross or Mr. Rogers because he’s got a wonderful, gentle voice and he’s relentlessly positive, but The Crafsman doesn’t really sound like either of them. His videos are genuinely informative and a delight to listen to. I cannot recommend him highly enough. Welcome to Night Vale WTNV has perhaps the easiest elevator pitch in the history of podcasts: H.P. Lovecraft meets NPR. If that description appeals to you, then go check it out right now. If it doesn’t? Then we’re just wired differently, I guess. WTNV at its best is gently weird and weirdly hilarious. The voice of WTNV is Cecil Baldwin, and I’m not sure it would work without him. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to. Q.I. Q.I. is a panel show hosted by Stephen Fry featuring four other comedians discussing trivia and general knowledge in the silliest way possible. It’s ostensibly a game show, although the scoring format is more about providing interesting answers (“Q.I.” stands for “quite interesting”) than obvious ones (which are almost always incorrect, anyway). No one skips from highbrow wordplay to vulgar puns as easily as Fry, but the guests make a game effort at keeping up. Keen shoes Comfortable and indestructible. They ain’t pretty. They’re not especially cheap. But if you want a shoe what will last you for a decade of hiking on rocks, or snow, or water, or whatever weird thing the universe throws at you, this is the only choice. Project Fi Ugh, Google, am I right? I’m not a big fan of the privacy-destroying monolith that seems to have its fingers in every aspect of my life. But, I will tell you this: Project Fi is the best cell phone service I’ve ever used. They have a “virtual SIM” thingie that allows them to use the best signal available from four different networks, so you will have signal in abundance. It’s cheap, too. My average bill is under $40 a month (it’s a pay-as-you-use-it plan, but with pretty generous terms). You do have to use one of only six phones, but there are some really good ones available. Korg Volcas (You have to scroll down a little to get to the Volca series.) These innocent little boxes, about the size of a Stylophone, are some serious kit for making music at very low prices. I have the Beats and the Sample and paid under $100 each for ‘em used. They’re not as powerful as some of the computer-based drum machines and synths, but there’s a tremendous satisfaction in twiddling with the knobs and getting crazy good sounds. I could talk for days about how fun they are and how they’re built to work together and with the Minilogue, but honestly? If you’re into making music, you really ought to get your hands on some of these. The value-to-fun ratio is off the charts. The Wicked + The Divine This comic, by Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen, is the pop-art masterpiece of the decade. It’s not my favorite book by this team (that would be Phonogram), but it’s the best and the most ambitious by a wide margin. Every ninety years, twelve young people become gods, manifestations of one or another ancient deity. It’s a (mostly) different mix every time through. After two years, they die. No one really knows why. That’s the setup. It’s a high-wire act from start to finish and…no, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Just enjoy the ride. The Battle of Polytopia This is a little 4x game for mobile devices. I downloaded it last February and immediately thought “Gee, this is way too simple to be interesting.” Danged if I’m not still playing it regularly. It doesn’t take terribly long to play, and the basics are super easy to pick up, but there are a ton of subtle wrinkles that give it an absurd amount of replay value. I love honing strategies to a fine edge, though, so your mileage may vary. Office Master Sit To Stand Work Stool Not the catchiest name, is it? After several decades of working in an office, my back was starting to feel the strain. I did a little testing and determined that I was most comfortable in a not-quite-standing position, with my butt on an angled stool and my legs still supporting some of the weight. I tried this with some conventional bar stools and, um, I broke a lot of conventional bar stools since the weight was all at the front of the saddle. I found this sucker online and it was exactly what I needed. People look at me funny now (I mean, they did anyway, but you get the idea), but I haven’t had any back pain from sitting in four years now. Yaupon This one’s a life-saver. I had to cut down on my coffee consumption, but I wasn’t going to completely give up on caffeine because, well, because I like caffeine. I didn’t even know what yaupon was before I tried it at the farmer’s market. I tasted a sample out of pity, but holy smokes, it’s good. It tastes like tea but without any of the bitterness, much the way cold brew tastes like drip coffee without the acid. It’s local, it’s sustainable, and it’s the only north American plant that has caffeine in it. You owe it to yourself to try it. That’s it for now, because ten seems like a nice number to stop on. I just wanted to share some of the things that I like, that work for me, and make me happy. I hope one or two of them appeal to…

This week has been terrible. The political scene is awful, there have been too many shootings (meaning “greater than none”), I have member of my family who are unwell and unlikely to get better, the owner of my favorite soccer team died in a helicopter crash…there just hasn’t been much to talk about that isn’t either sad or outrageous. But…when we were cleaning out our storage room at the apartment, we decided to toss the old 10 gallon snail tank. It had been empty for about 6 months, but there were still bit of dirt and snail poop in it. When I was about to toss it into the chute, I found a tiny snail shell that had been lodged in a crevasse. It felt thin and dry and very worrying. So, I took the shell back to our apartment, but the shell in a little ramekin, and added a little bit of water because you just never know with snails. They’re tougher than you’d think sometimes. And, wouldn’t you know it, the little gastropod came right out: I felt better about this one little fighter’s survival than I have about anything I’ve done at work in years. I don’t know what that means, but I’m just grinning ear to ear over this snail. Most of the lettuce leaf got monched and they’ve joined the other snails in the big tank for what we hope will be a long and happy life, inasmuch as the term “happy” applies to snails (and I like to think that it does). In other snail-related news, we’re having a pets-in-costumes contest at the office this week. There aren’t many off-the-rack snail costumes out there, so my limited crafting abilities were put to the test. Plus, getting a snail to pose for a photo isn’t a sure thing, but fortunately, Baby Blink was up to the task: I’m reasonably sure we won’t win the contest, but a lot of people got to see our lovely Blink being a show off and I’m happy enough with that. Snails are such good little critters. They don’t harm anyone, they get along with each other, and there’s something very peaceful about the slow pace at which they live. When people can’t be bothered to be decent to each other, and when horrible things are happening to people you care about, spending a little time with snails takes some of the edge off. -RK

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness is one of the most ambitious 200-page books I’ve ever encountered. It’s fascinating, eye-opening, and a little frustrating. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher (please don’t stop reading now, he’s not that kind of philosopher) with a strong background in science who’s given us a book that is about the evolution of consciousness, the various theories of how to determine whether or not a creature in fact has consciousness, and how all of this applies to the octopus. The frustrating part is that there’s no way to cover all of that ground sufficiently to satisfy my curiosity in just 200 pages. The evolution of nervous systems and the theories as to how, where, and why consciousness arose are the meat and bones of the book. We’re reasonably certain now that cetaceans and birds exhibit behavior that indicates consciousness, but in terms of evolution, they’re all pretty close to where we are on the tree. All of the chordate nervous systems evolved in much the same way, so as unknowable as crows and whales are to us, they not put together that differently than we are. That brings us to the octopus. Their branch of the evolutionary tree of life diverged from us quite some time ago. Their nervous systems, which are incredibly extensive, are nothing like our own. Nonetheless, the octopus behaves in ways that indicate consciousness. When you’re face to face with an octopus, you’re as close to encountering an alien mind as you’re ever likely to come. The cuttlefish also gets a good deal of time in the book. They’re a relative of the octopus, and their behavior is perhaps less indicative of consciousness, but there’s enough there to leave the question open. And here’s the weird thing: The cuttlefish nervous system evolved completely separately from that of the octopus. So these unusual, extensive nervous systems evolved separately three times: In chordates, in the octopus, and in the cuttlefish. Would I recommend the book? Oh hell yes I would. If you’re remotely interested in any of the subjects touched on above, you’ll probably love it. Just understand that it will likely leave you feeling unsatisfied in that you’ll want to know more about pretty much every subject Godfrey-Smith touches on. Also, if you’re anything like me, you won’t feel so good about eating octopus. -RK