Cortrinkau's Blog

best of the internet - false spring

Ranavalona ascending the throne at the age when my friends and I were graduating college and entering the workforce. Imagine your first job being head of state...
  • The last Madagascar queen – Ranavalona III. Widowed at a young age, she became queen of Madagascar at 22, and staved off French aggression for as long as she could before Madagascar was colonized. She tried to get U.S. military support for Madagascar by sending gifts to President Grover Cleveland, but as one might expect, the US did nothing.

    I was struck by how Western her clothing is. "She was the only Malagasy sovereign to import the majority of her clothing from Paris rather than London."

  • Rubber duck isopods! (This is one I didn't learn about from the internet, but rather from a friend of mine, and yet it truly seems like a creature meant to be there.)

    • Image courtesy of Nicky Bay
  • Zebu, a species of cattle cultivated widely in South Asia, South America, and Africa. I had never heard of this animal before, but there is a whole sport where young men wrestle it.

  • Onfim, a child artist from the early Middle Ages. I find it adorable seeing how small children draw people more or less the same way, no matter what geography (or time period) they're from.












    • andrew kilgore's arkansas

    I have been hearkening for a realm beyond industrialization, a world beyond the tech-bro dystopia that my mind makes my surroundings out to be. The fantasy of hermitage, of a place "away from all that," returns frequently, and vintage photography like this goes some way towards assuaging my mood.

    The late twentieth century saw no shortage of Southern artists and free spirits who simply went off into the woods:

    "Four of us lived outside all summer and this was our kitchen. That’s my bed under the tree. We were out in the middle of nowhere, crazy hippies. Life was an experiment; everything was an experiment. My friend Brian said, ‘Hey, I’ve got eighty acres, want to live on it?’ We made a lot of beans, lots of veggies, lots of brown rice. The name Lost Dog Farm fit since there were feral dogs in the woods howling in the middle of the night."

    Yet stories like this, of adult life in a treehouse, remind me that purist escapism of this form is not in fact what I want. I like running water. I want to be part of a society, collaborating with other humans. I don't need to go off-grid or do anything extreme. I'm just looking forward to when the current AI bubble bursts, when we can find some equilibrium where people acknowledge that this flashy hype machine of simulation and lies is not, in fact, worth the price we pay.

    "We would spend days just hanging out at Lost Dog Farm completely naked, staying stoned, cooking something. We bathed in the creek. One of the things Brian wanted was to live through the day with just his natural, instinctive sense of where the day was. He didn’t want a clock. He didn’t want to measure the time; he wanted to just experience it. So, I had a clock, and if I got pissed off at him enough, I would go look at it and shout out, ‘Hey, Brian, it’s 11:42!’ and he’d stomp off. I thought it was really funny that I could get his goat that way."

    I've become the same way about mentions of AI. I don't mind time… but naive techno-optimism, at this time in history, makes anger simmer in me in just the same way. There's a deep frustration in being alone against the companywide emails, the billboards, the dogmatic voices everywhere in the industry I'm in – and yet it helps knowing my opinion is shared by the population at large, or at least my friends who have things in common with me, fellow-artists and fellow loyalists to the humanities, even when we are not allowed to say these things out loud for fear of getting fired.

    I try not to let my frustration turn me into a curmudgeon before my time. I know that it is a slow poison to remain ensconced in silent rage. And yet – I am not alone, and there is a different world to escape to. I do not need to be nearly as radical as the individuals in these stories to find some inner peace. Just spending time in nature, spending time in the company of the people dearest to me, who are non-engineers, is a healing wholesome thing.