Knowing what is subtly false
Five fragments for the week of July 21, 2025
Hello from the last stretch of July. It’s starting to feel like fall is around the corner. It’s been misting in San Francisco and my son declared he’d hired the rain.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
Drawing on all these influences, [Shigetaka] Kurita designed 176 lively monochromatic icons with the intention of using them in Docomo’s new I-mode system. Pixelated faces vied for space with thunder clouds, cartoonish bombs, astrological symbols, no-smoking signs, and gibbous moons. There were planes, trains, and automobiles, Fans of manga and anime would have recognized sweat drops, pulsing veins, love hearts, and lightbulbs. Kurita’s icons were a microcosm of Japanese life and culture.
– Keith Houston, Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, July 1, 2025. Tugging on last week’s thread of discovering Houston’s body of work, I started reading his latest book on emoji. Kurita’s icon set was long thought to be the first emoji set, but Houston points to this post by Matt Sephton that complicates the story.
At my gym they say, you’re not here to do reps. You’re not even here to lift weights. You are here to exhaust your muscles, as efficiently as possible, so your body understands very clearly that it’s time to get stronger.
– Robin Sloan, “The golden door,” September 2024. I followed a link from Robin’s summer book sale, a treat in itself, to this newsletter edition from the fall that I somehow missed. He’s got me sold on trying this style of strength training (a fuzzy, descriptive search via LLM pointed me in the direction of this spot in SF). I want the fibers of my being to understand what it’s time for.
Knowing what is subtly false will only become increasingly useful
– Kojo Osei on X, July 18, 2025. An observation in response to Carmen Gutierrez’s note that “in the CS department, too, after GPT was released many tests began including false ‘proofs’ we had to dissect.” Miss you two!
The structure was inspired by The KLF’s 1990 album Chill Out – a concept album written as a sonic journal to document the band’s road trip across America. Yotto says Erased Dreams is structured like a journal, too, and acts as a documentation of his inner workings and sentiments during the lockdown. So it makes sense that an overarching theme is one of repetition and continuity. “I bought a guitar, which I had no idea how to play,” Yotto says. “So I started messing around with pedals and stuff, trying to see how far I can stretch one sound, so a lot of the album comes from me trying to make endless sounds from different sources.”
– Ricky L. Potts, “Yotto to release his first ambient studio album ‘Erased Dreams,’” June 2022. Came across this album in my Spotify travels and found it arresting, so went looking for the backstory. I’m always touched to come across the art made during lockdown…also, it now occurs to me, the last clear “before” moment of the before-and-after of LLM-era art.
imagine devil/angel airpods, each side connected to a different AI model
– Kelin on X, July 16, 2025. One half of Poetry Camera. Imagine!
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com