It was evening all afternoon

The eighth Tropical Depression periodic digest post

May 18, 2023

Here’s your eighth periodic digest post reviewing the last few entries and tossing in some recommendations, tidbits, etc.

Vibrations from behind the Iron Curtain

I really dig this album, Discophonia, by Argo. Released in Lithuania in 1981, that’s more or less all I know (strong album cover). Although someone keeps whispering the word “disco” as the album opens, this is not disco. Moody and groovy, for me it conjures a shy guy dancing with subtle movements of the shoulders and knees to avoid too much awkward small talk at a clandestine party in a vast warehouse.

Then my life became risky

Speaking of David Berman, when I first started drafting that post on him, I found this:

So there you go. I’ll spare you rabbit hole that followed, but this is an image that will stick with me:

IMHO

Recommendations: a poem, a podcast, a novella, a novel, a film.

FYI

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

Ghost stories

From an interview with AI researcher Meredith Whittaker in Fast Company magazine:

FC: So, we shouldn’t be worried that AI will come to life and wipe out humanity?
MW: I don’t think there’s any evidence that large machine learning models—that rely on huge amounts of surveillance data and the concentrated computational infrastructure that only a handful of corporations control—have the spark of consciousness.
We can still unplug the servers, the data centers can flood as the climate encroaches, we can run out of the water to cool the data centers, the surveillance pipelines can melt as the climate becomes more erratic and less hospitable.
I think we need to dig into what is happening here, which is that, when faced with a system that presents itself as a listening, eager interlocutor that’s hearing us and responding to us, that we seem to fall into a kind of trance in relation to these systems, and almost counterfactually engage in some kind of wish fulfillment: thinking that they’re human, and there’s someone there listening to us. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you’re telling ghost stories, something with a lot of emotional weight, and suddenly everybody is terrified and reacting to it. And it becomes hard to disbelieve.

NBA Playoffs

I went five for eight in my first-round predictions, which is maybe the worst I’ve ever done. In addition to me making bad predictions, I’d say that shows how much more parity there is in the league than in the recent past. The playoffs are more unpredictable and there’s more variance; that’s been true for a couple years now and seems to be getting more pronounced. That makes for good viewing overall, I think, though there can be something special about two absolutely elite teams squaring off. These later rounds are fantastic but I think the level of play is probably a bit lower. Or maybe a better way to put it is that certain weaknesses are less exploitable because all four of these teams have more significant weaknesses and gaps than the superteams of the recent past. My guess is that any of the top three teams in 2016 or 2017 would have blown the doors off of any of the remaining teams this year. I thought that Jokić’s lack of mobility on defense would become an issue this year—and it still might if he has to go against the Celtics—but the truth is that there just isn’t a team like, say, the 73-win Warriors (so even before Durant) that could make a weakness like that totally untenable in a seven-game series. In any event, these trends will accelerate with the new Collective Bargaining Agreement.

All that said, the unpredictability and drama feel like a net positive and the quality of play is still quite high. I keep telling myself I’ll go to bed early, but then wind up staying up late to finish a game.

My predictions for the second round went a little better, three out of four—I was too much of a believer in the disastrously thin Suns! My guesses for this round—Celtics in 7, Lakers in 6—are already looking shaky. But predictions are made to be wrong.

A few of my favorite things in the playoffs so far:

I already thought this before the playoffs started, but if you want to win a championship, Jimmy Butler has proved himself a no-doubt top ten player in the NBA. Energy is a talent, hard to quantify, but it is Butler’s unique, otherworldly skill. Scouts’ reliance on a metaphor (a player’s “motor”) suggests that it’s hard to pin down ahead of time. Lots of players play full-throttle; Jimmy is different. His two-way play as a go-to guy on offense and shut-down defender on elite scorers—with heavy minutes and enough in the tank to be a closer—has to represent one of the best displays of endurance in the history of the game.
My brain simply can’t compute how unstoppable an offensive force Jalen Brunson has become. There is something about him—I can’t square it. Surprises me every time.
Anthony Davis hasn’t been able to fully bring it every game, but his defensive performance has been at an all-time level, easily the best on that end in the playoffs thus far. When he’s on, he’s been a kind of reverse chessmaster, dictating what the offense does with his surreal ability to threaten as a shot blocker or play disruptor across a huge section of the court. His timing, agility, and intelligence control the action as a defensive player in a way that I’ve rarely ever seen. We have frustratingly limited evidence on Bill Russell’s dominance, but it must have looked a little bit like this.
Nikola Jokić makes reads, passes, and shots that make me laugh out loud several times a game. What a delight.
Favorite role players: Gary Payton III, Bruce Brown, Austin Reaves (role player understates how good he’s been), old-man Kyle Lowry, Keegan Murray, Obi Toppin in small doses. Rob Williams has not had a great playoffs and this may not be his series, but I bet he’ll still be heard from; I would say the same about Grant Williams, but the Celtics refuse to play him for reasons I don’t understand.

Superstar

To close us out, Karen Carpenter at age eighteen in 1968 (via AV Preservation Project):

Tropical Depression