Reading 1820 Blogs Daily!


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December 12, 2024
My 2024 Year In Review from Nina Paley

First picture of 2024: my cat Lola.

Writing is painful because of everything I think, I can only get a wee little bit on the page. I want to get EVERYTHING down and instead I squeeze out 1 to 2% at best.
I procrastinated writing my 2024 Year In review for this reason. How could I do this year justice? I would forget so much.
After several hours captioning photos, I realized forgetting is the point. Only getting 1 to 2% is the point. If you want EVERYTHING, you live Life itself. If you want writing, you recognize a few ...

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November 27, 2024
Soul and Intention from Nina Paley

People assure me AI art is “soulless,” that unlike human artists AI can’t be “original.” It can only copy. This reflects a widespread misunderstanding of how human artists work: we copy, and there’s no such thing as “original.” I understood this 16 years ago. 

We draw from more or less the same pool of culture that AI does, only our pools are necessarily smaller as humans simply don’t have the capacity for exposure to as much stuff. No matter, because all works carry the influences and language — be it verbal, visual, or musical — as the works around ...

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November 24, 2024
Buried in Diamonds from Nina Paley

I have no desire to animate. Add my work to a media stream already full of fascinating hallucinations? The creativity of AI exceeds my own, with its innumerable fingers and multiple arms and morphing cat heads. Things turning into other things used to be magic worthy of hard work and years of study. Now it’s a mere artifact, a waste product generated in pursuit of the more mundane.

All my work will be forgotten, because there is so much work. Art used to be diamonds the future could sift from the dust. Now the dust is made of diamonds ...

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My Past lives on Fecebook from Nina Paley

So much of my past lives on fecebook. People who believe in more than 2 sexes; the same “scientific” and “compassionate” articles on this subject keep getting re-shared by my former friends and acquaintances. Also denunciations of Twitter and declarations of moving to Bluesky.

I feel so disconnected from my past now. Who even am I? Young me might be aghast. Every article about policy responses to “climate change” makes me scoff. You’re 20 years too late, I think. NOW you’re trying to fix it? We knew back then it would be unfixable by today, but here you ...

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August 24, 2024
A Little Poison from Nina Paley

The temptation to self-loathing, like the temptation to drink or use drugs, is social.

When women of a certain age (mine) gather, as time passes and trust develops, the conversation often turns to plastic surgery. This is a bonding ritual: a display of intimacy and offering, because plastic surgery is hidden as much as possible from the general public. Apparently it is much more widespread than a casual observer would believe. Countless women you know have “had work done.” Over wine and good food, cocktails and snacks, in comfortable living rooms and hotel bar lounges at the end of a ...

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May 6, 2024
The War of Resistance from Nina Paley

“Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

In George Orwell’s 1984, the past is altered, but war is constant; the names of the combatants are changed retroactively, but combat is continuous. 

Members of nations at war bond more tightly with their compatriots. War offers a shared dream of triumph over a common enemy. Thus, continual state of war is an effective means of social control. It doesn’t really matter who Oceania is at war with, as long as Oceania is, and always has been, at war.

1984 illustrates how supporting wars is a sucker’s game. War ...

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March 2, 2024
My Last Hospital-Administered Skyrizi Infusion from Nina Paley

$320-per-minute infusion in progress (it takes just over an hour).

What does one wear to a $20,000-a-dose drug infusion? At least one person suggested a tiara and evening gown.

Arriving at the hospital

One Skyrizi intravenous infusion dose is 600mg, or 2.1164 .21164 ounces. At $20,000 per dose that’s $9,450 $943,333 per ounce.

CORRECTION: my math was off by a factor of 10. Via JO 753 in a comment below:

“There are 28.3 gramz per ounse. 600 milligramz iz .6 gramz, so an ounse iz 47 dosez. Thats 943,333$ an ounse.

No ...

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February 15, 2024
The Autoimmune Empire: Depression from Nina Paley

Example from my wayward youth

Depression is the mind attacking itself. It’s been called a “psychic autoimmune disease.

This morning, part of me woke up asking, what can I fix?  What problem can I attack?
I know — ME!

My motives are good: what can I purify and improve? But the target is wrong.

My impulses — to fix, to cure, to control — may be overactive and delusional, just as my immune system is overactive and confused. My Crohn’s disease is treated with immunosuppressants, designed to calm down the immune system.

My mind, over time, has learned to calm down ...

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January 16, 2024
Medical Impostor Syndrome from Nina Paley

Maybe I should start concealing my hair loss with a jaunty hat!

When I was a child I wanted to be sick, because when I was sick I got to stay home from school. Sometimes I was effortlessly sick and got to stay in the oddly quiet house with its peculiar mid-day creaks and sounds and winter light through the windows and extremely lame daytime TV. But at least once I sat near the heat register before school, then asked my Mom to feel my forehead, and with grave worry she said I should stay home. SCORE! But I suffered ...

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December 13, 2023
Protected: My Former Brother from Nina Paley

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February 7, 2023
He-ing Corinna from Nina Paley

Corinna, my friend and podcast co-host, is a man to me. I don’t think it’s because I’ve been using sex-based pronouns for him, as I do for everyone. He does pass; the majority of people read him as female. When I first saw him in a video, I thought, “he passes, he’s cute.” And once I mistook him for a mom, from a distance, while he was unloading his bike parked right next to a dad unloading more bikes with his kids. I read them all as a family unit, didn’t recognize Corinna, and rode ...

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October 4, 2022
Deluded and Immature from Nina Paley

When I lived in New York, I knew two very talented and driven artists who had abandoned their children. One had left her son with her parents so she could move to NYC and pursue visual arts. The other had simply ditched his kid with his ex-wife, to devote his life to stage performance. Both told me separately (they didn’t know each other) that, had they stayed to raise their offspring, they would have killed themselves.

I always took the prospect of parenthood very seriously. I believed anyone who had a child needed to prioritize them, and if that ...

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September 27, 2021
Love Thine Enemy from Nina Paley

I hated my parents. I hated my school. I hated the cops. I hated all authority. 

I hate anything that imposes limits on me, that gets in my way.

I hate disease, I hate that death is inevitable, I hate the laws of Nature. We all do. We all hate our parents, we all hate our Mother.

What goes up must come down. Hate that!

I hate that people form mobs and go after scapegoats. I hate that I have been a scapegoat, and may be again.

Hell is other people. I hate ‘em.

I hate suffering. Life is suffering ...

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November 30, 2020
Collective Senescence from Nina Paley

When I learn a new song – something I do unconsciously, every time I am exposed to new music – is some other song erased in my memory to make room? No. I seem to have unlimited capacity for memorizing music, even as my memory is like a sieve elsewhere. How does my brain do that? Does it re-use existing pathways, or create ever-more byzantine new ones? I imagine my mind’s architecture as ever-expanding fractals, filling the same space with more and more curves and crevices.

The older I get, the more byzantine my mind’s labyrinth, all to store the ...

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August 28, 2020
My Bicycling Origin Story from Nina Paley

Athena hurling the Javelin

I’m about to hit my 5,000th bike mile for 2020, and I’m buying yet another new-to-me used obscure recumbent, a rare Easy Racers Ti Javelin. A friend in an online chatroom today asked,

Have you always been this into cycling? Or is it something you developed as an adult?

Always somewhat, but this year I’m doing it way more. I have the pandemic to thank. No travel, and I’m not spending money on anything else really, so why not. Most of my socializing is happening on rides with friends; it ...

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July 30, 2020
Witnessing a Miracle from Nina Paley

The COVID-19 pandemic is a miracle.

I mean this in the biblical sense. Biblical miracles are horrific, bringing death and destruction. The Ten Plagues of Exodus were miracles, or at least “wonders.” The miracles of Revelation are even worse.

A miracle isn’t a fluffybunny event. It is an act of God.

The COVID pandemic is a power greater than ourselves. We can’t stop it; we understand very little about it. It brings us to our knees.

I am in awe of it. I have watched humanity killing the planet my whole life, with obvious warnings of dire consequences ...

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June 25, 2020
“What is the difference between virtue signaling and actually believing in something and wanting to spread the word about it?” from Nina Paley

Last week, on various social media, I shared this brief thought:

I’m starting to find virtue signaling frightening, rather than just annoying, because virtue signalers are the same people who cancel (ie lie, denounce, and attack). Virtue signaling and cancel culture are two sides of the same increasingly troubling coin.

This led someone on fecebook to ask:

“What is the difference between virtue signalling and actually believing in something and wanting to spread the word about it? Asking seriously. I have only seen virtue signalling used as a phrase by Republicans who don’t believe in the cause being ...

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April 4, 2020
The Human Threat from Nina Paley

I’m one of those self-unemployed introverts who is adjusting quite well to our pandemic lockdown. I feel especially peaceful because forced quarantine has temporarily quieted many of the garden-variety “alpha” humans, the ones who thrive on dominating others. They have to stay at home too, and haven’t been able to conduct their usual bullying and stirring up trouble. Under “normal” circumstances, they have power over other people, and the other people just aren’t available to lord it over right now.

But that will end. I don’t dread getting sick as much as I dread what the ...

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March 31, 2020
Answers from a Pandemic from Nina Paley

100 years without a pandemic has made us stupid. It’s made me stupid, anyway.

So many questions about human nature that puzzled me, I now see answered. Why are we so tribal? Why does language change so quickly? Why are we so xenophobic – so fearful of people who look different from us even slightly?

Answer: communicable diseases.

The Andaman Islanders  had the right idea. They may or may not have known the missionary attempting to evangelize them was full of contagions that could kill them; but they had instincts, and culture, that protected them from infection.

Doesn’t it ...

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January 24, 2020
In Defense of Books from Nina Paley

A year or two ago my friend Brewster Kahle told me he had been asking people, “when is the last time you read a book? Cover to cover?” Predictably, the answers were discouraging. In the age of the Internet, people still talk about books, praise books, and condemn books; but actually reading books is rare.

When I first heard of feminist author Andrea Dworkin, in the early 1990’s, I was told she said all heterosexual sex is rape. In popular discourse, “het sex is rape” was considered the gist of her work.

Well, I could easily form an opinion ...

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