//BNJMN (8/12/19): Watching that show, ‘Shitt’s Creek’, and they’re making fun of cheese balls and I’m here to say cheese balls are awesome and not liking them is a crime.

//BNJMN (8/9/19): When Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel invented his fancy explosive ammunition in 1784, I wonder if he intended his family name to be synonymous with death and destruction two centuries later, or if that was just considered a perk

//BNJMN (8/3/19): Is eating an apple sexy?

//BNJMN (8/1/19): Ok y’all, listen up. There’s a better way to eat cheese sticks.

Here’s the game—heat up some water on the stove, put the cheese sticks in the water (still wrapped), wait until the cheese has melted.

Then cut off an end and slurp that mozza into your face like it’s gogurt.

//BNJMN (7/30/19): I’ve become a person who listens the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat all day like its 2015.

//BNJMN (7/29/19): I don’t used inDesign often, but every time I do, it feels like I’ve been transported to this uncanny alternate dimension of Illustrator, where everything is stuck in the Middle Ages, but where they have multiple page documents.

//BNJMN (7/26/19): Cool thing about libraries—sometimes they have private rooms you can reserve for literally free!

//BNJMN (7/25/19): DNS stuff is one of the most frustrating aspects of web development for me, because it’s one of the few things where you don’t get immediate feedback, and it’s not something I deal with frequently enough to feel like I have deep expertise.

//BNJMN (7/25/19): Last night, prepping a walnut dresser for restoration, the mineral spirits I was using dried out the skin on my right thumb so badly that TouchID no longer recognizes me and it’s a living nightmare!

//BNJMN (7/23/19): Ok, hear me out– I think Donald Trump and Borris Johnson ascendeding to become chief executives of a country is good evidence David Foster Wallace has taken over as cosmic script writer and it’s gonna be post-mordern farce from here on out.

//BNJMN (7/22/19): I’ve been slowly working through this book “Being Ecological” by Timothy Morton and there is one particular concept that I’ve been chewing on.

The idea is this: we are familiar with the idea that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but there are times when the opposite is true. Sometimes a whole is less the sum of its parts. Maybe much less than the sum of its parts even.

I’m still thinking about the idea, but a particularly visceral, easy to access illustration of this is the example of the holocaust. The holocaust was horrible and it’s easy to say it was horrible. But what’s not easy is going through the list of the 8 million odd people who were murdered, one by one, and say that each murder was horrible. It would take days or weeks or months.

As an aggregate, the crime of the holocaust was just one thing—an operation to purify Germany of undesirables—but it was made up of 8 million murders, each of which is in some ways just as evil as the idea of the holocaust itself as a whole. You can tell that this is true because if we lived in a world where only 4 million were killed in the holocaust, we wouldn’t think the holocaust was any less evil. Its evilness is maxed out. The whole is less then the sum of its parts.

This isn’t to say that the concept “holocaust” isn’t useful and necessary, but the process of bundling it into existence inherently diminishes the actual total of the things the holocaust refers to.

I kind of hate this particular example, because it seems so trite, but it’s a pattern that applies to anything with scale, and the interesting thing is that literally everything has scale when you consider the number of things it’s made of.

The one area I’m still trying to understand how this fits in is when emergence happens—that is to say when a system of small things work together and are defined by the effect that they create. Is the sum of the cells in the human brain larger than a consciousness? Is the sum of the individuals in a culture greater than the culture itself? I’m not really sure.

//BNJMN (7/21/19): I’m finally getting around to listening to the Hamilton cast album. It’s really good…shocker. The guy who plays King George is so good.