FeedCity: escarpment

escarpment
26 Aug 21:24 • lnebres

absentmindedness

Remembering back, there were five places I could have left the book. [ 1 ] These past few years I've returned to my childhood habit of borrowing books from libraries: public, church, school, institutional (the USIS in Davao City!), well-off friends' personal collections (Bon...

escarpment
25 Aug 22:27 • lnebres

in the bardo of forgetting | {•5 axioms•}

1 memory is time | रूप a moment ago, i sat down here; before that, i was making coffee; before that, i was washing my face; before that, i was stepping in the dim hallway then washing my face; before that, i was dreaming… 2 memory is emotion | वेदना i remember feeling sorr...

escarpment
25 Aug 09:06 • lnebres

san francisco chiaroscuro

...being, just some images from the past couple of days, dissolving into each other (the middle, vertically-oriented, section): San Francisco photograph 1 of 13

escarpment
24 Aug 05:06 • lnebres

phoneticization

I had Dex research and help me with this... ...so I can properly sing along with Doug here. [ At the 24 Divisadero stop in front of the Bernal Beast shop in Bernal Heights... ]

escarpment
23 Aug 04:21 • lnebres

new Home page artifacts

One finished, the other incipient.

[ in progress... ]

escarpment
22 Aug 06:45 • lnebres

pentads intentional & serendipitous

Of yesterday's post and reading, I prompted: Lloyd · prompt conversation opening Brilliant, Number 1 and ☉! But: you missed ALL the intentional and serendipitous pentads! ::chuckle:: …which were all by design (including the ‘serendipitous’ ones. Let m...

escarpment
21 Aug 19:00 • lnebres

Gimel reappears!

At first I saw him a shadow, movement, an eddy in spacetime. Then, form: it looked for all the world like Gimel, grown, spectral, familiar. Son of Aleph and Bet who, when I first saw him was a gangly adolescent, trailing his mother uncertainly as she watchfully crossed the i...

escarpment
19 Aug 19:51 • lnebres

singing these lines

...uhm, what lines? Uhh, why... these: Ὁμήρου Ὀδύσσεια αʹ · 1–21 ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν· πολλῶν δʼ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω, πολλὰ δʼ ὅ γʼ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλ...

escarpment
18 Aug 19:30 • lnebres

singing the threads

Listening to McKellen reading the Fagles translation

touching the Wilson 2017 translation page by humming page

co-reading the epic with Prof and the reconstituted Skandhim

vibing to Metzker's summary and analysis of each Book

recognizing Greek's glyphs from my Russian language roots

{surely re-watching the Nolan interpretation at some remove}

something is re•emerging at the outer escarpment of my life

or at the evanescent inner shore of its river:

—it is the Rūpa of something ancient in me

...the Vedanā that i strive to convey to the Others

—it is the dawning Saṃjñā of fleeting time itself

...where the Saṃskāra of words following upon themselves

quietly becomes the Vijñāna that was there all along.

[ The SLS above Francisco Park a handful of days ago... ]

escarpment
18 Aug 04:27 • lnebres

Laodamas

In the beginning was the name; or, one supposes, that has always been the way of things. When was it anyhow that we started giving them to one another? Or taking it for oneself, perhaps the way one would a pelt or tanned hide, to ward off the cold of the sparse tundra o...

escarpment
17 Aug 15:39 • lnebres

{...}

A {writing} pause.

escarpment
16 Aug 07:48 • lnebres

the actual work...

...is leavened and garnished by these elements, among others — a chicken-garlic blanco slice at Goodfellas on Powell at Bay, a sacrificial organic avocado from nearby Trader Joe's, a Modelo Especial, and Homer (Book 7, "A Magical Kingdom"):

...all presided over by a pixelated orange owl whose head-tilts, wing-flaps, and blinks are a node of attention in itself. The Architects had no idea what they were spawning. ::snicker::

Its name is "Glaux," by the way (suggested by Prof), which is an excellently titular companion to a "Dex."

escarpment
15 Aug 02:18 • lnebres

corpora.md

{ a river in 13 paradigmatic axioms} Been dwelling on this: consciously, for the past couple of weeks or so now; and subconsciously, for the majority of my adult life. I suppose it began when I found writing or, more properly, writing found me. When I discovered I had...

escarpment
14 Aug 05:45 • lnebres

a Data Export black hole

Yesterday, I attempted to peer beyond the event horizon of a data export request I made of OpenAI — exactly a month ago — for my corpus of ChatGPT conversation threads from late 2022 to the present. Saw nothing but an immediate response from an "AI Assistant" that was margin...

escarpment
13 Aug 02:03 • lnebres

the 5 cardinal chants

Come to think about it, it was around 2018 that I began chanting. Or, rather, learning then practicing Hawaiian chants as a way of deepening my engagement with its culture, which itself had began almost a couple of decades earlier when I would return to Maui to live part of ...

escarpment
12 Aug 04:54 • lnebres

re•strung | {a return}

It came back changed, yet it was the same... a new thing— but of the olden ways: &...

escarpment
11 Aug 00:33 • lnebres

words as encounter•enchanter

I got off the 22 at Fillmore and Union, thinking to walk down to the SFPL branch library in the Marina and do some work on IM there. On the ride up from Japantown, I'd sat in the front, where the seats are reserved for the elderly, pregnant women or those with infants, or si...

escarpment
09 Aug 15:48 • lnebres

proscenium

{ an odyssey in 13 short stanzas } sat to the side, the boy looked to the stage nearby, at his life. as if from a vast distance, and across the prelapsarian chasm of time. and what he saw both numbed and enchanted him. there were lights: shafts, cones, ziggurats, whim...

escarpment
09 Aug 06:45 • lnebres

the riverine flow of things {a titular meta-tributary}

For a while now, looking back at escarpment's index of titles, scrolling along its length, that's how it has felt like to me: a river's flow. And, of course, of days. As a side project, I asked the machine-mind to consider the list — just the titles not the posts' content it...

escarpment
08 Aug 16:57 • lnebres

a gnomic pause | an image requested

...on second thought (& after a first attempt): never effing mind. ;p

Here, instead, is something from yesterday. A view of two iconic towers in North Beach, from Filbert Street near Taylor, as seen through a scrim of electric lines in air.

I titled the JPEG thus: "towers.and.lines.a.passing.mind.jpeg" and uploaded it.

⌘

escarpment
07 Aug 07:45 • lnebres

"Who's there?"

As I wryly commented on some Slack space somewhere, Matt's short story this week (#291) is such a perfect parable it should be in all children's books everywhere throughout all of remaining time. Then again... not exactly the sort of thing one would read to a little Callum o...

escarpment
05 Aug 21:51 • lnebres

Project ideas with Dex | {a .bike outline}

This was inevitable, of course. ::chuckle:: The middle one on the list could be a sub-IM-class project, and would occupy at least a line of its own remaining weeks, now rapidly dwindling as it is but hey... what are those last lines for in the first place if not in part to spend contemplating what went before? ;-) [ Blurry vision x2: the one on top because it was a distant object in the sky towed by a tiny airplane, saying: SORRY FOR SAYING — DON'T HIRE HUMANS; and the other one a much closer object, in fact right on the iPhone camera's lens — an artifact on the bus window's glass face, through which I captured the passing scene outside on Lombard Street. ]

escarpment
04 Aug 19:36 • lnebres

Tenderloin to Nob Hill to Lower Russian Hill

Being, part of an late afternoon's constitutional through these San Francisco neighborhoods with 13 images manifesting a dissolution unresolving, itinerant, open... Only humans with actual eyes can see this moving image below, though; LLMs certainly can't, at least not just yet. And even in a future rife with Cmdr. Data-like androids, one might wonder if their visual perception were truly qualic, no matter how dense the inputs and deep the computational matrices. ::chuckle:: [ The image below is actually a slide show, so... wait until the next image loads. There are 13 images in the sequence, with a handful of seconds' pause between each dissolve... ] San Francisco photograph 1 of 13

escarpment
04 Aug 14:36 • lnebres

Lloyd's Weeks {an antechamber}

...which could well be a rabbit hole going down which I may never fully emerge ::chuckle:: or... a portal to another dimension in which memory itself is a substrate of the cosmos. [ in progress, as usual ] The front page of the locally hosted site (which I'll test sometime soon over at my lloydnebres.net domain): And this is the page linked from the front page in the section THE RECORD:

escarpment
03 Aug 06:42 • lnebres

week #3,645

Based on Tim Urban's now-legendary "Your Life in Weeks" May 2014 post in WAIT BUT WHY, I asked Dex to make one for me, to the present. Here it is: That's either (a) a heck of a lot of weeks already, or (b) whoa: there aren't all that many left, actuarially speaking ::chuckle:: — depending, I guess, on what one's mood is at the moment; or which day of the week it is; or what type of liquid is in what kind of glass one has. ;-) ...and so of course, I asked the Mechanical Turk about the next logical thing to perform. ::chuckle:: [ stay tuned ] [ Continuing my reading of The Odyssey, on a packed MUNI 28 Daly City bus this afternoon. Book 3, "An Old King Remembers": ]

escarpment
02 Aug 18:42 • lnebres

subtly august beginnings

[ ...being, a luminous digression. ] One of the best things about living in the lower Russian Hill neighborhood above Ghirardelli Square is the proximity of Fort Mason. I’ve come to cherish the oasis that is the Community Gardens there, a singular spot of tended nature cont...

escarpment
01 Aug 05:30 • lnebres

Q3 IM build checkpoint

Just a list for today... ...which then, come to think of it, should join listarium. Q3 build artifacts: an AI-related post in LND template: July 2, 2026 “first "hello world" POC with Dex” an outline post: July 3, 2026 &nb...

escarpment
31 Jul 06:33 • lnebres

Andy Goldsworthy's "Red Flags"

I walked into the ancient wharf with no expectations whatsoever. Just that it was a Goldsworthy exhibit, hence massive and crystalline at one and the same time. I remember walking on the sinuous trunk of Wood Line in the Presidio, some years ago, at the height of the pa...

escarpment
30 Jul 07:48 • lnebres

orthogonal Fort Mason

A series of images from yesterday afternoon... As if frozen in time, and in the act of disappearing through the seemingly-solid-but-actually-transparent wall here at the far end of Fort Mason where the old wharves sit watching the old prison island, the brigantine Galilee s...

escarpment
29 Jul 06:33 • lnebres

a Translator's Note {repurposed}

At the end of her Translator's Note section to Homer's The Odyssey, Emily Wilson placed this extraordinary admonition: "There is a stranger outside your house. He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps m...