Worms are blessed animals in my eyes. For a while I got a little obsessed with worms as the ideal bilateria; they have a very elegant layout which represents at its simplest the layout I as a human have, so I empathize with them. I too know what it is like to have a nerve cord parallel with my digestive tract, so they are like sisters to me. Mealworms in specific I think about a lot less, except in the context of eating insects. I'm a little concerned by the fact that mealworms are commonly proposed as a meat substitute, not because I think people eating less meat is a good thing (am vegan and all), but because mealworms are so degraded in the public eye that the concept of caring about their welfare is often considered kinda laughable. Oh, and in any case, it should go without saying: I would still love you if you were one.

My favourite AI generated art was thishorsedoesnotexist.com. Sadly, like its horses, it does not exist any more. But it was truly beautiful, at the exact edge between realism and gibberish: so much of what it made was eldritch in ways I would not otherwise be able to understand. My favourite is one image which I use as a profile picture sometimes, which looks less like a horse than a set of environmental conditions combining with a horse's levitating head to produce the abstract conditions of a horse. I genuinely think it captures something about machinic production and about becoming, about how a landscape becomes horse. I sincerely think it's very beautiful; it's also less grotesque than most of the unhorses, but I find the grotesqueness of some of them beautiful as well.

This really is the single hardest question of finding decent art, in my experience. But I'm a strong believer that by far the best method is to ask other people what they find affecting. Oftentimes, just asking someone else will get you somewhere you had never thought about before, at which point you can pursue its connections with other things. Like, for example, some of my favourite pieces of "good art" are renditions of Faust. The reason I got into Faust in the first place is because I made a project of asking around among the people I knew (older people, largely) who listen to opera what their favourite operas were, because I realized I knew practically nothing about opera and how to enjoy it. That ended up introducing me to multiple pieces which have stuck with me, one of which was Dido & Aeneas, which I listen to regularly, and one of which was Gounod's Faust (which I am a defender of against Berlioz-only acolytes), which I watched a shockingly good, albeit poorly recorded, staging of with the person who's favourite it was. Then that led me to do further research into Faust and read more Fausts and end up reading some of my favourite texts. But there's no way to automate that process, or at least, not its beginnings. It's in a sense what Girard calls triangular desire: to have a mediator who initially transfigures the piece of art and invests it with significance. You have to find out what other people are in love with and find a way to be in that love with them. Then what you do from there is the easy part.

I've been thinking about this for about twelve hours now. My initial answer was of course, why not, but then I realized 500 feet is really high. For the vast majority of that distance a fall would kill you, and even if my chance of falling is only 1% (which seems generously low considering my coordination), I value my own life at more than $50,000. Logically that's also proportional, given that the increasing chance of lethality is roughly linear and the payment is linear. But obviously I am willing to climb ladders some distance, seeing as I've climbed less safe things for free. It kinda depends on the type of ladder and also how I'd be getting down, but I think under normal circumstances I could be enticed to climb a 30-foot ladder if I didn't have to worry about it toppling over, or about three storeys. But the money compared to the risk of lethality doesn't really convince me to go out of that comfort zone.

I hadn't thought about kaleidoscopes in years! I liked them quite a bit as a kid. Theoretically they're interesting in terms of the whole like, indefinite repetitions-with-a-difference of a single image. In AQ the word = 223, for 4::3, the lemur of highest pitch and also of perhaps the strangest path (41872563). I think it would be interesting to have some sort of kaleidoscopic ritual there, but I don't know what it would be. I'm sure kaleidoscopes do have artistic value and it'd probably be interesting to use the same kaleidoscope in different circumstances---different weather, different settings, different times of year---and record one's experience. Which is making me wish I had a kaleidoscope to do this with. And they do seem like they'd be a ton of fun to design, and not enormously difficult either! Cool thing to think about.