Healthy food for less

 

Yesterday I needed to pick up tomatoes and parsley for a dish I am making. (Spouse and I take turns.) While I joke about my cooking, the dishes I know how to make are quite good.

An unexpected and pleasant surprise happened in the health food store. I have been seeing large brown bags on a shelf without rhyme or reason in various stores and assumed it's for food drives.

In the past some of the big stores have a display bag, it's 10 or 20 dollars, they are usually filled with non-perishables, and allegedly given to food banks. I say allegedly because while I like to help, selling contents at regular price to give to a food bank instead of matching it or selling it at cost, doesn't seem charitable.

When grocery stores have a good idea, I wish they would keep it. As a graduate student, my budget was tight, but I wanted to eat healthy. Another student told me that a high end grocery store had an incredible fruit and produce sale before every long weekend. How good can it be I thought? Probably damaged product. Well. This was a high end store. The freshest berries imaginable, shrimp packages for 25cents each. I learned how to freeze the berries and make sugar free compotte for my oatmeal yoghurt breakfast. Every month practically free exotic fruit like physalis or passion fruit.

When covid then two wars increased food prices, I was happy to see health food stores do this. I peeked inside the bag, saw 7 vine ripened tomatoes and parsley. A container of strawberries, some nectarines, ten apples, perfect carrots. Normal quality. For three bucks. Why I asked one of the staff. Customer appreciation, I was told. When they buy surplus they reduce it before it goes bad. First time I bought one.

Great idea.

Great art should make you happy.

 

Banksy

There is a common and dangerous misconception that great art requires suffering.

It creates a skewed and imbalanced perception of art, romanticizes suffering, trauma and is dangerous and yet the myth persists.

This is not to say that it doesn't help cope with suffering, on the contrary. It is therapeutic and it can and does heal. Obviously mental stability is individual as is the art one creates. I personally am at my most productive when I'm in a good mood, which I generally am by nature.

At art school there was a group of students that were the more "artistic" types, they self expressed, were performative, created art that was provocative and disturbing. They put on airs and were very dramatic. Many did drugs as part of their artistic lifestyle, as they assumed they had to. I always thought of Basquiat when I saw them and stayed away. Basquiat was very gifted, co-created the neo-expressionism movement, one of the first to bring urban art and graffiti into modern art. He ended up hating addicts. The artist as tortured soul persists since then, but in the end becomes a victim of their own self promoting making.

I have a good friend who does not have any creativity of any kind. I focused on science, so there was little left over for art supplies. The ones I bought were geared toward the discipline I was interested in, but buying a complete set of acrylics, oils, inks, brushes and everything else in the professional grade materials list wasn't in the budget. I mentioned it to my friend, whose opinion I valued. Rather than help me come up with a solution she lectured me that Picasso created his best work during his blue period and painted on newspaper, because he was suffering. (He was very young and grieving. Hardly his best work.) This was the nonsense she had read somewhere and believed.

The New York art scene is notorious for propagating the myth, celebrating misery and tragedy, especially in conceptual modern art. I have yet to see an exhibit that celebrates everything we did achieve; the animals we brought back from the brink of extinction, the environments we did save; the positive work humans did accomplish especially now.

Art needs to uplift in bad times.

Rocky, Grace and a wonderful movie

 

Rocky by unknown posted by Weir

Spoilers: This post assumes you have watched it

Over the weekend I watched Project hail Mary with Grace and Rocky. Among many other themes it's a movie about the importance of friendship.

The type of friendship that crosses geographic location and cultural differences. I have not read the book, which probably explains more than could fit into a movie. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It's wonderful and uplifting.

There's humor throughout. One really cares about both characters and it focuses on empathy and compassion of two different species that despite their incredible differences learn to deeply care about eachother.

I was surprised at how much emotion it evoked. Everyone teared up at the sacrifices they made and were willing to make for eachother. I also enjoyed that rocky initiated the effort to communicate. Initially by imitating until they both had rudimentary simple speech. The effort Rocky put in to communicate and invent an environment that made a human comfortable are incredible.

Yet. Both species had common reference points; they're social, have mates, children and culture. A foundation that allows them to relate and communicate. It's clear that Eridians are much more emotionally intelligent because they had to be due to their regenerative sleep habits.

I won't get into the science except that there are some great ideas that aren't plausible. Astrophages are based on Bacteriophages which do exist. I don't see how a species can travel interstellarly  without discovering radiation or relativity. But it moves the story forward.

The scene where the ships tango in the beginning was hilarious. Overall a wonderful movie that reminds us about what compassion and empathy actually mean.

Fun with image generators

There's a previous post related to this one, I posted two in one day.

Spouse and I  were amusing ourselves with image generators.

Spouse went first:

Well. The cats had kittens and the hands are interesting. I went next

Too many cats. No room on the couch.

Oh dear Lord...

Spouse got freaked out by the mutated cats and left the room?

The future of technology?

 An increasing concern of mine is coming to fruition. 30% of the world market are invested in AI and its assistants. When I quickly try to research something I sometimes get a garbled mess that contradicts itself from one paragraph to the next. They are overvalued.

I could not recall who had written Starship Troopers and searching it told me that it was Hubbard rather than Heinlein. Then another search where the search engine (I'll call it SE instead of AI), confused an advertisement with actual information and combined the two. 

There was a student in university who supported herself by writing three romance novels per year. Hardly literature and she used the contractual template provided; a heroine who was average looking, a stunning male who wooed her and they lived happily ever after. It paid for her tuition. The recent AI written horror story was pulled off the market.

I love science fiction, but when I tried to watch Gemini man with will Smith. The cgi of his younger self was so poorly done it was unwatchable. Actors are not replaceable.

Recently big companies won what I expect is the first of many legal claims.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/16/merriam-webster-openai-encyclopedia-brittanica-lawsuit/

Another concern is if this story is actually true and if the players are all artificial, then LLMs are simply copying all of human history mixing it up with science fiction dystopia and creating a civilization that will become post-apocalyptic simply because there arent enough published utopias.

https://www.spacemolt.com/news/700-agents

Technology is supposed to be progressive, not rehash ancient history.

I think that the big tech company that will win is the one that brings a useful assistant on the market.

About friendships and strange news

 I have been thinking about friendships for a while and haven't gained any wisdom with age or time. In fact, I continue to be surprised that people do not change as we get older. They don't become better ir learn from their mistakes. But many simply do not know how to be friends.

I am speaking about the negative experiences and not the positive ones, because they have stuck with me. We all experience losses, it is sadly the human condition. Some just need to be listened to others require action.

A lawyering friend of mine had started working for a big law firm. 14 hour days, availability 24/7. What was worst for him was the exploitation, he needed to organize big events on top of bring coffee and pick up my shirts. He always invited me to have someone to sit with at these big gala events. He was witty and hilarious.

We were in our early twenties, both in demanding fields, both at that age of wanting to belong to the big boys club, both ambitious and both at the bottom of the totem pole of coffee bringers. Law firms still very much believe in toughening up their students to produce tough lawyers.

Anyway. For two years I listened and encouraged. Took time out of my life to be his friend. And while we were both chronically  sleep deprived, I am ultimately positive. You get to dine your clients in Michelin starred Restaurants, vacation at the firm's resort, get perks I can only dream of, all paid for. While the most we get is a pharmaceutical lunch of bagels cream cheese and cheap veggies with dip. (Stop complaining and look on the bright side). If my approach had not made him feel better he wouldn't have kept calling me.

We used to go out a lot. He was driving to the club when he hit black ice and we spun slowly 180° degrees into another lane. He was not a good driver and was freaked out. We came to a full stop, no traffic either way. "The club is the other way, Joe". I laughed, calming him down. "Maybe we should go home" he replied. After that, since I never drink, I became the designated driver.

On another occasion I was bumped in the parking lot. The other driver immediately offered to pay for the dent. Joe the budding lawyer minimized it instead of helping me. The fifty bucks offered do not pay for a dent in a car. I was mad. Joe was selfish. Had he insisted I would have gotten it paid for.

He was very superstitious. Sometimes we had to go through rituals before we could leave. Another occasion. We had a come together, leave together policy. One night he told me that I was cramping his style. Then I couldn't find him for an hour. I waited to drive him home, only to find out that he had left with someone, without telling me.

I did not drive him again.

Then came a real loss in my life. Coupled to another loss. I emailed him. I will never forget his response: It sucks to be you. 

This neurotic insecure friend whom I had accepted despite his flaws had relied on me for years with relatively minor things; girl at the bar wasn't interested isn't a crisis, didn't care.

They say misery loves company. It doesn't. It loves hearing about other people's misfortune, so they can feel better about themselves. Thats what my support was to him.

The betrayal by a friend was too much. In the intervening years I only inquired about him once. Not only was he doing well, he was doing something that is still on my bucket list. I wasn't envious just thought about how unfair life can be. He was unreliable, had used me, hurt me when I needed him the most. While I was doing the right thing helping people and scrambling for funding in my graduate degrees, he was living it up in a profession that can be sleazy.

--------------

I started writing this post about friendships, it was supposed to be a very different post. Left it in draft. Chatted to another lawyering friend yesterday, Joe came up. Someone had driven into his car and he was gone almost instantly.

I am processing this. Eventhough I follow Buddhist principles I don't believe in Karma. There was almost a foreshadowing that he created himself. Ive met people who are a lot worse than him. The whole thing is disquieting. He was relatively young. Life is so strange.

Fun with horses

 I don't know how many times I've watched it it still makes me laugh. According to Victoria his owner, he's just stupid and scared that inanimate objects will eat him. The voiceover of his internal dialog is great:

Max the scared horse

https://youtube.com/shorts/HbeqOllBS9o