Arts – An Echo That's Reversing

Backrooms, empty

Updated 28 Jun 2026

I watched the movie Backrooms [ 2026 | IMDB | Wikipedia ]. The reason I was drawn to it from the first trailer may be shared by others, or may be individual and manifest through vague personal emotions, or may be a genuine generational gestalt. I’ve had dreams of being in empty-not-abandoned hotel conference rooms. Large, vacuumed, beige-paneled spaces. I’ve always tied it to loose memories of being in hotel spaces where my father was giving presentations. (The in-the-moment creepiness about that is that it’s been a memory for so long that I don’t know when or where it happened). He did sales on housing construction. So I’m certain that those moments existed?

Lisa told me that the movie director is 20. This movie couldn’t have been made without having grown up with creepypasta. That’s maybe a bit exaggerated but what was “Twilight Zone”-y mid 20th-century became “creepypasta” in the 20-teens. Characteristics are: a particular feeling of disassociation paired with the suspicion that there’s an arbitrary cause, environmental, existential.

One of the first aspects of the story is that of a failed company. Empty office buildings are the haunted cabins of our current economic existence but even a comparison to haunted houses doesn’t express the horror vacui of seeing a cube farm without walls, desks, chairs. Such empty spaces conjure the ghosts of those who had been there.

A bunch of drunk friends and I were leaving an event at a hotel in downtown Atlanta. While still in the hotel, we wandered some back paths and hallways hoping to find a shortcut to where we could exit to find public transportation. I was feeling particularly sassy and pushed open a random door that took us into a large, dark, scaffolded room. The path wasn’t clear but when you’ve had drink… whatever. We wandered a bit, there was a silence in a vast, empty room. The first door we opened to the outside was directly across the street from our train.

Barbarella the Smuggler–Losing the thread

My writing has been inconsistent.

This is not unprecedented and not without cause. Many time before I’ve involuntarily, shamefully, paused on an idea I’ve loved, the story, returned, and finished. I’d thought that I would compose more while in Italy but stress and uncertainty from different directions has slowed not the ideas but the manifestation of those. I still have that “voice in my head” that elaborates on the story and the melodies and the structure as they should be, but… don’t act on it.

verse 5, where the people show her their most cherished possession: a map that can tell the future

Le porte di Genova

Updated 26 Feb 2026

Updated 6 Aug 2026

I arrived, the second of my three arrivals, and exiting the elevator at my front door I was serendipitously greeted by my elderly neighbor who was, beyond all pre-expectations for the genovese, more friendly than I’d expected in this or in any other city. I was disoriented by his kindness. The reason for my appreciation is obvious but it doesn’t take into consideration the rudderlessness you feel (I feel) in a foreign land etc. And, again, the unfair reputation the Genovese people get for being aggressively aloof with the non-Genovese is now something I will fight against.

The people I’ve met since have been just as piacievole.

The AI

The software industry has become a pretty immoral bunch of assholes, but the software industry married to the new AI revolution has exceeded this baseline immorality.

I’m a Malcolm Gladwell-y maven, or I aspire to be, w/r/t technology and it was a trip to Italy with the family several years back that gave me an opportunity to press to them the importance of what was coming and the importance that they, disregarding their disinterest or disgust, involve themselves with LLMs directly in order to understand how the world was going to change. I knew there was value there but I also understood that there was existential upheaval. Maybe they already knew that; I’m not sure.

For most of the time after that I’ve sworn off ChatGPT (let’s use the Kleenex-ified terms “ChatGPT” for the technical “LLM”). Its harm to the environment and social equality, and the socially inequitable harm that it causes, is horrifying. (Though, admittedly, extreme statements should generally be responded with doubt and verification.)

There’s too much politics to think about

There’s too much politics to think about. And that’s kindof an avoidance because calling waves hands what has just happened and what bleak anniversary just occurred, and the scars almost lining up, politics is not politics. There’s just too much to think about.