I think dating in Portugal has two sides. Or maybe three. One is if you live in the city it's a lot easier than if you live in a tiny little village. Two there is the question of whether to date expats or locals. Not that one has to choose, but having been married to two women from different cultures. I know that that can sometimes put a strain on the relationship. I now live in a small village. I lived in a small village in New York State previously. In that village, there was a gallery and a place to perform live music. Within 30 minutes of that village there were tens of galleries and places to perform music and museums large concert halls as well. There's nothing like that within a half an hour of here. In fact, I'd be willing to say that within a half an hour of me in the Hudson-Valley, there may have been more galleries and performance venues than there are within an hour and a half of me now, and I am within an hour and a half of both Porto and Braga. So, I'm discovering that there was a kind of febrile creative culture where I spent the last 26 years of my life that I can't find here. I might find it if I were wealthy enough to live in Lisbon, I don't know, but even there I have to say that for all the things I don't like about America, at least in my little bubble on the East Coast, there was an incredible amount of artistic energy. And as an artist, were I actively dating, I would want somebody with that kind of energy, and it might be hard to find one of those people among the locals, at least locals of my age of 66.

Data centers and AI are manifestly evil. Not only do they destroy the environment, not only do they use enormous amounts of water, and not only do they use enormous amounts of power, but they are late stage capitalism mechanism for theft of every bit of human creativity since humans first painted on cave walls. This is disgusting and distressing, but thank you for sharing.

@Carl Munson CB's as we called. It was an amazing space. I remember our first audition there. We really sucked! But Hilly Crystal, the owner, took a liking to us for some reason. By the time the band broke up when my brother got sick with AIDS, he had us opening for big bands on Saturday nights. We got to open for Richard Hell and the Voidoids, a really big punk band at the time who had one of the greatest, most unsung guitarists in rock history, Robert Quine. I stood about 3 feet in front of him for the entire set with my jaw on the floor, and my eyes riveted to his hands and guitar neck. I had some amazing times in that place! And by the time this gig was recorded, I must say that we were tighter than I ever remembered us being. Finding this recording made me reevaluate my entire time in that band. It made me realize that I wrote more of the songs that I thought, that I played more rhythm guitar than I thought. That my brother and I did some really fun intertwined guitar lines that I had completely forgotten about. We actually also did a lot of super wierd experimental stuff, but not during that particular gig.

@Carl Munson Thanks for having me. Dang, I forgot to talk about the novel. So. here's the pitch: Someone’s hacking our minds for profit, Andy!” There is a world-wide epidemic of a new disease, dubbed Non-Organic Dementia, or NOD, striking Africans and Asians exclusively. When someone ‘NODs Out’ they descend into helpless catatonia or violent uncontrolled rages, but once they die, autopsies find absolutely nothing wrong. The medical establishment is stumped and governments and populations around the world are panicking. Andrew Braxton, a half black, half Jewish speech pathologist, engages client and ex junkie Manny Reyes to research the epidemic. Manny discovers the grim truth: The SUR Corporation has discovered that thought and memory exist outside the human brain, in an energetic, omnipresent morphic field. They’ve developed ultra-fast, ultra-high-capacity, ultra-cheap storage devices that work by selectively reformatting human memory space for reuse as storage. And SUR is employing this technology against people of color in a scheme that is half money-making venture, half racist genocide. Andrew and Manny travel the globe attempting to find the psychic masters and technologists needed to stop this 21st century pogrom, while SUR hunts them in turn. Andrew eventually realizes he is the psychic he has been looking for and that he must stop running away from his gifts. He must also transcend his personal rage about loss of his girlfriend Nina Ohanyido to NOD, and his crippling self-doubt in order to lead the attack on SUR’s psychic brain trust. His efforts will either save what’s left of the world’s memory, or destroy all of humankind’s memories forever. NODding Out: Matter (69K), is speculative fiction that explores the ethical quandary of devoted pacifism in the face of industrialized violence, and conjures a possible future “tyranny of empathy” that may make all forms of violence, from rape to torture to warfare, impossible - but at what cost?

@Kate Bygrave Salazar was already dead when the regime was overthrown.

AI is an environmental sociological and technological existential threat. It's also interesting that most of the AI industry is run by people who are fans of an Italian fascist from the 1930s.