13 June 26
Russell and A
Here’s my sketch today of the house at Russell Boulevard and A Street in Davis looking across from Russell. This is right across the street from campus; in the lower right corner of the sketch one can see light towers on a campus playing field. The house belongs to the Chi Omega woman’s fraternity.
Pica has a good collection of graphic memoirs on our bookshelves, and looking for something to read there late this morning I found a copy of The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66, by Shing Yin Khor. A lovely little book chronicling a road trip the author took in April 2016. I was heartened to see the technique the author uses for their illustrations which is similar to the way I’m sketching now. There are three layers in their illustrations — an underdrawing in blue colored pencil, black ink line work. and watercolor washes. I’m finding I really like having an underdrawing before putting in the ink line work.
12 June 26
Mail Art -- For the Dead
This evening’s Friday Night Comics workshop was about mail art. Ron Regé has been sending art and zines through the mail for decades. We were encouraged to write or draw a letter to a specific person (it could even be yourself) and refrain from photographing it but rather putting it in an envelope and mailing it.
The Postal Service for the Dead is something I’ve encountered in my work with VEOLI (Visualizing End of Life Issues). A member of the comics community at SAW was recently diagnosed with leukemia and had a stroke before she’d even started chemo. She died shortly thereafter.
I didn’t know Kayte well but had interacted with her several times, always finding her a positive and inspiring presence. I made a zine this evening, filled it, and it will go in tomorrow’s mail to the Postal Service for the Dead. I like the idea of illustrating letters and think I’ll write more to those who have passed on…
11 June 26
And Then There Were Forty-Eight
The World Cup is now underway with two matches played today. This is not a World Cup I have much enthusiasm for, owing to the United States having alienated the rest of the world over the past year-and-a-half, including the other two host countries. Nevertheless, interesting storylines will emerge over the upcoming five weeks, I am sure.
Five weeks, not four as in the past. In its infinite wisdom FIFA has expanded the number of participating nations from thirty-two to forty-eight. In all likelihood this will make the group stage of the tournament less exciting since on average there is more of a range in quality from the strongest team to the weakest team in each group. FIFA may even continue in this direction: there is discussion of expanding the field to sixty teams for the 2030 World Cup which will take place in Morocco, Portugal, and Spain.
The nearby bakery will be showing the matches on a big screen outside on its patio. Pica was thinking of watching the first match there, but it was already 96° F outside at noon when it started, so that idea got nixed.
10 June 26
Olé León Olé
Numenius wrote yesterday about the Pope’s visit to Spain. Unlike him, I’m [still nominally] Catholic. I haven’t attended Mass for years, though this Pope’s fearlessness in criticizing autocracy is inspiring and almost has me wanting to reconnect.
Fr. Massimo Faggioli, who is a professor of Ecclesiology at University College Dublin, was interviewed by France 24 recently and talked about the rock star quality of popes. I was an active Catholic in the early 80s and went by bus from Birmingham University to Wembley to see Pope John Paul II, the first of the rock star popes. (His subsequent authoritarian tendencies and in particular his favoring of Opus Dei soured me on the papacy and on Catholicism in general, and in the United States the church tends to be far more conservative than in the UK, which doesn’t sit well.) But this Pope? Instead of worrying that he’d be eclipsed by Bad Bunny, who was in Madrid (and who my niece flew to Spain to see in concert at the Estadio Metropolitano last week), he decided to meet with him. At the Bernabéu no less. (When asked whether he supported Real Madrid or Barça, he said as Pope, he has to support all teams; as Prevost, he supports Real.) Well over a million people turned out to see him as he celebrated Mass in downtown Madrid.
I’m impressed by the breadth of the program in Spain, by the Pope’s willingness to dip his toe into Catalan which he speaks with a Brazilian accent, by his visiting a jail. By the performance of Sara Baras and the impassioned speech by Antonio Banderas in support of the arts. It’s been quite the trip.
Side note: I’m categorizing this post as “political” because like it or not this visit is highly political in all kinds of ways, not least in putting Trump’s nose badly out of joint again.
9 June 26
El Papa Llega
I am not Christian, let alone Catholic, but I have been entranced by the visit of Pope Leo XIV to Spain. He has a lot of fans in the United States: the first American pope has not been afraid to take on American authoritarianism. The spectacle of his tour in Madrid and now Barcelona has been affirming somehow, what with 1.2 million people present for the Mass he led in the Plaza de Cibeles on Sunday. I’ve watched a couple of his speeches in Spanish and the bit that he read today in Catalan.
Tomorrow is I think the centerpiece of his trip to Spain — he will go to the Sagrada Familia where he will inaugurate the Tower of Jesus Christ on the 100th anniversary of the death of the architect of the cathedral, Antonio Gaudí. This centenary would have a big deal in Barcelona even without the visit of the Pope, but he clearly was happy to time his visit to Spain to be present for it.
Prior to the event at the Sagrada Familia, he is heading up to the monastery at Montserrat. Visiting both sites in one day seems like too much to take in, but he won’t have to stand in line to enter. If I were him, I’d ask to see the Llibre Vermell.
8 June 26
Lieblingsautoren
I’ve been a member of an advanced German conversation group for several years, run through International House Davis. A year or so into it our leader got ill and was no longer able to run the group, which had been meeting on zoom since the start of the pandemic. Given that several of our members lived outside of Davis, we carried on with zoom. Since Paul’s death I’ve been running the zooms, though not necessarily leading the group (though by default that seems to have happened).
One exercise that is very useful when learning a language is to write in it. Dictionaries are ok but it’s really helpful to write down what you might say to someone in conversation, with a bit more time to think about it than on the spot. As humans, once we have the basics of a language under our belts, we are adept at finding ways around a problem, a word, a concept we can’t quite bring to the tip of our tongue in a hurry. So it is with writing — we have a little more time to cogitate on what we want to say, and even ponder the more direct way to say it.
Our exercise for this week is to write a paragraph about our favorite author. This is a tough one for me — I have several favorite authors, some of them fantasy writers, some of them graphic novelists, some of them nature writers, some of them even knitters. The problem is compounded when I have to figure out how I can convey this in German (I have already made a presentation on knitting in German to this group and I’m going to bow out of that particular niche). More anon.
7 June 26
For Lease
Here is yesterday’s urban sketch. This is the northernmost corner of the retail mall on G Street north of the Davis Food Co-op. Three of the nine spaces in this mall are vacant, though it does contain a good bike store and our favorite local bakery.
6 June 26
Pride
The 12th annual Davis Pride Fest is going on at Civic Center Park. We walked over there a couple of hours ago and did some quick sketches. Fun to see friends and acquaintances and join in the celebration. It’s much cooler today than it was yesterday, which I’m sure everyone appreciated.
5 June 26
On Green AI
Contrary to the normal progression of things, the computer that I built a year ago in May has increased in value by about $1150. This is because of the extraordinary demand being placed on supplies of memory and storage components of all sorts by the buildout of AI data centers — most spectacularly in my case, the 64 GB of DDR5 RAM which I purchased in May of 2025 for $165 is now priced at $915. With my workstation, I am continuing to play around with local AI models. The quality of these local models has increased dramatically over the past year, which is leading many developers to explore how they can be used in preference to the huge models from providers in the cloud such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
One could make the argument that running AI models locally is more sustainable than invoking the resources of huge server farms every time one calls upon AI. But are there other threads that might constitute “green AI”? Sharon Stein has a good piece about this topic on resilience.org. She identifies three visions for green AI. The first of these technical greening. This means running AI with fewer resources, for instance by using smaller models that demand less energy and materials. The second of these is ecological intervention. This refers to developing AI applications that help us understand and ameliorate environmental change, for instance by optimizing agricultural resource use. The third vision is relational reorientation. This focuses on questioning the assumptions around nature, intelligence, and relationships that are built into contemporary AI. A lot of this vision comes from Indigenous perspectives: one interesting research program in this vein is called Abundant Intelligences (also see an open access paper titled Abundant intelligences: placing AI within Indigenous knowledge frameworks).
On a more amusing note, here is a literally hand-cranked solution to the cost and energy use of contemporary AI systems.
4 June 26
Marjane Satrapi
In 1977 I travelled to Iran to visit a boyfriend whose father was an Australian geology professor at the University of Shiraz. This was before the Islamic Revolution, and Clint Eastwood was playing at the movie theater, bootleg tapes of rock music were for sale in the streets, and girls wore chadors over jeans and T-shirts.
The VW bus owned by Cameron’s family drove us around southern Iran, including a trip to Persepolis, the ancient capital of the Achaemenid empire. Processions of victorious warriors and their captives were carved in bas-relief on the walls of great buildings. The city was conquered and burned by Alexander the Great, so any remains are solid stone. I remember walking around the ruins above a copse where Cameron’s parents napped in the shade, among huge numbers of bee-eaters flying around. In the shade of massive blocks of stones, wild gerbils hopped about.
Since that time I’ve been particularly interested in Iran, in this great ancient civilization that has been through so much and which continues to do so. Today I learned that Marjane Satrapi, the author of a graphic memoir about her life in Tehran and France, had died at age 56. Her memoir, which was also turned into a film, was called Persepolis. It was only the second serious comic I ever read, after Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Satrapi lived in France for years and wrote her memoir in French. The style is bold black and white. Her family has said she died of a broken heart after the death of her husband. Whatever the official cause of death, I hope she is at peace now.