Image: My own, of the Pacific from Sutro Heights Park in San Francisco. The background is a movie—see the full effect here (though it’s rather fuzzy).

I’ve been re-reading the sci-fi book Spares by Michael Marshall Smith the last few days.

There’s an idea in there I’d forgotten about. I’d like to read you a short passage, from when the protagonist goes to a club and he describes the cacophonous music:

“The music was Predictive Trance, the notes and words all fresh-minted in real time by a bank of computers on the far wall. The algorithms for generating the lyrics are keyed to the effect of various recreational drugs, and thus the more out of it you get, the better you become at predicting what the words will be.”

I just wanted to share that with you. It seems relevant somehow.