Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209120817/https://scribe.rip/p/harry-potter-written-by-artificial-intelligence-8a9431803da6 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 12:08:17 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209130310/https://scribe.rip/p/thoughts-on-david-foster-wallace-and-the-end-of-the-tour-by-bret-easton-ellis-fc9ba2d76d84 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 01:03:10 PM EST

Random link from the archives: ""The Early Days of id Software: Programming Principles" by John Romero (Strange Loop 2022) - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20221006083938/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqdZAYcwfY originally retrieved Thu 06 Oct 2022 08:39:38 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years | Ars Technica" https://web.archive.org/web/20220308144439/https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/linux-has-been-bitten-by-its-most-high-severity-vulnerability-in-years/

Random link from the archives: "Theory of Hypertext Systems: Article by Jakob Nielsen" https://web.archive.org/web/20180814140045/https://www.nngroup.com/articles/architectural-component-hypertext-systems/ originally retrieved Tue Aug 14 14:00:45 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "a new life. by Angela He" https://web.archive.org/web/20200622104858/https://zephyo.itch.io/a-new-life originally retrieved Mon Jun 22 10:48:58 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "3 of 3 - A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari - Illustrated Audiobook - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190105130050/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws2b5aOhrdA originally retrieved Sat Jan 5 13:00:50 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "Aquarius Rising | by Jackson Lears | The New York Review of Books" https://web.archive.org/web/20180915085910/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/09/27/1968-aquarius-rising/ originally retrieved Sat Sep 15 08:59:10 EDT 2018

Agrihoods reimagine urban living by putting food at the center | Grist https://grist.org/cities/what-happens-when-a-neighborhood-is-built-around-a-farm/

Random link from the archives: "Dead Precedents by Roy Christopher review: how hip-hop and cyberpunk hijacked culture | Books | The Guardian" https://web.archive.org/web/20190318072113/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/17/dead-precedents-how-hip-hop-defines-future-roy-christopher-review-cyberpunk

BOMB Magazine | Mark Pauline by Bill Edmondson https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1983/07/01/mark-pauline/

Random link from the archives: "Queer Games Bundle 2022 by queergamesbundle and 413 others - itch.io" https://web.archive.org/web/20220614154554/https://itch.io/b/1404/queer-games-bundle-2022 originally retrieved Tue 14 Jun 2022 03:45:54 PM EDT

i used to turn off my bluetooth headphones by long-pressing the power button, but now that's been remapped to some LLM voice assistant & i haven't figured out how to remap it, so i literally have to let my headphones run out of battery to shut them off now.

Absurd Tech Videos of the 1980s | Sleepcore - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-GdsIM39BY

1958 - N.Y., N.Y.: A Day in New York - Avant Guarde Short film by Francis Thompson - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_I9L00WbbE

i very consistently misremember when any given movie came out by at least one year, but y'know what? i'm gonna keep putting a year in parentheses after every movie name. let people's LLM autosummarizers confabulate whole vistas of imaginary cinema

"Personal Computer" by Adrian Cochrane https://adrian.geek.nz/from-scratch/personal-computer

"How does this software work?" by Adrian Cochrane https://adrian.geek.nz/docs.html

"Programming Distributed Systems" by Mae Milano - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc3tTRkjCvE

Random link from the archives: "Stream episode S2 Episode 9: Go See Jackie with Codi Vore by Howell Dawdy's Fast Track podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud" https://web.archive.org/web/20220629195928/https://soundcloud.com/user-355057818/s2-episode-9-go-see-jackie-with-codi-vore

Abecedarian : Hindpsych: Erstwhile Conjectures by the Sometime Augur of Yore : March 30, 2020 https://www.oneletterwords.com/weblog/?id=51907

for all i could complain about tiktok, this recent bullshit is beyond the pale. like: a foreign company's product becomes popular and so it's taken away by presidential fiat and given to a major campaign donor? how does anybody, with a straight face, claim that's ok?

Random link from the archives: "episode 02: eigenrobot vs joel grus by eigenrobot | Free Listening on SoundCloud" https://web.archive.org/web/20210327163835/https://soundcloud.com/user-557955426/episode-02-eigenrobot-vs-joel-grus originally retrieved Sat 27 Mar 2021 04:38:35 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Goodbye, Cold War | Issue 30 | n+1" https://web.archive.org/web/20180504065538/https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/politics/goodbye-cold-war/ originally retrieved Fri May 4 06:55:38 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "5 Ways to Understand Deleuze Through the Work of David Byrne and the Talking Heads" https://web.archive.org/web/20211130093646/http://www.critical-theory.com/5-ways-approach-deleuze-work-david-byrne/ originally retrieved Tue 30 Nov 2021 09:36:46 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Creep by Radiohead but Using Google Autocomplete Results for Lyrics - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190425210200/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06TlZMQf2UA originally retrieved Thu Apr 25 21:02:00 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Notes: Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee" https://web.archive.org/web/20201001141556/https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/08/24/notes-astounding-by-alec-nevala-lee/ originally retrieved Thu Oct 1 14:15:56 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "a new life. by Angela He" https://web.archive.org/web/20200622104858/https://zephyo.itch.io/a-new-life originally retrieved Mon Jun 22 10:48:58 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "COVID-19 Manufacturing Challenges: Why Byproducts Are At Risk" https://web.archive.org/web/20200512145219/https://tedium.co/2020/04/28/manufacturing-byproducts-covid-19/ originally retrieved Tue May 12 14:52:19 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209120106/https://scribe.rip/p/goodbye-object-oriented-programming-a59cda4c0e53 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 12:01:06 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @JairusKhan: "I was a speaker and workshop organizer at hopeconf this year. My first 2600 meeting was over 20 years ago. I'm also an event organizer with […]" #hopeconf" https://web.archive.org/web/20180726103535/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1021576113875771392.html

rich parents hiring pharmaceutical marketing consultants to ensure their nepo baby has a name that sounds vaguely normal but is unique enough to be trademarked

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20210917203340/https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-facebook-target-harmful-coordination-by-real-accounts-using-playbook-2021-09-16/ originally retrieved Fri 17 Sep 2021 08:33:40 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "The Witch Can’t Be Identified | Ian Chambers" https://web.archive.org/web/20230719130619/https://www.patheos.com/blogs/bythepalemoonlight/2023/07/the-witch-cant-be-identified/ originally retrieved Wed 19 Jul 2023 01:06:19 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Hardcore techno's alternative history - Case: Dance of the Anthropoids - Electric Byway - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20221126132844/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfk7OY8eiBE originally retrieved Sat 26 Nov 2022 01:28:44 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "The Ufology Tarot by Greg Bishop — Kickstarter" https://web.archive.org/web/20211101201928/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ufotarot/the-ufology-tarot/ originally retrieved Mon 01 Nov 2021 08:19:28 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20230310233241/https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-scooby-doo-psyop originally retrieved Fri 10 Mar 2023 11:32:41 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190806151119/https://scribe.rip/p/algorithms-to-live-by-ddd587bd458d originally retrieved Tue Aug 6 15:11:19 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Edward Snowden Reconsidered | by Tamsin Shaw | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books" https://web.archive.org/web/20181012140122/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/13/edward-snowden-reconsidered/ originally retrieved Fri Oct 12 14:01:22 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Move Slow and Mend Things by Kevlin Henney - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180521105641/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kklyq4XYpw originally retrieved Mon May 21 10:56:41 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "What if a website were only accessible by assistive technology? // Sebastian Greger" https://web.archive.org/web/20201023150846/https://sebastiangreger.net/2020/06/website-only-accessible-by-assistive-tech/ originally retrieved Fri 23 Oct 2020 03:08:46 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: " Caffeine Calculator" https://web.archive.org/web/20250125095511/https://www.caffeineinformer.com/death-by-caffeine originally retrieved Sat 25 Jan 2025 09:55:11 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Tom Lehrer Songs – Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer" https://web.archive.org/web/20201021143326/https://tomlehrersongs.com/ originally retrieved Wed 21 Oct 2020 02:33:26 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200214101003/https://newrepublic.com/article/156528/enduring-vision-chinatown-sam-wasson-big-goodbye originally retrieved Fri Feb 14 10:10:03 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180903111618/https://scribe.rip/p/generation-jones-baby-boom-923270cb2010 originally retrieved Mon Sep 3 11:16:18 EDT 2018

Busby Berkeley "The Gang's All There" Finale 1943 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJHfApfdWW0

Random link from the archives: "retvals, terrible teaching, and admitting we have a problem" https://web.archive.org/web/20201207183624/https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/06/forked/ originally retrieved Mon 07 Dec 2020 06:36:24 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "Not Pounded By Anything As I Practice Responsible Social Distancing | MetaFilter" https://web.archive.org/web/20200316081515/https://www.metafilter.com/186062/Not-Pounded-By-Anything-As-I-Practice-Responsible-Social-Distancing

Random link from the archives: "...and by islands I mean paragraphs || J. R. Carpenter" https://web.archive.org/web/20220713110541/http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands/ originally retrieved Wed 13 Jul 2022 11:05:41 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Complete Stories, by Rudy Rucker" https://web.archive.org/web/20191010115014/http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/ originally retrieved Thu Oct 10 11:50:14 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Four Poems by Rae Armantrout from 'Finalists' [FLASHING LIGHTS] - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220226210618/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHz9qkB3uRc originally retrieved Sat 26 Feb 2022 09:06:18 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "Plot, scene by scene – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling" https://web.archive.org/web/20200115102902/https://emshort.blog/2008/05/04/plot-scene-by-scene/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 15 10:29:02 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200618223755/https://scribe.rip/p/japans-perennial-baby-stroller-war-1a8f70f111cf originally retrieved Thu Jun 18 22:37:55 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200611031504/https://scribe.rip/p/farewell-to-beyond-the-beyond-by-bruce-sterling-2020-24547824773c originally retrieved Thu Jun 11 03:15:04 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Folklore.org: MacPaint Evolution" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113001238/http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacPaint_Evolution.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Lisa originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 00:12:38 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/starcross: Starcross by Dave Lebling" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082021/https://github.com/historicalsource/starcross originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:20:21 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Amazon reviews are being gamed by shady sellers who swap out listings on popular pages." https://web.archive.org/web/20220104133729/https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/amazon-listings-wrong-reviews-why.html originally retrieved Tue 04 Jan 2022 01:37:29 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "Everyday Sigils by Helvetica Blanc" https://web.archive.org/web/20201029152438/https://helveticablanc.itch.io/everyday-sigils originally retrieved Thu 29 Oct 2020 03:24:38 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/journey: Journey, by Marc Blank, Illustrated by Donald Langos (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082242/https://github.com/historicalsource/journey originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:22:42 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: ""The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20181028170853/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4EX4dPppA originally retrieved Sun Oct 28 17:08:53 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber - Radical Reviewer - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220515122909/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTgJMx_DHbk originally retrieved Sun 15 May 2022 12:29:09 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "I Grew Up in the Drug Culture, and Sort of Miss It | www.splicetoday.com" https://web.archive.org/web/20200505172342/https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/i-grew-up-in-the-drug-culture-and-sort-of-miss-it?fbclid=IwAR0FFu0IMuE-zvmSNo6ZJ9e6cbYpDI755t3aFxUL827HaLeTC9UahMv-NOw

personally, i'm of the opinion that a logo change shouldn't ever be news. journalists should not be so easily led into doing PR. we should learn about branding changes the natural way: by being confused and not being able to find the damned place anymore because the sign changed

Random link from the archives: "AI in Sci-Fi - Andrew Hudson, Madeline Ashby, Lee Konstantinou, Kanta Dihal, Damien Williams, Chris Noessel | Open Transcripts" https://web.archive.org/web/20190610092243/http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/ai-in-sci-fi/

Random link from the archives: "What Does CINEMATIC Really Mean? - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210904154610/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbByKUDJlbI originally retrieved Sat 04 Sep 2021 03:46:10 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff · Longform" https://web.archive.org/web/20180607103830/https://longform.org/posts/the-mastermind originally retrieved Thu Jun 7 10:38:30 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Visual Novel Romance Collection for Black Trans Lives by Truant Pixel, LLC and 10 others - itch.io" https://web.archive.org/web/20200710124313/https://itch.io/b/558/visual-novel-romance-collection-for-black-trans-lives

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201010065629/https://scribe.rip/p/a-list-minute-influence-op-by-data-ddos-3698906d8836 originally retrieved Sat Oct 10 06:56:29 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "What happened to distributed programming languages? by Heather Miller - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180426101332/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAcDWcaezXY originally retrieved Thu Apr 26 10:13:32 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages by Shriram Krishnamurthi [PWLConf 2019] - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20191129094211/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43XaZEn2aLc originally retrieved Fri Nov 29 09:42:11 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/journey: Journey, by Marc Blank, Illustrated by Donald Langos (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082242/https://github.com/historicalsource/journey originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:22:42 EDT 2019

Bye Bye, Google AI: Turn off Google AI Overviews, Discussions and Ads - Chrome Web Store https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bye-bye-google-ai-turn-of/imllolhfajlbkpheaapjocclpppchggc?pli=1

Random link from the archives: "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall : Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy" https://web.archive.org/web/20200113113200/http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/ originally retrieved Mon Jan 13 11:32:00 EST 2020

the other day i was talking about genre & used terminal island as an example of roger corman helping a message movie hit with a wider audience by tying it into genre trappings. i buried the lede -- didn't mention it stars pam grier, who had led previous women's prison movies for him

Random link from the archives: "ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Your Woman" by White Town - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20221203142207/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRYO6-gNGzQ originally retrieved Sat 03 Dec 2022 02:22:07 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/sorcerer: Sorcerer by Steve Meretzky (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082043/https://github.com/historicalsource/sorcerer originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:20:43 EDT 2019

the judge keeps asking me questions about my 'ask me about jury nullification' t-shirt that i feel are adequately answered by the t-shirt and it's interrupting voir dire

Random link from the archives: "Moby Dick by Herman Melville and 346 Others" https://web.archive.org/web/20191202085853/https://hugovk.github.io/NaNoGenMo-2019/citifier/output.html originally retrieved Mon Dec 2 08:58:53 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "The American Civil War and the History of Embalming with Dillon Payne - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220325165448/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ClbyAHCDKw originally retrieved Fri 25 Mar 2022 04:54:48 PM EDT

take revenge on the people who hate your art by filling the world with it

a couple really basic usability things that every single browser i've used in the past decade has failed at by default: you should always be able to navigate to any open tab; you should always be able to close the tab you're in; open tabs that have not been viewed during the session should be docked & take no more memory or cpu footprint than a bookmark.

if you haven't already, now would be a good time to start going by at least one fake name online that isn't obviously fake. if somebody doesn't legally need your government name they should be provided with one of the acceptable substitutes.

Random link from the archives: "“S Clubbed to Death” - S Club 7 / Rob Dougan Mashup by ah! - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200510180229/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvCc-gLw33Y originally retrieved Sun May 10 18:02:29 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Poems William Carlos Williams Revised After Being Told By His Agent to “Do More Plums Content!” - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency" https://web.archive.org/web/20190919112150/https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/poems-william-carlos-williams-revised-after-being-told-by-his-agent-to-do-more-plums-content

Random link from the archives: " How Often Will Bystanders Help Strangers in Need? - CityLab" https://web.archive.org/web/20190730135120/https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/07/bystander-effect-stranger-danger-crime-public-safety-video/593755/?utm_source=nextdraft

The Magic Flute by W A Mozart BBC Animation (Full 30 mins) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxvyaapBcq4

Random link from the archives: "transmediale 2014 | Talk by Bruce Sterling at the Opening Ceremony - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20181201112154/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dacKWLGZklM originally retrieved Sat Dec 1 11:21:54 EST 2018

the two types of people: those who use chatgpt autosummary to avoid reading three page articles, and those who treat m-dashes and two-syllable words as indications that something's been written by an LLM and should be ignored

Crips for eSims for Gaza Bundle by Crips for eSims for Gaza and 176 others - itch.io https://itch.io/b/2965/crips-for-esims-for-gaza-bundle

Chrysalis Magazine | by trans youth, for trans youth https://www.chrysalismagazine.org/

OGTAPE3: Mothership Propagation - by Count Slobo - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD-sMOZurbE

i love going to modern art museums because for me, the thought 'i could do that' is followed by 'fuck yeah'. i love when making cool shit is actually accessible.

May Day Sale by enkiv2 - itch.io https://itch.io/s/152273/may-day-sale

it's walpurgis time again! celebrate by a libation of mead and semen

Random link from the archives: "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog | Slate Star Codex" https://web.archive.org/web/20200624170025/https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20181105083546/http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SF-MasterList-141103-byauthor.htm originally retrieved Mon Nov 5 08:35:46 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20181105083546/http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SF-MasterList-141103-byauthor.htm originally retrieved Mon Nov 5 08:35:46 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot | Poetry Foundation" https://web.archive.org/web/20210518114634/https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent--os originally retrieved Tue 18 May 2021 11:46:34 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201007140156/https://scribe.rip/p/romance-novels-generated-by-artificial-intelligence-1b31d9c872b2 originally retrieved Wed Oct 7 14:01:56 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Gutenberg:The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg by Michael Hart - Gutenberg" https://web.archive.org/web/20180924114710/https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_History_and_Philosophy_of_Project_Gutenberg_by_Michael_Hart

Random link from the archives: "Tom Lehrer Songs – Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer" https://web.archive.org/web/20201021143326/https://tomlehrersongs.com/ originally retrieved Wed 21 Oct 2020 02:33:26 PM EDT

Letraset Communication By Design : Letraset USA : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/letraset-communication-by-design/mode/1up?view=theater

Random link from the archives: "SF Book Review Index by Author | Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations" https://web.archive.org/web/20200115103657/https://sciencefictionruminations.com/science-fiction-book-reviews-by-author/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 15 10:36:57 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "[Essay] | Faustian Economics, by Wendell Berry | Harper's Magazine" https://web.archive.org/web/20190619140423/https://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/faustian-economics/ originally retrieved Wed Jun 19 14:04:23 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "200 Terabyte Proof Demonstrates the Potential of Brute-Force Math - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20170731092024/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/padnvm/200-terabyte-proof-demonstrates-the-potential-of-brute-force-math

is the database of, like, names of characters from particular shows used by MAL something i can download? i'm interested in graphing trends in anime character names over time...

Random link from the archives: "The AI Unbundling – Stratechery by Ben Thompson" https://web.archive.org/web/20220919103557/https://stratechery.com/2022/the-ai-unbundling/ originally retrieved Mon 19 Sep 2022 10:35:57 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209120817/https://scribe.rip/p/harry-potter-written-by-artificial-intelligence-8a9431803da6 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 12:08:17 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - eykd/plottoxml: Plotto—A new method of plot suggestion for writers of creative fiction by William Wallace Cook, 1867-1933" https://web.archive.org/web/20171012124606/https://github.com/eykd/plottoxml originally retrieved Thu Oct 12 12:46:06 EDT 2017

Everyone is horny now | Dazed https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/65952/1/everyone-is-horny-twigs-eusexua-babygirl-nosferatu

Random link from the archives: "The US town ruled by an AI storyteller • Eurogamer.net" https://web.archive.org/web/20180723100723/https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-14-the-us-town-ruled-by-an-ai-storyteller originally retrieved Mon Jul 23 10:07:23 EDT 2018

so basically the problem is that blurbs should be written by professional celebrity literary critics

Bad idea of the day: gift economy based on an ancestral swear-jar shared by the whole family that is used for miscellaneous expenses and individuals demonstrating their generousity by donating resources through elaborate public performances of extreme profanity

Caffeine Calculator https://www.caffeineinformer.com/death-by-caffeine

Bad idea of the day: sort a video's frames by a randomly selected pixel. for videos that have strong color symbolism, like suspiria, this will jumble thematically linked frames together in a way that doesn't quite flow

glad to see more people noticing that law is a weapon of the enemy, used selectively by the enemy for their own ends

americans in the 90s were right that japan is the future but wrong about how: old people working until they die because they can't afford to retire, young people hiding in their rooms from a world that doesn't want them, a perma-recession, declining birth rates, far-right parties backed by imageboard nerds & gangsters

Random link from the archives: "Glitch by Jenna Katerin Moran — Kickstarter" https://web.archive.org/web/20200204193841/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jennamoran/glitchrpg/ originally retrieved Tue Feb 4 19:38:41 EST 2020

Devoured by Electric Fog: The Devil's Triangle Disappearances | Episode 28 | Haunted Objects Podcast - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNOjzvBB0Bk

Random link from the archives: "good writers are perverts by DOMINO CLUB" https://web.archive.org/web/20240301154941/https://dominoclub.itch.io/good-writers-are-perverts originally retrieved Fri 01 Mar 2024 03:49:41 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "I Melt with You" by Modern English - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200729145828/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpIWsaI6hCg originally retrieved Wed Jul 29 14:58:28 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Itchio outshines Steam by staying small and weird - The Verge" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416084520/https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18118217/itchio-steam-leaf-corcoran-pc-games-indie originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:45:20 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "How to be kinder to yourself | Psyche Guides" https://web.archive.org/web/20220818091837/https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-be-kinder-to-yourself-by-practising-self-compassion originally retrieved Thu 18 Aug 2022 09:18:37 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "COVID-19 Manufacturing Challenges: Why Byproducts Are At Risk" https://web.archive.org/web/20200512145219/https://tedium.co/2020/04/28/manufacturing-byproducts-covid-19/ originally retrieved Tue May 12 14:52:19 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "5 Reasons Generative Art is an Ideal Hobby for a Software Developer" https://web.archive.org/web/20190722094218/https://spin.atomicobject.com/2019/07/20/generative-art-software-dev/ originally retrieved Mon Jul 22 09:42:18 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "miniKanren: an interactive Tutorial" https://web.archive.org/web/20180926133210/http://io.livecode.ch/learn/webyrd/webmk originally retrieved Wed Sep 26 13:32:10 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/trinity: Trinity by Brian Moriarty (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416081949/https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:19:49 EDT 2019

as a practitioner of magick for decades, my position is that the effiacy of magick does not point to unknown or spiritual forces (not even psi), but simply that many well-understood psychological and social principles are not being effectively applied except by occultists.

i need to stick to the games i'm already writing, rather than the MfoM sequel i keep imagining set in 2020 where ace reporter Mimi is living with clueless nepo baby with a heart of gold Aoi

Bathroom Bills: How American Bathrooms Got Separated by Sex | TIME https://time.com/4337761/history-sex-segregated-bathrooms/

GoToSocial - Fast, fun, ActivityPub server, powered by Go. https://gotosocial.org/

Random link from the archives: "From Mark Zuckerberg’s MMA hobby to Elon Musk’s ego: Silicon Valley had a very masculine year - Vox" https://web.archive.org/web/20240109071407/https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/12/27/24011198/bezos-zuckerberg-musk-buff-mma-masculine

Random link from the archives: "ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "I Melt with You" by Modern English - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200729145828/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpIWsaI6hCg originally retrieved Wed Jul 29 14:58:28 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: ""Cybernetic Culture" by CCRU : A Reading - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220923144352/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVW_SnLxfsk originally retrieved Fri 23 Sep 2022 02:43:52 PM EDT

The Butterfly Superhighway — A Project By Lafayette American https://www.butterflysuperhighway.com/

Random link from the archives: ""Wedding March" by Felix Mendelssohn in minor key - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200519215606/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAuPJmEBDEU originally retrieved Tue May 19 21:56:06 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Obsolete Capitalism: The strong of the future: Nietzsche’s accelerationist fragment in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus by Obsolete Capitalism" https://web.archive.org/web/20221222220115/http://obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-strong-of-future-nietzsches.html

judging by the first episode, the ranma reboot is following the model of the urusei yatsura reboot (stick closely to the manga, add color and movement to keep things fun) and doing a decent job (though not as well as UY)

Bad idea of the day: keep the MS word LLM training setting on and use Word only to paste gigabyte upon gigabyte of sonic mpreg fics via autokey

Random link from the archives: "The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881) by John Cleland – Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein" https://web.archive.org/web/20240301133729/https://deepcuts.blog/2023/11/15/the-amatory-experiences-of-a-surgeon-1881-by-john-cleland/

Random link from the archives: "An oral history of Babylon 5: The beloved TV novel that showed a different way to tell sci-fi" https://web.archive.org/web/20180629083202/http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/an-oral-history-of-babylon-5-the-beloved-tv-novel-that-showed-a-different-way-to-tell-sci

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @normative: So, years ago I quite accidentally injected the phrase “epistemic closure” into political discourse. This became a buzzword for five minutes…" https://web.archive.org/web/20200901163806/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1298738662532935681.html

Random link from the archives: "Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole But It's Island in the Sun By Weezer - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190921140416/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIVFmC9EsUM originally retrieved Sat Sep 21 14:04:16 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Limited Liability Is Causing Unlimited Harm by Katharina Pistor - Project Syndicate" https://web.archive.org/web/20200205113725/https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/limited-liability-corporate-shares-by-katharina-pistor-2020-02

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180913232937/https://scribe.rip/p/death-by-powerpoint-53472da3cd5 originally retrieved Thu Sep 13 23:29:37 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "So It Was Written: The History of The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey | Church of Satan" https://web.archive.org/web/20200121104415/https://www.churchofsatan.com/the-history-of-the-satanic-bible/ originally retrieved Tue Jan 21 10:44:15 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200928061733/https://scribe.rip/p/the-time-for-never-again-has-passed-americans-are-complicit-in-genocide-as-defined-by-the-un-940b368e63e5 originally retrieved Mon Sep 28 06:17:33 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @pangmeli: "I don't trust girlboss companies who use intimate gal pal language with their workers any more than I trusted techbro companies who installe […]"" https://web.archive.org/web/20201228141532/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204461601509773312.html

Q: Can an author make a living from royalties? | monica byrne https://monicacatherine.com/2024/05/16/q-can-an-author-make-a-living-from-royalties/

Internet Archive: Inside $621 Million Legal Battle by Record Labels https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/internet-archive-major-label-music-lawsuit-1235105273/?encoded_id=Ol5ke

whenever one of my special interests suddenly becomes mainstream (ex., with the pentagon UFO report or with LLMs flooding the prose generation space) i get really frustrated because there's now a plethora of material but it's all by people who know less than someone with a casual interest would

Random link from the archives: "Why Sailor Moon, YuGiOh, and Power Rangers Were Changed in America (+ Samurai Pizza Cats) - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190724180437/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASb3FS5-bBY originally retrieved Wed Jul 24 18:04:37 EDT 2019

if you can read, you can use the command line. GUIs are only usable if you happen, by a coincidence of fate, to be on exactly the same wavelength as the original UI designer was when the wireframe was proposed (or else all steps are confusingly arbitrary)

i'm guessing, based on all the vagueposting, that some fash called bluesky a 'left wing echo chamber'. but compared to masto, bluesky is lib af: i am somehow followed by non-anarchocommunists over there, and encounter enthusiasm over presidential candidates on the TL

is professor-dom a thing? like, can i get paid by people who feel sexual satisfaction when i assign them reading lists and engage them in round-table discussions? or do i have to spit on them or something too

tiktok face is when your facial expressions in real life interactions are distorted in a way caused by habitual attempts to trigger particular responses from AI video filters -- sign of a frequent uploader and frequent filter user, i.e., vain and very online

websites come in two flavors: ones that i need to use on my computer because they are unusable without an ad blocker, and ones i have to use on my phone because they have been booby-trapped so as to become unusable with an ad blocker.

UFO abductions are avant garde performance art pieces performed by faeries

once you give birth to a piece of art, you no longer own it. it will be recontextualized. you can choose to make this harder by annoying your fans. doing this increases the amount of money you can expect to make from like $5 to like $15.

vga256: "twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders…" - The Dialup Cybercafé https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/113014589292418783

Band name of the day: as if by some occult hand

Random link from the archives: "Popping the Publishing Bubble – Stratechery by Ben Thompson" https://web.archive.org/web/20191104092633/https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/ originally retrieved Mon Nov 4 09:26:33 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "Talk:List of most expensive artworks by living artists - Wikipedia" https://web.archive.org/web/20220123113623/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_most_expensive_artworks_by_living_artists originally retrieved Sun 23 Jan 2022 11:36:23 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Carol of the Bells: How a Ukrainian folk tune adapted by murdered composer became a Christmas classic." https://web.archive.org/web/20201217211949/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/carol-bells-shchedryk-ukraine-leontovych.html

honestly, anybody who gets on television and doesn't respond by dancing in a strange, uncomfortable, and upsetting way then writing an academic article about it is somebody i can't relate to

Random link from the archives: "The Ufology Tarot by Greg Bishop — Kickstarter" https://web.archive.org/web/20211101201928/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ufotarot/the-ufology-tarot/ originally retrieved Mon 01 Nov 2021 08:19:28 PM EDT

has anybody done an essay reading Full Metal Alchemist as a criticism of the naturalization of capitalism by colonial forces? bc 'oh we just tap into flows, this equivalent exchange thing was invented by europeans and enforced by a megalomaniac' is LOUD

Random link from the archives: "ACCEPTING THE CONTRADICTIONS: A REVIEW OF WHO KILLED THE KLF? – Welcome To The Dark Ages and Other Distractions by Page 130" https://web.archive.org/web/20220424120409/https://welcometothedarkagespage130.com/2022/04/05/accepting-the-contradictions-a-review-of-who-killed-the-klf/

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - automerge/automerge: A JSON-like data structure that can be modified concurrently by different users, and merged again automatically." https://web.archive.org/web/20180208114258/https://github.com/automerge/automerge

Random link from the archives: "A Cage by Another Name - Failed Architecture" https://web.archive.org/web/20220428105028/https://failedarchitecture.com/a-cage-by-another-name/ originally retrieved Thu 28 Apr 2022 10:50:28 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Flanderizing Akihabara - Educated by Culture - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20181130103026/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOBpJF9zQKY originally retrieved Fri Nov 30 10:30:26 EST 2018

Bad idea of the day: polyglot isekai: nerd who loves languages ends up in a politically and culturally fragmented fantasy world, accidentally forges a politically powerful network of connections just by trying to learn new languages and map their connections

GitHub - bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Random link from the archives: "‎enkiv2’s films • Letterboxd" https://web.archive.org/web/20210409153702/https://letterboxd.com/enkiv2/films/by/rating-lowest/ originally retrieved Fri 09 Apr 2021 03:37:02 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "New Years Resolutions generated by AI" https://web.archive.org/web/20211230134349/https://www.aiweirdness.com/new-years-resolutions-generated-by-ai/ originally retrieved Thu 30 Dec 2021 01:43:49 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "I Grew Up in the Drug Culture, and Sort of Miss It | www.splicetoday.com" https://web.archive.org/web/20200505172342/https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/i-grew-up-in-the-drug-culture-and-sort-of-miss-it?fbclid=IwAR0FFu0IMuE-zvmSNo6ZJ9e6cbYpDI755t3aFxUL827HaLeTC9UahMv-NOw

Random link from the archives: "Writing Software to Last 50 Years > Ying Wang" https://web.archive.org/web/20200113121712/https://bytes.yingw787.com/posts/2020/01/13/50years/ originally retrieved Mon Jan 13 12:17:12 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200925163726/https://scribe.rip/p/how-youre-being-manipulated-by-software-7ad939e46852 originally retrieved Fri Sep 25 16:37:26 EDT 2020

24 got a lot of shit for showing torture but i just realized... doesn't law and order regularly show police functionally torturing suspects? don't they beat somebody up in almost every episode, only to be told off by a superior who wishes beating up suspects was allowed?

Random link from the archives: "CBC Radio" https://web.archive.org/web/20200821095524/https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.5146761/new-academic-journal-only-publishes-unsurprising-research-rejected-by-others-1.5146765

it's pride month. celebrate by becoming even gayer.

maven seems to be populated by tech bros. weird interface: you have only a tag-based timeline, but all tags are determined by NLP topic-identification. it has the audience it does bc it calls this 'ai' but you can do it with a few dozen lines of perl...

OpenAI has a new safety team " it’s run by Sam Altman - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166105/openai-safety-team-sam-altman

every user of myspace managed to essentially just figure out how to write valid CSS by trial and error without even knowing the term CSS. i went to high school with these some of people & they weren't necessarily geniuses or anything, & CSS is unnecessarily complex. so anybody can code

Random link from the archives: "!!Con 2021 - Tropes! Cliches! Made-Up Slang! It’s the Data-Sitters Club! by Quinn Dombrowski - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210628155511/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fjgYEDZBKE originally retrieved Mon 28 Jun 2021 03:55:11 PM EDT

it's not enough that i have an extension that hides facebook's new LLM-based chat interface that they put in place of search; i need one that also causes facebook to lose money by spamming that interface with randomly selected dictionary words 24/7

Random link from the archives: "Algorithms to Live By" https://web.archive.org/web/20211102111855/https://scribe.rip/p/algorithms-to-live-by-ddd587bd458d originally retrieved Tue 02 Nov 2021 11:18:55 AM EDT

Meet Me at the Workers' Club by molleindustria https://molleindustria.itch.io/meet-me-at-the-workers-club

GitHub - Sebby37/Dead-Internet: Y'all thought the dead internet theory wasn't real, but HERE IT IS https://github.com/Sebby37/Dead-Internet

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/Search.aspx?task=searchbypop

what's your favorite rag not composed by scott joplin? because i'm pretty sure every ragtime song i've heard was by him

a recurring problem: pointing out that something is a conservative strawman version of an actual left-wing position is complicted by the inevitable existence of a bunch of kids who legitimately subscribe to the strawman version bc it's the only version they've ever heard

shinji ikari is both moe and a nepo-baby

isn't it funny that as soon a video game development became an industry instead of something done by hobbyists for beer money, corps conspired to promote the idea that 'real video games' are the ones that require huge teams to develop, expensive machines to play, and enormous skill to complete?

The Cult That Manifested A Baby - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFMx36MGuVU

The Stop Motion Horror Film That Was Animated by a Single Person - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKV3kH6YmLg

Random link from the archives: "The value of lives saved by social distancing outweighs the costs | Ars Technica" https://web.archive.org/web/20200424140450/https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/the-value-of-lives-saved-by-social-distancing-outweighs-the-costs/

Random link from the archives: "Popping the Publishing Bubble – Stratechery by Ben Thompson" https://web.archive.org/web/20191104092633/https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/ originally retrieved Mon Nov 4 09:26:33 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "The Internet of Garbage by Sarah Jeong - The Verge" https://web.archive.org/web/20190904180251/https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17777330/internet-of-garbage-book-sarah-jeong-online-harassment originally retrieved Wed Sep 4 18:02:51 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Defender of Utopia’s Remnant | The Meaning of Cities | Issues | The Hedgehog Review" https://web.archive.org/web/20190722140852/https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-meaning-of-cities/articles/habermas-a-biography-by-stefan-muller-doohm

i have a lot of problems with GANs but 'most AI art is uninspired' is not the knock-down argument people think it is in a world where most photographs are blurry selfies/pictures of food by amateurs.

Random link from the archives: "Devilman Crybaby - Instant AOTY? - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180113141629/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bGjnA30XYw originally retrieved Sat Jan 13 14:16:29 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "“The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson | Literary Fictions" https://web.archive.org/web/20181024130354/https://literaryfictions.com/fiction-1/the-daemon-lover-by-shirley-jackson/ originally retrieved Wed Oct 24 13:03:54 EDT 2018

appollo comes downstairs saturnalia morning to discover that baby hermes has disassembled all the tortoises

Random link from the archives: "Goodbye Gatekeepers – Stratechery by Ben Thompson" https://web.archive.org/web/20191104094226/https://stratechery.com/2017/goodbye-gatekeepers/ originally retrieved Mon Nov 4 09:42:26 EST 2019

septuple-feature: all three bill and ted movies followed by all four matrix movies

among people who aren't anime fans, there are three big perceptions of anime, all stemming from early 90s marketing: it's family cartoons, it's all porn, or it's basically sports. the last one is the least inaccurate (shonen battle manga are popular) but basically just describes everything loved by american teenage boys in the 90s

Random link from the archives: "Bela Lugosi's Dead by bauhaus live on Riverside - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200425163928/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTJF0uE2LOg originally retrieved Sat Apr 25 16:39:28 EDT 2020

Simon & Garfunkel sing "Baby Got Back" - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdsVRegEJTA&ab_channel=ThereIRuinedIt

today is the ides of march; celebrate by being ware

today is the ides of march; celebrate by eating a ceasar salad with a switchblade

today is the ides of march; celebrate by eating a ceasar salad with a bowie knife

Random link from the archives: "Identity by Any Other Name - ACM Queue" https://web.archive.org/web/20190312093043/https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3314115 originally retrieved Tue Mar 12 09:30:43 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200928161904/https://scribe.rip/p/the-pop-philosophy-of-authentic-inauthenticity-r-u-sirius-interviewed-by-douglas-rushkoff-part-3-ee4269494869 originally retrieved Mon Sep 28 16:19:04 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "“The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson | Literary Fictions" https://web.archive.org/web/20181024130354/https://literaryfictions.com/fiction-1/the-daemon-lover-by-shirley-jackson/ originally retrieved Wed Oct 24 13:03:54 EDT 2018

good writers are perverts by DOMINO CLUB https://dominoclub.itch.io/good-writers-are-perverts

The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881) by John Cleland – Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein https://deepcuts.blog/2023/11/15/the-amatory-experiences-of-a-surgeon-1881-by-john-cleland/

in the universe next door, phil dick's sodium pentothol was delivered by a teenage david lynch

ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NSP77KF5l4

Random link from the archives: "Castlevania Season 3's 'psychedelic horror,' explained by Warren Ellis" https://web.archive.org/web/20200316093736/https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/castlevania-season-3-psychedelic-horror-video-game originally retrieved Mon Mar 16 09:37:36 EDT 2020

my problem with arch & gentoo is that they are severe own-goals. if you wanted to make a source based distro, you can make a much better one with much less effort by exercising a tiny bit of planning. (this is what lunar is.) it's sort of impossible to take arch or gentoo seriously after using lunar.

my roman empire is a chaos communications conference presentation i watched once that was ostensibly about how to fight for civil rights but was actually about how this protest organization changed into a lobbying organization and spent years trying to accumulate a database of which cookies specific conservative politicians liked best and what their habits were so that they could be easily cornered and given cookies. like: way to go spending an enormous amount of effort trying to optimize unsuccessfully bribing people who hate you? i knew lobbying was stupid & contributed to political corruption but i didn't realize it wasalso the political equivalent of a tabs-vs-spaces argument

it's really weird that we group religion and ethnicity together. like, ethnicity is something you're born into & cannot escape from, but religion is a set of things you choose to believe to be true and a set of actions you choose to take in relationship to it. do we group them together simply because religious organizations have a history of trying to accumulate power by indoctrinating pre-rational children? (to be fair, perhaps the way i'm framing religion is unusual: most people i've met who identify with a religious label also reject or are unaware of basically everything that religion claims to be true, and the only real exception is people who converted in adulthood; clearly those folks do not think religion is a set of beliefs and actions, but something inherited like ethnicity is)

Random link from the archives: "Future of Software Ebook Bundle by enkiv2 - itch.io" https://web.archive.org/web/20200731124511/https://itch.io/s/33706/future-of-software-ebook-bundle originally retrieved Fri Jul 31 12:45:11 EDT 2020

just heard the euphemism 'matress actress' for sex worker for the first time and it's such a cute phrase <3 i hope it's not ruined by association by being used as a slur or something

i've been on bluesky for a couple days and my verdict is: it's twitter again, by the guy who did twitter the first time, and leans very normie (having none of the interesting subcultures that made twitter interesting except furries and cute-animal bots, both of which fedi is much better on). it's probably a good fit for people whose only problem with twitter is elon musk, & who thought it was perfect a couple years ago. they've rebranded saved searches as 'feeds' and they're trying to pitch it as a UI revolution, which it might be in the context of an app that looks and acts like somebody replaced the icon pack in the official twitter app. so far as i can tell it's very liberal and i'm one of only a handful of anarchists even on there.

This might be a bit too much for me. Vocal ANALYSIS of Meat Loaf's "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDuJkfnoZFE

Bad idea of the day: pitching xanadu as a solution for tracking individual bytes of LLM / GAN output to individual bytes of training corpus

Bad idea of the day: d&d but the hypnosis powers are replaced by players' actual ability to hypnotize each other / the DM

Random link from the archives: "Monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end - Uncanny Magazine" https://web.archive.org/web/20190123125905/https://uncannymagazine.com/article/monologue-by-an-unnamed-mage-recorded-at-the-brink-of-the-end/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 23 12:59:05 EST 2019

being critical of LLMs but not because you want to strengthen copyright is a difficult situation, if you want to interact with outsiders. actually this happens to me a lot: i criticize liberals but from the left, i think UFOs are a genuine phenomenon worthy of study but i think disclosure is bullshit & so is the ETH, i like low budget exploitation movies but totally unironically. coming to your opinions from the ground up instead of copying the opinions of your friends & slowly justifying or adapting them leaves you with a bunch of nuanced positions that don't fit well with the pattern-matching NTs usually do when trying to slot you into some category & figure out how to interact with you. and it's not like i don't understand why that's valuable: i totally spend a bunch of effort trying to satisfy the boolean 'is this person a fascist' when meeting someone new because i don't want to spend time and effort listening to a fascist. the problem is that a lot of the time, these frames are literally put in place as a form of power consolidation: whether you support strengthening copyright or you support widespread use of LLMs, you're supporting exactly the same large businesses for the most part, and only a nuanced position that doesn't frame it in terms of complete automation of existing commercial roles is capable of producing arguments that aren't functionally just shilling for pearson; the framing that UFOs are hostile extraterrestrials or hallucinations is basically just a story the US air force made up because it allows them to pull a paul bennewitz on people on the one hand but also justify military funding on the other, just by changing how the media spins an existing policy (the official air force position on UFOs has not changed since the 1950s); ironic enjoyment promotes bad craft while justifying dismissing good craft & interesting experiments as inherently unserious, & promotes the idea that a 'real movie' is defined by its budget and polish; i don't think i need to explain to masto why an anarchocommunist would dunk on liberals.

The DEATH of Classic Anime - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBYxS4uqHX0

About That Idris Elba Gold Documentary - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihvG3RgbYzE

libs love the rhetorical strategy of pointing out that two randomly selected right-wing positions are incompatible, ignoring that 'the right' is a fragile temporary alliance between fundamentally incompatible ideologies whose proponents would normally be busy murdering each other but were brought together by Nixon and Reagan & held together by fear. do individual right-wingers also, sometimes, claim to hold several beliefs at the same time that are incompatible with each other? absolutely, but this is normal when somebody hasn't come to positions rationally & has instead glued together various things they've heard without examining them and called it a belief system. most people with any belief system are like this. it's just more obvious in this case because the scale of the incompatibility between the various heterogenous groups those positions are taken from is so large.

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @enkiv2: "An article I'm considering writing: the (explicit) political use of ghost stories. The idea of the 'confederate soldier ghost' was explicitl […]"" https://web.archive.org/web/20180723103422/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1021352318028087297.html originally retrieved Mon Jul 23 10:34:22 EDT 2018

ice cold take: hot fuzz is still edgar wright's best film by a wide margin

one of these days some meta-analysis will reveal that 90% of ADHD diagnoses are actually just cases of misdiagnosed autism caused by shrinks whose entire training on autism came down to a paragraph in a textbook from the 70s that said, like, 'cant talk, obsessive'.

we used to have a billion little productive subcultures that were intentionally supported -- by art grants, cheap housing, & programmes for borrowing space and resources -- for the purpose of injecting novelty into the 'mainstream'. now we don't have a 'mainstream', and we kind of stopped trying to farm the avant-garde for stuff, but we still have the religiously-segregated media ecosystems developed in the 80s and 90s to cater to people who wanted a mainstream with less gay in it, and now if something inexplicably gets really popular it turns out it's astroturfed by a corporation that shills ripoff versions of hallmark movies or something. meanwhile all the little subcultures have gotten real incestuous because it's been 20 years since the last time a niche was mined by a mainstream artist (because it's been 20 years since there was a mainstream artist).

Random link from the archives: "British Folk Horror Is Back, and It's Scarier Than Ever - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20190626075339/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa3byz/british-folk-horror-is-back-and-its-scarier-than-ever originally retrieved Wed Jun 26 07:53:39 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/witness: The Witness, by Stu Galley (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416081927/https://github.com/historicalsource/witness originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:19:27 EDT 2019

idea for some future tabletop campaign: your party is being chased by some large slow beast and comes across a field of abandoned port-o-potties. these would be great places to hide, but it turns out that two species of air-cephalopod have evolved to use these portopotties as shells, using their camoflage ability to mimic the door. one species uses the port-o-potty purely as protection and pretends to be an in-use/locked potty; the other is a mimic that pretends to be a vacant one to lure in prey. the cephalopods are imperfect mimics but the port-o-potty manufacturers were cutting corners.

From Mark Zuckerberg’s MMA hobby to Elon Musk’s ego: Silicon Valley had a very masculine year - Vox https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/12/27/24011198/bezos-zuckerberg-musk-buff-mma-masculine

my copy of casablanca has an intro by lauren bacall and it's so weird, because she's clearly struggling to figure out something nice to say about the movie (which is weird in of itself -- it's a classic for a reason) and what she eventually settles on is 'the nationalism is romantic'. bruh, this is a movie about how it's more important to kill nazis than mope over your ex

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200920003647/https://scribe.rip/p/critics-of-hannah-gadsby-dont-understand-autism-d6365f288843 originally retrieved Sun Sep 20 00:36:47 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Novels written and illustrated by an “AI” (Phil Gyford’s website)" https://web.archive.org/web/20210910202219/https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2021/08/31/novels-by-ai/ originally retrieved Fri 10 Sep 2021 08:22:19 PM EDT

The step-by-step logic of old pinball machines - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3p_Cv32tEo

my dishwasher was complaining of a clogged valve so, after putting it off for weeks, i finally washed all the dishes in it by hand, pulled all the drawers out, and fished all the gunk out of the bottom. i started a test run and -- it pissed all over the floor.

sucks how musk does embrace-extend-extinguish by buying up whatever company happens to be doing a vaguely progressive thing (electric cars, space travel) & then running that company in such a way that it's inevitably doomed to catastrophic failure. like, is he trying to prevent electric cars and space travel from happening?

it occurs to me that, until the internet, the only reliable way to become famous without so much infrastructural support that you were practically just a figurehead for a large organization was to commit some kind of really gnarly crime. everybody from the king to stephen king basically owes their fame to institutions that promote individuals by polishing and spinning their image, but sink an axe into your dad's skull on christmas morning & songs will be sung about you for like 300 years. (though i guess there still is an institution involved there: the carceral one -- foucault demonstrates the shift from promoting murderers as examples of bad behavior to hiding them from sight in the first section of discipline & punish)

Random link from the archives: "Defender of Utopia’s Remnant | The Meaning of Cities | Issues | The Hedgehog Review" https://web.archive.org/web/20190722140852/https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-meaning-of-cities/articles/habermas-a-biography-by-stefan-muller-doohm originally retrieved Mon Jul 22 14:08:52 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Here’s your point by point refutation of the google memo." https://web.archive.org/web/20211024012226/https://scribe.rip/p/heres-your-point-by-point-refutation-of-the-google-memo-b7201d0cca04 originally retrieved Sun 24 Oct 2021 01:22:26 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Goodbye Facebook" https://web.archive.org/web/20190110091359/https://jasongullickson.com/posts/goodbye-facebook/ originally retrieved Thu Jan 10 09:13:59 EST 2019

i've gotten way better at handling situations where there's an obvious problem but i can't positively identify or solve it -- by which i mean it only ruins my whole day sometimes, and i hardly ever cry in public about it anymore

are text collages an accepted form of collage art? like, essays composed entirely of color-coded quotes from other essays, composed by cutting up and rearranging printouts. because blackout poetry and cutups are both things, and collage art often includes snippets of text on top of images, but this is sort of a different thing -- a medley intended to bring people back to the original sources with an extra layer of intertextual framing.

one thing i've noticed is that, since i've started smoking weed regularly, i'm prone to spontaneously smiling (even if i'm not high, even sometimes if i haven't smoked in more than a week). this is unexpected but i approve -- i think it balances out my RBF a bit. like, i'm fairly chill, but i can't blame anybody for being intimidated by a white guy in combat boots and all black with a shaved head frowning

Multifaceted: the linguistic echo chambers of LLMs - by James Padolsey https://blog.j11y.io/2023-11-22_multifaceted/

i'll bet any species that evolved on a planet without salty oceans will absolutely be fucked up by salt. same for oxygen: if there ain't free oxygen in the atmosphere at home, it'll probably literally dissolve your carapace or whatever

Random link from the archives: "Numbers Every Programmer Should Know By Year" https://web.archive.org/web/20180906084141/https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html originally retrieved Thu Sep 6 08:41:41 EDT 2018

by a mystery of facebook's algorithmic ranking, i see a lot of posts by strangers complaining about cheating or a fear of cheating. i've never really understood this, because i can't see how cheating could possibly be widespread or difficult to avoid. for your partner to cheat, they must (1) be really hot, and (2) be really stupid (or at least impulsive) -- because at least to people will need to want to fuck them at the same time (a rarity), and they need to consciously decide to handle this situation in an irresponsible way instead of just becoming poly or exerting self-control

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/bureaucracy: Bureaucracy, by Infocom" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082424/https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:24:24 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Bathead - Planet Claire (Original by "The B-52's") - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210825192410/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_jV-q7MIko originally retrieved Wed 25 Aug 2021 07:24:10 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Even leftists don't talk about animals. - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220608163109/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYDQZ3Neeqo originally retrieved Wed 08 Jun 2022 04:31:09 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - StevenBlack/hosts: Extending and consolidating hosts files from several well-curated sources like adaway.org, mvps.org, malwaredomainlist.com, someonewhocares.org, and potentially others. You can optionally invoke extensions to block additional sites by category." https://web.archive.org/web/20190123092520/https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts originally retrieved Wed Jan 23 09:25:20 EST 2019

Watching a whole bunch of movies by the director of Hausu - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7j3HpiVLPk

there are all sorts of interesting things you can demand be done with your corpse after your death but basically all the fun ones will be struck out by probate courts or will be a huge burden on the executor or are way better in theory than in practice. (as much as i love the 'my estate will be distributed in proportion to the amount of my corpse eaten by each attendee at my funeral slash banquet' nobody will actually do it and if they did nobody would attend.) the best i've come up with that is likely to work is schmaltz-adjacent: 'bury my ashes and plant a fruit tree above them, which must be allowed to grow to full maturity'. but here is a freebie for you, that you might be able to pull off if your executor has a sense of humor: 'my ashes are to be placed in envelopes with no return address and mailed to my ten worst enemies, so that i may haunt them'.

the first pro-israeli statement i've heard since the bombings started (not counting stuff being quoted in a pro-palestinian context or stuff by obvious trolls) was literally an ad on the grocery store PA system. broadcast media is a different universe

joan of arc was used by nonhuman intelligences to plant a myth in the culture, and died not knowing her purpose

any name you have chosen for yourself -- even temporarily -- is more real than the one chosen for you by the strangers who gave birth to you. they didn't know who you'd become.

How to drink less alcohol | Psyche Guides https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-drink-in-a-healthier-way-by-moderating-your-intake

in 100 years, english students will hear about stephen king for the first time in grad school and be very confused about why he was so popular. not knocking on king here -- i like his books, generally speaking -- but he's a deeply weird dude who writes long, rambling, extremely personal books that are frequently hard to relate to. people in the future will talk about It the same way people today talk about Moby Dick. people in the future will talk about The Tommyknockers the same way people today talk about Vril: The Power of the Coming Race. people in the future will talk about The Dark Tower the same way people today talk about Barsoom or The Night Land.

if you make your services stop working with ad blockers, people will stop using your services rather than see ads. if you make your services stop working with ad blockers when you weren't showing ads in the first place (looking at you, crunchyroll premium & the astonishing legends podcast) wtf are you even doing? last year, when i upgraded my internet, my router came with basically a pi hole built-in and enabled by default; people less technically proficient than i am would have no idea that it was even running, and will just think your shit is broken. and it is.

every constitution was written by terrorists, except the british constitution (which wasn't written at all, but was brought about through terrorism)

browser monopolization discourse is sort of (though not entirely) pointless because, while we certainly can't trust google, the browser landscape has never not been heavily monopolized by large arguably-evil corporations with lots of w3c influence, and that w3c influence has manifested a spec that cannot be implemented without the resources of a large arguably-evil corporation. on top of that, the purported alternatives (ex., firefox) are dependent upon google's continued goodwill anyhow. like, this matters because we've trapped ourselves in browserland for no good reason and relatively few technical people have bothered to find out how to escape. but the way the web is specced out directly encourages and supports monopolization; even if we didn't have a browser monopoly/oligopoly every website is still structured like a monopoly because of the way addressing works so anything that uses web tech is doomed to a monopoly-adjacent state.

regression hypnosis is not a method for 'uncovering suppressed memories' because 'suppressed memories' are not a thing; regression hypnosis is a method for implanting false memories and integrating them. it makes sense that people would take a while to understand this, because a kind of strict institutionalized freudianism was widespread for basically the entire 20th century. under the freudian model, all memories are stored perfectly but the psychic censor distorts or removes memories during retrieval in order to protect the organism from scary thoughts; this isn't actually how memories work but seems reasonable to somebody who has swallowed other parts of freudianism. memories actually work a little more like statistical machine learning: perceptions slightly modify the action potentials of a bunch of networks of neurons associated with attributes of the perception, and recall involves doing a weighted random walk of these networks -- meaning that any memory of an actual percieved event gets contaminated by similar events (and, because these neurons are part of several networks that correspond to totally unrelated stimuli, unrelated events also get contaminated based on the luck of the draw), and remembering an event (real or imagined) modifies these weights too, which means any time you remember anything it causes both that thing and a random selection of semi- and un-related memories to become slightly more corrupted. the upshot of this, with regard to 'suppressed memories', is that any memory that you avoid recalling will eventually become so distorted as to become inaccessible (like a CD-R left uncovered in the bottom of a bag of badgers) but that also, all that's necessary to implant a false memory is to motivate somebody to 'recall' it. ask somebody a question and, unless they are quite conscientious, they will probably give the system 1 answer (i.e., do a random walk and use whatever vaguely plausible thing it emits) -- and unless the exact answer to the question happens to have been strongly imprinted, you'll get a confabulation (or in layman's terms, bullshit). regression hypnosis involves strongly motivating people to confabulate experiences that probably never happened (and that, if they did happen, are irretrievably corrupted anyhow); at best it will produce fragments of actual experiences in a soup of nonsense.

i spent all night last night tossing and turning in a pool of sweat and dealing with gas-related cramping, and my nose has been stuffed up & throat sore for days, and today i had a headache, fatigue, and trouble focusing all day. these days, those kinds of symptoms (which i have, independently and in combination, a lot -- i don't go a week without having one, and i don't go a month without having several hit at the same time) make me wonder if i somehow got covid, but it's equally explained by the season change: allergies + sleep disruption + the outside temperature dramatically swinging between AC weather and furnace weather in the same day. i've got a covid shot scheduled for the day after tomorrow: i had one scheduled for friday but the place canceled day-of, and i tried to get one in the spring but the person administering the shot told me that i wasn't allowed to have one because it'd only been 6 months since my last booster.

Wikipedia search-by-vibes https://leebutterman.com/wikipedia-search-by-vibes/

if you're somehow under the impression that discussion on HN (or lobste.rs) is high-quality, try sorting posts by new and reading entire comment threads. the hn mods are very good at ensuring that comments (regardless of quality or salience) that superficially resemble intelligent & civil discussion show up high on frontpage posts. HN is a certain kind of cultural bubble (and lobste.rs is a slightly different but largely adjacent bubble), and ideas that conflict with the unexamined assumptions forming the foundation of this bubble get quickly buried under emotional outbursts, like they do in other communities; there's a large volume of this shit (although most posts have zero interaction -- justified since most posts are low-information self-promotion bullshit -- most comments are in long flame threads attached to troll/bait posts). the comments that end up not being removed from frontpage posts are the ones that do not threaten the whole 'capitalism and pop-science are the solution to every problem' model common to HN posters, arguably because such comments inevitably cause ugly fights -- the kind that the mods would like to make outsiders think never happen there; of course, the general acceptance of this model is arguably the biggest problem with HN's community and the SV tech industry whose culture HN purports to represent, so these flamewars are actually the most pro-social form of content on the whole site. lobste.rs is basically just ex-HN people who don't believe anything different from the HN people but have a slightly higher average technical competence and a marginally lower tolerance for obvious spam.

babylon five is about space racists whereas star trek is about space racists who think they're good liberals

you can tell a lot about a person by whether they pluralize 'person' as 'persons' or 'people', and when

'microcheating' sounds like it was invented by the kind of guy who puts on a suit and tie to beat his much-younger wife

any story that can be ruined by a spoiler deserves to be

the world we live in is so far from the world we'd like to live in that it's sometimes hard to figure out even a general trajectory: will this get me closer or will i drive into a cliff now hidden by the fog of time?

Band name of the day: abyssal red clays

Bad idea of the day: a heated and chaotic debate show about christian theology hosted by radio engineers called Cross Talk

i don't know how to explain this to somebody who doesn't already understand it (like my scrum master, whose mind is so alien as to be totally unknowable) but: looking pretty is totally unrelated to coding, so if you force workers to look pretty (ex., by making them come into the office or turn webcams on during meetings) that will inevitably take energy away from the more important task of doing the fucking labor. People came into offices because we didn't have the internet yet, not because offices actually provided value, and they continued coming into offices out of inertia and not because it wasn't a clearly stupid idea.

Taxi Driver and King of Comedy both represent worlds where people are trapped in shitty circumstances they can't imagine real alternatives to, and poorly-adjusted dudes working off naive-bordering-on-delusional models of the world consisting largely of contextless marketing slogans that give them no way to understand their own trauma, who then perform the only type of action they can imagine that's outside of their daily life: violence-as-spectacle. A smart viewer would recognize that these protagonists are deeply flawed, that they do not properly understand the nature of the system keeping them down, that their atomization and alienation is in a dysfunctional feedback loop with their individualism and self-aggrandizement, and that the fact that this spectacular violence worked is another terrible irony. But I am sure that my fifteen year old self would fundamentally misunderstand these movies as being in favor of 'heroic' big public gestures, the same way that a lot of teenagers misunderstood Fight Club, and the same way that my 5 year old self fundamentally misunderstood Weird Science. As somebody who as a general rule supports and enjoys 'extreme' media that represents undesirable behavior honestly, these movies are kind of an exception for me -- I wish they had more directly 'downer' endings, because the kinds of guys who identify with De Niro's beaten-down possibly-autistic protagonists are the least likely to understand the subtext of these movies and the most likely to actually perform public violence. I might recommend these movies to people, but only after specifically talking about this. (More likely, I wouldn't: these movies, despite their gritty reputation, are fundamentally cringe comedies -- michael scott with a gun -- and so they're really uncomfortable to sit through despite their artistry & all the social issues they touch on are better handled by books.)

baron munchausen by proxy

Bad idea of the day: a browser extension that uses a distributed cache to resolve shortened URLs, so that only the first user with the extension to resolve a URL is tracked by the shortener

i've probably ruined my chances of ever becoming a freemason by being loudly discordian online for 15 years

Remembering the Witch in Witchcraft | Ian Chambers https://www.patheos.com/blogs/bythepalemoonlight/2023/07/remembering-the-witch-in-witchcraft/

Random link from the archives: "Four Poems by Rae Armantrout from 'Finalists' [FLASHING LIGHTS] - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220226210618/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHz9qkB3uRc originally retrieved Sat 26 Feb 2022 09:06:18 PM EST

ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Barbie Girl" by Aqua - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqE9B1_9TpQ

it seems that medium has pulled a quora and alienated its audience of skilled and motivated early adopters in favor of casuals to the point where it has become very hard to get high quality conversation. i'm starting to get to the point where most comments on my posts are by people who clearly haven't read the post.

Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode https://www.righto.com/2023/07/undocumented-8086-instructions.html

Discord, or the Death of Lore « ASCII by Jason Scott http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509

The Witch Can’t Be Identified | Ian Chambers https://www.patheos.com/blogs/bythepalemoonlight/2023/07/the-witch-cant-be-identified/

World-Wide Labyrinth Locator - Welcome https://labyrinthlocator.com/

i believe in abolishing all forms of IP law (and this is directly informed by my day job, writing the infrastructure that allows IP law to be executed at scale). if you are worried that abolishing IP law would screw over individual artists (though i would argue that small artists are already screwed over and IP law is mostly used against them, and in fact cannot typically be used to support them) then a reasonable half-measure is as follows: limit copyright terms to 7 years, and rule that copyright can only be held by a natural person, and cannot be transferred or inherited. this will prevent copyright from ever being used as a corporate cash-cow, and ensures that whatever benefits might go to the copyright holder always go to the artist instead. this doesn't address other forms of IP, but other forms of IP are really not available to regular people unless they're quite rich, whereas everybody you have ever met owns a billion copyrights in theory and doesn't know it.

a bit about my background, so that people don't think my weird takes about software come from nowhere: i spent 15 years in mostly self-guided exploratory learning around programming & computers (supplemented in the last 10 with formal instruction: took some high school classes & got a BS in CS), only after which i entered the industry. during that first 15 years, i did OS development and wrote language interpreters and compilers, rudimentary machine learning, got really inspired by descriptions of smalltalk environments and wrote a similar kind of environment in tcl, researched the history of hypertext and its variations, and did a whole bunch of other projects of similar complexity but less relevance. then i got an internship working on a search engine, and shortly after, i was contacted by ted nelson, who had seen some of my xanadu-inspired projects, and began to write code for xanadu in an official capacity. now, i've been in the industry for a decade, and because i work for a large company, i've collaborated with a lot of different units and seen & written very different kinds of code in very different languages for very different purposes. already soured on java, i soured even further when i had to enhance and maintain a large java codebase that hadn't been edited in 6 years, and meanwhile my eyes were opened to the scope of shell functionality (which i approached with an enthusiasm tempered by experience with tcl maintenance). when i shoot off some angry polemic about DNS, or jump links, or language design influence on code structure, it's coming from a synthesis of this whole history -- somebody who had a lot of time to grow to appreciate what good code looked like and did, and to create elaborate single-user projects, being forced to adjust to a world of bad code and one-size-fits-all software products, and looking for a line of flight.

an LLM is a plausible-sounding-bullshit machine because any purely-statistical generative system is a plausible-sounding-bullshit machine: it optimizes for least-surprise along the metrics it knows how to measure. it produces interesting output by breaking -- by failing to measure something important and therefore producing output that no human would produce, because no human could ignore whatever metric the model is ignoring. this is great for art: like random factors and constraints, an artist can use interaction with a statistical model to propel them out of a rut and onto a new path (as long as the model is sufficiently bad at predicting what a human would 'really' do -- i.e., so long as the training data in that area is sparse enough that the model's idea of the most-likely thing is absurd). it's horrible for anything where correctness is important: there is no negative feedback mechanism for factually incorrect or (in the case of code) non-functional output, only for output that is insufficiently boring from the perspective of event frequency correlations (where, in the case of an LLM or a markov chain chatbot, the event is a letter or word respectively). if you want reliably correct results, you need to be doing symbolic processing -- using a theorem prover, constraint solver, or expert system. this division between statistical and symbolic techniques in AI mirrors the system I / system II division in human psychology. with humans, it seems like system II is an extremely expensive epiphenomenon on top of system I -- that, through rigorous conditioning, humans are taught to sometimes simulate symbolic processing on statistical hardware. it's possible that computers could do this. but why would we want them to, when conventional computer hardware is much better at symbolic processing than statistical processing (and in fact, we are already doing it the other way around and implementing statistical modeling on symbolic hardware). (i say 'conventional computer hardware' because there are a couple dedicated neural net chips around, mostly built in the 90s; they are not heavily used, but if i didn't mention them somebody would probably complain.) IBM's 'Watson' was originally billed as something that could combine statistical and symbolic methods, but clearly, the statistical side has been given higher priority in ways that make it not just useless but actively dangerous for most of the tasks it is marketed for. the draw of statistical models for a corporation is clear: with an expert system, a human who is an expert in writing expert systems needs to interview domain experts (and all these people are typically paid very well for their time since there are few experienced expert system engineers and the domain experts are automating away some of their own future consulting contracts), whereas you just throw mountains of unstructured text at an LLM until it starts making coherent sentences (and there's a lot of unstructured text that's either in the public domain or where copyright claims are nearly unenforceable).

deeply strange to see people (admittedly mostly non-technical people on places like facebook) get excited about bluesky & threads, when the fediverse... already exists, has existed for years, and is pretty heavily populated. corporations are spending a lot of money to make worse versions of mastodon, and then they are spending even more money making sure your aunt knows about their particular for-profit flavor & doesn't realize they could sign up on an instance owned by a person instead of one owned by a corporation. a lot of effort goes into convincing people that the fediverse is difficult to use; few of the people expending this effort on behalf of Facebook are getting paid. if you have ever called the fediverse confusing in public, contact zuck and demand your check for services rendered.

somehow, we ended up with a global software ecosystem consisting primarily of self-modifying rich text documents acting as slim clients to command line software running on remote machines running in vast centralized data centers, performing message passing over a protocol that uses DNS in conjunction with certificate hierarchies. and we're locked into this paradigm, basically because DNS is for turning hostnames into IPs and isn't suited for turning unique data identifiers into chunks of data or unique service identifiers into routing rules. now that we're locked in, we're being charged for network traffic by the byte & uptime by the second. this is sort of like ending up doing forced prison labor for the rest of your life because you filled out your taxes with a pink pen & the OCR system misread a checkbox.

What is Coöperism? with Bernard Harcourt and Acid Horizon - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7v_bYLbidY

Was Snippy Mutilated By A UFO? (Documentary) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ff25wY4oNE

by dismissing made for tv horror joe bob is just dismissing dan curtis's entire filmography, all of which is good and most of which is great... #thelastdrivein

one of the reasons i'm a never-delete-anything kind of guy is that when finding material is difficult, the person who puts in the effort to find the material gets power over which parts of it get seen and how it gets framed. let's say i wrote a long thread, and in the middle of the thread i made a typo that in the context of that one message could be seen as racist. if i delete the thread, then the only evidence i ever said anything is by the guys who screenshotted just the one bit in the middle to defame me. if i keep it up, and make it indexed on search engines, then anybody who wants to find it can see the whole context, and the people who want to misrepresent the context can only manipulate the people too lazy to look it up.

still so fuckin weird to me that you can demagnetize something by hitting it the wrong way

somehow i was under the impression that flatpack was one of those overly elaborate mechanisms for putting a web page into a zip file and giving it to users like it's a real executable, but people are mentioning it in the context of gnome and distro packaging, so i guess it's like RPM (i.e., an overly elaborate way of putting executables in a tarball so you know what files to delete when uninstalling). but that just makes me further wonder: why? why are we talking about this? source tarballs are still the primary way that packages are distributed by package maintainers, and any other format is at the whims of distro maintainers.

my position (which was very common up until a specific variety of anti-GAN sentiment was seeded) is that the world is better when access to media (including for creative & transformative purposes) is open, & that it's totally possible to have that while also ensuring the creators of that media have the resources to live their lives. the there are two things that need to be sacrified for that to happen -- two things that exist to benefit capitalists & screw over artists, but that have been sold as necessary evils -- and they are: IP law and capitalism. i hate to see social progress go backwards on account of workers imagining awesome short-term gains by becoming authoritarian rulers of a tiny personal media empire, especially when everybody involved has the capability to see ahead of time that those promised gains will never materialize. nobody was paying you a living wage for your fanart in 2017, they're paying about the same now, and they'll pay about the same in another five years whether or not the folks who are currently unwilling to commission an OC decide to use a GAN for that

the funny thing about using statistical models as an art partner is that the better the model it is, the worse the model is for art purposes. humans are great at pattern matching (way better than our best 'AI' tech), and we're especially good at identifying cliches (i.e., messages whose information level -- computed as quantity of surprise with respect to the human's mental model -- is below salience threshold), but our curse is that we have a hard time thinking outside of habitual modes, and so there's a long history of using drugs, machines, and social arrangements to scramble the WIP, forcing a piece of art that is shaping up to be uninteresting to instead shift to a more interesting path. (some of these tend to introduce too much information: you rarely get a compelling story out of exquisite corpse because it increases entropy on the paragraph level while eliminating normal forms of story-level coordination, for instance.) early LLMs fit this use-case well: so long as the suggestions, completions, or responses are sufficiently unexpected, they are interesting and can support an interesting large-scale structure. but LLMs try to accurately represent their corpus, and with extremely large corpora like GPT-3, they are essentially trying to accurately represent the most common features of already-existing literature. unlike markov models, which can have word frequency statistics intentionally manipulated by the user to give pretty straightforward effects (downrank the top quartile of 2-grams so that they are less likely to be picked than the 2-grams that show up only once and you'll get very diverse and unpredictable output, for instance), LLMs can't be reasoned about and manipulated in ways that dramatically decrease the likelihood of cliches without also scrambling less-frequent patterns. LLMs want to be boring, and using them to be interesting necessarily involves discovering the parts of the model that are poorly filled in and forcing the LLM into those areas -- to simulate a smaller language model, basically. so why not just use a tiny language model? because the style of language models used by GPT literally can't work without an enormous corpus.

ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "I Wish" by Skee-Lo - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nzdyPqId-A

Manipulated by Machines | CYBERGUNK 04 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kd0GQxr3KY

Random link from the archives: "Devilry Quarterly vol.2 by enkiv2" https://web.archive.org/web/20220729171322/https://enkiv2.itch.io/devilry-quarterly-vol2 originally retrieved Fri 29 Jul 2022 05:13:22 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Electric Zine Maker (early beta, be gentle, hug it often) by alienmelon" https://web.archive.org/web/20200112164537/https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker originally retrieved Sun Jan 12 16:45:37 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "Watch Sesame Street's long-lost "Cracks," resurfaced by internet sleuths (VIDEO)." https://web.archive.org/web/20190222064352/https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/sesame-streets-cracks-video-watch.html originally retrieved Fri Feb 22 06:43:52 EST 2019

hot take: if your entire job is running meetings, listening comprehension is a mandatory skill. trying to run a meeting when you let your own uninformed thoughts drown out the real information being stated by the people doing real work is worse than not having the meeting at all: you've just wasted an hour of everybody's time and shut down coordination, which now needs to be done away from your gaze.

really fun to have to explain what's going on with a ticket every morning for 3 sprints & have absolutely nobody remember, & get asked again about it by the guy who was supposed to unblock you every day too.

Band name of the day: carried away by owls

Brian Eno - Kings Lead Hat - 1977- Written & Produced by Brian Eno - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp0k_o8gfQI&ab_channel=Snirgwert

Random link from the archives: "The Most Damaging Election Disinformation Campaign Came From Donald Trump, Not Russia - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20181123174455/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbyg3x/the-most-damaging-election-disinformation-campaign-came-from-donald-trump-not-russia originally retrieved Fri Nov 23 17:44:55 EST 2018

everybody complains about the superhero movies but what about the other currently dominant types of movies: the mid-budget high-concept horror movie by blumhouse or somebody where the monster is a metaphor for grief, the wacky comedy that dumps all its points into character development so that it can make you cry as soon as it invokes some relatable and realistic trauma, the four hour long tarkovsky-inspired sci-fi epics with sun o))) scores, and the cg-animated toy commercial gag supercuts

in a world dominated by chaos and strife, it makes no sense to venerate a god of order (clearly defeated); we discordians venerate Eris, goddess of chaos and strife, in the hopes that the chaos and strife won't happen to us, or that if it does, it will at least be funny.

Random link from the archives: "RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing by Joe Duffy - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180312162821/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k originally retrieved Mon Mar 12 16:28:21 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Snowden in the Labyrinth | by Jonathan Lethem | The New York Review of Books" https://web.archive.org/web/20191007091836/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/edward-snowden-labyrinth/ originally retrieved Mon Oct 7 09:18:36 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Timothy" by The Buoys - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20201031110307/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDfxxOQZ1io originally retrieved Sat 31 Oct 2020 11:03:07 AM EDT

old tech storytime: SMIL is a w3c standard XML dialect for mixed media and vector graphics animations from 1997. it was developed by apple, microsoft, and realmedia -- the owners of the three biggest software media players (quicktime, windows media player, and realplayer). a SMIL page is about as interactive as a DVD menu -- not exactly turing-complete but potentially substantially complex -- and the SMIL standard contains all of the media control elements later added to HTML5, the whole of what later became SVG plus animation controls, and a bunch of other features that have not yet been brought into other standards. had it taken off, most of the things people used complex javascript+css hacks for in the early naughts (back when it was called 'DHTML' and was largely graphical flourishes like animated menus) would become trivial in SMIL, as would most of the things web developers used embedded flash for (such as videos). so why does nobody know about SMIL now? why don't our browsers have SMIL support? because microsoft released a deliberately-incompatible implementation of SMIL built into internet explorer the day before the standard was finalized in order to fragment the SMIL user base & sink the product, basically just as a way to waste apple & realmedia's time and effort (a replay of what they did to IBM a couple years earlier with the OS/2 project). most of webtech for the past 20 years has consisted of reinventing SMIL poorly instead of just using SMIL.

'hey enki, why the fuck are you still on twitter?' well, because so long as i have ad blockers on, every byte i transfer between me and twitter costs elon musk money. praxis is that you and your two thousand closest friends all run scripts that upload 3 minute gifs of 4k-resolution white noise every 2 seconds.

Random link from the archives: "David Bunch's Prophetic Dystopia | by Jeff VanderMeer | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books" https://web.archive.org/web/20180913110319/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/12/david-bunchs-prophetic-dystopia/ originally retrieved Thu Sep 13 11:03:19 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: ""The Sound of Silence" by Simon&Garfunkel in major key - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200618191847/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xthy4VrYHAg originally retrieved Thu Jun 18 19:18:47 EDT 2020

the framing of 'human rights' is unfortunately still useful -- i say unfortunately because it embeds within itself a defeatist framing. we live in a world where people are treated so horribly by states that we made a list of the especially horrible things and said that states should be embarased to do those anymore. it's a list of specific ways states aren't allowed to hurt us -- the implication being that every other possible way is okay. instead, why not admit an imagined-to-be-unpredictable inherently-chaotic human subject given the absolute minimum constraints necessary to prevent harm in communities, guided under the knowledge that people do tend to help each other when given the opportunity?

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/witness: The Witness, by Stu Galley (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416081927/https://github.com/historicalsource/witness originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:19:27 EDT 2019

Bad idea of the day: all secret agents are implanted with 'burn chips' so that they can be killed remotely by their CO if they go rogue, but because the bureaucracy / management branch of the espionage agency is made up of veteran former agents, they were all implanted, and introduced checks and balances to prevent a single highly-placed mole from wiping out a third of all active agents. as a result, rogue agents are kept in a suspended state of not-dead-yet dependent upon a willingness of bureaucrats to introduce red tape to gum up the works of an otherwise straightforward summary trial and execution: like a cross between cold war MAD doctrine and death row bargaining. most active agents are in this zombie state where they are under an indefinitely suspended sentence of death -- a situation where he pleases a big enough proportion of the bureaucrats to continue suspending his sentence, and in return, these bureaucrats may allow him to fulfill desires they are too afraid to articulate. the social reality becomes, in a way, a distorted mirror of the collective dream-life of the espionage-bureaucrat class. the demiurge invents kremlinology.

Random link from the archives: "Software Versus Capital by enkiv2" https://web.archive.org/web/20220729171446/https://enkiv2.itch.io/software-versus-capital originally retrieved Fri 29 Jul 2022 05:14:46 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201010194012/https://scribe.rip/p/sacred-cow-by-bruce-sterling-b467af2c2041 originally retrieved Sat Oct 10 19:40:12 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "transmediale 2014 | Talk by Bruce Sterling at the Opening Ceremony - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20181201112154/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dacKWLGZklM originally retrieved Sat Dec 1 11:21:54 EST 2018

Bad idea of the day: gunswords in an action-RPG have realistic wear patterns: hit too often with one side of the sword and it makes the gun less accurate by biasing it to one side

Random link from the archives: "In medieval England magic was a service industry used by rich and poor alike" https://web.archive.org/web/20190927125137/https://theconversation.com/in-medieval-england-magic-was-a-service-industry-used-by-rich-and-poor-alike-124009 originally retrieved Fri Sep 27 12:51:37 EDT 2019

is the popularity of LLMs an attempt by Language to give itself a body?

biases in language use mirror biases in activation potential, and apply to the same context (the Imaginal). in other words, language is an intelligent alien symbiote to humanity, made of living information. trickster phenomena -- UFO close encounters, faerie abductions, BVM apparitions -- are probably caused by this alien intelligence, whose very fingers are deep in our brains.

Random link from the archives: "Help Me Somebody ~ Brian Eno - David Byrne - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180108205413/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxeO0LBR6GY originally retrieved Mon Jan 8 20:54:13 EST 2018

discourse around the intersection of LLMs and commercial publishing is annoying largely because it's a complete rerun of the discourse around generative grammars in academic publishing from a decade ago, mostly by people who have no idea there even was such discourse. (and the problem in academic publishing was not solved; a bunch of journals did what some people are suggesting we do -- use word frequency statistics to flag likely generated works and just blanket reject any ms that got flagged -- and to the degree it worked at all it's a testament to the laziness of academic spammers & the wide availability of journals that are themselves spam, because you can absolutely break any of those word frequency heuristics with like two minutes of effort

Random link from the archives: "So It Was Written: The History of The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey | Church of Satan" https://web.archive.org/web/20200121104415/https://www.churchofsatan.com/the-history-of-the-satanic-bible/ originally retrieved Tue Jan 21 10:44:15 EST 2020

i grew up on the cod-deleuzianism of wired magazine and late night anime, bombarded with thirdhand summaries of the rhizome plateau by people who would feel personally attacked by the faciality plateau if they had ever heard of it. i guess it beats being immersed in the cod-deleuzianism of IDF slide decks.

Random link from the archives: "Emotional burnout is fueled by envy | The Outline" https://web.archive.org/web/20190221101903/https://theoutline.com/post/7065/emotional-burnout-is-fueled-by-envy originally retrieved Thu Feb 21 10:19:03 EST 2019

the ccru is the result of a conspiracy by time travelers from an alternate future to prevent the ccru from existing

Random link from the archives: "Coroutines, exceptions, time-traveling search, generators and threads: Continuations by example" https://web.archive.org/web/20201202124622/http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuations--exceptions-backtracking-search-threads-generators-coroutines/ originally retrieved Wed 02 Dec 2020 12:46:22 PM EST

protip: if you want performance, the biggest performance impact is probably not language choice, but some third party dependency doing something in n^3 time instead of linear time because it was written by somebody who didn't care about performance. the easiest way to get performant code is just to write things yourself & do it in a sensible way. this is how, for instance, i replaced 800 lines of java on a 40-node map-reduce cluster with an awk one-liner running on my first generation asus netbook & had it run hundreds of times faster.

hot take: scream is... fine. it's commenting on pop culture conceptions of slasher movies that were never actually accurate, and that lost whatever relevance they had even before it came out. it's reasonably well-executed but less interesting or atmospheric than early-80s slashers like the burning or happy birthday to me, and to the degree that what it comments on actually exists instead of being a 'beam me up scotty' popular-misunderstanding, those tropes are present in late-80s direct-to-vhs slasher cash-ins that are now forgotten (if not totally unavailable). its biggest impact on the slasher genre was to resurrect and preserve those tropes well beyond their sell-by date by inspiring late-90s slashers that try to copy scream's formula poorly. same applies to the whole rest of the franchise. it's watchable but if it were erased from history nothing of value would be lost.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200610154247/https://scribe.rip/p/by-the-end-of-his-life-martin-luther-king-realized-the-validity-of-violence-4de177a8c87b originally retrieved Wed Jun 10 15:42:47 EDT 2020

How I Paid My Rent by Publishing the Most Disgusting Things on the Internet https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/my-life-as-an-atrocity-tour-guide.html

nagatoro & kaguya-sama are both organized around playing intimacy-chicken and i actually like this as an improvement on the format you used to see in rom-coms in the 90s & naughts, where the characters are genuinely conflicted about their relationship & are either extremely accident-prone or literally just go into a fugue state where they don't care about consent. rom-coms of this breed need to extend the will-they-won't-they state as long as possible while also providing fanservice, so stuff needs to happen that normally would seem couple-y without the protagonists actually being a couple. the intimacy-chicken model gives these characters agency, ensures that every interaction is mutually consensual, and structures things so that the eventual payoff is inherently the result of character growth: these characters are only kept apart by their own internal hangups, and as they grow into a state where they feel comfortable loving and being loved, they naturally transition from this kind of plausibly-deniable mutual teasing into a comfortable intimacy based on familiarity and care. whereas in love hina (to pick probably the most egregious example not to involve a literal aspiring-rapist) basically just has god-the-author reach down and deus ex machina keitaro into boob grabs and panty flashes multiple times an episode so he can get his ass beat until these women get stockholm-syndromed somehow into thinking he's admirable. when there's a boob grab in nagatoro, it may be accidental but it's the direct result of an activity both people entered into specifically because of the risk of accidental boob-grabbing. there's room for overlap here: rent-a-girlfriend (which i like a bit better than most, not despite but because of the way that the main character's character flaws are highlighted -- they are pretty typical flaws for the kind of guy whose romantic frustrations & lack of perspective could easily lead him down an incel pipeline but who also could develop into a functional human being) has characters who like the MC despite their better judgement, or who like the MC for reasons that are not based on his character, and who deal with the ramifications of being involved with somebody who has a lot of growing to do before he's actual boyfriend material -- something that i think every straight girl has experience with, and that every guy who has grown out of early patriarchal conditioning remembers from the other side with a generous helping of cringe.

sqlglot/python_sql_engine.md at main · tobymao/sqlglot · GitHub https://github.com/tobymao/sqlglot/blob/main/posts/python_sql_engine.md

i'm a big proponent of forethought -- planning, design work, et cetera -- but planning work can only ever be done effectively by people who are also capable of executing the plan, and while delegation is important, when technical work is deeply entangled it's not possible to plan and delegate work that you yourself do not substantially understand. in other words, non-technical management of technical tasks does not serve to produce actionable planning; instead, it simply forms a reporting layer that produces 'performance data' (always, by definition, nonsense bullshit) to upper management that must be ignored and that relays 'guidelines' to developers (typically nonsense bullshit, but almost always necessary to ignore) from upper management. basically, it's a layer that sits between developers and middle management & spews random noise in both directions. a good developer can perform all of the tasks involved in bringing a project to fruition (including getting user feedback, managing the project, communicating with and delegating to other developers, writing documentation, doing UX analysis & design, and performing maintenance in response to changing requirements), but non-technical management's skillset is limited to interfacing with institutional tooling for creating the illusion of taylorization around the inherent chaos of any real work (ex., using JIRA, holding scrum rituals).

Random link from the archives: "COVID-19 Manufacturing Challenges: Why Byproducts Are At Risk" https://web.archive.org/web/20200512145219/https://tedium.co/2020/04/28/manufacturing-byproducts-covid-19/ originally retrieved Tue May 12 14:52:19 EDT 2020

Band name of the day: abyssal freedom

it's not that probability matrices are a bad way to model history for the purpose of prediction (nor even that they fail to account for creativity: the lossiness of any statistical model produces errors on generating predictions at different levels of abstraction and these errors, when taken seriously as hidden intentions, produce juxtapositions and mutations that are 'creative' by changing the flux distribution across the network of desire, opening up new channels and draining or flooding the old); it's just that any intelligence whose ass cannot at least theoretially be kicked if enough community members agreed it was necessary will inevitably start acting like a spoiled rich kid and be wildly irresponsible. too much positive feedback & you get the cocaine meltdown.

the term 'city pop' becomes funny when you realize that 'city' and 'shitty' are transliterated into katakana in exactly the same way (and therefore, to japanese people, are homonyms) & during the 80s, the music now classified as city pop was considered shallow bubble gum stuff by a lot of critics

under the studio system & for decades after, theatres were sold movies as package deals, wherein to show the A picture, you'd have to also show the B picture that had been packaged with it. imagine something like that across studio lines, tied to government art funding or something: wanna show the new marvel movie? well, you gotta show this random arthouse movie about a heroin-addicted vampire made by a college student too. wanna show the new DC movie? well,you gotta show this french-language family drama about a divorce in 1967 west berlin that makes frequent allusions to the compositions of brughel.

Random link from the archives: "Tool - Stinkfist But It's We Are Never Getting Back Together By Taylor Swift - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220327202342/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56Cqbk9CJz8&ab_channel=WilliamMaranciMashups originally retrieved Sun 27 Mar 2022 08:23:42 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Texas's Gulf Coast Is Being Battered by 'Nurdle' Pollution - Atlas Obscura" https://web.archive.org/web/20190723140253/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/plastic-nurdle-pollution-in-texas originally retrieved Tue Jul 23 14:02:53 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200214101003/https://newrepublic.com/article/156528/enduring-vision-chinatown-sam-wasson-big-goodbye originally retrieved Fri Feb 14 10:10:03 EST 2020

Bonus Episode: RAW Politics with Bobby Campbell - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7wm1Xwn5go

tfw you click the 'sort by match %' on okcupid and it shows you somebody with a 65% match, who answered five questions and four are disagree.

I'm usually tolerant of linguistic drift but the shift toward treating 'shop' as intransitive seems like it's an astroturfed plan to make it easier to talk about buying things, and to thereby orient people toward a more consumerist mindset.

i always end up regretting doing big (but necessary) refactoring efforts on this codebase for work, because inevitably during the time i've had the branch open there will have been hundreds of modifications by total strangers to all the files i'm changing and i'm stuck spending literal days resolving merge conflicts, mostly just guessing what the hell the person was trying to do and whether or not it still needs to be done. it's no wonder that i'm the only one still willing to make these big structural changes, and it's no wonder (given that) that the codebase is such a goddamned mess.

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @GalaxyKate: "Do you know this book (grapefruit, by Yoko Ono)? I've been reading it and profoundly affecting my bot-making. Art appreciation and bot-makin […]"" https://web.archive.org/web/20180523102628/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/999110758305882112.html?refreshed=yes originally retrieved Wed May 23 10:26:28 EDT 2018

The Commodity Fetishism of Mark Fisher https://www.sublationmag.com/post/the-commodity-fetishism-of-mark-fisher?fbclid=IwAR3gwxk8IprqrmZ47zup1pb5LbyPSmr-FsUYQbmbC7DqL2fRXXRML9vIDUE

Librarians Are Finding Thousands Of Books No Longer Protected By Copyright Law https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzyde/librarians-are-finding-thousands-of-books-no-longer-protected-by-copyright-law

it's upsetting how successful the astroturfing campaign to treat dubious IP-based lawsuits against GANs as somehow by or for artists is.

really tempted to write an extension to automatically swipe left on people who are in the wrong state / have listed some other dealbreaker that okcupid wants me to pay 40 bucks a week to filter by. all these dating sites let you filter by ethnicity for free but they all want you to pay to filter out right-wingers

Random link from the archives: "How Patreon Has Helped And Hindered Creators, As Told By 13 Users - Digg" https://web.archive.org/web/20190508101510/http://digg.com/2019/patreon-creator-plans-user-interviews originally retrieved Wed May 8 10:15:10 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Edward Snowden Reconsidered | by Tamsin Shaw | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books" https://web.archive.org/web/20181012140122/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/13/edward-snowden-reconsidered/ originally retrieved Fri Oct 12 14:01:22 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200611072853/https://scribe.rip/p/why-youre-so-irritated-by-everything-ae8ead4ad63e originally retrieved Thu Jun 11 07:28:53 EDT 2020

ongoing by Tim Bray · Private and Public Mastodon https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @pangmeli: "I don't trust girlboss companies who use intimate gal pal language with their workers any more than I trusted techbro companies who installe […]"" https://web.archive.org/web/20201228141532/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204461601509773312.html originally retrieved Mon 28 Dec 2020 02:15:32 PM EST

AI and the Big Five – Stratechery by Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com/2023/ai-and-the-big-five/

Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse – Jon Udell https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/01/19/of-course-the-attention-economy-is-threatened-by-the-fediverse/

Random link from the archives: "Kowloon's Curse by Rem — Kickstarter" https://web.archive.org/web/20210330121919/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kowloonscurse/kowloons-curse originally retrieved Tue 30 Mar 2021 12:19:19 PM EDT

you make an orgone accumulator by alternating layers of metal and organic materials, but what if for the organic materials you used newspapers -- just the obituaries

Random link from the archives: "What We Can Learn From Software History by Hillel Wayne – Deconstruct" https://web.archive.org/web/20200421101314/https://www.deconstructconf.com/2019/hillel-wayne-what-we-can-learn-from-software-history originally retrieved Tue Apr 21 10:13:14 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Review of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis | Dreamflesh" https://web.archive.org/web/20200105111911/https://dreamflesh.com/review/book/high-weirdness/ originally retrieved Sun Jan 5 11:19:11 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/amfv: A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Steve Meretzky (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082505/https://github.com/historicalsource/amfv originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:25:05 EDT 2019

ongoing by Tim Bray · Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical? https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/21/Mastodon-Ethics

Random link from the archives: "Troubleshooting shell scripts that grew slower with age" https://web.archive.org/web/20191119080912/https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/11/18/oldbash/ originally retrieved Tue Nov 19 08:09:12 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "3 of 3 - A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari - Illustrated Audiobook - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190105130050/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws2b5aOhrdA originally retrieved Sat Jan 5 13:00:50 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "Lambda World 2018 - What FP can learn from Smalltalk by Aditya Siram - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20181118084431/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baxtyeFVn3w originally retrieved Sun Nov 18 08:44:31 EST 2018

Arts and AI: Being Authentic to Intent by J Curcio https://modernmythology.net/arts-and-ai-being-authentic-to-intent-95bc1c000b14

'i saved 15 dollars a week on coffee by ' bro how many pots of coffee are you drinking per day? i bought two pounds of grounds on sale for three bucks in 2019 and haven't finished it yet.

Random link from the archives: "Inspired by 'They Live,' these glasses block screens / Boing Boing" https://web.archive.org/web/20181003141329/https://boingboing.net/2018/10/03/inspired-by-they-live-the.html originally retrieved Wed Oct 3 14:13:29 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "The American Civil War and the History of Embalming with Dillon Payne - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220325165448/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ClbyAHCDKw originally retrieved Fri 25 Mar 2022 04:54:48 PM EDT

today is boxing day. celebrate by casting to Object[]

Cultural industries have been captured by billionaires " a new book considers what we can do about it https://theconversation.com/cultural-industries-have-been-captured-by-billionaires-a-new-book-considers-what-we-can-do-about-it-193838

Obsolete Capitalism: The strong of the future: Nietzsche’s accelerationist fragment in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus by Obsolete Capitalism http://obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-strong-of-future-nietzsches.html

i wonder if, in 20 years, there will be a rennaissance in VNs spearheaded by the guys who currently do those interactive online corporate training things, the same way that low-budget horror was innovated in the 60s and 70s by industrial filmmakers

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/cutthroats: Cutthroats, by Michael Berlyn and Jerry Wolper (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082402/https://github.com/historicalsource/cutthroats originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:24:02 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "How the killing of an abusive father by his daughters fuelled Russia's culture wars | World news | The Guardian" https://web.archive.org/web/20200316091520/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/khachaturyan-sisters-killing-of-abusive-father-russia-trial-family-values originally retrieved Mon Mar 16 09:15:20 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "The CPython Bytecode Compiler is Dumb « null program" https://web.archive.org/web/20190225131451/https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/02/24/ originally retrieved Mon Feb 25 13:14:51 EST 2019

ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Your Woman" by White Town - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRYO6-gNGzQ

No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices – Terence Eden’s Blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/no-you-cant-save-30-per-year-by-switching-off-your-standby-devices/

Popular writing manuals that are actually pretty bad and should be avoided: Story by Robert McKee (meandering and abstract), On Writing by Stephen King (not really a writing manual), Writing for Interactive Media by Jon Samsel (unimaginative and obsessed with the limitations of mid-90s tech and market forces), any of the many writing manuals by Kevin J. Anderson (advice only applicable if you happen to be Kevin J. Anderson), Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (10% good advice, 20% repetition, 70% complaining about Kids These Days Being Too Woke), Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg (contains exactly one piece of writing advice -- to trick yourself into writing -- repeated for 200 pages, interspersed with completely unrelated anecdotes about hanging out with some cult leader), Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and Susan Weinberg (indulges too much in emotional bullshit to the exclusion of actionable advice, and more than half the pages are just reprinted short stories you've already read in high school english), The Anatomy of Story by John Truby (a mix of extremely abstract & confusing models & weird sweeping political shit)

Writing manuals actually worth reading: Screenplay by Syd Field, Writing Dialogue by Tom Chicarella, Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, Story Genius by Lisa Cron, Graphs Maps Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti, Writing Space by J. David Bolter

cross-product/moby-jones-march.txt at develop · bensteinberg/cross-product · GitHub https://github.com/bensteinberg/cross-product/blob/develop/moby-jones-march.txt

isekai oji-san is fun and all but one of the central gags simply doesn't work because the tsundere archetype was common by the early 90s (and present in very high-profile shows much earlier -- macross features it, and so does urusei yatsura) so the idea that an otaku who disappeared in 2000 wouldn't recognize a tsundere because the tsundere archetype appeared in 2004 is complete nonsense. the term tsundere might concievably only be 20 years old, but even that seems unlikely.

Thread by @hondanhon on Thread Reader App " Thread Reader App https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593646758357504001.html

Hardcore techno's alternative history - Case: Dance of the Anthropoids - Electric Byway - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfk7OY8eiBE

people ask 'why is open source software so poorly designed' and then they get into industry and realize that all b2b software is even worse. then they go back and try to use something they used to use a couple years ago & can't figure it out. because it turns out that almost all software is poorly designed, but we overlook the workarounds we do for the flaws in the software we're most accustomed to, and to the degree that open source software is exceptionally bad, it's because it's made by professionals during their off time or built on some proprietary software that had its source donated to apache or something. when people make software that scratches their own personal itches, that software is easy to use in that particular domain.

i often hear about discourse for the first time by reading a detailed and coherent takedown of a take so bad that i couldn't imagine someone actually believing it. i guess that beats hearing those extremely bad takes directly...

you know what movie really needs the vinegar syndrome treatment? radioactive dreams. that's a new york ninja tier crazy movie rendered borderline unwatchable by bad audio mixing and blurry, washed-out video transfers

Content Moderation Is Terrible by Design https://hbr.org/2022/11/content-moderation-is-terrible-by-design

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209110704/https://scribe.rip/p/fbi-now-believes-real-trump-kidnapped-last-year-replaced-by-russian-cyborg-987fc2111b1d originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 11:07:04 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Letting neural networks be weird • The first line of a novel, by an improved neural..." https://web.archive.org/web/20180804145120/http://aiweirdness.com/post/168051907512/the-first-line-of-a-novel-by-an-improved-neural originally retrieved Sat Aug 4 14:51:20 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "7 Books About Cyberspace by Women Writers - Electric Literature" https://web.archive.org/web/20211006122723/https://electricliterature.com/7-books-about-cyberspace-by-women-writers/ originally retrieved Wed 06 Oct 2021 12:27:23 PM EDT

What did the Russians dig up when they dug trenches in Chernobyl? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/what-did-the-russians-dig-up-when-they-dug-trenches-in-chernobyl

the computer revolution was put down by the CIA on september 11, 1973

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - eykd/plottoxml: Plotto—A new method of plot suggestion for writers of creative fiction by William Wallace Cook, 1867-1933" https://web.archive.org/web/20171012124606/https://github.com/eykd/plottoxml originally retrieved Thu Oct 12 12:46:06 EDT 2017

4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything - ⌨️🤷🏻‍♂️" https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw/

This Is Just Infinite by samplereality https://samplereality.itch.io/this-is-just-infinite

"Stop Writing Dead Programs" by Jack Rusher (Strange Loop 2022) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s

the killer robot movies of the 80s and 90s (war games, deadly friend, evolver, small soldiers, etc) have a better intuitive grasp of the real problems associated with reward function gaming in machine learning systems than killer robot movies from earlier and later, at least for the ones set 'in the present day', and i think it's because that's the sweet spot wherein rudimentary machine learning tech was just widespread enough that filmmakers know somebody who knows exactly how it works because they've implemented some (ex., by following the heiserman books) but wasn't so widespread that it became highly professionalized. all these movies exaggerated the power of the tech (mostly in order to give us machines that could see in real time -- actually, even today, mobile robots are unlikely to have the processing power to do what was put into an action figure in small soldiers) but they basically capture the nature of a pattern-matching mechanism tied to an optimizer. the other half, somewhat related, is that the robot effects during this era aren't just practical but robotic. in other words, the people doing the effects know how robots work and how they break, and while it's necessarily exaggerated, that knowledge acts to somewhat ground the behaviors (whereas when robots were people in costumes or CGI hallucinations they didn't need to have any relationship to the actual physics of an electro-mechanical device)

seeing a lot of people on twitter say 'mastodon is siloed'. three days ago i'd assume this was a misunderstanding & try to clear it up. now i'm beginning to think a lot of it is bad faith. like: discovery isn't functionally impacted by federation, because the way you find people to follow on mastodon is exactly the same as the way you'd find people on twitter (by following people boosted by the people you already follow when they say interesting things, or by initially following people you know from other platforms). everybody who is currently on twitter already knows how to do this, and has no reason to believe it would work any other way on any other platform.

all ads are irrelevant by definition. an ad is an attempt to get you to buy something you don't want, with money you don't have.

Random link from the archives: ""Mapping Imaginary Cities" by Mouse Reeve - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20181015170103/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic_5gRVTQ_k originally retrieved Mon Oct 15 17:01:03 EDT 2018

IT by Stephen King - Radical Reviewer - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_1oJYW4K88

Band name of the day: by some savage claw

Bad idea of the day: vampire as parasitic-sea-sponge: fangs are fruiting bodies used for reproduction, and the puncture holes made by the bite become the combination mouth-anus of the creature, which gets most of its nutrition from filtering the host's blood. so under stress, the vampire's neck holes will, like, gape. soon after reproduction, the host (now something like 40% mycelium by weight) is liquidated for remaining nutrients, forming a deposit of star jelly

listening to this guy do a presentation about ad tech where he has completely swallowed hype about ad-tech effectiveness & catatrophizes about it. let's be clear: ad tech isn't sustainable, and that's easily provable based on a bit of back of the envelope math. consider the amount of money you have, and the number of ads you see every day. how much would it cost to actually buy everything that was advertised to you? how many hundreds of times your net worth would it take to buy everything in every ad you saw in a single day? that's the upper limit on the maximum effectiveness of advertising, because the most you can do is go broke. now, ad-tech actually can't get anywhere close to that, because it has zero access to the most important signals about advertising success: it has no idea whether or not you bought something in response to an ad. it's optimized for proxy measures that CAN be captured, but the relationship between those proxy measures and the only thing that actually matters is just, sort of guessed by humans at some stage of early development and never reconsidered. then, on the other side, we have the companies buying the ads: how many ads do you need to buy before you have spent more on advertising than you will make in profits? the answer is, generally, not all that much -- and if ad targeting worked, it would lower that number because the likelihood that somebody bought something would increase proportionally to ads, but ad targetting doesn't work well enough to actually calculate and plan about that factor. the actual value of ads (in terms of the percentage increase in number of people buying a product who have seen the ad vs prior multiplied by the marginal profit) goes down with every ad you put out, and goes down with every ad any competitor puts out: every podcast tries to sell me mattresses six times an episode but i only need one mattress per 10-20 years. the promise of ad-tech is that this number will go up over time, but every business that has ads is bound to notice that they overestimated it in the first place & adjust, being willing to pay less and less for targetted advertising. all the personal information ad-tech companies collect, all their gdpr violations, aren't actually going to make targetting good enough to make the ads worth paying for, and ad-tech survives purely on the basis of misleading investors about possible future targetting improvements that will never really happen, trying to get theirs and get out before all of the customers realize that there's no point in advertising with them at all. is the personal information a problem? absolutely. but not because the companies can predict behavior -- they can't, at all -- but because that data is gonna leak and be used by nazis or something. your ethnicity, gender, and sexuality says absolutely nothing about whether or not you are gonna buy a car or a mattress (nor is your politics or taste in movies) but it's a great predictor of whether or not somebody is looking for an opportunity to bash your head in.

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/enchanter: Enchanter (Zork IV) by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082341/https://github.com/historicalsource/enchanter originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:23:41 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "“Homo sapiens declared extinct” by Bruce Sterling (1999)" https://web.archive.org/web/20211102221313/https://scribe.rip/p/homo-sapiens-declared-extinct-by-bruce-sterling-1999-cc8b0f94b195 originally retrieved Tue 02 Nov 2021 10:13:13 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: ""Aesthetic Engine 2" by Vladimir Mitrovic - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20171004122858/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAil0DzclFA originally retrieved Wed Oct 4 12:28:58 EDT 2017

Random link from the archives: "302 Found" https://web.archive.org/web/20190801131829/https://modernmythology.net/a-rose-by-any-other-name-would-smell-just-the-same-says-the-poet-5b5acb61a709 originally retrieved Thu Aug 1 13:18:29 EDT 2019

This Movie Does Not Exists - Movies designed by AI https://thismoviedoesnotexist.org/

MagicPrompt Stable Diffusion - a Hugging Face Space by Gustavosta https://huggingface.co/spaces/Gustavosta/MagicPrompt-Stable-Diffusion

"The Early Days of id Software: Programming Principles" by John Romero (Strange Loop 2022) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqdZAYcwfY

Held Hostage by Truth | A Conversation with Joe Koch - Southwest Review http://southwestreview.com/held-hostage-by-truth-a-conversation-with-joe-koch/

Prince of Darkness has such an interesting metaphysics, because the primary way that the titular goo 'infects' reality is by harnessing natural processes in such a way that they are pushed, slightly, more in line with its underlying will. In other words: the appearance of satan, in this film, is through synchronicity, through the invasion of meaning into the parts of the universe that are supposed to remain mechanical. God is dead & Satan lives.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200110091547/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/the-bystander-effect-in-open-source-598430de16a7?sk=af9746e7b3b64233834f7d7e5fb21f2a originally retrieved Fri Jan 10 09:15:47 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "The Mysterious Origins of the Angel Metatron from the 3rd Book of Enoch - Sefer Hekhalot Mysticism - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220624190731/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-VGkaqDxbY originally retrieved Fri 24 Jun 2022 07:07:31 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "‘Babylon 5’ is great, so why does it look so bad?" https://web.archive.org/web/20180625071437/https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/22/babylon-5-digital-video-quality/ originally retrieved Mon Jun 25 07:14:37 EDT 2018

If you like cyberpunk & horror & you need something suitably early-90s to read, I highly recommend Arachne by Lisa Mason. Seems to be out of print -- I could only find an ARC second-hand. It takes a couple chapters to hit its stride, but it really wades into the bodily grossness of human flesh, the rickety materiality of robots, the horrifying numinousness of the collective unconscious, and the exploitativeness of capitalism (especially self-exploitation as part of hustle culture). And it's from, like, 1992. Apparently there's a whole trilogy? Anyway, go read it.

one of the downsides of blocking bad-faith shit from all my feeds is that i get into this headspace where i feel like bad-faith argumentation is rare, easily identified, easily avoided, toothless, and ineffective -- forgetting that i've spent literally years doing daily maintenance to produce a space with those characteristics. based on the accounts of... pretty much everybody, it seems like the norm is to be absolutely inundated with it all the time and manipulated by it despite yourself, because your ability to resist blatant emotional manipulation has been worn down through exposure.

"Cybernetic Culture" by CCRU : A Reading - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVW_SnLxfsk

people keep making videos talking about how cyberpunk 2077 edgerunners is great over the top of the most lazy/generic/halfassed looking footage ever. like, i guess it must be good in context, but it looks less like an anime (let alone a cyberpunk anime) and more like one of those late 90s nickelodeon productions trying to cater to 13 year olds by showing the character designers one (1) low-res jpeg of akira

diversify your cults. if you join a cult, hedge by joining another, incompatible cult at the same time.

Bad idea of the day: a video game where you need to talk the player character through solving thorny personal problems so that they can get some sleep, with half the screen taken up by a giant timer representing how much time they have until they have to get up. when the timer runs out, you get blasted with alarm sounds, whether or not you 'finished' the level & got the PC to sleep. the less time the PC has slept (in terms of 'time left on the clock') the more problems you have to solve the next night, on top of particular 'solutions' having ramifications that can add more problems.

Baby Pics, Life Lessons, and Obits: What Happened to LinkedIn? | The Walrus https://thewalrus.ca/what-happened-to-linkedin/

The AI Unbundling – Stratechery by Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com/2022/the-ai-unbundling/

geekdom/fandom can be broken down into two subgroups: one based on costly signalling (generally, the production of creative transformative works, but sometimes legally risky manouvers like tape-trading or technical ones like translation) and one based on consumption (sometimes, but not always, involving participating in a critical discourse, of varying degrees of rigour). these two groups are biased in very different directions because of the way the gatekeeping mechanisms manifest: one joins and participates in the costly signalling segment of fandom by defeating legal, technical, and cultural mechanisms of centralized media control manifesting in the form of market segmentation, artificial scarcity, and the fixation of elements into 'canon' based around authorial intent, and while this produces a widespread anti-IP sentiment, were these blockages fully removed, there would be no way for this group to meaningfully demonstrate their affiliation; the consumption-based segment, on the other hand, can only show its affiliation through legitimate and 'approved' channels, and is limited to officially-available media and tie-in merchandise, but benefits directly from network effects. While the consumption segment is broader in some ways (no skill or daring is required, nor any connections) it is narrower in others (one's cultural capital here is tied entirely to one's bank account, and wealth is not a good proxy for anything other than perhaps power, so not only is there no need to form a complex web of meaningful relationships within a fandom of this type, doing so is a negative since it limits the 'fan's ability to cut all ties with one fandom and gain social capital in another through buying and selling). completely opening up licenses -- flooding the market with new shows, licensing every anime in every region for simulcasting -- paradoxically gives in to the apparent demands of the first group and demolishes them: if your cultural capital came from fansubbing TV rips, you are no longer useful to your cohort when crunchyroll streams the new episode within a half an hour of broadcast (even if the official sub has none of the translation notes or karaoke subs or font changes that formed the basis of inter-fansub competition); if your cultural capital came from writing spicy and politically radical slash fics in private mailing lists under threat of bogus lawsuits, your cultural capital goes away when the showrunners begin to anticipate, manipulate, and lampshade the things you would say by lurking in fan communities and turning them into a kind of unpaid second writer's room. There are only a couple things left to do: go much further (in obscurity, by focusing on older titles that are not available, or in transgression, by making transformative fan content so culturally radioactive that businesses cannot touch it), continue what you're doing in a community that keeps shrinking because of a loss of a sense of meaning, or become a consumer-type (if you can afford it). Or, alternately, become one of the outside observers -- the people who do not actually participate in the cultural production but collectively provide social capital through a consumption of fandom that's wholly passive. It is these folks who leave the outer ring of costly-signalling-based fandom first: they have not done any costly signalling themselves, but they watch fansubs because they don't want to wait for an expensive dvd release that might never come, read fanfiction because they wish they were seeing these situations in the shows themselves, and (though totally silent and anonymous) their footprints produce view counts that justify cultural production. When the costly-signalling side of fandom shrinks, though, and this group leaves, they will necessarily find less fulfillment in observation of the consumption side: a lovingly constructed spirk-tribble orgy is always going to be more fulfilling than a photograph of someone else's collection of mass-produced dolls, because the former at least offers imaginative investment. One could always graduate from an observer to a member of the costly signalling based fandom culture: while skill is prized and confers social capital, all that is actually necessary to join is sacrifice (ex., a willingness to write bad fanfiction in public, which may over time become good fanfiction); the consumption-based group is only open to you if you can afford to spend money on worthless objects, and class mobility is such that if you can't, nothing within your power is likely to make it so that you can. I've tried to be NPOV here, but I think it's clear that the costly signalling based segment is doing something valuable (making meaningful cultural production, breaking down barriers, weakening the power of corporations and IP, being inclusive across class lines, transforming an interest in media into the development of useful skills) and the consumption based section is a kind of shallow one-upsmanship between rich idiots; it benefits IP owners to cater to the latter and try to demolish the former, and until that process began in earnest and cultural shifts became noticable in fandom spaces, there was very little interest in distinguishing between the two (who overlap anyway).

Let’s talk about Visual Novel mechanics! Part 3: Time wasters - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyAbYoC__ek

A New HOPE (2022): Shoplifting on a Budget: Exploring Bypasses for Retail Security Tags - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AukEEMhNxo

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - opennars/Narjure: A Clojure implementation of the Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System proposed by Pei Wang." https://web.archive.org/web/20210112105738/https://github.com/opennars/Narjure originally retrieved Tue 12 Jan 2021 10:57:38 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209111205/https://scribe.rip/p/i-have-discovered-many-ways-to-not-make-money-by-writing-books-8ea5fd99492a originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 11:12:05 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Why Sailor Moon, YuGiOh, and Power Rangers Were Changed in America (+ Samurai Pizza Cats) - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190724180437/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASb3FS5-bBY originally retrieved Wed Jul 24 18:04:37 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209100335/https://scribe.rip/p/good-points-on-the-issues-and-failure-to-respond-by-publications-c0c14a06ae3f originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 10:03:35 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Computers by the Millions" https://web.archive.org/web/20191022134559/https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/cbm.html originally retrieved Tue Oct 22 13:45:59 EDT 2019

last night i saw a movie called Sins of Dracula. i had a much better time than i expected to. it came out in 2014, but it's a pastiche/parody of pureflix-type 'evangelical propaganda version of a regular movie genre' movies, which is a thing that was common about 10 years earlier. the premise is that this is a 'christian horror movie' that teaches about the dangers of secular community theatre, by presenting a story wherein a community theatre production of a jonestown musical is actually a honeypot run by an over the top 'evil satanist' to get misfits he can kill in order to ressurrect dracula. also there's a minor character who is basically shaft-meets-kojack-as-evangelical-exorcist. i don't know if i would have liked it nearly as much if i was sober, but i had a great time; it never felt like a mean-spirited movie (the way bush-era evangelical-media parodies often do)

Random link from the archives: "This frostbitten black metal album was created by an artificial intelligence | The Outline" https://web.archive.org/web/20171220102435/https://theoutline.com/post/2556/this-frostbitten-black-metal-album-was-created-by-an-artificial-intelligence originally retrieved Wed Dec 20 10:24:35 EST 2017

Random link from the archives: "Defender of Utopia’s Remnant | The Meaning of Cities | Issues | The Hedgehog Review" https://web.archive.org/web/20190722140852/https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-meaning-of-cities/articles/habermas-a-biography-by-stefan-muller-doohm originally retrieved Mon Jul 22 14:08:52 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/suspect: Suspect, by Dave Lebling (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082010/https://github.com/historicalsource/suspect originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:20:10 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @mykola: A relational database represents an ontology of the data it contains. It is a graph, not a tree -- everything is defined in terms of everyth…" https://web.archive.org/web/20200709084811/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281203896384393216.html originally retrieved Thu Jul 9 08:48:11 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "#104 The Case of the Phantom Caller - Reply All by Gimlet Media" https://web.archive.org/web/20170909155739/https://gimletmedia.com/episode/104-case-phantom-caller/ originally retrieved Sat Sep 9 15:57:39 EDT 2017

Random link from the archives: "GANZEER - 1,000,000 A.D. PART III[[MORE]] By Ganzeer Adapted..." https://web.archive.org/web/20171120083721/http://www.ganzeer.com/post/167538424069/1000000-ad-part-iiimore-by-ganzeer-adapted originally retrieved Mon Nov 20 08:37:21 EST 2017

Related Subreddits By User/Redditor Overlap https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps

Thread by @jackclarkSF on Thread Reader App " Thread Reader App https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1555980989297410049.html

How to sleep well again | Psyche Guides https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-overcome-insomnia-by-breaking-your-behaviour-patterns

Deter Prying Eyes by Locking Your Own Letters - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/letterlocking-how-to

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Random link from the archives: "Glitch by Jenna Katerin Moran — Kickstarter" https://web.archive.org/web/20200204193841/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jennamoran/glitchrpg/ originally retrieved Tue Feb 4 19:38:41 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "Visual Novel Romance Collection for Black Trans Lives by Truant Pixel, LLC and 10 others - itch.io" https://web.archive.org/web/20200710124313/https://itch.io/b/558/visual-novel-romance-collection-for-black-trans-lives originally retrieved Fri Jul 10 12:43:13 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200928161904/https://scribe.rip/p/the-pop-philosophy-of-authentic-inauthenticity-r-u-sirius-interviewed-by-douglas-rushkoff-part-3-ee4269494869 originally retrieved Mon Sep 28 16:19:04 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/seastalker: Seastalker, by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082054/https://github.com/historicalsource/seastalker originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:20:54 EDT 2019

Software Versus Capital by enkiv2 https://enkiv2.itch.io/software-versus-capital

Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software by enkiv2 https://enkiv2.itch.io/big-and-small-computing-trajectories-for-the-future-of-software

Devilry Quarterly vol.2 by enkiv2 https://enkiv2.itch.io/devilry-quarterly-vol2

Devilry Quarterly vol.1 by enkiv2 https://enkiv2.itch.io/devilry-quarterly-vol1

Blood Ocean by enkiv2 https://enkiv2.itch.io/blood-ocean

Trilogy by enkiv2 https://enkiv2.itch.io/trilogy

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Random link from the archives: "The Name of The Rose By That Guy Who Wrote The Fascism Essay Everyone Uses | Brows Held High - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220609202155/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd8Pg8q_2Qs originally retrieved Thu 09 Jun 2022 08:21:55 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Which Scooby-Doo Character is the Best? - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20211114202927/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw0vB4Lm1Tk originally retrieved Sun 14 Nov 2021 08:29:27 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "Design for a brain; the origin of adaptive behavior : Ashby, William Ross : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive" https://web.archive.org/web/20190607141253/https://archive.org/details/designforbrainor00ashb originally retrieved Fri Jun 7 14:12:53 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism | by Pankaj Mishra | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books" https://web.archive.org/web/20180323130003/http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/ originally retrieved Fri Mar 23 13:00:03 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @normative: So, years ago I quite accidentally injected the phrase “epistemic closure” into political discourse. This became a buzzword for five minutes…" https://web.archive.org/web/20200901163806/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1298738662532935681.html originally retrieved Tue Sep 1 16:38:06 EDT 2020

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Thanks to fans, the weirdest official Doom game is now playable on Windows | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/06/dumbphone-exclusive-doom-rpg-has-been-reverse-engineered-by-fans/

Jim Watkins Duped By Fake Q Copying Tripcode https://www.dailydot.com/debug/jim-watkins-duped-fake-q-tripcode/

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This Mystical Book Was Co-Authored by a Disturbingly Realistic AI https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbjvb/this-magickal-grimoire-was-co-authored-by-a-disturbingly-realistic-ai

all statements are lies by omission

...and by islands I mean paragraphs || J. R. Carpenter http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands/

Random link from the archives: "10 Horror Movies Directed by Women You Maybe Haven't Seen - Bloody Disgusting" https://web.archive.org/web/20200226073812/https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3604647/10-horror-movies-directed-women-maybe-havent-seen/ originally retrieved Wed Feb 26 07:38:12 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "In Defense of Nicolas Cage - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20211210100144/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJmJ5FbY5RY originally retrieved Fri 10 Dec 2021 10:01:44 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @JYSexton: All right. Let’s talk about Donald Trump, Jr posing with a gun adorned with crusader iconography as America teeters on the brink of a religi…" https://web.archive.org/web/20200107093942/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1214193844797018112.html originally retrieved Tue Jan 7 09:39:42 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/hollywoodhijinx: Hollywood Hijinx, by Hollywood Dave Anderson (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082315/https://github.com/historicalsource/hollywoodhijinx originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:23:15 EDT 2019

Stream episode S2 Episode 9: Go See Jackie with Codi Vore by Howell Dawdy's Fast Track podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/user-355057818/s2-episode-9-go-see-jackie-with-codi-vore

Random link from the archives: "Soundcities by Stanza. The Global soundmaps project. Sounds from around the world in an online database of soundmaps. The sounds and noise of cities. Hundreds of city sounds recorded from around the world on soundmaps. The website also has series on online mixing desks where you can mix these sounds." https://web.archive.org/web/20210607101654/https://soundcities.com/ originally retrieved Mon 07 Jun 2021 10:16:54 AM EDT

the whole period-tracking-app-data-secondary-market thing is a good reason that internet access should be a permission that apps need to ask for, rather than something available by default. personal medical information should generally remain local to a device; other than performing periodic backups, why would anybody think it's ok for any of these applications to use a remote server at all?

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - jzck/kernel-zig: hobby x86 kernel zig" https://web.archive.org/web/20200115111613/https://github.com/jzck/kernel-zig originally retrieved Wed Jan 15 11:16:13 EST 2020

The Mysterious Origins of the Angel Metatron from the 3rd Book of Enoch - Sefer Hekhalot Mysticism - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-VGkaqDxbY

Wordalle - a Hugging Face Space by huggingface-projects https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingface-projects/wordalle

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - historicalsource/nordandbert: Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It, by Jeff O'Neill (Infocom)" https://web.archive.org/web/20190416082138/https://github.com/historicalsource/nordandbert originally retrieved Tue Apr 16 08:21:38 EDT 2019

whatever happened to rosemary's spider baby, jane?

Random link from the archives: "Tracing fake news footprints: characterizing social media messages by how they propagate | the morning paper" https://web.archive.org/web/20180306132916/https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/02/19/tracing-fake-news-footprints-characterizing-social-media-messages-by-how-they-propagate/ originally retrieved Tue Mar 6 13:29:16 EST 2018

my favorite piece of visionary apophatic poetry is 'seether' by veruca salt, followed by 'planet telex' by radiohead

Queer Games Bundle 2022 by queergamesbundle and 413 others - itch.io https://itch.io/b/1404/queer-games-bundle-2022

Random link from the archives: "“S Clubbed to Death” - S Club 7 / Rob Dougan Mashup by ah! - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200510180229/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvCc-gLw33Y originally retrieved Sun May 10 18:02:29 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @patrissimo: "1/ On the danger of "Puzzles". A puzzle is an activity which takes brains but not effort, like Sudoku, crosswords, Hearthstone/MtG, bridge, […]"" https://web.archive.org/web/20190524081737/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1130871057961766912.html originally retrieved Fri May 24 08:17:37 EDT 2019

Postcards from a Dying World: Essay: Moon is more Philip K. Dick than Blade Runner by David Agranoff http://davidagranoff.blogspot.com/2022/06/essay-moon-is-more-philip-k-dick-than.html

The Name of The Rose By That Guy Who Wrote The Fascism Essay Everyone Uses | Brows Held High - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd8Pg8q_2Qs

Babylon 5 (1993) Retrospective/Review - Part 1 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FfKOubWE14

the logic behind House of Dark Shadows was clearly that they had made a lot of money off a cheap soap opera by being extremely goth and now that they had a bunch of money to make a movie they were going to make the most goth thing imaginable, and y'know what? they pulled it off.

Random link from the archives: "An oral history of Babylon 5: The beloved TV novel that showed a different way to tell sci-fi" https://web.archive.org/web/20180629083202/http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/an-oral-history-of-babylon-5-the-beloved-tv-novel-that-showed-a-different-way-to-tell-sci originally retrieved Fri Jun 29 08:32:02 EDT 2018

Even leftists don't talk about animals. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYDQZ3Neeqo

Random link from the archives: "Enjoying High-Res Graphics on a Text-Only TRS-80 Model 4 from 1983 | Byte Cellar" https://web.archive.org/web/20181019110829/http://www.bytecellar.com/2018/10/17/enjoying-high-res-graphics-on-a-text-only-trs-80-model-4-from-1983/ originally retrieved Fri Oct 19 11:08:29 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "I’m only making business card sized games now | Killed By A Pixel" https://web.archive.org/web/20190402084150/http://frankforce.com/?p=5826 originally retrieved Tue Apr 2 08:41:50 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200618041023/https://scribe.rip/p/we-can-de-power-capitalism-by-supporting-each-other-cf4fd3b51830 originally retrieved Thu Jun 18 04:10:23 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Folklore.org: Busy Being Born" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113001753/http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Lisa originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 00:17:53 EST 2018

Bad idea of the day: real reverse isekai: a normal guy gets accosted by girls who want to force him to remember a past life where they were part of his harem, but they're all pretty weird & have complicated politics with each other & he just wants to not lose his job.

Random link from the archives: "Ashby Says: The Aphorisms of W. Ross Ashby " https://web.archive.org/web/20190607142319/http://www.cybsoc.org/ross.htm originally retrieved Fri Jun 7 14:23:19 EDT 2019

hot take: nihilism is necessary because beyond nihilism is maturity. to avoid or retreat from nihilism is to flee from the responsibility -- yours alone -- to choose your own values; if you retreat into faith, you pretend that the arbitrary values you have inherited or gained through mimicry are reified by an unimpeachable authority, but even if such an authority existed you would have no way to know for sure, so the responsibility for your values is still ultimately your own (to select values for yourself that you imagine would be shared by the most perfect agent). rejecting your responsibility to select (and question) your values is even worse than rejecting your responsibility to act in accordance with your values, because your actions are always constrained by the environment and your values, which influence all your decisions, are constrained only by your willingness to introspect.

“Dislodged” by Josh McColough | The Missouri Review https://www.missourireview.com/dislodged-by-josh-mccolough/

Random link from the archives: "TRAINWRECKORDS: "Passage" by Carpenters - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210822204449/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_gwA_hdKMs originally retrieved Sun 22 Aug 2021 08:44:49 PM EDT

Bad idea of the day: last dragon x new york ninja fanfiction 'new york ronin', about the mechanics by which the complex and diverse underworld depicted in new york ninja slowly reconstitutes itself into something more closely resembling the one depicted in the warriors, through the lens of a former vassal of the queens damiyo who seeks revenge on sho'nuff for knocking off his lord & must team up with the new york ninja and learn to harness the glow while playing upwardly-mobile cosplay gang leaders against each other in a careful political strategy game intended to destablize the nascent unification of new york gangs and return it to a warring states period

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber - Radical Reviewer - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTgJMx_DHbk

Random link from the archives: "Selling Lisp by the pound · GitHub" https://web.archive.org/web/20211022121842/https://gist.github.com/no-defun-allowed/4f0a06e17b3ce74c6aeac514281f350f originally retrieved Fri 22 Oct 2021 12:18:42 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "How China censors the net: by making sure there’s too much information | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian" https://web.archive.org/web/20180625091005/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/16/how-china-censors-internet-information originally retrieved Mon Jun 25 09:10:05 EDT 2018

Fired by Starbucks, Union Organizer Now Wears His Fursuit to Rallies  https://www.vice.com/en/article/4awzmm/fired-by-starbucks-union-organizer-now-wears-his-fursuit-to-rallies

TIL that BIG FUN is not just the name of a fake band from Heathers but also a real album by Miles Davis

celebrate mother's day by watching Suspiria and Inferno

i'd say that romance-comedy anime is bad for my mental health but honestly i can't blame media for poking sensitivities that get poked by themselves all the time anyway

Random link from the archives: "How Do We Talk About The Cosby Show? A Retrospective - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210716234936/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khIS98DltT8 originally retrieved Fri 16 Jul 2021 11:49:36 PM EDT

Bytebeat composer https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/#v3b64q1ZKzk9JVbJSKtHSKFEzNDO2MLE3szLV1NIw0dUwVCuxs7PQ1LSz0zBW0wWyLTVrgKSZUi0A

Anarchist Collective Shares Instructions to Make DIY Abortion Pills https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjby4b/anarchist-collective-shares-instructions-to-make-diy-abortion-pills

scooby doo: the great american giallo

i dunno about y'all but i am celebrating may day by listening to the album Chanctonbury Rings by the hauntology group Belbury Poly on repeat -- the same way i celebrate every cross-day, solstice, and equinox.

today is may day. celebrate by dancing clothed around a pole.

today is walpurgisnacht. celebrate by dancing naked in the woods.

A Cage by Another Name - Failed Architecture https://failedarchitecture.com/a-cage-by-another-name/

Postcards from a Dying World: Book Review: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin http://davidagranoff.blogspot.com/2022/04/book-review-manhunt-by-gretchen-felker.html

Random link from the archives: "Was Umineko influenced by The Colonel's Bequest? - Quora" https://web.archive.org/web/20191212234657/https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Was-Umineko-influenced-by-The-Colonels-Bequest originally retrieved Thu Dec 12 23:46:57 EST 2019

ACCEPTING THE CONTRADICTIONS: A REVIEW OF WHO KILLED THE KLF? – Welcome To The Dark Ages and Other Distractions by Page 130 https://welcometothedarkagespage130.com/2022/04/05/accepting-the-contradictions-a-review-of-who-killed-the-klf/

Man Inspired by QAnon and Hopped Up on Caffeine Purposefully Derailed Train https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb38q/man-inspired-by-qanon-and-hopped-up-on-caffeine-purposefully-derailed-train

Baby Oopsie: Film of the century? - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvetgr9O7QI

it always takes me like 10 minutes to remember the term 'brussels sprouts' because growing up my mom always called them by their french name, 'petits chuts', & so i find actually-bilingual people really impressive for being able to hold a conversation in any language at all

Random link from the archives: "Popping the Publishing Bubble – Stratechery by Ben Thompson" https://web.archive.org/web/20191104092633/https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/ originally retrieved Mon Nov 4 09:26:33 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction. - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180201181021/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY originally retrieved Thu Feb 1 18:10:21 EST 2018

it's unclear what happens when money is burned because every major model of economics has an irreducible kernel of incoherence -- a paradox at its heart from which it derives power -- but one thing agreed upon by every serious model is that the 'value' of money, in practice and sometimes in theory, is a kind of crystallization of belief. so the one thing we can agree upon is that burning money involves suspending or relinquishing a little bit of that belief. and then something else is let into that space.

Random link from the archives: "Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug But It's We Like to Party by Vengaboys - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200719175618/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXzFukTUyhk originally retrieved Sun Jul 19 17:56:18 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "David Byrne on True Stories, American Utopia, and his unofficial American triptych." https://web.archive.org/web/20181129085955/https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/david-byrne-true-stories-american-utopia-interview.html originally retrieved Thu Nov 29 08:59:55 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "Teaching Programming Languages by Experimental and Adversarial Thinking" https://web.archive.org/web/20180529092825/http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pkf-teach-pl-exp-adv-think/ originally retrieved Tue May 29 09:28:25 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Super Uplifting Friendship Simulator by Kara Stone" https://web.archive.org/web/20190219151716/https://karastone.itch.io/super-uplifting-friendship-simulator originally retrieved Tue Feb 19 15:17:16 EST 2019

Tool - Stinkfist But It's We Are Never Getting Back Together By Taylor Swift - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56Cqbk9CJz8&ab_channel=WilliamMaranciMashups

A pro-fossil fuel Disney ride voiced by Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye? Yes, it existed | Fossil fuels | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/16/disney-fossil-fuel-ride-ellen-degeneres-bill-nye

Erotica Inspired by My Endometriosis - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/erotica-inspired-by-my-endometriosis

The American Civil War and the History of Embalming with Dillon Payne - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ClbyAHCDKw

forgive me if this is obvious but it just now struck me as salient for the first time: collage-based pop-art became a thing in the 50s and 60s because of mass-distribution high-resolution photo-mags like Life providing a wealth of material to draw from, and likewise, the 'postmodern' mixing of styles from different decades and genres in music videos and later films in the late 80s and through the 90s were probably enabled by VHS releases of older films & cable channels like Turner's re-running old movies (i.e., even though footage wasn't necessarily used & editing wasn't necessarily done on VHS, VHS re-releases created an awareness of a variety of styles and helped situate them, so that one could draw from a style that wasn't part of a current 'scene' and expect some of the audience to also have a context for it). in other words: technical advances in communication technologies democratized access to visual ideas from groups distant in space or time, preparing people's imaginations for both creating and interpreting new variations. both photo-mags and video tapes are time-binding technologies, and i think this might be specific to time-binding: long before VHS existed, films got re-released for new theatrical runs, and although that occasionally led to artistic inspiration when a particular film ended up being very popular in re-run (ex., Disney's Alice in Wonderland, originally not terribly popular, got re-released in the late 60s and marketed to heads, & 50s re-releases & TV re-runs of 30s Universal horror flicks created the 'monster kid' generation), these hyper-specific genre riffs mostly only happened when it was possible for large numbers of people to re-experience media in detail repeatedly at their own leisure -- especially to rewind, use slow motion, go frame by frame, and eventually to zoom. likewise, you don't get hip-hop without records and tapes (not just the equipment but the actual media -- if records decayed & became unusable in 10 years then hip hop would have looked very different because crate digging would not involve digging so far back in time) and you don't get jazz without cheat books (i.e., jazz has its origins as a popular form in a certain set of process-technologies -- notational technologies in addition to techniques of performance and concepts about improvization -- and those notational technologies have a material basis and economic-social constraint-incentive structures that influence them). videocollage existed before the 90s, because at least some people had film projectors, film splicing equipment, and access to large quantities of developed film, but until the 80s everybody in that category was a Film Person (and probably a Film Industry Person); videocollage only became A Thing when regular people had cheap access to a huge variety of film (and even then, the editing technology was only accessible to Film People), and videocollage will only become democratized when recorded video and the film editing tech is not just cheap but the technical skills widespread. video (and to some extent audio) has actually gone backwards in this respect for reasons of copyright protectionism: streaming is so common that younger people often don't have copies of any film or music (either on media like DVDs or pirated files), and as understanding for how to get access to video in a form that can be edited becomes an additional hurdle people have to cross before editing (on top of getting and learning to use editing software, which is generally quite hard to learn to use) the number of people from a new generation who bother doing any of it drops. IP holders see DRM and (to some degree) streaming as a win because they see piracy as lost sales, but this is actually only a short term win for them (if at all) because the most skilled people in any domain are folks who started young and got a lot of practice -- in other words, people who didn't get 100% of their training on-the-job but instead are former amateurs -- and those people are also the ones most likely to bring new and innovative ideas into a stagnating field. In other words, when streaming and DRM is promoted to the exclusion of media that can be easily edited, the next generation is starved of new talent. the same thing has happened to computing: in the 80s, lots of people learned BASIC without intending to ever become professional programmers because it was one of the things machines could do out of the box; in the 90s, lots of people learned HTML and javascript without ever intending to become professional web developers because it was one of the things a web browser could do out of the box; today nearly all development tools & development tool documentation is aimed at professionals or would-be professionals and put in places where only people who are interested in learning to code will ever come across it, with few opportunities (excel being a rare exception) where non-programmers can 'naturally' slide into doing a little programming in order to make their lives easier. creative industries that don't get fresh ideas stagnate and eventually crash as they hit the limit of what their intellectual monoculture can imagine. because we have misused computer technology for professional protectionism, we are headed for a creative-stagnation crash in software, film, and music within the next 15 years, unless we take some drastic measures (like putting programming & multi-channel editing into the curriculum of mandatory schooling)

Random link from the archives: "Rosemary’s Baby: Blueprint for Satanic Panic - CrookedMarquee" https://web.archive.org/web/20180614130938/https://crookedmarquee.com/rosemarys-baby-blueprint-for-satanic-panic/ originally retrieved Thu Jun 14 13:09:38 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald" https://web.archive.org/web/20210209193042/https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/ originally retrieved Tue 09 Feb 2021 07:30:42 PM EST

facebook mobile appears to have rolled out a change where you can no longer download pictures from groups & must screenshot them instead. i guess i'll just not be using facebook anymore, seeing as how 98% of my facebook use is finding memes to crosspost to tumblr. (2% is getting pulled into arguments by total strangers)

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - nickolas360/markov-complete: A hackathon project written with ~bobbybee. Inspired by code written by ~hardmath123 and me." https://web.archive.org/web/20180618080054/https://github.com/nickolas360/markov-complete originally retrieved Mon Jun 18 08:00:54 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200924181753/https://scribe.rip/p/isola-2018-thoughts-on-x-by-construction-3f027e1ee024 originally retrieved Thu Sep 24 18:17:53 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "What if they threw a purge and nobody came? - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20191026165718/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEIbyuKRXko originally retrieved Sat Oct 26 16:57:18 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Fall by Neal Stephenson review." https://web.archive.org/web/20190603085255/https://slate.com/culture/2019/06/neal-stephenson-fall-book-review-dodge-in-hell.html originally retrieved Mon Jun 3 08:52:55 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Moldable tools; a book and a movement" https://web.archive.org/web/20191115072917/http://blog.rfox.eu/Bystroushaak%20s%20blog/English%20section/Moldable%20tools%20a%20book%20and%20a%20movement.html originally retrieved Fri Nov 15 07:29:17 EST 2019

Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/linux-has-been-bitten-by-its-most-high-severity-vulnerability-in-years/

Random link from the archives: "The Fascinating '80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult - Atlas Obscura" https://web.archive.org/web/20191202095440/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-fascinating-80s-public-access-films-produced-by-a-california-ufo-cult originally retrieved Mon Dec 2 09:54:40 EST 2019

Nuclear Poker by miniver https://miniver.itch.io/nuclear-poker

Random link from the archives: "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall : Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy" https://web.archive.org/web/20200113113200/http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/ originally retrieved Mon Jan 13 11:32:00 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "GANZEER - 1,000,000 A.D. PART II[[MORE]] By Ganzeer Adapted..." https://web.archive.org/web/20171113124959/http://www.ganzeer.com/post/167295499974/1000000-ad-part-iimore-by-ganzeer-adapted originally retrieved Mon Nov 13 12:49:59 EST 2017

some people on this website really be like 'o noe they are presenting as high status by pretending they don't care chiefly about status hierarchies; let me declare that they care chiefly about status hierarchies, and thus bring them back down to my level without helping anyone' and think they're rational

Random link from the archives: "Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows" https://web.archive.org/web/20190603153019/http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/thinking_in_systems.html originally retrieved Mon Jun 3 15:30:19 EDT 2019

Four Poems by Rae Armantrout from 'Finalists' [FLASHING LIGHTS] - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHz9qkB3uRc

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209111205/https://scribe.rip/p/i-have-discovered-many-ways-to-not-make-money-by-writing-books-8ea5fd99492a originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 11:12:05 AM EST

first, the tsars were replaced by those who were the intelligensia under their rule (i.e., the vanguard party); then, the soviet representatives were replaced by those who were intelligence agents under their rule (the KGB and GRU). what's the next step in this process? is it linear or alternating?

bricolage is powerful because it makes clear that the story told by carefully-contextualized information is a manipulation -- that there is no single 'obvious' 'correct' narrative, and the illusion of one is evidence of soft power exertion. unfortunately, while tech for scrambling engineered contexts and narrative is very easy & very widespread, tech for aiding interactive sense-making by finding and making visible true connections is mostly awkward and difficult to use -- largely because sensemaking is seen as a specialized and professionalized skill. in fact, sensemaking is a basic function of the nervous system, and allowing it to become centralized is dangerous, since it centralizes power.

History of Hypertext: Article by Jakob Nielsen https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hypertext-history/

The Comics Code Authority! What Exactly Were the Rules? We Break Them Down, Point by Point! - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwlWurOuH-k

so the contradictions are sharpening, but is it much better to be cut by sharp contradictions than bludgeoned by dull ones? if we don't pull ourselves together, all we will have gained from theory is a cultivated critical distance toward our own suffering & exploitation, and all we will have gained from praxis is a couple scars to tell interesting bar stories about

pet peeve: when people attribute babylonian culture to sumer. like, they're in the same place, but thousands of years apart. when you call the enuma elish sumerian, that's like saying that having a cheeky nando's is popular in gaul

Random link from the archives: "Sort-by-controversial as a proxy for information content" https://web.archive.org/web/20211119140357/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/sort-by-controversial-as-a-proxy-for-information-content-748bd7124b7a?source=friends_link&sk=ff5730559afb33bfdf1c2a4e177feaee originally retrieved Fri 19 Nov 2021 02:03:57 PM EST

There's this current in horror media, most prevalent from the publication of The Haunting of Hill House in the 1950s to the release of the final Poltergeist movie in the 1980s, where the haunted house is a metaphor for the abusive husband/father, and I think it's a pretty interesting current with many variations. In Haunting, Elanor basically reproduces her dysfunctional relationship with her mother at the house (one where she martyrs herself for the happiness of another who has promised her shelter), and despite lesbian subtext I think we can recognize that the house is at least sometimes characterized as masculine -- and at the very least, Elanor at least sometimes describes the house as a lover. Both Matheson's Hell House & King's The Shining are conscious responses to The Haunting of Hill House, and where most film adaptations of Haunting treat the house as female & re-focus the haunting on a stereotyped desire for children, Matheson & King's work in this space brings out the implicit subtext of an abusive and sexualized male figure -- as though the sinister intelligence of Hill House was literally that of Hugh Crain. In Hell House, Matheson finally exorcises this sinister masculine figure by having another masculine figure open himself up to emotional influences and recognize that the evil in the house is a twisted form of fear of inadequacy. In The Shining, the Overlook's long history of vice created a magnetic field to bring out the dark aspects of Jack Torrance (and in Kubrick's adaptation of the book, Jack is made out to be an abusive husband and father from the start, with the Overlook merely making that evil so pervasive as to be impossible to ignore). Meanwhile, we got The Amityville Horror, which was basically a monetized version of a cover story for an actual abusive husband and (step)father (which got its own film and about a million sequels, and which arguably was as much of an influence on Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining as King's book was). On the other side of the world, we got Hausu, which treats the haunted house not as an avatar of an abusive husband but as a sink for the complicated feelings of attachment that a war widow had, when she took the house as a substitute for her officially-MIA husband -- feelings that were programmed by Japan's massive propaganda apparatus for her whole life, and that once she finally died turned her and the house into a hungry ghost that eats womens' youth and transforms them into sanitized automata that serve to lure in more young women. Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door features a completely new house, born out of a nexus of complicated desires for independence and worth on the part of the people who were involved in making it, that first develops a taste for blood even before it has been completed and that eventually learns to attract vulnerable women, charm them, and torture them with horrors specially tailored to their traumas. All of these versions are really interesting (even Amityville, which became extremely popular despite the absolute incompetence with which the original story & most if not all direct adaptations were told), but with Poltergeist we start to lose the plot a little due to the unnecessary introduction of a 'good' father figure (Craig T. Nelson, who is a kind of re-insertion of the Jack Torrance of the original Shining) who only really becomes a vector for evil in the second film. Poltergeist echoes tropes from the haunted-house-as-abusive-father current without actually properly contextualizing it, and the house's fatherliness never outshines Nelson's own, to the massive detriment of the films as horror (but this probably made them more palatable & was thereby involved in their success).

gangstalked by the pervasive and interminable threat of meaning

Random link from the archives: "Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Lost Album, Human Highway" https://web.archive.org/web/20210622171723/https://longreads.com/2021/03/30/crosby-stills-nash-youngs-lost-album-human-highway/ originally retrieved Tue 22 Jun 2021 05:17:23 PM EDT

today i got a cold email from a recruiter who asked me to email me with my current position and years of experience. these guys aren't even reading my linkedin anymore apparently. like, i know almost all cold emails are scams so i wasn't going to reply anyhow, but i'm sort of insulted by the laziness

Bell, Book and Candle (the Jimmy Stewart / Kim Novak film -- I haven't seen the play) is interesting in that it shows witch society as a primarily consumerist society of nifty new ready-made charms. It does not show practitioners inventing new spells at all, or modifying old ones. It merely shows them either using 'traditional' spells or using new, potion-based ones. This feels like a commentary on the corporate-science-and-engineering boosterism of the postwar period -- in which american society was presented as upper middle class white people consuming the wondrous labor-saving devices produced by hoards of anonymous scientists. (All of the characters in the film are also very 50s-hip: they read non-fiction books about and collect artifacts from far-away and exoticized cultures as a hobby, and Kim Novak's only sartorial concession to traditional conceptions of witchiness is a fondness for black clothes and a tendency to go barefoot.) I wonder if there was ever an explicit connection made, at the time, between this framing and the idea (seemingly completely novel to this franchise) that a witch's power is connected to an inability to truly feel emotions -- Novak's character losing her powers because she fell in love, and proving this by shedding tears, with witch society meanwhile being presented as an orgy of flashy but shallow hipsterism.

this whole web3 thing has the same basic problem as web2 and web1, and is boring in the same way: everything wrong with it is about money, and everything about it that's about money is wrong. the stuff that can't be made to be about money is sometimes interesting and sometimes humanist, but people don't talk about it because the people who talk the loudest are being paid to talk (directly or indirectly) about the things that make them or other people money. and money will always be antihuman because money is an inherently re-centralizing force: it accumulates schocastically but anybody who starts out with more has an edge and that edge never evens out on average. if you want something interesting, you can't let money get involved, because then it'll just become about money & everything that isn't compatible with that gets drowned out; if you want something humane, you can't let money get involved, because money will tempt you to remove the humanity and empathy little by little, all in exchange for a little more money. the only difference here is that, for the first time, web3 people are foregrounding the fact that it's all about money (and so people are realizing that, like everything involving money, it is a scam)

is there a database of just the dates, times, and locations of all MUFON reports? i'd be interested in a heat-map adjusted by population density, maybe animated and windowed into 10 year increments (centered around census years) so we can minimize the distorting effect of periods of fast migration

Talk:List of most expensive artworks by living artists - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_most_expensive_artworks_by_living_artists

Random link from the archives: "Folklore.org: The Grand Unified Model (2) - The Finder" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113003328/http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Software+Design originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 00:33:28 EST 2018

Fear of Cold - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2wbyLoEtM

‎Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (100%), a list of films by Julian • Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/volgorde/list/woodlands-dark-and-days-bewitched-a-history/

worst, most heinous take i've heard thus far today: 'we need to allow users to cover their ass in court by letting them avoid knowing about patents they think might exist, so that they can get a slightly lower penalty for infringement, and therefore we should never show recommendations'. imo, it's never acceptable to incentivize someone whose job is to invent new things to be willfully ignorant of their field.

mark fisher sure does steelman some bullshit, as a way of defending against more advanced & coherent forms of already-existing bad arugments, but because he's good at it, we run the risk of some future persistent state where people online spend all their time LARPing either side of arguments Fisher already made (because he airs better versions of arguments than their proponents could possibly construct), by people who never actually read the stuff & are just going off memes. this already happens with... every other leftist thinker, so i guess if it's a major problem it's not specific to fisher.

Routine Maintenance, by Meghan O’Gieblyn https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/routine-maintenance-embracing-habit-in-an-automated-world-meghan-ogieblyn/

The Anxiety of Influencers, by Barrett Swanson https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-house-the-anxiety-of-influencers/

Stream 288 - So You Want To Start A Union feat. Brace Belden (2/10/19) by Chapo Trap House | Listen online for free on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/288-so-you-want-to-start-a-union-feat-brace-belden-21019

Random link from the archives: ""Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation" by Will Wilson - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190611185323/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc originally retrieved Tue Jun 11 18:53:23 EDT 2019

Thread by @dynamic_proxy on Thread Reader App " Thread Reader App https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1478469859176591364.html

pepto abysmal

Amazon reviews are being gamed by shady sellers who swap out listings on popular pages. https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/amazon-listings-wrong-reviews-why.html

a nice piece of hacktivism for folks with the skills to implement it would be to get into services that score job applicants & slowly, one by one, replace every metric with a random number generator (over the course of a year or two, so that people don't notice that result variability is going up). these systems are sufficiently complex and opaque that some variance is expected, and almost all enforced correlations in this context are antisocial/antihuman.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20210923163613/https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/87390-neal-stephenson-s-shock-doctrine.html originally retrieved Thu 23 Sep 2021 04:36:13 PM EDT

New Years Resolutions generated by AI https://www.aiweirdness.com/new-years-resolutions-generated-by-ai/

Random link from the archives: "What do we mean by “evidence-based journalism”?" https://web.archive.org/web/20211021215601/https://scribe.rip/p/what-do-we-mean-by-evidence-based-journalism-3fd7113102d3 originally retrieved Thu 21 Oct 2021 09:56:01 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Folklore.org: The Grand Unified Model (2) - The Finder" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113003328/http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Software+Design originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 00:33:28 EST 2018

within anything, there is the potential of a knot which sub/verts and per/verts the entire context by warping it. escape to alterity is not a line of flight to the outside but to the uncharted inside that, as it grows, replaces the shell of the world with an unrecognizable new order that is only distinguishable from chaos in retrospect

Random link from the archives: "gift game by Everest Pipkin" https://web.archive.org/web/20200226111637/https://everestpipkin.itch.io/gift-game originally retrieved Wed Feb 26 11:16:37 EST 2020