Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209121151/https://scribe.rip/p/the-worst-thing-i-read-this-year-and-what-it-taught-me-or-can-we-design-sociotechnical-systems-4c8c51074337 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 12:11:51 PM EST

there's this great metaphor from the foreword to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man where he talks about perspective in terms of finding a point where the straight-line paths to important objects are unimpeded. usually we talk about clear views in terms of elevation, but the inside perspective of selecting POV involves matching the environment with your sense of salience

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201007175412/https://scribe.rip/p/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 originally retrieved Wed Oct 7 17:54:12 EDT 2020

New Neighbor, Who’s This? – The New Inquiry https://thenewinquiry.com/new-neighbor-whos-this/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180922074446/https://scribe.rip/p/you-wish-this-was-fake-news-bdc8ac9a9268 originally retrieved Sat Sep 22 07:44:46 EDT 2018

I love this kind of album cover - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3_7MUH9wJk

Random link from the archives: "This Company Built a Private Surveillance Network. We Tracked Someone With It - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20190918141517/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn

this seven hour quinton reviews video about a show i hated really justifies why i hated it

Random link from the archives: "This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web " https://web.archive.org/web/20200102104417/https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/ originally retrieved Thu Jan 2 10:44:17 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "Why build this blog - or anything - on IPFS? | Teetotality" https://web.archive.org/web/20200121120131/http://teetotality.blog/posts/why-ipfs/ originally retrieved Tue Jan 21 12:01:31 EST 2020

seeing a lot of software engineer job descriptions that are like: if you don't use LLMs, don't bother applying. that bodes ill for anything that runs software, and it's inconscionable in 2026 when we're all suffering the impacts of this bullshit

Random link from the archives: "This skate punk album was created by artificial intelligence | The Outline" https://web.archive.org/web/20180528144802/https://theoutline.com/post/3567/this-skate-punk-album-was-created-by-artificial-inteliigence originally retrieved Mon May 28 14:48:02 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201001115544/https://scribe.rip/p/i-really-appreciate-and-like-this-break-from-the-prevailing-technolibertarianism-of-the-field-47c07337e29f originally retrieved Thu Oct 1 11:55:44 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200612100141/https://scribe.rip/p/the-next-terrible-phase-of-this-crisis-f14f584c194c originally retrieved Fri Jun 12 10:01:41 EDT 2020

Is This The Strangest Gnostic Text? - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4lxQMQYdYU

Random link from the archives: "This Will All Be So Great If We Don't Screw It Up | Bioneers" https://web.archive.org/web/20190729082736/https://bioneers.org/this-will-all-be-so-great-if-we-dont-screw-it-up-zmbz1907/ originally retrieved Mon Jul 29 08:27:36 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Where Vim Came From" https://web.archive.org/web/20180809114903/https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html originally retrieved Thu Aug 9 11:49:03 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation" https://web.archive.org/web/20200701105127/https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html originally retrieved Wed Jul 1 10:51:27 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "One bold move you could make on this front is to not tag your stories with anything." https://web.archive.org/web/20211115070815/https://scribe.rip/p/one-bold-move-you-could-make-on-this-front-is-to-not-tag-your-stories-with-anything-ed9d337cd5df

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209103410/https://scribe.rip/p/as-a-lay-pataphysician-i-support-this-procedure-756080e0a390 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 10:34:10 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190816080206/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx4z8/revealed-this-is-palantirs-top-secret-user-manual-for-cops originally retrieved Fri Aug 16 08:02:06 EDT 2019

Just a moment... https://indicator.media/grok-is-this-true-tracker

Random link from the archives: "If you understood this essay as advocating for some language, you didn’t read it carefully." https://web.archive.org/web/20211103025333/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/if-you-understood-this-essay-as-advocating-for-some-language-you-didnt-read-it-carefully-470b35984b3a

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200919121708/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-normal-2316889589e originally retrieved Sat Sep 19 12:17:08 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Computers Are Bad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210316125311/https://computer.rip/2021-01-12%20taking%20this%20serially.html originally retrieved Tue 16 Mar 2021 12:53:11 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "CBC Radio" https://web.archive.org/web/20220510122731/https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-the-tuesday-edition-1.6439812/how-making-recipes-etched-on-gravestones-changed-this-student-s-perspective-on-death-1.6440208

Marc Andreessen’s Dangerously Unexamined Life https://clearthis.page/?u=https://www.thenation.com/article/society/marc-andreessen-silicon-valley-military-tech/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201007050822/https://scribe.rip/p/i-really-enjoyed-reading-this-but-i-think-given-your-claim-that-this-is-a-philosophical-piece-239280f879d6 originally retrieved Wed Oct 7 05:08:22 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "boxbase.org: Don't clone that GUI (how about this instead?)" https://web.archive.org/web/20200923125543/http://boxbase.org/entries/2020/sep/23/dont-clone-that-gui/ originally retrieved Wed Sep 23 12:55:43 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Boy Toy Wonder" https://web.archive.org/web/20200220085943/https://pinktwink.tumblr.com/post/190417053021/theprincerubert-typicalacademic-in-this-house originally retrieved Thu Feb 20 08:59:43 EST 2020

the version of me from 2008 would hate me for saying this but i wish all the attention currently applied to language models was instead applied to constraint solvers

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190814101834/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-dont-know-where-you-got-any-of-the-ideas-in-this-article-a469369df6a6 originally retrieved Wed Aug 14 10:18:34 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "This 'Boring' Album Cover is Hiding a Masterpiece - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20221109185045/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcYRmCiJxRE originally retrieved Wed 09 Nov 2022 06:50:45 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "How to Use a Differential Analyzer (to Murder People)" https://web.archive.org/web/20200409082959/https://twobithistory.org/2020/04/06/differential-analyzer.html originally retrieved Thu Apr 9 08:29:59 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190731081836/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/rather-than-asking-how-did-i-come-to-this-belief-which-may-be-irrelevant-we-can-accidentally-e59456a1ff38 originally retrieved Wed Jul 31 08:18:36 EDT 2019

the wikipedia page for united states should have an entry in the infobox explaining who we're currently at war with & how long that's been going on. but it doesn't. maybe some subsidiary page has this?

every previous world war has had at least one signature impossibly-inhumane weapon: machine guns and mustard gas in WWI, nukes, firebombs, and poison showers in WWII; what will be the signature atrocity weapon of this one? it has to be worse than modern nukes in order to count.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20191110181650/https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/ originally retrieved Sun Nov 10 18:16:50 EST 2019

This Console Doesn't Exist - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg3xzNc0sQ0

Random link from the archives: "In 1983, This Bell Labs Computer Was the First Machine to Become a Chess Master - IEEE Spectrum" https://web.archive.org/web/20190430123310/https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/in-1983-this-bell-labs-computer-was-the-first-machine-to-become-a-chess-master

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

Random link from the archives: "31/07/2019: Not made for this world" https://web.archive.org/web/20190731071044/https://magnusson.io/blog/6.html originally retrieved Wed Jul 31 07:10:44 EDT 2019

is there a handy database of sound samples of formerly-trademarked jingles whose trademark has expired or been dissolved? trademark offices must have this in some form, but the databases i've worked with don't have audio files...

Random link from the archives: "A Short History of Chaosnet" https://web.archive.org/web/20181112130510/https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html originally retrieved Mon Nov 12 13:05:10 EST 2018

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: "“This Shithole Made Me”: 4 Extremely Online Writers on How the Internet Broke Our Brains and How We Can Unbreak Them – Mother Jones" https://web.archive.org/web/20190812081307/https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/08/this-shithole-made-me-4-very-online-writers-on-how-the-internet-broke-our-brains-and-how-we-can-unbreak-them/

Random link from the archives: "Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality | Tor.com" https://web.archive.org/web/20200417132344/https://www.tor.com/2020/04/14/didnt-i-write-this-story-already-when-your-fictional-pandemic-becomes-reality/

legitimately saw somebody this morning suggesting that, to counteract GAN-generated images, every photograph should be cryptographically signed with the serial number of the device used to take the photo and every device used to edit it. and, like... was that the plan? is that why this is a thing? the surveillance shit?

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

Random link from the archives: "Why this creepy melody is in so many movies - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190916114352/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3-bVRYRnSM originally retrieved Mon Sep 16 11:43:52 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209115546/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-the-best-kind-of-writing-on-the-internet-ad1d3bdad054 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 11:55:46 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom?" https://web.archive.org/web/20191108093534/https://twobithistory.org/2019/11/06/doom-bsp.html?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email originally retrieved Fri Nov 8 09:35:34 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "Don’t fall for this Elite Dangerous scam - Polygon" https://web.archive.org/web/20210208132016/https://www.polygon.com/features/2021/2/4/22264605/elite-dangerous-newbies-trapped-forced-labor originally retrieved Mon 08 Feb 2021 01:20:16 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "About the critical stance of this blog | Sci-fi interfaces" https://web.archive.org/web/20210530101055/https://scifiinterfaces.com/about-the-critical-stance-of-this-blog/ originally retrieved Sun 30 May 2021 10:10:55 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "A Whimsical Wordsmith Charts a Course Beyond Twitter - The New York Times" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713084205/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/magazine/a-whimsical-wordsmith-charts-a-course-beyond-twitter.html##%E2%80%9CI+was+able+to+be+funny+and+natural+through+the+keyboard+and+awkward+and+quiet+and+weird+in+person%2C%E2%80%9D+he+told+me.+%E2%80%9CI+wonder+how+many+writers+of+this+generation+figured+out+how+to+write+through+chat.%E2%80%9D

just realized that when somebody rhetorically asks 'is this niche fetish content', they are usually actually prudes & not cool people looking for new niche fetishes to get into

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190409083252/http://readthis.wtf/writing/hyperplastic-supernormal/ originally retrieved Tue Apr 9 08:32:52 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "How the ARPANET Protocols Worked" https://web.archive.org/web/20210315202307/https://twobithistory.org/2021/03/08/arpanet-protocols.html originally retrieved Mon 15 Mar 2021 08:23:07 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language" https://web.archive.org/web/20181015145126/https://twobithistory.org/2018/10/14/lisp.html originally retrieved Mon Oct 15 14:51:26 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200617044227/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-the-stupidest-change-medium-has-made-since-the-last-splash-screen-eadc151aa869 originally retrieved Wed Jun 17 04:42:27 EDT 2020

am i the only one who thought DanDaDan was pretty clearly a horror-comedy? what is all of this confusion about the genre

i've been struggling all day with this repo at work where all the setup instructions are just completely wrong (specifying versions much too low for the features we're using, specifying incompatible versions, missing key steps) and eventually realized that the folks who developed it originally expect me to be doing dev in a docker container inside a venv inside of wsl. wtf?

this idea is bad not least because it requires LOTS OF FINGERS

Random link from the archives: "I Study UFOs and This Is the Best UFO Documentary Ever Made - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20191023142158/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5xaa/witness-of-another-world-is-the-best-ufo-movie-ever-made originally retrieved Wed Oct 23 14:21:58 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220214160100/https://scribe.rip/p/again-its-so-interesting-to-see-this-and-feel-this-throughout-mostly-philosophical-82fb5d880ac7 originally retrieved Mon 14 Feb 2022 04:01:00 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "As much as I’m loathe to heap praise on Second Life & Linden Labs, I think they at least got this…" https://web.archive.org/web/20211103182933/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/as-much-as-im-loathe-to-heap-praise-on-second-life-linden-labs-i-think-they-at-least-got-this-8a4ed0a4d4a

you tellin' me somebody iced this cream?

This Is Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Massage (1967) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFwVCHkL-JU

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20191102194425/https://scribe.rip/p/in-1995-this-astronomer-predicted-the-internets-greatest-failure-68a1c3927e46 originally retrieved Sat Nov 2 19:44:25 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "“This Shithole Made Me”: 4 Extremely Online Writers on How the Internet Broke Our Brains and How We Can Unbreak Them – Mother Jones" https://web.archive.org/web/20190812081307/https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/08/this-shithole-made-me-4-very-online-writers-on-how-the-internet-broke-our-brains-and-how-we-can-unbreak-them/

my insurance rep is trying really hard to sell me on handing out referrals. like, i've gotten several calls and texts this week about it

Random link from the archives: "Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp: "We are the Reality of this Cyberpunk Fantasy" 1991 - Mondo 2000" https://web.archive.org/web/20181127132236/https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/05/17/glenn-branca-and-elliott-sharp-we-are-the-reality-of-this-cyberpunk-fantasy/

just ran into someone who claims that people are using LLMs for horse race gambling. i thought i had heard the worst-suited use case but this takes the cake

Random link from the archives: "It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters" https://web.archive.org/web/20180806115351/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a

there's been a lot of talk about whether to recommend prometheus rising / cosmic trigger (and if not, what to replace it with) today. RAW's misguided characterizations of women's lib in particular have led to some troubling tendencies in discordian & psychonaut communities. a lot of the science hasn't held up, & he's inherited some eugenic taint from his sources. it occurs to me that while i got some mileage out of the general ordering of the circuits, mostly what i appreciated about prometheus rising was the detailed description of circuits 1-4 and how they interact -- really 'this is how to tell when you are feeling unsafe versus oppressed, and here are things you can do about it, and here are some tells for when someone is feeling that way'. the core stuff there is still present in modern personality models like OCEAN and modern developmental psychology (at least as I was taught in psych 101 a decade ago) so somebody could probably do another book with the same general structure and have a funny typology of types of neurosis. i still find prometheus rising worth reading and returning to, despite incorporating some really heinous shit (like betelheim's refrigerator-mother-autism thing).

eventually somebody's gonna tie up Elon and put him in an empty rocket headed for Mars with like 3 hours oxygen supply, right? like, this is how all this is gonna end, right?

saw the looker commentary, and michael chrichton's ego is just astounding. i say this as somebody who has spent a lot of time with ted nelson.

there is such thing as 'good ai art' or 'good generative art' but doing that involves being in dialogue with a tradition going back at least to the 1950s (and arguably to the 15th century) and y'all aren't doing the reading. signed, somebody who was talking about this 10 years ago.

Random link from the archives: "Bulletin Board Systems: The VICE Exposé" https://web.archive.org/web/20200227103303/https://twobithistory.org/2020/02/02/bbs.html originally retrieved Thu Feb 27 10:33:03 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "BBC - Future - Could you have this memory disorder?" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113155108/http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181112-severely-deficient-autobiographical-memory-is-surprisi?ocid=twfut originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 15:51:08 EST 2018

Something Evil Comes This Way: James Bond and the Gothic with Tom Mason - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kDgkx_cc6A

whenever i see a 'i bought this before elon went crazy' sticker, my reaction is 'i don't believe you'. like, he was getting news coverage for bizarre own-goals a full decade ago.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20191024113701/https://scribe.rip/p/one-bold-move-you-could-make-on-this-front-is-to-not-tag-your-stories-with-anything-ed9d337cd5df originally retrieved Thu Oct 24 11:37:01 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "This Old Lisp" https://web.archive.org/web/20181019091226/http://thisoldlisp.com/talks/els-2018/ originally retrieved Fri Oct 19 09:12:26 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200922152517/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-a-really-interesting-model-49102c8d825c originally retrieved Tue Sep 22 15:25:17 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "This digital piano has some very clever controls - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20211124115428/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXYMdxwTf8s originally retrieved Wed 24 Nov 2021 11:54:28 AM EST

star trek kind of has a formula, and it's the same as an hp lovecraft story: a weird thing happens (often it takes a while for people to notice), an absolutely wild explanation is implied or presented, and it ends up being true. star trek movies add effects but i want them to add more theories. make me work to figure out whether this one is psychic space ants or psychedelic god fungus or brainwashed transporter replicas or what

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

Night Trap - BAN THIS SICK FILTH | Renegade Cut - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aALBdkxG9n4

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200619092346/https://scribe.rip/p/somehow-i-just-saw-this-thanks-man-993100c0f43f originally retrieved Fri Jun 19 09:23:46 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well • The Register" https://web.archive.org/web/20190628072145/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/28/ai_3d_simulations_universe/

if you download a meme to repost and somebody has scribbled out a swear word on it, write the swear word back in before sharing it. we shouldn't let them do this to us.

it's time to archive & mirror all those pages that list the top brass at various companies, because they're being taken down out of fear of violent reprisals for violent policies, and this fear is the only thing keeping more violent policies in check.

Bad idea of the day: hit wikipedia random page 3 times and make a story with all three elements. (this is difficult because most wikipedia pages appear to be stubs about small towns)

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220214154351/https://scribe.rip/p/the-brain-isnt-supposed-to-change-this-much-4d35bc6679d8 originally retrieved Mon 14 Feb 2022 03:43:51 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "Sorry, that’s my Canon Cat article. I meant to link to this one." https://web.archive.org/web/20211202041203/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/sorry-thats-my-canon-cat-article-i-meant-to-link-to-this-one-c88061628070 originally retrieved Thu 02 Dec 2021 04:12:03 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "DEAD ALIVE | it all melts down to this" https://web.archive.org/web/20220219144846/https://deadalivemagazine.com/pieces/it-all-melts/down-to-this.html originally retrieved Sat 19 Feb 2022 02:48:46 PM EST

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: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220214155017/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-your-brain-on-architecture-2c3b7338d3db originally retrieved Mon 14 Feb 2022 03:50:17 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "This Medieval Italian Man Replaced His Amputated Hand With a Knife : ScienceAlert" https://web.archive.org/web/20240129092118/https://www.sciencealert.com/a-medieval-italian-man-replaced-his-amputated-hand-with-a-knife

Random link from the archives: "2019 Open Call | Now Play This" https://web.archive.org/web/20181209192543/http://nowplaythis.net/2019-open-call/ originally retrieved Sun Dec 9 19:25:43 EST 2018

bounty hunting in cowboy bebop is this perfectly contingent carceral labor. the guy who's best at it, zen badass who singlehandedly defeats like a third of the mafia, immortals, and experimental weapons, can barely afford to eat. get their news from a talk show with tiddies in.

One thing I've learned from reading UFO reports is that people see really weird shit in the sky all the time and it's nearly impossible to figure out what something was because of how many obscure possibilities you have to take into account. If you really want to know, report it to the air force and in 20 years an explanation that may or may not be lazy BS will be declassified. But I suspect you'll have to let this one be a mystery.

Trapper, this is our trapper, Dave Bowman. Dave, this is our new bow man, Trapper John.

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES - This Move Exists #SCHLOCKTOBER - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3CZP8Akmaw

This Ivy League Scientist Did A Bunch Of Food Surveys And Somehow Got The Same Number Of Responses Each Time https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/brian-wansink-770-survey-responses#.diow41oq1

anybody know of a tool to convert antlr3 grammars to antlr4? i'm supposed to spend no more than 2 days per ticket and that's way too short a time to learn two different versions of antlr well enough to reliably translate between them, starting from 'oh this resembles gnu lex'

The Return of Fu Manchu (1930), while very racist, is less racist than I was expecting. the first scene sets him up as a former quisling to western imperialists who, after being attacked himself, realized the error of his ways. does this reading actually work?

Random link from the archives: "How I Animated This Video - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210709161630/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo originally retrieved Fri 09 Jul 2021 04:16:30 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220214154351/https://scribe.rip/p/the-brain-isnt-supposed-to-change-this-much-4d35bc6679d8 originally retrieved Mon 14 Feb 2022 03:43:51 PM EST

so, i told my manager why my performance has been shit (tickets with important info missing, time zone issues mean PRs take at least 24 hours to be merged, over-rigorous 'security' measures make testing unnecessarily difficult) & he acted like he didn't know all that already. was this a mistake

'old soul' as in 'it took me a single digit number of years to be done with this shit'

shoutfactory is streaming elvira's movie mac on youtube and i've had it on in the background for like 2 days and i just realized... i've already seen every one of the movies she's showing in this set of episodes

hey babe, wanna scroll tiktok with this dickcoc k

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.

Random link from the archives: "The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency" https://web.archive.org/web/20210225084243/https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-ux-on-this-small-child-is-terrible originally retrieved Thu 25 Feb 2021 08:42:43 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209100405/https://scribe.rip/p/this-machine-turns-trump-tweets-into-planned-parenthood-donations-4ece8301e722 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 10:04:05 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - ojahnn/NaNoLiPo2018: This is the repository for 2018's collaborative NaNoLiPo project." https://web.archive.org/web/20181029102025/https://github.com/ojahnn/NaNoLiPo2018 originally retrieved Mon Oct 29 10:20:25 EDT 2018

i love context collapse because as a fan of niche horror movies, i keep randomly discovering the source of striking images that i saw 15 years ago on occult and conspiracy imageboards in this sudden flash that unites times, places, concepts, and life-worlds

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

the world is full of technologies whose affordances subtly incentivize particular behaviors. if this were the result of individual creators promoting their personal worldviews, it'd be great. but the worldview being promoted is 'make my boss richer'.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209092205/https://scribe.rip/p/no-elon-musk-is-not-about-to-blow-this-covid-19-testing-thing-wide-open-d7de38ba6706 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 09:22:05 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "Watch This Doc on Alien Gangsters and the 'Biggest Story Never Told' - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20171128104715/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43nzng/roger-leir-alien-implant-ufo-abduction

Random link from the archives: "THE CRUSADES (1935) - This Movie Exists - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20240325111353/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YuKh2Pt9TI originally retrieved Mon 25 Mar 2024 11:13:53 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "2019 Open Call | Now Play This" https://web.archive.org/web/20181209192543/http://nowplaythis.net/2019-open-call/ originally retrieved Sun Dec 9 19:25:43 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "I promise this story about microwaves is interesting. - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210519145614/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y originally retrieved Wed 19 May 2021 02:56:14 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20181130125604/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is-inside-this-internet-rabbit-hole.html originally retrieved Fri Nov 30 12:56:04 EST 2018

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...

Random link from the archives: "This Twitter Bot Is Generating Jokes and It's Funnier Than You - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20180523105841/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5kmzy/headlinetron-comedy-twitter-bot originally retrieved Wed May 23 10:58:41 EDT 2018

if i was smart enough, i'd go around inventing easy-to-make-at-home alternatives to things that are under patent protection and then license them in such a way that they could never be made commercial. but i'm not smart enough. sorry. somebody else please do this thing.

Random link from the archives: "This Twitter Bot Is Generating Jokes and It's Funnier Than You - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20180523105841/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5kmzy/headlinetron-comedy-twitter-bot originally retrieved Wed May 23 10:58:41 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "A Good Place: When Shazam fails you, this Facebook group comes through | The Outline" https://web.archive.org/web/20190408132535/https://theoutline.com/post/7282/when-you-can-t-find-the-song-on-shazam originally retrieved Mon Apr 8 13:25:35 EDT 2019

Bad idea of the day: each item in the estate of any deceased person is to be distributed to a randomly selected living person in the county. this promotes local commerce: many people suddenly getting free stuff they don't want.

corporate computer security feels like this weird mix of over- and under- protection. like, it's a nightmare to do my job bc of all these hurdles in the way of the public domain data we downloaded for free, but i'm pretty sure anybody could call the public HR number & get my paycheck routed to them without any of my personal information

Random link from the archives: "THE CRUSADES (1935) - This Movie Exists - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20240325111353/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YuKh2Pt9TI originally retrieved Mon 25 Mar 2024 11:13:53 AM EDT

this b-tier hicksploitation movie isn't bad but it's hard to take seriously when they put the inbred confederate plantation owner family with the prison-industrial-complex connections in Hoboken, New Jersey

flownase sounds so shady when you explain it literally. 'it's this steroid i snort that causes my sinuses to get all numb and i have to use it every day'

Band name of the day: this place is just crawling with missile siloes

Random link from the archives: "No Cash Needed At This Cafe. Students Pay The Tab With Their Personal Data : The Salt : NPR" https://web.archive.org/web/20181003133522/https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/29/643386327/no-cash-needed-at-this-cafe-students-pay-the-tab-with-their-personal-data

Random link from the archives: "Avicee" https://web.archive.org/web/20190226084005/https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/ originally retrieved Tue Feb 26 08:40:05 EST 2019

art exists to justify art criticism, which is valuable because art criticism sometimes becomes philosophy. none of this requires intent on the part of the artist.

a lot of anti-spam measures are based on the logic that, because spam has a low success rate, any friction added to posting will prevent it. this does not work when spammers have such an accumulation of resources that it's easier for them to ignore friction than it is for legitimate users.

this whole thing where we gotta keep 5 ssh tunnels up whenever we are doing local development would work a lot better if the VPN didn't go down for 10 seconds every five minutes, causing all the tunnels to hang until force-killed...

postman baffles me. like, this little GUI wrapper around core curl features is somehow 1) distributed as a binary that you gotta run from the unpacked tarball, 2) fuckin massive, 3) has accounts for some reason, and 4) gets updates like every couple days?

THE CRUSADES (1935) - This Movie Exists - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YuKh2Pt9TI

ever been watching a movie and been like 'aw nice, parts of this look like an actual movie'?

amidst the debate over DUNE 2, take a moment to appreciate the way that everything in the dune franchise effectively communicates why somebody might be into dune. this is not true of, for instance, star wars or evangelion

Random link from the archives: "This recipe for 3-ingredient carnitas makes taco night easy" https://web.archive.org/web/20181002124947/https://thetakeout.com/recipe-3-ingredient-carnitas-1828956318 originally retrieved Tue Oct 2 12:49:47 EDT 2018

all horniness is a desire to unleash the flows of desire, to make new demonic alliances with radical alterity, to open up and become a gaping wound. this makes horniness rhizomatically active, a nomadic warm machine. in this essay, i will--

This Guy Made a Dating App Where You Can Only Date Him https://gizmodo.com/flirt-with-los-mayers-app-developer-dating-art-1851258014

Random link from the archives: "The Real Novelty of the ARPANET" https://web.archive.org/web/20210208112910/https://twobithistory.org/2021/02/07/arpanet.html originally retrieved Mon 08 Feb 2021 11:29:10 AM EST

I'm no longer quite as confident about this take as I was in 2021 but I still think it's worth consideration: https://enkiv2.medium.com/both-neoreaction-a-basilisk-and-postcapitalist-desire-try-to-act-as-a-vaccine-against-the-nick-9be2000746f5?sk=33d9fc4919d183e250cb6335e4632b2b

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.

this copy of Baba Yaga (1973) is so shitty that the big dramatic reveal of Nicole is mostly a completely black screen

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

we desperately need an adaptation of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde that makes the subtext (that this is about a rich 'respectable' white guy putting on blackface to commit crimes & trying to convince people it's shadow work) explicit

Is masturbation a sin? This researcher has something to say about your favorite private pastime. https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/masturbation-sin-testosterone-bad-history-benefits-effects-eric-sprankle.html?via=rss

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

This Forgotten Masterpiece Inspired Tolkien - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBlawD9T25k

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180831030929/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-excellent-advice-not-just-for-horror-filmmakers-but-for-all-people-who-make-and-share-de2d2955838a originally retrieved Fri Aug 31 03:09:29 EDT 2018

this morning i'm thinking about how, after my grandfather's funeral, some guy pulled my grandmother aside and spent like 20 minutes trying to convince her to worry about an immanent chinese invasion of the united states, and whenever i tried to push back on anything he was basically like 'what do you know, you're not a member of the military so you can't possibly have any idea about politics'. who was that guy? why did he think this was an appropriate time or place for that discussion? and why was he so sure?

one thing i don't like about academic writing is when people feel like, for their introduction, they need to summarize adjacent work from other fields & they end up repeating stuff that's dumb specifically because another academic of higher standing said it & it's outside their interest area to really question. for instance, i'm reading this book about the intersection of horror and architecture, and in the introduction they basically shit on horror movies and use adorno to claim that horror movies are bad because modern media is lazy. now, as a horror movie afficianado: most horror movies are bad, yes. but, as somebody who is interested in the history of gothic literature: most gothic literature is bad (and the same problems we have with it today are, for the most part, what people complained about in the 18th century). there's a very straightforward framing of horror that explains why a lot of it is bad, but it's rooted in analysis that acknowledges the nature of 'camp' as genuinely vital & important violation of cultural norms. i'm sure the rest of the book will be fine but whenever i see somebody look down on camp in favor of 'high art' i see it as a giant red flag.

Bad idea of the day: historical fiction about what would have happened if, as originally planned, big bird was on the challenger when it exploded. we cover the effects of this on parents groups, the o-ring lawsuit, nasa's PR wing, the off-brand children's puppet television ecosystem, NPR funding models, comedy magazines, and STEM enrollment. this would necessarily be in the Neal Stephenson mode

let me tell you a story about how not just gender roles but gender categories are highly culturally specific. in japan, in the 60s, there was a category called 'gayboy'; lots of people self-identified with it. what it meant was an AMAB person who dresses in a feminine way and enacts feminine roles. this can map onto a lot of stuff in other systems of understanding gender; actually, it was a pretty big tent. in the late 60s, a movie came out: half kitchen-sink drama and half documentary, Funeral Parade of Roses was a movie about life in tokyo's queer underground intercut with interviews with the cast and crew, themselves members of the tokyo queer underground, about their experiences of sex, gender, attraction, social roles, journeys of self-identification, and their similarity and differences with their characters. one of the questions that was asked, of many people, was 'why are you a gayboy?' the answers fell across a familiar spectrum, and again there's this temptation to place it on our own maps, which are ours because we prefer them and vice versa. for instance: 'i like being a girl', 'i like acting like a girl but only because i'm not a girl', 'i was bad at being a boy, and i found out that i'm naturally better at being a girl', 'i'm not exactly either a boy or girl', 'i'm a boy, this dress is just a fashion statement', 'i am not a gayboy, i am a traditional conservative woman with a birth defect'. now, the editor of japan's first gay magazine wrote a review of The Funeral Parade of Roses that took on a revolutionary tone, and afterward, the term gayboy fell out of favor and instead people refered to themselves as 'the rose tribe' -- as in, anyone who ever identified with something they saw in The Funeral Parade of Roses. the magazine pivoted to be the premire publication of the rose tribe, broadening its audience, but the old guard and the majority were gay men. in response to reader mail about gay male content crowding other stuff out of limited page space, the editor created a specific section called 'the lily tribe', which got guaranteed page space and was exclusive to femme-leaning content (while masc- and neutral- content could predominate elsewhere). this did not necessarily mean that the occasional lesbian or transfem article wouldn't make its way into the main body of the magazine if it was deemed of wide enough interest. the rose / lily categorization system seems to have remained the baseline in japan for a while (my direct knowledge of this part is very limited). today, our categories are more global and intersecting: anime will intentionally place trans flags or use bisexual lighting.

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.

Random link from the archives: "This Private Investigator Was The Original Most Interesting Man In The World" https://web.archive.org/web/20170908102003/https://www.buzzfeed.com/eamonjavers/this-private-investigator-was-the-original-most-interesting originally retrieved Fri Sep 8 10:20:03 EDT 2017

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.

This Medieval Italian Man Replaced His Amputated Hand With a Knife : ScienceAlert https://www.sciencealert.com/a-medieval-italian-man-replaced-his-amputated-hand-with-a-knife

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180909152220/https://scribe.rip/p/medium-ate-my-first-draft-so-this-is-a-bit-abbreviated-ed5bb64e42c originally retrieved Sun Sep 9 15:22:20 EDT 2018

Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing? - Aftermath https://aftermath.site/why-would-i-buy-this-useless-evil-thing

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

i think i figured out the reason why these steamboat willy memes aren't hitting the spot. it's that mickey mouse, as a character, is not interesting or amusing. he's iconic because he's literally a logo -- and thus, acts as a cypher for everything the disney corporation puts out, preventing him from being able to have any personality or attributes aside from 'marketable', which in this case just means 'recognizable'.

catholic vs protestant really is drama club kids vs chess club kids isn't it? (i am high and probably should not post this.)

Random link from the archives: "You don’t really need to go to 4chan for this." https://web.archive.org/web/20211108063437/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/you-dont-really-need-to-go-to-4chan-for-this-c6786130a774 originally retrieved Mon 08 Nov 2021 06:34:37 AM EST

maybe if i analyze all the possible implications of every word anyone is saying, i can prevent this social interaction from becoming awkward and uncomfortable

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

it took a while for me to realise this, but... 'desert islands' aren't called that because they're deserts, right? (because they're not -- they're sandy but they get a lot of rainfall?) they're called that because they're deserted?

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

[this is aaronland] generative adversarial therapy sessions https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - catseye/Flobnar: This is what happens when you get Befunge-93 drunk" https://web.archive.org/web/20190509103521/https://github.com/catseye/Flobnar originally retrieved Thu May 9 10:35:21 EDT 2019

This boring gray boat is actually super weird - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml_ZAgbnGJ8

tinder wants me to 'invite someone' to 'be my matchmaker' which i guess means have them swipe for me. no way am i forcing somebody else into this hellscape of blank fucking profiles

two nuclear powers are in separate full wars at the same time, and the remaining ones are officially allied to opposite sides in each conflict. this fuckin sucks

when somebody says 'roguelike', i picture nethack, because hack and rogue are extremely similar games. this makes modern video game discourse extremely difficult to follow sometimes.

i subscribed to this guy's newsletter years ago -- seemingly cool, intelligent, interesting, with meaningful and insightful things to say about a wide variety of topics. and then at some point he got into NFTs. and then slowly more and more of the newsletter was about NFTs (which was OK because he sent them less and less frequently). but today he sent one out, and it literally begins with 'pay for twitter because otherwise nobody will see your posts' and the rest of the newsletter is literally NFT investing tips? like dude, even the most hard-core NFT boosters ditched the scene a year and a half ago, wtf are you doing? i followed you for japanese rural pizza-toast analysis and reflections on human-centered UX; why have you become a 2020 SNL skit?

nothing i've ever read or heard about rust has dispelled my immediate first impression, which is that it's basically c for people who like haskell. between this and finding that the rust compiler won't build from source on a standard toolchain the last couple times i tried, i have very little interest. i like weird high-concept programming languages, and rust seems to be in the same basic category as scala (too weird for the normies but too normal for me).

all these stories about people trying to ressurrect the dead but having them come back wrong are typically classified as warnings about death being unavoidable, but i think most of them are more fruitfully read as metaphors for trying to get back with a toxic ex / reconnect with a friend or family member you cut out of your life for good reason. like: you still love somebody, and you want them back, but once they come back you realize that, while they are in some ways the same person you remember, they also ruin your life with what sometimes feels like malice. the real horror, then, is the thought that perhaps this is who they were the whole time and you just let yourself get used to it.

i got my second-ever payout from steam last month. my game was released in 2018. this means i just now reached 200 dollars on my cut of sales, after five and a half years. don't let anybody tell you that indie games are easy money.

not only could this meeting be an email, but the email wouldn't have needed to have been sent; nevertheless, we've got five or six people in the call with their mics on and not using headsets, so everything anybody says turns into an experimental tape-music album

a pattern that repeats over and over in tech is that somebody will invent a cool toy (whose usefulness is very obviously, and sometimes intentionally, circumscribed), a bunch of grifters will say 'this toy is actually a panacea that will do everything for you', a bunch of capitalists hear this and say 'will it help me replace all my employees with perfect slaves?', the grifters will say 'yes', and a bunch of the capitalists will lose a bunch of their money to the grift but won't suffer real consequences. during the whole thing, regular people will be flooded with news coverage along the lines of 'new toy will solve all problems' and 'new toy will take your job and force you to starve'. and the new toy will be something like, play doom in your word processor at 5fps, or pay for a pizza without money but it takes four hours, or emit random dictionary words.

i fuckin hate how hunger comes out of nowhere. one second you're fine, the next your stomach is burning and you're so lightheaded you can't stand. i don't know how normal people deal with this. i try to keep nutritional drinks and protein bars around but i'm too disorganized.

movies used to be full of great fog effects, and then after like 1990, there was less fog and the fog that was there all looked like crap. is this just a fashion thing? is it lost technology? or was the good fog carcinogenic or something?

Shift Happens is a beautifully designed history of how keyboards got this way | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/10/shift-happens-is-a-beautifully-designed-history-of-how-keyboards-got-this-way/

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.

saying 'this place has a lot of crime so let's send more police' is like saying 'this place is way too bright, let's shine a spotlight on it and maybe it'll get dimmer'

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.

mainstream culture is fash-adjacent, which is part of why creeping fascism is so dangerous, but it also means that anybody who is not already a leftist is liable to accidentally stumble into fascist dogwhistles. fascists know this and use it to hide.

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?

stitcher and google podcasts are both being shuttered this year. is this a general trend? are all the other podcatchers that i haven't used also shutting down? is there a story behind this?

ordered food & the restaurant accidentally gave me 3 extra salads -- is this a sign

jimray: "Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty…" - Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@jimray/110792901356804895

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.

This 1977 horror novel is about social media - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/23863059/social-media-20-days-of-turin-giorgio-de-maria

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.)

Random link from the archives: "I don’t know where you got any of the ideas in this article." https://web.archive.org/web/20211105202216/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-dont-know-where-you-got-any-of-the-ideas-in-this-article-a469369df6a6 originally retrieved Fri 05 Nov 2021 08:22:16 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Valley of the Dolls: Why We Love This Awful Movie - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220603173758/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSeWqO6IAT0 originally retrieved Fri 03 Jun 2022 05:37:58 PM EDT

I thought this rotating house was impossible. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gisdyTBMNyQ

github could have been a dating site for gay men who want to get married, but no, we had to have another sourceforge with microsoft branding this time

i'm embarassed that i didn't recognize this until seeing barbie clips but... margot robie and ryan gosling are extremely talented actors huh? like, they can play serious and comedy, give depth to totally shallow characters while playing against type, and really sell subtle shit with body language in short clips without coming off as scenery-chewing.

V-Discs - Music from the longest strike in American history " ~ajroach42.com " I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog. https://ajroach42.com/v-discs-music-from-the-longest-strike-in-american-history/

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.

creating an open source clone of a close source product is not completely pointless (the people who left twitter for mastodon did so for a good reason, even though, no matter what anybody says, mastodon is a twitter clone), but it is at best a small first step. a commercial mindset produces pervasive effects on software design in ways that exert pressure towards becoming commercial again, and most open source developers are totally unaware that they are doing this because they have never known anything else. (as an example, the fediverse relies upon DNS instead of being fully peer-to-peer, which means somebody needs to pay for a central node that's beefy and has a reliable network connection and then rent a domain name from ICANN, and on top of that, do support for users who are prohibited from supporting themselves unless they start their own instance -- and this applies to any piece of software that has a client-server architecture over http/s on the open internet.) free software will only become truly free when it embraces the things only free software can do.

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).

the fact that some people find LLMs useful for writing code is not a credit to LLMs but an indictment of the average signal to noise ratio of code: it means that most code is confusing boilerplate -- boilerplate because a statistical model can only reliably reproduce patterns that reoccur many times across its training corpus, and confusing because otherwise-intelligent people capable of convincing a hiring manager that they are competent programmers find it easier to ask a statistical model to produce an incorrect prototype they must debug than write the code themselves. we all know from experience that most code is bad, but for LLMs to be able to write more-or-less working code at all indicates that code is much worse than we imagine, and that even what we consider 'good' code is from a broader perspective totally awful. (in my opinion, it is forced to be this way because of the way we design programming languages and libraries.)

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.

'poor network quality', teams says, as it disconnects me from the daily standup for 20 seconds after every 1 second of actually being in the meeting. all my other machines are fine. (i thought it was the VPN, but it started doing it this morning when i forgot to turn on the VPN too...) pretty sure it's literally just teams.

ever have one of those days when you notice how broken literally every social-technical system is? every computer program, every bureaucracy, every machine, every habit, is all elbows? and then you realize: it's always like this, and you just usually have the spoons to compensate.

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.

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.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200616212356/https://scribe.rip/p/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-development-community-where-this-regularly-happens-8ef59e6836de originally retrieved Tue Jun 16 21:23:56 EDT 2020

i saw this corman-produced robocop rip-off, programmed to kill. it's great actually; i recommend it. anyway, it clearly had a typical corman budget. yet what did he spend 10 minutes on at the beginning of the movie? establishing the vibe of the marketplace, and the espionage/resistance network operating in the marketplace -- which gets decimated almost immediately & we spend the rest of the movie on another continent, following two characters we barely met in the opening sequence. it made the movie feel big.

mainstream movies have gotten better about being long and slow lately but one thing that used to be common & now is lost is having long scenes of people who aren't important to the plot doing something interesting -- marketplaces, carnivals, parades. it gives a sense of place, but it also acts against the monomythic impulse of narrative film: sure, you're following the protagonist, but for this part of the movie you have to reckon with the fact that every person in this crowd is just as autonomous as the protagonist, in the middle of their own story of a different genre.

Random link from the archives: "Read this book despite its awful title. - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200818191320/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nFFY8SStrg originally retrieved Tue Aug 18 19:13:20 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Watch This Adorable Robot Write Poems on the Beach - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20170724115847/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwz78q/watch-this-adorable-robot-write-poems-on-the-beach originally retrieved Mon Jul 24 11:58:47 EDT 2017

you can't tell me this guy isn't singing 'fuck in the night' #thelastdrivein

Random link from the archives: "Boy Toy Wonder" https://web.archive.org/web/20200220085943/https://pinktwink.tumblr.com/post/190417053021/theprincerubert-typicalacademic-in-this-house originally retrieved Thu Feb 20 08:59:43 EST 2020

did they reuse this script for CONTAMINATION? #thelastdrivein

i love most fulci movies and hate most zombie movies, and i haven't seen this one yet... #thelastdrivein

madness is the goddess of this world

VN fans: i will give you a steam key for my game, if you agree to give it a fair/impartial/honest review on steam. the game is called Manna for our Malices. reply to this post and i'll get in contact with you.

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.

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.

there's this list of the #1 song for every month since 1980, but the real nostalgia-inducing thing is gonna be the list of the #41 song for every month since 1980. the one that was popular enough to hear all the time, but never cracked the top 40, and that hasn't been played or anthologized since

on april 1st, my employer made a change to their VPN system globally that locked out everyone who wasn't using the (famously buggy & security-hole-ridden) cisco anyconnect client on (also famously buggy and security-hole-ridden) windows. so, this morning, every mac & linux user was unable to do any work for the first few hours of the day, as we tried to find workarounds.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200102091127/http://readthis.wtf/writing/towards-a-transcendental-deduction-of-jungle-interview-part-1/ originally retrieved Thu Jan 2 09:11:27 EST 2020

This is Not a Video Essay - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaYWpNwLvxw

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.

god, why is city hunter so good? a show like city hunter doesn't have any right to be this good.

something that i don't think gets talked about much is that, as a long-time anime fan, trends in average art quality are pretty dramatic. in the 80s, your average anime would have some absolutely beautiful shots. in the 90s, shows you wouldn't necessary expect (like slayers or dna^2) would have some absolutely beautiful shots. then basically everything sort of looked like dogshit for about a decade, as animators got used to digital coloring at the same time they started to get used to CG & digital compositing for the first time on tv budgets & also were doing way more shows at once at the same rates -- plus the trend of 'realistic' (i.e., low-contrast & desaturated) coloring was imported from live action around this time. but since around 2010, your average show has gotten better and better looking on average until the point we're at now, where basically every show occasionally has cuts with absolutely incredible blocking or color design or something, even shows that look like dogshit 90% of the time, and the shows that always look bad are typically TRYING to do something interesting, and the shows that would have been given zero effort 20 years ago often look amazing almost all the time. gag-based harem comedies look amazing most of the time now (and sometimes even push artistic boundaries). how the hell did we get to the point where a show like bokuben or nagatoro looks, on average, better than fate/zero?

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.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190809101803/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/as-much-as-im-loathe-to-heap-praise-on-second-life-linden-labs-i-think-they-at-least-got-this-8a4ed0a4d4a originally retrieved Fri Aug 9 10:18:03 EDT 2019

This Strange Orb Freaked Out a City in Japan - Unseen Japan https://unseenjapan.com/this-strange-orb-freaked-out-a-city-in-japan/

conspiracy is not an octopus; it is a ratking. this is the primary theoretical failure in the reasoning of conspiracy theorists. a radical framework is simply a hub-and-spoke elaboration of an arborescent mode: trees reproducing themselves fractally; actually, a radical approximation of the flow of desire and operation of desiring-machines loses so much fidelity versus the rhizomatic lens so as to be useless for predicting the likelihood of any particular relation to be True (either abstractly or in reference to a phenomenal world): the order word lurks in the anus of the policeman in each person's head, cutting off new tendrils that dare connect outside of the family. arborescent tendencies of thought, when widespread, project onto the society as a whole a rejection on the prohibition on incest (of thoughts, ideas, behaviors, artifacts, trade, and desire, as well as sexually) which could also be thought of as a prototype or analogy of pathological codependence. co-independence is the norm: we depend on each other in a way that uses redundancy to avoid disruption, have many shallow acquaintances even within a dunbar-sized group.

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: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200919232729/https://scribe.rip/p/how-do-we-build-a-world-where-this-does-not-happen-9c9d12e53d0c originally retrieved Sat Sep 19 23:27:29 EDT 2020

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.

a weird bias i see in well-meaning social justice circles is treating the earliest instance of an idea as somehow representative of all later variations (especially if that first instance is problematic). for instance, somebody on tiktok noticed that some early discussions of thieves' cants were basically anti-romani propaganda, and implied that the notion of theieves cants was therefore specifically racist against romani people. now, there are a lot of documented 'underworld' cants (mostly language games), some specifically developed for criminal purposes; there's a huge amount of racial and class baggage around most of these, but very little of it relates to the romani at all since they developed in non-romani communities (ex., yob developed among australian youth & verlan among parisian youth, while carny slang, the only of these that's clearly intentionally associated with crime, developed in the united states). furthermore, romani language isn't any sort of cant, so these 16th century documents aren't even describing a real thing. so, it's absurd to claim (for instance, as this person did) that having a notion of thieves' cant in D&D is inherently racist against romani people.

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

weird to read about attachment styles because the description is like 'healthy and secure people feel like '. also, weird that basically anybody whose parents both worked (i.e., basically anybody not rich) under this model is sort of doomed to be dysfunctional.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220214160100/https://scribe.rip/p/again-its-so-interesting-to-see-this-and-feel-this-throughout-mostly-philosophical-82fb5d880ac7 originally retrieved Mon 14 Feb 2022 04:01:00 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "This Erotica Does Not Exist" https://web.archive.org/web/20191011132933/https://erogenerator.gitlab.io/ originally retrieved Fri Oct 11 13:29:33 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209092205/https://scribe.rip/p/no-elon-musk-is-not-about-to-blow-this-covid-19-testing-thing-wide-open-d7de38ba6706 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 09:22:05 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "How the ARPANET Protocols Worked" https://web.archive.org/web/20210315202307/https://twobithistory.org/2021/03/08/arpanet-protocols.html originally retrieved Mon 15 Mar 2021 08:23:07 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "No Cash Needed At This Cafe. Students Pay The Tab With Their Personal Data : The Salt : NPR" https://web.archive.org/web/20181003133522/https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/29/643386327/no-cash-needed-at-this-cafe-students-pay-the-tab-with-their-personal-data originally retrieved Wed Oct 3 13:35:22 EDT 2018

Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This? | Techdirt https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/why-would-anyone-use-another-centralized-social-media-service-after-this/

Random link from the archives: "This video is not about The Batman | Renegade Cut - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220821145906/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_rfVSHVNCg originally retrieved Sun 21 Aug 2022 02:59:06 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "This Old Lisp" https://web.archive.org/web/20181019091226/http://thisoldlisp.com/talks/els-2018/ originally retrieved Fri Oct 19 09:12:26 EDT 2018

so i switched my twitter account to (almost entirely) automated generated image posts (at a high rate) in order to help fill twitter's disks with low-value content, and ironically i got a bunch of new followers & a substantially higher engagement rate. this tells you everything you need to know about the incentive dynamics of twitter tbh

is witch from mercury doing a star driver / captain earth thing with all the dynastic stuff or did star driver get that from gundam? (i've only watched the first and second gundam movies + a little of seed before this...)

Random link from the archives: "This is why cognitive behavioural therapy works so well | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20171109075439/https://aeon.co/essays/this-is-why-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-works-so-well originally retrieved Thu Nov 9 07:54:39 EST 2017

'konosuba but everyone is darkness' dude you just sold me on this show so hard

i may be deranged, but the piano musak version of down in the park that gary numan tacked onto the end of telekon is one of the funniest things i've ever heard. i've been saying this for almost 20 years

This 'Boring' Album Cover is Hiding a Masterpiece - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcYRmCiJxRE

This TV gadget censors bad words with 1980's tech - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiXg6H_FycI

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

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)

right now, i've got periodic random links every 4 hours on twitter and masto but a roundup of ~20 random links daily on ssb. i originally decided to do it this way because my home fedi node had a ~500 character post limit & ssb's limit was much longer, and because ssb has a culture of longer posts at a slower rate. now that eldritch.cafe has an extremely high post length limit, should i post daily link roundups on masto instead?

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200922152517/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-a-really-interesting-model-49102c8d825c originally retrieved Tue Sep 22 15:25:17 EDT 2020

The small things Manifesto " ~ajroach42.com " I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog. https://ajroach42.com/the-small-things-manifesto/

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.

one of my character flaws is that, whenever someone says something i already know, i get slightly offended (as though they are implying i don't know the thing). this is more of a problem than it might otherwise be, because i went down wiki holes 12 hours a day for like 10 years, & devoured trivia books for a decade before that...

okay so i have this whole 'rebecca meets mkultra' thing percolating so maybe i'll do a nanowrimo on that, or try to

re: 'ai in medicine' -- in the 60s and 70s, there were expert systems for blood diseases & for oncology. from what i gather, they were pretty good, and were used as diagnostic aids in several hospitals. but naturally, any doctor who just trusted those systems instead of consulting them skeptically would be in a state of sin, with regard to medical ethics. importantly, expert systems are not statistical: they are the product of individual experts explicitly describing their decision-making and getting that decision-making encoded. statistical systems have a nasty habit of modeling the wrong things: consider the image classifier trained to identify cancerous tumors that actually identified pencils (because the pictures of cancerous tumors had pencils pointing to the tumors, being repurposed teaching aids). statistical systems also tend to model exactly as things are, rather than as they should be: a statistical model of pain medication prescription would have a dose inversely proportional to skin pigmentation because doctors systematically prescribe lower doses of pain meds to darker-skinned people, but no expert system would capture that because doing so would require a doctor to outright tell an interviewer to make their robot more racist. all of this is to say that statistical systems have a hard time taking advantage of the human capacity to identify salient features, and basically can't take any advantage at all of the human tendency to second-guess our instincts and try to counteract our worst unconscious biases when primed to be explicit. these two factors -- keeping a human expert in the loop in both the training phase and the usage phase -- are what made medical expert systems useful tools instead of systematic killers, and those two factors are exactly what a lot of statistical machine learning projects are trying to eliminate (since doing so transfers power away from expensive human experts and toward machines that can be shut off or modified at the demands of mangement)

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: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201006120933/https://scribe.rip/p/this-thinking-in-this-article-is-sloppy-and-leads-to-confusion-28b59effe6d8 originally retrieved Tue Oct 6 12:09:33 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "This Eccentric Academic Thinks the Zodiac Killer Is a Hoax - MEL Magazine" https://web.archive.org/web/20181217112948/https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/this-eccentric-academic-thinks-the-zodiac-killer-is-a-hoax originally retrieved Mon Dec 17 11:29:48 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "This Is Neutrinowatch – Neutrinowatch" https://web.archive.org/web/20210621065724/https://neutrinowatch.org/2021/06/05/this-is-neutrinowatch/ originally retrieved Mon 21 Jun 2021 06:57:24 AM EDT

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

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209102324/https://scribe.rip/p/i-built-a-fake-news-site-this-is-what-i-learned-54263ea1c6a9 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 10:23:24 AM EST

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/20190701160822/https://trackthis.link/ originally retrieved Mon Jul 1 16:08:22 EDT 2019

Did Hans Neimann Cheat at Chess With a Sex Toy? This Coder Is Attempting to Find Out. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d3w9z/did-hans-neimann-cheat-at-chess-with-a-sex-toy-this-coder-is-attempting-to-find-out

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.

Anyone can use this AI art generator " that’s the risk - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/15/23340673/ai-image-generation-stable-diffusion-explained-ethics-copyright-data

Bad idea of the day: a private twitter account and only patrons get follow approval (please nobody ever do this, it is terrible)

I had avoided Buio Omega / Beyond Darkness for a while because it had this reputation as a meaningless gorefest, but I finally watched it last night and let me say: it's beautifully shot, atmospheric, with great (and innovative) use of framing & blocking, on top of the incredible Goblin sound-track, and the plot has more meat on it than you'd expect. Is Mattei dismissed for the same reasons as late Fulci? IMO, late Fulci is best Fulci: House of Clocks, Sweet House of Horror, and Cat in the Brain are incredible.

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).

Random link from the archives: "This House Is Still Haunted: An Essay In Seven Gables - Dilettante Army" https://web.archive.org/web/20220228120646/https://dilettantearmy.com/articles/this-house-is-still-haunted originally retrieved Mon 28 Feb 2022 12:06:46 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "I wish I could recommend this article multiple times." https://web.archive.org/web/20211102190602/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-wish-i-could-recommend-this-article-multiple-times-dbbad1a478e6 originally retrieved Tue 02 Nov 2021 07:06:02 PM EDT

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

This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017 | Tor.com https://www.tor.com/2017/10/03/this-future-looks-familiar-watching-blade-runner-in-2017/

getting more people on tumblr trying to make me start posting stuff or stop posting other stuff, saying 'this blog does x'. i'm not a blog; i'm a person, and you are a stranger on the internet trying to control me instead of just unfollowing, ya fuckin weirdo.

This video is not about The Batman | Renegade Cut - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_rfVSHVNCg

Bad idea of the day: a horror ARG in the form of a fake video essayist whose analyses slowly get stranger until you realize they are living in a universe only slightly different from this one, where certain pivotal events didn't occur

Random link from the archives: "Why Hollywood loves this creepy bird call - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20211018154705/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVFBUIGfcJk originally retrieved Mon 18 Oct 2021 03:47:05 PM EDT

The Weird Cyberpunk Yuri VN Behind This GIF (Possessioner) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1Uhf_Lt0Fo

Random link from the archives: "Bruce Schneier’s book Liars and Outliers intersects with this material, & so may be of interest." https://web.archive.org/web/20211128235610/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/bruce-schneiers-book-liars-and-outliers-intersects-with-this-material-so-may-be-of-interest-984e970c168b originally retrieved Sun 28 Nov 2021 11:56:10 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200311124319/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/this-is-a-good-point-3c530922c72c originally retrieved Wed Mar 11 12:43:19 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "BBC - Future - Could you have this memory disorder?" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113155108/http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181112-severely-deficient-autobiographical-memory-is-surprisi?ocid=twfut originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 15:51:08 EST 2018

Have you ever seen this terrifying cursed movie? - SCP-5040 - Tears of Blood - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTYuamwTl5U

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - ojahnn/NaNoLiPo2018: This is the repository for 2018's collaborative NaNoLiPo project." https://web.archive.org/web/20181029102025/https://github.com/ojahnn/NaNoLiPo2018 originally retrieved Mon Oct 29 10:20:25 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

Random link from the archives: "DDoS attackers have found this new trick to knock over websites | ZDNet" https://web.archive.org/web/20220302163540/https://www.zdnet.com/article/attackers-now-hit-firewalls-to-knock-out-websites/ originally retrieved Wed 02 Mar 2022 04:35:40 PM EST

I was originally gonna do this game for NaNoReNo years ago & never got around to it, but it's finished now: https://enkiv2.itch.io/blood-ocean

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209123026/https://scribe.rip/p/part-1-steal-this-singularity-defined-7c4a819a2297 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 12:30:26 PM EST

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

Random link from the archives: "Valley of the Dolls: Why We Love This Awful Movie - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20220603173758/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSeWqO6IAT0 originally retrieved Fri 03 Jun 2022 05:37:58 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Otaku Culture Oasis (This Ain't That) - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180828114834/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SV1GME_FHQ originally retrieved Tue Aug 28 11:48:34 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency" https://web.archive.org/web/20210225084243/https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-ux-on-this-small-child-is-terrible originally retrieved Thu 25 Feb 2021 08:42:43 AM EST

anime very often comments on the phenomenon of microaggressions against non-asians & mixed white/asian people in japan, and i basically never see western fandom talk about this, to the point where i think it might be going over western audience's heads?

Random link from the archives: "A Short History of Chaosnet" https://web.archive.org/web/20181112130510/https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html originally retrieved Mon Nov 12 13:05:10 EST 2018

This Free Manga Will Break You. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHb_S5WOmuE

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200927014603/https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-where-internet-memes-come-from-9de9c21c07e8 originally retrieved Sun Sep 27 01:46:03 EDT 2020

Valley of the Dolls: Why We Love This Awful Movie - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSeWqO6IAT0

Random link from the archives: "This Anime Does Not Exist" https://web.archive.org/web/20220111174108/https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ originally retrieved Tue 11 Jan 2022 05:41:08 PM EST

if hypertext stack editing programs on home computers (like hypercard) had remained popular for another 20 years after the introduction of the web, we would have had a perfect understandable set of metaphors for a new breed of 'found footage' epistolary FMV horror games, because people collecting pieces of media together in combination with personal notes in a manner that could be packed up together for distribution would be a recognizable thing. we have the tech but there's no social basis for this behavior anymore, and so any epistolary FMV game has to either take place in an alternate universe, spend time justifying why the collator might be using weird monkey-patched old hypertext systems, or create an in-universe justification wherein the player character is somehow using a strangely designed professional database of some kind. basically, a very short-lived set of technical and financial incentives in the real world prevented a really interesting & obvious potential style of game from coming into its own.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209130041/https://scribe.rip/p/is-this-a-sandwich-50b1317eb3f5 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 01:00:41 PM EST

Joined a 'leftist speculative fiction' group on facebook, because I'm a leftist & writer of speculative fiction who cares about leftist speculative fiction, & was disappointed to find that it's basically a 'sex negative speculative fiction' group. How does this happen? Is this related to anti-shipping discourse somehow?

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200319161442/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-dont-remember-writing-this-but-it-looks-exactly-like-my-writing-style-1faf3ef0b394 originally retrieved Thu Mar 19 16:14:42 EDT 2020

‘This house. It’s unhealthy’: Stephen Weeks’ Ghost Story | Horrified Magazine - The British Horror Website https://www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk/film/stephen-weeks-ghost-story/

This Interview is a Mistake | Spike Art Magazine https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/interview-mistake

Random link from the archives: "Imagine This: A Web Without Servers - Tara Vancil - JSConf EU 2018 - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180727145646/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ_WvfF3FN8 originally retrieved Fri Jul 27 14:56:46 EDT 2018

This Indie Horror Movie is a Grade A Mindf*ck - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN29HmyuS5w

CBC Radio https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-the-tuesday-edition-1.6439812/how-making-recipes-etched-on-gravestones-changed-this-student-s-perspective-on-death-1.6440208

OK, I've lost some respect for S. T. Jioshi. This is a lot of vitriol, basically completely unwarranted, and it all boils down to Jioshi telling on himself for failing to be a careful reader & not being particularly imaginative. http://stjoshi.org/review_vandermeer.html

my rule of thumb when it comes to my own creative works is: the amount of money or attention any of this is going to net anybody is negligable, so i'm creating 100% for my own amusement; as a result, i get to be as self-indulgent as i like, & i can quit whenever it stops being fun

i'm late to the party on Termination Shock, but i recommend it tbh. it's not transcendently good or gut-bustingly funny like early Stephenson, & is instead definitely in line with lesser efforts like REAMDE and Seveneves, but in a way i think his slow transition to near-future technothriller has started to mature (and the geopolitics feel more like Bruce Sterling than Neal Stephenson in this book)

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180905031732/https://scribe.rip/p/the-election-of-1800-was-way-more-important-than-this-one-fd711eb93837 originally retrieved Wed Sep 5 03:17:32 EDT 2018

the only thing more depressing that being in this 2 hour meeting where we just fill in a boolean column in a spreadsheet is how useful the other seven people in the meeting seem to find it

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - catseye/Flobnar: This is what happens when you get Befunge-93 drunk" https://web.archive.org/web/20190509103521/https://github.com/catseye/Flobnar originally retrieved Thu May 9 10:35:21 EDT 2019

damn, i'm doing a lot more shooting my shot lately. taking risks. they're all failing miserably but for some reason i'm not stopping like usual. this is scary.

I Beat the Dark Souls Trilogy and All I Made Was This Lousy Video Essay - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_KVCFxnpj4

Wtch This: Unravelling the Mystery Behind a Secret YouTube URL https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7d8g8/youtube-mystery-custom-urls

Random link from the archives: "“Who’s quoting this?”: Synchromystic Language, Narrative and Metatextuality in Hellier – The House of Alexander" https://web.archive.org/web/20200829173610/http://houseofalexander.wiki/whos-quoting-this originally retrieved Sat Aug 29 17:36:10 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "The Little Cards That Tell Police 'Let's Forget This Ever Happened'" https://web.archive.org/web/20200903142052/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards originally retrieved Thu Sep 3 14:20:52 EDT 2020

that feeling of brushing up against the edge of an alien discourse and saying 'nope, i will not learn enough to entangle myself with this'

Like Twin Peaks? The X-Files? VIDEO GAMES? Then You Will Love This. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRyNd3p_49g

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: "This Man Committed Paradise Lost to Memory for Mental Exercise" https://web.archive.org/web/20180531064618/http://nautil.us/blog/-this-man-memorized-a-60000_word-poem-using-deep-encoding originally retrieved Thu May 31 06:46:18 EDT 2018

people flounce from facebook shitposting groups like 'when i first saw this show i was too young and dumb to get any of the political implications, and now that i am an adult i refuse to expose myself to information that might make me grow as a person'

Random link from the archives: "I thought this was going to turn into a full rejection of the representativeness heuristic, and was…" https://web.archive.org/web/20211208171839/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-thought-this-was-going-to-turn-into-a-full-rejection-of-the-representativeness-heuristic-and-was-dba5d6ebde9c originally retrieved Wed 08 Dec 2021 05:18:39 PM EST

DDoS attackers have found this new trick to knock over websites | ZDNet https://www.zdnet.com/article/attackers-now-hit-firewalls-to-knock-out-websites/

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

This House Is Still Haunted: An Essay In Seven Gables - Dilettante Army https://dilettantearmy.com/articles/this-house-is-still-haunted

Who Was Responsible For This Anime? - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTBvvRCqmk

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?

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180902031339/https://scribe.rip/p/nearly-everything-you-ever-need-to-know-about-ui-you-can-learn-from-this-toilet-247d4ca1c9b2 originally retrieved Sun Sep 2 03:13:39 EDT 2018

DEAD ALIVE | it all melts down to this https://deadalivemagazine.com/pieces/it-all-melts/down-to-this.html

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

This Friday, for #itchio's Creator Day, all my games, books, and albums are 50% off: https://itch.io/s/67031/creator-day-feb-2022

Bad idea of the day: a 'search engine for intuition'. it takes a search phrase for input, and simultaneously does a text search, news search, patent / scientific search, wikipedia/wictionary lookup, video search, and image search, and produces a page of arbitrarily-sized 'tiles', each with a result from a randomly chosen source (for text sources, a marquee of the first 1k characters, possibly with speech synthesis synced to the speed of the marquee), and each closing once the content of the box had 'finished playing' (or after a configurable delay for images) to have a new box appended to the end of the document. this continues in search result order until the user presses 'stop', searches for something new, or until all search results that were fetched (with some fetchahead) were shown. extra search backends configurable: ex., we may want to do a gematria lookup

how often does the same native god (in a land invaded in the name of the church) become the basis for both a saint and a demon? and, how often is this simultaneous? my intuition is that the overlap will be small because demon names tended to be based on the gods of peoples that hebrews encountered during the writing of the old testament, the saints are mostly based on gods of peoples who post-300-AD romanized christians were encountering for the first time, and so any local gods would need to survive a roughly 500 year gap at the minimum (and probably more like 1000-2000) with very little sound variation, in a world where almost everybody is illiterate and so the vernacular has a high rate of churn

since close to the beginning of the pandemic, i've been a part of at least one (and sometimes 3 or 4) weekly book clubs on discord, and i just realized... that it's basically a college class? like, a bunch of us dorks decided to take it upon ourselves to do intensive studies of often-difficult texts and come together to discuss them for 2-3 hours, every week, for years. there are no tests & there's no credit -- we are doing this purely as a social thing and to learn stuff we're interested in -- and we're not even recording it for a podcast or anything. some of our book clubs have homework or group projects, even. at the same time, this work has been driving my media consumption habits & a lot of my writing and other interests for the past few years. this is a thing that people can do. while there are a bunch of reasons to attend an accredited university (including having qualified experts to personally advise you & being able to prove, in an easily-legible way, to future employers that you passed some kind of measure of competence), if your goal is to learn (especially to learn together & have all the positive social pressures that can keep you committed to often-difficult subjects) you can just... do it. you can just arrange with your friends to... do a class. the stuff i've been doing has involved occult tomes, works of critical theory, and mass-market nonfiction, but i think you can even do this with textbooks. and, with smaller groups, it's easier to negotiate an appropriate pace. while in these meetings there's always been someone to step up and gently guide discussion back toward the subject & make sure everyone has a chance to speak, there generally hasn't been a 'teacher' in the sense of 'expert', and for the most part, that's been OK. it captures everything i loved about being in college with none of the things i hated.

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).

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.

Random link from the archives: "This Artwork Does Not Exist" https://web.archive.org/web/20200316095727/https://thisartworkdoesnotexist.com/ originally retrieved Mon Mar 16 09:57:27 EDT 2020

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)

About 10 years ago, I used to have this album on heavy rotation called 'RITES' which was a sample-based electronic performance of The Rite of Spring. I can't remember the artist, and now I am having a hard time finding it. Anybody know what I'm talking about?

Random link from the archives: "This recipe for 3-ingredient carnitas makes taco night easy" https://web.archive.org/web/20181002124947/https://thetakeout.com/recipe-3-ingredient-carnitas-1828956318 originally retrieved Tue Oct 2 12:49:47 EDT 2018

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.

This Anime Does Not Exist https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/

Random link from the archives: "A Short History of Chaosnet" https://web.archive.org/web/20181112130510/https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html originally retrieved Mon Nov 12 13:05:10 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "No Son of Mine Is Going to Be a Benthamite Utilitarian. This Is a John Stuart Mill Family, Dammit! - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency" https://web.archive.org/web/20190820114635/https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/no-son-of-mine-is-going-to-be-a-benthamite-utilitarian-this-is-a-john-stuart-mill-family-dammit originally retrieved Tue Aug 20 11:46:35 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "This Artwork Does Not Exist" https://web.archive.org/web/20200316095727/https://thisartworkdoesnotexist.com/ originally retrieved Mon Mar 16 09:57:27 EDT 2020

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.

before adding a new dependency to your project, make sure to read and understand the entire dependency stack (including your OS kernel). this will make you a better developer & surface problems -- and even better, it will dramatically decrease the likelihood that you will add new dependencies, which are ticking time bombs.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190731081836/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/rather-than-asking-how-did-i-come-to-this-belief-which-may-be-irrelevant-we-can-accidentally-e59456a1ff38 originally retrieved Wed Jul 31 08:18:36 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Targeted ads exploded this decade and the damage has been devastating." https://web.archive.org/web/20200121101009/https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/decade-in-advertising-data-terrifying.html originally retrieved Tue Jan 21 10:10:09 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "I Just Binge-Watched Every Bill Murray Movie and This is…" https://web.archive.org/web/20211020175252/https://scribe.rip/p/i-just-binge-watched-every-bill-murray-movie-and-this-is-a6d5beb9a716 originally retrieved Wed 20 Oct 2021 05:52:52 PM EDT

This experiment might prove an interesting basis for the artistic use of transclusion. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/this-experiment-might-prove-an-interesting-basis-for-the-artistic-use-of-transclusion-f12cab7bf762

I don’t remember writing this but it looks exactly like my writing style. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-dont-remember-writing-this-but-it-looks-exactly-like-my-writing-style-1faf3ef0b394

I thought this was going to turn into a full rejection of the representativeness heuristic, and was… https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-thought-this-was-going-to-turn-into-a-full-rejection-of-the-representativeness-heuristic-and-was-dba5d6ebde9c

You might get more out of the third article in this series, then. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/you-might-get-more-out-of-the-third-article-in-this-series-then-bc090c0d26c9

i've been finding and logging phantom 503 errors at work -- http requests between two VMs are very frequently erroring with 503, requiring a retry, yet the target server doesn't have any log evidence of these 503s. is this an amazon thing? are they, like, stealth-throttling?

all this web3 nonsense bothers me because actual really-real decentralization is inherently unprofitable -- it makes it difficult to track or meter usage, even for the sake of avoiding double-spending, and (to survive) is actively & consistently de-centralizing, in order to counteract all the forces (like capital and economies-of-scale) that push systems toward re-centralization. anything profitable is inherently re-centralizing because it benefits people who already have capital with more capital.

The Flawed History of Graphical User Interfaces https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/lets-pretend-this-never-happened-8abf0bc9648c

Sorry, that’s my Canon Cat article. I meant to link to this one. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/sorry-thats-my-canon-cat-article-i-meant-to-link-to-this-one-c88061628070

This is a good point. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/this-is-a-good-point-3c530922c72c

Bruce Schneier’s book Liars and Outliers intersects with this material, & so may be of interest. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/bruce-schneiers-book-liars-and-outliers-intersects-with-this-material-so-may-be-of-interest-984e970c168b

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: The Power of Negative Thinking https://scribe.rip/p/it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way-the-power-of-negative-thinking-2627a3cb2f6c

I’ll consider this carefully. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/ill-consider-this-carefully-1b02d91933e9

This digital piano has some very clever controls - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXYMdxwTf8s

The key thing here is not that this time is different than the 60s, or that the people writing… https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/the-key-thing-here-is-not-that-this-time-is-different-than-the-60s-or-that-the-people-writing-a44c7f62430e

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200619092346/https://medium.com/p/somehow-i-just-saw-this-thanks-man-993100c0f43f originally retrieved Fri Jun 19 09:23:46 EDT 2020

In 1995, this astronomer predicted the Internet’s greatest failure https://scribe.rip/p/in-1995-this-astronomer-predicted-the-internets-greatest-failure-68a1c3927e46

Thank you for this. https://scribe.rip/p/thank-you-for-this-abda56f1ee27

One bold move you could make on this front is to not tag your stories with anything. https://scribe.rip/p/one-bold-move-you-could-make-on-this-front-is-to-not-tag-your-stories-with-anything-ed9d337cd5df

Scott Alexander is taking grant applications. I think this is a good opportunity for tools-for-thought people to get enough cash to quit their day jobs and work on actually useful shit for a while. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant

Making this album with AI ‘felt like wandering in an enormous labyrinth’ - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/28/22750337/shadow-planet-ai-robin-sloan-jesse-solomon-clark

This Magazine ' Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment https://this.org/2017/11/15/social-media-is-keeping-us-stuck-in-the-moment/

You don’t really need to go to 4chan for this. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/you-dont-really-need-to-go-to-4chan-for-this-c6786130a774

I wonder if this was the inspiration for the famous scene in Scanners… https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-wonder-if-this-was-the-inspiration-for-the-famous-scene-in-scanners-3e17e1860207

I don’t know where you got any of the ideas in this article. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-dont-know-where-you-got-any-of-the-ideas-in-this-article-a469369df6a6

As much as I’m loathe to heap praise on Second Life & Linden Labs, I think they at least got this… https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/as-much-as-im-loathe-to-heap-praise-on-second-life-linden-labs-i-think-they-at-least-got-this-8a4ed0a4d4a

If you understood this essay as advocating for some language, you didn’t read it carefully. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/if-you-understood-this-essay-as-advocating-for-some-language-you-didnt-read-it-carefully-470b35984b3a

I wish I could recommend this article multiple times. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-wish-i-could-recommend-this-article-multiple-times-dbbad1a478e6

Rather than asking ‘how did I come to this belief’ (which may be irrelevant " we can accidentally… https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/rather-than-asking-how-did-i-come-to-this-belief-which-may-be-irrelevant-we-can-accidentally-e59456a1ff38

This is an interesting article because it’s posted on Medium, and the Medium comment system is… https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-an-interesting-article-because-it-s-posted-on-medium-and-the-medium-comment-system-is-ef1c9cddcb01

It was sex all the time at this 1800s commune, with anyone you wanted and none of the guilt https://scribe.rip/p/it-was-sex-all-the-time-at-this-1800s-commune-with-anyone-you-wanted-and-none-of-the-guilt-c7ea4734e9ca

You’re Gonna Wish This Was Fake News https://scribe.rip/p/you-wish-this-was-fake-news-bdc8ac9a9268

Why is this article so mean-spirited and condescending? https://scribe.rip/p/why-is-this-article-so-mean-spirited-and-condescending-cc86a8a0d899

This Handy Chart Automatically Generates a Pitch for Your New Novel https://scribe.rip/p/how-to-write-elevator-pitch-novel-publicity-infographic-a8ec74ecf7ce

Random link from the archives: "A Short History of Chaosnet" https://web.archive.org/web/20181001150614/https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html originally retrieved Mon Oct 1 15:06:14 EDT 2018

I Just Binge-Watched Every Bill Murray Movie and This is… https://scribe.rip/p/i-just-binge-watched-every-bill-murray-movie-and-this-is-a6d5beb9a716

Why Hollywood loves this creepy bird call - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVFBUIGfcJk

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20191101084353/https://medium.com/p/thank-you-for-this-abda56f1ee27 originally retrieved Fri Nov 1 08:43:53 EDT 2019

(Medium ate my first draft…:( so this is a bit abbreviated…) https://scribe.rip/p/medium-ate-my-first-draft-so-this-is-a-bit-abbreviated-ed5bb64e42c

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180905031732/https://medium.com/p/the-election-of-1800-was-way-more-important-than-this-one-fd711eb93837 originally retrieved Wed Sep 5 03:17:32 EDT 2018

The Election of 1800 Was Way More Important Than This One https://scribe.rip/p/the-election-of-1800-was-way-more-important-than-this-one-fd711eb93837

This niche generation within the Baby Boom is a highly coveted"and persuadable"voting bloc https://scribe.rip/p/generation-jones-baby-boom-923270cb2010

Nearly everything you ever need to know about UI you can learn from this toilet. https://scribe.rip/p/nearly-everything-you-ever-need-to-know-about-ui-you-can-learn-from-this-toilet-247d4ca1c9b2

This is excellent advice not just for horror filmmakers, but for all people who make and share… https://scribe.rip/p/this-is-excellent-advice-not-just-for-horror-filmmakers-but-for-all-people-who-make-and-share-de2d2955838a

“All medias are propagandic” " Of Bowie, Mishima, Memewar: Jamie Curcio Interviewed https://scribe.rip/@StealThisSingul/all-medias-are-propagandic-of-bowie-mishima-memewar-jamie-curcio-interviewed-fba0245075bc

OPERATION MINDFUCK WAS TOO SUCCESSFUL " R.U. Sirius Interviewed by Douglas Rushkoff (Part 1) https://scribe.rip/@StealThisSingul/operation-mindfuck-was-too-successful-r-u-sirius-interviewed-by-douglas-rushkoff-6607e4edc522

Nearly two years after writing https://enkiv2.medium.com/i-do-not-see-myself-represented-in-essays-on-dating-78488462efa6?sk=705f8e1a535edbecb948fb7f9fd59034 I now know why this perspective is underrepresented. Reactions to this article are split cleanly in three: redpill-bros who call me a cuck, incels who think I'm a poor naive soul who hasn't seen the light & decided to blame women, and anti-incels who think I'm an incel. All three groups think this post is some kind of cannily performative bad-faith attempt to get a mercy-fuck -- as though I didn't know that mercy fucks are not worth the time, and as though I didn't know that this kind of essay wouldn't get me one anyway. I still think I can't be the only one in this specific situation, but despite a lot of readers, this essay doesn't seem to have produced new conversation about how to make women feel more comfortable with taking the initiative or how to discourage men from spamming unwanted advances.

Random link from the archives: "Giving Workers Equal Power Isn't Radical. This Studio's Done It For Years." https://web.archive.org/web/20200923131933/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xybb4/giving-workers-equal-power-isnt-radical-this-studios-done-it-for-years originally retrieved Wed Sep 23 13:19:33 EDT 2020

if you're looking for a sign, this is it

Random link from the archives: "Where Vim Came From" https://web.archive.org/web/20180809114903/https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html originally retrieved Thu Aug 9 11:49:03 EDT 2018

This One’s Too Large, This One’s Too Small: Is There a Perfect Shape for Books? | Tor.com https://www.tor.com/2021/09/09/mark-as-read-the-shape-of-books/

i don't know who needs to hear this but, anyway here's wonderwall

Trust Me, You Want This " Real Life https://reallifemag.com/trust-me-you-want-this/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200619175123/https://medium.com/p/thank-you-very-very-much-for-all-this-information-4434476f3195 originally retrieved Fri Jun 19 17:51:23 EDT 2020

there's something like tsilovsky's rocket equation going on with people, where you have to have within a certain window of comfort and support before you can create meaningful and lasting improvements to your life (and, at scale: people must have a certain window of support before the society as a whole can begin to take a slow step up to a greater level of functionality). this seems to work in stages, with effort large and progress slow at the beginning of a stage and efficiency increasing in an exponential pattern until near the end of the stage.

since the KLF locked down their back-catalog for 23 years, there was a period in which this was true: the 3am that you can purchase is not the 3am eternal

how come every drug that acts on neurochemistry (whatever else it might do) seems to affect the detail-threshold window of salience? (or the detail-threshold-response function i guess, seems to be a bell curve.) in entheogens and dissociatives most apparent first-order 'effects' appear to be knock-on effects of this, & so the 'valve theory of mind' from huxley's doors of perception has been almost fully integrated with popular ideas of how psychedelics work, but this also seems to be the major mental effect of uppers & sedatives (and this might be related to associated effects in the adrenal system)

Why people think this photo of JFK's killer is fake - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD1d8wKIrps

Random link from the archives: "[2008.06537] The Relevance of Classic Fuzz Testing: Have We Solved This One?" https://web.archive.org/web/20201206182741/https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06537 originally retrieved Sun 06 Dec 2020 06:27:41 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190814101834/https://medium.com/@enkiv2/i-dont-know-where-you-got-any-of-the-ideas-in-this-article-a469369df6a6 originally retrieved Wed Aug 14 10:18:34 EDT 2019

Let People Enjoy This Essay https://www.gawker.com/culture/let-people-enjoy-this-essay

Random link from the archives: "SUN RA: NEVER A PART OF THIS PLANET" https://web.archive.org/web/20190109093554/https://pleasekillme.com/sun-ra/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 9 09:35:54 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "This is (not) the greatest song in the world. - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200509101711/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afZu1hxAQQ0 originally retrieved Sat May 9 10:17:11 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200617044227/https://medium.com/p/this-is-the-stupidest-change-medium-has-made-since-the-last-splash-screen-eadc151aa869 originally retrieved Wed Jun 17 04:42:27 EDT 2020

You Probably Won't Change Your Mind After Reading This - Christopher Butler https://www.chrbutler.com/you-probably-wont-change-your-mind

Reading https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/how-we-forgot-foucault/ and thinking that, certainly, intersectional idpol could be defended on grounds of practical biopolitics even if it's neither transcendently metaphysically justified nor expected to be permanent. We could look to Fanon for a framework for this. Of course, as Fanon points out, once an identity is formed, it's difficult to then break it up. But, from D&G we could take the justification that under a signifying regime of signs, each and any deviation from an imagined norm is used as a justification for social sanction, and these percieved deviations are imposed from outside so whether individuals identify with them or not is essentially irrelevant to whether or not they are applied, so if identifying with them gives you the potential for solidarity (to create parallel alternative institutions, for instance) it might be a good strategic decision. Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to determine if this is a good or original idea :(

Random link from the archives: "Observations on Modern Computing (The Last 10 Years Were a Misstep) – ~ajroach42.com – I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog." https://web.archive.org/web/20180425144929/http://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/ originally retrieved Wed Apr 25 14:49:29 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190807101753/https://medium.com/@enkiv2/i-wish-i-could-recommend-this-article-multiple-times-dbbad1a478e6 originally retrieved Wed Aug 7 10:17:53 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "This Is the Most Important Fallacy You’ve Never Heard Of" https://web.archive.org/web/20180103095438/http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-ruining-your-decisions originally retrieved Wed Jan 3 09:54:38 EST 2018

How I Animated This Video - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200919232729/https://medium.com/p/how-do-we-build-a-world-where-this-does-not-happen-9c9d12e53d0c originally retrieved Sat Sep 19 23:27:29 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "'This is small talk purgatory': what Tinder taught me about love | Life and style | The Guardian" https://web.archive.org/web/20191216124705/https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/dec/07/small-talk-purgatory-what-tinder-taught-me-about-love originally retrieved Mon Dec 16 12:47:05 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "This cybernetic synth contains a brain grown from the inventor's cells - CDM Create Digital Music" https://web.archive.org/web/20171031081119/http://cdm.link/2017/05/cybernetic-synth-contains-brain-grown-inventors-cells/ originally retrieved Tue Oct 31 08:11:19 EDT 2017

This Is Neutrinowatch – Neutrinowatch https://neutrinowatch.org/2021/06/05/this-is-neutrinowatch/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200918224903/https://medium.com/p/all-this-2020-tumult-may-be-good-for-our-brains-d8b89ef34a8c originally retrieved Fri Sep 18 22:49:03 EDT 2020

About the critical stance of this blog | Sci-fi interfaces https://scifiinterfaces.com/about-the-critical-stance-of-this-blog/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180831030929/https://medium.com/p/this-is-excellent-advice-not-just-for-horror-filmmakers-but-for-all-people-who-make-and-share-de2d2955838a originally retrieved Fri Aug 31 03:09:29 EDT 2018

Is there any known connection between Lovecraft & Francis Stevens? Her 1919 story 'Unfeared - Unseen' feels like a Lovecraft pastiche and even uses the phrase 'nameless dread' but it'd be weird for somebody outside his circle to pastiche this nobody. I know he did ghostwriting work for other pulp authors but I feel like if this was implicated, the anthology I'm reading would have omitted the story.

I promise this story about microwaves is interesting. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

This isn’t just art, but a supercharged act of meaning-making | Psyche Ideas https://psyche.co/ideas/this-isnt-just-art-but-a-supercharged-act-of-meaning-making

This is an incredibly accurate pastiche of 90s childrens' programming and the folks who made it are extremely skilled https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAGsqtqJUAY&ab_channel=NonCompete

remind me to continue to avoid the wild alternate universe scott alexander lives in wherein this historical account is remotely believable and not, like, contradicted by both aggregate trends and the direct experience of everyone who has ever heard of twitter https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture

just as good database design and good use of types makes invalid state impossible to represent, good UI design ought to make it possible to produce, through the UI, all the states and operations that are possible in the underlying representation. even most WSIWYG editors fail miserably in this.

Random link from the archives: "I Study UFOs and This Is the Best UFO Documentary Ever Made - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20191023142158/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5xaa/witness-of-another-world-is-the-best-ufo-movie-ever-made originally retrieved Wed Oct 23 14:21:58 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20191007075704/https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614043/instead-of-practicing-this-ai-mastered-chess-by-reading-about-it/ originally retrieved Mon Oct 7 07:57:04 EDT 2019

legibility has a cost. optimize entirely for legibility and all useful work halts. optimize for anything else and, at extremes of efficiency, everything becomes entirely illegible. this is flow

Random link from the archives: "This Is What It's Like To Wake Up During Surgery - Digg" https://web.archive.org/web/20190312104443/http://digg.com/2019/waking-up-from-anesthsia originally retrieved Tue Mar 12 10:44:43 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Where Vim Came From" https://web.archive.org/web/20180809114903/https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html originally retrieved Thu Aug 9 11:49:03 EDT 2018

This is extremely exciting https://twitter.com/KendraSerra/status/1379079052766683143

pro tip: when starting work (while working from home), put on an elaborate cosplay of a character whose attributes you would like to channel during this work day

it's a lot easier to generate creepy shit than non-creepy shit -- which is to say, most of possibility space is creepy. what this says about the nature of the universe is left as an exercise for the reader.

OMFG The Haunting of Julia (AKA Full Circle) is on shudder! Everybody go watch it now This movie is impossible to get. I only managed to see it by buying a limited edition french-language belgian DVD. But it's so fucking good

OMFG The Haunting of Julia (AKA Full Circle) is on shudder! Everybody go watch it nowlinkit https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-lulz-of-medusa-on-laughter-as-protest/ This movie is impossible to get. I only managed to see it by buying a limited edition french-language belgian DVD. But it's so fucking good

This Is What It's Like to Live in a Country ‘That Doesn't Exist’ https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdjkb/unrecognised-countries-south-ossetia-abkhazia-transnistria-nagorno-karabakh

This time next year: Jordan Peterson comes back from another multi-month drug fugue claiming to be the reincarnation of Felix Guattari, releases to great and inexplicable fanfare a book called A Thousand More Plateaus: Reterritorializing Chaos. Interviewers are confused because he speaks no french.

Computers Are Bad https://computer.rip/2021-01-12%20taking%20this%20serially.html

How the ARPANET Protocols Worked https://twobithistory.org/2021/03/08/arpanet-protocols.html

https://www.quora.com/unanswered/If-you-set-fire-to-a-million-dollars-in-secret-how-long-would-it-take-for-the-value-of-all-of-the-other-money-in-the-world-to-adjust-to-this-change

Random link from the archives: "This is what filter bubbles actually look like - MIT Technology Review" https://web.archive.org/web/20180823113055/https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611807/this-is-what-filter-bubbles-actually-look-like/ originally retrieved Thu Aug 23 11:30:55 EDT 2018

The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-ux-on-this-small-child-is-terrible

Random link from the archives: "This Game Teaches You How to Build a Quantum Computer - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20171218142449/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jkya/quantum-game-physics-computer-puzzle originally retrieved Mon Dec 18 14:24:49 EST 2017

Don’t fall for this Elite Dangerous scam - Polygon https://www.polygon.com/features/2021/2/4/22264605/elite-dangerous-newbies-trapped-forced-labor

The Real Novelty of the ARPANET https://twobithistory.org/2021/02/07/arpanet.html

Most of the time I feel like I don't have deep knowledge of any subject, but when I hear normies talk about hypertext or magick I realize -- oh yeah, most people have a deep and abiding ignorance of this stuff, don't know who the fuck John Dee is, etc.

Why Phoenix may be uninhabitable by the end of this century | Salon.com https://www.salon.com/2021/01/31/why-phoenix-may-be-uninhabitable-by-the-end-of-this-century/

Random link from the archives: "This wave of global protest is being led by the children of the financial crash | Jack Shenker | Opinion | The Guardian" https://web.archive.org/web/20191104095545/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/29/global-protest-children-financial-crash-hong-kong-london originally retrieved Mon Nov 4 09:55:45 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom?" https://web.archive.org/web/20191108093534/https://twobithistory.org/2019/11/06/doom-bsp.html?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email originally retrieved Fri Nov 8 09:35:34 EST 2019

This Is Not a Game " Real Life https://reallifemag.com/this-is-not-a-game/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200929185820/https://medium.com/p/is-this-pigeon-meme-a-think-piece-ba3880a1fda3 originally retrieved Tue Sep 29 18:58:20 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200611220609/https://medium.com/p/plan-who-youll-be-after-this-942c8bcae8cb originally retrieved Thu Jun 11 22:06:09 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @mcfunley: "Mute me for a bit if you don’t like long diatribes about startup debacles but this reminds me of a story (1/n) So the first version of Etsy […]"" https://web.archive.org/web/20191114134113/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1194713711337852928.html originally posted Thu Nov 14 13:41:13 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "More Than This: Notes on Acid Communism – The Wasted World" https://web.archive.org/web/20190328111720/https://thewastedworld.wordpress.com/2018/12/16/notes-on-acid-communism/ originally posted Thu Mar 28 11:17:20 EDT 2019

You are reincarnated as the type of life form you ate the most of in life, by mass. Only by eating primarily godflesh can you gain the power necessary to stop the wheel of karma. This is difficult: the gods are very small, and have high metabolisms, like hummingbirds. And, of course, they know all about this dynamic, so they eat only each other (or, sometimes, themselves).

Random link from the archives: "A Whimsical Wordsmith Charts a Course Beyond Twitter - The New York Times" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713084205/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/magazine/a-whimsical-wordsmith-charts-a-course-beyond-twitter.html##%E2%80%9CI+was+able+to+be+funny+and+natural+through+the+keyboard+and+awkward+and+quiet+and+weird+in+person%2C%E2%80%9D+he+told+me.+%E2%80%9CI+wonder+how+many+writers+of+this+generation+figured+out+how+to+write+through+chat.%E2%80%9D

Since 1946, a secret organization answerable only to the president has been performing expensive rituals falsely believed to increase the likelihood a UFO will arrive carrying cargo powerful enough to demolish the USSR. Due to a reporting error, no president since Truman has been briefed on this organization, and the members of this organization are not briefed on the intent of the ritual.

[2008.06537] The Relevance of Classic Fuzz Testing: Have We Solved This One? https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06537

Random link from the archives: "This Tool Will Tell You If You Can Make a Living Wage on Mechanical Turk" https://web.archive.org/web/20200923131638/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5pv5b/this-tool-will-tell-you-if-you-can-make-a-living-wage-on-mechanical-turk originally posted Wed Sep 23 13:16:38 EDT 2020

Facework: Trick the AI into thinking you're someone you're not https://www.fastcompany.com/90581252/can-you-trick-this-ai-into-making-money-with-your-face

Zach Whalen generated a comic book using a neural net & an EC Comics archive, and it is a treasure. Imagine being stoned and running across a physical copy of this. http://www.zachwhalen.net/pg/horrrrr/book.pdf

The Clockwork DevTerm Has Cyberpunk Vibes https://gizmodo.com/this-super-compact-computer-will-let-me-live-at-least-o-1845741070

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190820101900/https://medium.com/@enkiv2/you-dont-really-need-to-go-to-4chan-for-this-c6786130a774 originally posted Tue Aug 20 10:19:00 EDT 2019

For the past three years, ILLUMINATI-THEMED spambots have been posting in the comments of this one blog post of mine from 2013: https://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2013/12/rahxephon-as-tortured-metaphor-for.html

this week, it's all year long

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200314010017/https://medium.com/@enkiv2/lets-pretend-this-never-happened-8abf0bc9648c originally posted Sat Mar 14 01:00:17 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "This summer's hottest event is a "Goat LARP," a LARP designed to entertain goats" https://web.archive.org/web/20190531121033/https://news.avclub.com/this-summers-hottest-event-is-a-goat-larp-a-larp-des-1835148101 originally posted Fri May 31 12:10:33 EDT 2019

Let's Talk About This Highly Questionable X-Files Episode 😬 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D9gcBG-gNk

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 originally posted Thu Jul 26 10:35:35 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180902031339/https://medium.com/p/nearly-everything-you-ever-need-to-know-about-ui-you-can-learn-from-this-toilet-247d4ca1c9b2 originally posted Sun Sep 2 03:13:39 EDT 2018

The genderbending nature of incubi/succubi in catholic canon is an excellent opportunity for genderbending which somehow is drastically underserved in hentai, which has historically been very enthusiastic about both succubi and gender-bending individually. Do your part to remedy this.

Vietnam, 2045: the american anti-president in exile, dying in bed, beckons his son-in-law in through the pitted mosquito nets and, hands trembling, puts a plastic tiara on his head, thus completing the coronation of the second generation. In occupied Lichenstein, members of the First Reformed Occipital Church of Q, Anonymous celebrate this event by baking a bread-effigy of Jeffrey Epstein and eating it while wearing mass-produced Guy Fawkes masks. This would become a coronation tradition for the following 600 years.

What fresh hell? This hell is clearly expired. Folks -- you're all out of hell, go restock your pantry.

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

Want something spooky to play this Halloween? Try Manna for our Malices, 50% off for the halloween sale. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/

A Day-By-Day Guide to What Could Happen If This Election Goes Bad - POLITICO https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/23/election-nightmares-guide-430915

Want something spooky to play this October? Try Manna for our Malices: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/ https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices

This Man Exposed 40K Voters Purged by Mistake - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5jK4BzbgXw

olive oil can be extra-virgin even though all trees are fucking basically all the time & this tells you all you need to know about virgin sacrifice

Want something spooky to play this October? Try Manna for our Malices: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/ https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices

I still haven't written this damned essay... https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1021352318028087297.html

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This book is a mirror: when a monkey looks in, he percieves himself as an Other and begins the master-slave dialectic

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Everything worth saying or doing is an active revolt against God, Nature, Good Sense, and Propriety. It is our duty, as thinking beings with will and reason, to revolt in this way. The nature of Nature is to keep the world exactly as shitty as it is now, and we're the only ones equipped to complain, so it's up to us to fix it. We can't, but it's worse not to try.

nothing is more transgressive than the unclassifiable. 'trash' or 'pulp' culture is important in part because it's the only place where the unclassifiable is reliably allowed to appear: there is no expectation that this media will be worth criticizing, and therefore it is allowed to have those indigestible elements -- social-cultural-political fiber -- that make criticism really worthwhile.

Sonic fans are looking forward to the release of the long-rumored cut 'mirror stage' wherein, through one of Robotnik's ingenious mechanisms, Sonic sees himself as an other, becoming human and beginning the process of individuation. This is also part of the origin of Shadow.

Random link from the archives: "A Whimsical Wordsmith Charts a Course Beyond Twitter - The New York Times" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713084205/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/magazine/a-whimsical-wordsmith-charts-a-course-beyond-twitter.html##%E2%80%9CI+was+able+to+be+funny+and+natural+through+the+keyboard+and+awkward+and+quiet+and+weird+in+person%2C%E2%80%9D+he+told+me.+%E2%80%9CI+wonder+how+many+writers+of+this+generation+figured+out+how+to+write+through+chat.%E2%80%9D

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200927014603/https://medium.com/p/this-is-where-internet-memes-come-from-9de9c21c07e8 originally posted Sun Sep 27 01:46:03 EDT 2020

I'm not an authority on much, but I am an authority on the subject of 'what Ted Nelson meant by hypertext'. This is almost entirely because almost nobody listens carefully to Ted Nelson, including his self-proclaimed biggest fans.

Random link from the archives: "How Cold War philosophy permeates US society to this day | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20170724115842/https://aeon.co/essays/how-cold-war-philosophy-permeates-us-society-to-this-day?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ba66c731ab-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-ba66c731ab-68693017 originally posted Mon Jul 24 11:58:42 EDT 2017

Random link from the archives: "This Algorithm Can Tell What You've Learned Before Going to Sleep - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20171115133158/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbka5/algorithm-sleep-eeg-learning-memories originally posted Wed Nov 15 13:31:58 EST 2017

Band name of the day: I WAS MAD TO CHALLENGE THIS FIEND WHO BATHES IN LIVING FLAMES

Random link from the archives: "This Game Teaches You How to Build a Quantum Computer - Motherboard" https://web.archive.org/web/20171218142449/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jkya/quantum-game-physics-computer-puzzle originally posted Mon Dec 18 14:24:49 EST 2017

Random link from the archives: "Letting neural networks be weird • On this blog I’ve posted a lot about neural..." https://web.archive.org/web/20190510103354/https://aiweirdness.com/post/183803561307/on-this-blog-ive-posted-a-lot-about-neural originally posted Fri May 10 10:33:54 EDT 2019

Giving Workers Equal Power Isn't Radical. This Studio's Done It For Years. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xybb4/giving-workers-equal-power-isnt-radical-this-studios-done-it-for-years

boxbase.org: Don't clone that GUI (how about this instead?) http://boxbase.org/entries/2020/sep/23/dont-clone-that-gui/

Random link from the archives: "Imagine This: A Web Without Servers - Tara Vancil - JSConf EU 2018 - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180727145646/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ_WvfF3FN8 originally posted Fri Jul 27 14:56:46 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "This Is Why The Minions Are So Popular" https://web.archive.org/web/20170705111338/https://www.buzzfeed.com/danielspielberger/how-the-minions-took-over-the-world?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email&utm_term=.veNr7beDV#.acdKNDV4O originally posted Wed Jul 5 11:13:38 EDT 2017

Random link from the archives: "Things You Didn't Know About GNU Readline" https://web.archive.org/web/20190826110544/https://twobithistory.org/2019/08/22/readline.html originally posted Mon Aug 26 11:05:44 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20191024113701/https://medium.com/p/one-bold-move-you-could-make-on-this-front-is-to-not-tag-your-stories-with-anything-ed9d337cd5df originally posted Thu Oct 24 11:37:01 EDT 2019

The Little Cards That Tell Police 'Let's Forget This Ever Happened' https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards

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://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1298738662532935681.html

This Great Society is Going Smash: A Lesson to be Learned from Accelerationism – xenogothic https://xenogothic.com/2020/08/31/this-great-society-is-going-smash-a-lesson-to-be-learned-from-accelerationism/

Random link from the archives: "So, Do We Need This Parser Thing Anyway? – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling" https://web.archive.org/web/20200115090225/https://emshort.blog/2010/06/07/so-do-we-need-this-parser-thing-anyway/ originally posted Wed Jan 15 09:02:25 EST 2020

“Who’s quoting this?”: Synchromystic Language, Narrative and Metatextuality in Hellier – The House of Alexander http://houseofalexander.wiki/whos-quoting-this

There Are Only 37 Possible Stories, According to This 1919 Manual for Screenwriters | Open Culture http://www.openculture.com/2020/08/37-possible-stories.html

Band name of the day: few things in this life work

Random link from the archives: "OPERATION MINDFUCK WAS TOO SUCCESSFUL — R.U. Sirius Interviewed by Douglas Rushkoff (Part 1)" https://web.archive.org/web/20180216114922/https://medium.com/@StealThisSingul/operation-mindfuck-was-too-successful-r-u-sirius-interviewed-by-douglas-rushkoff-6607e4edc522 originally posted Fri Feb 16 11:49:22 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200611220609/https://medium.com/p/plan-who-youll-be-after-this-942c8bcae8cb originally posted Thu Jun 11 22:06:09 EDT 2020

Beliefs have a social purpose. Does this explain delusions? | Psyche Ideas https://psyche.co/ideas/beliefs-have-a-social-purpose-does-this-explain-delusions

Read this book despite its awful title. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nFFY8SStrg

The New Design Congress https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine/

Sign says 'end of city limits'. Know what that means? That's right: beyond this point, the city is unlimited.

Band name of the day: in this region of death

Is there an efficient way to find prime numbers that are the sum of some n other prime numbers, for small values of n? This seems like the kind of problem that either is trivial or was proposed by somebody in the 60s & now has number theory phd theses about whether or not it's provable in L1

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200314010017/https://medium.com/@enkiv2/lets-pretend-this-never-happened-8abf0bc9648c originally posted Sat Mar 14 01:00:17 EDT 2020

I had forgotten, but this album actually turned out pretty OK https://www.jamendo.com/album/151358/horror-movie-sound-track-ii

GF and I having a fight because I thought it was reasonable to assume that some people prefer strawberry rhubarb pie solely due to the difficulty of sourcing fresh high-quality rhubarb. This is a thing that is happening.

Random link from the archives: "OOP Before OOP with Simula" https://web.archive.org/web/20190409104450/https://twobithistory.org/2019/01/31/simula.html originally posted Tue Apr 9 10:44:50 EDT 2019

Remember when one of these was featured on Hack-A-Day ten years ago? Or was actually on the market 20 years ago? Or was actually on the market 30 years ago? I'm sure this is an at least incremental improvement but jesus, tech amnesia is real. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200720190922.htm

Random link from the archives: "404 Not Found" https://web.archive.org/web/20190726074021/http://mshook.webfactional.com/talkabout/archive/talkabout.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader15fb67.html?mode=topic&print-friendly=true originally posted Fri Jul 26 07:40:21 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Why build this blog - or anything - on IPFS? | Teetotality" https://web.archive.org/web/20200121120131/http://teetotality.blog/posts/why-ipfs/ originally posted Tue Jan 21 12:01:31 EST 2020

GitHub - cdanis/sandia-public-license: This is not a license of honor. No highly esteemed copyright statement is written here. https://github.com/cdanis/sandia-public-license

Random link from the archives: "It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters" https://web.archive.org/web/20180806115351/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a originally posted Mon Aug 6 11:53:51 EDT 2018

In the year 2501, improvements in automated translation technologies for interplanetary email triggers a holy war between warring sects of latter-day Q-ists: the Adventarians, who believe JFK Jr was wholly divine, and the Counter-Seventhists, who believe JFK Jr was a vessel for the cosmic pleroma engineered by reptilians from Zeta Reticuli. The Twelfthists, who believe JFK Jr was a hologram, and the Antebeerists, who believe JFK was JFK Jr and did 9/11, remained neutral.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200620193808/https://medium.com/p/this-is-silicon-valley-3c4583d6e7c2 originally posted Sat Jun 20 19:38:08 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180916153558/https://medium.com/p/i-just-binge-watched-every-bill-murray-movie-and-this-is-a6d5beb9a716 originally posted Sun Sep 16 15:35:58 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200306102602/https://medium.com/p/it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way-the-power-of-negative-thinking-2627a3cb2f6c originally posted Fri Mar 6 10:26:02 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "I Study UFOs and This Is the Best UFO Documentary Ever Made - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20191023142158/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5xaa/witness-of-another-world-is-the-best-ufo-movie-ever-made originally posted Wed Oct 23 14:21:58 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "I’m Thinking of a Word to Describe… | Toronto Standard" https://web.archive.org/web/20200121110722/http://www.torontostandard.com/culture/theres-a-word-for-this/ originally posted Tue Jan 21 11:07:22 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20191024113701/https://medium.com/p/one-bold-move-you-could-make-on-this-front-is-to-not-tag-your-stories-with-anything-ed9d337cd5df originally posted Thu Oct 24 11:37:01 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "This Company Built a Private Surveillance Network. We Tracked Someone With It - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20190918141517/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn originally posted Wed Sep 18 14:15:17 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200122093110/https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/is-this-video-missing-context-transformed-or-edited-this-effort-wants-to-standardize-how-we-categorize-visual-misinformation/ originally posted Wed Jan 22 09:31:10 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "OOP Before OOP with Simula" https://web.archive.org/web/20190409104450/https://twobithistory.org/2019/01/31/simula.html originally posted Tue Apr 9 10:44:50 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "Cleveland Okie" https://web.archive.org/web/20180520165522/https://clevelandokie.blogspot.com/2011/04/editors-note-this-interview-with-robert.html originally posted Sun May 20 16:55:22 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "This multimedia artist explores the relationship between weaving and c" https://web.archive.org/web/20191115080723/https://www.fastcompany.com/90425067/weaving-coding-and-the-secret-history-of-womens-work originally posted Fri Nov 15 08:07:23 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "This Deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg Tests Facebook’s Fake Video Policies - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20190626075226/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywyxex/deepfake-of-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fake-video-policy originally posted Wed Jun 26 07:52:26 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "A Short History of Chaosnet" https://web.archive.org/web/20181112130510/https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html originally posted Mon Nov 12 13:05:10 EST 2018

Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html

Time to link this again https://medium.com/the-weird-politics-review/2027-ecd158e4a338?source=friends_link&sk=480cc074d6491eb811a01f317b51d268

A random book vending machine would be GREAT for vintage pulp paperbacks -- if you've got a used book store and are having trouble moving those for some reason, this is a good idea https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-monkey-s-paw-toronto-ontario

Random link from the archives: "Otaku Culture Oasis (This Ain't That) - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20180828114834/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SV1GME_FHQ originally posted Tue Aug 28 11:48:34 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20180723073509/http://hilobrow.com/2017/02/20/this-the-gathering-brainstorm/ originally posted Mon Jul 23 07:35:09 EDT 2018/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20190812081307/https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/08/this-shithole-made-me-4-very-online-writers-on-how-the-internet-broke-our-brains-and-how-we-can-unbreak-them/ originally posted Mon Aug 12 08:13:07 EDT 2019/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20200611220609/https://medium.com/p/plan-who-youll-be-after-this-942c8bcae8cb originally posted Thu Jun 11 22:06:09 EDT 2020/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20200619175123/https://medium.com/p/thank-you-very-very-much-for-all-this-information-4434476f3195 originally posted Fri Jun 19 17:51:23 EDT 2020/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20190913084928/https://aeon.co/ideas/science-is-deeply-imaginative-why-is-this-treated-as-a-secret originally posted Fri Sep 13 08:49:28 EDT 2019/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20190429100810/https://gizmodo.com/this-was-supposed-to-be-a-story-about-a-bizarre-anti-va-1833941139 originally posted Mon Apr 29 10:08:10 EDT 2019/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20171110154644/https://www.tor.com/2017/11/08/this-world-is-full-of-monsters/ originally posted Fri Nov 10 15:46:44 EST 2017/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20190816080206/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx4z8/revealed-this-is-palantirs-top-secret-user-manual-for-cops originally posted Fri Aug 16 08:02:06 EDT 2019/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20200311174439/https://medium.com/@enkiv2/sorry-thats-my-canon-cat-article-i-meant-to-link-to-this-one-c88061628070 originally posted Wed Mar 11 17:44:39 EDT 2020/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20180806115351/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a originally posted Mon Aug 6 11:53:51 EDT 2018/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20180723073509/http://hilobrow.com/2017/02/20/this-the-gathering-brainstorm/ originally posted Mon Jul 23 07:35:09 EDT 2018/

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20181217112948/https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/this-eccentric-academic-thinks-the-zodiac-killer-is-a-hoax originally posted Mon Dec 17 11:29:48 EST 2018/

I could really use a proper answer to this: https://www.quora.com/How-many-micromorts-is-not-being-unionized-worth

This is (not) the greatest song in the world. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afZu1hxAQQ0

Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20180809114903/https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html originally posted Thu Aug 9 11:49:03 EDT 2018/