- Jul 2022
-
-
Modern readers might be struck in these early accounts by the extent to which cheerfulness is much more than the superficial performance of the upbeat colleague or the annoying salesman. A social quality, it shapes and defines a particular moral community. It emerges between people, binding them together.
Are they going to mention the cross-cultural smiling thing?
-
‘Cheer’ comes from an Old French word that means, simply, ‘face’. The term comes into English and spreads through medieval culture in the 14th century. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), for example, people are depicted as having a ‘piteous cheer’ or a ‘sober cheer’. ‘Cheer’ is an expression, but also a body part. It lies at the intersection of our emotions and physiognomy.
We love an etymology!
-
Melancholy, for example, arose from an excess of black bile, while certain stimulants were understood to counter melancholy and generate cheerfulness – one glass of wine (not two), bright music, a well-lit room. The Renaissance doctor Levinus Lemnius recommended good company, ‘dallying and kissing’, drink and dancing – all of which, he noted, generate an emotional uplift that endures for days afterwards, visible in the face. Other doctors argued that it was possible to stimulate cheer chemically: in 1696, the English doctor William Salmon prescribed a powder to stimulate cheerfulness: mix up some clove, basil, saffron, lemon peel, bits of ivory, leaves of gold and silver, with shavings from the heart of a stag and, voilà! – you will be made cheerful.
Seems about as sound as modern advice. I can try it!
-
-
www.atlasobscura.com www.atlasobscura.com
-
This brown bread was probably more appetizing than it sounds, Rubel says. Bran carries the nutty, complex flavor associated with whole grains,
Oh give me a break
-
Horse bread, typically a flat, brown bread baked alongside human bread, fueled England’s equine transport system from the Middle Ages up until the early 1800s. It was so logistically important that it was more highly regulated than its human counterpart, with commercial bakers adhering to laws dictating who could bake horse bread, as well as the bread’s price, size, and occasionally even its composition. The ubiquitous bread was made from a dough of bran, bean flour, or a combination of the two, and typically was flat, coarse, and brown.
Wild! Why have I not seen mention of this in literature? Class factors?
-
-
silkroadgourmet.com silkroadgourmet.com
-
He chose the silky and concentrated Syrah because he was cooking a wild boar shot on the vineyard grounds and thought that the red would work better with that meat. He writes, “After a little experimentation, I decided that the right proportional volume of Syrah to garum was 225ml wine to 50ml garum–that seemed to have the right fruit to savory balance.” I find David’s choice interesting because many historical cooks use a 1:1 ratio, that for me, at least, is much too heavy on the garum. David’s ratio of about 4.5:1 (wine:garum) works extremely well from a culinary point of view as a sauce to prep dishes with in the kitchen.
This would make sense if we thought the historical wine was more concentrated/boiled down.
-
Still lower in quality was lora, which was made by soaking the pomace of grape skins already pressed twice in water for a day, and then pressing a third time.
I wonder how much flavor this retains and whether it'd be handy to have.
-
Below that was posca, a mixture of water and sour wine that had not yet turned into vinegar. Posca’s use as soldiers’ rations was codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis and amounted to around a liter per day.
Could one use a bit of grape syrup and a bit of wine vinegar?
-
-
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
-
Kolay Mor Salkımlı Şerbet Tarifi
I want to know how this tastes so badly. I cannot even imagine it. To me, wisteria has a faint scent only similar to that of clover, and has always reminded me of oatmeal. But it's gorgeous, and I love floral recipes, but what would it even taste like
Wait, isn't wisteria poisonous? Is it a dose thing? Will someone please explain what is going on to me
-
-
thoughts.hnr.fyi thoughts.hnr.fyi
-
context collapse refers to the removal of any meaningful signifiers which could go into helping us understand where someone might be coming from, or just whose living room we just walked into unannounced to take a big shit on the floor (and therefore the ability to discern if they might like that we’d done that, or think it was very rude and weird).
There is a very handy distinction I think is worth keeping here between context and content collapse
-
-
rarehistoricalphotos.com rarehistoricalphotos.com
-
The students used a vivid combination of vintage decor, collegiate pennants, high school diplomas, family portraits, and advertisements to decorate their walls.
Vividly illustrating that paper taped on walls has been the province of the young for longer than color photography. Buy frames, bachelors! Buy frames!
-
-
lettersofnote.com lettersofnote.com
-
OUR ARTILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVENS SAKE STOP IT.
"Friendly fire" is both obvious – fog of war and all that – and insane. You mean, we have intricately engineered killing devices? And we use them with such casual attention that they can be pointed at our own side?
Blessings to the pigeon, also.
-
-
www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
-
Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months.
This seems brutal. I'd love to know more about readers' particularity to one writer vs. a wider field.
-
-
www.commonwealmagazine.org www.commonwealmagazine.org
-
the kind of Catholics who, if they didn’t have this community where they can count on someone to pray every week for union organizers or LGBTQ rights, might abscond to the Episcopalians, the kind of Catholics drawn to apophatic theology and social-justice movements, Catholics who have their doubts but just can’t let go.
Ah, well, hello
-
-
www.somebits.com www.somebits.com
-
The novel thing on my new website is sentiment. I decide whether the link will make readers feel better or worse and color the post white or black.
This is phenomenal. I love this. What the heck. I would never have thought to do this.
What a great example of the kind of thing you can do when you're not reliant on social media to share stuff!
-
-
theconvivialsociety.substack.com theconvivialsociety.substack.com
-
Under the conditions of liquid modernity, in the human and material realms, such permanence is unattainable, and we are living with the psychic and social consequences.
What was ever permanent? To what was Arendt referring and what does it have to do with disposed plastics? This feels Scott-Alexanderesque, and I don't mean in a nice way
-
In retrospect, I think what I was registering was a more textured experience of material culture.
"Texture" calls out for more definition, used so confidently here
-
An array of distinct physical objects—cash, maps, analog music players, cameras, calendars, etc.—become one thing. The texture of our experience is flattened out as a result.
This is wrong, but it's interesting to think about how it's wrong. We can call back the physical forms of old cameras but struggle to capture old Instagram interfaces. The things that do lend texture to our experience are licensed, intellectual property, and not physical ephemera to which we can assert our own rights.
-
The digitized book by contrast may have its own advantages, but by being the single undifferentiated interface for every book it loses its function as a mooring for the self.
rolls eyes in fanfiction
-
At the very least, it becomes an always available potential portal into my past.
What kind of person gets to carry the cost of keeping it available? What kind of person doesn't? Archival as ongoing action, not costless default
-
It suggests that the self and its relation to the world is not merely a mental phenomenon. It has a sensual, embodied, and material dimension,
Watching The Quiet Man would be enough to get that far
-
The majority of things that ought to count as “technology” are ignored and the more subtle, and possibly more significant consequences of technology are unaccounted for.
Table stakes, innit?
-
All of this said, it seems to me that our experience of the self can range across a spectrum from more free-floating to more anchored. In these examples, people act as anchors. And, to be more precise, what we are being anchored to is some segment of our own past.
This is interesting because I wouldn't think the anchoring comes from the past but from the continued connection. The neighbor's significance would be different if the parents hadn't still lived there.
-
-
anonymous-animal.neocities.org anonymous-animal.neocities.org
-
It is an elegy for the era of cross-origin browser requests and off-site embeddable media
via mikael
God, what a feeling.
-
-
tedgioia.substack.com tedgioia.substack.com
-
The latest report shows that the consumption of old music grew another 14% during the first half of 2022, while demand for new music declined an additional 1.4%.
If you were to believe that
- older listeners tend to listen to fewer new releases
- there's been a huge increase in the amount people listen (in a measured way, at least) to music that matches up with the ease of streaming
- younger listeners have already been at saturation with streaming technology for ~5 years
- older listeners are still coming on board with streaming and we're therefore seeing their stats pop up more
that would be one explanation for all of this that doesn't sound quite so, err... declinist.
-
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
In a Baroque palace, access down an enfilade suite of state rooms typically was restricted by the rank or degree of intimacy of the visitor. The first rooms were more public, and usually at the end was the bedroom, sometimes with an intimate cabinet or boudoir beyond. Baroque protocol dictated that visitors of lower rank than their host would be escorted by servants down the enfilade to the farthest room their status allowed. If the visitor was of equal or higher rank, the host would advance down the enfilade to meet their guest, before taking the visitor back. At parting, the same ritual would be observed, although the host might pay their guest a compliment by taking them back farther than their rank strictly dictated. If a person of much higher rank visited, these rituals extended beyond the enfilade to the entrance hall, the gates to the palace, or beyond (in modern State visits, to the airport). Memoirs and letters of the period often note the exact details of where meetings and partings occurred, even to whether they were in the centre of the room, or at the door.[citation needed]
This is very fun if true and the [citation needed] saddens me
-
-
www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
-
wonderful desert sand - used it as top cover for my potted citrus tree to combat fungus gnats. sand even came with free lizard.
-
-
www.fart.gold www.fart.gold
-
Perhaps my least favorite discourse is the crowing about how the whites have destroyed the meaning of “namaste.” They clearly haven’t, because Indians still say it. Nothing has been lost, you just spend your time around non-Indians now.
For some reason this reminds me of "everyone who posts on the internet is using marketing tactics now" – no, the people whose posts on the internet you see are using marketing tactics
-
-
astra-mag.com astra-mag.com
-
When people say the X community, I wonder whether they just mean some X people I know and refuse to say that because it sounds sillier to extrapolate uniform feeling from the latter, as there’s no X convention where everyone votes on a slate of propositions. I feel no allegiance toward Vietnamese, Vietnamese(-)American, Asian, or Asian(-)American “communities” because no such things can be composed of millions of individuals without interpersonal relationships. I graduated from law school recently, and you could not have caught me dead at any Asian Pacific American Law Student Association events making polite small talk with people headed to clerk for the country’s foulest xenophobes. I do not care for the nation-state, any nation-state; I care about people who have fed and held and loved me, and those I’ve tried to love back. When people say representation, I wonder why anyone should accept fictive lookalike kin, an indirect democracy of culture and its quasi-electeds, rather than a direct one, and what anyone even wants from art. I cannot preface my thoughts with “as a Vietnamese-American woman” credentials, not with a straight face. Of course, everything I think is “as a Vietnamese-American woman,” but my critical legitimacy derives from elsewhere. Still, every cover letter I write explaining that I’m of Vietnam, in some sense, is an act of pathetic, irreparable, mercenary, crass disloyalty.
deconstruction of "the X community"
-
-
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
-
Despite the seriousness of his subject matter and the esoteric quality of his references, Tooze’s writing has a kind of magpie joy. In person, he comes off as intellectual, sure, but also self-deprecating, voluble, funny.
This is the vibe I want to give off no matter what I touch!
-
-
-
a terrible tweet she made in which she corrected a service worker’s grammar
it's not even, like, "correct"? This is a known linguistic thing around uncertainty, and I'm pretty sure the indirectness of language around uncertainty and the indirectness of language to convey respect are Not Unconnected
-
-
thelionsrear.com thelionsrear.com
-
Tim's was fine, I don't really "get it" but I don't really "get" fast food in general…
I think you have to have a feeling in between nostalgia and kitsch.
-
-
anagora.org anagora.org
-
I was only able to spend fifteen minutes in [[powell's books]] but I loved every minute of it and it was enough to know it's amazing.
I think there are many great relationships to have with Powell's. Dropping in to get one thing you need. Running by to smell the book air to restore one's faith. Spending enough time browsing to merit paying rent. Pseudo lending library cycles. Etc.
-
-
anagora.org anagora.org
-
A local copy of [[Wikipedia]] could be a good thing to have on our laptops.
Worth looking into RACHEL pi, I'd guess
-
-
anagora.org anagora.org
-
idea to make a [[memex]] for the agora. browser extension where node name is url of page and each annotation is a blockquote with comment for that node
isn't the agora itself aiming for memexdom?
-
-
anagora.org anagora.org
-
One says to oneself that there must be happy people somewhere. Well then! Unless you get that out of your head, you have understood nothing about [[psychoanalysis]]. — [[Jacques Lacan]], Seminar III
I really enjoy this from a meta perspective of tone. Eau de French intellectual
-
-
anagora.org anagora.org
-
My brain is going wild right now thinking about all the [[p2p systems]] I want to build
I am really curious as to what will end up of p2p matrix. Aesthetically I favor hypercore ("here is a CLI and it do magic") but there's Big Energy around Matrix so who knows
-
-
anagora.org anagora.org
-
[[email]] is decentralized but >90% of people use gmail/hotmail
How true is this if we consider business email? Or: even when businesses use Google business packages, they have the ability to pick up their namespace and leave. That seems pretty important to how email can be relied upon for interbusiness communication. And interbusiness communication is less Important, in a greater sense, than my mom and I sending each other friendly notes in between Proton and gmail -- but much more Infrastructurally Important.
Might also be interesting to get meta about why it is that we think first of individual consumer email when evaluating email's centralization.
-
-
ravensblight.com ravensblight.com
-
Remember those wonderfull days of childhood? Remember playing with your most favorite toy in the whole world, that battered old skull you found in the attic?
Everything about this page is perfect and this might be the most perfect line.
-
-
www.vatican.va www.vatican.va
-
Everybody doing together the same gesture, everyone speaking together in one voice — this transmits to each individual the energy of the entire assembly. It is a uniformity that not only does not deaden but, on the contrary, educates individual believers to discover the authentic uniqueness of their personalities not in individualistic attitudes but in the awareness of being one body.
I am who I am as a part of a larger being
-
Our body is a symbol because it is an intimate union of soul and body; it is the visibility of the spiritual soul in the corporeal order; and in this consists human uniqueness, the specificity of the person irreducible to any other form of living being.
A body is the visibility of the soul
-
The Liturgy is done with things that are the exact opposite of spiritual abstractions: bread, wine, oil, water, fragrances, fire, ashes, rock, fabrics, colours, body, words, sounds, silences, gestures, space, movement, action, order, time, light. The whole of creation is a manifestation of the love of God, and from when that same love was manifested in its fullness in the cross of Jesus, all of creation was drawn toward it.
Spiritual implementations! (Sorry)
-
Wonder is an essential part of the liturgical act because it is the way that those who know they are engaged in the particularity of symbolic gestures look at things. It is the marvelling of those who experience the power of symbol, which does not consist in referring to some abstract concept but rather in containing and expressing in its very concreteness what it signifies.
Symbol is not reference! Wonder - an orientation towards meaning
-
Interiority can run the risk of reducing itself to an empty subjectivity if it has not taken on board the revelation of the Christian mystery. The encounter with God is not the fruit of an individual interior searching for Him, but it is an event given.
Not the fruit of searching
-
The action of the celebration does not belong to the individual but to the Christ-Church, to the totality of the faithful united in Christ. The liturgy does not say “I” but “we,” and any limitation on the breadth of this “we” is always demonic. The Liturgy does not leave us alone to search out an individual supposed knowledge of the mystery of God. Rather, it takes us by the hand, together, as an assembly, to lead us deep within the mystery that the Word and the sacramental signs reveal to us. And it does this, consistent with all action of God, following the way of the Incarnation, that is, by means of the symbolic language of the body, which extends to things in space and time.
Unlimited "we", but in space and time as well
-
It is not magic. Magic is the opposite of the logic of the sacraments because magic pretends to have a power over God, and for this reason it comes from the Tempter.
Technology also pretends to have a power over God
-
We may not even be aware of it, but every time we go to Mass, the first reason is that we are drawn there by his desire for us. For our part, the possible response — which is also the most demanding asceticism — is, as always, that surrender to this love, that letting ourselves be drawn by him. Indeed, every reception of communion of the Body and Blood of Christ was already desired by him in the Last Supper.
Every reception desired. Unworthy, desired.
-
No one had earned a place at that Supper. All had been invited. Or better said: all had been drawn there by the burning desire that Jesus had to eat that Passover with them.
Not my intent, but His
-
- Jun 2022
-
news.lettersofnote.com news.lettersofnote.com
-
Life is too gorgeous to waste a second of it in drabness or open-mouthed stupidity. One must work and riot and throw oneself into the whirl. Boredom and denseness are the two unforgivable sins. We’ll have plenty of time to be bored when the little white worms crawl about our bones in the crescent putrifying earth. While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket. Let’s have no smelly smouldering.
A hundred percent or nothing at all
-
Then too I suffer from a multiplicity of desires. I want to swallow the oyster of the world. I want to peel the rind of the orange. I want to drink the cup to the dregs—no—I want to swallow it and still have it to look at. I want to peel off the rind in patterns of my own making. I want to paint with the dregs pictures of gods and demons on the great white curtains of eternity.And I do nothing. I blame the army, the weather, the food—O if I could wrench myself out of the blankness of inertia.
Desire, inability to move
-
-
bluelander.bearblog.dev bluelander.bearblog.dev
-
(anyway, it's interesting that these days there isn't really a strong brand association for sunscreen, at least not in the US. It's one of those rare fully genericized products; no one cares what brand of sunscreen they get, it could be the cheapest possible product on the shelf as long as it has a high SPF. One cynical point of view would be that this is a market niche just waiting for someone with a clever marketing idea to swoop in and make a name for themselves.
I don't think this is true! A lot of people care about sunscreen in three ways:
- People who wear makeup have a real hard time with it not playing nicely with SPF, especially those higher SPFs, especially especially if water resistant. The exact texture ends up being important.
- There are real safety concerns and then also people getting ridiculous about particular ingredients, so some people get really picky about what's in their sunscreen.
- Fragrance. I cannot stand the smell of a lot of sunscreen, but I am a Real Pale Person so I can't just ignore it. Hawaiian Tropic has a loud floral scent to cover it up; the Supergoop play stuff smells like it's trying to cover it up with lemon candy; there are Whole Foodsy herbal variants; etc. etc.
Sunscreen is one of the harder things to launch because of the testing involved; innovative formulations available in Asia and Europe are often unavailable in the US for that reason. However, there definitely still is someone trying to make a brand out of it: the Poolsuite.FM people have launched Vacation sunscreen (full screen video so won't play nice with that mobile data limit).
-
-
3quarksdaily.com 3quarksdaily.com
-
The same process occurred with the invention of stoves to replace hearths. Most pre-industrialization meals were usually a meat stew of some kind that was cooked in a single pot over a hearth, and people typically ate the same thing day after day. This task also involved men’s labor: they hauled the necessary wood to the kitchen every day. When stoves and ovens became affordable for most households, men’s contribution to the cooking process was no longer necessary, but women’s contribution remained just as burdensome as ever. On top of that, a skilled cook suddenly had the ability (and therefore, the obligation) to cook multiple different dishes simultaneously, spelling the end of the simple one-pot stew.
Pottage!
-
Take, for example, white flour. Traditionally, most bread made in a household was quick bread (such as cornbread) which could be made, as the name implies, quickly and without relying on yeast cultures or rising time. Men played a significant role in the cornbread-making process: they shucked the corn and ground it into meal by hand or hauled it to the local grist mill for grinding. Over time, as refined white flour became widely available from large commercial flour mills, it replaced cornmeal as the household’s primary grain. This shift from home-grown to store-bought grains relieved men and boys of one of their most time-consuming chores, while paradoxically increasing labor for women. This was because women were now expected to make more complex yeast breads that required more time, more skill, and more physical labor in the form of kneading dough. In short, men’s portion of bread labor disappeared, and women’s was augmented.
I have just adjusted my expectations of a "breadwinner".
-
-
thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org
-
Cognitive ease also comes from a feeling of hope. Uncomfortable information that could generate fear (such as a report on the devastation of this year’s flu epidemic) is more palatable to people if it comes with a side of specific actions that people can take in response (such as a list of pharmacies offering free flu shots along with their hours of operation).
I notice this about myself. I am desperate for calls to action even when I don't live up to them.
-
In conversations across profound divides, Resetting the Table trains people to listen for specific clues or “signposts,” which are usually symptoms of deeper, hidden meaning. Signposts include words like “always” or “never,” any sign of emotion, the use of metaphors, statements of identity, words that get repeated or any signs of confusion or ambiguity. When you hear one of these clues, identify it explicitly and ask for more.
-
My opinion on trigger words has not changed; but I can no longer dismiss its supporters as clueless, coddled automatons. (Well, I can, but it requires a slight effort, which is new.)
Now if you bothered to learn what trigger warnings actually are...
-
Starting in the 1990s, Stanford political science professor Shanto Iyengar exposed people to two kinds of TV news stories: wider-lens stories (which he called “thematic” and which focused on broader trends or systemic issues — like, say, the causes of poverty) and narrow-lens stories (which he labeled “episodic” and which focused on one individual or event — say, for example, one welfare mother or homeless man).Again and again, people who watched the narrow-lens stories on the welfare mother were more likely to blame individuals for poverty afterwards — even if the story of the welfare mother was compassionately rendered. By contrast, people who saw the wider-lens stories were more likely to blame government and society for the problems of poverty. The wider the lens, the wider the blame, in other words.In reality, most stories include both wide and narrow-lens moments; a feature on a welfare mother will still invariably include a few lines about the status of job-training programs or government spending. But as Iyengar showed in his book Is Anyone Responsible?, TV news segments are dominated by a narrow focus. As a result, TV news unintentionally lets politicians off the hook, Iyengar wrote, because of the framing of most stories. The narrow-lens nudges the public to hold individuals accountable for the ills of society — rather than corporate leaders or government officials. We don’t connect the dots.Great storytelling always zooms in on individual people or incidents; I don’t know many other ways to bring a complicated problem to life in ways that people will remember. But if journalists don’t then zoom out again — connecting the welfare mother or, say, the controversial sculpture to a larger problem — then the news media just feeds into a human bias. If we’re all focused on whatever small threat is right in front of us, it’s easy to miss the big catastrophe unfolding around us.
I wonder if there were other differences between the stories? Lots of people are cowed by quantitative arguments, which are in short supply in individuals' stories.
-
-
thoughts.hnr.fyi thoughts.hnr.fyi
-
i think it is interesting, and perhaps a bit suspect, how quickly everyone has started to make their boards into mini-feeds, archives of their own history, timestamped, and interactive. honestly, i do bristle to that usage, compared to the purity of thought that was present in the original writing about the spec.
I stress about posting things and I stress less when I don't have to think "is this thing that I want to put up worth having to punt the existing thing -- that I might have worked much harder on -- into the abyss?" If participation meant having to assume the raking-the-zen-garden's-sand-knowing-that-the-wind-will-rearrange-it mindset, I, for one, wouldn't -- my style is accretion, gradual collage.
I think it'd be interesting to read more on your idea of "purity" there and what it means to you, though.
-
custom board sizes/aspect ratio (maybe chosen from a few standardised variables, to allow fitting in a grid and prevent misuse)
robin's idea had been 1:(2^0.5) portrait or landscape -- still not clear to me whether the board gets to specify which orientation, though maybe that's made it into the new spec?
-
i think it could really come into its own with 0 padding/margin between boards,
tbh I could try mocking this up with user CSS, it sounds doable
-
i like imagining it could have been there unchanged for decades - or it could have been updated the second before i logged on.
I wanted to scream one time when content flashed before my eyes and was replaced. I'd missed the old board and could never get it back. that's stress in a way -- like that once a day social media app. I wonder why some people find that more tolerable than do others.
-
tools which abstract that process in the name of making it easier only serve to frustrate and obfuscate how something actually works - we end up with something beautiful and complex that we don’t actually understand under the hood, a lot of the time.
Hmm. I think there's some level of templating that's very freeing, though. I like that I can just write text and have it Look Like Me, Look Like My Site, without having to copy-paste things. on the other hand, I'd imagine a lot less templating would be more honest for someone less prone to making programming projects out of things.
-
animated favicons
off-topic: you can use SVGs in favicons these days mostly -- I do for most of my projects to just make them emoji -- and I wonder if animated SVGs display...
-
i still feel like that's amateur hour around here
i now want to put "amateur hour 24/7" in my website description
-
i can see that ryan embedded one of his too ⧉ - hosted on his own server - with a note that it’s much easier to update than the rest of his site. i think that’s super interesting, because to me it’s absolutely the same!
I'm tossing mine into my jekyll site with a little frame HTML layout... and I can't say I love that I ended up having to use javascript to shove in a shadow DOM for consistency.
-
spring ’83 boards are so inherently creative, it’s beautiful to have that kind of customisation not only encouraged but really forced
is it? I feel like you could certainly participate with raw markdown styled with Robin's defaults. hard to know how people who aren't Like Us would use the form because of course it's people Like Us who want to
-
it feels pure in a way, to not be able to message or like or comment natively - everyone has their own solutions to links out, to emails or mailing lists or whatever.
this stresses me out a bit. mastodon as one signaling layer, email as another... I do like that there's no commenting though. it'd make it too conversational and less like little miniatures put on display.
-
i struggle a lot with getting distracted and not following through, so having a place i can see everyone else updating their boards is inspirational for me to take the moment to sit down and write a little haiku.
one really good thing about the size constraint: makes it feel Doable, like microblogging. easier to feel inspired to a haiku than an epic, maybe?
-
-
www.makeworld.space www.makeworld.space
-
How do clients enforce the board aspect ratio? I don’t know enough about HTML/CSS to understand how boards wouldn’t just be able to override this with !important or something.
Ah, if you only give the HTML a fixed amount of screen to render into, this one's totally tractable. (cf. the
iframe
tags for webgardens --if someone's misspecified their webgarden in a way that tries to make the wrong size display, it'll still only show up in the given size box) -
I’ve got my hands full working on a secret DNS project for now anyway .
:3
-
DNS could be used to get around having to share public keys with people Set a TXT record on _spring83.mydomain.com with your public key Then clients will resolve that, so you can just tell your friends to follow you by entering mydomain.com
I friggin' love using DNS records for this kind of thing. Also might work with an entry in an HTML
head
like how webmentions or RSS autodiscovery do -- and that way, someone can attach it to e.g.https://coolstaticsiteuser.neocities.org
without being able to futz with domains. -
larger, or at least well explained and justified.
Agreed -- even if the justification is "because it feels right because look at this example that fits the vibes", that would be useful context
-
However I think the user experience of having to generate a new key every two years and tell all your friends about it is quite bad, and will make people wonder why they have to do this.
I wonder if there needs to be a protocol affordance? I love that Mastodon has a "move" feature -- even though it's incomplete, its existence makes federated social media less like just-another-silo and more within the user's control. Maybe if there's a standard client link to replace a follow relationship with another? Groups of boards more generally? Hmm
-
Please don’t use YAML for the peer list. YAML is not great. A simple JSON list would be better.
I share this general feeling, though my sense is that it's an implementation detail that can get ironed out. Still, I do hate it when things at work need YAML.
-
-
press.princeton.edu press.princeton.edu
-
Historically, every attempt at structuring society in a perfectly rational way has been a folly, and has resulted in tremendous individual suffering, in part because the human beings made to endure such political projects remain exactly the same inwardly as humans in those societies that have found effective ways to manage all our dark impulses and unjustifiable but beautiful attachments rather than simply to suppress them.
I do like this sentence
-
Can groups like LessWrong ever really eliminate irrational decision-making as it relates to artificial intelligence and business operations? JS: Of course not. As I say in the book, they’d be a lot better off just reading some Virgil or Shakespeare and not worrying so much about whether it’s helping them to better apply Bayesianism to their daily lives, rather than acting as if human flourishing is equivalent to making rationally justifiable choices. I mean, obviously, if you spend your days writing Harry Potter fan-fiction, which seems to be a thing in that subculture, something has gone very wrong, and no amount of formal epistemology or probability theory can rescue you from what appears to an outsider to that subculture as an obviously bad choice, not just of how to spend one’s time, but of a whole form of life.
I have never been so thoroughly opposed to everyone involved. He's right to scorn the rationalismists, but not for the fan fiction, Jesus.
-
-
thepointmag.com thepointmag.com
-
My own book may be crap, but I am certain, when such an imbalance in profitability as the one I have just described emerges, between photojournalism and selfies, that it is all over.
When has dreck been less profitable than the substantive?
-
Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects.
Do you see how he manages to entirely sidestep that there's structural violence being inflicted?
-
It is not surprising, in a historical moment in which such structural breakdowns are easily perceived as injustices, as occasions to ask to speak with a proverbial manager, that in more straightforwardly political matters people should spend more time worrying about structural violence than about violence
This guy is mad because the internet made it possible for his type to be identified as a type, and wants us to stop, because that's destroying his human subjecthood or whatever
-
I experience my love of Burroughs as singular and irreducible, but I am given to know, when I check in on the discourse, that I only feel this way because I am running a bad algorithm.
Is it a lack of self-awareness or a lack of awareness of what is meant by others that insists that this pattern recognition must be tied only to a flat disparagement?
-
-
damagemag.com damagemag.com
-
And as nice as Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the internet is a poison.
For the kind of person who professionally writes book reviews? Maybe.
-
I’m not so sure we can do that today: the horn and its demon are one and the same thing.
🙄
-
Today, of course, it’s gone the other way: computerized systems form our opinions for us and decide what music we enjoy; dating-app algorithms choose our sexual partners. Meanwhile, the pressures of capitalism force us to act as rational agents, always calculating our individual interests, condemned to live like machines.
So quick to say we've no agency left!
-
Similarly, many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don’t like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.
🙄🙄🙄
-
Apparently wanting to read anything other than YA fiction means that you’re an agent of the patriarchy.
That wasn't what had happened. Isn't it outrage begging for clicks to simplify it so?
-
You have no free speech—not because someone might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions.
🙄
-
-
hazlitt.net hazlitt.net
-
Remembering working with him on Phantom of the Opera (in which she plays the past-her-prime diva), Minnie Driver meanwhile recalled this week that “once, on set, an actress was complaining about me within earshot [about] how I was dreadfully over the top (I was).” Driver said that Schumacher “barely looked up from his New York Times” and replied: “Oh honey, no one ever paid to see under the top.”
Quotable!
-
-
damagemag.com damagemag.com
-
He is the author of We Could All Probably Be Better at Oral Sex Than We Are Now: Haiku for Life (Forthcoming).
...lol
-
In that, its conceptualization as a narcotic is quite apt: it provides a form of relief that ultimately only exacerbates the underlying problem.
Tell me that you don't have people with chronic pain in your life without telling me that you don't have people with chronic pain in your life
-
Under current atomized, depressing, and anxiety-producing conditions, if you port all social media users over to a democratically-run cooperative or state-owned platform, you’re going to get many, though not all, of the same problems—trolling, “fake news,” narcissistic preening, etc.
This is up for argument or empirical investigation, though, right? It can't just be flatly asserted.
-
Social media is not just accepted—it’s also seen as something functionally beneficial, something that not only supports but also enables our lives.
Passive voice: who sees it this way? Is this even the mainstream view?
-
And unlike the pub, where novel encounters can and do happen, the social media experience is curated and siloed—the most inhospitable terrain for organizing.
This could have used some concrete details about curation and silos, because it doesn't seem supported from my experience.
-
Social media users, by contrast, skew middle-class and well-educated.
I'm not sure that's supported by the linked survey -- it looks like Twitter and LinkedIn are playgrounds for the neurotic rich, but the rest seem about as flat across brackets as I'd have thought
-
An ideal tool for this are the “new social media” that produce social structures for individuals, substituting voluntary for obligatory forms of social relations, and networks of users for communities of citizens.
user vs. citizen
-
unions and membership organizations have been gutted, replaced by heartless, top-down non-profits
Are non-profits even really a replacement?
-
It also gives us an illusion of control: every sentence can be carefully crafted, every picture carefully staged. The digital self is as malleable as social reality is inflexible.
What a line!
-
What they omit is that the entire history of the culture industry since its appearance in the early twentieth century has been that of the increasing individualization of marketing techniques. Before we lamented the siloed micro-communities of Facebook, we did the same for the fragmenting effect of cable television channels. Before Google was scanning our email to target ads, relevant snail mail catalogues were following important life events like clockwork. Social media platforms have certainly enhanced and accelerated already existing cultural trends, but they didn’t create them.
Is it that the individualization is so black-boxy?
-
-
www.damagemag.com www.damagemag.com
-
It was organized labor, not journalists or newspapers, Progressive businessmen or silverite populists, that truly civilized American politics. And if there is any hope of any such civilizing project today it will start in our union halls, not on our TLs.
I'm not sure I trust the closing sentence here, but this bit is more solid.
-
Here’s a free idea for a research project: these social facts suggest that social media is likely more detrimental to rich modern countries than poorer, more traditional ones. The Philippines boasts extremely high levels of social media usage, but the size of Filipino families and the fact that some 37% attend mass every week suggests that social media is likely to have less deleterious social effects there than in the United States.
I'm not sure this follows. You could very well argue it's going to have the same direction of effect, but the magnitude would have to be much larger to get to the same place.
-
Our society discourages virtually all forms of social behavior and encourages all forms of indulgent individualism. Everyday, Americans are moving their homes thousands of miles from where they were born and where their parents onced lived (often like their parents before them), making social life on the neighborhood-level deeply ephemeral. We have virtually no shared social rights (save the right to a social security check) and, not coincidentally, we feel almost no social obligations.
Thinning of social context...
-
On the one hand, the online thrives off of the atomization that the neoliberal offensive has inflicted on society. It is the substitute association for a world in which all associative units have been pulverized. (There is now ample research showing positive correlations between declining civic commitment and broadband access.) At the same time, the internet evidently accelerates and even entrenches this atomization. In this sense it is hardly a substitute for the older types of civic association we knew from the twentieth century. The exit and entry costs of the online of our new, simulated civil society are extremely low. The internet is the ideal exit option for a general “exit society”—it allows people to exercise “voice” in the Hirschmanian sense while always keeping open the possibility that you can completely drop out and check out. The stigma that comes with leaving a Facebook group or a Twitter subculture is incomparable to having to move out of a neighborhood because you scabbed during a strike. The internet does create communities, of course, from meme groups to cooking tips. Yet the thickness and density of previous associations—to call them “voluntary” is misleading—are nowhere to be seen online. Perhaps, then, the internet is here best understood as the first properly “voluntary” association; the commodification of the social come into its own.
This makes me queasy. It seems correct.
-
The extreme marketization of society that defined the 1980s and 1990s made the West uniquely vulnerable to the perils of social media. The dissolution of voluntary organizations, the decline of Fordist job stability (and with it trade-unionism), the death of religious life, the evaporation of amateur athletic associations, the “dissolution of the masses” and the rise of a multitudinous crowd of “individuals”—all were forces that generated the demand for social media long before there was a product like Facebook to supply the consumer. Social media could only grow in a void not of its own making.
Some of these seem like symptoms rather than forces, but it's a nice brief list to be able to quote.
-
-
-
But the profound magic trick of the signature: that it allows a piece of content to flow around the internet, handed from peer to peer, impossible to tamper with... it's too good to pass up.
I wonder if, given that boards are supposed to expire anyway, the key rotation shouldn't involve publishing old secrets such that it's not possible to use an old key to pin someone down as having published something (which would be long after its intended expiry anyway)? With the caveat that I don't know nothing about cryptography, I'm just a horrible little goblin typing in a Hypothes.is pane.
-
New boards should be transmitted to peers asynchronously. The server must wait at least five minutes before sharing, but it may wait longer. In this way, the server acts as a buffer, absorbing and "compacting" rapid PUTs.
This is interesting. I could imagine wanting a more instant version of a tiled view of those I follow -- back when I was on Twitter, there was something cool about the implicit group liveblog of e.g. a major news event. I would have liked to be able to see it all tiled out in one view.
-
Simple. This means the protocol is easy to understand and implement, even for a non-expert programmer.
I'm not sure implementation difficulty is the same thing as simplicity. Gemini also says those things are the same. This is also really tricky to evaluate in a world of libraries and linking; we're not mentally including the difficulty of Ed25519 cryptography in our assessment of the protocol's "simplicity" because we're not absolute loons and would use a library for that... but it's part of the fabric being woven.
-
Accordingly, a Spring '83 realm is limited to 10 million boards
My gut desire is always for social media accommodating closer to Darius's 50-ish, Dunbar's tiers. I wonder how allowing for media publishers needs to change those numbers.
-
display each board in a region with an aspect ratio of either 1:sqrt(2) or sqrt(2):1
Is this really compatible with "[embracing] the richness, flexibility, and chaos of modern HTML and CSS"? I don't have a big negative opinion about it because fixed display size is how webgardens work, too, but articulating the root of the design decision (to allow things to tile nicely?) could open interesting discussion.
-
load any images, media, or fonts linked by the board
sobs
-
(It also means the protocol doesn't provide any mechanism for replies, likes, favorites, or, indeed, feedback of any kind. Publishers are encouraged to use the full flexibility of HTML to develop their own approaches, inviting readers to respond via email, join a live chat, send a postcard... whatever!)
This has chafed at the users of Gemini even while its designers seem to be proud of holding the line.
-
-
tracydurnell.com tracydurnell.com
-
n the IndieWeb we’ve talked a bunch about following people rather than feeds, and wanting to be able to see that in one place rather than going to each service.
I don't love this, of course, even as I've taped on every Indieweb accoutrement to my own site. It's so prescriptive -- like the converse of the idea that one should slice up one's own posts into neat tag-based filtered feeds for the convenience of The Consumer. Maybe I like that there's some friction in getting from my hypertexting to my more social nattering. To say it must be otherwise feels... real-name-policy-esque.
-
-
tinysubversions.com tinysubversions.com
-
please assume that any- thing I'm not commenting on is an enthusiastic "wow this is cool!"
Yeah, ditto.
-
-
www.robinsloan.com www.robinsloan.com
-
Ten million boards gives us a maximum disk space requirement of 22.17 gigabytes, easily stored on a commodity hard drive or a cheap-enough cloud volume. A capable computer could even hold that in RAM. Turns out, when you don’t store every user’s entire history, plus a record of every advertisement they’ve ever seen, your database can stay pretty slim!
This is essentially the SSB take too. I don't love it, but the way in which I don't love it is a crotchety computer professional way, not a meaningful one.
-
Boards are cryptographically signed in such a way that they can be passed from server to server and, no matter where your client gets a copy of a publisher’s board, you can be assured it is valid.
Peer to peer content transmission is an awfully big can of worms. Freedom to delete is real contentious in SSB/Fediverse sstuff.
-
More importantly, every board holds its place, regardless of when it was last updated.
One uncomfortable thing about this is that it replicates a scarcity logic of space in an unscarce medium. I keep lots of barely-more-than-defunct feeds in my RSS reader because it costs me nothing to do so and I'd be so happy if they did start publishing again. Looking at an unchanged board for a year would feel different.
-
I recommend this kind of project, this flavor of puzzle, to anyone who feels tangled up by the present state of the internet. Protocol design is a form of investigation and critique. Even if what I describe below goes nowhere, I’ll be very glad to have done this thinking and writing. I found it challenging and energizing.
This is fun! Maybe I should try sketching some stuff out here before I work further on that web directory SSG template project.
-
Client applications display all the boards you are following together, laying them out on a 2D canvas, producing unplanned juxtapositions, just like the newsstand above.
Reminds me of the neocities webgardens (that list of creators is incomplete), doing something like this with iframes and friendly convention.
-
unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS.
But -- external images? No images? 😔
-
You probably reached this web page through an email.
looks around shiftily at RSS reader
-
For my part, I believe presentation is fused to content; I believe presentation is a form of content; so RSS cannot be the end of the story.
Viva! I do still use RSS as more of a notification stream than a consumption stream; I don't really want the consumption to all happen in one place. When Cinni updates in her RSS feed, it's links to her proper pages, and this is right and good because her site is beautiful in a way RSS couldn't (shouldn't) accommodate.
-
when a user stops speaking, they disappear, and, by corollary, as a follower, you mostly encounter the users who are speaking nonstop.
Hmm. I don't know that there's a way to get around the 90-9-1 ratios there. I had to resort to user scripts even for my own stuff. I'm reminded of this whole thing, too.
-
I am not sharing, at this time, code for a client or server, although I have reference implementations of both that I’m testing with a couple of friends.
I am forcibly reminded of this orange site comment that makeworld had shared though I guess I haven't really gotten it out of my head in the first place.
-
-
adikos.net adikos.net
-
And it makes writing feel fun and worthwhile again, valde operae pretium.
Very much worthwhile
-
WordPress vel sim.,
Wordpress or similar
-
-
www.robinsloan.com www.robinsloan.com
-
In all my work with language models since 2016, nothing has approached this feeling, and I think I am ready to close the loop, finally: I don’t believe AI tools are useful for serious writers.
A Serious Writer has the right to say this. I still hold out small hope that they may help the rest of us nudge ourselves closer to seriousness, even if as Dumbo's feather.
-
I hope to see more AI artists identify a technique or model they love and stick with it, even as the state of the art advances, leaving them behind. I don’t mean that in a crusty, regressive way; the vibe is not “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” I just want to suggest that it’s fun and satisying to form attachments to specific tools; to get good!
Has the deep dream aesthetic gotten this at all?
-
-
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com
-
When the young women arrived at Oxford, strict quotas were still in place to ensure that the male-to-female undergraduate ratio would not dip below 4-to-1. But the upheavals of the war had at least one unexpectedly positive effect on their education: After their male classmates went off to fight, the women no longer had to compete for professorial attention. As Midgley commented toward the end of her long life, “In normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn’t get heard.”
Oh, this hurts.
-
-
reallifemag.com reallifemag.com
-
the use of a consistent sweatpants-and-crop-top aesthetic (key tenets of her “girl next door” self-brand)
Oh fuck off. An 18-year-old wearing similar outfits for dancing shouldn't be fodder for your academized garbage. You're telling me this is the best example you could come up with?
-
art markets — from which they once could keep a safe personal distance even as they depended on it
Could they though?
-
They are obliged to produce both art and a portrait of themselves as an artist.
I want more of this sentence specifically
-
sectors that operate on freelance and insecure labor, in which individuals take on a slate of unremunerated promotional work in lieu of job security
"take on a slate of unremunerated promotional work" = "are responsible for their own marketing"
"in lieu of job security" = "I'm trying to sound pithy about this"
-
self-optimization for platforms (organizing one’s content to be recognizable by algorithmic systems)
again, useless link, good for your credentials I guess, but also: using "platforms" and "algorithmic systems" as synonymous loses you a lot of credibility
-
consistent self-branding (defined by sociologist Alison Hearn as “self-conscious construction of a meta-narrative and meta-image of self)
the link is to an academic publication, so totally inaccessible and therefore useless, but I have to say I'm not really sure why we're saying "meta-narrative" and not "narrative" here
-
-
bluelander.bearblog.dev bluelander.bearblog.dev
-
Q: Why do you have a semicolon in your name? On raccoon typewriters, the semicolon was originally on the 2 key, where the @ symbol is now. It's a visual pun that only raccoons get, but m; is still pronounced "mat". Also, raccoons traditionally put punctuation in their names because they don't like to be tracked, and it foils government databases.
This is fantastic. Internet persona lore. Who is brave enough to make themselves lore? Kicks has legendary-tier lore. (I still get mad thinking about hacker news dweebs failing to have even a single bone in their body capable of recognizing non-literal text, I am not cool, I have no chill, etc.) I like that this isn't quite a statement about bluelander themself, but about the context they inhabit.
I'm somehow reminded of
Now, when getting into book discussions with a certain kind of man, I often say “I can’t read” as soon as possible. This is a pretty transparent defense mechanism, but it works for me, sort of.
from that essay on David Foster Wallace that I treasure in my heart more than I can explain. I love the idea of instrumentalizing one's angle on reality. Sorry, having this conversation with you in the frame you want to use is just not going to work for me. I can't read.
Raccoons traditionally put punctuation in their names because they don't like to be tracked.
Phenomenal.
-
-
erikhoel.substack.com erikhoel.substack.com
-
The readymades of Duchamp were art because of their audacity, because of the context of the other art around them, and because of their arrangements—when everything is a readymade, it’s not an art gallery, it’s a scrapyard.
Precisely what I was thinking reading the paragraphs above. Damn
-
The response of AI-art enthusiasts, like those at the tech companies standing to make trillions off AI, or those who simply enjoy nerding out over new technological toys, will be to suggest that what matters in art is solely its extrinsic properties. That is, a painting is a painting, an image an image—in this view the definition of art is expanded to be such that if an image strikes someone as art, then it’s art. Case closed.Consider the banality of this view, a view that reduces art to merely what’s in front of us. Without taking into account the consciousness of the artist, the word “art” loses all meaning, becoming merely a synonym for “beautiful.” We may find something pretty, or interesting, or striking, or pleasing, but none of these mean that it is art. We may find a natural vista affecting, we may even weep, but to say that it is “art” implies a cosmic consciousness working behind the scenes, an intrinsic property like a teleological origin, or a purpose that goes beyond the mere material. Without the intentionality of the artist taken into account, the definition of “art” is bled of all meaning, all differentiation, all usefulness as a term—such a move is really a defeat claimed in the name of victory. This is why deflationary theories of art, like how art is “whatever is in an art gallery” or “whatever anyone says” or “whatever pleases the senses” are all unsatisfying as definitions, for they strip the word “art” of all capacity to do the job of a word, which is to differentiate.
Oh I hate when people do that "art is anything" thing, this will be a useful quote to have around
-
-
catapult.co catapult.co
-
n the space below, please provide an example of each listed cognitive bias. Reactance When I thought you didn’t want me, I would have done anything.
Hard to pull a quote that doesn't spoil something
-
-
languagehat.com languagehat.com
-
Patrick Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. In the middle of describing (many decades after the fact) walking though Swabia in between Stuttgart and Ulm as a teenager in early 1934, he gets into a digression about what sorts of poetry in what languages he had memorized at various points in his life, which leads to a further digression about the time he was an SOE officer in German-occupied Crete in 1944 and he and his colleagues and some local Cretan guerillas kidnapped the German commander (General Heinrich Kreipe, 1895-1976). They spent some time moving around the mountains with their captive while evading pursuing German forces before they were able to get the captive to a beach where a British boat picked him up and took him to Egypt and thence into POW camps. One morning during this process, as the sun was rising rather spectacularly over Mt. Ida, the captive general murmured to himself a bit of memorized Horace: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte … Fermor, who was 20 years younger then his captive, then picked up from memory where the general had stopped: …nec jam sustineant onus Silvae laborantes geluque Flumina constiterant acuto (etc etc etc.) The general looked at his young captor and said “Ach so, Herr Major.” “It was very strange. As if, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk from the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”
Can a person of our time imagine having this thick of a context? Shared this broadly?
-
-
bluelander.bearblog.dev bluelander.bearblog.dev
-
Because nobody but me would notice it, I feel weird about opening an issue on github. I know it's a bug, I know it's something the developer would want to fix if he knew about it, but something about it feels entitled, like "excuse me, you broke my toy, wtf are you doing." The new issue is, at least for awhile, right at the top of the issue page, implying that it's the most important. It feels like I'm making work for someone, for a completely trivial reason. I can live without the favimoji. Why make a big deal about it?
FWIW I don't know your dev experience but mine has been that... it's easy for things to descend into chaos without a record of them. By creating the record of this unintended behavior, you're already doing some of the work for the maintainer. Every project has an implicit backlog, and making it explicit is tedious, so rather than "asking for a fix", you're "documenting a future item" (especially because like you're saying: they definitely intend for it to not work this way!)
-
-
eev.ee eev.ee
-
XMLHttpRequest — named for the fact that nobody has ever once used it to request XML
Eevee is so damn quotable
-
-
wyclif.substack.com wyclif.substack.com
-
In the past generation, concern about social values has moved from an eccentric hobby, pursued by Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse and their ilk, to the mainstream.
[citation needed]
-
-
wyclif.substack.com wyclif.substack.com
-
When the Austrian general von Haynau visited Britain in 1850, he was chased down Borough High Street by a mob of draymen, who objected to his brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising the previous year. By 1861, London street-singers had recorded the event in ballads. More typically, poor people took action against rule-breakers in their own communities. Across Europe, there were institutions of public shaming, with names like “rough music,” “charivari” or “skimmington”. If you slept with someone else's spouse, married an older woman, or beat your wife, you might wake to see a procession coming past your house, beating pans and bearing an effigy. You might then be captured and ridden backwards on a donkey, or thrown into a ditch.
Cancel culture has gotten out of control!
-
-
interconnected.org interconnected.org
-
Spotify gives you an automatically generated playlist: Try Anything Once, Twice If You Like It.
They did this -- it was called "Tastebreakers", and they used 2018 listening data to give you suggestions for 2019. Things to shake you out of your rut, but familiar enough they guessed you'd like it.
It can't have been a great success by whatever metrics they use, because they never brought it back, but of course we have no way of knowing what metrics those were. Did they adequately count the value to dorks who had fun clicking through even if they didn't save anything? (It's me, I'm dorks)
-
…look at a menu, run Scatter/Gather on any list. The words swim and reorganise into categories; I pick one, focus, they re-categorise.
People hate having to learn how to engage with things: the lowest-common-denominator school of product design. More charitably, they're not all able. Nerds like us like exploratory UIs, but how many heat maps / graph structure visualizations have ever been given real mileage in their intended contexts?
-
What if it were law to name the algorithm according to its reward function? Little Miss Reverse-Chronological Little Miss I-Make-You-Click Mr I-Reinforce-Your-Prejudices And you would get to choose.
The thing I find frustrating about this is that -- the real reward function is Grand Duke Increases-Advertisable-Engagement, you know? I wonder how much this kind of thing can help without fixing the incentives.
-
What if you discovered a secret toggle, deep in the Settings of your phone, and it was labelled “Routine” – and one morning you tapped “Turn off until tomorrow.” Then your Citymapper ranks a route at the top which is almost as quick, but you never take it. Your Priority Inbox makes sure it shows you emails from people you typically don’t read. Your alarms are all late; you get breaking news notifications from publications you don’t read. A klaxon goes off if you get the same darn sandwich from the same darn place for lunch. Your phone rings but actually it has spontaneously placed an outbound call and is just letting you know. It has called your father. He doesn’t have a blue underline in your contacts, which your phone knows. “Hello,” he says, picking up, “What a surprise! I was just thinking about you.”
Directionless aberration isn't a good time. Even being able to specify direction, though, doesn't invalidate the concept: Hey, Spotify, I want to listen to music I like (or would like), but a bit jazzier than my normal. Hey Google, give me the scenic route. Rank my inbox by novelty.
-
-
tomstafford.staff.shef.ac.uk tomstafford.staff.shef.ac.uk
-
My reading of this study would be that it isn’t that we live in a ‘post-fact’ political climate. Rather it is that attempts to take facts out of their social context won’t work. For me and my friends it seems incomprehensible to ignore the facts, whether about the science of vaccination, or the law and economics of leaving the EU. But me and my friends do very well from the status quo- the Treasury, the Bar, the University work well for us. We know who these people are, we know how they work, and we trust them because we feel they are working for us, in some wider sense.
Put another one up on the board for "pretending that you're just being objective blinds you to all the non-objective factors you might want to consider"
-
-
tomstafford.substack.com tomstafford.substack.com
-
The recommendation algorithms in these platforms are great at showing me more of what I like, but are there any which try and identify gaps in my experience and surprise me?
Yes, using social information -- they do try and do this so you don't get bored by monotony and disengage.
-
Pandemonium is another model of social intelligence. An early and influential model of computation, proposed by Oliver Selfridge in 1959. The pandemonium model assumes that problems can be solved by a legion of specialised demons. Each demon, like their underworld counterparts, has a very specialised task. In hell, a particular demon might be responsible for stoking the fires at the feet of a particular sinner. In Pandemonium, if the problem is word reading, a particular demon might be responsible for recognising the letter A, and another responsible for recognising the letter R. Each demon shrieks, with a volume related to their confidence about what they’re seeing. At the top sits a decision demon whose job is to judge the loudness of shrieks. In this way, via interactive connections, the myopic and stupid demons generate an emergent solution to the greater task
Holy shit neural nets have never sounded this cool.
-
Companies design and deploy the epistemic agents and we buy their services, based on them “just working” - in other words, accurately guessing what will make us happy.
If this were the case it wouldn't be so bad -- the objective function is closer to continued engagement / $$$.
-
The “truth seeking” part needs to be explicit, according to Goldman, as a defence against fashionable post-modernisms which deny the existence of truth and pretend to build an account of knowledge based on some other feature, such as consensus.
🙄
-
-
ravenmagazine.org ravenmagazine.org
-
I have concluded that the epistemic argument for markets needs to be heavily qualified, if not put on its head: it is not an argument for “free” markets but for the careful regulation of markets. The “invisible hand” can only, if ever, do its work on material that has been diligently prepared, and continues to be monitored, by many visible hands. Otherwise, the result may be a mere chimera of the epistemic mechanism that I learned about when studying economics: it may seem to work fine on the surface but fail to realize the goals it is supposed to achieve, such as genuine preference satisfaction and the avoidance of inefficient economic behavior.
This is all very "duh" but also... 💡💡💡💡💡💡
-
-
ravenmagazine.org ravenmagazine.org
-
Twitter, I want to suggest, is a machine made for intimate jokes. The central fact of the medium is its brevity. A single tweet is 280 characters. This is barely enough for a coherent thought, let alone a full story. And the gold standard of tweeting isn’t a thread—it’s a single tweet that does the job all in one.
It strips context more even than that limit might suggest. Those short-form Facebook text posts let you put a background in -- Twitter doesn't even let you pick profile colors anymore. People desperately try to rebuild that context using every lever still left to them: "red rose emoji Twitter", very specific ways of stylizing text, etc.
-
Jokes, then, are intimacy pumps. The teller gambles on a presumption of intimacy, and when the joke succeeds, it accentuates that intimacy. The practice of joking highlights the fragility of the relationship: of the teller’s leap and the audience’s catch. Every joke is a trust fall. And every laugh is a direct experience of connection.
I remember a theory of webcomics in their boom day -- that the reason the printed funny pages were so abysmal was that they had to be so general as to work for absolutely anyone who might be reading them, and there's not a lot of good material that's that broad (especially without e.g. tonal delivery) so instead we get "mondays, am I right?" and "managers, am I right?" and "teenagers, am I right?" (thinking about it, Zits was much better than it had a right to be)
-
Jokes, says Cohen, have an essential structure. All jokes require that the joke-teller and audience share some background knowledge. And that background knowledge needs to be unstated for the joke to work. A joke will absolutely fail if the teller tries to prepare the audience with an explicit declaration of the necessary background knowledge. We need to be surprised by the sudden emergence of that shared background knowledge, mid-joke.
Are there other things that work this way? Romantic gestures: I can't ask for one.
-
-
emilygorcenski.com emilygorcenski.com
-
At the end of the day, I’m the user. I want to be convinced that the approach is better. Sell me on it. Prove it to me. Don’t do it by telling me about the moral worth of open source or federation or any of those things. Care about my use case. Value how I value my time.
I wonder if you can really take this approach without someone footing the bill.
-
Even if you look at the “Guide for ActivityPub users,” it tells people to “spread the word,” saying, “the most effective way to promote a decentralized internet is by using it and encouraging others to do likewise.” This may be the case, but what this ends up as is people trying to sell me on a service because it is decentralized and not people trying to make decentralized services the obvious and easy choice for users.
There are plenty of people for whom it is already easy and obvious enough -- because it's not actually selling a decentralized vision, it's selling a federated vision, so only one in fifty should be wrestling with postgres. Focusing on the forty-nine is fair according to that vision, but isn't going to smooth an admin's experience.
-
Static site generators are like candy for nerds. Every serious writer I know uses Substack or Medium or Wordpress.
Hmm. This is kind of interesting, but then I also find myself wondering how she's defining "serious writer".
-
It doesn’t really understand how people use Twitter.
This is tricky, because it requires some exegesis to tell the difference between the parts where this is true and the parts where -- it's not that people don't understand how Twitter works, it's that they wanted Mastodon to be different. This is then also complicated by the difference between how the community sees the product (pro-difference, essentially) and how Eugen does.
-
was developed for developers who really enjoy designing and implementing standards
I mean, maybe. This wouldn't make the top 10 of things I'd complain about about how Mastodon was/is developed, though.
-
This means that for the most basic, out-of-the-box setup, I would have to pay more to host my own instance on the cloud than I would pay for Spotify in the end.
Efficiencies of scale would point to this not being inherently unreasonable -- especially since I think Funkwhale isn't designed for single-user use especially.
-
I would control my own data; no algorithm would be siphoning off my listening habits and constructing some profile of who some AI believes me to be.
I love personalized music recommendations and I won't apologize for it. "who some AI believes me to be" is a weirdly anthropomorphizing and dismissive framing.
-
I took a look at my 2021 Spotify Wrapped, the streaming service’s year-in-review feature that tells you exactly how many times you hurt your own feelings with a song.
My top songs playlist since 2018 has just been a signal of how often I have listened to my "GOD my job makes me mad" playlist. 2021: good! 2020: bad.
-
-
-
In recent months, Sidechat, a buzzy new app, where users log in with university-affiliated email addresses and write anonymous posts that are visible only within their school community, has racked up downloads at universities including Harvard, Cornell, Tufts and Columbia. Campus newspapers have documented the app’s fast-paced growth. In March, The Cornell Daily Sun wrote that “the app has quickly become a hallmark of Cornell social life.” In April, The Harvard Crimson reported that Sidechat “is taking campus by storm.” The premise isn’t new but is irresistible for many students: an opportunity to chat about what’s happening on campus with peers, without having their names attached to what they say. Posts go live without any prior approval and are only removed later if a message is deemed to be in violation of platform guidelines. While some students find the secrecy to be harmless fun, others seem to be emboldened by the anonymity and, as is common online, post caustic and hurtful comments. Now, some students, many already jaded by past experiences with similar platforms, say they are souring on Sidechat, but they are still signing on.
Even our condo building's horribly clunky message board gets a bit of this.
-
-
theconvivialsociety.substack.com theconvivialsociety.substack.com
-
On the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen.
Where is this not the case?
-
On the internet, there is no present, only variously organized fragments of the past.
What is "the present" that exists not on the internet, then? (Especially relative to the prominence of instant messaging)
-
These inscriptions include verbal expressions as well as images, audio, videos, memes, likes, shares, buttons hovered over, forms filled but never submitted, location data, etc. The inscriptions are legible either to humans or to machines, or to both.
Are they all legible, though? In the bigger meaning of legibility?
-
-
www.plough.com www.plough.com
-
Alongside monastic practice, recent scholarship has identified another tradition that scholars such as Taft call a “cathedral office” of prayer, which would have been intended for the laity. Unlike monasticism, which established a pattern of obligatory prayer at set hours throughout the day, this cathedral office centered on dawn and dusk. Like its precursors, it engaged in daily prayer as expectation of Christ, and saw him present in the sign of the rising and setting sun. Vespers, the evening liturgy, expressed this in a unique way. At the hour of dusk, as the shadows set in, a lamp would be brought into the congregation to be blessed. The practice, called the Lucernarium, was a long-established custom throughout the Mediterranean world, in various religious and cultural persuasions. And yet Christians transformed the convention into a potent sign of worship: in that flame they recognized Christ, the true light of the world, whose light would, in time, replace even the sun itself. And the response to that sign, the means through which Christians might participate in that light and make its meaning real in their lives, was to sing.
I wonder how hard it will be to find records of this
-
- May 2022
-
www.plough.com www.plough.com
-
Early Christians expected Christ to return soon and restore the world. The Incarnation initiated a new relationship between world and God, and in Christ’s paschal sacrifice on the cross the curtain of the temple was torn asunder. The rites and rituals reserved for the holy of holies now seeped out into the world, and every activity within creation, from the patterns of prayer to the movement of the sun and moon, became imbued with liturgical significance. Robert Taft writes that in the worship of the early church, “all of creation is a cosmic sacrament of our saving God. … For the Christian everything, including the morning and evening, the day and the night, the sun and its setting, can be a means of communication with God.”
Ultra-enchantment
-
-
foxfonts.com foxfonts.comFonts1
-
Murderino Zodiac Regular price $ 19.00 Sale price $ 19.00 Regular price Unit price /per Sale Sold out Meghan #ProductCardImage-collection-template-1316592255069 { max-width: 250.0px; max-height: 250px; } #ProductCardImageWrapper-collection-template-1316592255069 { max-width: 250.0px; } <img class="grid-view-item__image" src="//cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/7285/products/lldl-moubatine-meghan-03_250x250@2x.jpg?v=1597642747" alt="" style="max-width: 250.0px;"> Meghan Regular price $ 29.00
Not even slightly sure how to feel about the Zodiac killer and Meghan Markle having replica handwriting fonts sold right next to each other. The designer donates half of proceeds from the murderer fonts to a legal aid organization, and yet... Still not sure this is something anybody should be able to get for the convenient price of nineteen dollars?
-
-
cacm.acm.org cacm.acm.org
-
Politicians do not worry that thousands of toilets may suddenly start spewing water because goods like that have to "follow code" and adhere to product liability standards. In contrast to this, lawyers for today's 200-plus affected corporations will find out that the full and complete extent of the third-party software vendors' liability is that they will send a new CD if the first one is unreadable.
Google around for a driver yourself!
-
-
tedgioia.substack.com tedgioia.substack.com
-
7. Indie music and alt music are marginalized.
What the piece actually says: A large percentage of songs on these playlists come from big labels. What the piece does not say: that this is disproportionate in any way to any alternative metric of what one would expect or want that percentage to be. What the piece does not say: that this is in any way different to how the different modes of consumption of music would have worked out to in the past.
-
2. Alt Weeklies disappear in every city—along with everything else that’s alternative or outside the norm.
"I'm getting older and am perturbed by the death of the things that signified edgy coolness when I was the age to be a tastemaker"
(And I love alt weeklies)
-
Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence
"are increasingly evaluated"
By whom? And by what can we see the "increase" in this "evaluation"?
Other considerations having little influence on what?
-
9. The experts who ‘explain’ the culture to us all seem to be insiders with identical backgrounds.
One cannot emphasize enough how incredibly unimportant the NYRB is to "the counterculture" (and has been for... decades?)
(Also, I'm not sure that it's a bad thing that a publication exists where academic types try to write for a slightly less academic audience. It's a bad thing if we pretend that's the only kind of criticism that should be out there, and it's bad how ludicrously white, male, socially incestuous, and otherwise privileged they all are, but the academickiness of it seems fine to me...)
-
14. All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds.
I'm sorry, Beyonce and the Chainsmokers are your idea of authority-defiance?
-
13. Everybody is encouraged to watch the same TV shows and movies—with niche options gradually removed from the dominant platforms.
What a great way of making this sound deeply insidious without referring to the actual reasons this is the case. (Also, interesting how this clashes with the common narrative that There's Just Too Much To Watch)
-
12. Five companies have almost complete control over the book business—where, in an earlier day, dozens of indie publishers thrived.
Again, a great story we should be looking into in more economic terms without trying to tie it to "someone slapped Chris Rock"
-
11. Even elite awards for creativity are dominated by reboots and remakes.
So now the counterculture is defined by... the Oscars?
-
10. This year’s movies look a lot like last year’s movies.
The tweet is about things coming up in the future. When even trailers may not exist for original properties at this distance from their release, how would you expect ordinary people to be looking forward to them?
-
8. Telling jokes becomes a dangerous profession.
Oh For Fuck's Sake
-
6. The dominant company in the creative culture views everything as a brand extension.
When has this not been the case?
Why would this be relevant to anything but the mainstream?
-
5. There are lots of journalists, but they all seem to be working for the same corporations.
It's almost like... there's an economic point here... that we're trying to make into a cultural point in order to not need economic credibility to speak on....
-
4. The banal word ‘content’ is used to describe every type of creative work, implying that artistry is generic and interchangeable.
I mean, yes, but this has nothing to do with the presence or health of counterculture
-
3. The most popular song doesn’t change for three years in a row.
"The way that people listen to music has changed so drastically that our measurements seem to be stuck." "No! It is the Ed Sheeran who are wrong!"
-
This is a deep matter, and I won’t try to unlock all the nuances here.
"I'm going to wave in the direction of implying that this is very important without actually fleshing anything out that would indicate something of import"
-
Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago
The "avant-garde" is overhyped by definition, but okay, you could get an essay out of this I'm sure
-
Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible
Cool thesis, love to see some supporting detail
-
Every year the same stories are retold, and this sameness is considered a plus
What on earth has this ever had to do with the absence of a counterculture?
-
Alternative voices exist—in fact, they are everywhere—but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible
We continue to carefully craft definitions that can't be evaluated except in terms of the subject's mood
-
The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful
Again, this is so subjective
-
A sense of sameness pervades the creative world
I don't really feel like this is the case. Maybe the stuff that Ted Gioia is looking at?
-
-
rosequartzroyalty.blogspot.com rosequartzroyalty.blogspot.com
-
Fairy kei tutorials used to be everywhere back in the day but it seems like they're not really being made anymore, so I am READY TO FIX THIS PROBLEM! If there's anything you'd like to see me make, leave me a comment and let me know!
I miss the alt-fashion tutorial web, kawaii blogspots... Damn.
-
-
magazine.atavist.com magazine.atavist.com
-
“He used to come home every weekend, and one weekend he came to church and he saw me,” Gilda said. “I had cut my hair, I had a permanent. I looked a little different. So he wrote me a letter to say that I looked beautiful, that someday we [were] going to get together.” When Reverend Mother heard about the letter—because she heard about everything—she demanded that Gilda give it to her. “She took it from me. She took the letter,” Gilda said, tapping her fingers one, two, three, four, five times on her kitchen table. “But you know what I did before I gave it to her? I rewrote it.” She gave Reverend Mother the original and kept the copy.
This is such a touching detail
-
-
hmmdaily.com hmmdaily.com
-
The mainstream pundit class is never alarmed on its own behalf about the growth of the immigrant population. It is just very deeply worried about other people, who are alarmed by immigrants, and it wants to persuade the political class to get rid of the immigrants before those other people decide to get rid of the immigrants.
-
-
writing.bobdoto.computer writing.bobdoto.computer
-
Nick Milo developed the LYT methodology6 during one of the most tumultuous political climates in recent US history. It was 2016 and the US was plunging into social and political polarization. Many of us, especially on the left, felt that Trump winning the election, along with the appointing of vocal white nationalists, was a wake-up call-to-action. It was also a time riddled with anxiety. To balance the confusion that came with social upheaval, each of us created our own version of stability. For Nick, that stability was found in the ancient, Western philosophical tradition.
This paragraph exhausts me for reasons I can't put into words
-
-
www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
-
I think we’re in a situation now in which people have a lot of [online] associations, but not many [physical] associations. And it feels a bit lopsided. It’s very easy to live in an American city, not know your neighbors, not really know anybody in your other community, not really have relationships with your coworkers, but live much of your social life through the internet with people you’ve never met. I wouldn’t moralize and say that’s bad — I think people create arrangements that work for them. But I think there is probably something to be said for creating a more balanced arrangement where in-person, place-based, workplace-based affiliations could be restored.
I would kill for something halfway to Nextdoor -- where people had interactions more normal to non-local social media, not "omg needles!" all the time.
-
-
theconvivialsociety.substack.com theconvivialsociety.substack.com
-
Under digitally re-enchanted conditions, policing the bounds of the community appears to overshadow the value of ostensibly objective, civil discourse. In other words, meta-positioning, from this perspective, might just a matter of making sure you are always playing for the right team, or at least not perceived to be playing for the wrong one. It’s not so much that we have something to say but that we have a social space we want to be seen to occupy.
Is there really an increase in meta-positioning? Also: would this description of Society At Large resonate with someone who isn't specifically terminally online on Twitter?
-
-
theconvivialsociety.substack.com theconvivialsociety.substack.com
-
The enchanted world, in Taylor’s view, yielded the experience of a porous, and thus vulnerable self.
Only vulnerability from porosity? Not flexibility or strength?
-
To speak into the digital public sphere is to potentially invite an immediate and intense assault not simply upon your ideas but upon you and your livelihood and well-being because, after all, you and your ideas and your words are now more tightly bound together.
What does this sentence follow from?
-
Not surprisingly, then, modern free speech ideals are historically correlated with emergence and internalization of print culture. Print encourages the notion that the content of ideas can easily be and, indeed, ought to be distinguished from the one who presents them. Print abstracts the act of communication from the lived experience of communicators and thus fosters the sense that words alone can do no harm. The well-known proverb about sticks and stones, for example, is most plausible in the context of print culture (and, in fact, seems to arise precisely in this context). The time and space necessary to the labor of communicating in print itself has a diminishing effect on the felt intensity of communication.
Is this true? How did the treatment of heresy differ in the period right before print and the period right after?
-