Why Read the Classics? | by Italo Calvino | The New York Review of Books https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/10/09/why-read-the-classics/

On Emergent Centralization · Field Notes https://fieldnotes.resistant.tech/defensive-decentralization/

Unlimited Dream Country “ a review of Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe by Simon Sellars … https://minorliteratures.com/2018/06/20/unlimited-dream-country-a-review-of-applied-ballardianismmemoir-from-a-parallel-universe-by-simon-sellars-brendan-gillott/

Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system | Read the Tea Leaves https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/

Why Is American Mass Transit So Bad? It’s a Long Story. - CityLab https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-killed-transit/568825/

A Constructive Look At TempleOS http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/

How to teach yourself hard things - Julia Evans https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/09/01/learning-skills-you-can-practice/

Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983 https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/02/learning-basic.html

Bad idea of the day: a sanrio-branded sentient shoelace character who is nervous about fraying named Aglets-ko

In case you were wondering, indeed, Female Prisoner Scorpion is a MUCH better movie than the title makes it sound like. (It is exploitation, but it is ALSO surreal impressionistic gothic horror. Also, every frame of this damn movie is gorgeous.)

The best vampire movies either make you ask ‘is this about vampires’ (Baba Yaga, Blood and Roses) or make you say ‘god damn this is super about vampires’ (Drink the Blood of Dracula, Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter D)

Bad idea of the day: The HOWLing: angel-headed hipsters fight werewolves whose blood is running money and whose mind is vast machinery

We live in a world where both Guy Madden’s The Heart of the World & Matmos’s Ultimate Care II exist, and that has to count for something.

Bad idea of the day: Phibes recut as a silent film

Bad idea of the day: a retelling of Dracula where Van Hellsing and Renfield are merged into the same character

Band name of the day: betrothed by a scream

Bad idea of the day: Batman (1968) vs Doctor Phibes: two rich geniuses who love gadgets and labelling things fight each other in an art-deco city with a comically incompetent police force

Haunted by a phantom timeline - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNHW4_R_xI8

Bad idea of the day: replace every word in a book with a sentence in another book that is an anagram of the NATO word-spelling of it

Bad idea of the day: replace every sentence in some book with a sentence from a different gutenberg book that is an anagram of it

Beheadings as honest communication devices – International Cognition and Culture Institute http://cognitionandculture.net/blog/radu-umbres-blog/beheadings-as-honest-communication-devices

The Secret London Exhibition for Spies’ Eyes Only - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exhibit-for-spies-at-natural-history-museum-london

Clip Art History https://tedium.co/2018/08/30/clip-art-history/

Simplicity or style: what makes a sentence a masterpiece? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/simplicity-or-style-what-makes-a-sentence-a-masterpiece

Zero-copy deserialization in Julia http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2018/08/28/zero-copy-deserialization-in-julia/

Little Languages http://staff.um.edu.mt/afra1/seminar/little-languages.pdf

Improving the Discussion Board - Lehigh University https://www.lehigh.edu/~indiscus/doc_guidelines.html

Band name of the day: the ass antlers

Hot take: anything with more than 200 people in it is necessarily too diverse and internally schismatic to be called a ‘community’ – if it has shared norms, it’s at best a ‘subculture’, & if those norms are being imposed by a corporation, it’s not even that.

QOTD: ‘Deny what you know in your bones and instill a new law of reality in them’

Socially Conscious Sci-Fi | The Smart Set https://thesmartset.com/socially-conscious-sci-fi/

Could Patreon Be “Better For The Industry” Than Crunchyroll? - Answerman - Anime News Network https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2018-08-29/.136030

“Open” everything, and minimal financial needs: Wikipedia’s strengths https://medium.com/wiki-strategies/platform2-def60ce63a3a

How Wikipedia dodged public outcry plaguing social media platforms https://medium.com/wiki-strategies/platform-a3b8c3ce901e

Hereditary (but it’s Paddington) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20AFSVC0_LQ

Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata - Nick’s Blog http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Levenshtein-Automata

My hobby: Troll hugging. - 鳳 http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/08/my-hobby-troll-hugging.html

Translating HyperTalk to JavaScript http://lexnet.bravepages.com/HTMLJS.htm

C considered dangerous [LWN.net] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/763641/c9a04da2a33af0a3/

Band name of the day: hot sleep

Band name of the day: the desperate orgies

Band name of the day: dream loss bureau

Bursting stovepipes creates an intellectual explosion, but it’s short-lived. You don’t get scenius without tribes, but you also don’t get it without potlatches. The periodic nature of the potlatch is necessary, & so is the discarding of material work.

The thing about cultural niches is that they are created by and for ‘mass media’ as a novelty… https://medium.com/@/the-thing-about-cultural-niches-is-that-they-are-created-by-and-for-mass-media-as-a-novelty-4e5853196ee3

My feed will be deader than usual for a while so I’m going to be automatically posting a medium story I clapped for every 4 hours. Set your filters accordingly.

Brandon Invergo - Anti-Web-Design Manifesto http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2013-03-10-Anti-web-design-Manifesto.html

Dr. Edward Morbius ⭕: “Agency, its lack, or what is often a sense of fal…” - mastodon.cloud https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/100629636975889255

Bad idea of the day: an anki deck of oblique strategies

Bad idea of the day: using spaced repetition software to remind yourself to meditate on open questions

Bad idea of the day: Expand citizenship: you are automatically a citizen of a state if you were born there, if either parent is from there, if you have lived there for more than 6 months, or if you own or rent any land there.

The Ripper: The disturbing Visceral Games project that EA canceled - Polygon https://www.polygon.com/2018/8/24/17770668/jack-the-ripper-visceral-games-electronic-arts-canceled

The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/the-mystery-of-people-who-speak-dozens-of-languages

Debugging with intelligence via probabilistic inference | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/19/debugging-with-intelligence-via-probabilistic-inference/

Deep code search | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/26/deep-code-search/

Oblix: an efficient oblivious search index | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/07/06/oblix-an-efficient-oblivious-search-index/

Band name of the day: hotel fire

Band name of the day: tabby starr

Manifesto for Minimalist Software Engineers | Minifesto.org http://minifesto.org/

Band name of the day: hard dollar

Band name of the day: the mosquito king

Vision for a new, truly decentralized Web | Empowering People. Uniting Communities. https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-decentralized-web/

Otaku Culture Oasis (This Ain’t That) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SV1GME_FHQ

Bad idea of the day: a metal detector that plays a guitar solo instead of beeping

Federated Learning https://florian.github.io/federated-learning/

Online Bettors Know If Psychology Studies Will Replicate - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/scientists-can-collectively-sense-which-psychology-studies-are-weak/568630/

Band name of the day: strange remains

Why Folklorists Hate Joseph Campbell’s Work | Jeana Jorgensen http://www.patheos.com/blogs/foxyfolklorist/why-folklorists-hate-joseph-campbells-work/

I would be surprised if Hataraki Saibou didn’t become extremely popular with cosplayers. It has a wide variety of iconic, low-effort uniforms, plus a handful of even more iconic higher-effort ones.

Friends and Enemies: On Slogan Tees - Los Angeles Review of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/friends-and-enemies-on-slogan-tees/

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/5

Unitary urbanism - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_urbanism

The four ways that ex-internet idealists explain where it all went wrong - MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611805/the-four-ways-that-ex-internet-idealists-explain-where-it-all-went-wrong/

The very fact that ‘product’ and ‘consumer’ are often appropriate terms is an indication that we have failed to create a sensible world.

“Striving to minimize technical and reputational risks” – Ethical OS and Silicon Valley’s guilty … https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/striving-to-minimize-technical-and-reputational-risks-ethical-os-and-silicon-valleys-guilty-conscience/

Why Love Generative Art? “ Artnome https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-art

Dread of Heinleinism - Charlie’s Diary http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/08/dread-of-heinleinism.html

Bad idea of the day: A video game called ‘infodump’ where the primary mechanic is literally using a wiki/world bible to research lore.

Taking note: Luhmann’s Zettelkasten http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

PoundArt – about Random Computer Comics http://www.poundart.com/art/randcomix/about.html

What (Else) Cells At Work Can Teach Us - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u2Uh4SWGd8

This Fred Turner book really makes me wish we had good hypertext integrated into publishing. Hard to go more than a sentence or two in From Counterculture to Cyberculture without wanting to link it to Rise of the Machines, or Encountering America, or What the Dormouse Said, or Fire in the Valley

Suspiria - Official Trailer | Amazon Studios - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY6QKRl56Ok

Miyazaki, Lineage, and Depth - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GpUQ42qtRA

Bad idea of the day: automatically replace words with synonyms that have more phoneme sequences in common with the previous word (post-processing)

Band name of the day: droop snoot

Bad idea of the day: turn the entire military budget into a sovergn wealth fund

Hot take: there are (somehow) no /mature/ GUI toolkits, but even under that low bar, there’s lots of variability – and webtech makes TK look like the Sagrada Familia.

The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/best-superstores-architecture

Curta Calculator History: A Mechanical Calculator Survival Story https://tedium.co/2018/08/23/curta-calculator-history/

Severin re-release of The Changeling leads thousands of millenials to say ‘Ohh, so THAT’s what that scene in Scary Movie 2 was referencing’.

W O R D S https://garbados.github.io/my-blog/regarding-software.html

Also pulse randomly decided that I didn’t get to have a driver for my (extremely common) sound card anymore. Jesus, systemd – you’re pushing linux on the desktop back to 1998 levels of bullshit.

Udevd was eating up literally all my ram and literally all my CPU, while doing nothing. I fixed it by turning off udevd. (Take that, systemd.)

When a social structure is flat (like twitter) all friction is between people & there’s no ‘natural’ adjuticator except a powerful & unaccoutable adjutication class. When it has cliques (like mastodon) it can be broken down & adjuticators are limited in power.

Logic Magazine | The Data Is Ours! What is big data? And how do we democratize it? by curio.io | Curio Io | Free Listening on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/curioio/logic-magazine-the-data-is-ours/s-8XDfX

Hot take: being critical of the Tech Industry (i.e., VC-model businesses that may or may not have to do with tech) is not the same as being Anti-Tech. It’s the kind of common sense that people inside the Tech Industry should take advantage of if they want to survive.

Band name of the day: the unavoidable spasm

Band name of the day: Red Birth

Letting neural networks be weird • Robotics teams: why not name them with a bot? http://aiweirdness.com/post/177307156177/robotics-teams-why-not-name-them-with-a-bot

Band name of the day: THREAT