Favorites from rory
Subscribe:
Displaying post 51 to 100 of 3435
The Premonition of a Fraying
"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski]
The unauthorized adventure of Tom Bombadil
Redditor "whypic" has been posting daily installments to the Glorious Tom Bombadil subreddit of an original webcomic work of fan-fiction describing an adventure of the mysterious side-character Tom Bombadil from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the webcomic, Bombadil is portrayed like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, and his naive enthusiasm is contrasted with the more worldly and serious elf-king Gil-Galad who is more of a "Hobbes" figure. Who is Tom Bombadil? Let "Jess of the Shire" explain.
Webcomic installments 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
(Previously: Dark Bombadil)
(Previously)
Burrowed out in ancient times by the slithering of a giant worm
Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
Lessons from artist Hannah Höch
She found freedom from society’s limiting views by employing fantasy, or assuming the perspectives of non-human creatures and objects. “Most of all I would like to depict the world as a bee sees it, then tomorrow as the moon sees it, and then, as many other creatures see it,” she continued. “I am, however, a human being, and can use my fantasy, bound as I am, as a bridge.”
a taxonomy of supremacist bad faith, and the margins of permission
Part 1:
my Poochie who is sure to tell you that he only finds anti-woke rhetoric understandable. Part 2 : Charlie Kirk now believes that pretending to revere Dr. King is less useful. Part 3: the most insidious kind of bad faith—pretending to take an opposing position in order to create a normalizing debate for [white] supremacy. A.R. Moxon's Reframe, relocated off of substack!
[STOP in the name of HUMANITY]
Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime
Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it.
The Rise of Obituary Spam
AI generated obituaries turn real people into clickbait.
Searching for information on a deceased friend? Better check your sources carefully; there’s a whole shady online industry designed to profit off your loss.
Absolutely Fabulist
One reason that it’s so difficult to know what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Dave Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London kid, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London. from A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld by Patrick Radden Keefe [The New Yorker; ungated] [CW: Death of a teenager, possible suicide]
Samuel Moyn on The Trouble with Old Men
Gerontocracy is as old as the world. For millennia, to greater or lesser degrees, it has been the default principle of governance, from ancient Greek city-states to the Soviet republics. Though there have been exceptions, when you look for gerontocracy today, you find it everywhere – aged men and women at the helms of states the world over. [CW: suicide, senicide, ageism]
Recycling haul
Linkfest on recycling or recyclability research and approaches: Pulpatronics makes RFID tags out of scorch marks on paper. Turbine blade maker Vestas may have figured out how to recycle the epoxy in epoxy-carbon-fiber. California museum Exploratorium uses and re-uses machinery from the Bay Area's history, which become part of the exhibits. A polymer analagous to porphyrin is good at collecting gold and platinum from acid-cleaned circuit boards. A plastics-back-to-polymers technique with a new factory opening ?soon?.
An atmosphere of total incuriosity suffuses the entire book
Some books are so utterly bad that the case against them can be made based on almost any excerpt. Elon Musk is one of those books. from Very Ordinary Men, a deliciously scathing review of Walter Isaacson's biography by Sam Kriss [The Point Magazine; ungated]
Righteous Victims
1948 and the roots of Israeli-Palestinian conflict
"In the time of the British mandate, Jews and Palestinians, and Western and Arab powers, made fundamental choices that set the groundwork for the suffering and irresolution of today. Along the way, there were many opportunities for events to play out differently. We asked a panel of historians — three Palestinians, two Israelis and a Canadian American — to talk about the decisive moments leading up to the founding of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians and whether a different outcome could have been possible."
So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?
Everyone’s a sellout now
Vox article describing the challenge for artists, writers, musicians who just want to practice their craft: Sorry, you need to be a highly-promoted brand first.
The botanical imperialism of weeds and crops
The botanical imperialism of weeds and crops: how alien plant species on the First Fleet changed Australia. It wasn’t just colonists and convicts who invaded Australia in 1788 – invasive plant species arrived too.
How to Comment on Social Media by Rebecca Solnit
On Lit Hub, Rebecca Solnit writes about how to comment on social media:
1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence.
‘Lake Mungo’ (2008): The Oral History
Lake Mungo made a modest impact when it was first released in 2008. It premiered at the Sydney Film Festival, screened at South by Southwest in 2009, and premiered in the United States as part of the After Dark 4 horror anthology in 2010. Yet residencies on Tubi, Shudder, and Amazon Prime exposed new audiences to this sad, frightening, and fascinating film more than a decade after its release, and its explorations of grief fit more comfortably with a horror landscape influenced by The Babadook (2014) and Hereditary (2018) than the 2000s post-Blair Witch Project (1999) found footage explosion.
Won't Panic
We require leaders who recognize before disaster strikes that mass panic is largely a myth, not after they have mismanaged it. This is a hard thing to ask of a governing class. One reason this myth has persisted despite decades of evidence to the contrary is that narratives of panic are a useful crutch for leaders under pressure. By projecting their own insecurities onto the masses they lead, elites find a ready scapegoat for their own failings. A leader who does not measure up to the demands of disaster will find it easier to blame the crowd for panic than accept the crowd’s harsh judgments on his own performance. from The Myth of Panic [Palladium; from 2021]
Where All the World’s Vegemite Comes From
Vegemite is a thick, dark brown Australian food spread made from leftover brewers' yeast extract with various vegetable and spice additives. The New York Times says, "First concocted a century ago, the spread is widely adored by Australians — and loathed by almost everyone else" and reveals "The Corner Lot Where All the World’s Vegemite Comes From" (ungated & archive). Oh, and there's a song.
"...major upheaval in debates over the language of mass atrocity..."
The Charge of Genocide
- Darryl Li writes for Dissent Magazine: "Israel and its supporters have responded to the ICJ case with accusations of antisemitism (describing the case as “blood libel”), attempts at distraction (arguing over quantities of humanitarian aid it allows into the Gaza Strip), and technical legal objections. But South Africa’s willingness to file the case is a sign that the old tactics used to police discourse about genocide have lost much of their power."
How the devil are you? Have you had a good week?
In July 2022, YouTube channel Auto Shenanigans started a new series called Secrets of the Motorway.
With the posting of part 3 of the M25, the series is now complete, and we have 80 short videos about every motorway in mainland Britain.
Trolley Problem Solution
"Got tired of having [the trolley problem] conversation over and over again so I just spent way too much time making this." [SLMastoImageLink, via your friends in IWW IU 520, Railroad Workers.)
The earth-science equivalent of an urban legend
This is not to say that there is no climatological mystery to be explained. The countries of northern Europe do indeed have curiously mild climates, a phenomenon I didn't really appreciate until I moved from Liverpool to New York. I arrived in the Big Apple just before a late-summer heat wave, at a time when the temperature soared to around 35 degrees Celsius. I had never endured such blistering temperatures. And just a few months later I was awestruck by the sensation of my nostrils freezing when I went outside. Nothing like that happens in England, where the average January is 15 to 20 degrees warmer than what prevails at the same latitude in eastern North America. So what keeps my former home so balmy in the winter? And why do so many people credit the Gulf Stream? from The Source of Europe's Mild Climate
Wish It Were Here
Wish you could revisit New York's Tower Records circa 2005, or San Francisco's Sutro Baths before it was demolished in 1964? Disappointed Tourist
is a series of paintings by Ellen Harvey depicting places that no longer exist. Some reach as far back as Ireland's prehistoric rainforest or the City of Troy; others are painfully recent. Each painting is nominated by someone who cares about that place.
"It is quite likely that you feel it yourself"
"With this desperation comes an openness to the idea that what we've done so far isn't enough."
An brutally honest interview of Andreas Malm* on how it feels when "the enemy has never ceased to be victorious – and it's more victorious than ever" in this stage of the climate crisis. Gift link to the NYTimes article.
*author of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” and now co-author of “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.”
Amazing list of curmudgeonly websites
There was an askme (I think) not too long ago, about websites that are amazingly specific, usually maintained by a cranky crank. It's where I found the sauce packet database for example... So many amazing links. Maybe even a link to a big website of other links. Somehow I seem to have lost it and I'm sad. Anyone remember and able to point me to the thread?
Laser-sensor technology reveals ancient cities in Amazon rainforest
Laser-sensor technology reveals ancient cities in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest. The settlements were occupied around 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD — a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in Europe.
Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Barbie, BFI, Wow
I've watched a LOT of stuff related to Barbie. Panels and interviews and contrived videos... but I'm going to say that Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera on Barbie | BFI in conversation [40m] is the single most grounded, real-feeling conversation I've seen. Ryan and America seem to be sitting with a small group of friends talking about this experience they both went through, and it just feels so honest and bare and naked... Hard to describe, great to experience.
Obsessions
He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable. Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile’s dream — the world’s greatest hi-fi. What would it mean in the end?
The Old Man and the C Drive
What are some comprehensive one-topic websites maintained by cranky old guys (or gals)?
Slowness is hard for most of us
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient. from Slow Change Can Be Radical Change by Rebecca Solnit
Happy 50th birthday, more or less, to Dungeons & Dragons!
Tom Van Winkle (01/10/2024), "Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons": "Fifty years ago this month, the first 1000 copies of the original Dungeons & Dragons were printed and then boxed up at Gary Gygax's house. It's supposed to have been late in January of 1974, but we don't have a specific date. January 1974 is good enough for me. And what counts as the specific origin date, anyway? The final draft? The actual printing? The availability for sale? We're close enough. I'm saying it's been fifty years right now."
SpaceX vs OSHA
“Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company."
CW: Descriptions and a few photos of injuries.
“SpaceX’s idea of safety is: ‘We’ll let you decide what’s safe for you,’ which really means there was no accountability,” said Carson, who has worked for more than two decades in dangerous jobs such as building submarines. “That’s a terrible approach to take in industrial environments.”
“Dar’st thou measure this our god!”
Through most of modern history the idea that the value of a whale was not discoverable through its market price would have seemed silly, at least to anyone operating in that commercial market. But for three centuries whales have occupied a peculiar point where economics and the environment meet, their fortunes tracing the changing relationship between the two. In the 19th century a drop in the demand for whale-based products worked to the whales’ benefit. In the 20th century, though, the supply of whale-based products became much cheaper and demand returned redoubled. Whales became increasingly endangered until societies newly focused on the environmental costs of affluence imposed a worldwide whaling ban. That made them literally priceless. from Where capitalism and conservation meet [The Economist; ungated]
*Imitates the sound of the spokeshave*
Tchiks is an amateur woodworker from Brussels. He makes the kind of YouTube video I enjoy: Someone making things (in this case guitars), no chat-to-camera (though there's some in-the-room chat, usually dialogue with his daughter, who is now six years old), no music (apart from the demonstration of the instrument at the end), the only sounds are workshop sounds. Since 2019 he's occasionally been uploading videos of the guitars he's been building, including the one he made out of a shelf during quarantine (because it's the only wood he could get), the one he made with one hand (because he'd broken his arm) and the detailed reproduction of Brian May's Red Special.
For their latest project Tchiks and his daughter built her a bass guitar together.
Even if you're not interested in videos of people building guitars, it's worth skipping to the last minute or so of this one for the demonstration.
Yes, citing these in an argument will annoy everyone. But what fun!
100 Little Ideas that Explain how the Human World works.
"Bizarreness Effect: Crazy things are easier to remember than common things, providing a distorted sense of “normal.”
Nonlinearity: Outputs aren’t always proportional to inputs, so the world is a barrage of massive wins and horrible losses that surprise people.
Moderating Relationship: The correlation between two variables depends on a third, seemingly unrelated variable. The quality of a marriage may be dependent on a spouse’s work project that’s causing stress.
Denomination Effect: One hundred $1 bills feels like less money than one $100 bill. Also explains stock splits – buying 10 shares for $10 each feels cheaper than one share for $100.
Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” - Daniel Kahneman."
Minimum Wage Clock
This began as a quick-and-dirty experiment to visualize the UK National Minimum Wage in real-time, inspired by Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine.
Then I added the US Federal Minimum Wage, since a sizeable proportion of this blog’s readership are US-based. Did you know the US also has a Youth Minimum Wage? I didn’t.
Then I got curious, and added some CEO salaries for comparison. The vast disparity is nothing new to me, but seeing it like this...
It’s fucking sobering.
The companies themselves are bullshit
For much of this century, optimism that technology would make the world a better place fueled the perception that Silicon Valley was the moral alternative to an extractive Wall Street—that it was possible to make money, not at the expense of society but in service of it. In other words, many who joined the industry did so precisely because they thought that their work would be useful. Yet what we’re now seeing is a lot of bullshit. from It's All Bullshit [The Baffler; ungated]
An evil vanquished so completely it has been all but forgotten
Cretinism and goitre were among the great medical mysteries of 19th-century Europe. The overlap of the conditions was a source of fascination, as was their geographical specificity. Scientists, medics and armchair experts flocked to the Alps, seeming to discount nothing in their investigations: landscape, elevation, atmospheric electricity, snow melt, sunlight (too much and too little), ‘miasma’, bad beer, stagnant air, incest and ‘moral failure’. ... In 1876, a list of the most promising theories was published; it featured forty different hypotheses. from A National Evil [LRB; ungated]
"The upshot is that nowhere in Gaza is safe."
"Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies."
- Avi Shlaim writes for Prospect magazine || Jewish Currents: Israel’s “Humanitarian” Expulsion || WashPo: How Israel pushed over a million Palestinians into a tiny corner of Gaza (ungated) || NYT: Skepticism Grows Over Israel’s Ability to Dismantle Hamas || Guardian: Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to discuss postwar plan for Gaza Strip || CTV News: Israel's forces raid a West Bank refugee camp as its military expands Gaza offensive || Democracy Now: As Phone Line Breaks Up, Palestinian Journalist Akram al-Satarri Describes "Dire" Conditions in Gaza; Palestinian Christian Pastor [Rev Munther Isaac] Slams Western Silence on Genocide in Gaza & his Christmas sermon, "Christ in the Rubble"
McSweeney's on the tradition of developers as Hallmark-movie villains
The villain who plans to demolish the toy shop in a Hallmark Christmas movie sets the record straight.
By Joanna Castle Miller, December 2021.
no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now)
YouTuber Jeffiot goes digging for the origins of skull trumpet / doot doot / mr skeltal, and ends up taking a trip to the early web heyday of animated gif art, and ruminating on creativity and legacy
Efforts to save endangered orange-bellied parrot paying off
It is a species so endangered that just five years ago only 20 birds returned from the species' annual migration. But 81 orange-bellied parrots have returned to Melaleuca in Tasmania's remote south-west from the mainland to breed, the largest number seen in 15 years. The orange-bellied parrot is one of the most endangered birds in the world, and the program saving it from extinction is starting to focus on the next phase of the birds' survival plan.
Book: Asterix and the White Iris
"A strange new philosophy is gaining popularity amongst the Roman soldiers, spearheaded by the charismatic Isivertuus. When its enchanting influence reaches the Gauls, everything they once held dear is turned upside down. As news of the dire situation reaches Asterix and Obelix, they embark on a thrilling quest to confront Isivertuus and restore the indomitable spirit of the Gauls. Armed with their trademark humour, bravery, and trusty magic potion, can our heroic duo save the Chief's wife and break the spell of the White Iris?"
截金
"The only artist in the world to embed gold leaves in glass, Kirikane."
Yamamoto Akane: 'Making Beauty'.
(slyt) [via The British museum]