Heraldic and personal rebuses are still being created today, though their usage is much diminished. One way they are hanging on is in text messaging. North London teenager Isla Burgess, for example, says her friends refer to her by using the emojis for island and then iceberg on text messages. “We all do it,” Burgess says, smartphone in hand. “My friend Oliver is the olive. Martin is the martini glass. It’s much easier to type.”

Derived from the Latin expression non verbis sed rebus, which means “not by words, but with things,” a rebus is a puzzle in which a word, or part of a word, is represented by a picture.

What we pay attention to and the language in which we pay attention are the only realities worth considering, which is one reason why stories are so often framed by the idea that nobody is talking about a problem, when the problem is often quite endlessly talked about—just not solved. Why isn’t the media covering this story? is a common refrain that is just as often accompanied by a link to an article about the story, which is how the complainer learned about it in the first place.

timer jobs (think spicy cronjobs)

How can you generate category and tag pages? More generally, how do you generate any limited set of pages based on querying information from other content, without having to manually create a new (probably empty) content file?

What those developers probably mean is that they find static site generators elegant.

a bunch of technical language

One workaround is using separate files in the same folder or in subfolder, than use the content API to retrieve them. Each such “resource” can have a body and metadata.

A theming infrastructure imposes a lot of technical restrictions and indirection, such as template lookup orders (see: Hugo), having to specify a handful of default template names (Hugo, again), and having to specify strange content conventions for mapping content to those default template names (still Hugo). Frankly, if a user really wants a template inheritance and theme inheritance mechanism, they’ll probably bite the bullet and work with WordPress or Drupal.

On top of traversing and retrieving content, templates should be able to transform formats (Markdown to HTML, parsing JSON and maybe YAML) and process images.

There should be a full content traversal API, which could be modelled after Kirby’s API (itself inspired by jQuery). Other sources of inspiration: Globbing, e.g. find('posts/*.md'). DOM traversal (there’s no reason why your content tree cannot be a tree of nodes).

as we said we’re making a tool for technically-minded people

Most generators use restrictive template engines, and feed a restricted context (aka a set of data and functions) to those templates. This seems to come from a misguided need to keep templates “simple”, “logic-less”, and other kinds of baloney.

Another consequence of restricted templates is that SSG documentation will then tell you to work in a third place: not in content, not in templates, but in “config code”. This is a problem because A) it’s probably one place too many and B) it’s often unclear at what time this config code is running or how often: once for every page generation or template run, or just once at the start of a build?

To surface this information efficiently, the generator may need to come with a GUI (a web UI could work).

How may users control the transformations that are applied to content (processing of Markdown or other formats, templates, image transformations)? Should this be defined in the content or elsewhere?

What will be ignored?

Or you have to write some configuration code that populates “Collections” ahead of build time. (Too indirect, and breaks if you change your information architecture a bit. We need something a bit closer to direct manipulation!)

Sometimes it’s just not possible to work with content hierarchies and partial content. (Most JavaScript static site generators fall into that category.)

the plain-files-and-scripts philosophy

I sometimes talk with developers who praise static site generators as simple, which is hogwash. I’ve seen a few projects where content editors were handed off a site based on a SSG (especially in startups where devs may dominate the conversation), and could not manage any change without a lot of training and assistance. Nothing simple about that.

{{< imgproc sniffles-4months.jpg Resize "600x" />}}

how to prepare images themselves (in Photoshop, Gimp or similar software)

Users are expected to know what formats like HTML and Markdown are

they are expected to know how to put those files online to publish them. This can require software such as a FTP client, or more complex setups involving one or two additional command line tools.

They’re often written by developers — professionals or hobbyists — to power their own small website or blog, and as such they tend to have a limited feature set. SSG are close parents to scripts: short programs (a few hundred lines of code), which can be used from a command prompt to achieve specific tasks. They’re often built as a hobby by one developer, sometimes getting help from a few others months or years later.

Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties, things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools, and things which are actually difficult, which no programming tool or language is going to solve. Joel Spolsky reviewing Beyond Java

In short, since the rise of the content industry, established journalistic institutions have struggled to survive and been forced to produce news that functions like content.

the content industry is also adept at appropriating existing texts, images, moving images, and recordings.

Does a classic film streamed online rather than projected in a movie theater become content simply because of the context?

Take Banana no hi (Banana Day) for example. Broken down, the Japanese pronunciation—ba-na-na—corresponds to the Japanese for eight (ba) and seven (nana). The seventh day of the eighth month, August 7, thus becomes “Banana Day.”

In the field, workers operate potato harvesters, made by the German company Grimme. The technology is common among area growers and specifically designed for wet soil, he said. The machines are mounted onto tractors. After the machines scoop potatoes from the ground, the potatoes fall onto a web where loose dirt falls back to the ground The company’s largest machine can harvest four rows at once, Wisdom said. He said he sees technology continuing to evolve. “I think in our lifetime there will be automated potato harvesting equipment,” Wisdon said. At the company’s packing and shipping plant, there is more technology, such as a machine that scans the potatoes and discards imperfect or meager spuds. Wisdom said workers can program the machine to reject undesirable features, such as those green in color or with blemishes. These “cull” potatoes don’t go to waste. Wisdom said they are shipped to a plant and turned into dehydrated potato. After another machine separates potatoes by size — small, medium, large and extra large — and a second sort takes place, with workers inspecting potatoes at a detailed level.

But I guess that’s a product of the time we live in.

Maybe it’s just me noticing this a bit more lately, but it feels as if people are a lot less engaged with the world around them and they don’t really care about their surroundings. And you can see it everywhere when you start paying attention.

The world around us is pushing us more and more toward selfishness. Social media itself is—for the most part—a self centered world. How many people have IG profiles filled with selfies? I’d probably say way too many.

Opening the code of the algorithm might be a good place to start, but it’s not unlike making an architectural excavation site open to the public: without the guidance of an archaeologist to explain it, it’s just a set of pottery shards. There is not much we as end users can do with “The Algorithm” as-is.

But let’s say you come up with 10000 Flits to recommend? You can’t show them all in any given timeline, so what do you do? 

As is typical of these controversies, it's hard to parse exactly what Jackson did wrong

Those who put stock in sensitivity reads seem to mostly imagine that the practice offers a form of insurance, preempting allegations of this -ism or that -phobia, although it rarely pans out that way.

authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.

“GeoCities was not about self-promotion,” Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. “It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge.”

Well the Letter saw that idea coming, and what I love so much about it is the fact that is wants married women to consider that “[n]ow you are married, and have descended so low from so high – from the likeness of angels, from the beloved of Jesus Christ, from a lady in heaven, into carnal filth, into the life of an animal, into servitude to a man, and into the world’s misery”.[3] There it is – servitude to a man. Sure, you might enjoy having kids and all that, but ultimately “whatever advantage or happiness comes of it, it is too dearly bought”.[4]

In raccoon societies, asking this for any reason other than genuine concern about potential danger is considered the height of rudeness. The traditional response is "why does your face look like that?"

It’s just too easy to accidentally give a good result to a controversial topic, and have the law makers pounce on you.

You’ll notice there are no actual books here. There are only lists of best books. Cynical me notes that if you were to actually list a book, someone could find it controversial. Instead, you can link to institutional websites, and let them take the controversy for their picks.

Every recipe site I’ve ever seen is like this — nobody cares about how this recipe was originally your great-grandmother’s. Just tell us what’s in it.

This is not the first time that classified information on modern-day weapons systems was leaked on the War Thunder forums.

Poop-scooping regulations serve as a way to manage dogs in urban spaces, but also underline the idea that they are pampered pets.

The price the rescues ask for dogs (whether they label it as a ‘rehoming fee’ or whatever, it is a sale price) has climbed with demand, with some asking four figures for these allegedly unwanted dogs. Yet for the end owner (or consumer) of the dog, having the rescue serve as a middleman means they don’t feel they have bought from a puppy mill. It’s a win-win for the dog owner: they get the particular breed they want by going to a specialised rescue, and they get the moral value of ‘not having bought from a breeder’.

The messaging that animals are needlessly euthanised, and could have been saved, has been very effective. However, the argument that it is better to adopt a dog rather than to buy one from a breeder overlooks the fact that the shelter population has dropped dramatically since the 1970s. There are, in fact, not enough dogs in shelters to meet demand, if every would-be dog owner went there for a pet.

One of the clearest cases of this was the poodle. A specific genetic bottleneck in the breed is traced to a champion dog named Annsown Sir Gay, born in 1949. A prolific stud, he fathered 21 litters, containing more show winners. Other kennels were keen to have dogs from this line, spreading their genetic influence through the breed. One son, Gay Knight, fathered a litter at the Wycliffe kennels in 1959, containing five winners. This litter’s genes are still found today – identified in genetic analysis as ‘x per cent Wycliffe’ – and pedigree poodles in the UK, the US and Australia all share this heritage. By the 1990s, registered poodles had more than 40 per cent of their genes from this Wycliffe bottleneck, and for black poodles it is as high as 50 per cent.

Boosts empowers even non technical users to create with the web rather than simply consuming it.

It has always been possible to run user scripts and styles via browser extensions, but the developer experience of creating an extension has never been particularly beginner friendly. I’ve personally never seen extension development integrated so seamlessly and directly into the browser.

Rice believed noise was unhealthy

20-something woman new to Brooklyn

In England, 18th-century farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765.

In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

Crimes of the Future (June 3), David Cronenberg’s deeply weird but oddly stirring look at the ways people connect in an imagined, post-human, dystopic future, one in which our fascination with the inside of one another’s bodies fuels something deeper.

Brian and Charles (June 17), a kind of warmly comedic take on Frankenstein in which an eccentric inventor in a tiny English village accidentally invents a robot that becomes his best friend and, eventually, his family

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, for instance. Based on the viral YouTube shorts of a decade ago, the feature is about an inch-high shell named Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate) who lives a lonely life with his grandmother, Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini) in a largely vacant Airbnb.

We Met in Virtual Reality (July 27), a vérité documentary shot entirely inside the virtual reality platform VRChat.

In recent decades, some environmentalists have been advocating for swapping red meat with white meat, because red meat — especially beef — emits far more greenhouse gasses than white meat. (Though plant-based protein usually pollutes less than them all.)

Rather, says Jens Tuider of ProVeg International, a Berlin-based organization that advocates for reducing meat consumption, “it’s the flexitarians that drive this development.”

The people of the cloud

a basic ratio of three parts soy sauce to three parts oil to one part vinegar and one part sugar, all by volume.

The Sandman 8/5 (Netflix)

Virtue doesn’t reside in the sky, or the cloud, or any form of abstraction; it must be passed from one person to the next. By reinforcing and augmenting the foundations of civilization, we invite the next generation to become builders too. But a lack of authority deprives them of this role, tells them that civilization is already full (or maybe empty), and thus leaves young people with two terrible choices: despair or rebellion.

If empirical truths are up for debate, then non-empirical truths are basically dead on arrival for most people. But relational authority can still create a little force field, a little stay against the storm; if someone holds fast to unseen principles, their conviction can radiate outward and maybe even pull another into its orbit.

The Romans revered their city’s legendary founding and greatly admired those who had laid the foundations. They called their ancestors the maiores—literally, “the greater ones”—and carefully passed down their wisdom from one generation to the next. In the Eternal City, Arendt writes, “religion literally meant re-ligare, to be tied back, obligated.” Here, the weight of the past leaned heavily and welcomely on the present. The citizen who could bear up well under such weight had gravitas, and the one who strengthened and augmented (from the Latin augere) the city’s cherished foundations had auctoritas.

maya let me know that there is actually some history of composers recording piano rolls in the early 20th century (i.e. "classical" composers, not just ragtime or saloon music, which is the context in which I usually think of piano rolls being used)—and music-knowers don't think of them any differently than a traditionally recorded performance. Neat! Yet another reason I should've waited to blog about it instead of firing off a post, because I might've thought to look that sort of thing up first. Then again, I might not've. Don't know what I don't know, and all that.

If you know me, you know I am unlikely to ever be coming from the gym, and if I am it will be the first thing I mention because I will expect a parade or commemorative plaque.

I’m trying to stretch myself these days. I’m 50, and only a fool or optimist would believe I am middle-aged. I’m closer to the end than the beginning, and people I love are dying at a prodigious rate. One does not want to be the last man standing. So, I signed up to be part of this bonsai club. We gathered at a local coffee shop this weekend. The convener gave a little presentation on a particular type of tree that several of us had bought at his suggestion. We then spent an hour or so trimming our tree’s roots and repotting them. In the end, the trees looked basically as they did when we started, but we were dirtier and had spent an hour laughing, telling stories, and meeting each other. Among others, there was the mullet-having, trucker-cap-wearing landscape worker, the young lesbian mother who had her 7-year-old in tow, the Jack Black lookalike who does marketing communication and plays in a band, the 70-year-old dentist, plus whatever it is that I am. It was a group of people unlikely to be in the same room by accident, and I found myself having fun, despite my apprehensions. Clubs are dying out. My parent’s generation thrived at the end of the reign of things like the Rotary Club and The Lions Club, which still exist but as a shadow of their former glory. Archie Bunker’s bowling league sounds quaint and archaic when one watches All in the Family reruns. But one advantage they served, for which technology has yet to give us a substitute, is the fostering of unlikely relationships. And I think we are poorer for the loss.

Then it clarifies and brightens into something unrecognizable, and there’s no way of reversing the process.

Krishna Gade took a job at Facebook just after the 2016 election, working to improve news-feed quality. While there, he developed a feature, called “Why am I seeing this post?,” that allowed a user to click a button on any item that appeared in her Facebook feed and see some of the algorithmic variables that had caused the item to appear. A dog photo might be in her feed, for example, because she “commented on posts with photos more than other media types” and because she belonged to a group called Woofers & Puppers. Gade told me that he saw the feature as fostering a sense of transparency and trust. “I think users should be given the rights to ask for what’s going on,” he said. At the least, it offered users a striking glimpse of how the recommender system perceived them. Yet today, on Facebook’s Web site, the “Why am I seeing this post?” button is available only for ads. On the app it’s included for non-ad posts, too, but, when I tried it recently on a handful of posts, most said only that they were “popular compared to other posts you’ve seen.”

When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century. Bucher told me that the idea of the algorithm is “a proxy for technology, and people’s relationships to the machine.” It has become a metaphor for the ultimate digital Other, a representation of all of our uneasiness with online life.

The Airbnb hosts’ concerns were rooted in the challenges of selling a product online, but I’m most interested in the similar feelings that plague those, like Valerie Peter, who are trying to figure out what to consume.

On top of trying to boost their rankings by repainting walls, replacing furniture, or taking more flattering photos, the hosts also developed what Jhaver called “folk theories” about how the algorithm worked. They would log on to Airbnb repeatedly throughout the day or constantly update their unit’s availability, suspecting that doing so would help get them noticed by the algorithm.

In a recent essay for Pitchfork, Jeremy D. Larson described a nagging feeling that Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and automated playlists were draining the joy from listening to music by short-circuiting the process of organic discovery: “Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal.”

It can feel as though every app is trying to guess what you want before your brain has time to come up with its own answer, like an obnoxious party guest who finishes your sentences as you speak them.

Almost every other major Internet platform makes use of some form of algorithmic recommendation. Google Maps calculates driving routes using unspecified variables, including predicted traffic patterns and fuel efficiency, rerouting us mid-journey in ways that may be more convenient or may lead us astray.

Only in the middle of the past decade, though, did recommender systems become a pervasive part of life online.

It also reproduces images and transcripts of all the entries in Alden’s actual diary; according to Scott, Sparks drew on only about a third of them, fabricating nearly ninety per cent of what she published, including entries about how, after being sent to reform school, Jay learned to levitate objects, developed E.S.P., attended midnight orgies, and was possessed by a demon named Raul.

Sparks, for all her fact-fudging, seems to have had a genuine conviction that young people in crisis needed adults to do more to understand them—a conviction so smothered by anti-drug and pro-abstinence propaganda that it’s hard to appreciate her sincerity fifty years later.

Ecologies of Houston

If you purchased chicken in Washington state in the last 10 years, you were harmed

Both Peale and Boy Scout literatures build on the earlier language of cheerfulness as articulated in the Bible and in the work of early modern philosophy. But they strip it of its collective dimension. And as those communities are erased and reimagined in the developing world of industrial, and now post-industrial, capitalism, cheerfulness is at once endlessly evoked and drained of its power to bind humans to each other. Today, cheerfulness mainly evokes the ghosts of earlier cheerful scenes: we walk among the ruins of theological and natural cheer. Contemporary cheer – the gaiety of networking apps and cheer squads – mimics the spirituality of communities that no longer exist.

In his essay ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’ (1850), Emerson asserts that poetic genius requires two things. First, the ability of the poet to see natural phenomena as moral phenomena – that is, to turn things in the world into metaphors of our inner lives. It is the poet who first sees that apples and corn can mean something beyond their use as fruit and grain. The poet turns things into signs that convey ‘in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life’. Through the poet’s noticing, nature and humans are linked. No less important is a second trait: ‘I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet – for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace.’ The poet’s cheerfulness involves his ability to see the beauty of the world, to see things ‘for the lovely light that sparkles from them’.

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.

‘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.

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.

This brown bread was probably more appetizing than it sounds, Rubel says. Bran carries the nutty, complex flavor associated with whole grains,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kolay Mor Salkımlı Şerbet Tarifi

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).

The students used a vivid combination of vintage decor, collegiate pennants, high school diplomas, family portraits, and advertisements to decorate their walls.

OUR ARTILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVENS SAKE STOP IT.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In retrospect, I think what I was registering was a more textured experience of material culture.

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.

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.

At the very least, it becomes an always available potential portal into my past.

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,

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.

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.

It is an elegy for the era of cross-origin browser requests and off-site embeddable media

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%.

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]

wonderful desert sand - used it as top cover for my potted citrus tree to combat fungus gnats. sand even came with free lizard.

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.

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.

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.

a terrible tweet she made in which she corrected a service worker’s grammar

Tim's was fine, I don't really "get it" but I don't really "get" fast food in general…

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.

A local copy of [[Wikipedia]] could be a good thing to have on our laptops.

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

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

My brain is going wild right now thinking about all the [[p2p systems]] I want to build

[[email]] is decentralized but >90% of people use gmail/hotmail

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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. 

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).

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.)

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 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.

custom board sizes/aspect ratio (maybe chosen from a few standardised variables, to allow fitting in a grid and prevent misuse)

i think it could really come into its own with 0 padding/margin between boards,

i like imagining it could have been there unchanged for decades - or it could have been updated the second before i logged on.

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.

animated favicons

i still feel like that's amateur hour around here

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!

spring ’83 boards are so inherently creative, it’s beautiful to have that kind of customisation not only encouraged but really forced

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.

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.

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.

I’ve got my hands full working on a secret DNS project for now anyway .

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

larger, or at least well explained and justified.

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.

Please don’t use YAML for the peer list. YAML is not great. A simple JSON list would be better.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

He is the author of We Could All Probably Be Better at Oral Sex Than We Are Now: Haiku for Life (Forthcoming).

In that, its conceptualization as a narcotic is quite apt: it provides a form of relief that ultimately only exacerbates the underlying problem.

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.

Social media is not just accepted—it’s also seen as something functionally beneficial, something that not only supports but also enables our lives.

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.

Social media users, by contrast, skew middle-class and well-educated.

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.

unions and membership organizations have been gutted, replaced by heartless, top-down non-profits

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Simple. This means the protocol is easy to understand and implement, even for a non-expert programmer.

Accordingly, a Spring '83 realm is limited to 10 million boards

display each board in a region with an aspect ratio of either 1:sqrt(2) or sqrt(2):1

load any images, media, or fonts linked by the board

(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!)

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.

please assume that any- thing I'm not commenting on is an enthusiastic "wow this is cool!"

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!