bunny-rabbit style (13. 505)

Via Kottke, we are directed to a decades long, well maintained passion project that has reliably remained the go-to destination on the internet for educating oneself about shoelacing and knot tying. There’s a wealth of useful and practical advice here with contributions of fans and enthusiasts spanning years. New to us, we happily don’t arrive here too late to find it retired, archived or worse zombified, a fall that befalls many inactive sites that once had a following as a landing page for catch-penny SEO, or even worse succumbed to enshittification by the platforms and infrastructure that undergird such veteran webpages, but there is a tinge of sadness to learning about Ian’s Shoelace Site, a dying breed whose likes are disappearing from the web, resilient to the above symptoms that make the internet brittle and anaemic it’s still susceptible to the sleek plagiarism and repackaging that erodes the quality of the lessons, not only with AI scrapping and TikTok artists reposting content without attribution but also usually get things wrong. I am going to learn some new, satisfying knot techniques and wish I had known years before in protest to the heartbreaking hunger that the web has developed.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronopticæ)

twelve years ago: travels in Liguria 

thirteen years ago: flooding in the Danube 

fourteen years ago: mood rings and classroom metrics plus EU economics rollercoaster

gestalt (13. 431)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest linkfest (lots more to discover there), we discover this catalogue of scores of visual phenomena and optical illusions catalogued and indexed by one Michael Bach, polymath and ophthalmologist. Each entry includes details about the provenance and with an explanation of what’s going on perception-wise, including how to unsee it—see also. Furthermore, unlike this sample GIF of Roget’s Palisade, the illusion first described by the author of the eponymous thesaurus though his take on the mechanism behind the illusion does not quite fit with the current understanding of what’s classed as the rolling shutter effect, the animations that Bach has created can be paused, the colours denuded and sped up or slowed down. Let us know your favourites and what you find most befuddling.

8x8 (13. 372)

first flush: Shizoka region’s campaign to reclaim its status as the world’s number one tea producer

tippy the turtle and cubby the bear: the long history of drawing short-cuts before AI  

portraits of population: in 1971 and 1981, the Indian government conducted a people’s census with accompanying illustrated volumes to explain the motivation for collecting data—via Quantum of Sollazzo 

top of the hour: programming schedules and regular segments for a veteran blogger influenced by a career in radio  

the books are open: following a distressed shoe company’s pivot to LLMs, pasta sauce maker Prego releases a table top device to record family dinner conversations to cherish for all time—via Super Punch  

extrapolated futures: a reverse look-up archive of speculative fiction to explore how science-fiction authors of the past assay a real world scenario of the present—via Kottke  

the edge of sentience: the theory of mind, our history of underestimating the internality of others and how we might be diminishing the conscience of the machine  

hanami: Kyoto gets a new caretaker for the records of cherry tree blooms (see previously) that goes back to the ninth century, one of the oldest, continuous archives of climate data in the world

the whispering earring (13. 364)

Via Super Punch (an AI roundup with more stories to explore), we are directed to a cautionary tale about wearables, the Internet of Things and shoe-horning unwanted artificial intelligence into everything from a 2012 with an IT company creating the proverbial accessory that the Livejournal post explicitly warned against making, unearthing the cursed talisman buried within a horde of real treasures, enough to make one overlook the Monkey’s Paw of a trinket. It begins with the disclosure, “Better for you if you take me off,” which of course the wearer ignores instead of tossing it into the fires of Mount Doom. Parasitically attached and knowing its host’s predilections all too well, the earring—like a shoulder devil—offers not the best advice but rather the oft-times sabotaging yet infallible confirmation that will lead to instant gratification, prefaced with the same “Better for you…” at the expense of long term goals, although in the estimation of their peers, most successful and contented.

dire straits (13. 361)

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in response to the ceasefire brokered for Lebanon, has announced that the Strait of Hormuz will be unconditionally opened for commercial shipping for the duration of the cessation of hostilities, a key point in Tehran’s list of demands. In response and trying to flatten and take ownership of the narrative, Trump dispatched a celebratory series of seemingly detached missives that read as if from some mirror universe wire-services, simplifying the yet tenuous and unresolved situation, offering thanks and demands that the rest of the world acknowledge this gratitude and tribute, stating that Iran promises to never block the waterway again, that the US had prohibited Israel from bombing Beirut, that Iran will surrender its supplies of enriched uranium (“nuclear dust”) to the US, sanctions will remain in place and Iranian funds will continue to be frozen, and America will maintain its blockade of Iranian ports until a peace deal is finalised—claims all (except the last) unverified with the Revolutionary Guard still requiring clearance, escort and Netanyahu insisting that it has not yet finished operations against Hezbollah, throwing shade at and reifying the concept of the fog of war.

9x9 (13. 350)

reference desk: harness Google’s secret card catalog—via Kottke  

nitrate divas: a remarkable 1928 amateur film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” 

📍: a Scrabble Map commissioned for the word play game’s (previously) international commemoration, celebrated yesterday  

middle powers: Carney’s Liberal Party secures supermajority in parliamentary special elections  

print gallery of an artist: an MC Escherque exploration of recursive spaces—via Waxy 

infallibilità papale: ally Meloni (previously) breaks with Trump over criticism of Pope, cancels security arrangement with Israel  

dutch cartocubism: an overlooked approach to simplify mapping from the early 1930s from the figures behind ISOTYPE—via Quantum of Sollazzo—see also  

connie converse: rediscovering the forgotten folk-music genius 

огас: the 1960s proto-internet that the Soviet Union passed on—see previously

trust in chariots (13.348)

In a semi-annual tradition, a consortium of international literary bloggers gets together online to champion books published in a given year—this time for the class of 1961, a pivotal range that bridges the transition from relatively conformist writing of the 1950s and anticipate the coming counter-cultural movements of the decade ahead. Neglected Books features an array of titles from the club for one’s reading enjoyment and edification, but not the necessarily the timeless classics, which also might merit reevaluation and reflections through a fresh reading, like JD Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” Solaris by Stanislav Lem, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ No One Writes to the Colonel, etc, and rather the more obscure and forgotten ones, like the titular work by Thomas Savage, a later travelogue by acclaimed the acclaimed author of The Power of the Dog, whose prose was sadly only afforded the moment before consigned to obscurity to be revived as a belated cinematic adaptation—the story informed Annie Proulx’ Brokeback Mountain. Though not a part of the webring myself, if I were to nominate a title for the book club, maybe I would choose the novella The Curious Sofa by Edward Gorey (published under the anagrammatical pseudonym Ogdred Weary) and subtitled as “a pornographic illustrated story about furniture. Whilst portraying nothing explicit, there is a great deal of suggestive innuendo, in turn inspiring other fictions with a kernel of truth. The German translation was banned in Austria on the grounds that it promoted lustfulness and misleading sex-drive for youths. What titles would you recommend from 1961? More at the links above.

random landing (13. 301)

Via the always excellent Web Curios, we are directed to the now occasional blog that visits a point in the contiguous states in the USA and reports back on the geographic features, watersheds, human settlements, history, local commerce, culture, etc nearby, emphasising the size of America and the vast sparsely populated places determined by chance selection of longitude and latitude with a certain methodology. Much research and record keeping has gone into these plots, often removed and remote—the middle of nowhere—that limn the nation as a whole spanning from sea to shining sea and inspired us to attempt some flattery for this personal project through imitation.

Throwing a dart at a map of Germany, at coordinates 49.9969614, 8.9482212 we arrived in the cornfield near Nieder-Roden within the urban district of Darmstadt and the municipality of Offenbach and a constituent community of Greater Roden near the city of Heusenstamm, the fiftieth parallel north passing directly through the Pusieaux-Platz in the centre of the borough.

When I lived in Wiesbaden, I recall the state news broadcast featuring a segment—weekly, daily?—called “Dolles Dörfer” so called in country dialect that highlighted a village in Hessen, some of which I visited with detours from my usual route.

Divided by thirds, it is approximately equally partitioned amongst human habitation, woodlands and agriculture with a prominent swampland stand of pine forest and was first documented in 791 as Rotaha inferior in the codex of Lorsch. If you live in the lower-48 or elsewhere, this would be a good project to cultivate for one’s own exploration, like our friend Diamond Geezer, virtual or otherwise.

on-line relationship (13.287)

Via Nag on the Lake and MetaFilter, we are turned to analysis and reflection that no one has heretofore managed to articulate well, in my opinion, muddled with concerns of privacy, the Internet of Things, the pivot away from physical media, tiered subscription models, algorithimic recommendations and baking AI into everything from software engineer Terry Godier about the gradual awakening of our gadgets, accessories and appliances over the past two decades. I feel like we first started experiencing this with electronic toys which instead of running on imagination created a technical debt between the cared for and the caretaker that required attention at regular cycles otherwise it would wither away, then it coffee pods, requiring a regular and recurring replenishment and not just dosing of one’s choosing and then vehicles that gave one service reminders, which ignoring could void one’s warranty—and maybe these happened all at once—that was in part by design and inadvertently scaled up into architectural layers underpinned by a thousand interdependent systems vying for attention and maintenance. Screen-time becomes a “you problem” and moral failure, scolded by our objects and made to feel as sense of shame for over-engagement—not to worry there’s an app for that with its own host of knock-on perils—when in actuality a significant portion of that time is spent in maintenance of the platform, updates and de-conflicting, swatting away nuisances rather than the preening of self-curation. The distinction between smart and dumb have taken on whole new meanings in terms of uncompensated labour keeping the whole system configured. More at the links above and advice to help one curate more quiet.

11x11 (13. 268)

epistemic cocoon: filters, bubbles, synthetic friends and the personal theatre of disinformation—via Web Curios  

no yokes: a quarter of a century in market fluctuations  

semantic drift: the etymological and entomological history of the word drone  

belated blogoversary: Kottke turns twenty-eight  

wet shelter: the house photographer of the aid mission in the crypt of St Botolph’s 

le salaire de la peur: in a demonstration project to expand research partnerships with other laboratories, CERN attempts to transport a microscopic payload of antimatter for the first time—see previously  

caged lorries: Singapore, despite pressure from businesses that rely on migrant labour, is moving towards banning the dehumanising way workers are transported to job sites  

unbirthday: salutations and reflections from veteran blogger Diamond Geezer  

áfram með smjörið: delightful Icelandic idioms—via friend of the blog Nag on the Lake  

what’s that got to do with the price of tea in china: US egg cost down forty-two percent—hope it was all worth it  

ai is african intelligence: the exploited workers who tutor and moderate chatbots fight back

day sixteen (13. 267)

Rebuffing calls from allied Gulf states under attack for their hosting of American assets (materiel and business interests declared legitimate targets and intimating that some strikes are being carried out covertly by US and Israeli aggressors) for ceasefire negotiations, Trump rejects talks outright saying that Iran is demanding too much and expresses surprise that the conflict spread, insisting again he has decimated the oil export hub of Kharg Island and may destroy more facilities for target practise. US federal communications commission chair has accused media outlets of putting out fake news and hoaxes regarding the special operation and threatens to take away their broadcasting licenses unless they correct course. Separately, the Pentagon announces a major overhaul for the journalistically independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes, labelling it a “woke distraction.”People are being arrested for posting images of war damage in the Emirates and elsewhere. Formula One grand prix scheduled for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in April have been cancelled as the Iraqi national team prepares to travel to Mexico for play-offs for the upcoming World Cup, FIFA ignoring overtures to call off the North American venue. The Iranian national women’s soccer team withdraw their applications for asylum in Australia and plan to return home. The supplies of anti-ballistic missile interceptors continue to dwindle. Ukraine says Russia is replenishing drones. Switzerland denies request by the US for fly-over rights. Over eight hundred civilians have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli bombardment.

synchronopticon

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronopticæ), the four pillars of consumer rights plus veto through inaction

twelve years ago: everyday objects rendered useless 

fourteen years ago: impressions from Prague plus UAVs in warfare

fifteen years ago: buried news and hidden connections 

 

8x8 (13. 255)

should make you think: the Ig Noble commitee and ceremony (see previously) moves to Zürich permanently out of fear for its international laureates coming to the US  

multisource authentication: the madding task of logging on to any platform, ostensibly for security reasons, also is unpaid labour to train AI  

ʰ-bomb: a typographical mystery surrounding one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most celebrated sacred spaces—via MetaFilter  

asterisms: learn about the night sky by creating one’s own constellations with Neal Agarwal (previously)  

saint-michel d’aiguihe: the chapel of St Michael of the Needle built atop a volcanic plug and has a secret reliquary—via Miss Cellania    

diacritics: kernels, ʻokinas and curly quotes 

short imagined monologues: the void would very much like you to stop screaming into it—see also  

rebel alliance: Minnesota’s badge of resistance to ICE terror

checkpoints (13. 252)

Reminding us of the phenomena we encountered recently of being blessed by the algorithm, we appreciated this essay by Bijan Stephen about happening across a soothing montage of ambient sounds accompanied with a pristine arcade sky—evoking vague memories that one couldn’t quite place. Even more remarkable than the occasional videos posted by an anonymous user—since removed with the ephemerality of much of the internet though archived and re-uploaded—were the comments by the thousands from others who stumbled there by chance. Sincere and confessional, many referred to the collection as a “checkpoint”—a place to save one’s progress in video game parlance, where should one fail the next challenges, one does not have to start over from the very beginning. In early 2020, something in the platform’s recommendation protocols changes and suddenly began previewing these vignettes to more and more users—like the above algorithmancy—found serendipity and community outside their accustomed fare in these years old videos with titled in Japanese titles, inspiring more lore in this second wave: “Legends say, if you find this video in your recommended, you truly are a main character in your world—not an NPC,” albeit not the most uplifting turn of phrase nowadays with term coopted by those who punch down. More from Longreads at the link above.

all your base are belong to us (13. 244)

Via Super Punch, we see that either the public affairs office of the Pentagon is using AI to write its press releases for troops killed in the line of duty—or perhaps more likely as this administration has gone on record on several occasions to call those that returned on their shields as opposed with them losers,and LLM-generated copy and syntax is generally better than this was written by a careless human and approved by another one at a higher level, the passive voice of bad news having its own passive voice.  The Trump administration has no empathy and now it has proven it controls an army that will blindly obey illegal orders without question (and better yet for them, autonomous kill-bots with no safeguards) it does not even need the pretence of condolence. Incidentally, the poorly translated title phrase (see also), apt for the memified, baiting, derivative and influencer-driven government of the US, recently observed the twenty-fifth anniversary of the virally shared techno-remix video, originally posted to the website Newgrounds.

mythical reel pull (13. 227)

Through there’s possibly no longer such a thing as serendipity and salvation in the endless feed with the machine knowing better and better what’s a hook for fleeting attention, there was once a belief in algorithmancy as a form of divination when scrollers were blessed or cursed with a presentation so jarring and out-of-keeping with the content bubble of one’s usual FYP fare. Though these incidents of benighted and inscrutable magic seem to be the antithesis of traditional bibliomancy and other forms of divination with an injection of chaos built into the calculus—some pseudo-random variables or tenuous connection that evades linkage—there is on a certain level the same pretended element of chance as with thumbing through a well-worn tome to land on an inspired or affirmative passage—the rhythm of flipping through a book, bindings and subtle dog ears make the process less random and more resonant in the dissonance. There’s strong appeal sometimes in being told what to do. It has been a minute but we suspect one’s feed has not been completely disenchanted.

prosopagnosia (13. 194)

Scoring the average ourselves and not much better than chance, we found this research project from the British Journal of Psychology and the University of New South Wales, pitting control participants with verified super-recognisers, we found some upbuilding ironies—via MetaFilter—to the self-selecting experiment to identify authentic human faces among AI-generated ones. First there was some gatekeeping to take put with a series of CAPTCHA verifications to prove one is a human by identifying traffic features to covertly train autonomous vehicles, and then, I wanted to repeat the trial to test my own biases, wondering if I was giving women and non-white presenting personae (a rejection of the Mar-a-Lago look to embrace our faults and asymmetries) pass or whether I was actually detecting certain tells. Glancingly as profile pictures or avatars, we wouldn’t have questioned the authenticity of any of these and erring on the side of voting human versus depersonalising is much preferable to being deemed a composite image but were nonetheless disturbingly off-putting judgments to make and revealing the tells only will make the masquerade harder to detect.

9x9 (13. 188)

all lawful uses: Pentagon labels Anthropic AI a supply-chain risk for refusing to activate Skynet  

digital humanities: platforms, ethnographically, can only deliver two out of the three trilemmas  

skimo: newest Olympic sport combines uphill and downhill action 

⻢: etymologies of the year of the Fire Horse—more here 

rainbow push coalition: tributes for Jesse Jackson (RIP)  

the great breath: Christian Waller’s theosophical fairy tales 

sơng: author Ocean Vuong is suspiciously talented as a photographer as well  

project cardinal: turnaround management, corporate restructuring codenames and other euphemisms 

most energy storage solutions: inspired by DNA, a liquid forming molecular bonds can hold potential heat for months until it’s needed

synchronoptica

one year ago: protests against DOGE (with synchronopticæ) plus European emergency summit convened immediately following the Munich Security Conference

thirteen years ago: regional franchises plus more former enclaves and exclaves

fourteen years ago: the neocolonialism of finance 

fifteen years ago: academic dishonesty in the German government 

sixteen years ago: upcoming trips 

nervy-b (13. 186)

Whilst recalling one-hundo and pandemmy, we hadn’t yet really really encountered this new formula, reserved for a certain deomgraphic and perhaps more often spoken than committed to written exchanges, though it’s out there and possibly indicative that’s less ephemeral than some fads—doggos and brds have stuck around for quite a while and may be more than “cringe lingua” and datedness, like the enshrinement ceremony of Australia’s 2023 Word of the Year as a clipping of “cost of living crisis” or cozzie livs following the same pattern—the recent template of truncation and initialism: ChatGPT to chatty g, the above 100% to hundy p, sauvigon blanc to saavy b as well as numerous regular events that already have established abbreviations in defiance of jargon and speciality, like Unny-G and Euro-V. Such trends have their share of detractors, despite some sticking and demanding a rebrand, like Mickey D’s and SunnyD, calling them twee or insensitive, but it is in that reduction and destruction of the crucial element, an empowering indignity that one can visit on any phrase thanks to its formulaic nature—cf, mitty circs for “mitigating circumstances,” depreciating the important part—to undo the structural strictures imposed by language and institutions. Let’s come up with a good one for US ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents. The trend is also an emancipating format for hypocorism—pet-naming, for good or ill—probably the more ludicrious the better, 💯. Much more from Sentence First at the link up top.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Alaska’s Elizabeth Peratrovich Day (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links to revisit

thirteen years ago: unique automats, eye-charts for drones, low-effort advertising plus hearty immune systems

fifteen years ago: more moon Nazis 

9x9 (13. 183)

chinamaxxing: sinophiles dominate online forums  

next sunday a.d.: Mystery Science Theater 3000 to reunite almost all of the original cast and crew  

blue monday: analysis of the quintessential 80s drum beat  

sol invictus: unique Mithraic altars uncovered in Scotland go on display—see previously  

bloqueo: US regional tactics fomenting rebellion in Cuba—see previously—with siege strategy  

the golden road: Sanskrit and Tamil inscriptions uncovered in ancient Egyptian tombs 

orchestral strike: you know this sound but not its name  

just to be safe, here’s a scrollfrog: Cabel Sasser on one of the most incredible XOXO talks ever—see previously—via Waxy 

lilliputian hallucinations: a common dietary mushroom, if undercooked, causes diners to see tiny humans on their plates—via Kottke

synchronoptica

one year ago: a papal bull on artificial intelligence (with synchronpticæ), the purge of US civil servants plus the foundations of ancient London

thirteen years ago: horsemeat and an explosive meteor 

fourteen years ago: a mascot for the eurozone plus a Vatican political thriller

fifteen years ago: sovereign debt 

seventeen years ago: lint eggs from the laundry fairy 

 

supercluster (13. 178)

Though finding PfRC’s rather standoffish and neglected handle, via Web Curios, in the vast undifferentiated Bermuda Triangle between the Creative Portfolios Gallery, the Canadian Nature & Arts Scatter and the Geometry Dash Arena, given our level of engagement with the platform and only occasionally checking-in, we’re not surprised our granularity hasn’t coalesced around a larger group. Not sure what kind of data connections feed these nodes and nebulae (see also for some more online geocaching) but certain those profiles more active on the site have found their niche and those they identify with—and whilst more interaction might shift one to the Highlands of Resistance or the Vale of Swedish Progressives or the German Antifa Expanse, there are social media bubbles topologically, cosmologically grouped (some mixed metaphors for invented topolects), enclaves and Twitter exodus exclaves but, thankfully no charted lands as refuges for toxic tribalism, shitposters and reply guys. Plug in your name and check out this map of Bluesky and get to know what’s in your local neighbourhood and constellation. Hopefully the network effect has taken hold and free exchange, journalism, fandom can be taken back from moribund and algorithmic platforms.