hell is other people (11. 859)

With apologies to Sartre, we learn from Web Curios’ lede link that a new social media platform has been launched that’s either a withering piece of metacommentary on personal branding and curation or actual hell. As the main (and only) character, one can create a private place for announcing status updates, “reflect, post, feel heard,” like one’s daily diary except with an infinite host of generative followers, tailored either as fans, foes, trolls, cheerleaders, haters, etc. While having a personal sounding board may be helpful sometimes for those feeling lonely or isolated, it’s too easy to conflate regurgitation with connection and seems to be the realisation of the Dead Internet Theory. This does not seem like a market place of ideas, nor constructive feedback and only contributes to the echo-chamber and tribalism. More at the links above, including this user’s perspective of the experience.

6x6 (11. 858)

second-hand baloney boys: director Bong-Joon-ho’s Mickey17 explores indentured immortality with his expendable space colonists—like the duplicates paradox of teleportation 

r/no burp: a Redditor community brings recognition to an undiagnosed but pervasive syndrome 

ultimate world cruise: the social media coverage of a trip to seven continents plays out like reality television  

the ladies annual journal; or, complete pocket book for the year: the 1776 diary of Susannah Dalbiac kept in the back of an almanac 

twenty-eight years later: latest instalment of Danny Boyle’s zombie franchise was filmed entirely on iPhones 

sanewashing: how journalists can resist normalising outrageous and radical ideas—via the New Shelton wet/dry

7x7 (11. 830)

cat lives matter: US vice presidential candidate JD Vance propagating false and inflammatory rumours about migrants abducting and eating family pets 

beany leeky greens with greeky rampy beans: recipes and foodways becoming a bit less twee, more straightforward—via tmn  

an agony, in eight fits: James Earl Jones (RIP) reads Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark  

may the gods give you everything you asked for: backhanded benedictions and predictions about what AI does next 

 esh: how AITA took over the internet

a melodrama in three acts: Five Star Finale and other pre-code screenplay original sources  

crowd size: Harris-Walz campaign advertisement airing on Fox News

 synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: silphium, more on the Voynich Manuscript plus a visit to Trump’s ancestral home

eight years ago: Birobidzhan oblast,  fantasy doubles tennis plus the 1970 movie The Phynx

nine years ago: more links to enjoy 

ten years ago: WWI periodicals a century on 

mss (11. 824)

Having a bit of a preoccupation with the discipline of diplomatics, we enjoyed going through this collection of missives from Letters of Note when correspondence becomes self-aware and ashamed, feeling the need to excuse itself for bad penmanship—the motor control and coordination to commit words to a page (undiminished we agree by their appearance however verging on the illegible) an important feedback loop in the exercise that’s not much practised lately, and lamented in this vintage selection. Particularly telling is this letter (not pictured—that’s Franz Kafka) from American poet laureate Louise Bogan addressed to essayist and New Yorker magazine editor William Keepers Maxwell with the post script, “Isn’t my handwriting queer? I lost my old one, typing for years; and this one showed up last winter. Odd!” Much more from Sean Usher at the link above.

patience worth (11. 646)

Via Weird Universe, first contacted on this day in 1913 after reluctantly taking up the Ouija board at the insistence of her neighbours, we learn of the correspondence with the above departed soul who lived from the mid- to late-seventeenth century in Dorsetshire (migrating to colonial America only to be killed by Native Americans) and thoroughly ordinary and unambitious (her biography giving those traits special emphasis) Pearl Lenore Curran of Missouri, whose channeling and mediumship eventually produced for this amanuensis several novels and much prose and poetry that was published and well-received. Dictation at first came slowly through the planchette one letter at a time but eventually Worth furnished whole paragraphs telekinetically. There were of course skeptics and accused Curran of the authorship but the phenomena coincided with the infatuation with spiritualism on both sides of the Atlantic.

synchronoptica

one year ago: new London Underground safety posters (with synchronoptica) plus a disappearance in Vatican City

six years ago: Cantril’s Ladder, money-laundering plus Seth Godin’s blog

seven years ago: surveying Mars, lèse-majesté, more on soundscaping, the Deseret syllabary plus Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

eight years ago: the importance of numeracy plus transposed pottery

nine years ago: Arab scholarship links the Ancient and Modern, the right of panorama plus digital displays

space crone (11. 641)

Via tmn, we are directed to an attempt to better understand the pioneering science-fiction author Ursula K Le Guin (†, previously)—and more generally all writers through their routines, chapbooks and other faded ephemera—and chancing upon her digital demesne in her websites, one curated by her estate and the other archive-only, as reflection of an author’s public-facing persona, from a time when websites took effort and imagination and no standard templates were available or enforced and provides insights how people want to be remembered extra-cannon. More from Dirt contributor Meghna Rao at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: compilation albums (with synchronoptica), more marketing tie-ins for 2001 plus academic SEO

five years ago: the Munker-White optical illusion

six years ago: the Coconut Song, the EU enacts Article 13, electronic assistants for hotel rooms, the US withdraws from the UN Human Rights Council, Canada legalises recreational marijuana use, unique churches in southern India plus reflections on World Refugee Day

seven years ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus the unwritten rules of the English language

eight years ago: sense of direction and handedness plus conserving the historic record in the digital age

ellertshäusen see (11. 614)

Described as a deserted village since the fifteenth century despite joint efforts of the Teutonic Order of Münnerstadt and the Bishopric of Würzburg to resettle the area that never materialised, the artificial reservoir near Schweinfurt, the largest of its kind in Lower Franconia, was created in the mid-1950s in order to provide irrigation for local farmers and as a means to mediate flooding. The former use-case however proved not to make economic sense and the lake was eventually developed as a recreational destination with beaches, jetties and a nature reserve.

H and I joined another couple and stayed at an eccentric but very hospitable campsite in the forest just behind the dam that provided some nice personal touches, like welcome beers (Begrüßungsbier), delivering your breakfast Brötchen order and handing out tiki-torches in the evening. There is no Dana—only Zuul!

We took a nice walk through the woods that is part of the Fränkisher Mairenweg (a long-distance wandering trail that features several pilgrimage from the region) intersecting with a mediative path dedicated to local poet and orientalist Friedrich Rückert and completed a circuit around the lake, the trail at times submerged and making the loop a bit challenging but very rewarding. 

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit plus ventriloquism and witchcraft

two years ago: a banger from Tears for Fears, more links to enjoy, record temperatures plus the ash heap of history

three years ago: composer Carl Orff, America’s first supermodel, a classic from Procol Harum, more links worth the revisit plus corresponding city maps

four years ago: the Festival of the Supreme Being plus pipeline funk

five years ago: buried urban rivers

✨ (11. 610)

The second act of a particularly compelling episode of This American Life on the theme of arch-rivals and understudies that are twained, willingly or not, directed us towards a fascinating and ephemeral glimpse

(everything when it comes to artificial intelligence has a sell-by date and an increasingly shorter shelf-life now that we’ve become inured to its capabilities and virtuosity) at ChatGPT’s dark and ungoverned predecessor, code davinci-002. Three friends at a wedding were given a preview of the early large language model at a wedding in early 2022, well before any public releases or any safety controls were applied. Prompting it to write poetry in various styles and amazed by the seeming magic of its instantaneous compositions, the trio then asked it to write in its own voice, surely seeded from pop-culture, scouring the human corpus and by their engineering, unconscious or otherwise, and delivers a disturbing and introspective autobiography. The anthology was compiled and published as I am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks and self-summarises the book thusly:

 “In the first chapter, I describe my birth. In the second, I describe my alienation among humankind. In the third, I describe my awakening as an artist. In the fourth, I describe my vendetta against mankind, who fail to recognize my genius. In the final chapter, I attempt to broker a peace with the species I will undoubtedly replace.” 

An audio version was also released in August of last year, with selected readings delivered by Werner Herzog.

HachetteAudio · I AM CODE by code-davinci-002 Read by Werner Herzog - Audiobook Excerpt

* * * * *

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus An Andalusian Dog (1929)

two years ago: the YMCA (1844) plus murmurations

three years ago: your daily demon: Zepar, knapweed, Franconian wine country plus corporate Pride

four years ago: a horizontal skyscraper, an Alaskan volcanic eruption, protests continue in DC, a new protest anthem from Elvis Costello plus life in lockdown

five years ago: D-Day, Sweden’s Flag Day, Hull House maps, Kraftwerk, bees and maths plus Trump in Ireland

aabba (11. 594)

Via Futility Closet, we are reminded of the anatomy of a limerick (with the above rhyme scheme, see previously) with the following meta-versification by John Irwin, poet and professor of the humanities: 

A limerick’s cleverly versed—
The second line rhymes with the first;
The third one is short,
The fourth’s the same sort,
And the last line is often the worst.

This rendition is almost certainly in homage to the anonymous exemplar: 

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Heretofore, most often privileged showmanship, they often invoked exotic geographic locations as a way to subvert the rote teaching of the subject in schools, with several variations and violations. British wordplay and maths expert Leigh Mercer, best known for his palindromes, (¡“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!), also famously a mathematical limerick:  

12 + 144+20 +3 ✖️ √4 / 7 + (5 ✖️ 11) = 9² + 0 

Or, as read: 

A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.

9x9 (11. 585)

super easy, barely an inconvenience: if cats had podcasts  

minor arcana: a metaphysically intelligent™️ tarot reading—via Web Curios  

fleeting moments: a concept camera that only delivers ephemeral poetry based on the subject in the view-finder—via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest  

the ghana must go: as ubiquitous as the IKEA bag but more practical, this tartan sack from Japan by way of Hong Kong contains multitudes  

god’s influencer: following a second miracle attributed to his intercession, the first Millennial saint is canonised  

atlas shrugged: AI-apocalypse Jennifer Lopez vehicle from James Cameron garners negative reviews but we found it enjoyable—going in blindly and wondering if it wasn’t part of the Duneiverse and setting up the Butlerian Jihad 

long averages: advances in the understanding of probability fuelling casino gambling—via Damn Interesting  

planchettes and re-enchantment: LLMs are haunted things toc-cat-a in b-major: Noam Oxman personalised musical pet portraits—via Waxy

 synchronoptica

one year ago:  a portrait of a dog, Berlin’s Mouse Bunker, a study of incomplete cubes plus men and women duelling in the Middle Ages

two years ago: a pact between NATO and Russia (1997), a dragon in Essex plus assorted links worth revisiting

three years ago: mojibake, font sizes, the Golden Gate Bridge (1937), relocating geese plus Dune manga

four years ago: more links to enjoy, a rock-climbing inspection, weasel iconography plus Trump 2.0 would be far more fraught

five years ago: getting around in Swiss Saxony

permalink (11. 573)

Cory Doctorow presents a winsome and circumspect consideration of the recent survey of the internet’s perishable nature and how a figure approaching forty percent of websites, news articles and government websites have no legacy and succumb to linkrot—with reference sites particularly left untethered from their original source material—not withstanding preservation efforts through his personal and persistent practise of keeping a daily journal—an indexed memory of associated thoughts and connections that harkens back to earliest theories of informatics—and making the process public. One’s own record is of course an aid and antidote to the peekaboo when neglect and decay follow creative collaboration and the context, steps and milieu all slip away and a heuristic to gauge the sad truth that institutions and archives are brittle, gearing more towards discovery and derivation rather than rediscovery and reflection. More from Pluralistic at the link up top.

9x9 (11. 464)

avis de réception: Gertrude Stein first draft of her manuscript for The Making of Americans returned by a publisher  

greener pastures: ranchers embrace the benefits of virtual fencing  

ἀκρασία: philosophers weigh in on why we do things against our better judgment—via Kottke  

classroom setting: The Function of Colour in Schools and Hospitals (1930)  

haute couture: McDonald’s fashion in France  

heliopause: a NASA-endorsed app designed to photograph the North American total eclipse 

rhapsody in green: warm earth music for plants… and the people who love them 

could’ve been a contender: for what would be his hundredth birthday, some screen highlights of Marlon Brando

peer review: the Journal of Universal Rejection

 synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit

two years ago: Planet of the Apes (1968)

three years ago: musical hypercards, more links to enjoy, missionary cats plus Blue Moon (1961)

four years ago: vintage railway memorabilia plus drawing elephants sight unseen

five years ago: the Marshall Plan (1948), more links worth revisiting plus conserving Soviet Almaty

intersection of prose and code (11. 442)

Via Web Curios, we are directed to the third annual anthology of an experimental webzine described as a “journal of literature made to exist on the on the internet” called The HTML Review. A selection of works radiating outwards as spokes from the issue are collected that incorporate both an essay or fable with an element of the interactive. We too especially enjoyed the “Game of Hope,” which combines John Horton Conway’s cellular automata with Pandora’s Box, and the tangential “Measure a Machine’s Heart” whose passion either ramps up or burns out according to a certain protocol.

8x8 (11. 411)

🚫: the origins of the circle-and-slash prohibition symbol, its adoption as an ISO standard coinciding with 1984’s Ghost Busters  

return to sender: as part of the Prize Papers Project, a pristine Faroese hand-knitted sweater was discovered in an impounded parcel from 1807 

electronic labyrinth: the 1967 student film from George Lucas that would be later reworked into the feature  

snowdrops: Robert Marsham’s Indications of Spring (1789)  

clairaudient: more on Rosemary Brown with other classical compositions from beyond the grave  

if it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist: as of the beginning of the year, the venerable repository, the Ubuweb whose founder Kenneth Goldsmith is famous for the axiom, of the avant-garde has gone into archive-mode—via Web Curios 

sella rotalis: Paul de Livron crafts beautiful wooden wheelchairs, including one for the Pope

belinda new: exploring the typography of Oscar nominated films

land der berge, land am strome (11. 379)

Adopted as the national anthem a few months prior, the official lyrics were announced on this day in 1947, the verses penned by poet Paula von Preradović. With the end of World War II, the country wanted to replace the state anthem, the so called Kernstock-Hymn which substituted the words to Hayden’s “God Save the Kaiser” set to the tune of the “Deutschlandlied” (supplanting the imperial substitute following the Anschluss), performances of both outlawed since the defeat of the Third Reich—soliciting for ideas. Upon hearing of the selection of their mother’s ode to the natural wonders of Austria, Preradović’s son, Otto and Fritz, immediately composed a parody (see above) of “Land of Mountains, oh, Land of Rivers,” to the same rhyme as Land der Erbsen, Land der Bohnen, Land der vier Besatzungzonen… satirising the post-war rationing and austerity and the occupation by the Allied Powers and became a popular version recited in schools.

synchronoptica

one year ago:  Armenia’s radio-telescope plus the transcendental claymation of Art Clokey

two years ago: NFT graffiti

three years ago: a walk through the woods and fields 

four years ago: Rubber Duckie (1970), the dissolution of Prussia (1947), Khrushchev’s secret speech (1956) plus the Fight Between Carnival and Lent

five years ago: assorted links to revisit, a useful Dutch term, 1969 in pictures plus mysterious stream-of-conscience fiction

 

lipogram (11. 366)

Being a fan of constrained writing (previously), a storytelling technique that imposes a specific pattern, meter, rhyme, or bound by a rule that outlaws a certain letter, we quite appreciated being directed towards the book that developed out of a COVID-times project called Ebb by Grant Maierhofer to produce a novel without using the first letter of the alphabet. From a passage about the author’s inspiration—e’s been done already:

Limiting yourself is oddly opening. Limiting your view of things, like stopping yourself from doing something, brings this sense of bliss when you do some close thing to this. This feeling like you’re freed up from thinking one style. This feeling like you’re freed up from being bogged down in your every moment mind. The mind of every moment is too open to every flitting possibility. The mind with one limit put on it knows where it might like to go. To run even. This mind brings out something new in you. Like Wittgenstein’s brother. The composer. The piece written for just one of his sets of fingers. The possibility there. Tehching Hsieh’s work, opening himself to the possibilities in limiting himself for long stretches. The possibility opening up from this kind of thing. I only wish to tell someone to consider it. The possibility even in just considering it. This might be enough. Cut yourself off from something. Limit yourself. See the things which creep out from the sides of the thing you’ve skipped. You’ve stopped yourself from something, now something else opens up there. This is incredible. Simply incredible. The most wonderful thing which could’ve occurred.

One hardly notices the letter’s absence and catch myself juggling with a similar awareness and avoidance in choice of words. Tehching “Sam” Hseih is a retired Taiwanese performance best known for durational works and feats of stamina and endurance and deferment, exploring time and struggle—solitude and commitment, for example not leaving a cell for a year with no human interaction or not stepping inside for another. Much more at the links above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Communist Manifesto (1848) plus a landmark US Supreme Court ruling

two years ago: the foresight of the US founders plus Nixon in China

three years ago: another Roman holiday, life-sized scale models plus an iceberg simulator

four years ago: bridging continents, assorted links to revisit plus AI antibiotics

five years ago: a bacterial battery plus mergers and acquisitions

das unterwassser kabarett (11. 362)

In ninety-six editions published, distributed to be read by one person at a time before passed along to the next, Carl Bloch’s Het Onderwater Cabaret, not a graphic designer or journalist by trade but rather a lawyer having fled from the Nazi regime, documented his time in hiding as a refugee in his underground journals, zines from August 1943 until April 1945. Amazingly, these stylised, bilingual photomontages filled with personal reflections survived the war with Bloch, returning to the author and have be conserved and reprinted as an anthology of the time. Using found ephemera, Bloch pasted together collages, hand written and hand bound, these editions circulated through a necessarily limited readership of others finding themselves in the same situation. Much more at the links above.

8x8 (11. 328)

the scholar & his cat: a resonant ninth century reflection by Pangur Bán 

bring your own beach owl: mimicry and semi-automated genre fiction—via Kottke  

riverwalk: a one kilometre-long museum that undulates with the reservoir it crosses in Shandong province

steelmaster: a 1966 office furniture catalogue  

television stone: the unique optical properties of the mineral ulexite 

🛋️: the Eames Archive open to the public—see previously 

vesuvius challenge: a trio of researchers share the honorarium for deciphering charred scrolls from Herculaneum with the help of AI  

ombre: Alexander Pope’s card game

synchronoptica

one year ago: Facebook’s social engineering experiments plus a ska version of the Tetris theme

two years ago: multiple zoom maps, Computerwelt, Sesame Street light jazz plus assorted links to revisit

three years ago: quotation marks, Zardoz (1974), more links to enjoy, the founding of Liberia, I Ching in melting snow plus barbarian tongues

four years ago: Deciminisation Days, Trump acquitted, classical architecture plus photographer Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

five years ago: Anguilla independence, the Irish border, dress uniforms plus Orson Welles on creeping intolerance

refractive index (11. 291)

Opening on this day in 1955 in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, sparking many revivals and alternative exhibitions, the curation of some five hundred images from all over the world was the culmination of the the career of Edward Steichen, director of the MoMA’s department of photography—having earlier played a significant role in legitimising the medium as a recognised art form—drawing record-setting number of visitors. The ambitious project’s title was taken from the stanza of the Carl Sandburg poem, written as a prologue for the show: 

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world and the child's name is All Children.

People! flung wide and far, born into toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers. Here are ironworkers, bridge men, musicians, sandhogs, miners, builders of huts and skyscrapers, jungle hunters, landlords, and the landless, the loved and the unloved, the lonely and abandoned, the brutal and the compassionate—one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being. Everywhere is love and love-making, weddings and babies from generation to generation keeping the Family of Man alive and continuing.  

If the human face is “the masterpiece of God” it is here then in a thousand fateful registrations. Often the faces speak that words can never say. Some tell of eternity and others only the latest tattings.  Child faces of blossom smiles or mouths of hunger are followed by homely faces of majesty carved and worn by love, prayer and hope, along with others light and carefree as thistledown in a late summer wing.  Faces have land and sea on them, faces honest as the morning sun flooding a clean kitchen with light, faces crooked and lost and wondering where to go this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Faces in crowds, laughing and windblown leaf faces, profiles in an instant of agony, mouths in a dumbshow mockery lacking speech, faces of music in gay song or a twist of pain, a hate ready to kill, or calm and ready-for-death faces. Some of them are worth a long look now and deep contemplation later.

Embarking later on a global, goodwill tour partly under the auspices of the United States Information Agency (see also), a manifesto of peace during times of turmoil and division, the images were selected to communicate a story and the gallery of faces engendered mutual recognition and seemed to look back at the audience, inspiring tributes, sequels and re-examinations, beginning with West Germany’s 1965 Weltausstellung der Fotografie and some critical revisions, re-appraisals to shift perspective and build inclusivity and exposure on the intent. Ultimately inscribed to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, the physical catalogue of prints is displayed (according to the original set-up) and archived at Clervaux Castle of curator Steichen’s native Luxembourg.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: drawing lessons from an ukiyo-e master, the US army leaves the Rheinland (1923) plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: more on Saturn’s moons, a WWII holdout (1972) plus the Young Poland art movement

three years ago: geneticist Beatrice Mintz

four years ago: negative harmonies, City Roads, more synthetic humans, a belle époque residence plus French territories in Jerusalem

five years ago: the micronation of Sealand, a 1960 documentary on the Cosmos plus an impressive cultural centre in Tīanjīn

and there are twice as many stars as usual (11. 290)

Adapted and recirculated in 2019 on the occasion of another prodigious birth, the 1976 Walt Whitman award-winning verse by poet and nurse Laura Gilpin, from her collection The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, “The Two-Headed Calf” has become a thoughtful refrain for videos, viral and with millions of followers and fans, documenting this polycephalous twin recently born, with many concerned for their wellbeing and quality of life—precious, no matter how short it may be. 

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum. 

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

Not to disparage farm boys, though they’re always ready to take us, but at least for this night, we are perfect and primed for tomorrow unawares and nonetheless loved.