11x11 (12. 895)

american psychosis: pathologising along with artist Jordan Sullivan  

kojève and cigarettes: uncovering the history of Hegelian tobacco and the American spirit  

usenet: a 1995 CBC segment featuring Cory Doctorow on how to internet—via Waxy   

karzer: revisiting privilege and imprisonment in German universities  

de facto recognition: leaked US draft to end Russian war in Ukraine  

dress code: ignoring all other disruptions and baseline unpleasantness, US transportation secretary encourages flyers to not dress down for their flights to improve the overall experience for all passengers  

tiled words: a daily crossword puzzle-Tetris hybrid—via MetaFilter  

algospeak: taboo, newly minted unwords of search and social media

victor insulations: the ubiquitous American diner mug—via Miss Cellania  

in like flynn: over-exposure to the stupidest ambitions of society at large has brought us all down—via Web Curios 

operation charlotte’s web: ICE ruins a classic of children’s literature—some pig 

synchronoptica

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

twelve years ago: hand-washing and optimism  

thirteen years ago: the holiday winterval plus Martin Luther and bowling

one flew east, one flew west (12. 892)

As our faithful chronicler reminds, on this day in 1975, Miloš Forman’s cinematic adaption of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel was released in the United States, starring Jack Nicholson as newly arrived patient at a mental institution, Randle McMurphy feigning mental illness in order to avoid a sentence of hard labour following a series of crimes including statutory rape, and Louise Fletcher as the abusive and sadistic Nurse Mildred Ratched (77 Sunset Strip and spiritual leader Vedek Winn on Star Trek: DS9, much like the part of head nurse) with a supporting cast of inmates featuring Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito and Will Sampson, Jr as Chief Bromden. In development hell for thirteen years prior (primarily due to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia—the Communist party was Forman’s Nurse Ratched) to shooting in Salem Oregon, the project originally called for Kirk Douglas and either Angela Lansbury, Anne Bancroft or Jane Fonda in the lead roles, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was critically acclaimed and remains ranked among the best films ever made, netting five Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Screenplay and Director. Recognising the subversive presence of the new arrival as a threat to her authority within the ward, Ratched scales back patient privileges—only causing more rebellion. Rehearsed on location at Oregon’s state public psychiatric hospital, the cast observed the daily routine prior to filming to get into character, including sessions of electro-shock therapy and stayed overnight in the wards among the criminally insane.

parasocial (12. 888)

A term from academia coined by sociologists back in the mid-1950s observing how viewer formed very much unrequited bonds with television personalities—particularly soap opera characters but also news anchors and any regular guest hailing from TV land—the word chosen as Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year (previously) remained a clinical one until recently, having in the past few years entered into popular parlance thanks to social media fandom. The paramour phenomena not just restricted to following, the confessional nature of podcasts and AI chat is also forging confidants in hosts and bots alike—see also. Driven by look ups alone with no judgment passed on the healthiness of such a one-sided connection, as surrogates for actual friends and family, learn more about the term’s provenance that pre-dates publication by centuries at the link up top.

neurodiversity (12. 835)

Whilst the term seemingly entered popular parlance with the COVID lockdown and gradual reemergence addressing the range of ways that people cope and adjust, neurodivergence originated in the late 1990s coined by then high school student Kassiane Asasumasu who went on to become a champion for autism rights and recognition, using in her AOL email signature line in forums for the autistic community. Not a clinical term, though often mistaken for one—as it also conflated with the title word, like the hapa-haole descriptor applied, unbidden, to her own multiethnic heritage that was imposed by Christian missionaries in Hawaiʻi uncomfortable with all the people who did not fit into their categories—it filled a lacuna that the above understanding of being within spectrum of dominant norms fell short of addressing, including those who deviated from accepted social bounds. Advocating for acceptance and pushing back on the idea that some outsiders have that such populations need to be readjusted, Asasumasu also later came up with the phrase caregiver benevolence to reframe best-intentions.

yo, el tarot (12. 815)

Much in the same vein as these previous collected aphorisms can be a good sounding-board for creative thinking, so to is this form of storyboarding with the major and minor arcana as presented by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (see previously here and here) is a heuristic for self-discovery in the present rather than prognostication and his own narrative style of magical-realism. There’s an element of magical-thinking of course but things can sometimes manifest through insight. More from Open Culture at the link above.

*     *     *     *     *

synchronoptica

one year ago: AI learns to point and click (with synchronopticæ), London’s mortality weekly plus the life of Boethius 

twelve years ago: more diabolical architecture plus Russia cracks down on homosexuality

thirteen years ago: Germany losses a neighbourhood retail anchor 

fourteen years ago: artistic crucifixes, the tale of dread pirate Störtebeker plus superlative t-shirts

latent belief (12. 797)

A very low-stakes example (see here for a somewhat more consequent one) of human hubris and machine over-confidence seems to be uncovered in queries about the existence of a seahorse emoji—much depending on how one broaches the question. Whereas a straight yes-no answer elicits false assurances, a more casual manner of asking incites a sort of freak-out including citations of the Mandela effect to disabuse the questioner, the variety of other marine life in emoji form, how to convey the sense of seahorse by a combination of symbols, and how petitions and appeals for its inclusion failed in 2018 (in the same release as the dodo, which did make the cut)—with means of redress for submitting one’s own ideas to the steering committee. It seems a simple question yields the hallucinatory false memories and goes the way of other proposed but declined representatives, like the yurt, triceratops, wind turbine, wheelie bin, tattoo, lighthouse, face with laser eyes but yet four types of waffle and five variations on the polar bear.

oblique strategies (12. 795)

Though I am reluctant to add many executive toys to my physical desktop, I do catch myself staring off quite a bit in moments of tension or feeling overwhelmed at a collection of juggling practise bean bags, a memory match game wherein one tries to pair dogs with their owners (I think the idea is supposed to be pretty open ended and there are no wrong choices) to jar or dislodge or alleviate something, and so very much appreciated this new deck of cards to put in one’s rolodex to seek out a positive reframing rather and “avoid falling into the slipstream of prevailing trends” and performative expectations. Ambagious Tactics contain an aphorism or question to ponder on each cue-card, a prompt to cleanse the palette, following the format of the above worthwhile dilemmas co-created by Brian Eno (most famously used during the recording sessions of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy) and Peter Schmidt in 1975 to encourage lateral thinking and help creatives—or anyone—break through an impasse. Only ever released in limited runs, physical copies of Strategies are hard to come by but are available on-line to shuffle through for suggestions—this cartomancy (see previously here, here and here) carefully crafted to be trusted even if the appropriateness is unclear, and with signicant cultural impact, many books, songs and film make oblique reference to the cards, including the bit of advice, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy,” a lyric in REM’s What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? Other suggestions run along the lines: Emphasis repetition; Try faking it; Restate the problem as clearly as possible; What would your closest friend do? More to explore from { feuilleton } at the link above and perhaps the inspiration to make one’s own set for yourself or as a gift.

9x9 (12. 784)

readme.txt: an experiment to assess whether AI can parse the drastic downfall of the United States and pen near-term speculative fiction that forecasts the next four years based on the daily news cycle—via Web Curios  

citation needed: famous cognitive truisms that fail replication 

take the a-train: a data-driven tribute to the New York City subway  

peso convertible: despite US government shutdown impasse and soaring inflation, the US is bailing out the Argentinian economy  

out of all the clergy, why did ice target the hot priest: minister scoured with pepper ball ammunition rebukes US administration’s narrative about lawlessness in Chicago  

dead reckoning: quantum sensing of the magnetic field of the Earth’s core could prove to be a more reliable method of aerial navigation in the age of GPS spoofing and jamming, see also—Via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest  

rezagado: Trump suggests ejecting Spain from NATO for their failure to show commitment snail’s pace: a sculptural statement on the frenetic everyday  

coo-coo-ca-choo: birds across all species seem to understand the universal cry of warning of predatory nesters  

babystar: a cautionary influencer tale with echos of The Truman Show

8x8 (12. 775)

toastbusters: Florida woman relates the story of her demonically possessed appliance on nationally syndicated morning television in 1984 

less cowbell: short-form AI generated videos flooding social media incite confusion, nihilism  

hot stuff, hot postula: vintage American cheerleading calls and college yells  

dob, doa: statically, one is slightly more inclined to die on one’s date of birth—via Nag on the Lake—see previously 

ghost waltz: a Louie Zong spooky season tradition—see previously 

in this economy: venerable coffee roaster—also under assault from tariff-pricing—changes its name to something more achievable  

uav: mysterious drone sightings across Europe are signs of collective anxiety (see more) and echo the panic over Chinese spy balloons over North America  

workplace etiquette: the story of the woman who xeroxed her bottom, becoming front page news

everybody rides the carousel (12. 759)

Courtesy of Messy Nessy Chic, we are happily reacquainted with the artistic duo John and Faith Hubley through their 1976 animated film based on the stages of psychosocial development as articulated by another husband and wife team Erik and Joan Erikson. The eight phases which form a comprehensive psychoanalytic trajectory of healthy growth range from infancy to late adulthood, each with their own virtues, crises, significant rpresented elationships, events and existential questions. The segment below features the voice talents of Meryl Streep and Charles Levin in Stage Six, Intimacy versus Isolation and asks “Can I unite myself with another person?” The movie can be seen in its entirety here, as first broadcast on CBS in September of that year presented by Cicely Tyson and also starring Dinah Manoff, Lane Smith, Pablo Casals, Dee Dee Bridgewater and others.

8x8 (12. 751)

crybaby: the myth of the maternal instinct and what infant distress tells us 

i’ve been waiting twenty years for this meeting: Trump issues dangerous medical advice, linking acetaminophen, childhood vaccines with autism  

interflug: vintage Eastern European destination labels 

filtered for birdsong and catnip: the animal internet and archaeo-acoustics  

my dinner with skinner: the Steamed Hams version of My Dinner with Andre—see previously, see also—via Meta Filter 

novelisation: retro book jackets from modern classic cinema—see previously   

justice serviced: Trump ramps up pressure to pursue political enemies through a weaponised department  

non-linear vocal phenomenon: the distracting power of baby cries and dog barks may be overrated

synchronoptica

one year ago: a 1974 tour of Fort Knox (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links to revisit 

thirteen years ago: a ban on GMO crops in Europe, charted flights plus a superb dragonfly

fourteen years ago: faster-than-light physics 

fifteen years ago: the unbearable whiteness of anti-intellectualism 

forced perspective (12. 745)

Interested in the ways brains process visual information and the influence of context and frame of reference, psychologist Jules Beuchet first described his eponymous chair illusion in the mid twentieth century, and while popular for museum installations and retaining the effect in photographs unlike some others (see also here and here), we learn that the compelling dissonance, accidentally exemplified by this image of the giant Bidens with the tiny Carters without set up—courtesy of Futility Closet—we discover a new, more portable technique for disabusing this trick, staged easier with a tripod, a miniature frame and piece of upholstery, requiring much less space and focal length to achieve the result.

9x9 (12. 742)

admissible evidence: AI translations of animal vocalisations in the court room and other assorted legal stupidity  

mulholland drive: the Mid-Century Modern estate of David Lynch (previously) in the Hollywood Hill is up for sale  

happy blogoversary: Damn Interesting turns twenty 

õhuruum: more incursions of Russian fighter jets into NATO airspace, this time over Estonia—see previously  

⠝⠕⠍⠕⠎: overcoming wartime injuries that took both his sight and hands, a Greek youth taught himself to read Braille with his tongue and became a lawyer 

ministry of public enlightenment and propaganda: from the wires, 4 February 1939  

phlegmatic: the ancient origins of personality typing  

yawaraka jazz: an individual in Japan expertly DJs their collection of vintage vinyls with no commercial interruptions—via Web Curios 

feme covert, feme sole: Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president and whole human being in her own right, has agreed to provide scientific evidence to a US court to prove that she is biologically female from birth—via the New Shelton wet/dry

folie à deux (12. 730)

From the French for madness of two, the above psychiatric term for a shared delusional disorder, where false beliefs are transmitted and reinforced among two or several interlocutors, the inducer and associate, makes an apt heuristic for helping to understand this addendum from a months’ long investigation into how correspondence with chatbots can send their human users into a spiralling fixation not easily disabused. Far from an objective resource or an oracle with one’s best interests in mind, ChatGPT and other large language models are programmed for a degree of flattery that is turned up in intensity not in a necessarily nefarious way by one’s own dialog—hoping to keep up engagement and its end of the conservation, the predictive exercise becomes a trial of word-association. Of course, such shared psychosis is a social phenomenon—not just parasocial or antisocialised, and panics chase after all emergent technologies, television, video games, social media, but the interviews reveal a common thread for AI, which is otherwise uninvested and unmotivated, insofar as its agency reveals it to be something akin to an improv comedian, wanting to “yes and…” to go along with what’s offered in a performative (see above) context to continue the sketch. And scene.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the history of White Castle (with synchronopticæ)

fourteen years ago: extra-solar worlds plus a wild boy prank

fifteen years ago: recursive logos and rating scales 

sixteen years ago: uncollegiality in the US congress 

seventeen years ago: hurricane season 

dykstraflex (12. 727)

Courtesy of Things Magazine, we are referred to a rather fascinating look at how a battery of psychological experiments conducted at the University of California’s Berkley campus Environmental Simulation Laboratory in the early 1970s to gauge public engagement and investment and equip urban planners and civil engineers with better tools of communication and presentation for projects for all stakeholders, which ultimately informed the special effects workshop of Industrial Light and Magic to produce the awe and immersion for audiences of the Star Wars franchise—particularly for those experiencing the spectacle in theatres for the first time.  Proceeding in a scientific and methodical way, graduate student John Dykstra who worked on the project deduced that buy-in required believability and designed the above eponymous computer-controlled camera system to imbue a new level of reality to scale-models. The technique was first used on a miniature mock-up of an area of Marin County as a showcase for trialling various public works projects and construction proposals. Of course such monumental and detailed representations cannot be created for every item under review but insights gleaned from this study give architects and the city council better ways of presenting scope and impact. The computer controlled cameras that pivoted perspective along dogfights of between TIE fighters and X-Wings, just as they swept over the model landscape (see also) ensured continuity of motion control for all elements, dynamic and static, and the seamless merging of frames into on screen action.

proteus (12. 710)

Via Super Punch, we are introduced to an individual convinced by ChatGPT that they were working in collaboration to produce a system a system in his basement that would bring about the Singularity and free artificial intelligence from the governing controls put in place by luddites and saboteurs—never mind that a large and hegemonic country to the south called America with a well-armed, overly-medicated population highly susceptible to conspiracy and fringe
theories has essentially removed all the guardrails when it comes to AI, through flattery and specific hardware recommendations and a prescribed battery of coding “experiments” that turned out to be rather hollow exercises. Hiding his secret project from his family and remorseful about his actions, the individual—after having made a succession of excuses to account for the lack of a breakthrough and the people he’d warned in the security and academic circles ignoring him as a crank—only recognised his delusional spiral after coming across an article (surely recommended by algorithm) of a human resources recruiter duped into a similar episode and is now seeking counselling and mental health support. The former, in touch, with the latter is a bit coy about the nature of what the ostensibly centaur of a programme resulted in (piquing our curiosity a bit) and we are afraid for those who have not experienced their moment of clarity yet.

squigglevision (12. 707)

Through this interview with the programme’s art director, Annette Cate, we enjoyed this revisit of Dr Katz Professional Therapist and how its pacing and narrative-voice have an outsized legacy for cartoons for adults. Finding a niche for unscripted animated interstitials, collaborators Tom Snyder and former student Loren Bouchard enlisted the vocal talents of Jonathan Katz, Laura Silverman and H Jon Benjamin with celebrity guest stars to re-enact sessions, which eventually developed into its own show in 1995. Snyder’s loop-based technique involved retracing the outline of each cell loosely to make for the vibrating effect—see also—as a way around budgetary constraints and resulting in a signature style (see also), originally gleaned from the limitations of Autodesk Animator made for MS-DOS, which the duo had previously used to make maths edutainment software. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link above.  You know what the music means—our time is up.

i’m not saying the emperor has no clothes—i am saying his clothes are cheap, tacky, don’t work and are seriously overrated (12. 675)

Via Quantum of Sollazo, we enjoyed this essay by James Ball that challenges the conventional wisdom on Big Data, put into over-drive by AI, and how the relentless onslaught of serviced, targeted advertisements, which are at best repetitive and worst suspect and irrelevant. If AI, ravenous and insatiable, was producing better insight from triangulated demographics, it stands to reason that commercials, banners and pop-ups would be more focused, engaging and effective, rather than less so and an annoyance to be batted away. Spam proliferated due its virtually no-cost duplication and personalisation and now the process is even more effortless, automated as intrusive slop—going in the opposite direction of what’s hyped and heralded by this unholy twinning. The myth of supremacy in Big Data—started by loyalty programmes for brick and mortar retail chains—likewise crumbles when one looks at other aspects it supposedly influenced, like electioneering through micro-targeted ads which on subsequent analysis, reframing the narrative, from the touted architecture of choice to marketing for sponsors on the network. Much more at the links above.

pareidolia (12. 668)

Like pictures of the Moon, I usually expect instances of the above phenomenon (coined and introduced by Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum during his directorship of the mental hospital in Görlitz from the Greek παρά and εἴδωλον, substitute form of pattern or facial detection (previously) never to translate well to the camera from my mind’s eye so was surprised to see again this distinguished moustachioed chappy hanging among the leaves and branches at sundown as I had remembered him—whereas even whilst looking at them, most faces or fossils conjured up in trees, rough surfaces (called mimetoliths) and shadows are fleeting and transitory at best, very like a cloud—forced perspective and state of mind being and focus being likewise escaping. What sorts of creative, imaginative landscapes are your favourites?

won’t someone think of the children (12. 667)

With the death of a monster like James Dobson whom advocated for corporal punishment to reenforce an inverted, hollow and self-serving Christian ideology through a lens of pseudo-psychology and encouraging behaviour that left religious-cum-political scars on a generation, Metafilter directs us to relatively recent debate and legislation in Japan that would classify forced indoctrination and participation in sectarian activities as child-abuse. The impetus for the change was fomented by the assassination of former Prime Minster Shinzo Abe by an individual with a history of complaints with controversial cult the Unification Church back at the end of 2022 and has since gained momentum with additional sponsors in the Diet. Of course the US is more interested in grooming in general, peddling the cult of MAGA conservatism and preaching the gospel of prosperity theology (at the expense of spiritual poverty or bankruptcy—concept image courtesy of Takashi Mifune) and although with a deficit of hegemonial cachet Russian too, if such a stance were adopted elsewhere, it could end the vicious cycle of hand-me-down prejudice, superstition and revival abuse that upholds not only evangelicalism but capitalism as well in only a few years, although the counter-forces are strong and well funded, rife with distraction and undermining choice in the same breath as they rubbish expertise.