a poet and didn’t know it

Our sincere gratitude to Nag on the Lake for introducing us to the rather remarkable troubadour known as Poetweet that will cull one’s Twitter feed for lyrical snippets and combine them into one of three poetic forms. We were really impressed with the eye-rhyme that it found amongst our twiterpation, pairing fascist with Zeitgeist or “a send away service for souvenirs” with “and their houses in dire need of repairs,” but I think we write about too many non-sequitir things to get an authentic couplet—and that gave us an idea. Granted Dear Leader is a sub-literate sophist and a general menace to language in any capacity, Poetweet was nonetheless also willing to take the dotard’s handle and make him sound a bit like a bard. Give it a try yourself at the links above.

we don't deserve nice things

This post is maybe too morose and dejected for a fair early Autumn Friday morning, and though only learning of this particularly photogenic Swedish tree’s existence and demise, the episode struck a chord within me and how celebrity is a crisis of character. Naturally the Broccoli Tree did not seek out the fame that led to its destruction—that was the senseless vandalism of some Herostratic offender, but it nonetheless became too famous to be left alone. So called Hugs of Death usually don’t have physical targets but adoration amplified can have lethal consequences and seeing what became of this pretty tree seems a very powerful and poignant reminder of the dangers and responsibilities of stardom—especially the self-propelled variety.

memory hole

An archive dedicated to delving through a quarter of a century of radio talk shows to cull nihilistically embarrassing interviews between the provocative host and Dear Dotard has been silenced with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) order to cease and desist.
The broadcaster that is the rightful owner of this catalogue—and the investigative archivists ought to be lauded for their stamina as the original recordings were cringe-worthy enough without the abject horror knowing that America would one day elevate this D-List celebrity to high office—is refusing to air these back episodes, but if it changed its mind the Washington, DC-based litigant would happily drop its challenge. The intellectual property owners feel that Trump’s words might be too easily taken out of context and argue that there is no way to bolster the sessions with enough background to constitute a fair-use case—that is, deeming it research or of journalistic merit. These factors and shrill cries of infringement, of course stand in sharp contrast to the special dispensation afforded Trump for his entertainment value despite the fact his deportment clearly violates company policies on libellous and abusive speech. Dear Dotard has not just threatened North Korea with destruction via his medium of choice but has repeated hurled hateful and violent insults at individuals and whole groups of people that would merit a lifelong banishment.

6x6

1995: a retrospective of the first five web applications that informed the internet as we know it, via Waxy

travelling matte: a thirty kilometre long art project for train passengers between Jena and Naumburg

bellerophon: incredible Roman mosaic discovered by amateur archaeologists in the Cotswolds

lay of the land: different proposals for visualising maps and daily journeys through the lens of time

mona lisas and mad hatters: other Elton John songs that Dear Leader uses to refer to world leaders

phase shift: pumping air through sand makes it behave like a liquid, first spotted here  

6x6

hello, I am a bear: ursine pondering and poetry, via Dave Log

alles in ordnung: German government being sublimely dull

down in the underground: the forgotten catacombs underneath Brussels, via Messy Nessy Chic

muted: hushed and concise social media is reviving the cinematography of the silent film

orbit city: celebrating the life and work of Gin Wong, the architect who inspired The Jetsons

adult swim: synchronised images of Soviet-era public pools

6x6

all the lonely people: the backstory of Eleanor Rigby and a chance to own a rather macabre piece of Beatles’ memorabilia, via Nag on the Lake

nuda veritas: the murals of Gustav Klimt re-enacted with live models, via the Everlasting Blört

poker face: lessons from a professional player that apply to life outside of the game

weblog: eulogising Jerry Pournelle, who was not only the first to write a book solely on a computer but also one of the pioneering bloggers

field guide: understanding the symbols of hate may prove empowering in shaping the trajectory of society for the better

enduring mystery: those claims of having deciphered the Voynich Manuscript were a mix of unprovable claims and already surmised details  

stop the presses

Though sometimes expository headlines and news segments in film can make for lazy story-telling, we’re rather enamoured with Movie Heds, introduced to us by the always marvellous Nag on the Lake. We’re given the license to reclaim our fake news as a narrative arc by pausing to appreciate the layout and formatting that’s gone into fictional copy-editing.

bizarre love triangle

The Spanish commercial photographer that took the image of a boyfriend with a wondering eye, as Super Punch informs, is surprised but unconcerned (so long as decorum is maintained) by how one of his staged stock photos has gone viral and is fodder for the meme-mill.  The prolific self-taught entrepreneur has used the same trio of models in most of his compositions taken over the past five years, stringing their affairs into one epic soap opera story-board.

algorithmic engagement

We’ve previously explored numerous times how fraught social media is with manipulative and inscrutable sets of instructions that determine what content one is presented—or confronted with—that has led to people bemoaning the changes in myriad ways. We ought not be so obsessed with what’s hot off the presses but missives can grow stale and many times pledges and opinion do not age well—and it’s a psychological distressing struggle that a billion denizens charge towards daily and mostly fail by the hour.  People rate what comes across as an asynchronous jumble from a nuisance when they’d just care to experience events chronologically without some strange dream sequences or unbidden flashbacks to something more sinister when something from weeks and months past is unearthed.
Considering the geopolitical climate of the present, however, it seems that the war for our attention is going far beyond the vaguely menacing to the patently terrorising insofar as the figurative war is being translated into very real ones in the name of optimising revenue and we lose on both fronts. Online engagement is perhaps its own apotheosis in reality, but sensationalism distorts our perception of threats and given that our experience across all demographics is necessarily either dogmatic and doctrinaire or impressionable because of the limits of what we can know and can take part in have suddenly been made rather unlimited and the propagandists were the first on the scene.

blogoversary

Remarkably on this day nine distant years ago, PfRC began as a little travelogue. Still wanting for a theme and some direction some four thousand posts later, we hope to continue making it worth your while to visit for years to come. Here are our top ten most viewed posts of all-time for your consideration, the rankings possibly being somewhat skewed due to gentle vandalism (or shameless self-promotion) but such is the architecture of things on-line, we suppose:

10: a recipe for a vegetarian shawarma sandwich

9: a collection of links from April of 2017

8: discovering the Germanic Yuletide demon and friends

7: civic disengagement does not correlate with religiosity

6: a Russian parking garage employs holograms to discourage able-bodied drivers from occupying handicapped spaces

5: the tenants of ´pataphysics and its discontents

4: socio-realism in art movements

3: a periodic table of typefaces

2: some office-place ephemera of the Satanic panic of the 1980s

 1: a collection of links from November 2011






Thanks for stopping by and making this hobby an enriched and rewarding experience.  Please stay tuned for continued curiosities and adventures.
 

5x5

in your feed: BBC Culture recommends five-and-twenty arts and history podcasts with recommended episodes to try on for size

qvc: Dear Leader launches a propaganda network with weekly praise-a-thons as a refreshing alternative to fake news

automata: governments issuing guidelines to encourage manufacturers to redress lax security for smart cars and the internet of things

store brand: having accumulated billions of data points on sales, giant retail emporium turns, covertly, to selling its own line of products

zeitgeist: apps and internet dating platforms had already become part of the culture with two clubs in 1920s Berlin that facilitated flirtation via anonymised pneumatic tube, via Messy Nessy Chic

retrolithic

Geoff Manaugh’s latest speculative piece in BLDGBlog that turns over the aesthetics of civil engineering to an algorithm that has demonstrated a knack for the scenic initially made me think of another trail of a neural network plucking idyllic postcards from vast collections of unprocessed data, but the examination went deeper to question what these heralded breakthroughs in artificial intelligence might mean when the gauge of their success is our hazy ideal.
Humans own sense of taste and proportion are in turn thought to be informed, like our myths and oral traditions, by surveying the plains of Africa and learning that certain configurations of contour and shading invite prey and shelter—and are in tour reflected in the art and landscaping that we find unconsciously resonant. Advertisers exploit these sort of backdrops all the time to draw us in—or at least not to offend by choosing something anodyne and universal. What do you think? I do admit that in a moment of laziness recently that has since proven quite serendipitous and worth repeating I have turned to a PfRC site-specific image search to try to pick illustrations to go with some posts that I don’t have a specific for. With over four thousand articles and more photographs (mostly confusingly captioned or labelled), I’d prefer to recycle one of my own—especially pictures I’ve taken myself rather than accumulating more, I restrict the search criteria to this site and tell the search engine a few topics in the post, and I’ll get results like the one pictured—which is exactly what I had in mind. If our digital amanuensis and analyst is only rewarded for being a feed-back loop that draws on our oldest comforts neither side is challenged and the process seems like atrophy rather than growth.

the prisoners’ dilemma

Of course the online world is not reality—though sometimes that fact is easy to overlook—but the interactive demonstration, The Evolution of Trust by Nicky Case, is a good heuristic tool not only for exploring how relationship of trust and the opposite are cultivated but also an appreciation of the frameworks and experiences that prompt and promote cooperation.
Models of conflict and optimising agents can be structured to persuade people to have confidence in one another that one’s not seeking profit at the expense of another but they can also be created (and perhaps it’s easier to digest psychologically as general mistrust given the pace of the internet and nature of interaction) where cheating is the best strategy. The internet entire isn’t rigged like that, but suspicions are justified—especially it seems against a milieu that’s being manipulative in inscrutable ways. The canonical prisoner’s dilemma that the iterative game’s set up (but updated and couched in more familiar experiences) is premised upon posits that two members of a criminal gang are caught and incarcerated and put in solitary confinement (no way to communicate or form a strategy with one another). Due to insufficient evidence, there’s a possibility for them both to have the sentences commuted, but are separately give the opportunity to either betray the other by profession his own innocence or remain silent (thick as thieves). If they betray each other, they both are sentenced and if one betrays the other, one goes free and the other goes to prison, while if they both are truthful, they both are released.

conjuring

It’s always frustrating when I go to download an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross and end up summoning a demon. Is anyone else experiencing this? After this opening interlude, the show proceeded as normal—and we suspect that the currently available version has been duly exorcised—and was a really good one, in fact, with a profile of the performer and composer behind the quite timely School House Rock! number “I’m Just a Bill” and a captivating deconstruction of The Doors’ “Light my Fire.”

that’s kind of a downer

Via Waxy, we’re acquainted with Inspirobot, whose purpose is to supply “unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for the endless enrichment of otherwise pointless human existence,” and while the de-motivational posters the algorithm generates are not that dark—at least from a cursory interaction—I think we are privileged witnesses to the moment when the robots just took away the jobs of those seemingly employed to disseminate similarly snarky (or well-intended) content on social media. I’m guessing that the genuinely inspiring might present more of a challenge to construct but possibly not. Hang in there, baby!

wayback machine

Brilliantly, as Waxy informs, the Internet Archive (previously here and here) is curating daily snapshots of a dozen of major internet properties (CNN, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon, the BBC, Yahoo! News, et al.) of how these web sites looked a decade ago. The historical chronicle elicits a sense of nostalgia and contextualises where we stand now.

dustbin, doxbin

Though generally only perceived as a vaguely threatening presence by pets, it turns out that for the past few years robotic vacuums, in their quest to optimise navigating the terrain of one’s home, have also been collecting that telemetry and reporting back to the mother-ship in order for those maps to be sold on to marketers to formulate better-focused furniture advertisements (or scare families into investing in security services) and model virtual smart-houses. Or simply to judge our taste in décor. These domestic double-agents that we welcome into our lives highlights one way that technologies are no longer ours to exploit and benefit from as tools, but rather the merchants of attention undermine our relationship with computers and machines by supplanting it with some Pavlovian bond of button-mashing and push-notifications. What do you think? Albeit arguably robot vacuums are a time-saving convenience but coordination and connectedness come with a cost and perhaps the autonomous appliance market is reaching its true economical zenith—again, not as an instrument or amusement but as pusher, staking out its beat, like that craze with augmented reality games which helped plot out previously uncharted demographics.

foreshortening or draw me like one of your french girls

We were having too much fun with Heloisa’s quite photo-realistic renderings of the felines in her life to not share this delightful discovery by friend of the blog Nag on the Lake. Indeed, one shouldn’t judge another’s sense of perspective and place before getting a look at the artist’s models. Check out more poorly drawn cats at the links a
bove.

pro-bono or controlling-share

Rather than yielding to investor demands that the social media giant sell out to the highest bidder and thus loose its independent voice (Yahoo! was once offered the Facebook and where are they now?), I thought that a government, like the tech-haven Iceland, ought to swoop in and operate Twitter for the public good, sort of like an NPR of socials.
Despite the ability of Twitter to turn a profit, those charged with maximising returns are sensing the opportunity for a windfall—however that’s reckoned in business terms. There is another avenue to explore, as Boing Boing informs, that may be for the good of all stakeholders in allowing the users to take it over (in the sense of financial stewardship) and run it as a cooperative venture. As the proposal points out, and not being a follower of the sports ball really, I would have never appreciated the genius of this model, there’s a parallel to be found in the premier status that the small town of Green Bay in the state of Wisconsin has retained over all these years and the last of its kind. The Packers (named for Acme tinned meat company) are owned by their fans and have never been the playthings of billionaire investors. What do you think? Greed tempers censorship as much as any other ideology.

cocktail hour

Discerning gourmand Nag on the Lake had two successive food and drinks posts that paired very well together indeed. First, there were the exquisite still-lives of artist Greg Stroube who imagined how the Renaissance masters might depict a Bloody Mary or a Lime Rickey with all its garnish and the hyper-realistic detail of Bellini (also the name of a cocktail, Prosecco and peach nectar) or Vermeer.
These delights of and for the palette are then served up with a selection of sumptuous recipes from the mind of Salvador Dalí from a cookbook being reissued over forty years after its first and only print run. The surreal and bizarre cult cookbook called Les Diners de Gala has over a hundred illustrated recipes—of the strange and decadent variety, like toffee and pinecones or frog pastries. Be sure to indulge more delectable delights on Nag on the Lake.