vintage obscura

Gleaning the rarities of world music from popular sources this radio station—with a simple protocol of a few criteria—rotates through taste-expanding repertoire of tracks of limited exposure and have been recorded or released at least a quarter century prior—which is presently pre-1996. Give them a listen live and review their entire growing playlist.

7x7

70% côte d’ivoire, 66% cyprus, 65% republic of ireland: doodle world flags and let a computer guess—via Web Curios  

peaky finders: a selection of interactive mapping application still functional and chugging along a decade later  

cult of the sun: a look at the Athon, a 1980 Lamborghini concept car  

ss experiment: an unsuccessful ferry, powered by eight horses on a treadmill  

astronomia: a lovely antique deck of playing cards with celestial charts and information on the planets and stars 

flsa: US congressional representation introducing legislation for a four-day work week—see previously here and here  

google doodle: a selection of the best commemorative banners—via Things Magazine

after dark

Via Boing Boing, we are directed to a suite of classic screen-saver recreations in Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) mark-up language in homage to Berkeley Systems’ Flying Toasters, Randomiser and other visualisations. For some time, my default snooze or sleep mode has been a gallery of our pictures but it’s fun to cultivate and reconfigure settings periodically, like swapping out ringtones and other sound-effects.  Find more projects from Brian Braun at his website.

the treachery of images

We really enjoyed these philosophical Captchas (see also) from the always brilliant Jason Kottke that in addition to referencing, name-dropping the classical metaphysical conundrum of Heraclitus and Plato in the Ship of Theseus also appeals to René Magritte.

8x8

autobus park № 7: explore Kyiv’s derelict modernist transportation hippodrome—via Things Magazine  

blue: listen to rediscovered demos and outtakes from Joni Mitchell’s album on its fiftieth anniversary 

i’m chasing martian: excellent auditory illusion illustrated—see previously—from chanting fans  

dark matter, dark fish: the overwhelming biomass of Earth’s ecosystem is essentially undetectable for us (see also) yet we claim the right to rubbish it  

warriors of the zenith, warriors of the nadir: a 1904 ethnograph of Zuni ritual masks  

work-life balance: Japanese government proposes four-day work-week  

shareware: a look at the App Store’s predecessor, Software Labs  

private viewing: the collectors who saved modernist Soviet masterpieces

iso 646

Considered one of the early and foundational milestones in electronics engineering and developed as an offshoot of telegraphic encoding (see previously here and here), the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was first published by the American Standards Association (ASA—presently organised as the American Nation Standards Institute, ANSI) on this day in 1963. Its application in linking networks of machines was formalised and demonstrated by 1969 (see also) and has been since elevated to an internet standard, undergoing multiple revisions from conception through 2017. Initially recognised for its ability to aid in sorting list, character order is called ASCIIbetical and the collating sequence of data puts numbers and punctuation before letters and upper carriage letters before their smaller versions. While ASCII is constrained to a character set of only one hundred twenty eight, it is rolled into the larger and more inclusive, international Unicode standard.

8x8

what sophistry is this: Mark Liberman discusses the rhetoric of “elevated stupidity” 

truly toastmasters: a virtual toaster museum with fine exhibits from many eras and manufacturers  

water shrews: the BBC Science & Environment desk examines these superb divers of this large group of insectivores called collectively Eulipotyphla, “the truly fat and blind”—via Super Punch 

les cités obscures: revisiting the imaginative utopias of architect Luc Schuiten (previously)  

games for crows: like Where’s Waldo but with emoji—via Waxy red rover: Zhurong Mars explorer sends a selfie  

letragraphia: the sleek, revolutionary graphic design of Felix Beltrán

urbane dictionary: a gloss of cancel-culture terminology

alugalug

This short musical arrangement, a collaboration by the artist The Kiffness first building on the strange mleping vocalisation of a cat and then six other musicians from around the world contributing their own tonal layers transformed that initial sound into something viral and epic—making us think of the cumulative, repetitive one-movement orchestral piece by Maurice Ravel, Boléro. This talented crew I imagine could even set Aluglug to the tune and timing of the 1928 classical composition.

pups unlimited

Having recently learned about one individual’s ahead of its time efforts to create an all puppy cable channel for relaxing active viewing or comforting background noise that unfortunately never had its day though has been later realised a hundred-times over with a sorts of niche sites and moments of indulgence, we could appreciate arriving at this one venue via Pasa Bon! that fulfils the original vision. The platform allows one to cycle through the looping footage of dozens of dogs and puppies behaving in characteristically cute and charming ways. Below was the proposed station identification jingle for the sadly never established Puppy Channel.

8x8

such good: a dating app based on shared meme-affinity  

boulevard du crime: a lost Parisien theatre district that specialised in putting on felonious melodramas 

lion city rising: photographer Keith Loutit captures eight years of change in Sinagpore  

lunachicks: a flamboyant punk rock group who are a product of unvarnished New York  

broodclipjes: more fun with twist-ties and related species (see previously)—from Pasa Bon!  

horological constraints: the typography of watches—see also  

 profiles in pride: World of Wonder showcases some of the gay rights movement’s pioneers (see also), starting with Frank Kamey of the DC Mattachine Society  

masterpieces of streaming: a collection of the subtle genius of dumb viral videos—via Waxy

� or code point blank

Specials or replacement characters are shunted to the very end of Unicode allocations to act as a substitute for an otherwise unrepresentable glyph (see previously here and here). The garbled text that can result from bad decoding and false rendering is referred to mojibake (文字化け). Though the effects are most catastrophic across different writing systems, languages that use the extended Latin alphabet assigned the character set “Western” or ISO-8859-1 encounter problems as well with the Icelandic praise for outstanding hospitality þjóðlöð transmitted as the unintelligible mess þjóðlöð or some other character string likely to break one’s computer.

stack overflow

Released on this this day in cinemas in 1995, the Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren dystopian science-fiction adaptation of the eponymous William Ford Gibson cyberpunk novel, the film takes place in 2021 with global population deeply and irretrievably engaged with an augmented reality internet which has a debilitating long-term effect called “nervous attenuation syndrome” (NAS) and transfer and transmission of data is closely controlled by mega-corporations who enforce their hegemony through the mafia.

Reeves’ character is a mnemonic courier discreetly transports data, avoiding traffic on the worldwide web, with an implant in his brain, and is entrusted with the safekeeping and eventually uploading into the public domain documents that reveal the corporations’ connections with organised crime and the computer virus that will return power and autonomy to the people, teaming up with the Lo-Teks under the leadership of J-Bone, played by Ice-T, a mysterious female projection of an omnipresent digital assistant and a genetically enhanced dolphin with abilities to break any encryption.

triptych

Via friend of the blog Everlasting Blört, we thoroughly enjoyed pouring of the details of Carla Gannis’ 2014 digital art project that replaces the

religious allegory and iconography of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (see previously here and here) with a more secular and contemporary vernacular, the collage exploring modern vanities and consumerism. Much more at the links above and the short video on the exhibition below. Check out all three panels compared with the original and let us know your favourite emoji substitutions.

digital minoritization

In a valiant effort to save their native language from obsolescence by the dominance of English not just as a global lingua franca but also as the default of technology and media within and without their horizons, a middle-school class in Reykjavík paradoxically represents both the cause of Icelandic’s endangerment but also its potential salvation. As savvy and confident as the students are in global English (there are far more so called non-native speakers than those that live in the UK and former colonies that Indians and Icelanders have as much claim as Australians and Americans) they couldn’t conceive of an Iceland without Icelandic and are training, at the urging of their teacher, to recite, to incant, the Prose Edda, the epic of Snorri Sturluson to their laptops and tablets, in order that one day—eventually—the computer answers back, in Icelandic, and save the language from stafrænn dauði, digital death.

9x9

segmentation and targeting: A/B testing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—see also 

light house customer: we appreciated the chance to revisit a new and improved version Lights at Sea—via Nag on the Lake—both times  

nice.walk.ruined: award-winning global addressing scheme what3words (previously) subject to some juvenile humour with locations mapped in smutty language, both real and bespoke  

isotopia: a high-brow 1950 ballet and pantomime presented to the steering committee of the Atomic Energy Association to extol nuclear power from Weird Universe  

apartment d3: seven printed homes around the world  

l’art de payer ses dettes et de satisfaire ses créanciers san débourser un sou: credit culture in nineteenth century France 

alpha version: drag and drop personal, old school websites from mmm—via Kicks Condor 

sovietwave radio: broadcasting a selection of the sub-genre’s best space age and syntho-pop—via Dark Roasted Blend 

the writers’ block: a suite in Chelsea Carlyle mansion home to Henry James, T. S. Eliot and Ian Fleming on the market

nighty-nite

Via Boing Boing, we are referred to a simple, self-coordinating, synchronising programme conceived by Masamichi Souzou, a company championing happiness and well-being, that allows one to put to bed their website—according to the visitors’ time-zones, the kanji top-level domain suffix, みんな, being everyone—like a physical store or business branch with workers who need rest and recuperation and signal the importance of adequate sleep and highlight the forces and diversions that make us indebted in terms of something so fundamental as adequate shut-eye.

cheugy

Though hard to define—via the morning news—with a throughline connecting wine moms, Hogwart’s houses, gender reveal parties and the benevolent narcissism of adulting, binge-watching reruns and their inherent advertising—all these things having nothing in common yet somehow everything, the aesthetic—pronounced chew-GEE, strikes one as something one’s dog could be accused of as much as any one of us (as much as, recursively, the term itself), the opposite of trendy but not borne out of rebellion. Not quite judgmental or condemnatory, it’s a mechanism, a term created to distance ourselves from something once wildly popular then suddenly not. Cheug is a spectrum and I’m sure we all have our particular pet tastes that have come and gone and there is no harm in that.

third eye blind

Industrial designer Minwook Paeng has created a prototype prosthetic eye that is meant to keep vigil whilst the wearer is fiddling if their phone to help prevent distracted pedestrians from getting in accidents themselves and becoming a nuisance or threat to others sharing their space. Automatically awaking once it detects the head is tilted downward and the neck slumped—possibly also a good posture re-enforcer—and buzzes to warn one of approaching obstacles, the satirical though appreciable in application project examines how phono-sapiens are evolving and our relations to our gadgets and accessories. More to explore from Dezeen at the link up top.

9x9

why are you still here: our houses get sick of us never leaving too—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to see here)  

fake id: the unfortunately inevitable rise of counterfeit vaccination credentials  

disaster girl: meme as NFT (previously) nets a half-million dollars at auction 

comically overwrought: an oral history of the Crying Dawson gif  

resident evil village: games company produced a musical, gory puppet show to promote its latest instalment  

sunshine state: Florida will make it illegal for social media to deplatform politicians, with a especial carve-out for Disney—via Slashdot  

euphonium: found poetry in the history of acoustic waves  

web curios: Waxy lets us know that the fine and well-connected newsletter returns after a sabbatical of nine months with the folding of Imperia   

windows on the world: artwork by Liam Cobb that fills one with Wanderlust—via the morning news

colin’s bear revisited

Andy Baio at Waxy noticed a viral resurgence of an animated dance moves of a thirteen-year-old short clip, rediscovered and remixed though sadly without any deference to the creator—which Baio seeks to remedy the record by recontextualising and exploring the evolution of the meme that untethered certainly carries the sentiment idk—ive never seen the show its from. Whatever iteration you prefer, you can make your own joyful celebration of International Dance Day, held annually of this day, marking the birthday (1727) of Jean-Georges Noverre, creator of modern ballet.