stalkie talkie

Via Things Magazine, we are presented with this quite dystopian and invasive catalogue of playthings with the hallmark of being highly addictive by design following the form of manipulation. Age-inappropriate, there’s data-hungry aggregate Pocket Troll, Fishing for Likes and a grab-bag of Mystery Friends to be foisted on all and sundry, aged nine to ninety-nine.

pair bonding

Endearingly, Kottke brings us the story of the requited courtship and romance of zookeeper Chris Crowe and his non-corvid bird wife, Walnut—a spry twenty-three year-old white-named crane, the former earning the latter’s affections despite being a rather lacking (by avian standards) mate and life partner.

net promoter score

Incredulously and with much the same hubris and spirit that the American baseball commission calls its big annual play-off the World Series (it’s not) or organisers an international beauty pageant Miss Universe (she’s not), we learn thanks to the always authentic and as-advertised Miss Cellania that unsurprisingly there’s not only no US airline placing in the top ten globally, because America can’t rise to the challenge to compete on the world-wide stage, there’s a separate ranking for North American airlines. The US doesn’t even manage to sweep this category with Air Canada placing third.

7x7

kádár cube: a practical, mass-produced boxy house (Magyar Építőművészet) from Communist-era Hungary is staging a comeback 

the new english canaan: revisiting the banned publication that mocked American’s puritanical ways—see also  

you’ve got a habit of leaving: the first single from the unreleased David Bowie album, coming in January

merfolk and melusine: tritons and mermaids entertained by enlightened minds 

facebookland: the social media giant ought to be treated like the autocratic rogue state it is—via Waxy 

roll over beethoven: a team of musicologists using artificial intelligence complete the composer’s unfinished tenth symphony—to premier in Bonn next month, via Kottke  

гостиный двор: a rotating arch for a shopping arcade in St. Petersburg—via Pasa Bon!

the woodcutter

Faithfully conserved by Kicks Condor by making an archival backup of the interactive artistic exploration that relies on the sunset rich web application Flash protocol by comic milieu pioneer and author of the early web classic (with cul-de-sacs and hidden corners to poke and prod) launched in 1997 by Josh Kimberg, utilising preservation projects that matured sufficiently for the task at hand which would otherwise see large swaths of the foundational and essentially experimental internet lost to the ages. Aside from the impression that The Woodcutter made for contemporary discoverers, Kimberg’s creative collective Bullseye Art created many early web cartoons as well as the opening title sequence for The Rosie O’Donnell Show, twice Emmy-nominated and the first Flash work to air on television.

rewilding ones attention

Via Things Magazine, we quite enjoyed this essay by Clive Thomas expounding on the above maxim from CJ Eller to stray from the algorithmic path, to step off of the hedonistic treadmill by cultivating diversity in what one allows inside. The nature of what goes viral—even if it’s pedestrian and unviral—is in the subterfuge in not noticing ourselves how much mind we’re giving it, and we owe it to ourselves to at least be aware of how we’re otherwise pigeon-holed and exert the effort to seek out those smaller sensations. We agreed that rewilding was a fitting and lucid way to describe what we aspire to appreciate and explore.

the dead internet theory

On this anniversary which has propounded two Forever Wars (one of which capitalised on the 9/11 terror attacks to as a pretext to invade Iraq with the media mostly obliging, a misdirection that prised open for some a credibility chasm), the panopticon of the surveillance state, xenophobia, sectarianism, intolerance, violence, bloodshed all at a very dear price with the most treacherous legacy perhaps being the exportable cult of conspiracy theorists that first emerged as Truthers, then morphed into Birthers, Pizzagate, QAnon and whatever atrocity is next in the line of succession, we are presented a new one positing that the world wide web, acknowledging that the majority of traffic is bot driven, did die the death approximately five years ago and what remains is not all an elaborate hoax but rather a platform almost entirely dominated by artificial intelligence. Weighted interaction, with human engagement or robotic attention-seeking seems to matter little ultimately in a world of detached rankings and recursive references, but what if since 2016, the web and its various walled-gardens was depopulated and replaced with neural network propagandists, influencers and marketers? It’s patently ridiculous and like most “independent research” lurches to the territory of unhinged and offensive but the veiled unreality of it all makes it intriguing and a challenge to disprove, and with no prevailing mainstream narrative to counter the arc of conservation, evidence, it is garnering traction. There’s more than a kernel of truth to the manipulative, unrestrained and inhumanly automated nature of social media and shadow profiles created to supplement the personalities of those who don’t participate sufficiently. Not that the metaverse was ever particularly welcoming, it certainly seems uninviting if made by and for people-pleasing machines.

kermit the forg

Thankfully spared this conspiracy theory when it first gained currency and spread memetically, the implication that Kermit the Frog was somehow responsible for the 9/11 Terror Attacks though crass and callous through its ridiculousness (and possibly one of the more pallatable suggestions regarding second-guessing investigative commissions and expert testimony), excelling beyond others in terms of unreality and detachment, does yield some insights into how these ideas form and take hold. The idea stems from a continuity error spotted in a made-for-television retelling of It’s A Wonderful Life aired in 2002. Having wished he were never born after failing to save their theatre, Kermit finds himself in an alternate reality and encountering familiar friends who have taken decidedly different career-paths absent Kermit’s influence. Visiting a decidedly spinsterish Miss Piggy, the Twin Towers are clearly visible from her apartment window for a brief moment, leading some to conclude that in a parallel timeline where there is no Kermit or Muppet Show, there would be no terror attack, assigning blame in this counter-factual situation to a puppet. It’s cringeworthy of course but I wonder how some of our contemporary explanations invoking sinister forces will age. More at MEL Magazine at the link up top.

tales of the old web

Via Web Curios, which has been an absolute wealth of Wunderkammer ideas lately, we discover a repository of the old, weird internet of mostly personal webpages that despite link-rot, abandonment and isolation have endured in a discoverable state since the mid- to late 1990s curated by 404Pagefound, an established source that’s been gathering moribund websites going on seven years but new to us. Browse through the exhibitions—all clickable and not archived—and do some time-travelling in Web 1.0.

6x6

this slaps: the Kiffness and friends (see previously) remixes the little melody of a harmonica playing rat—debuting here

à la recherché du temps perdu: wondering how Marcel Proust’s Instagram might look is a pathway into memory in the age of social media 

melts in your mouth: the long and cursed history of the sexy green M&M—via Things Magazine  

development hell: scores of unfinished films that we would watch  

sit a spell: a visual essay on the American porch 

latch-mediated spring actuation: scientists engineer a robot that packs the wallop of the powerful punch of the mantis shrimp

6x6

slough off old skins: the rise and demise of an Internet Onion—via Kicks Condor  

posture pals: a gallery of awkward, outstanding stances  

gravy boat: kitschy vintage table settings  

a little pick-me-up: the lovely Flowers for Sick People project by Tucker Nichols—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links  

news at eleven: screen grabs of 1990s reporting captions  

more like a simile: an experiment searching the web with AI contextualised natural language—via Web Curios

you give me fasciation

Our gratitude to our peripatetic pal Memo of the Air for directing us to this updated re-post from TYWKIWDBI that we managed to miss earlier that gives a little more background on the backstory of a Stevie Nicks’ classic we’ve covered previously by way of contorted, cresting displays of growth in certain kinds of plants, included the celebrated saguaro of central and southwestern North America with wasps, bees and white-winged doves counted among their important daytime pollinators.

help wanted

Again via Waxy and vis-à-vis yesterday’s post about ARGs, side-quests and scavenger hunts, we are directed towards this delightful interactive job listing (in the tradition of The Last Starfighter) from multimedia artist and entrepreneur Danielle Baskin to help find an ideal collaborator, also hiding floppy discs around San Francisco like an ad in the classifieds.

7x7

the dance of the proletariat: a cultural revolutionary ballet 

reefer madness: an excerpt from “Cocaine, the Princess of Perdition” (1939)  

beef and dairy network: a 1986 board game called “Grade Up to Elite Cow” 

music to moog by: Melbourne’s Electronic instrument museum  

old growth: an anthology of the most memorable trees in the literary canon  

ambiguate: a notable lacuna, lexical gap for a word that ought to have been formed 

rhythm is a dancer: a comprehensive dance music archive covering the recent past—via Things Magazine

7x7

wait for the beep: a growing collection of found-sounds in the form of answering machine narratives—via Memo of the Air  

potatopoty: superlative tubers  

yaxety sax: string ensemble performs the 1968 instrumental from Spider Rich and Boots Randolph 

the metz address: Philip K. Dick (previously) speaks to an audience in 1977 at a sci-fi convention in France 

say taliban, move your minivans: November 2001 Saturday Night Live sketch “Kandahar Dance Party” recirculating to mixed responses 

dateline: Merv Griffin’s short-lived 1985 game show Headline Chasers  

dear friends of mine, please write a line in this little wash tubbs book of mine—help me keep you in my mind: a comic scrapbook chronicling the Great Depression, via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to see there)

happy blogoversary—we are now thirteen years old

As PfRC passes this milestone, we wanted to again extend our gratitude to our readership for your encouragement and sustaining interest, and hope that we’ve given you all something to pique your curiosity and aspire to keep the internet engaging and old school.

Since our last celebration, here are the most popular posts:

10. An entry about the pirate broadcaster Radio Caroline



9. The “Washington Wives” call for the Parents’ Music Resource Center


8. General Motors commissions a trio of pro-capitalist propaganda cartoons during the height of the Red Scare



7. An entry comparing emojis for ringed planets




6. Live-tweeting revolutions, from previous years’ top ten.




5. Speculation about the etymology of OK, also from past years.



4. A cross-post from Art for Housewives about author and journalist Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife



3. A treasury of typographical and graphic design resources curated by the Internet Archive




2. A post looking at Cyrillic numerals


1. Tying for number one are a duo of posts about the equal sign, one reminding us to practise social distance and about the advent of the glyph itself


Salutations to all of you and wishing you nothing but the best for the balance of 2021.

adoxography

Brilliantly the titular term is derived from the New Latin for paradoxical, in turn from the Ancient Greek obscure (ἀ + δόξα = against expectations), and in rhetoric refers to refined writing on minor, trivial or base subjects or praise of things of dubious value or the exercise thereof beginning with the revival of the art of loquacious, persuasive speech with the pivotal publication of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly (Moriæ Encomium). Surveying the field in classical and contemporary education, a non-exhaustive list unworthy subjects of erudition included ageing, infirmities, promiscuity and pests.

7x7

event horizon: unlike planets or stars, the size of black holes are not limited by physical constraints  

peg and pulley: a compelling argument to revive the cross-building washing line—via Pasa Bon!  

alien dreams: uncannily creative art from AIs—via Waxy 

bertilak de hautdesert: a highly recommended retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—see previously 

the greater fool theory: also called survivor investing, on the origins of value, margin calls and fiat currency—see previously  

thirteen things: a truly outstanding round-up from a fellow internet caretaker, including an indoor-outdoor bath tub on rails, pineapple cheese and a chameleon tape-measure 

intercluster medium: a galaxy-sized cloud of gas out floating in splendid isolation

netscape navigator

We enjoyed contemplating these social media properties featured in Print Magazine reimagined with retro trappings of the late nineties and early noughts (see also) from website builder Zyro. Though nostalgia is not the best impulse to reach for and those Golden Ages are illusory, we liked the subtle indictment of the platforms that ruined the internet and society at large.

wag the dog

From the always engaging Language Hat, which just turned nineteen years old, we learn that the above phrase has a specific origin (see previously here, here and here) and can in print be sourced to the rather infamous 1858 play by Tom Taylor Our American Cousin (a boorish American comes to England as claimant to an estate—think King Ralph) and a scene with the characters Lord Dundreary and Florence: “Now I’ve got another. Why does a dog waggle his tail?” “Upon my word, I’ve never inquired.” “Because the tail can’t waggle the dog. Ha!” Familiar with the performance and audience reaction, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin timed his gun shot to be muted by laughter when the eponymous cousin Asa Trenchard says to Missus Mountchessington: “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well—I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old man-trap!” More philological investigations at the link up top.