some distant call
some distant call
I had big plans for this month, but then got ill while I was on annual leave and basically lost a week recovering. So no digital things yet, but I did do a bit of bird photography from my garden. I haven't quite got the hang of it yet, and I don't know if I've got the best equipment for it, but it was fun catching all the wee birds mid-flight like this.
Further Reading
Kelly Pendergrast on Khloé Kardashian’s baffling pantry.
Poison-as-a-Service: Julian Oliver's Science is Poetry site designed to trap AI crawlers and poison their training data.
A short post on public domain review about Virginia Frances Sterrett's incredible illustrations from the 1920's.
Cecile Richard ran a third manifesto jam this month. Some of my favourites:
IAN MARTIN's EXPAND THE POSSIBILITY SPACE - "The things you believe are not a joke."
communistsister's THE ARTIST'S INTENT TO ENJOY IT
Mike Cook's NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR VIDEOGAME
Laura McGee's manifestos deserve numbers manifesto
caeth's Please tell me what to do
And apparently some people were upset there was a manifesto jam? I didn't see any of that, and don't fully grasp what they were upset about, but it spurred Em Reed to write about the ways games (or maybe specifically game dev?) culture has changed since the first manifesto jam. How a kind of desperate professionalism has become the default, squeezing out the weird, the uncommercial, the hobbyist.
"Hello. I am a horse. I work very hard at my job of being a horse. When humans say move the heavy thing, I move the heavy thing. When humans sit on top of me and pull on my head, I carry them where they want to go. The main food the humans give me is hay and oats. But I am thinking it would be nice to have a different food.
An incredible, detailed look at the history of Arabic typography, and why it is still so poorly supported by modern software.
"I’ve seen people joke about adding typos to emails to prove that they wrote them. MS Paint-style image macros read as more human than detailed, funny images (the image could be AI slop). Websites that look intentionally bad are more interesting than websites that look beautifully bland.
Conveying our humanity in the face of LLMs is a hard, new, interesting problem. I’m interested to see what we produce as a result."
"Technology is about humans, and it is not neutral"
A Better World Is Not Possible: A furious, scathing rebuke to a recent biography of the Weather Underground activists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
"The third option, of course, is to try to blow up a police station. To run wild through the streets. To scream and not stop screaming. To do this knowing that you are very likely to lose, that you are certain to be mocked and feared, discredited and persecuted; to endure the relentless, reflexive, and stupid double standard of a cynical world, and die and be forgotten. Or worse: to live a long and inexplicable life, comfortable in your second act once all the legal matters have been resolved, sitting as your son—who clearly loves you—reassures his readers that everything you ever did was just a fit of pique. Sure, the government set millions of people on fire, and sure, they murdered your friends, and yes, they even have tapes, somewhere, of your sister having sex (just in case she shouted out your hiding place mid-coitus), and yes, all of that was bad, no doubt, they shouldn’t have done it, but that the real catastrophe, the real history in need of reckoning, the real beyond the pale radical act is your misguided belief, once upon a time, that you could do anything about it. That you could stop it. That the horror of it all might move you to make a spectacle of your resistance—taking care, each time, to call ahead and warn the switchboard, to make sure the building will be empty when the bomb goes off, lest somebody get hurt while you register your silly, childish discontent."
Well. I have been sitting at a computer all day and I am quite tired, so I will leave you there. Here are some things to tide you over in my absence:
- sparrows
- ox-eye daisies
- Pig Beach
- bees
- the sound of beech trees in an evening summer's breeze
- when the sky falls and the floods come, you won't be alone; people will come help