Category: links

Things being published

• [Digital Poetics 4.13] Three Poems by Lola Olufemi — the87press. Big fan of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.

• Missed the call for this ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) zine, but worth keeping an eye out for the result.

• This image by Richard Littler that can’t be replicated by AI is nuts – the level of detail he’s added in draws attention to the fact that AI (as well as humans, perhaps) is based on generalisaion. I dread to think how long he spent on this though.

Who am I anyway

• Inspiration: Josh Wool on the simplicity of communicating feelings:

"My goal is to strip away anything that takes the focus away from my subject. My tip would be to only do what is necessary to convey the feeling you want in a photograph" (Black & White Photography magazine 200)

Some amazing portraits on his site, such as the one below, but also I’m thinking a bit about how the idea of "feeling" comes first here. How can this be applied to other aspects of life too?

What’s been beeping the radar the last few weeks?

Cross the disciplines

• It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks. – such a good piece looking at the "macho" mindset that still pervades "development" and code in 2024.

• Free Climate Art Worshop with Nicole Kelner – Friday, March 1, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM GMT

Climate and feedback loops and fish food

• How to do climate policy in the age of the green backlash (£FT) – In the words of study co-author Teodora Boneva: “Most of the world’s population wants to fight climate change, but that majority thinks they are the minority.”

• The uninsurable world: what climate change is costing homeowners (£FT) – finally some kind of feedback loop kicking in…

• The hidden cost of your supermarket salmon (£FT)

Energy and efficiency

• Watt-Wise Game Jam – a jam focusing on energy usage and optimisation in gaming

• Scaphandre v1.0 is here : Windows support, IT resources metrics, packaging, and more…

• IFixit: Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea

• Data centres curbed as pressure grows on electricity grids (£FT)

Software security

• Why Bloat Is Still Software’s Biggest Vulnerability – complexity is dangerous.

• I Stopped Using Passwords. It’s Great—and a Total Mess – not using these myself yet, but still using BitWarden a year after signing up.

Random tales

• Game designer Jason Rohrer designs a game meant to be played 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert – mad use of AI, a million lat/lng coordinates, and screen masking to obscure something from the present day.

• Walkers forced to trespass onto open access countryside – real world as battlefield.

• Stroke of genius? How one developer earned over £250k from games made in 30 minutes – less is more? Or there’s a market for everything these days?

Making an effort to post these links more regularly, but my track record for routine isn’t the greatest.

• On the spaghetti monster of midlife. – identifying with this at the moment as I stare into the future. "But I had just enough awareness to see all of this going on and rather than switch back to what I knew or try to find a way to neutralise the feelings, I felt I had to ‘trust the process’ and see where it went."

• James on Nick Cave on Cynicism but also talk by Amy Hupe on the meaning(lessness) of work but also Paul Watson on sci-fi and transitions all tying back in with my earlier post on Hardcore Hope Navigation.

  I mean, there are enough of us thinking about this shit. Why aren’t we collaborating more, huh?

  Oh yeah, I tried revitalising myself with a new personal manifesto too. "22. Never take what you have for granted. Never get used to what you have. Always see with fresh eyes."

• John Cage: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord. Watching the video of the 2020 chord change, I’m appalled that the crowd clapped mid-performance 😉

  … Unrelated, I love the idea of this taking place in a tiny church, but love even more the idea that resilient, solar-powered devices could be hidden away in tiny places to do similar things for decades. Imagine coming across a shrine in the middle of nowhere pumping out drone chords. See also: Brighton’s 1998 Twins Statue that does this.

• Project 2025 on Wikipedia – at least the Right has a coherent plan to conquer the future?

• New directive to empower consumers – what does it mean for repair?

• Local authorities in England face deadline to publish overdue accounts (£FT) and Council financial crisis "out of control", MPs warn. Bigger shit is coming. Seems like a good time to be reading Butler’s Parable of the Sower (which, coincidentally, begins in the year 2024).

Not quite weeklinks, more a 6-month backlog of links. Think I’m going to post these here for a while – at least until I get round to setting up a different personal blog.

Organised by theme, subjective.

Inconvenience

• We should stop worshipping at the altar of convenience (FT)

• Old Computer Challenge from July 2023

• Is the ‘low-maintenance’ garden a myth?

Art and Form

• Anton Repponen’s amazing, scrollable Museum of Online Artifacts

• Oulipo – "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy"

• Haunted by design: how buildings can make us see ghosts

• Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain

• Sanpo Game Devlog (006) – Moving on from "Shuffled World"

• Take in a sunset, a snowstorm or a baby’s cry, and see why AI is no threat to art | Ai Weiwei

Disruption

• Fake plans for three cesspits across city circulate on social media

• Most of the world’s workers are ‘quiet quitters’

• On the future of work, learning, time, and space

• Quit Your Job – "You need far less than you think to live in monk mode and pursue this kind of exploration."

• A “Do More of the Things you Love” tool — Caroline Beavon

• Paul Watson on Being a Serious Artist – relevant to anyone that wants to do anything for reasons other than money, I think

Illusions

• Chief executive of collapsed crypto fund HyperVerse does not appear to exist

• San Serriffe – an April Fools invented island from the Guardian in 1977. I’ll visit one day.

Mindsets

• Engineering Habits of Mind – what are they and how can we cultivate them?

• From Individual Self to Universal Self – It’s not about You

• Out of the Wild – "By pretending to be above nature, we are the only unnatural creature."

• other networks – "… a cluster of projects that document and experiment with networks outside of what’s now called “the internet.”"

• How are you doing? – a visual exploration of self-care.

Infrastructures gone wrong, going wrong

• UK has made dumb mess of £13.5bn smart meter scheme

• Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination, report finds

• AI is making us less environmentally friendly, Google admits

• OpenAI’s GPT-4 safety systems broken by Scots Gaelic

• Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies – The Markup

Long-term Tech

• For ‘Oppenheimer’ 70mm Print, Imax Needed to Write Software to Emulate a 2002 PalmPilot Device to Control Massive Film Platters

• Wii U Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 – Notice regarding the ending of the current maintenance

• Recycling power: man uses 80 discarded vape batteries 'marketed as disposable' to power e-scooter

• New EU Rules: Smartphones and Tablets will follow new ecodesign requirements by June 2025! – Right to Repair Europe

• “The Fairphone experiment is changing the tech industry.”

• The Performance Inequality Gap, 2024 – Website sizes, load times, and device performance