Allison's bookmarks (2020 archive)

Most recent

On Wrong Love: A Response to the Geoffrey H. Nicholson Controversy

"...however vulnerable the situation of transphobia makes us to the pain of wrong love, however vulnerable trans people are to abuse from cisgender partners, wrong love is not a trans problem. It is not a chaser problem. It is a problem everyone has; it is the problem that systems of meaning-making as diverse as heterosexual marriage, political lesbianism, and T4T sexuality all attempt to safeguard against."

trans gender sexuality culture

Alt-Text as Poetry

"Alt-text is an essential part of web accessibility. It is often overlooked or understood through the lens of compliance, as an unwelcome burden to be met with minimum effort. How can we instead approach alt-text thoughtfully and creatively?" (presented at wordhack dec 2020)

accessibility web text poetics poetry

Karrik

"Karrik is an open source typeface designed by Jean-Baptiste Morizot and Lucas Le Bihan. This font was originally commissioned by ‘Cercle’ magazine for their 2020 issue—dedicated to the topic of ghosts. The design started in March 2019 and ended in October of the same year. [...] Karrik is rooted in vernacular typography. The weight disadjustments, the lack of optical corrections, the uneven width of the letters are some of the features of early sans serif typefaces that inspired us..." (hey plus it's open source!)

fonts typography text poetics

UniMorph: Schema and datasets for universal morphological annotation

"a collaborative effort to improve how NLP handles complex morphology in the world’s languages. The goal of UniMorph is to annotate morphological data in a universal schema that allows an inflected word from any language to be defined by its lexical meaning, typically carried by the lemma, and by a rendering of its inflectional form in terms of a bundle of morphological features from our schema."

nlproc text programming poetics linguistics morphology

thwidge/brutalcss: Lovely as a rock

"Brutal CSS is an immature expression of my frustration with other brutalist website nerds who don't include the one meta tag that makes your website work on mobile."

programming web

Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge

Kyle Chayka: "the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started."

travel urbanplanning design culture

Democracy’s Afterlife | by Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books

"In all the noise of the 2020 election, it was easy to miss the signal that was not being sent. The incumbent president made no effort even to go through the motions of presenting a future open to deliberation by citizens. He had no policy agenda for a second term—the GOP merely readopted its platform from 2016, without even bothering to delete its multiple attacks on “the current president.” Why? Because arguments about policy are the vestiges of a notion that Trump has killed off: the idea that an election is a contest for the support, or at least the consent, of a majority of voters. Such arguments implicitly concede the possibility that there is another, equally legitimate choice. That is precisely what the posthumous Republican Party cannot and does not accept."

politics democracy history

Home | Transfeminine Science

"Transfeminine Science contains articles by different writers on the subject of transfeminine hormone therapy. Our authors and their information are listed on the Authors page. Transfeminine Science is written by transgender people, for transgender people—and for their medical providers."

gender science trans

Weightless Books

lots of stuff in pdf format incl. sofia samatar!

ebooks

Speech Accent Archive

"a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed" (close IPA transcriptions)

language linguistics

The New Stability | NEJM

"I look for hope and find none, but I am not allowed to admit to total free fall. “Stronger together” say the screen savers on every screen in the hospital, the banners on the sides of the shuttle bus. What I’ll see in the coming weeks is just how much this isn’t true, how so many of our sickest patients are Black or Brown like you, “essential” and yet unprotected. I will see a 46-year-old Black man, infected with SARS-CoV-2, die instead from having a police officer kneel on his neck. I will see those who protest police brutality, though masked and mostly peaceful, tear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets. I will see unregulated corporate bailouts, record unemployment, record housing insecurity. I will see political polarization recast common-sense public health policy as liberal propaganda. I will see your death multiplied by 10,000, by 100,000, all those bodies, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons. I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, for my fear, for our nation, for what happens next."

covid

Has The American Left Lost Its Mind? ❧ Current Affairs

"I don’t understand why Taibbi cites these incidents as part of his case that the Left has turned into a bunch of “Twitter Robespierres.” The accusation here is that bosses were racist and that people of color were treated differently and paid less. How is that not a legitimate complaint? I can only conclude that Taibbi either thinks people need to shut up about racism in the workplace and that going public on social media about it makes them a bunch of snowflakes, or that he simply hasn’t thought his argument through."

politics journalism

Julian "fake-deep deepfake" Jarboe on Twitter: "@BigEchoSF I also came here to say @_vajra lol. But also @METROPOLARITY -- if you haven't read their (collective) works you're missing out on some of the best experimental and very very radical SFF." / Twitt

"Short form SF published over the last ten years that aggressively challenged form/language/expectation? Avant-garde-ish, wildly exuberant, austere to the point of impoverishment. Whatever crazy shit somehow slipped past the gatekeepers and caught you by surprise. Suggestions?"

scifi literature poetics

How to think differently about doing good as a creative person

"White Savior Complex causes a lot of money to be wasted in order to, for example, give children sneakers and headphones that are of little to no use to them. At its most harmful, it can lead to an entire country being colonized. Creative Savior Complex works in similar ways: without proper consideration, many of the ways we try to help as creatives may mean valuable resources that could’ve done a lot of good are wasted, or, at its worst, it can lead to people getting hurt."

art culture politics

modernity coloniality syllabus

"a reading seminar and survey course looking into the constitution, scale, and many dimensions of the modern\colonial world-system. The texts here are merely a tiny fraction of the work done by non-Anglo-European, non-white scholars and activists in articulating the origins, development, and hegemony of the modern world-system, and yet my hope is that these will act as sparks for curious minds and a place within which to situate oneself and start from."

culture history decoloniality

Intersectional Environmentalist

"a platform for resources, information and action steps to support intersectional environmentalism and dismantle systems of oppression in the environmental movement, led by environmental activists and sustainability advocates"

environment solarpunk culture climatechange

EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset

"The extended largest dataset in first-person (egocentric) vision; multi-faceted, audio-visual, non-scripted recordings in native environments - i.e. the wearers' homes, capturing all daily activities in the kitchen over multiple days. Annotations are collected using a novel 'Pause-and-Talk' narration interface."

datasets cooking cv text corpus

StereoSet

"StereoSet is a dataset that measures stereotype bias in language models. StereoSet consists of 17,000 sentences that measures model preferences across gender, race, religion, and profession."

machinelearning nlproc text poetics culture

OPEN SCORES. How to Program the Commons. Exhibition catalogue – creating commons

"The exhibition OPEN SCORES brought together a series of practices through which artists articulate their specific forms of digital commons. From online archives to digital tools/ infrastructure and educational formats, the projects envision a (post-)digital culture in which notions of collaboration, free access to knowledge, sustainable use of shared resources, and data privacy are central. For the exhibition, each of the projects created a unique score to present their practice."

text poetics creativecommons

Gemini Gateway

"Gemini is a new internet protocol which: Is heavier than gopher; Is lighter than the web; Will not replace either; Strives for maximum power to weight ratio; Takes user privacy very seriously"

internet software protocols web

Fraidycat

"Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki."

rss web software socialsoftware

Wealth, shown to scale

"Is it really so radical to suggest that this is the right thing to do? Given the choice between millions of deaths, and slightly shrinking the fortunes of a few super rich people, how could anyone conclude that the death of millions is preferable?"

politics

ffmprovisr

"FFmpeg is a powerful tool for manipulating audiovisual files. Unfortunately, it also has a steep learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with a command line interface. This app helps users through the command generation process so that more people can reap the benefits of FFmpeg."

video ffmpeg opensource

An organically grown planet definition | Astronomy.com

"This new schema for planet — properly defined by expert planetary scientists — will powerfully work itself out in grade school classrooms. Rather than teaching students the names of all the planets, teachers should emphasize the types and subtypes of planets and how the solar system is naturally organized outward from the Sun, using a handful of planets as examples. This is analogous to learning the organization of the periodic table of the elements without having to memorize all or even most of the 100+ names."

space onomastics planets pluto

Pirate Care - Pirate Care

"Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions."

syllabus politics activism technology

Chinese WeChat Users Are Sharing A Censored Post About COVID-19 By Filling It With Emojis And Writing It In Other Languages

"[T]o avoid the censorship, people have converted parts of the interview into Morse code, filled it up with emojis, or translated it into fictional languages like Sindarin from The Lord of the Rings or Klingon from Star Trek. In one particularly creative example, someone inserted it into the iconic opening crawl of Star Wars."

language text poetics politics censorship china

Grey Rabbit

'...very boring stories that did not even satisfy my youngest children... I tried these stories on my very small children but after some minutes they grew very irritable, because nothing actually happened. This shows that even small children of three can measure entropy'

poetry poetics generative text

Face

"Face lets you edit both the text and the font it is rendered in. In text mode you can type and edit text normally. Press escape to enter font mode, where you can select a character to edit. Any changes to a character are visible immediately."

text interface writing poetics

On Design Thinking | Issue 35 | n+1

"Americans love design most when we’re afraid. Just as the Depression enabled industrial design to present itself as the solution to US manufacturing woes, the 2000 to 2002 dot-com crash and 2008 recession, with their long tails, have enabled the rise of a new embrace of design and a new broadening of design’s imagined jurisdiction. This time the specific fear is that the knowledge economy is coming for everyone. Bewildered and anxious leaders, public and private, have responded by throwing in their lots with the seemingly magical knowledge-work that is design."

design technology culture

From Panic to Profit - Data & Society: Points

"As panic around AI-generated fake news and videos have shown, new technologies described as overwhelmingly advanced, conceptually inscrutable, and deeply conspiratorial make for headlines that draw attention. As AI-supported disinformation technologies advance, it is possible we will see panic around these technologies wielded to justify technological closure in the name of “the public interest.” While caution and care is warranted, we should not accept fast and seemingly easy technological closures for these problems without pushing for social, cultural, legal, and historical explanations."

machinelearning ethics culture technology

VIRT-EU

"a series of tools to support creators of new connected technology to reflect on their product’s ethical and social impacts."

ethics programming culture software

Kyle Booten — Tentacular

"Conclusion: We hypothesized that radical swings in affective posture would make the writer more emotionally flexible. Likewise, we hypothesized that attempting to discern the emotional valences of a machine learning model derived from achingly sensitive Tumblr posts would make the writer more empathetic. Unfortunately, no conclusions could be drawn from a single poem."

poetics text machinelearning sentiment poetry

The internet could learn a lot from the VR sign language community | Rock Paper Shotgun

"Even the fancier controllers of Valve’s Index kits don’t let you separate your fingers to produce the Ws or Vs necessary for some words. [...] It’s a lovely avenue of human connection, but I can also imagine linguists frothing over VR sign language. There’s a great example in Syrmor’s video where a currently learning interpreter called Quentin explains that because the W restriction means they can’t use the normal word for ‘world’, they instead mimic the appearance of a portal opening up in VR. They’ve also got different ways of signing words depending on your gear, which is both fascinating and mildly concerning." that must feel weird

mol asl language poetics vr internet

If the world ran on sun, it wouldn’t fight over oil | Bill McKibben | Opinion | The Guardian

"[W]e are told that the Green New Deal is an impossibly expensive boondoggle – by precisely the same people now eager to pour blood and treasure down a hole in the desert. A trillion dollars spent on war returns nothing except trauma and misery; a trillion dollars spent on solar panels leaves behind a nation that gets its power for free each morning when the sun comes up."

politics climate culture

Technology - ONiO

"an ultra-low-power wireless MCU that uses energy harvesting technology. This means that the ONiO.zero solely operates on energy from its surroundings. No coincell, no supercap, no lithium, no battery at all - but still a ton of power."

pcomp

It's Time To Let Go Of Commuter Culture

such a great summary of how we got here and what's at stake, including a link between interstate highways and redlining; "commuter culture" being yet another example of how conservative americans have been tricked into thinking that "freedom" is the same thing as "maintaining the wealth of fossil fuel corporations"; breaking "car culture" is "not about making people who love cars to stop loving them. It’s about allowing those who don’t to stop needing one."

transportation politics cars

文蚀 / wenyan‑lang

"an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature. Moreover, the alphabet of wenyan contains only traditional Chinese characters and 「」 quotes, so it is guaranteed to be readable by ancient Chinese people." (from one of Golan Levin's students)

programming chinese language text poetics