Allison's bookmarks (2022 archive)

Most recent

SmolCSS

"Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components"

css webdev

Proud Employees

"The models are just an acceleration of processes that are already in place. The ideal outcome of a machine-learning driven society is overfitting: a world where, whether all our jobs are automated or we've just trained ourselves to work with the machine, no new information will need to be processed, all will be determined and predicted."

machinelearning culture

Thoughts on Stable Diffusion and Free Culture

"These reactions, I think, help us to imagine what a public culture might be after free culture’s demise. What remains, however, is to recapture that productive engine of Kelty’s recursive publics that drive cryptocurrency and web3 today in building other hyper-capitalist futures. If commons-based peer production is a joke. If free culture is a ruse. What ways of doing with technology remain? Just as Jackie Wang has productively re-read theories of control through racial capitalism, I see a continued challenge of reimagining democracy, addressing its historic exclusions, and colonial underpinnings."

culture copyright machinelearning

Of Hegel jokes and hole-walls, or, why Twitter is good actually

"It’s really nice to be on the edge of a community... and to be able to smoothly transition inwards and outwards as time passes. My Twitter timeline is a record of my passing interests and side-projects.... Something in the structure of Twitter makes it ideal for this kind of mixing and matching, a lurker’s paradise. [...] By leaving communities implicit, Twitter allows for a much more nuanced sense of what it means to be part of something."

socialmedia internet

The Commodordion

"an 8-bit accordion primarily made of C64s, floppy disks, and gaffer tape"

music retro c64

Pluralistic: 20 Oct 2022 It was all downhill after the Cuecat – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

'Once we gave companies the power to literally criminalize the reconfiguration of their products, everything changed. [...] [I]n a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?"'

culture business internet technology

The internet is already over - by Sam Kriss

"The only reliable source of profits is in the extraction of raw materials: chiefly, pulling the black corpses of trillions of prehistoric organisms out of the ground so they can be set on fire. Which means that the feudal rulers of those corpselands—men like King Salman, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques—ended up sitting on a vast reservoir of capital without many productive industries through which it could be valorised. So, as a temporary solution, they stuck it in the tech sector."

internet culture history

Hysterically Real: ELDEN POEM by Daniel Scott Snelson PDF Paperback ...

"Snelson plays a wandering bard – misusing the system to produce the most unlikely of scrawls: small poems scattered across the game’s landscape. The book is a documentation of that performance in a prosody marked by the poetics of fandom. They are recorded here as movie captures, static images, and poetic texts, arranged in four parts spelling a newly coherent object."

videogames poetry poetics text landscape

Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened To Game Design?) - k-hole

'“What already works” is a fundamentally conservative and nostalgic lens through which to view cultural production. Looking at “what already works” rejects an idea or potential of progress, and instead narrows the scope of possibility of a medium to only be capable or remediating its greatest hits.' [...] 'People already famous from producing “works” are now focused on meta-work, their cultural capital gained from doing that work in the first place now refocused on producing content related to their strongest signifiers.' (but how do you distinguish nostalgia from maintenance and re-absorbing work into the commons?)

games design culture

The Artist Is the Void - Momus

"Extraction—of natural resources and of labor—is the defining American act, at home and at war. Inasmuch as art is for the statement of itself, earthworks such as Heizer’s extract for the sake of extraction. To me he is the most patriotic of artists. The effect of an earthwork is never big enough to critique its circumstances nor generative enough to counter the harmful effects of its creation. In this, the NFT producers have accomplished something great, and outdone the 1970s land artists. With minimal labor, no pretense of theory or contextualization, no aesthetic clarity, and no object to speak of, they have set off exponential extractions. It’s not new; it’s just worse." [...] "Art can’t fill the damage done by extraction and enshrining a site of extraction through installation, reframing it as a cultural space, is a softened blow rather than an elucidation. When art fills a void, it justifies the void."

art crypto nfts culture

The Edenic Allure of Ballerinafarm - by Anne Helen Petersen

"If I asked a teenager to create an Animal Crossing Island with a farm aesthetic, they might create something close to what Ballerina Farm looks like." [...] "... Mormon culture often tells girls they should grow up to be something kind of like an AGA. Always on. Divided into compartments — one that is ready to receive whatever needs warming, one that is always prepared to produce something sustaining. A surface that is not too hot to the touch. But enough warmth to extend to all the people in the space around you, all the while burning through more fuel than you can shake a damn stick at."

culture religion socialmedia

To save the Arts we must kill the Artist

brilliant essay on nfts, arts, politics, economics: "This comparison isn't really rigorous at all so i won't spend more time on it, i just thought the concept of a bourgeois failson containment zoo was funny." also: "The artists have exactly as much depth of existence as everyone, but they had the time and means to develop tools to communicate it in specific ways, and access to specific platforms. Any attempt to naturalize these privileges into an intellectual, emotional, creative superiority of artists over the rest of the people is absolute garbage, and should be treated with the disdain it deserves."

art politics crypto nfts

Mimeoprinting

diy mimeograph-a-like made with "an inexpensive shipping-label printer, themoplastic stencil paper, and a few simple craft materials"

printmaking diy

regl

"using regl is easier than writing raw webgl code because you don't need to manage state or binding. it's also lighter and faster and has less overhead than many existing 3d frameworks. and it has a functional data-driven style inspired by react."

3d programming graphics javascript

We Have Entered the “Anti-Gender” Endgame

"Griswold also formed the basis of Obergefell v. Hodges (the right to marry someone of the same gender) and Lawrence v. Texas (the right to have queer sex, ever, at all, without being criminalized). If there is no “right to privacy” and no sovereign right to control one’s healthcare decisions, then bans on HRT and gender-affirming surgery for adults are within the realm of realistic possibility..."

gender politics

Strange Horizons - Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles By Cat Fitzpatrick

incredibly insightful review. "Their exact words, not just their paraphraseable meaning but their precise choices of phrasing, become full of comprehensible information about character, and this gives the characters themselves an unusual reality and presence. As in all good poetry, it is the language itself, and not just the plot and worldbuilding, that makes us care."

poetry poetics scifi language linguistics literature

Is a Cervix Cis?: My Year in the Stirrups - Aster(ix) Journal

"nothing is denied the girl in that video by recognizing that the hatred of girls and women on display therein attacks trans girls and women with equal vigor. That experience is activated when you are sexed or sexualized against your will, when having health care that focuses on your genitals or have such healthcare withheld"

gender trans feminism

Low Carbon Methods

"The Low-Carbon Research Methods Group is a loosely affiliated network of scholars interested in examining how climate change not only stands to alter what we study, but how we do so."

academia sustainability

genish.js

"a library to help develop optimized audio callbacks employing per-sample processing techniques. This enables signal processing that is not possible using buffers" VERY cool

javascript audio

The Oncoming Ransomware Storm

"The free flow of money from US banks to cryptocurrency exchanges is the root cause of this pandemic and needs to halt. [...] Imagine a world in which every other month you’re forced to bid for your personal data back from hackers who continuously rob you. And a world where all of this is is so commonplace there are automated darknet marketplaces where others can bid on your data, and every detail of your personal life is up for sale to the highest bidder. Every private text, photo, email, and password is just a digital commodity to be traded on the market. Because that’s what the market demands and that’s what capitalism left unchecked will provide."

cryptocurrency security

When Joss Whedon Was Our Master

as much as I recognize Whedon's shortcomings, I really didn't connect with this specific criticism—seems to be arguing that particular "realist" techniques ("show don't tell") should be valued over their alternatives... e.g. I don't agree that stories are (or should be) "about letting the audience disappear into a world you created."

culture film criticism narrative writing

The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth - American Affairs Journal

"In liberal capitalism or plutocracy, on the other hand, the oligarchs will use their power to resist development. For them, hoard­ing capital to preserve high returns and asset values is preferable to investing in growth at lower returns—if not always on an absolute basis, then at least relative to the rest of society." the last section on silicon valley is chef's kiss

capitalism economics politics

Bitcoin is a mouth hungry for fossil fuels – Ketan Joshi

"For the most part, this greenwashing isn’t for us. It’s for those in the community with a guilty conscience and for nervous rich investors and speculators. It ends up so weird and confused because it’s a community of explicitly anti-community, anti-government people clumsily feigning membership on a finite physical planet stocked with other non-Bitcoin people. That’s how you end up with a mix of ‘Bitcoin is a battery’, mixed with ‘STAY POOR CLIMATE ALARMIST SJW’. It is exhausting and unpleasant."

climate cryptocurrency culture