Now with a Cool Sites section!
Previous iterations:
Serious Reads
'A Directive From Above': Former NYT Editor Lays Out How The Paper Pushes Anti-Trans Bigotry
The story ignored, both then and later, reports that were emerging in France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany that were directly in opposition to Cass.I have a particular scorn for Serious Commentators. The type that cannot be seen next to a contentious fact, opinion, or existence. They position themselves adjacent to power, not too close, not too distant. And they play whatever tune they are told.
The science desk covered these things when it served their narrative. But when the France report came out, when the Austrian report came out, when the German report came out the science desk ignored those. The directive from above was that the international desk was to ignore it as well [Note: Sweeney clarified that these directives were pointedly communicated down from the top of the Times’ hierarchy by conversation, not via email or internal announcement].
The tunes are played out to the type of listener and reader that knows close to zero about the truth of our realities. The average person on the street knows nothing about HRT, gender-affirming care, or my legal rights. But they're very opinionated about toilets and pronouns. And for that we have Serious Commentators to thank.
Communities are not fungible
The internet has run this experiment dozens of times now, and the results are consistent. When a platform dies or degrades, its community does not simply migrate to the next platform, it fragments, and the ones who do arrive at the new place find that the social dynamics are different, the norms have shifted, and a substantial number of the people who made the old place feel like home are gone. LiveJournal's Russian acquisition scattered its English-speaking community across Dreamwidth and eventually Twitter. Each successor captured a fraction of the original user base and none of them captured the culture.I currently run a Discord server of local Cool People, population approx. 120. Discord's rapid enshittification is forcing some serious questions: whether we can stay and hold on, would things get worse if we did, and what we do if we jump ship.
What's certain is that the outcome would not be preferable versus the old established norm. We stay on Discord -> the platform gets worse. We leave -> the community fragments, and only a select percentage[1] will assemble on Stoat, or Matrix, or a tailored Mastodon instance, or whatever. The joy is inevitably lost.
Google's AI pricing plan
Google's "direct pricing" offering will allow all comers to have Google set their prices for them, based on Google's surveillance data. That includes direct competitors. As Stoller points out, both Nike and Reebok are Google advertisers. If they let Google price their sneakers, Google can raise prices across the market in lockstep.I entertain myself with this possible new feature, by dreaming up scenarios where careful manipulation of IP address, cookies, and browser data, one could manipulate discounts that otherwise would not be possible.
The first impediment to this is that any clear path to a computer-granted discount would be short-lived. Once a browser extension that serves curated data reaches say 100,000 users, it would be swiftly countered. Also, staying on top of this relentless dance for every capitalistic website would be exhausting. But still, better than having no plan for the possible inevitable.
The Line, a Saudi Megaproject, Is Dead
Note: Paywalled article, archived link is available here.Architecture is always political. Greed and the promise of creative freedom—which, of course, is always secured at a cost—lure architects toward countries that are looking to culture-wash their bad names through stadiums, cultural centers, luxury shopping districts, and dazzling hotels. The logic behind many of these bad choices is that everyone else is doing the same. Louis Vuitton is doing it. Formula One is doing it. If I don’t do it, somebody else will.I can think of more than one youtuber who will deliver a stunningly smug video ripping into this.
The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting
Consider the cost of storing 100 petabytes on Amazon S3. At standard rates (~$0.021 per GB per month), the storage alone would cost over $2.1 million per month. The Internet Archive’s entire annual operating budget—for staff, buildings, legal defense, and hardware—is less than what it would cost to store their data on AWS for a year. By owning its hardware, using the PetaBox high-density architecture, avoiding air conditioning costs, and using open-source software, the Archive achieves a storage cost efficiency that is orders of magnitude better than commercial cloud rates.I enjoy the realisation that the enormous growth in my PC storage over the past two decades has been perfectly replecated on a much larger scale.
Recreating the smells of history
As our oldest sense, evolutionarily speaking, olfaction enjoys priority access to brain regions like the amygdala and hippocampus, which are key in processing emotion and memory, notes Dikeçligil. This means that the memories triggered by scents tend to be especially vivid and emotionally significant.Perhaps history might be thought of as less boring if one could experience it in a much more living way.
Also, *sniffs you*.
Child’s Play
Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco. He was probably right: he could count on making a few million dollars every year for the rest of his life, even after Cluely inevitably crashes and burns. He would never want for capital, but this did not seem like the most efficient way to achieve his goals.One would wonder if the proliferation of technology has created a new breed of affluent and bombastic imbeciles, or if this simply permits a certain subset of people another vehicle to detach from reality.
Alternative phrasing: Nuke San Francisco.
Light Reads
Duct-Tape Typographer Shuetsu Sato Honored With Design Award
Over the years, a cultish appreciation has grown for Shuetsu Sato’s work with fans dubbing his clean-line, rounded edge typography as Shuetsu-tai (Shuetsu font).Unusual fonts in foreign languages usually throw me off, but Sato's design is suprisingly easy to intuitively pick up.
Behind the scenes of Estonia's newly opened Saaremaa–Hiiumaa ice road
Before the official ice road was confirmed, islanders were already crossing the frozen Soela Strait on their own, with dozens of cars venturing over the ice early in the week. Social media posts made the route look safe, but officials later warned this perception was dangerously misleading.Here's a link to a gallery of pictures, and a video link as well. It's pretty neat.
Is Overwatch actually worth playing again?
Many did not stop playing Overwatch because it was bad or bloated or enshittified. They just let it go. But players and media just love a "narrative" about a game so much, starved for the idea of comebacks and turnarounds and disasters, that we readily and willingly create dramas to fit an idea that is not observably real.I'm in a very similar position to the author, having also dropped Overwatch in 2018 shortly after the release of Echo. Excessive rambling about the time put into a single game[2], plus the myriad thoughts as to why I feel the need to justify dropping it, aren't really appropriate here. But I do feel the lingering appeal of a game that used to have so much pull.
But I've played hundreds of games throughout the years. What's so special about this one? Not an enormous amount. Yet the endless shouting surrounding Overwatch drags up thoughts and opinions, sometimes usefully, sometimes unnecessarily.
It's still a game, will still have players, and will still make Team Fortress 2 fans incomprehensibly mad. The show must go on.
Yes Prime Minister, questionnaire design matters
As Sir Humphrey's questions point out in their own way, the way a policy choice is framed matters in whether the public will support it or not. Public opinion is rarely set in stone.A cute quantitative proof of behavioural biases.
Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China’s Wind and Solar Buildout
“I started out just shooting landscapes,” [Weimin] Chu said. “But when I traveled to places like Guizhou, Yunnan, and Qinghai in 2022, I kept seeing wind farms and solar power plants appear in my camera frame. I realized this is the story of our time — and almost no one is documenting it in a systematic way.”100 solar panels installed per second is absolutely stunning. The photos are nice too.
Brazilian affection/cuddling vocabulary
👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌th 👌 ere👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my selｆ 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠＯOOＯOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shitCool Sites
This is a new addition in this edition: just cool websites that I found!Broadly, these are sites that serve a single niche or gimmick, and are delightfully charming for one reason or another.
NMS Ceefax
This is a recreation of BBC's Ceefax, a teletext information service that was operated between 1974 and 2012. There was an Irish equivalent (ambitiously called Teletext) that I would have experienced as a child.NMS Ceefax is currently updating with today's news stories - I'd love to see how long it runs.
The creator, Nathan, writes more about their experience in experimenting with Teletext here.
Dithering - Part 1: Introduction
A visual example of how the animation technique of dithering can be used.Shinsuke Nakamura Fotos
Photography site for Shinsuke Nakamura, often better known for his work as a professional wrestler.Aside from being skilled and high-quality shots, I enjoy the way he brings out a personality in other wrestlers that simply won't be shown on television.
Videos
How Enemies Detect You in Dark Souls: Part 1 - Sound
Welcome back to my gay and stupid hyperfixation.
Dark Souls 1's mechanics regarding enemy detection via proximity, sight, and sound are not unique, but I appreciate how they play out in-game. Via accumulating experience, testing out theories against enemies, and running into interesting dev workarounds, Dark Souls 1 has been one of the most useful games for building my understanding of how games are constructed, and how radically different the game functions under the hood.
The Fokker Enigma ❄️ Dangerous Plane or Misunderstood?
A story about Fokker jet airplanes, how they are tricky to handle in snowy weather, and the impact of icing on aircraft. That's it! Very interesting! Yay! 😇