A list of Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail, including an Apple Powerbook 100, a SGI R4000 Indigo, the Motorola Envoy (PDA), and some Thinking Machines CM-5s. “This is a Unix system, I know this!”
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There is nothing more I love in this world right now than these two lunch ladies performing Firestarter by The Prodigy.
Unclassifiable Artists
Using William Blake (aka “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists”) as an example, Evan Puschak’s latest video explores how society often rejects artists whose work doesn’t fit neatly into established categories and frameworks of criticism and commerce.
What you’re seeing here, these are not paintings. They’re prints of engravings from Blake’s illuminated books, which he designed, wrote, etched, colored, and printed himself using a technique that he invented. These extraordinary books are works of art that mix and synthesize categories. And as a result, the art world of the late 17 and early 1800s didn’t really know what to make of them. And Blake never sold more than a handful.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listA digital museum of video game levels…you can move freely around each level using your keyboard. Heavy on Nintendo games (Mario Kart 64, Wii Sports, etc.) but also includes Portal, Halo, Katamari Damacy, GTA III, and World of Warcraft.
I have lived more than two score and twelve years on this Earth and somehow I didn’t know that there are two copies of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s own hand in the Smithsonian (and five overall).
The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration, a collection of oral histories recorded in Michigan in the 1970s of Black people who had previously escaped the Jim Crow South. “If we don’t get it from those individuals, then we can’t get it from anyone else.”
“Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest — and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.”
Brian Eno on the Cherished Sounds of Failure
Near the end of 1995, the artist and producer Brian Eno wrote the following about new media in his diary, which entries were later collected in a book called A Year with Swollen Appendices.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.
Nailed it.
Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed. “Google has often said it was ‘sending out more traffic & the web is bigger than ever. And then right next to that is a bunch of publishers whose businesses are getting destroyed.’”
Elephants May Hear Ground Vibrations Through Their Bones, Helping Them to Communicate Over 6 Miles. “Studying elephant hearing isn’t as simple as asking an elephant to wear headphones…”
Vertical Panoramas of Churches
From photographer Richard Silver, vertical panoramic photos of churches that emphasize their often incredible ceilings. (via ignant)
I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era. “It is a future in which other nations or leaders may have an incentive to pursue genocidal policies knowing they will not only get away with murder but may even benefit from it.”
What to Read & Listen to After Seeing The Odyssey
I’m currently doing the thing I do after seeing a movie (The Odyssey) I really enjoyed or found interesting: digging into related media. Yesterday I had an hour in the car, so I listened to this episode of The Daily podcast with Madeline Miller and Emily Wilson.
I think it’s quite odd to think that one book or one translation erases the others. I mean, if people prefer some other translation or if people want to read the Greek, I would love for them to do that. I think it’s great. I have no desire to legislate about which versions of “The Odyssey,” or of any ancient text, people want to engage with. So I think there’s something quite strange about the idea that the canon doesn’t have room for many, many different interpretations, translations, engagements, reinventions.
I’ve also flagged this New York Review of Books podcast with Daniel Mendelsohn, another NYT podcast with Madeline Miller, and this WNYC podcast with Emily Wilson for future listening.
As for reading, Wilson and Mendelsohn both did contemporary translations of The Odyssey within the past few years: The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (I loved this, read it aloud to my kids) and The Odyssey translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Actor Stephen Fry recently did a more approachable reimagining of The Odyssey. The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds is even more accessible, especially for younger readers.
Miller is the author of two great novels based on the Iliad and the Odyssey: Circe (my personal favorite of the two…I love this book and tell everyone to read it)1 and The Song of Achilles.
Other novels based on Homer’s works: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.
Mendelsohn also wrote An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic back in 2018; it sounds really interesting:
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician’s unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his “one last chance” to learn the great literature he’d neglected in his youth—and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.
Do you have any recommendations for podcasts or favorite Odyssey translations/retellings?
I would love to see a $200 million blockbuster adaptation of Circe directed by, say, Céline Sciamma, Sarah Polley, Chloé Zhao, Celine Song, Patty Jenkins, or Greta Gerwig…no shortage of great options. ↩
The trailer for Behemoth!, a forthcoming film written and directed by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Andor) and starring Pedro Pascal & Olivia Wilde. Great trailer: it pulls you in without revealing anything about the plot.
On the use of AI for creative work (type design in this case). “A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”
“No CGI” Is Really Just Invisible CGI
Mission Impossible. Oppenheimer. F1. The Odyssey. Top Gun: Maverick. Mad Max: Fury Road. Inception. Dune. Filmmakers and studios who make movies like these love to emphasize their heavy use of practical effects, i.e. real cars jumping real bridges or real people hanging off of real airplanes. “No CGI”, they say, despite the hundreds of names in the visual effects section of the films’ credits.
In his six-part series, Jonas Ussing, who co-owns a visual effects studio in Denmark, takes a look at these “No CGI” films and shows us just how much digital graphical effects goes into them. For instance, did you know that every single flying jet in Top Gun: Maverick, a movie we were assured was all practical effects, was built with CGI? Take a look:
His latest video is all about Christopher Nolan:
I’ve only watched bits and pieces of these videos so far (the Nolan one is 71 minutes long), but when ILM’s Todd Vaziri says something film-related is good, it’s good.
The official trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. They’ve gotten (some of) the band back together — perhaps this will be a return to form for Marvel?
New lecture series from authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today. “The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now.”
The Lost Joy of Music Piracy. “Still to this day, I’ve never seen such an actively maintained network of knowledge and output, it really sucked me in.”
Goofy Oversized Wicker Costumes
Artist Lewis Prosser describes himself on Instagram as an “absurdist basket-maker”. His costumes for a project called Making Merrie reflect that self-description.
Making Merrie explores the material culture of folk theatre. Inspired by mummers’ plays and masked traditions along the Wales/England border, Making Merrie combines craft, performance, and language to reflect on cultural heritage and exchange.
Mummers’ plays are traditional folk performances with roots over 500 years old, often tied to Christmas and New Year. Full of humour and spontaneous revelry, these plays were staged in streets, homes, or pubs by amateur troupes, telling simple stories of combat, death, and miraculous revival. Unlike the religious Mystery Plays, mummers’ plays are secular, carnivalesque, and performed for community fun.
The project features large-scale wicker costumes, handcrafted using regional willow basketry techniques, highlighting basketry as an essential human skill we’re at risk of forgetting—a skill that, if lost, means losing part of what it is to be human.
(via colossal)
Excerpt from a longer (podcast) conversation with John Waters about how he used to work at Mary Oliver’s bookstore in Provincetown. “They had this bookshop where you were allowed to be mean to the customers. It was really fun.”
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is making a documentary about the 14th amendment, “spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get”.
On Japan’s visible evidence of care. “American service providers, private and public, increasingly run like ghost ships. Japanese technology and design seemed in greater service to humans, their journeys, and enterprises.”
Watch 1969’s Apollo 11 Moon Landing “Live!”
57 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 18th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W television, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser today, July 20th, and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule (all times EDT):
4:10:30 pm: Moon landing broadcast starts
4:17:40 pm: Lunar module lands on the Moon
4:20:15 pm - 10:51:26 pm: Break in coverage
10:51:27 pm: Moon walk broadcast starts
10:56:15 pm: First step on Moon
11:51:30 pm: Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew
12:00:30 am: Broadcast end (on July 21)
Set an alarm on your phone or calendar! Also, this works best on an actual computer but I think it functions ok on phones and tablets if necessary.
Back in 2018, I wrote a bit about what to look out for when you’re watching the landing:
The radio voices you hear are mostly Mission Control in Houston (specifically Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who acted as the spacecraft communicator for this mission) and Buzz Aldrin, whose job during the landing was to keep an eye on the LM’s altitude and speed — you can hear him calling it out, “3 1/2 down, 220 feet, 13 forward.” Armstrong doesn’t say a whole lot…he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”. Note the change in call sign from “Eagle” to “Tranquility Base”. :)
Two things to listen for on the broadcast: the 1201/1202 program alarms I mentioned above and two quick callouts by Charlie Duke about the remaining fuel towards the end: “60 seconds” and “30 seconds”. Armstrong is taking all this information in through his earpiece — the 1202s, the altitude and speed from Aldrin, and the remaining fuel — and using it to figure out where to land.
I love the 1-bit aesthetic of this story-driven city builder game called GlagStone.
The Meaning of Nolan’s The Odyssey
I suspect like many of you, I saw The Odyssey this weekend. I really liked it and the more I read & think about the film, the more it grows in my esteem. This thread by Mmina Maclang-Tamayo (spoilers!) is pretty much how I interpreted what Nolan was trying to convey.
As it turns out, it was 10,000% important that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was delivered in American accents, beyond just the Emily Wilson linguistics of it all.
It’s because it was about America.
I didn’t think it’d be possible to spoil a 3000 year-old epic, but here’s a 🧵
The emphasis on what’s happening back in Ithaca, with the royal courts and suitors to Penelope reflect upon the internal politics of taking the anxieties of the people about external invaders to attempt to seize power.
Then, Odysseus returns with the revelation: the feared invaders, “The Sea People”, were them all along.
Zeus’ Law has an uncanny resemblance to Christian teaching. “Whatsoever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me”. (Matthew 25:40)
That America proudly keeps envoking the Abrahamic God in its identity as a nation, and its government attempting to justify their actions in the name of such a God, yet turn around and gravely mistreat the immigrants on their doorstep, and antagonize their own allies, is a betrayal of its identity.
The film warns: America has broken Zeus’ Law.
Steve Donner shared some interesting thoughts in his reading of the film:
20. The point: Nothing is sacred in war, and we have lost all respect for basic decency and hospitality. We’re all the violators; we are all the suitors, we are all the cyclops. Consequently, all the towers and temples burn (“the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead”). It’s Odysseus’ guilt about his foreign wars manifesting again and he’s spent years avoiding the truth.
21. That’s why he’s unconsciously avoided home for twenty years: he simply cannot face what he has become, nor does he wish to show his shame to his wife and son.
I’m looking forward to seeing the movie again in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, what did you think of The Odyssey? And if you read or listened to something interesting or provocative about the film, please share links!
From BBC Earth, the trailer for Evolution, a five-part series premiering on PBS in October. “Ponder this: All the incredible diversity of animal life on Earth sprang from a single organism. Every animal, no matter how weird, is related to every other.”
TV Appearance of Lincoln Assassination Witness
In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour appeared on a game show called I’ve Got A Secret…his secret was that he saw Lincoln’s assassination when he was five years old.
Mind-blowing…the Civil War & Lincoln’s assassination directly linked to something as modern as a TV game show. Two years earlier, Seymour gave an interview about witnessing the assassination. His father, an overseer on a Maryland estate, and his boss Mr. Goldsboro needed to travel to Washington to check on “the legal status of their 150 slaves”. Seymour got to go along.
It was going on toward supper time — on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 — when we finally pulled up in front of the biggest house I ever had seen. It looked to me like a thousand farmhouses all pushed together, but my father said it was a hotel.
[…] When I finally had been rushed upstairs, shushed and scrubbed and put into fresh clothes, Mrs. Goldsboro said she had a wonderful surprise.
“Sammy, you and Sarah and I are going to a play tonight,” she explained. “A real play — and President Abraham Lincoln will be there.”
After Lincoln was shot, Seymour saw Booth fall from the balcony and run off.
What Training My Chaotic Dog Taught Me About Power, Control — and Human Beings. “As any parent of a toddler knows, being morally liable for something that is incapable of moral liability is a fraught and stressful business.”
How Are Memories Stored Inside Your Brain?
This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories.
Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.
What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life?
From the Brooklyn Public Library, a list of “the 250 most influential books in United States history”. Incl. Neuromancer, The Fire Next Time, Nickel and Dimed, The Power Broker, and The Snowy Day.
New-to-me podcast that looks really interesting: Time Sensitive, “a podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form conversations with leading minds about their life and work through the lens of time”.
Amazing Newspaper Ad Highlighting Period Poverty
To draw attention to the millions of girls who cannot afford period products, the MENstruation Foundation ran a unique advertisement in three major South African newspapers.
Readers of The Star, The Mercury and Cape Times opened their newspapers this week to find something deeply uncomfortable: period blood stains on the front page, seeping through to the pages beneath — as if the newspaper itself had been used as a sanitary pad.
South African schoolgirls suffering from period poverty are forced to use newspapers, rags, and even cow dung in place of sanitary pads. Here’s a short video of what the ad looks like as you page through the paper, culminating in a full page highlighting the foundation’s free sanitary pad dispensers placed in schools.
Maybe one of the best advertisements I’ve ever seen? (thx, caroline)
Uncovered, a site for judging books by their first pages. “No cover. No bestseller sticker, no celebrity book club, no BookTok trend. You read the opening of a real book, blind, and answer the only question that matters: would you keep reading?”
The Resonant Computing Manifesto. “We can now build technology that adaptively shapes itself in service of our individual and collective aspirations. We can build resonant environments that bring out the best in every human who inhabits them.”
A few highlights from a collection of lovely woodblock-printed sugoroku game boards from Japan. “The gameboards use stories and maps to teach children history and geography.”
The Naturalist’s Library (1833-43)
Nicholas Rougeux, whose work I have featured here before, has published a complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume book series on natural history published in the early-to-mid 19th-century. As part of the project, Rougeux restored each of the more than 1300 illustrations in the library, and the results are fantastic.
Rougeux wrote a post on the history of The Naturalist’s Library and how the project came about.
The Library is credited with having a significant democratizing effect on the study of natural history because Jardine and Lizars prioritized affordability and portability. Each book was only 4 by 6 inches and priced at six shillings, making them a much more accessible alternative to the “unwieldy folios” from other naturalists. This led to a tremendous demand for each one, resulting in tens of thousands of copies being printed overall. Just two years into publication, a notice appears at the beginning of one volume stating, “we have sold upwards of 60,000 volumes, in which there have been nearly 2,400,000 coloured plates given as Illustration.” Exact sales numbers are difficult to come by but history has shown that the series was very popular with estimates of 10,000 copies sold for each volume, totaling at least 400,000.
In order to help with his research, he borrowed a biography of Jardine from the library and built a custom rig out of K’nex construction toy pieces to scan the whole thing.
About a month later, I discovered a 2001 biography about Jardine, Sir William Jardine: A Life in Natural History, which only existed as a physical copy. I emailed the publisher to ask for a digital copy but had no luck. So I did what any self-respecting researcher would do and borrowed it on an inter-library loan and made my own digital copy by building a very janky custom rig out of old K’nex parts to take pictures of each page with my phone that I later combined into a searchable PDF. The OCR on it could be improved but having it available digitally allowed me to consult it in my research.
You can check out the shop for posters of the illustrations as well as a complete, bound, 800-page volume of all 1300+ illustrations.
Legibility of effort in the LLM age. “What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.”
Lionel Messi Bathing a Baby Lamine Yamal
These have to be some of the most remarkable sports photos of all time: a 20-year-old Lionel Messi bathing a five-month-old Lamine Yamal.
Two of the best football players in the world, one a Barcelona legend and another a Barca legend in the making. Both came up through the ranks of the club’s La Masia youth academy. Both wore number 19 for Barca before switching to the number 10. And if Argentina can advance past England in this afternoon’s semifinal match, the two will face each other in the World Cup final on Sunday. It’s like if there was a photo of Muhammad Ali holding Mike Tyson as a baby. Remarkable.
And the way the photos happened is completely random; Yamal’s family didn’t have footballing connections or anything like that. The photos were taken by photographer Joan Monfort in 2007 for a UNICEF fundraiser (UNICEF was the jersey “sponsor” for Barca’s 2007-2008 season).
“UNICEF did a raffle in the neighbourhood of Roca Fonda in Mataro where Lamine’s family lived,” said Monfort. “They signed up for the raffle to have their picture taken at the Camp Nou with a Barca player. And they won the raffle.”
“He [Messi] didn’t even know how to hold him at first,” Monfort said, recalling the difficulties of the shoot. “Messi is a pretty introverted guy, he’s shy. He was coming out of the locker room and suddenly he finds himself in another locker room with a plastic tub full of water and a baby in it. It was complicated.”
More from Monfort in The Athletic:
“It’s the most famous photo I’ve taken in my life, by a long way. So many people have been interested, again during this World Cup now. If Lamine keeps growing like he is growing, the photo will be even more historic. The chances of all this happening was like winning the lottery. Although it’s not sorted me out financially for life (laughs).
“I’m just really happy it happened. It’s especially nice in today’s football, when so much is to do with money and power.”
Ted Gioia: “Works like the Odyssey are ritualistic and trance-inducing. They are propelled by music and driven by rhythm. They cross a border beyond literature, and enter something more transcendent and metaphysical.”
Good interview with Craig Mod about how he uses LLMs: “using AI as a research assistant, why he keeps a tech-free zone in the mornings for deep thinking, and why he’s resisting the pull of the ‘mainlining’ AI era”.
The Types of People to Keep Around
Molly Burford, author of Moments to Hold Close, writes list poetry (is that a thing?) about the kinds of people that you want in your life. From Types Of People You Need To Hang On To:
The friend who helps you clean your room. Those who are kind to those who can do nothing for them. Messy folks who repeatedly get it wrong but never stop trying to get it right anyway. Kindred spirits. Loud laughers. Pals who make the grocery store fun. Loved ones who get as excited about your success as you do. The person you feel comfortable crying in front of. Sing-in-the-car friends. People who text you to look at the moon.
I am 100% the friend who will text you to look at the moon or the meteor shower or the aurora.
From Types Of People I Admire The Most:
Someone who isn’t afraid to just be human. The friend who commits to the bit, even if it is well past its expiration date. People who accept that their ducks will always be in a bit of a zig-zag formation. Relentlessly creative folks. Daydreamers. Awkward silence embracers.
From Types Of People Who Will Change Your Life:
Teachers who believed there was potential within you, even when you were convinced you would always be a lost cause. The internet friend who showed you that your art does matter, and it’s needed. The mentor who became the older sister you never had. The ex-partner who showed you there are some types of people you’re only meant to love from afar. The neighbors who became family. The family members who became friends.
100000% this: I Hate The Way We Talk Online. “Let’s discuss topics without feeling the need to win a non-existent argument. Hot takes? No. Engage with nuance. Show the grace you would extend offline to those you meet on these virtual streets.”
Heard It Through the Grapevine
Marvin Gaye’s isolated vocals on I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The man has pipes.
Robert Eggers continues his run of One Word Title Films Featuring Very Strange Men with Werwulf. I’m not a horror guy but I was pleasantly surprised by Nosferatu, which I quite liked.
Trump Dismantled a Federal Climate Website. These Women Rebuilt It. “It’s not a pretty picture for climate communication and climate journalism right now.” You can check out the new site at climate.us.
A short, hypnotic video by Matthew Wilcock of the music generated by a tennis rally at Wimbledon. “Duplicating the players and then using the rhythm of the multiple tennis balls as they cross the pink line to drive the rhythm of the piece.”
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