Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It.

Paul Ford:

AI is like having my very own shameless monster as a pet. […] It does everything badly and confidently. And I want to be it. I want to be that confident, that unembarrassed, that ridiculously sure of myself.

(Wired) via

Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling

Transcript of a long speech by Sterling that starts of with Thomas Moore writing Utopia (a story I didn’t know and which is kinda fascinating) and then goes… places. The bit that really caught my eye, about halfway through, is about artist Alexander Calder who, per Sterling, made his own versions of everyday objects, such as forks, not because they were better but to understand them and make them his own.

These may not quite look like utopian objects, because they’re so personal. But it’s probably what a handmade personal Utopia actually has to look like. You have to dig down to the original basic principles.

via (Tumblr)

‘I was in a kind of ecstatic freefall’: artist Miranda July on writing the book that could change your life

Miranda July has a novel out this month and it looks really good.

Talking to these older women, she started to consider time in a new way. As a young person she’d thought ahead to the family she might have, the fantasy, maybe, of being a star. Now at 50, “When I look ahead the same number of years, then it’s death at the end. You start setting your goals.” To my polite open mouth she says, gently, “I’m giving you the sense of the headspace that I was in when I was writing, which was, ‘Who do I want to be as a dying person?’” Here is, maybe, the hidden, spiritual element of the book. “So much of what you thought was you was maybe really other people. That starts to become more clear. And the weird part is,” she chuckles earnestly, “there can be discomfort, but I think there’s a kind of psychedelic joy to it, too.”

(Guardian)

Grace Jones - Slave to the Rhythm (video)

Curiously I never saw this music video in the 80s (probably for the same reason it’s age restricted on YouTube) and I have questions, so many questions. I’d love to read a detailed breakdown of all the references and semiotics and stuff. Per Wikipedia:

The accompanying music video largely consists of previously seen footage, using excerpts from Jones' previously released music videos, “My Jamaican Guy” and “Living My Life”, as well as the live concert performance video A One Man Show. Included are also still pictures of some of the singer’s most iconic looks and the Citroën CX TV advertisement. No new footage of Jones herself was filmed for the video.

But what does it all mean?

(YouTube)

R.I.P. Steve Albini

Fuck.

(The Quietus)

No one buys books

A fantastically detailed breakdown of the batshit economic reality of the book publishing trade (English language, at least) using testimony from the monopolies trial when Penguin Random House tried to buy Simon & Schuster.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

The best thing is, most of this was true in the 1990s when I was in bookselling and was probably always the case, though there’s a load of new post-Amazon stuff of course.

I’m fairly convinced the book trade is an example of collective magic, where we’ve willed something into existence that really shouldn’t survive so that people can write books that no-one will read.

(The Elysian)

Language of flowers

Filed under “stuff I never knew I never knew”.

Floriography (language of flowers) is a means of cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers. […] Specific floral arrangements were used to send a coded message to the recipient, allowing the sender to express feelings of romance and courtship which could not be spoken aloud in Victorian society. Armed with floral dictionaries, Victorians often exchanged small “talking bouquets” or “word poesy” which could be worn or carried as a fashion accessory.

(Wikipedia)

‘The courgettes were so good last year, I got a tattoo of one’: life on a Birmingham allotment

Lovely bunch of interviews with and photos of people on an allotment down the road from mine.

(Guardian)

RIP Trina Robbins (tcj.com)

One of the key figures in western comics, from the feminist counterculture underground to the modern day, Trina was the GOAT and no mistake. Her story is at times remarkable and she was also pretty fucking cool. Fantagraphics published her autobiography a few years back with THE most awesome cover.

All issues of Escape Magazine are on the Internet Archive (archive.org)

This is probably the most important 1980s British comics anthology (for me, anyway). I have most of the physical issues and was pondering scanning them for posterity, and now I don’t have to. Yay!

via LMG

We Need To Rewild The Internet - Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon (Noema)

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

The Aerobic Digest: issue 12

My monthly-ish composting newsletter went out this morning.

Yan Wang Preston – gloriously confronting art history in the nude (Guardian)

Wang Preston’s subversive reworking of Friedrich proposes a different relationship with the land. In her version of the image, the figure (the artist herself) is naked – buttocks exposed to the freezing temperatures of the South Pennines, where the photograph was made. Wang Preston stood there for as long as she could handle (10 minutes).

Part portrait, part witness to this solitary durational performance (which will be repeated, with other people, throughout the rest of the year) the raw discomfort Wang Preston felt in standing naked in snow, she has said, is akin to what she experiences as a Chinese woman encountering the exoticised female nudes in canonical western paintings. Rather than the promise of domination, Wang Preston’s nude wanderer offers endurance and symbiosis with the land. Following the trajectory of ecofeminists, Wang Preston frames her “exotic” body in the landscape to point to the way both have been degraded and dominated by the male gaze.

More of her work.

We can have a different web (Molly White)

The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

Notes from Inside the Ecosystem: Joanne McNeil on Apple Vision Pro (filmmakermagazine.com)

When I left the Apple store, I realized that perhaps I had been thinking about the company’s history of big product launches too narrowly. Apple doesn’t just build products, but contexts for its products. The iPod had iTunes, the iPhone has the App Store. Each device ushered with it a marketplace where every offering must adhere to Apple’s rigorous standards for inclusion.

What is the correct speed limit for cities? (YouTube)

It’s a trick question - the answer is 30kph / 20mph, and here’s 20 minutes of reasons why. We’ve had 20mph limits around us for a few years now and the resistance to them from some drivers is utterly bemusing.

Streaming Follows a Trail Paved by Thieves and Pirates (Pixel Envy)

Paid streaming services are not the product of record industry brilliance. In fact, the most clear lineage can be traced back to websites that were repeatedly accused of destroying the possibility of artists making a living. Ironically, the world’s greatest libraries of digital music were created by loose groups of thieves and pirates. And it all started with a pig-themed website.

The 1918 Flu Pandemic Killed Millions. So Why Does Its Cultural Memory Feel So Faint? (Slate)

According to scholar Elizabeth Outka, the tragedy haunts modernist literature between the lines.

Efficiency Is Biting Back (The Atlantic)

Efficiency, in fact, can be hazardous to our well-being, and a strategic amount of inefficiency is crucial in keeping society healthy.

Toiletpaperfullerenes and Charmin Nanotubes (Observable)

Toilet paper tubes have the curious property that you can flatten them, cut out loops, and link the loops together without fasteners.