Get weird and disappear ✶

One of my favorite new tech writers, Nik Suresh:

But other scripts, especially the ones that are too small to think about or too large to see, drive insane life decisions. When I was studying psychology, almost everyone, including me, picked the course because we weren’t sure what we wanted to do with our lives, but the script says finish high school and then take on ten of thousands of dollars in debt. That script is so large that it basically encompasses your whole upbringing. When you try to look at it, you see grey, and think “there is no elephant here, just a cement wall”.

Thursday, 29 May 2025

Andrea del Sarto ✶

From a poem about the Renaissance painter by Robert Browning:

Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Goodbye, Sebastião Salgado ✶

May more people appreciate life the way you did.

Thursday, 22 May 2025

Cartography design tutorials ✶

Daniel Huffman gets in the weeds with lots practical advice on map making.

See also Tom Patterson and Molly O’Halloran.

Tuesday, 20 May 2025

Protect my public media ✶

Public media is facing multiple serious threats. The Administration has proposed eliminating federal funding in its annual budget request, issued an Executive Order to block support for PBS and NPR, cancelled grants that support the creation of children’s educational programming, and plans to claw back funding approved by Congress.

Act now. Tell Congress to reject the rescissions package and stop the dismantling of public media.

Via 88.1 FM WYCE

Monday, 19 May 2025

We become what we behold ✶

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

—Marshall McLuhan (misattributed)

Friday, 16 May 2025

Dissolution Speech ✶

From the read-again-regularly list.

Thursday, 8 May 2025

Snaking Electrical Wires

❦

Two or four winding wires snaking wanting to touch. A way to stop all wars by stopping them, tying them together and to a ceramic circle (in the middle of a round-shaped device? Fusion?)…

Whistling singing woman, Asian features, with daughter in a bar, staying for a month. Eyes, high-pitched sound in song makes emotion well up…

Car accident, told not to stand where person fell, by wall…

Wind strong over a curved, wing-shaped roof (a way to speed up wind, directing to turbines?)…

Mom with many visitors, confused…

Skin of salmon or fish falls on floor. Messy. Next to someone eating the flesh of the fish…

Man with pistol teaching to shoot, showing that the bullets are rocks, flicking them up and letting them fall down again on his palm…

“Ask Google” LLM interface by using a prompt or thought experiment involving water and gravity…

…from a dream.

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Wednesday, 7 May 2025

“Just so you know, I don’t know where we are” ✶

Jordana Cepelewicz writing about poet mathematician June Huh in Quanta magazine:

Moreover, as he later realized, “I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry,” he said. “I didn’t want to write great poetry.” Now he sees that version of himself as almost a complete stranger.

Thursday, 1 May 2025

Dawn of the Dead ✶

My favorite zombie film, from 2004. Here’s the trailer.

Monday, 28 April 2025

Aviassembly ✶

New plane building and flying game with a cartoon flat graphic style by Jelle Booij.

Could this be a contender for a roguelite flight sim?

I’ll be trying it soon and comparing it with KitHack Model Club.

Via M0rt75.

Sunday, 27 April 2025

A Dao of Web Design ✶

Written by John Allsopp 25 years ago, this is still my favorite text concerning web typography, even though it doesn’t have the word “typography” in it.

If you want to read the Tao Te Ching, referenced in the article, I can recommend Gia-Fu Feng’s and Jane English’s English translation.

This is in reply to Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web typography: a refresher and history.

Wild Geese ✶

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

By Mary Oliver.

Tuesday, 22 April 2025

Krishnamurti on Trees

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From Krishnamurti to Himself, His Last Journal, 1987:

Brockwood Park, Friday 25th February, 1983

THERE IS A tree by the river and we have been watching it day after day for several weeks when the sun is about to rise. As the sun rises slowly over the horizon, over the trees, this particular tree becomes all of a sudden golden. All the leaves are bright with life and as you watch it as the hours pass by, that tree whose name does not matter — what matters is that beautiful tree — an extraordinary quality seems to spread all over the land, over the river. And as the sun rises a little higher the leaves begin to flutter, to dance. And each hour seems to give to that tree a different quality. Before the sun rises it has a sombre feeling, quiet, far away, full of dignity. And as the day begins, the leaves with the light on them dance and give it that peculiar feeling that one has of great beauty. By midday its shadow has deepened and you can sit there protected from the sun, never feeling lonely, with the tree as your companion. As you sit there, there is a relationship of deep abiding security and a freedom that only trees can know.

Towards the evening when the western skies are lit up by the setting sun, the tree gradually becomes sombre, dark, closing in on itself. The sky has become red, yellow, green, but the tree remains quiet, hidden, and is resting for the night.

If you establish a relationship with it then you have relationship with mankind. You are responsible then for that tree and for the trees of the world. But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity, with human beings. We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots. You must be extraordinarily sensitive to hear the sound. This sound is not the noise of the world, not the noise of the chattering of the mind, not the vulgarity of human quarrels and human warfare but sound as part of the universe.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds.

This is not sentiment or romantic imagination but a reality of a relationship with everything that lives and moves on the earth. Man has killed millions of whales and is still killing them. All that we derive from their slaughter can be had through other means. But apparently man loves to kill things, the fleeting deer, the marvellous gazelle and the great elephant. We love to kill each other. This killing of other human beings has never stopped throughout the history of man’s life on this earth. If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass and the fast moving clouds, then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever. Organized murder is war, and though we demonstrate against a particular war, the nuclear, or any other kind of war, we have never demonstrated against war. We have never said that to kill another human being is the greatest sin on earth.

Every day is Earth day.

❤

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Monday, 21 April 2025

Goodbye, Jorge Mario Bergoglio ✶

You were better than most in your position.

I pray free thought prevails, and maybe for robots, bugs, and aliens to attack, so humans stop fighting each other and join forces to combat them, instead.

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