Blog

I've kind of wanted to move my site to flat-file static framework for a while. I like writing in plain text in my text editor; I like operating in files and directories. I liked Wordpress for a good long while, but when I return to my site's back-end to post once every six months, I discover it's been redesigned again and I have less and less idea about what things there mean. (The move to blocks, and even post formats, passed me by.)

(For the ≤1 people who will appreciate this stupid thing I made.)

Telephone is a game in which participants whisper a phrase person-to-person, and see how it evolves as people guess at words they mishear.

The following music video for True Thrush takes this a step further, giving participants one shot to view and memorise a short video, before asking them to recreate it.

Telephone is entertaining because people’s natural automatic error correction (tendency to recognise and reproduce actual words) fights with the noisy communication channel of a quiet whisper. The True Thrush video is more about the unreliability of memory and creativity, and what details seem salient.

Grant Sanderson aka 3blue1brown has a wonderful channel on Youtube where he creates accessible yet deep educational maths videos. The are literally all very good, but the last two are a really great introduction to a topic in fractal geometry, and a demystification of the Mandelbrot set, presented with supreme clarity and fantastic visualisations. Probably requires high-school or first-year undergrad maths to really understand the technical content, but if you have interest in the topic I think you would get a lot out of this even if you have no formal education.

I came across this entertaining essay about NFTs (digital certificates of authenticity traded in a speculative asset bubble, aka “non-fungible tokens”), not from a financial, technological or environmental perspective, but instead from an art-criticism perspective.

As soon as you actually try to talk about this art as art the whole thing sort of falls apart, it just absolutely cannot stand up to the scrutiny. Doing so is about as cringy for the writer and the reader as it is for the viewer of the art itself, which I have to think is why the entire art world seems committed to talking only about the technology, the transmission mechanism, the great great value, all the swirling bullshit AROUND NFTs rather than, god forbid, the amateurish nonsense itself.

Plenty of social and environmental issues with NFTs too, of course, but those have been discussed to death by people more knowledgeable than me.

Edit: the follow-up essay “Why is NFT art so lazy?” is also good, focussing more on procgen in and out of NFTs.

I turned on Radio 1 today for the first time in years. While I know essentially nothing about the current pop music scene, the unique combination of my decades-old pop music knowledge and a tiny slice of contemporary pop music knowledge (courtesy of my far-more worldly sister) allowed me to identify this song as a Coldplay/BTS colab purely from the singers’ voices.

Unfortunately I don’t really like it :/

Every now and then when I find something online which I want to remember or show to somebody — usually an image or a video — I save it in a text file; one per person. Literally kilobytes of the stuff. And even more occasionally, I look back through those text files, and post something I find there on this site. (At this rate it’ll be the year 3888 before I get through it all.)

This is one such thing:

Geoff Manaugh’s speculative landscape and architecture blog BLDG BLOG has reopened its doors. Always worth reading.

I invite you to watch this highly instructional film on dating from 1949.

The Internet Archive is a real treasure trove.

I absolutely love this photo of space shuttle Endeavor, low over an LA city street. Yep, even though it looks like an exquisite Simon Stålenhag painting of an alternative 1970s America, this is actually a real event.