- State Library acquires Flinders’ original love letters – It’s more than just love letters, really. I’ve been to a couple events at the State Library of NSW in the past year and I’m always astounded by the depth of their collections. It’s as much a museum as it is a library!
- News Knitter – A data visualisation project where information gathered from daily political news was analysed, filtered, and converted into a pattern for a machine knitted sweater.
- The Commercial Pattern Archive – A wonderful resource that archives commercial sewing pattern data to preserve these ephemeral bits of our culture for the future. (Link via Metafilter.)
- The Easy Tiger Sessions by Charley Castle & The Boys in the Well – We heard this group playing a bit at Wayward last weekend and Rodd tracked them down. It’s “newgrass.” Very nice.
- Blogroll.org – I’m still on the hunt for more sites to add to my feed reader. Lots to explore here!
Category: Random Links
Links that I’m reading/watching/listening to/thinking about
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Links I’ve been enjoying lately
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Links I’ve been enjoying lately
- 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web – 1995 was the year I graduated high school, and while I’d briefly looked at Compuserve at home, it was at uni that I really got into the Internet in a big way. I’m really loving this series.
- ‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers – Yep. I’m glad I’m not working in tech right now.
- Lunar Quilts capture crafters, astronaut’s take on return to the moon – Gorgeous! I love these. (Quite frankly, I’m surprised these works are being displayed at the Kennedy Center. Quilting? Women astronauts? Feels a bit woke, doesn’t it? 🙄)
- TOAST MALONE – That one helped us win pub trivia last week, as it enabled me to quickly identify the singer’s name from an anagram. 😂
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“Good God, it was fun!”
LOVED this piece where Vulture got some of the legends of Broadway to dress up and revisit some of their famous characters. Patti, Liza, Mandy, Bebe, Joel, Lin… and so many more.
Relatedly, I’m trying to justify flying to Brisbane to see Bernadette Peters in October. I want to minimise air travel these days, but when am I going to get the chance to see this legend again?!
Updated to add: I bought the tickets. Maybe we’ll take the train??
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Precarious situation 🧑🚀🚀
Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought – DAMN! Astronauts are the absolute coolest, smartest, bravest human beings. I also love the respect they have for the folks in Mission Control:
“Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That’s a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, ‘What do you think?’ they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.”
Link courtesy of Metafilter…
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Aussie architecture 🏠
Do you know your Art Deco from mid-century modern? Your guide to five popular design eras – Fun little visual guide to some of the common architectural styles you see in Australia. There’s a quiz at the bottom too! I immediately fell in love with the Star Theatre in Launceston. *sigh*
Relatedly, I was interested to read that someone in Ohio has built a “new” Frank Lloyd Wright house from blueprints he drew but never built. Hilariously, the FLW Foundation refuses to classify it as authentically his work… because they built it to modern building codes. 😂 I’m not surprised. When we visited Taliesin in 2010, I was shocked by how poor some of the workmanship was. The walls were thin, and there were literally gaps around some of the windows. “How in the world did the family live here in Wisconsin in the winter?” I asked the tour guide. “They didn’t. They had another home in Arizona.” Of course! While some of his ideas were brilliant, his designs don’t always seem especially suited to the realities of how people live.
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Links that have been occupying me lately
- AO3 is entering a new era – some fascinating number-crunching here on the stats around what’s happening in the world of fan fiction. I’ll confess I’ve read a ton on AO3, and I was motivated enough to look up the full report. I also didn’t realise the impact that AI-scraping is having on the fanfic community, but it makes sense.
- Coming Soon: From ‘The Sims’ to ‘World of Warcraft’, You’ll Be Able to Play Your Way Through ACMI’s ‘Game Worlds’ Exhibition – Oh, fun. We’ll have to plan a trip to Melbourne.
- Why are we still using 88×31 buttons – Nostalgia! The bit about IAB ad sizes reminded me of my “Responsive Ads: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things… Yet” talk. It also reminded me of Amazon’s “Phone Tool Icons,” these little badges employees can earn that get displayed on your page on the internal company directory. Some people were obsessed with those. I remember back in 2020 I tried to get a new one approved to award to people who managed to record their Summit talks with a perfectly white backdrop. (Everyone had to scramble and record at home during Covid lockdown, and for some reason Amazon PR were super fastidious about your backdrop not having any visible shadows or texture on it. Like, we’re all paranoid about the global pandemic and finding toilet paper and homeschooling kids, but you’re totally right, a perfectly smooth white background is the #1 priority. 🙄) But it got rejected, because whoever approves the Phone Tool Icons hates fun. Anyway, I pinged a friend there yesterday to see what size they are, and turns out they’re 120×30, so they’re not actually Micro Buttons anyway.
- Do One Thing – Everything is awful, and when I’ve run out of stupid Internet things to distract myself with (like fan fiction and video games and micro buttons), I find myself seeking out these posts with suggestions of how to cope.
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Links I’ve been reading lately
- Hayao Miyazaki Would Hate You Fucking Losers – Harsh, but true. I can’t believe how many people I know jumped on posting those images on LinkedIn. So gross.
- How to make a book – Another great post from Mike Monteiro’s Good News. I immediately sent it to my sister, who is a freelance editor. It also made me think about whether I have a book in me.
- Michael Shannon Loves Music Like We Love Music – As a card carrying member of the R.E.M. fan club (not kidding), I unabashedly love this. I wish they would tour Australia!
- Knitting Through Digital Decay: A Collection of Digital Preservation Jumpers No One Asked For (But Here They Are Anyway) – LOVE this! I really need to get back to the project I started to knit a modern fairisle that incorporates the DOCOMO emoji.
- South Korea releases long-awaited report into overseas adoptions of thousands of children – I’m glad that some of these kids are starting to get answers. Heartbreaking, though…
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AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
Ahhh, yes. And it’s all over Facebook. I had to unfriend a former colleague this week for posting a shitty image of a Muslim man walking a British police officer on a dog leash, who actually tried to defend that (as somehow being related to child abuse?) when I called him out for it. It’s awful and dehumanising and racist. Leni Riefenstahl would’ve loved Gen AI.
AI imagery looks like shit. But that is its main draw to the right. if AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, they wouldn’t want it.
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Love this.
From Meanjin to Warrane, Apple Maps adds more than 250 Indigenous placenames in Australia. Hey, this is pretty good. I just checked on my iPhone and I was able to see Warrane now included for Sydney Cove, as well as a label for Eora Nation. Apple have done something similar in NZ, and they have shared details on grants and partnerships with indigenous groups in both countries. I’m still salty with Tim Cook for that inauguration bribe, but this seems like an unambiguous Good Thing, and we need those these days. (I switched from Google Maps some time ago.)
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Botanical block prints
How gorgeous is Lili Arnold’s work? As soon as I saw this Colossal post, I fell in love with that Strelitzia print. A few minutes later it was ordered and on its way to me, exchange rate be damned. (She features several native Australian plants as well, which made me wonder at first if she was Aussie. Alas, Californian.)