Chærete again. I’ve been reading Snow Crash for the first time recently, and it’s absolutely rewired my brain. I suspect i shall have more to say on it when i finish it — in which event you’ll be able to find it on the brand new “Stuff i’ve {watched, listened to, read, played} recently” page, if you were wondering where those posts had gone!

Anyway. Some links for you all, for the sixty-ninth time.

• An extremely good short story
• DadSwap
• News Item (6b370068-7b94-5a0e-1ded-9d1490d2ec32). Glad to see the AP getting into the analogue-horror space.
• Liminal Bingo, a participatory photo scavenger hunt
• At last, ELIZA’s source code has been unearthed!
• Clocks.dev
• Off-roading in latent space
• Jules Vernacular, a collection of France’s vernacular typography
• The Grauniad interviews Candice Odgers, who would like you all to stop being silly about kids and social media
• Apocalypse Troy: Nolan’s Odyssey and the end of civilisation
• “A Locomotive Named Big Boy Is Making Grown Men Cry” ($)
• Suika Game. It’s like 2048, but you have to combine fruit without filling up the board. Dangerously moreish.
• Cooking for Engineers®
• The End of an Era:

  Another prediction is that most readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. Book series will go viral and readers will get wholly absorbed and where the story came from won’t matter. There will always be readers pushing beyond the fringe. That’s how fanfiction became viable. It’s why I had a career. There were readers who ignored the assholes saying, “Don’t read that, it’s self-published.” These readers asked instead, “Yeah, but is it any good?” Because of them, I got to write for a living. So I will always have a fondness for readers who search for story, ignoring the stories behind the stories.

• “Welcome to RamenHaus, home of rotating ramen.”

• “I probably had a weirder referendum week than you”, or, the recollections of the creator of a Change.org petition for London independence, ten years on
• Skumsoft.ltd
• “Tamatou was a wooden doll which, according to oral tradition, ruled as the 13^th Tuʻi Tonga of the Tuʻi Tonga Empire.”
• Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–92)
• “Generative artificial intelligence creates delicious, sustainable, and nutritious burgers”
• Things unexpectedly named after people: “an incomplete and infuriating list”
• Kyoto Aquarium’s penguin relationship chart is now available in English. Truly, a thing of beauty…
• There are more than five POVs. Tempted to write something in the first-person plural now…
• The Forestiere Underground Gardens
• A cool polar “sun compass” from the National Geographic Society’s archives
• I’m a huge fan of this New York cinema’s fuckass website
• King Charles III, Defender of the Faith?
• The Garfield Tea House, “the only remaining structure directly related to President James A. Garfield’s final trip to the Jersey Shore”.
• File under “we do a little trolling”: Using crowdsourcing and swarms of AI, a Seattle startup cracked Google’s secret cryptography results within seventy-two hours
• Yeast architecture (via Linkfest)
• A retail T-shirt with a wonderful obfuscated Bash script printed on its back

Welcome back! I’ve had a stress-filled month, and i just saw Disclosure Day and thought it was naff, but let’s ignore that and focus on the beautiful things of the world for a moment. Like these links i found you. Please enjoy each one equally. :-)

• A history of Arabic typography, and why it’s still so sucky on the web
• Where to find the colours your screen can’t show you. There’s some beautiful stuff out there in the world.
• CrankGPT: A small language model running on a hand-cranked computer. “Provided the electronics are kept dry and at a reasonable temperature, there’s no reason this thing won’t still work in a hundred years.”
• “List of anachronistic contemporary”
• What Rothko is the weather today?
• Banana youth
• The Star Gauge (璇璣圖), a fourth-century Chinese poem written in a 29-by-29 grid that can be read in three thousand different ways
• In similar vein: “On the Page Lays Language”, one of many poems submitted to a writing contest for aliens
• A fun showcase of some Winogradsky columns and other jarred terraria
• Plot.fyi: “Film discovery for film lovers”, recommending similar films based on plot/tropes/director quirks/&c.
• I Spy but for Wikipedia pictures
• Heikki’s Garden of Flowers: a compendium of pre-Ascii typographic art
• A site devoted to Coventina, a Roman British Goddess of wells and springs
• “Society’s Resilience to a Total Loss of Agriculture”: or, how to use natural gas and microbes to feed the population in the event that farms suddenly stop working
• This one’s just for the real transhumanist sickos in the audience: A talk for mental-health professionals about the coming explosion of non-human minds. “The road to transformative regenerative medicine leads directly to freedom of embodiment.” Yes… yes!!!!
• Some deliciously nineties panoramas of the view from various hills