Oliver Roick's Weblog

7PM — The story of Deltron 3030, a defining underground hip hop record, told by Deltron members Del tha Funky Homosapian, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala.

KID KOALA I remember when it first came out, it wasn’t like people just got it right away or anything.

DAN THE AUTOMATOR That’s just how it is, because you’re giving them something that they’re not used to. You’re in the music world, and you know everything has to be categorized. And once you do something that’s not categorized, it messes people up, it trips them up.

KID KOALA We finished that record, we did a ten city tour, I think, but we were all literally coming off of other tours, so we just stopped it at that. A few months later, Gorillaz came out and just super-nova-ed.

DEL THA FUNKEE HOMOSAPIEN When it first came out, wasn’t nobody tripping like that. Of course, I knew that ahead of time. Nobody’s going know when it first drops. You got to give it time for people to listen to it and figure out what it is. It was some years.

KID KOALA It took three, four years before it found its audience and then that audience just kept multiplying somehow. The record was being passed around to people. I guess it became a little bit of a cult classic in a sense. It was odd how excited people got when I would even mention Deltron, or that we were working on some new material.

The first time I heard about Deltron 3030 was on VIVA2, a more cultured, German-speaking MTV, and it didn’t stick. I rediscovered it years later and realised what I had missed. A truly groundbreaking hip hop record.It became a favourite amongst some of my friends, even those that wouldn’t normally listen to rap music much.

10AM — Robin Sloan: Spending time with the material

A wild find at a comic book store yesterday: The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, a doorstop volume, devoted mostly to complete reproductions of early versions of the game, from typewritten drafts to published booklets. This isn’t just a breezy review, but a presentation of real archival material. I pored over the book for hours, enjoying the edits in pencil, the 1970s paste-up design. I read out of order, flipped back and forth, skimmed and scanned, jotted notes on my phone.

It occurred to me, deep into a really wonderful experience, of reading and thinking and wondering and feeling, that if Wizards of the Coast had published exactly the same material online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the website, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the digital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.

[…]

[W]e can see plainly the value of the book as information technology: a mechanism for accessing a bundle of material, for spending time with it, for investigating and considering it. Still unmatched!

There are books I like to own as a physical, printed copy. And there are books where I don’t bother, books that I prefer to read on my trusty eleven-year-old old Kindle.

Like Sloan’s copy of “The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons”, the books I buy in a shop are those that are highly visual, containing many photographs, maps, and graphics. The books you come back to, in an idle moment, to flip through its pages, go back and forth in a non-linear way. Whereas a novel? That I get digital. It’s likely I’ll only read it once and never touch it again.

11AM — Work culture has changed dramatically in the last hundred years. Before it was obvious that you’re working for “the man.” In today’s hustle culture, you work for yourself, first and foremost. Your employer’s success is your success. You don’t progress? You’re not seeing the opportunities. Still on a shit salary? You’re not working hard enough. Mandy Brown writes:

The turn, here, is to note that what’s burned up is both the individual worker and the collective they might have belonged to. That is, when the worker absorbs the management ethos and becomes their own manager—when they see themselves as a project to be designed, branded, and marketed—they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses.

I noticed this in previous jobs. People, who primarily define their role as “entrepreneur of the self” and shoehorn their actions under the disguise of “the mission,” start working against other people or teams. They prioritise outcomes that prove advantageous to themselves. And management doesn’t figure it out because they play the same game. And we end up with two groups. One that gets ahead, and another that ships actual work but slowly burns out.

10AM — Lessons from Robert Redford’s impeccable fashion sense. (Side note: I wish Derek Guy would put this kind of content on his blog instead of Bluesky, which I have blocked on my devices along with other social media platforms to stay sane. And the way the thread is presented here, interrupted by irrelevant comments by his followers, just doesn’t make for a good reading experience.

7PM — Good Internet Magazine

Good Internet is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit print and digital biannual magazine for personal website owners and those interested in using the internet as a means of self-expression, art, and recreation.

9PM — Another photography post: Stephen Shore’s Early Work includes photography documenting everyday life in the 1960s New York :

Early Work collects for the first time the entirely unseen photographs created during Shore’s early teenage years between 1960 and 1965, a period of rich experimentation that precedes his time working with Andy Warhol at The Factory.

8PM — The Guardian has a nice overview of documentary photographer Martin Parr’s career, in pictures and in Parr’s own words.

11AM — If you needed a reminder how utterly weird Mark Zuckerberg is:

A seven-foot statue depicting Ms. Chan in a silver, flowing robe that Mr. Zuckerberg commissioned last year sits on the property.

There was once a rumour that Jeff Bezos had a fully equipped Starbucks installed at his home. It turned out to be false, but is nevertheless entirely believable because the one thing all Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and many other tech billionaires share is a lack of class. Ironically one of the few things money cannot buy.

10AM — Elron is at it again (not linking because it’s obviously posted to X and I don’t link to X)

In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.

In a recent South Park episode, Randy March, high on ketamine, runs whatever remains of his weed farm fully into the ground after solely relying on ChatGPT for every business decision. This feels like the same plot.

9AM — Alan Schaller is not only one of the finest contemporary black and white photographers, he also has one of the best photography channels on YouTube He never discusses gear or ponders the meaning of it all without ever getting to the point. Instead you get actual practical insight on photography techniques, presented with wit and humour.

How to photograph silhouettes

How to use panning to add motion to your pictures:

Reflecting on reflections:

The last one has the most London ending ever. Set out to do a thing, go to the pub “for one,” end up getting pissed without doing the thing.

8AM — Sad to see Son Heung-min leave Tottenham this summer. He’s an incredible footballer, his Puskas Award winning goal against Burnley proves it.

7PM — The Set Design of Sesame Street. A look at how Jane Jacobs, ideas from “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” were incorporated into Sesame Street’s set design in the 1960s and how the set change since (cleaner, brighter, gentrified).

9AM — The Mozilla developer Network turns 20. MDN still is my go to page whenever I need documentation on JavaScript features or browser APIs. So essential that I’d search “JS array reduce MDN” to make sure MDN is the top result.

8AM — “I Drank Every Cocktail”, well, not every cocktail but all cocktails listed by the International Bartenders Association.

About the list, the IBA writes:

The official IBA Cocktail List recognizes the most requested recipes, used over the years by bartenders servicing the most important bars all over the world.

One drink, the Spicy Fifty, proved to be a real headache for Aaronson to complete his quest. A drink so obscure that he had to fly to London to go to a specific bar.

I was able to check off the Spicy Fifty, one of the list’s most perplexing inclusions, by going to creator Salvatore Calabrese’s own Velvet bar at the Corinthia hotel, seemingly the only place in the world where it’s served.

Does the IBA list recognise “the most requested recipes” if you have to fly half way around the world to have a drink in one particular bar? Just a thought, really, I don’t care.

After reading the story, I went out to buy Campari and Vermouth because I felt like a Negroni. A “pedestrian” choice it may be, but I’m a simple man. I like my drink like I like my tech. A bit boring, perhaps, but well-established and has stood the test of time.

10AM — Can Directories Rise Again?. I sure hope so, but I don’t think many people will put in the work to dig through directories as long as they can access no-effort curated content 24/7.

The only resistance to the current advance of AI is humanity. We are relearning that humans can see through the bullshit. There are examples everywhere.

This is why I love blogs with many links as they are chronologically ordered lists of links curated by humans. I trust humans more when they are posting for the sake of collecting content, instead of posting for reach, and likes and comments and going viral. Because such people don’t see through the bullshit, they contribute to it.

1PM — The hardest working font in Manhattan. Gorton, the font doing the work, is so ubiquitous, once you’ve read this piece you’ll see it everywhere.

9AM — Classic Web posts “screenshots of classic websites and blogs from Dot-Com, Web 2.0 and the 2010s.” Spelunking in the Wayback Machine, indulging in old-fashioned web design is one of my favourite past times. So this is right up my alley.

11AM — ChatGPT running hot tonight as scores of Gooners scramble to come up with new jokes.

3PM — I did not know there was a 30-minute extended film to Beastie Boys’ Make Some Noise.

10AM — The Neocities browse page features some absolutely wild web design and I’m here for it. Children, this is what the social web looked like before social media.

2PM — Interview with Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, founders of Bombay artist group CAMP, about their current show at MOMA. I saw their work Bombay Tilts Down last year at RMIT in Melbourne and I can highly recommend. Go see the show if you’re New York in the next couple of months.

12PM — Worth following: A pull request proposing to reinstate Mozilla’s promise not to sell user data.

4PM — You now work in Marcodata Refinement at Lumon Industries, if mindless jobs are your jam.

3PM — A British phone company has created a generative “granny AI” that engages and ultimately frustrates scam callers. For once, a useful application of generative AI.

9AM — And here is the trailer for “SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” Questlove’s documentary film about Sly Stone.

7PM — This mashup of SNL musical guests, that acts as the intro to Questlove’s upcoming documentary, is brilliant. Can’t wait to watch the whole thing now.

6PM — Stimulation Clicker is a fun new app by digital artist Neal Agarwal. This one grabs your attention and magically sucks you in. You keep playing the game, clicking the button, engaging with everything presented to you. The more attention you pay, the more useless features the app will add until it becomes a completely pointless mess of videos, sound, and things flying around. And before you know it, you’ve spent thirty minutes on the site and accomplished absolutely nothing. Just like most websites today.

3PM — A web page that uses every HTML element doubles as a comprehensive reference and learning guide.

10AM — Questlove on his upcoming documentary on the history of music on Saturday Night Live:

The whole experience is the same as “Summer of Soul.” At first, I said, “Just let me get the 20 coolest performances, let’s cut and paste it, and that’s it.” But I’m not at the place where I’m ready to say: “OK, here’s what you asked for. Where’s my money?” I want to make history buffs and nerds feel good about this show, and I want future creatives to get a master class on how to take risks and be creative.

Funding member of groundbreaking hip-hop group The Roots, member of the Soulquarians, Fallon’s in-house band (neglectable), author of books on music history and creativity and music-history documentary film maker. Questlove is manifesting himself as one of the most important and influential cultural icons of our times.