Posts from July 2023

9PM — Rotten Tomatoes critics picked the 25 best films of the last 25 years. Lord of the Rings is on that list, so is Paddington 2. Mad Max Fury Road is number one. I don’t know how to say this, but are the Rotten Tomatoes critics all children?

5PM — All nominations for The Tiny Awards. The sheer amount of really interesting sites fills me with hope that the independent web will survive. But there are also many bland personal sites—who nominated these, the site owners themselves? (via)

5PM — Joe Moran writes to the class of 2023 who started their degrees in 2000 at the height of the COVID pandemic and who will soon graduate:

I dislike the flexed-biceps-emoji, “you’ve-got-this” culture of positive thinking that has overtaken universities in recent years. The self-help and personal growth industries, where all this originates, are wrong to insist that the world is always solvable and that even the worst experiences can be turned into opportunities. Not every adversity is a chance to learn and grow. And no, despite what every graduation ceremony speaker seems to tell you, you can’t just achieve your dreams by never giving up.

But, still, it is amazing what you can survive. And when faced with a real, full-bore crisis, this generation of supposed snowflakes just got on with it and coped better than I did.

So, graduating class of 2023, I doff my floppy felt hat to you. If you can get through a degree with all that going on, I have high hopes for you. Now, if you wouldn’t mind sorting out the world, we’d all be very grateful. Sorry we left it in such a mess.

8PM — Photos of the people working at Smithfield Market, an old meat market in central London. “Experiencing Smithfield at night is to uncover a secret parallel world that operates in the shadows while the rest of London sleeps.” I always wanted to go, shame the marked moves out of the city but it was somewhat inevitable. I hope the owners put the building to good use and that they don’t turn into another market selling trash to tourists or luxury condos.

1PM — Gruber translates Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino’s memo from Hostage Code to plain English. This could be a business, translating lofty words from executives into human-friendly language for the normal people on the shop floor.

1PM — Rotating Sandwiches wins the Tiny Award. There couldn’t be a more worthy winner than a website that shows rotating images of various sandwiches.

6PM — Visualisations of traffic, posts, and votes on StackOverflow show a steady decline in user activity on the site in the past three years. My theory: Content farms like dev.to have been flooding the Web, taking over top results on Google, and leading to less traffic on StackOverflow.

6PM — Reactions to Twitter’s new branding. “Sounds like a porn site and the logo looks like the emblem to a bad Call of Duty gamebattles team from 2008,” and “This new one looks like the logo of a seedy suburban strip club.”

3PM — Here’s why Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to ‘X’ is good, actually

1PM — Fascinating piece about the dependencies between Wikipedia and large-language AI models. LLMs scrape Wikipedia data and flood the internet with AI-generated, sometimes inaccurate and outdated content. This leads to less exposure of Wikipedia, fewer contributions, and potentially a decline of Wikipedia’s quality. But large-language models rely on Wikipedia for verification of facts and information on recent events. A healthy Wikipedia is crucial for companies running products on large-language models, at the same time they are working to diminish its relevance.

10AM — Melbournes best record stores. Some of my favourites are on the list: Union Heights, Greville Records, and Plug Seven.

8AM — Victoria’s government cancels the Commonwealth Games 2026 after estimated costs added up to 7 billion dollars, a significant increase from the anticipated 2.6 billion. It’s the right call. These events cost too much and leave too little impact with local communities and the money is better spent elsewhere.

5PM — Shiobi is a bare-bones blogging tool using plain-text files and shell scripts to manage content. Content is published as plain text as well, no HTML, no styling—just content. RSS is the only “fancy” feature here.

5PM — Try Legal Lullabies if you have trouble falling asleep. It’s Terms of Service from popular social media sites, read by a man with the most soothing voice. (via)

5PM — Wiby is a search engine that indexes simple, non-commercial web pages; you know the ones that made you fall in love with the Web. Surprise me… opens a random web site from the index. Feels like it’s 1998 again.

2PM — Mianzhi Wang’s PhD simulator very much resembles reality. In the game, my hope score was way down after three years, just as it was when I quit my PhD program after years of mediocre results and failed attempts to get funding. (via)

9AM — Many old LEGO building instructions are available in the Internet Archive. Sadly it doesn’t contain sets from the early 90s yet, like the airport or fire station I had as a child. (via)

11AM — Homes in Britain are built 21 metres apart to protect the privacy of woman in Edwardian times: “a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.”

10AM — Saw this piece about fashion brand Magnolia Pearl, who make clothes that look like they were sourced from scraps dumped next to a donation bin, and immediately thought of Derelicte. The piece mentions it too—great journalism all around.

5PM — Kottke revisits the Long Boom, an article published in WIRED in 1997 that forecasted prolonged prosperity and freedom. As we all know, it turned out a little different. The “scenario spoilers,” possible developments that might impede progress, were pretty spot on.

8AM — The New York Times disbands its Sports desk. Going forward, sports content will be supplied by their subsidiary The Athletic. The Times employs some of the finest sports journalists, Rory Smith amongst them. I hope they keep him around and let him continue do his thing, Smith’s football writing is one of the few reasons I subscribe to The Times.

5PM — The Guardian ranks the twenty best Bill Callahan songs, celebrating 20 years since his debut album Supper.

5PM

Róisín Murphy – Fader The song is produced by DJ Koze, so Murphy’s forthcoming album “Hit Parade.” Looking forward to that.

8PM — Patricia Lockwood writes about David Foster Wallace’s “Something to Do with Paying Attention.” A monumental piece, meandering between Foster Wallace’s earlier work and this late publication; sprawling and convoluted, as if it was written by Foster Wallace himself.

5PM — For the 100th anniversary of Le Corbusier’s “Vers Une Architecture – Towards an Architecture,” contemporary architects reflect on the legacy their colleague. “Le Corbusier was an ass.”

5PM

This is genius: a trailer for a hypothetical Succession prequel made of clips from the cast’s previous work.

10AM — Watch Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey in super slow motion, at one frame per hour.

7PM — The rise and fall of Google Reader, told by the people who were involved in the project.

7PM — The Zentrum Paul Klee made available online 3,900 pages of Klee’s notebooks that he used for his teachings at the Bauhaus. The books are “the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist – it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton’s in the realm of physics.”

5PM — The Verge ranks the best books about technology.

12PM

Wax Tailor ft. Victoria Bigelow - Come With Me

8AM — Some guy in Massachusetts had 2,200 units of the the NABU, an obscure 1980s networked computer, stored in a barn. He sold them on eBay, and an online community has formed between the folks who now own one.

8AM — Twitter now blocks unregistered users from seeing content on the platform. A good reminder that a website you own is the only place where access to your content isn’t subject to decisions of an erratic billionaire or the whims of a dogmatic community.