A blog by yours truly.
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The Amish are not a people known for their love of the newfangled. They are deeply wed to their traditions, keeping to themselves, keeping the old ways alive, and shunning any sort of Engliſche imposition on their material culture. But there is one technological innovation which even the most stringently conservative have accepted: Via Wikipedia The washing machine may be the most revolutionary…
“Song from the perspective of a ransomware virus” has to be up there with “Song from the perspective of a child’s bedroom nightlight” in terms of the great musical points of view, right? 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…
Worried we’re going to run out of good, reliable Future Years. 2000 was a big blow, and we just lost 2019, 2020, and 2025 in rapid succession. 2050 and 2070 are in reach in our lifetimes. I don’t think anything starting with a 21- has anywhere near the same amount of aura
Oops! The book we gave the guy in the Chinese room was about Mandarin, but all the people passing slips actually wanted Cantonese
IT'S COMING H[15 July Messi incident, thousands dead]
“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…
Apologies for any recent downtime — the repairman had to turn off the power for a bit and my server-laptop’s been a bit finnicky as always in trying to get back up.
it’s too late. i’ve already depicted you as the screeching, dangerous, overengineered trans-Atlantic hyperloop and myself as the cool, collected, romantic maglev gliding serenely over the Bering Strait
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…
Got into an argument with someone on the internet and we both deëscalated to a reasoned conclusion where we agreed to disagree. What the fuck i didn’t know that was allowed
Coming Home Status: It’s
It is the position of His Majesty’s Government that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are old enough to vote, old enough to join the military, old enough to drink, old enough to have sex, and old enough to pay income tax, but not old enough to go on the computer after the watershed. They want to protect the children by boxing at shadows, but all they’re doing is trapping the sons and daughters of…
When/if i die, my tombstone is going to read “Thought for 2,682,000,000s”
There’s something disturbing about modern McDonald’s marketing where Grimace, Hamburglar, and the rest of the M c DCU cast are there, but Ronald McDonald is absent. Like he’s been erased from history after falling out of favour with the régime.
Weird Britain: The Guardian ’s list of ten great British oddities you should visit I don’t know what this is. A gallery of 100,000 seemingly random images, sourced from ??? and organised by ??? in order to ???. “Let’s hear it for small dicks and short sex!” Something about the url “playboy.substack.com” fills me with an unnameable emotion. A recreation of the star map from Project Hail Mary The…
Forget Victorian children or mediæval peasants; “The American pope closes his manifesto on artificial intelligence by quoting Gandalf ” is a sentence that would instantly kill a 2003-era forum user
Say what you will about coronavirus disease 2019, but it did give us some great music. A cool explainer of infrared photography, with even cooler photos Elizabeth Saloka’s painted rock snacks On grey literature The New York Times on minimal-comfort feeding, an emerging middle-ground in dementia care between prolonging unwilling lives and euthanasia Apocalypse Early Warning System : “In the event…
Whenever i hear the phrase “separating the art from the artist” it makes me imagine something like the anti-dæmon guillotine doohickey from His Dark Materials .
The Tyne and Wear Metro is a marvel of the British railway network: the only true metro system outside of London and Glasgow 1 , with fully accessible stations, beautiful typographic design , and only the occasional closure because someone stole all the copper wiring again. But amongst railway nerds, it is also known for one more puzzling detail: it’s a pretzel. 1 Many sources describe it as a…
It’s 2026 and, somehow, the most convenient way of getting an image from my phone to my desktop (or vice versa) is still “posting it in a private Discord server with me as the only member”.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Absolute queer cinema. An injection of life in the arm. Possibly the only thing that would make me want to actually go to Australia. (9/10) To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) Unfortunately this loses steam once it stops being a road movie and starts being a True Stories -esque small-wacky-town comedy — which is, uh, most…
Before we start — i always feel a little awkward about publishing two link roundups in a row, and three especially is pushing it, so i wanted to assure everyone that i do have some more stuff in the pipe! In the coming months, you can expect (okay, hope) to see, in no particular order: A deep dive into why the Tyne and Wear Metro is the funny shape it is Several short multimedia articles on the…
Getting a “Claude is AI and can make mistakes.” tramp stamp
In Europe we call him/them 22.86 Centimetre Nails
Tickle Me Elmo vs. a particle accelerator The Artemis II launch, but with “Free Bird” playing RavensBlight’s paper toy shop : Dozens of free papercraft you can make at home! A teardown of LG ’s unreleased rollable phone shows why it never made it to market … but damn, does it look cool. Slop Sculpt! Bash together a crummy 3D model and it’ll sloppify it into anything you want. Here’s my otter:…
The New Statesman interviews Thomas Heatherwick, Britain’s most divisive designer Bajini : “It has been argued that the account of the Baijini in the Aboriginal folklore are in fact a mythological reflection of the experiences of some Aboriginals who have traveled to Sulawesi with the Macassans and came back.” Man who talked down hospital bomber says would-be attacker asked for a cuddle How the…
Ryan Gosling has entered that pantheon of actors where i will happily go see literally anything he is in 1 , but it’s always nice when i wouldn’t have needed convincing in the first place, and as it stands, i probably would have watched Project Hail Mary even if it had starred Neil Breen. (…Maybe only once, though.) 1 Other members: Timothée Chalamet, LaKeith Stanfield, Dev Patel, Nic Cage……
Genuinely quite honoured to see the Forest on the FMHY list … that site has helped my cheapskate ass out more times than i can count.
Canadian place names be like: Rhodesville Sainte-Marie-du-Saguenay Bull Penis, Alberta Kitchenpissing Xɬθʷəyëm Gitzâa (formerly Adolf Hitler Island)
🫵️ YOU should go watch Project Hail Mary in Imax right now. I don’t care what you’re doing. Get on the bus and buy a ticket.
Two arcades both claim to be the “world’s largest”. Which is right? How thousands of AI Homer Simpson cover songs flooded Soulseek A cool personal page listing the webmaster’s favourite Chinese alternative music (via Gleech ) A history of the Fn key Tembo, a drum machine that thinks it’s a draughts board Starboy! An adorable Tamagotchi-type thing that senses its environment, recognises faces ,…
I actually thought some of the Nvidia DLSS examples everyone is butt-mad about looked kinda neat, IDK . Clearly not ready for prime time, but if they can tamp down on the yassification it might help break through the plateau of diminishing returns on photorealism that the past decade of video games has been stuck on.
AI by fax. Incredible things are happening in Germany. A fun little web sandbox… thing where you mess about with a grid of squares. Three Letters Game. Is this the new Wordle? Who knows! An hour-long recording of a drive through central London in 1999. Soundtracked, naturally, by nothing but the utmost tunes . Choirs are facing a tenor shortage The nightmare of time zones on a boat to Antarctica…
Marty Supreme (2025) So many insane fucking things happen in this film, i almost forgot that the opening credits sequence is Timothée Chalamet’s sperm racing to inseminate Odessa A’Zion’s egg, which then turns into a ping-pong ball, which he hits . Everything about Marty Supreme further confirms that Mr Chalamet is our generation’s only true movie star. 9/10 Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part Two…
Pleased to see that ——— Mountbatten-Windsor has been stripped of the title of “Andrew”, and is now simply “a man in his sixties from Norfolk” .
Okay, i know it’s gauche to begin a link roundup with an image file just after i forced your computer to load a Youtube embed, but i need to confirm that you’re seeing the same thing i am on your screens. We’re all seeing that, right? A robotics company called “Satyress” that’s making centaur-shaped robots? I’m not just hallucinating the most concentrated Xanthebait imaginable? You’d fucking…
Please ignore the smear of utility pole blocking the view. When i was a child, old enough to be firmly planted in the UK but young enough that every day outside a school’s walls was magical, my family would sometimes take the train up to visit kin in Scotland. I got the window seat, of course — i still hold that those who genuinely prefer aisle seats are suckers — and as i watched the Northumbrian…
Claude is learning to garden. I’m glad the robots are taking up hobbies, at least. Poms.fun “What did we get stuck in our rectums last year?” The battle over New Brunswick’s mystery disease Marcin Wichary’s favourite tech museums Even More Very Good Music Facts , which, as you may be able to tell, is part three in a series The Shortest Longest Bus Trip , or, a pleasant holiday in Belarus The New…
Yes, it’s true. The Horny Awards — the annual celebration of the best things of the year — have outgrown the plant-pots of The Garden , and have thus been moved to their own page, which you can visit here. See you there!
I spent so much time as a little kid listening to They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science , and as my brain’s synapses reminded me recently, it turns out that “Why Does the Sun Shine?” is still a fucking jam. A very big fight over a very small language , or, the war for Romansh A fascinating profile of the Vatican’s official astronomer. Quoth: “Scientists at the observatory are liberated from the…
BOTTOM TEXT For a long time, i’ve proudly put all of my creative outputs (including this site) into the public domain, free from the shackles of copyright. As it says on the front page , that means anyone in the world is free to “copy it, remix it, translate it,” and — most controversially — “train a computer on it”. I like the idea that something written or chicken-scratched by little old me will…
Oh, cripes, i’ve waited far too long. I’ve got, like, twenty films to review now. Shall we just get on with it? Let’s. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) I can’t lie — this is the first western i’ve actually liked , rather than just going “oh, yeah, i can see the craft.” I love that the two leads just bicker like an old married couple the entire time. It’s amazing what Robert Redford can do…
Sorry to lead with a depressing one, but sometimes we live in a depressing world and it can’t be helped: Rest of World covers the bombing and rebuilding of a Gazan tech hub. A beautiful article on the struggles of geologists to truly comprehend the vastity of deep time An absolutely legendary Youtube algorithm pull: “Viva la Vida” played on a Dutch mechanical funfair organ. It’s so jaunty ! Charli…
Spilt my hot chocolate all over the table on the ferry · Seen tonnes of posters for the recent election · Hugged my oma and papa for the first time in six years · Visited her in her new flat · Bought a bami kroket… thing from a vending machine · Eaten brunch with the entire family · Got locked out of a fare gate · Accidentally sat in first class · Relaxed in the quiet carriage · Marvelled at the…
Io Saturnalia, friends, and welcome to the fifth annual edition of The Satyrs’ Forest Lords of Misrule! First, i would like to apologise to my fellow θιασῶται for the delay — i was on private satyr business in Batavia, and you know what they’re like in those kabouter-coffeeshops. Still, perhaps the extra wait was for the best. As i write this in late November, there is real, honest-to- Bacchus…
Hello from Hoorn! I was hoping to write some blog posts whilst i was here, but my editor isn’t letting me upload my holiday photos and there’s no way to fix it until i get back, so i’m afraid you’ll have to wait. — Love, Xan
I’ve been getting into Nine Inch Nails recently, and i have to ask… how the hell did The Downward Spiral elude me for this long? What a goated album. I went to a local astronomers’ meetup the other night. Apparently they gather every new moon by the reservoir to do more proper dark-sky stargazing — they picked the new moon, i assume, to avoid a scheduling conflict with the werewolves. I can’t…
I think that, when the suits at Netflix talk about “second-screen content”, that should be interpreted to mean that they’re gonna start making movies exclusively for the Nintendo 3DS .
I’ve been in the process of writing sci-fi furry smut recently. (Don’t ask why — i don’t know either! The brain wants what it wants, and it’s decided it won’t let me get any alternate-history ideas 1 until i push out the idle trivia about marsupial anatomy.) 2 1 That WW3 map is coming any day now. I swear. 2 I get all of my best ideas on walks, and there’s a certain beauty in the juxtaposition…
