Idea for TABlog is to semi-regularly list the open tabs I have open, and explain why. I haven’t read them yet, so I can’t comment on their content, but I figure we all have reasons for keeping tabs open and around.
Here’s the 3 questions:
How many tabs do you have open right now? What are they? And why do you have them open?
I’m sure this isn’t a new idea, but I think its cool. I wanna know what Tabs you have open too. If you post one one of these on your own blog let me know in the comments or fire a webmention.
Excluding the tab I’m writing this post in I have 4 tabs open.
Which is actually a lot for me. Todays tabs are whats left over from the last few days of being on the web. Here’s whats on deck:
I haven’t seen K IRL since just before the pandemic, so it’s been a long while. I’m looking forward to watching their talk on Neural Media. Sterling linked it on his new(ish) Art Maker blog the other day.
I listened to K’s discussion with the New Models crew a few weeks ago, and I’m interested to hear more/a deep dive in the presentation on their McLuhan-esq four phases of media: Broadcast, Immersive, Network and now Neural.
Apparently this piece/essay has been online for a while, but it’s new to me and instantly knew I wanted to give it my full attention the moment I scrolled down. I love visual essays and obviously I’m interested in the topic. I’m a sucker for pages that look like this and really want to do something like this myself.
Arnaud spoke at the Floating Worlds zine launch conference the other month. His Trust Infrastructure essay came up in conversation on Wednesday several times. I glanced over it when it came out, but didn’t give it my full attention. But since it seems to have influenced a lot of people, I’m going to read it to find out why.
I skipped over this in my RSS reader when it came out on the 25th of April because .. TLDR. But I’ve seen it linked to twice this week on different Discords. I think its a long exploration of the argument ‘Writing helps you think more clearly’. Gonna have to read it to find out.
A few years ago Eve got me a MagLite Solitaire AAA torch for Christmas. I recently came across an LED conversion kit for it.
Friends and pals over at 0xSalon just published the script (and an in-line glossary of terms) of their theatrical project THE BLACK HOLE OF MONEY. A play about Bitcoin and proof of work that premiered at click festival Denmark 2022:
Spanning the entire 21st century, we are guided by our narrator—a time-travelling cowboy—across multiple parallel timelines originating from present day events. Bitcoin mediates a game of chicken between capital, ecology and the humans who scramble to coordinate and respond to the crises it creates. Characters represent the principal stakeholders in the Bitcoin economy, and their emissaries. Faced with Earth’s quickening deterioration, Earth’s unwitting protagonists can adopt various strategies: acceleration of the quest for limitless energy, attempt to tame Bitcoin with regulation, conducting insurrectionary uprisings, or acquiescence to the new machine god.
Wild to me that a Salon/Reading group can generate enough escape velocity to do something like this post pandemic. Why isn’t there anything like this in London?
The arrival of Age of Empires signaled a new era of interest and engagement with games by the most daunting single corporate power in the broader field of computing in general.
This gap is a problem. 60% of workers in low-income countries are employed in agriculture, arguably the most weather-dependent sector. Most are small-scale farmers, who are often extremely poor.
If lobbying your grocery managers sounds like a futile effort, look at the changes that have rippled through the tomato industry as breeders re-embrace heirlooms.
I finished ‘Voice of the whirlwind‘ by Jon Williams. The 1987 follow up novel to the cyberpunk classic Hardwired. Like the first novel in the series, it holds up extremely well compared to other books of the era. I can only describe it as The Expanse+Altered Carbon+Hardwired. Must have blown the domes of people when it came out that’s for sure.
I finished Cal Newports ‘Slow Productivity’. It was alright. Didn’t really wider issues is have with personal organisation. But did enjoy the Missions, Projects, Goals, Tasks taxonomy.
Still reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. Its a bit of a slog, but i’m only reading one chapter a night so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I smashed though the audio book of Kyle Chayka’s newest book Filterworld. It’s really good. A wide-ranging book looking at the effects the last 15 years of algorithmically mediated culture as shaped society and culture. I don’t think it contains anything ‘new’ to the sorts of people who read this blog, but its nice to have it all in one place and valuable book to point other people toward. I liked show the Chayka repeatedly returns to airspace and coffeeshop culture in every chapter.
I’ve been listening to this collab album between Jazz saxophonist Gendel and Bassist Wilkes.
The whole album is absolutely amazing. The whole album has this wonky nostalgic vibe. Like you’re listening to jazz from the future sent back in time. I really don’t know how to describe it. Other than I like it. A lot.
Remember Kids:
They absorbed the costs of full employment during slack times on the theory that the investment in keeping a trained, loyal work force on the job would pay off when things turned up.
The Chip by T. R. Reid
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I’ve just finished reading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, I can’t recommend it enough. It covers many of the same themes that 301 has touched on over the years. How algorithms shape our online and offline experiences, how seamless media consumption leads to pervasive anxiety etc. Chayka’s proposed solutions will be familiar to listeners too.
So it’s been with Filterworld as a sort of cognitive background radiation that I’ve been thinking about systems and ‘Going Deep’. I drew a 2×2 in my notebook the other day to explore the idea.
Deep and Surface Engagement on one axis, and High and Low Context on the other. But the results are unsatisfying. Low Engagement and Low Context isn’t negative. It’s just a different way of experiencing a system. You don’t need to know how DNS or TCP IP works to enjoy the web, you know?
So instead, let’s explore an example of what it means to ‘Go Deep’ into a system.
Here’s Tobias Revell back in 2018 on the phenomenon of speedrunning.
In speedrunning is a model for interacting with systems, playing them properly, not just operating within their confines as I’ve previously identified being the failure of contemporary political action. Speedrunners play the playing of the game. As we build a rule increasingly structured by software and the confines of simulations and predictions, a mentality that shifts to re-constructing the rules and playing in a true sense has enormous potential.
A game has a defined beginning and end. A start and a finish. But when you speedrun a game, how you get from point A to point B is open to interpretation. Players know the code space so well they set their own constraints on the way in which agency inside of it should be recognised. There are many types of records for the same game. Completed with or without glitches, sequence breaks, going out of bounds, with or without tools to aid the player etc.
It might seem strange to ask this about a 35 year old game but, have you been following developments in competitive Tetris lately?
Players have GONE.DEEP.
For almost the entire game’s history, players interacted with the system in a certain way. With a technique called – hyper tapping.
Which involved rapidly tapping the buttons of the controller with thumb and fingers. How fast you could spin or move a piece was constrained by how quickly you could physically tap the controller. Essentially setting a hard limit on what was humanly possible in the faster, higher levels.
In 2020 however, a competitive NES Tetris player named “Cheez_fish” developed a technique known as the ‘rolling’.
Instead of tapping the button with your thumb, you instead place a stationary finger on the D-pad and drum the back of the controller with the fingers of the other hand. Four fingers tapping in quick succession is obviously faster than using one. Existing world records were demolished.
There’s a word we used to use in the 1980’s and 90’s to describe a user with such a deep understanding of a technological-system.
A Wizard.
Tetris players have gone so deep, and become such powerful wizards, that they can avoid the end of the world.
Games aren’t the only worlds that people can go deep on. We all know people who have gone deep into their interests or subjects of choice. Wine, whisky, music, art, bird watching, anime, manga, taylor swift, BTS or whatever. We used to call these people nerds connoisseurs.
Connaître meaning ‘to be acquainted with‘. People who go so deep on a subject that they become – to others – an expert judge in matters of taste. With wine or whisky, quite literally.
Going deep also requires time, sustained interest, and attention. All things that are not encouraged or highly prized by our society. Gardening comes to mind as an example of another deep activity.
Unlike speed running, an ecological system is open and can never be predicted. But a gardener can still go deep – a garden is a world that too can be known. With time and attention one can become acquainted with the place how the afternoon light falls in spring. The way the water runs after rains.
A place, a world within which they have agency, tending, caring, worrying over, and for. You can’t speedrun a game without having gone deep, nor can you speed run a garden.
In our current world of shallow engagement, perhaps we should all consider going deep on something we enjoy.
You don’t need to know or care about everything. Step into a world, go deep, and become a wizard.
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A few years ago Eve got me a MagLite Solitaire AAA torch for Christmas. It’s been on my keys ever since, but I recently came across an LED conversion kit for it.
Until I started regularly carrying a torch around with me, I didn’t realise how many day-to-day situations I encounter in life that are improved by …. regularly carrying a torch. Looking in cupboards, looking for dropped earrings under tables in pubs/restaurants. Lost doodads in the rehearsal room/in the footwells of cars late at night, or even for things that have fallen under/off my desk etc.
As I understand it, MagLite were very late in updating/upgrading their range to LED’s and this complacency has meant they have lost a lot of marketshare to upstarts. There is an LED version of the Solitaire available now, there wasn’t at the time that Eve bought me mine. Which speaks to the thing that has always disappointed me about the device – how anaemic the light from it is. I mean, as I said above it does the job when you need it too; and it saved my bacon walking back to the car along a sea wall after dark with my Mum last year. But during daylight, it’s barely perceptible and once you have *some light* in your life, it turns out you want moar.
What it needs is a bright LED in it.
Wondering if there was anything I could do, I recently came across a conversion kit on e-Bay. It arrived the other day and I couldn’t be happier with the results!
The replacement bulb fits right into the existing pin holes with zero fuss. The only thing I was confused about was initially it wasn’t working. I had to flip the pins around 180 degrees, as obviously the current is only designed to flow one way though the pin.
When purchasing the kit it did warn that because of the heat sink, the focusing ring will no longer fully focus and you end up with a 3mm gap between the head of the torch and the body when everything is fully seated in the off position.
Check out the gap in the after image below and compare it to the before image above.
But I’m honestly fine with this as what you loose in focusing ability you gain in brightness. I took side by side comparison photos of original MagLite Bulb on the left and the LED kit on the right. Both photos are taken in ambient daylight.
As you can see, the upgraded LED is bright enough to cast it’s own shadow which is a major improvement! I just walked into our under stairs chaos-cupboard and was pleasantly surprised by how bright it was. It’s definitely going to come in more handy loading in, shipping out at gigs, or when I’m looking for the speaker cable that someone unhelpfully left dangling at the practice room.
I know its only a small thing, but for 10 quid its a major upgrade and well worth the money. Much better than getting a new one.
This has been an 🟧RSS Club post. Syndicated to you, really simply, from thejaymo.net
