Sorry for sharing silly digital debris with you, but it got a chuckle out of me. Wanting to give a like to a comment on BoingBoing, the system told me it had suspended my account for the next 99 years. https://octodon.social/media/ncVKYfSXN5gPLPomfr0
An unlikely companion piece, but I thought it nevertheless worked well as such, is her story of how she and three others completely controlled the economy on a Minecraft server that was set up to simulate capitalism: https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html
My TL/DR of Alice Maz' A Priesthood of Programmers: 'Priests' serve to explain to us the meaning of the world. Network effects undermine gatekeepers i.e. undermine priesthoods. Journalism was born of network effects but became the priesthood. Facebook and its ilk undermine journalism. What next?
https://jacobitemag.com/2017/12/05/a-priesthood-of-programmers/ Compelling reading.
Michael Steil is the master of the Ultimate Talk Series, in which geeks go deep on popular retro computing topics, and his latest is on the Apollo guidance computer:
Been using a stanley knife for over 90 minutes to cut up old boxes and only cut myself once. #score
The neo-liberal frame that has replaced the social-democratic one: we used to be a society of winners and losers, we are now a society of winners and would-be winners.
This has had me chuckling all day..
The queen gets excited by cows...
A rough guide to the 1970's BBC sci-fi cult classic Blake's 7.
For comparisson, the Mastodon page for my previous tweet takes up 3,000 times more space. https://octodon.social/media/Xsteu3LG2iH0eo_HdcI
A 256-byte C-64 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RATc-g4jxr0 (Explanation: https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/)
How did I become a gamer?!? Three months ago I bought Mount & Blade on a whim, now I speak the jargon, discuss other games with other gamers and my weekday evenings have been taken over by regimental activities. (A regiment is what M&B Napoleonic Era DLC players call a clan.)
Cardboard fantasy airships by Jeroen van Kesteren: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/03/magnificent-cardboard-airships-by-jeroen-van-kesteren/
Fitting that the woman who was among the first to play the electric guitar would be one of the first to use wireless mics on stage.
Rosetta Tharpe singing Didn't It Rain in Manchester in 1964, something worrying at the back of my mind. Ah yes, where is the boom mic? Turns out she was sporting a wireless microphone, the Sony CR-4.
I enjoyed reading Lucas Varela's comic The Longest Day of the Future. The simple drawing style hides (but also gives room to think about) some deep concepts: sentient robots as slaves, the end state of capitalism, the acceptance of violent imagery in main stream media (seguing from cartoon violence!), and so on. Will have to re-read to understand more.
When I hold in my stomach I can almost imagine that if that were my relaxed position, I'd only need to hold in my stomach to pretend to have a six pack. #2degreesofseparation
