@celrae.bsky.social see! Next year in NYC.

In Berkeley for less than 10 min, at original Peets, a stranger is telling me about a girlfriend sleeping with Bob Weir, tweaking machine language code to port millipede for Atari when working there in the 80s, and significance of discrete cosine transformation in making jpgs of his b&w photographs.

FT over here going “gee, would be a real shame if something were to unexpectedly happen to your data centre…” www.ft.com/content/5ba0...

8 am AAG session and once again can't keep track if we're talking about NDVI or NVIDIA

Sometimes I am still amazed Silicon Valley has become what it has become.

Forum on Climate change and urban agrarian solidarities. From food, water, and energy to social reproduction, the forum asks: how do we move from urban agrarian opposition to political solidarity? Read: tandfonline.com/toc/ccit20/current

hello! meet MOSS, the newest painting toy from @brainfruit.bsky.social MOSS is a pixel art creator with programmable brushes and shareable pads. it's kind of like if procreate and asesprite got together and made something weird together. www.moss.town

Yes. But the real villain all along was the "learning management system" ... and the entire neoliberal for-profit, ed-tech, text-book-publishing, anti-intellectual, anti-union, "efficiency" and metrics driven apparatus behind it. This is the last nail? Calling it 'Einstein' is a low blow though.

Happy annual re-reading of George Lipsitz’s seminal 1988 essay “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans” to all who celebrate. (it is admittedly gets more dated by each passing year, but remains such a point of departure in my life)

"When Ursula K Le Guin was writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World, a book co-published by Spiral House + AA Publications, brings Le Guin’s maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays" — video of AA launch (via @the-syllabus.bsky.social)

Replacing all social media with RSS feeds would fix the internet immediately.

"A budget is a statement of our values..." Would be nice to hear this reflected in how we discuss financial modelling in UK HE. Currently, we seems to stuck at "number go up, number go down" rather than what kind of institution are we and why?

For years I've relied on Grace Hopper's explanation that sending data via satellites is inherently slow because of the distances information has to travel up and down... but all the StarLink hoopla and NASA's TBRID, realising I may not really have a good grasp on this. Anyone have a good primer?

A bing news update on my work computer has informed me that the Victorian era ended on this day in 1901. So you can stop debating that point at least.

have reached a moment where friends and colleagues fully know their use of gen AIs is bad for everyone but the corporations who make them, but unprompted are pre-emptively defensive about it. Getting a lot of the same vibes from cigarette smokers in the 90s, "everyone does it, why am I the bad guy?"

more like they're Bored of Peace?

thinking about this some more

Could really use more reporting on the geography of why US companies 'need' Venezuelan oil. i.e. FT mentions in passing Gulf Coast refining infrastructure is built for crude they can't access now, so hundreds of billions in fixed capital not producing expected profits. Fix those spatial problems!

I’d start with Oracle, personally, but any start seems wise.

Just to say, I am a supervisor here: UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-world Natural Language Processing www.responsiblenlp.org/2026-student... If you are reading things like this and planning PhD project, do reach out: www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

I know this paper is way over the word count, but just can’t bring myself to delete the footnote that simply states “Packard-Bell is not Hewlett-Packard.”

"AIs, the models work just like us!"

Thinking about the early 2000s on this momentous November day, and what's really popped into my head is that, if I'm honest, my all time favourite rhyming lyric is "Candy left over from halloween, a unified theory of everything."

computational humanities ==! digital humanities Is this a conversation worth trying to have in 2025?

To follow!

WARNING: THIS COMPUTER MUST BE EARTHED Top of page 1 of the 1986 BBC AIV (advanced interactive video) user guide that accompanied the BBC Domesday Project (on 2 custom laser disks), where nearly a million UK children collected data for an interactive map, photos, videos and virtual tours project?!

Who's writing the "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" style book on how we got from a 2000s free/remix-culture liberal dream that the Internet could break the corporate stranglehold on life to this moment of Tech Corporation actively trying to end life as we know it by seizing control of culture?

We’re not just planning for a digital future: we’re living in a digital present. How do we make a sustainable cultural memory? @TJOwens.bsky.social & @ShannonMattern.bsky.social discuss in the #booktalk AFTER DISRUPTION. 🗓 Thurs Sept 25 🕖 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET 🎟️ www.eventbrite.com/e/1633230118...

"Cities continue to change, in response to access to and control over their energy supplies, as well as to their will to exploit and conserve. But our ability to penetrate our surroundings-to distinguish myth from reality, wish from fulfilment has only begun to cope with environmental change..." 1/2

who writes about the origins of 'data' as something a subject possess? In something like an ontological sense- in the same way that a subject (once) possessed a soul or personality, one now *has* data. Data that is to be guarded, protected or given at will? When did "my data" enter the zeitgeist?

Most reposting to remind fellow urbanists that you can now follow @city-journal.bsky.social on bluesky! But, of course, also welcome more feedback on the editorial. (come for the great art by Tom Schofield, stay for the non-sequitur, but maybe prescient, swipes at Larry Ellison and Oracle)

semi-annual reminder that Japancakes covered My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" in its entirety and it is perfect. All instrumental (the cellos and pedal steels work brilliantly) so you can put it on at your place of work today! japancakes.bandcamp.com/album/loveless

wonder what the mood is over at the NSA this week.

Hot off the digital press, my article in @antipodeonline.bsky.social on Social Reproduction and the Housing Question onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I understand why a studio went with "A Complete Unknown" as the recognisable lyric to use as a title for a Dylan biopic, but I still think they should have gone with "Short Pants Romance."

Looks like there's a new influx of folks here, so boosting the @cplusc.bsky.social starter pack- if you want to hear about the best new ideas in climate and economic policy in the coming dark days, this is a good place to start! bsky.app/starter-pack...

The wonderful editors at City asked me to write an editorial for the latest issue. Here is what I had to say about Cities, computation and capitalism: doi.org/10.1080/1360... (lots of wonderful work I didn't have space to cite, but I hope it furthers a broader conversation and action)

Israeli forces have bombed another UN-run school in southern Gaza, killing at least 20 displaced Palestinians sheltering in the building, witnesses told Al Jazeera. 🔗: aje.io/otnvl2

Admittedly, I may be more excited about the "Drawing and Dreaming" version, but both look like absolute treasures. a4kids.org/book/city/

and just when I was starting to think tech might just save us.

"These people looked deep within my soul... and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

www.jsonline.com/story/money/... my friend Lindsay did a big long piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the impact of local data center development and I'm so proud of her!! Regional coverage is very important for this topic!!

🚨 New issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities! Jennifer Guiliano and I are excited to share the August issue of #ReviewsInDH: “Community-engaged Mapping.” reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v5-n8

hearing a lot of hemming-and-hawing on UK media about why the country is behind in the tech economy, and, more generally, declining productivity. Has any considered that at the root of the problem is that the '#' key is just in the wrong place on most British keyboards? And non-existent on others?

forgot that I'd found this remarkable illustration of the military industrial complex from *checks notes* the magazine Missiles and Rockets, 1958

Want to meet people analyzing historical maps using computer vision? Curious to see MapReader in action? 🗃️ Join the MapReader team for our first community call on Thursday, Feb 15 at 4pm UK time! Details here: docs.google.com/document/d/1... MapReader: mapreader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

anyone writing about the rise of auto-generated text-overflow ellipsis as a destructive design element in the last decade or so? It feels like what was a necessary work-around for small screens has lazily become huge empty spaces accompanied by snippets of text so truncated as to be unintelligible.