Our Beach by J. A. Brown > Dark and cold salt-breeze > Sandy-star infinity > The eyes my mind sees... A poem written in pencil in the inside of the UVA Library's copy of Harold G. Henderson's 1958 collection "An Introduction to Haiku" 🥹

Listening to Odd Lots on dairy industry trends and now my tabs are all bovine biotech and back issues of HOARD'S DAIRYMAN magazine 🐄 See also: https://www.cobank.com/people/expert/corey-geiger

"ONE of the unpleasant discoveries many consumers make after buying a personal computer is that a good printer, required for hard copy, can cost almost as much as the computer itself. "Why, I have often asked myself, doesn't someone turn out a printer- typewriter […] [Original post on aoir.social]

> "And the Lizard named several of the locusts, and regarding one the Lizard said, The <blink> tag worketh not. Whereupon the users hearing this were sore amazed, and said they one unto another, Verily, that is no bug, but a feature to be highly praised while it lasteth." -- An excerpt from the […]

The frisson of clicking a good link

Last week, a self-driving car killed a beloved neighborhood cat in the Mission. Alex Hanna on mourning and anger and tech on the streets in SF: https://bayareacurrent.com/fuck-waymo-long-live-kitkat/

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #unix v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973 Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum #retrocomputing

Obsessed with this cover of HTRK by Kali Malone and Stephen O'Malley. The original 50 seconds pushed to almost 6 minutes. Pushing, churning, rising, burning #thisismyjam https://htrk.bandcamp.com/track/siren-song-kali-malone-and-stephen-omalley

Faye Wong's Cantonese version of "Dreams" by The Cranberries on repeat. A very welcome side effect of my random walk through the Hong Kong New Wave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B83jdOH0Q1c #thisismyjam

In *Pee-Wee as Himself*, Paul Reubens pronounces it "jiff" #gif

Enterprise software UX is so bizarre. Just trying to sort a bunch of documents but it's giving Milon's Secret Castle

"standing in a brightly lit marijuana dispensary, wearing a thin necklace and a Billabong T-shirt"

Shout out to @kdriscoll, who had a useful website up about a really interesting angle of the RF interference tale: The guy who managed to play a song on the radio using his Altair 8800. https://kevindriscoll.org/projects/ccswg2012/fool_on_a_hill.html

Ever wonder why old computers have thick plates of metal inside of them? You can credit/blame the FCC—and indirectly, the CB radio fad—for that. https://tedium.co/2025/10/20/computers-fcc-rf-interference-history/ new @tedium

Social media use begins global decline. For the first time, time spent on social media is falling worldwide. An analysis of 250,000 adults across 50 countries shows average daily use dropped nearly 10% since 2022, reversing a decade of growth. The steepest declines are among teens and […]

Middlemen are everywhere. I just got an automated speeding ticket and the fee for electronic payment is $5, collected by a privately owned financial services firm based in a different city, different state. Rents on rents on rents.

"zombie nation" faintly audible from a not-so-distant stadium, gently shaking the walls of my living room

Tomorrow I will present a paper co-authored with @rra, "What is 'alternative' about 'alternative social media'?" If that title alone doesn't entice you, come for the shout-out to a really cool alternative social media system that began right here in #brazil! Then stick around for a 'Birds of a […]

I can't stop thinking about @bedoyausa.bsky.social's essay this week. It is a story-forward account of why the American people are struggling. (Hint: political economy.) It's the kind of account that makes an ethnographer swoon. I can't recommend this enough: newrepublic.com/article/2011...

vibe coding a workday competitor

«younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. This gradual shift is not unique to #wikipedia. Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to […]

Oh, no. D'Angelo. The type of singer to remind you: otherworldly beings walk among us RIP ☁️☁️☁️ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/arts/music/dangelo-dead.html

"Shake it off" is canonically a Screaming Females song, I don't make the rules

Kill yr TV (2025 remix) 📺🪓 Derek Thompson on the televisionization of the internet with helpful assists from Raymond Williams and the gang= https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television

AI did not kill this free and open resource, but the AI goldrush did. AI companies are hungry for training data. Companies that control access to content are locking it down in hopes of cashing in. The rest of us are bystanders watching the demise of the greatest information resource ever built.

"everybody's so punk on the internet"

What will be the dark fiber of the #ai bubble? Unfinished data centers sinking into swamps? Power lines leading nowhere? Possums sleeping in an unused gas generator? I keep thinking of those photos of scrapped ASICs, crypto mining gear that was already obsolete before it even came off the […]

Good night, AOL dial-up

Learning about military #email etiquette and it's like an alt reality. How have I lived in VA for this long without seeing "V/R" or "/R"? > "Hierarchy is extremely important in the military world [...] If you use just “/r,” for someone in a higher rank than yours, you will come across as rude […]

Ben Recht on the under-theorization of representation in #machinelearning: > "In [ML], we take for granted that there is a measurement process that renders signals of interest as bit strings on the computer. All images start as pixels. All language starts as Unicode characters. All people start […]

🏆 The #sigcis2025 awards are up!! 🏆 📖 Computer History Museum Prize ➡️ @apdamegriff *The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet* https://nyupress.org/9781479818310/the-two-revolutions/ 📄 The Mahoney Prize ➡️ @theodorajewell “Settler Computing: Water Algorithms and the Equitable […]

while we're mourning the soon-shuttered @WFMU blog, station manager ken's post about the very weird professional blacklist snitch harvey matusow (who ratted on pete seeger) is a big part of what set me on the path to write a book about the weavers […]

Today, in media history class, we're talking about RADIO DRAMAS and early broadcasting. Last night, we all listened to *Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar*. Perfect for this rainy week. https://archive.org/details/OTRR_YoursTrulyJohnnyDollar_Singles/YTJD+1955-11-14+261+The+Broderick+Matter+-+Ep+1.mp3 […]

Mediumwave (AM) broadcast radio uses lower frequencies than other modern broadcasting and so requires much larger antennas (generally getting larger and larger as the frequency gets lower on the dial). This often entails highly customized antenna designs engineered for the particular site and […]

https://c-ville.com/car-light-families-in-cville-are-trading-car-trips-for-e-bike-rides/ “I totally understand why people would not feel comfortable biking around Charlottesville right now,” Gillikin says, “because we don’t have good bike infrastructure.” #BikeTooter #cville #parenting […]

Here's an #autohotkey script that will send any highlighted text to ZoteroBib in a new browser tab. Typical usage: highlight a URL, hit the hotkeys, and generate a full bibliography entry. #dh #zotero https://gist.github.com/driscoll/dfa86c8978bfae74cae8747d5545f513

RIP JD Twitch of Optimo, a true lifer music obsessive gonzo DJ ----- https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/21/from-disco-to-slayer-a-dj-set-by-optimos-jd-twitch-made-life-feel-full-of-wild-possibility

KGEI Transmitter Building, Redwood City, CA, 2024. 250 KW of pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/54131707918 #photography

protip: pinch-and-zoom on your calendar app to get more time

Ice cold call to arms from the editors of n+1: "AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind" 🤜💀🤛 https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/ #ai

"One day, son, this will all be podcasts, with sponsored content and automated transcripts as far as the eye can see..."

@kdriscoll This reminds me of the classic STS book, Cowan's "More Work for Mother." The shift from making simple stews to complex recipes meant the intensification of domestic labor for women -- time-saving devices turned out to create more demands on people's time.

Is it OK for recipe writers to assume that readers own a stand mixer? Fascinating arguments based on food science and the history of technology: > "When I talk about how important a stand mixer is for baking, folks usually respond with something along the lines of, 'Well, then how did they do […]

🌍🎶 "There's no planet like my planet" 🎶🌎 Such a sweet little earworm from Ready, Jet, Go! (PBS Kids) #thisismyjam https://youtu.be/fE9ShAaSnDE?feature=shared

Walking the dog and my neighbors are playing early 00s crunk at max volume. I sweat I felt the call of the wild, all over print hoodies emerging from the shadows, the smell of vitamin water and offbrand red bull in the air

"make it huge, make it pop" live coding hypnotic hard acid in strudel is the cyberpunk we need cc @darius @petersibley https://youtu.be/HkgV_-nJOuE?si=5Ot5zGj8u430V6BF

In Intro to #dh today, we explored the binary digit as a highly constrained symbolic system. In workshop, we tried recreating Susan Kare's early Mac icons using this fantastic 1-bit pixel art tool: https://beyondloom.com/tools/ditherpaint.html

Never noticed the little bottles of Tabasco in the prison mess hall with Charlie Chaplin and his cellmate. Distracted by the cocaine in the salt shakers, I guess! ("Modern Times", 1936)

Ugh just remembered the Nokia Asha series-- cheap, colorful, and useful. My last phone before giving up Series 40 for Android was the Asha 302 but I loved the chonky ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Asha_platform