The fact that Charlie Kirk was viewed as some kind of a Titan of free speech and debate shows a bizarre trend where it somehow became acceptable for adult non student conservatives to invade college campuses and talk about why women and black people shouldn’t have basic civil liberties

political writing needs bold new thinking, and i applaud ezra klein for inventing the self-holding hostage

Really good piece about the intrusion of AI into interactive fiction spaces.

This is the correct reading. I am introducing “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” to the language-space of unfamiliar Americans.

As someone who grew up in a state like this, I have to tell you: the *real* secret police is always your friends and coworkers, the professionals mostly sit back and watch people eat each other's faces.

The thing about being an artist is that sometimes you’ll have a really silly/cursed image enter your head and spend hours of your life drawing it. Hours you’ll never get back.

I’m loath to go to Orwell but I think “duckspeak” is a useful concept for this moment. Kirk was fundamentally a duckspeaker, filling thousands of hours with ambient malicious quacking, which is why his elite allies can’t quote him and never actually listened. www.orwelltoday.com/duckspeak.sh...

The most British prime minister (derogatory) is actually an interesting question — that is, the one who most encapsulates all the flaws of the national character as expressed in governance — because I’m flitting around history and thinking “it’s probably fucking Churchill, isn’t it?”

burningbird.net/typepad-will... if you’re on Typepad, which is shutting down, export your site, to start with. Shelley has more info for what to do next in her post.

TypePad is closing down at the end of the month and Phil Gyford has shared the process for downloading a TypePad blog (so that you can turn it into “a pretty self-contained ‘static HTML’ site”). [gyford.com]

¡Allá! La Restinga (La Laja bus stop) on the island of El Hierro, the end of the longest point-to-point journey you can make in the Schengen Zone by surface public transport. 5650.2km from Vardø Havn. 192hrs 31 mins. Now excuse me while I go and find my room and shower and I’ll be back. #Schengen200

*steps out of the WAIS server in 1996* “Whoah that was quick! Why are you back so soo—“ “Future’s haunted.” “What?” *cocks gun* “Future’s haunted.”

My existence as a British immigrant is buying tea from the Russian grocery and biscuits from the Indian grocery and wondering more or less every fucking day what Average Americans do in their lives because I live here with them.

in retrospect, there’s probably never been a name as threatening as “America Online”

My dad first signed up for Twitter to follow live sports and he’s a freak about U of I. One day he said to me “Twitter is abuzz about Illini golf,” and I was like dude you only follow Illini sports accounts. And that’s how every reporter feels Charlie Kirk was the most important person in the world.

Every centrist hagiographer: he said some very important stuff Everyone: oh, like what? Every centrist hagiographer: very important things Everyone: Can you repeat some of those things he said? Every centrist hagiographer, looking at their legal department frantically shaking their heads: no

Update:

I think I will go to the fair tonight.

A night journey on a stopping train on an unknown railway has an air of mystery to it. What is this little town that suddenly appears in the midst of the darkness? Why is Jörn here? What do its people do? And did Lenin wonder the same when his train from exile called here in 1917? #Schengen200

"Internet in your pocket" was the promise.

The administration, elected Republicans, maga pundits, bluecheck botlike entities, and elite political journalists are all lying in slightly different ways for slightly different reasons and only the latter category is potentially susceptible to vocal contempt.

Follow Jo, if you don't already. His trips are brilliant and you will love what he does to your timeline over the next 200 hours (and afterwards)

One of my most precious privileges is that I got to spend a little time with him in 1995. (I literally ran from my finals in my silly costume for that opportunity.) The least moralistic moral teacher.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s TRANSFORMERS

is the new Washington Post editorial board just Jeff Bezos + chatgpt.

Honestly having a reasonable accurate memory of the course of the pandemic, what was generally believed at the time, what *could* have been known at the time, and what changed over time is like a superpower at this point.

In the late 90s I ended up at every workers’ collective veggie restaurant in every biggish city I visited: the Well-Fed Café in Dublin, De Vliegende Schotel and the Silo in Amsterdam.

My one visit to the Lincoln Memorial was after dark eight years ago this coming week and I can still hear the quiet.

Wouldn’t it suck to have worked obsessively to become one of the richest men in history only to find it hasn’t made you free? In fact you are so unfree that you have to abandon your dignity to grovel to a buffoon? www.wired.com/story/tech-c...

December, 1997. Just One Question for Carl Steadman… Sippey: What do you want for Christmas? Steadman: I want things to work. cc @leahreich.com sippey.com/1997/12/24/j...

I think often “even if we get past this we still have to live with the people who cheered it on” and the RFK Jr / woo people are perhaps worse than the bundle you into an unmarked van people because they don’t need the power of the state to make things worse

I now ask LLMs the things I asked Google when I was unsure but deeply directed — Google Search provided all this before 2015 when it knew in advance that the blog-made web was terminally dying — and sometimes it is right and sometimes it is right if I shout a lot at it and how did we end up here.

For all the clichés about US vs. UK political journalism I think this is the first time Flange has faced any kind of hostile interrogator in a very long time.

I stand by this: I dodge most of the 18th-c lit episodes, though history of science can be good esp. if Simon Schaffer is there because he knows what the format permits. And Bragg can be frustrating at times. But as a project — 27 years! — it is immense.

Understandably and predictably, sometimes people choose the latter. And that means police have to intervene on lots of cases that could and should’ve been dealt with by moderators instead. Right wing people are getting arrested because Musk won’t enforce the law on X. And politicians won’t say that.

I don't mind people going back to "TCI" but sometimes I think it it eclipses the much broader (mostly UK/Euro) conversation about the limits and contradictions of technoutopianism in Mute, nettime, Rewired, and to some degree Wired UK.

all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe

Another rediscovered Nick Drake track on Guy Garvey? That was an uncanny experience; I thought it was a (very very good) modern cover and then came the vocal. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tVl...

Gregorio Astengo explores the innovations employed in early issues of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, the world's first scientific journal — new forms of image making which pushed the boundaries of 17th-century book printing: publicdomainreview.org/essay/m...

I saw today that the Root Bar had been demolished after 11 months of being flooded out and caved in and so I will link to this in its memory: flaminghydra.com/the-root-bar...

There is a scenario where the current president ends up reading import copies of The Sunday Post that his mother really likes and if he is not dead yet someone should ask him if he knows Oor Wullie.

The first few days after Helene were a lot like that. Some crickets and frogs but muted. The daylight hours were filled with the drone of helicopters and spotter planes, but after sunset the darkness and stillness were wrapped into one thing.

You have to assume that TypePad is being held together with wire and duct tape and that large exports have a strong chance of breaking things and what I’m saying really is that someone(s) who did ok out of the golden age of blogs ought to ask its owners about taking it over.

The IBM Travelling Pavilion was designed by Renzo Piano and visited 20 European cities over 4 years, almost always located near a historic building. www.historybit.it/ibm-exhibit/

New Miriam Toews and it's a non-linear memoir? Oh gosh. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

Ah, here is IBM’s “Exhibit” from 1985 in the Museum Gardens: www.flickr.com/photos/allan...

40 degrees at Newfound Gap this morning. Friend sent me this pic on her walk. Jackets in the am, 70's in the afternoon. Loving this cool spell. Have a wonderful Wednesday!!

I forgot that the best explanation of “the sea” vs “the ocean” was a Morcheeba song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=--wy...