unironically I think people in the future will look back on this as a named aesthetic of a named era

A national postal service is "a logistics and communications network that reaches nearly every household in the country." That network carries the burden of legal notices, federal communications (e.g. tax information, Social Security checks), and deliveries by every company that isn't the 'Zon.

All computational systems contain a model of time and all of them are wrong open.substack.com/pub/isthisan...

I'm sorry Ray Harryhausen, for forty years I assumed you were ripping off R2-D2

Incredible--apparently the reason this can be done with only a launcher utility, and no changes to the compiled game, is that the necessary inputs were already exposed for use with an "ancient" VR headset

I like the similar frame proposed by Alger Hiss (the spy, who lived to 92 and had a post-prison second career as a historian)--a "Great Span" is when an adult grandchild retells a story their grandparent told about their own childhood, thereby carrying the story across a gap of about a hundred years

Between Backrooms and I Love Boosters this weekend I'm feeling good about the revival of actual color grading in movies

Transcript of the speech here: thenightgallery.wordpress.com/2022/03/31/h...

"It is not my fault that your gramophone is lying broken on the floor, you have to believe me" -cat

One time when I was helping out at the USC film archives I found a split reel that had "Marcia Lucas" written on it. It was like holding an object of power

At the risk of giving away the thing I want you to listen to all of: one major reason Doom runs on an ATM is the same reason it has a vibrant, active community of modders and maintainers - which is that it is effectively isolated from destructive economic forces. All of these things are related.

message that comes up when you want to close mobydick.exe

IMO Laura Dern is the best at pretending to have seen a dinosaur

Hoppers (2026)

‘dialectics’ is grad school for ‘there’s two of them’

Rise of The Machines

watched someone get rescued from a mountain today and sometimes you forget that its just someones job to rappel down from a hovering helicopter onto a cliff and save another human life

ja fragt euch mal

The bit about the machine god being born from [SPOILER] an open-source white-label fast food loyalty app was eerily almost correct though, considering the real machine gods ended up descended from Google Translate (Word2vec)

I said what I said, and I stand by every word.

he also snuck a prompt injection in there that ensouls your chatbot if you ask it to give you a summary so watch out

solar is so cool man. I climbed up on my shed roof last week and installed a panel to charge my yard tools and now I’m mowing my lawn with power I stole from a fucking star

Can’t wait to tell the network execs “sorry, I can’t use AI on this project, I’m Catholic.”

that student? herman melville

Welcome back, John Henry (18??-187?)

Obviously Wizards (1977), but also weirdly Flight of Dragons (1982), where iirc the contemporary scientist transported to fantasyland can block spells by spitting random science facts

If I’m ever in the Bardo, I won’t know, but there will be signs

the death and life of great american web pages

Resistance to tech is rendered invisible when it succeeds, because the industry and institutions that drive these changes adapt to the criticism but have to pretend it is self-restraint

It is funny to be in the middle of an energy and medicine revolution while the part of the tech industry that draws attention to itself is entirely devoted to scams and exploding rockets.

No one talks about why data centers take so much water LLMs run on shower thoughts, and the data centers must keep a stream of steamy water spraying gpus 24/7 Without the showers, LLMs just have regular thoughts like everyone else currently not in the shower, and would have no sellable value

Exciting news: the Godot Asset Store is live and stable (and will be fully integrated for 4.7)! This is a big, exciting step forward for the engine and the community. #GodotEngine #gamedev #indiedev

most of the time when people say things like "technofeudalism" or "serfdom" to talk about modern conditions, I would urge you to consider instead the "company town."

free screenname to a good home: Mothra Stewart

It's a crowded field but probably "Corn is no place for a mighty warrior"

And it also delivers what's got to be the most sublimely elaborate CS joke in film history--a "reverse centaur" is automation used to limit human agency and exploit people, vs. a "Kasparov centaur" is automation used to enhance human agency and help people

Sitting in on final crits at RISD because I'm an external committee member for a student here and it's just so cool to see students making their extremely specific weird beautiful projects!! This is what we live for

Fwiw I never expected there to be any more after 1983, so the three good ones we've gotten since are just a nice bonus. P.S. No way would I say in public which three

"Mobility lanes" is a really good frame

"Underground bunker factories" should read as "vengeful, lethal Makerspaces" for you remaining fans of the kind-hearted, shareable, open-source Web2 Maker Movement

We still use this concept.

This will be the fourteenth time today I've exported a final video render to upload before I spot another minor issue to fix, and I have become exceedingly efficient at it.

Orson Welles: I worked with Grogu. Not in film you see but on the stage. Brilliant performer but a cruel disgusting wretch of a soul. Interviewer: Pourrions-nous parler de Citizen Kane à la place, s'il vous plaît ? Welles: yes he did sell out his friends to HUAC, I will never forgive him for that

I don't really know what the Mandalorian is about but I'm happy to see more Armenian representation in sci fi

she’s in oakland, someone tell interpol

The Babadook and Grogu

one thing that's really interesting to me is that while you can learn dead programming languages, that doesn't mean you'll be able to read or write code that looks correct to the historical period because best practice and idiom change with the broader metadiscussion and wasn't recorded

The future is inevitable. The EV is to the internal combustion engine what the internal combustion engine was to the horse. It’s not a question of if, only when