The diagram you’ve shared is a Venn diagram that explores the intersection of three distinct categories:
Anticonventional Objects,
The Magical, and
Profitable. Each circle in the diagram lists items or concepts that fall under its respective category, and the overlapping sections show where these categories intersect, suggesting that the items listed there share characteristics of both categories.
For instance, the overlap between
Anticonventional Objects and
Profitable includes quirky items like “Fake Paperweights” and “Prison Paraphernalia.” The central area where all three circles intersect is labeled “Cursed Coin Operated Conveyances,” indicating an item that is considered anticonventional, magical, and profitable.
The items within each category are quite diverse:
Anticonventional Objects include things like “Space Stations,” “Monuments,” and “Sharpened Hubcaps.”
The Magical encompasses “Desirable,” “Mythical,” and “Miraculous” elements.
Profitable features terms like “Hoaxes,” “Spurious Awards,” and “Embezzlement.”
This diagram seems to be a creative way to categorize objects or concepts that defy conventional understanding, have a sense of wonder or magic, or are associated with financial gain. It could be used to stimulate discussion on how certain items or ideas can be perceived from different perspectives or serve multiple purposes.
*Well, that “explanation” is so amazing that I don’t even know where to put it, so I’m afraid it will have to be Tumblr.
Luuq, Somalia, is located in a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Jubba River. The town’s geographic position has had a great influence on its history and development, helping it to become one of Somalia’s larger inland market towns as early as the 15th century. Central Luuq is home to about 41,000 people, and the broader region has a population of roughly 185,000.
Zhou Zhou —
World After Humanity I (ink, chinese pigments, linen, rainbow yarn, suzhou embroidery thread, machine embroidery thread, silk, pin; hand embroidery, 2023)
Flaubert famously said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I suppose the effect of being irregular and disorderly in your life is that you end up meek and unoriginal in your work. But people much older than me seem to cheerfully handle much more demanding and incoherent travel schedules and retain their creative momentum, so clearly I’m doing something wrong. There’s a Pareto frontier here and it looks like I’m nowhere near it. Let’s call it the Flaubert frontier.
Intellectuals are wonderfully cultivated, they have views on everything. I’m not an intellectual, because I can’t supply views like that, I’ve got no stock of views to draw on. What I know, I know only from something I’m actually working on, and if I come back to something a few years later, I have to learn everything all over again. It’s really good not having any view or idea about this or that point. We don’t suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we’ve nothing much to say.
Show up at work like hi boss sorry I’m late my I was helping my mother track down one specific 90s dungeon crawler for the purposes of obtaining a muffin recipe the developer hid in the files
Anyway shoutout to Stonekeep (1995)
I’M MAKING THE MUFFINS
Burnt my hand picking it up to show. Gonna wait to taste.
Taste review: Make the video game muffins oh my GOD.
These are DELICIOUS! I substituted chocolate chips for pecans because its what i had on hand.
It tastes like a pumpkin gingerbread cake! Great treat for fall and winter!
Definitely make these!
Text from recipe
Tim Cain’s Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins – They’re the shadow king’s favorite!
1 and 2/3 cup flour
2 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp cloves
¼ tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup sugar
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
1 cup pumpkin (half of a 16 oz can)
½ cup (one stick) butter, melted
preheat oven to 350. grease muffin tins (one dozen regular size) or use baking cups. mix flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. Break eggs into another bowl. add pumpkin and butter and whisk until blended. stir in chocolate chips. pour over dry ingredients and stir until just blended. do NOT overstir! scoop batter into tins and bake 20-25 minutes. after cooling, keep muffins wrapped in plastic to avoid drying.
An AI explaining cyberpunk to Bruce Sterling, 2024 AD
You:
Please list the essential graphic elements of a “cyberpunk image,” in order of their importance to a “cyberpunk aesthetic.”
Microsoft Bing Copilot:
Certainly! The “cyberpunk aesthetic” is characterized by a blend of futuristic and gritty elements that create a unique visual experience. Here are the essential graphic elements, listed in order of their importance to achieving a cyberpunk vibe:
Neon Lights: The quintessential feature of cyberpunk visuals, neon lights provide the vibrant color palette and mood-setting ambiance1.
Futuristic Typography: Bold, angular fonts that suggest high-tech sophistication and complement the cyberpunk theme2.
Urban Textures: Grunge-inspired textures that reflect decaying city walls or rain-soaked streets, adding depth and realism2.
Cybernetic Elements: Features that blur the line between humans and machines, such as cybernetic enhancements or interfaces2.
Advanced Technology: Depictions of high-tech gadgets, sprawling cityscapes with skyscrapers, and holographic displays1.
Gritty Urban Environment: A backdrop that combines high-tech elements with the darker aspects of urban life1.
Geometry, Gradients, and Glitch Effects: These design elements are often used to create the surreal and futuristic images typical of cyberpunk3.
These elements together create the immersive and visually rich world that defines cyberpunk imagery. The combination of advanced technology and urban decay, along with the use of neon and holographic textures, sets the stage for a narrative that explores the intersection of humanity with technology.
We’ve received a strange signal from across the galaxy, and astronomers are struggling to understand what it means.
They know what’s emitting the signals. It’s a neutron star named ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0 (ASKAP J1935+2148 for short), located in the plane of the Milky Way, some 15,820 light-years from Earth.
But the signals themselves are like none we’ve ever seen before. The star goes through periods of strong pulses, periods of weak pulses, and periods of no pulses at all.
What we don’t know, according to a team led by astrophysicist Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney in Australia, is why. The strange object poses a fascinating challenge to our models of neutron star evolution – which, let’s be honest, are currently pretty far from complete.
People need to stop teaching Australian kids the ASL signs to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Most of the signs are similar to AUSLAN but not diamond. Please stop teaching your kids to sign about cunts in the sky.
vegans making honey a bee labour issue is the funniest thing imaginable because like, you picked the one animal that has already unionised
You literally could not exploit bees if you TRIED
“Oh well if you stop the queen leaving the bees are trapped” wrong, bees can and will swarm without a queen. They will also make new queens if they don’t think theirs is good enough
“Bees don’t consent to their honey being taken” wrong, bees are actually more than intelligent enough to know we take the honey. They LET us take the honey if they think what we provide in return (shelter, food, protection) is a fair deal.
“Taking honey starves the bees” WRONG AGAIN! Domestic bees overproduce honey. A beekeeper NEVER takes honey the bees would need because then you piss off the bees, and if you piss off the bees you don’t have any bees. They stockpile honey for the winter, but because domestic colonies do way better than wild ones they stockpile too much. That’s why beekeepers can take out whole frames and then have them filled in no time. Domestic bees actively overproduce because they know humans are going to skim some off the top.
And if they didn’t want humans to take it, beekeeping WOULD NOT work.
To keep bees you have to let them fly free. If they can fly free they can leave. Meaning if they don’t like what you’re doing, they WILL leave.
The whole idea they’re basically slaves to the queen is also not true, they can just make a new queen literally whenever, and if they don’t like her, they kill her.
There is no way for a beekeeper to exploit their bees. The bees are EMPLOYEES.
In the wake of the 2016 election, historian Timothy Snyder reminded us with his first rule for surviving authoritarianism: “1. Do not obey in advance.”
I would add to that “do not surrender in advance.” Do not surrender prematurely. Do not surrender maturely, for that matter. Do not surrender if there is any other option, and maybe don’t surrender then, either.
Snyder continues, “ Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.”
I have said, “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”
So it’s interesting to see people deciding they’ve lost an election that has yet to begin rather than figuring out how to fight like hell for it. You would never see this kind of public defeatism from the right, and while they’re bad at being human beings, they’re good at strategy. I wish we didn’t so often seem like the opposite.
Too, our words, our stories, creates our reality. The New York Times pretending to report and comment on Biden’s age made a much bigger issue of Biden’s age just like they cooked up Clinton’s emails into a faux-issue that infiltrated the conversation. You all saying that the election is already lost are helping lose it. This doesn’t mean that there is no trouble, and no need for change. It just means those are not grounds for surrender.
On Monday evening, the video-sharing service Nico Nico streamed a live debate for candidates of the Tokyo gubernatorial election. While all 56 candidates were invited to appear and talk about their vision for the capital, it was largely only those with no chance of winning that turned up. Hosted by author and journalist Michiyoshi Hatakeyama, the debate gave wacky candidates such as Yusuke Kawai, dressed as the Joker, and Ken Komatsu, the leader of the Golf Party, the opportunity to speak to a wider audience as the mainstream media refuses to cover them.
Hatakeyama tried to calm the situation. “You’re all candidates. It is the voters who decide who is suitable or not,” he said. Independent candidate Akane Himasora had already seen enough. The YouTuber, who had been participating online, departed after saying, “There is no one here to debate with, so I am leaving now.” Another person who left early was Midori Yokoyama, a self-proclaimed internet comedian representing the NHK Party. “The number of people viewing this has dropped, so I’m leaving,” was his reason. There are 19 candidates from the NHK Party, who have all been asked to “hijack” campaign boards with their posters. The gubernatorial race has been heavily criticized for making a mockery of the electoral process.
According to Flusser’s classification, the hyper textual, hypercultural world would be a ‘universe of points’ in which there would no longer be any comprehensive order; it would therefore be a ‘patchwork universe’, one that maybe would consist of coloured panes or windows.
Maybe controversial opinion but my favorite trope in solarpunk is the “building a better world with or without your permission” rather than stories focusing on the end goal of solarpunk.
My first solarpunk collection I read was
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation and
The Boston Hearth Project by T.X. Watson is not only my favorite story in that book specifically, but probably my favorite solarpunk story of all time. (So far)
It’s told in an essay style, beginning with email correspondence about a college essay and the security of information sent to the college, due to the illegal nature of the story. In the essay part, the writer discusses how they use tech to break into The Hale Center, a self supported smart building that houses its own closed ecosystem. It’s supposed to be used for wealthy business men, but the main characters have a better use for it. The story is set in Massachusetts, and it discusses the deaths of homeless people due to polar vortices caused by climate change, and basically the story is about them taking over the building to house the homeless population.
It’s a really great read and obviously i recommend it. I don’t want to reveal too much, but I really think it embodies solarpunk perfectly with both the high tech part of the building (and the tech used by the characters) and the -punk part of repurposing a building meant for the wealthy for the people who need it most.
Île des Pingouins, or Penguin Island, is an uninhabited island in the subantarctic Crozet Archipelago of the southern Indian Ocean. It is small — just 1 square mile (3 sq. km) — with coastal cliffs ranging from 164 to 984 feet (50-300 meters) tall, making it virtually inaccessible by sea. The island is an important nesting site for seabirds and has an exceptionally high density of avian residents, including a million pairs of macaroni penguins.
EVs won’t save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit –
lots of it.
But no matter how much public transit we install, there’s always going to be
some personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters. Between deliveries, accessibility, and stubbornly low-density regions, there’s going to be a lot of cars, vans and trucks on the road for the foreseeable future, and these
should be electric.
Beyond that irreducible minimum of personal vehicles, there’s the fact that individuals can’t install their own public transit system; in places that lack the political will or means to create working transit, EVs are a way for people to significantly reduce their personal emissions.
In policy circles, EV adoption is treated as a logistical and financial issue, so governments have focused on making EVs affordable and increasing the density of charging stations. As an EV owner, I can affirm that affordability and logistics were important concerns when we were shopping for a car.
But there’s a third EV problem that is almost entirely off policy radar: enshittification.
An EV is a rolling computer in a fancy case with a squishy person inside of it. While this can sound scary, there are lots of cool implications for this. For example, your EV could download your local power company’s tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking. You can start them with your phone. Your repair technician can run extensive remote diagnostics on them and help you solve many problems from the road. New features can be delivered over the air.
That’s just for starters, but there’s so much more in the future. After all, the signal virtue of a digital computer is its flexibility. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing complete, universal, Von Neumann machine, which can run every valid program. If a feature is computationally tractable – from automated parallel parking to advanced collision prevention – it can run on a car.
The problem is that this digital flexibility presents a moral hazard to EV manufacturers. EVs are designed to make any kind of unauthorized, owner-selected modification into an IP rights violation (“IP” in this case is “any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers or competitors”):
EVs are
also designed so that the manufacturer can unilaterally exert control over them or alter their operation. EVs – even more than conventional vehicles – are designed to be remotely killswitched in order to help manufacturers and dealers pressure people into paying their car notes on time:
They can lock your car and have it send its location to a repo man, then greet him by blinking its lights, honking its horn, and pulling out of its parking space:
This is “twiddling” – unilaterally and irreversibly altering the functionality of a product or service, secure in the knowledge that IP law will prevent anyone from twiddling back by restoring the gadget to a preferred configuration:
The thing is, for an EV, twiddling is the
best case scenario. As bad as it is for the company that made your EV to change how it works whenever they feel like picking your pocket, that’s
infinitely preferable to the manufacturer going bankrupt and
bricking your car.
That’s what just happened to owners of Fisker EVs, cars that cost $40-70k. Cars are long-term purchases. An EV should last 12-20 years, or even longer if you pay to swap the battery pack. Fisker was founded in 2016 and shipped its first Ocean SUV in 2023. The company is now bankrupt:
Fisker called its vehicles “software-based cars” and they weren’t kidding. Without continuous software updates and server access, those Fisker Ocean SUVs are turning into bricks. What’s more, the company designed the car from the ground up to make any kind of independent service and support into a felony, by wrapping the whole thing in overlapping layers of IP. That means that no one can step in with a module that jailbreaks the Fisker and drops in an alternative firmware that will keep the fleet rolling.
This is the third EV risk – not just finance, not just charger infrastructure, but the possibility that any whizzy, cool new EV company will go bust and brick your $70k cleantech investment, irreversibly transforming your car into 5,500 lb worth of e-waste.
This confers a huge advantage onto the big automakers like VW, Kia, Ford, etc. Tesla gets a pass, too, because it achieved critical mass before people started to wise up to the risk of twiddling and bricking. If you’re making a serious investment in a product you expect to use for 20 years, are you
really gonna buy it from a two-year old startup with six months’ capital in the bank?
The incumbency advantage here means that the big automakers won’t have any reason to sink a lot of money into R&D, because they won’t have to worry about hungry startups with cool new ideas eating their lunches. They can maintain the cozy cartel that has seen cars stagnate for decades, with the majority of “innovation” taking the form of shitty, extractive and ill-starred ideas like touchscreen controls and an accelerator pedal that you have to rent by the month:
Two steps ahead of most, Jay Springett (kind of) wonders if GPT-4o Must Die? Thought we/some were already addicted to apps? Just wait until AI companions replace pets, dead loved ones, friends, and dates.
“I think discussions around the safety of these technologies shouldn’t be focused on AGI and run away intelligence etc – but instead we should ask how psychologically safe these tools are going to be (long term) as people integrate them into their lives.”
ALT
