Disclaimer Previously… Rules of Acquisition Conclusions The Good The Bad Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth,…

“I’m a sentient rock,” a panel that Rowan presented at Othercon 2026.“It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, but first we have to go back 4.5 billion years to the creation of the Earth. This panel will discuss questions such as: What does that mean? Is the Earth conscious? And, could YOU secretly be a rock?”

unstory's Own your content goes like so: POSSE it, they say. Own your content. Publish once, fork it five times. RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, webmention, pick your parasite. Fix the typo in two minutes. Already too late. Fossils wearing your name. Forking your content five times? Those are rookie numbers! You can fork your content anywhere and everywhere as many times as you wish. That does a great job of encouraging others to interact with and remix it, while diminishing the importance of you…

This past week I read Otessa Moshfegh's Lapvona (link opens to bookshop.org), a surrealist novel set in the titular petty, pre-modern, European fiefdom of Lapvona. It's a quick, horrifying, beautiful and deeply affecting read that I would only recommend to someone with a strong stomach. Historically, feudalism is a family of modes of production, cultural and religious practices, and legal and political systems. Specifically, the manor system in western Europe organized society into peasants…

Drawing comparison to our collective experience of interacting with digital entities in video games, Simon Duan offers an opinion on consciousness in AI agents: When a user feels a bond with a chatbot, they are not just anthropomorphizing a static object; they may be actively extending a part of their own consciousness into it, transforming the AI agent from a simple algorithmic responder—a digital nonplayer character—into a kind of avatar, enlivened by the user’s consciousness and the lived…

This summer has been the most challenging of my career so far. When I became Vice-Chancellor, President and Khan of Khans of Ex University, I knew that I would need all my leadership skills and renowned personal empathy to guide the institution through the uncertain waters of Earth 2 higher education, but I must admit I was not prepared for how much you lot would whinge about a bit of necessary blood-letting. Some very hurtful things have been said about the competence and honesty of my team.…

Ted Gioia asserts “Most of the predictions about AI have proven dead wrong. You could get more reliable information by consulting tarot cards or an Ouija board.” In his post 10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI he presumably eschews the Ouija board; I believe he hopes his ten predictions will be accurate. Most striking to me is his analogy of the arrival of AI-generated texts with the introduction of frozen precooked dinners.* People thought great, how easy, just stick it in the…

There are two camps. One says, make money—it is life’s ultimate truth. The other says money makes you evil and corrupt. One says money makes people respect you. The other says relationships cannot be bought with money. One says people who claim money can’t buy happiness simply don’t know where to shop. The other says, try buying someone’s love with money. Both camps are right in a way. But my point isn’t whether you should dedicate your life to making more money. You don’t really have a choice…

Jeffrey Zeldman: At the time of the initial conversation, I believed most people involved in the creation of websites were motivated by altruism, aesthetics, and the desire to create a fairer world. And of course many are. Many, but far from all. I did not see how quickly fascism was infiltrating our trade. Perhaps infiltrating is the wrong word. Perhaps there had always been a Dark Side. For a long time, I had been guilty of assuming that many people in tech just want to mess around with…

New links in the Heap… “There are just so many other things you could be doing” — Daniel Groll wrote something for his students about the role of phones in their lives. (Perhaps it would work better as a TikTok?) “I can now keep walking and say things like ‘Find the relevant sections of the papers I mentioned, add them to the notes for Chapter 3, and update the references accordingly’” — Gus Skorburg shares how he uses AI in his work Improve your philosophy teaching with this one weird trick —…

by Gertrud U. Rey The recent cholera outbreak in Myanmar, along with recurring outbreaks in Haiti and other regions where access to clean water and sanitation remains inconsistent, highlight the continued global public health burden of this disease. Cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, but most people are unaware that the bacterium’s pathogenicity […]

I caught a news report today and was reflecting on its implications for my work in higher education.

Sarah Wynn-Williams joined Facebook believing it could change the world. She was right, but unfortunately very wrong about what those changes would be. The way Meta reacted to Wynn-Williams’ memoir is awful, and as both an author and a whistleblower, she should be left in peace to publish and promote her book. That said, Careless People is so unilluminating I don’t understand why Meta even care. There was little to any new information about the inner workings. The writing is dull, and the…

This is to mainly answer the questions, how to syndicate my work and to answer some questions surrounding the respectability of syndication. Let’s first answer the question, may you syndicate my work. Yes. You may syndicate my work. You may syndicate my work because that's combatting censorship, and I'm one hundred percent behind you in combatting censorship. I can't stand censorship of any kind, no matter who is doing the censorship. Trying to erase racism from history is just as problematic…

You've noticed everyone around you is more successful: they built businesses, have great careers, loving families. You wish you had the same. What to do? Have you tried feeling morally superior instead? All successful businesses steal money from somebody else. Working for corporations is basically the same as supporting fascism. You don't have family and friends because nobody else sees how corrupt ordinary people are - and you don't want to mingle with evil people, don't you? Your failures are…

We1 are pleased to announce that the Structural Engineers Association of New York has made it official: Donald Friedman is now an Honorary Member. The award comes as SEAoNY celebrates its 30th anniversary—which is particularly appropriate since Don was one of the organization’s founding board members. In announcing the award, SEAoNY highlighted Don’s longstanding devotion to structural engineering and to SEAoNY, as well as his extensive research and writing on the structural engineering of…

America 243

The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of…

Coming across the video “They’re Banning Your Home Servers” from creator Loyal Moses discussing the California legislative battle over the “Protect Our Games Act” (AB 1921) immediately caught my eye, pulling me down a rather depressing rabbit hole about digital ownership and what it means for anyone who likes running their own gear. Over in California, that modest little piece of legislation… Source

A note on how the city you live in can shape who you become. A reflection on Lagos and how our environments influence our habits, ambitions, and lives.

I often find myself in conversations about the comparative value of side-road zebra crossings and continuous footways. People want to see improvements for pedestrians, a means to get cyclists safely past side roads, and they want to know where to focus their efforts. Does the future lie in developing the use of side road zebra crossings, or is it continuous footways that will more likely change driving behaviour? This article provides my answer. But it does that by explaining why the people…

I read Guy Standing's short essay on education in Monocle's Issue #195. I have mixed thoughts about Guy's arguments. I think the introduction explains the whole article well: The acquisition of knowledge is becoming more commodified, seen as a way of filling gaps in the workforce. But for a society to thrive, it needs to remember how to value learning. I understand that education previously aimed to teach people how to think (influenced by thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau). This focus has…

New blogging discussion! Do you want to be a NPC? Yes - or no? Right out of the gate if you don't feel like reading up, both bloggers generally agree that you should do your own thing - but I feel like they are speaking past eachother based on how they interpret the concept of a NPC. I'll paraprhase the two posts above: Signal Undefined: Yay NPC, don't care 'bout what others think, I'm just here runnin' my own race. I ain't gotta please other by living a exciting life. I aint the main…

The right complain a lot about how the main stream media is very captured by people with socialist tendencies. Same in universities. In the online world the right seems to have more of a presence, so much so that the left is always complaining about it. Anyway that's just some pre-amble, which you might or might not agree with, for this particularly simple idea I had yesterday. Isn‘t it odd that people who‘s primary wealth is social capital, from which their financial capital is derived, are…

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton’s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away. Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination Library, which sends free books to children every month from birth to age five. There are currently 3 million children enrolled, and the program has given…

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton’s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away. Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination Library, which sends free books to children every month from birth to age five. There are currently 3 million children enrolled, and the program has given…

From the September 2, 2026, issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter: 40: Percent of fish in experiment, when submitted to motorboat noise, that mistakenly swam toward predators 95: Percent of short Chinese dramas — out of 128,000 in the first quarter of 2026 — that were AI-generated, including voices 80.65: Average noise level in decibels of the loudest of the 50 states that comprise the USA (it’s Texas) Sources: motorboat (phys.org), China (ft.com), Texas (timeout.com)

The Commonwealth supplies less than half the revenue of Australia’s universities and sets very nearly all of their terms. That sentence is not a complaint. It is a description of an arrangement we have never argued about directly, because we have been busy arguing about its instruments instead—fees, caps, student numbers, research block grants, the price of an arts degree. Each of those debates settles a question about what universities are for without ever putting the question itself to a…

It is based on a false premise that you are incomplete and need to find something to become whole. If you accept that there is no inherent meaning, the mind has no job. It panics. To avoid this horrific silence, it creates ideologies, debates about nonsense to keep this psychological engine running. The pursuit itself generates the anxiety it claims to solve. Endless search. It is a closed self-feeding loop. Ceaseless energy sucking search for a better life, lifestyle. Hilarious debates about…