The Garden

Worried we’re going to run out of good, reliable Future Years. 2000 was a big blow, and we just lost 2019, 2020, and 2025 in rapid succession. 2050 and 2070 are in reach in our lifetimes. I don’t think anything starting with a 21- has anywhere near the same amount of aura

Oops! The book we gave the guy in the Chinese room was about Mandarin, but all the people passing slips actually wanted Cantonese

IT'S COMING H[15 July Messi incident, thousands dead]

“I probably had a weirder referendum week than you”, or, the recollections of the creator of a Change.org petition for London independence, ten years on Skumsoft.ltd “Tamatou was a wooden doll which, according to oral tradition, ruled as the 13th Tuʻi Tonga of the Tuʻi Tonga Empire.” Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–92) “Generative artificial intelligence creates delicious, sustainable, and nutritious burgers” Things unexpectedly named after people: “an incomplete and infuriating list” Kyoto…

Apologies for any recent downtime — the repairman had to turn off the power for a bit and my server-laptop’s been a bit finnicky as always in trying to get back up.

it’s too late. i’ve already depicted you as the screeching, dangerous, overengineered trans-Atlantic hyperloop and myself as the cool, collected, romantic maglev gliding serenely over the Bering Strait

Welcome back! I’ve had a stress-filled month, and i just saw Disclosure Day and thought it was naff, but let’s ignore that and focus on the beautiful things of the world for a moment. Like these links i found you. Please enjoy each one equally. :-) A history of Arabic typography, and why it’s still so sucky on the web Where to find the colours your screen can’t show you. There’s some beautiful stuff out there in the world. CrankGPT: A small language model running on a hand-cranked computer.…

Got into an argument with someone on the internet and we both deëscalated to a reasoned conclusion where we agreed to disagree. What the fuck i didn’t know that was allowed

Coming Home Status: It’s

It is the position of His Majesty’s Government that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are old enough to vote, old enough to join the military, old enough to drink, old enough to have sex, and old enough to pay income tax, but not old enough to go on the computer after the watershed. They want to protect the children by boxing at shadows, but all they’re doing is trapping the sons and daughters of abusive parents tighter between the walls of their cruel homes. They are condemning the transgender…

When/if i die, my tombstone is going to read “Thought for 2,682,000,000s”

There’s something disturbing about modern McDonald’s marketing where Grimace, Hamburglar, and the rest of the McDCU cast are there, but Ronald McDonald is absent. Like he’s been erased from history after falling out of favour with the régime.

Weird Britain: The Guardian’s list of ten great British oddities you should visit I don’t know what this is. A gallery of 100,000 seemingly random images, sourced from ??? and organised by ??? in order to ???. “Let’s hear it for small dicks and short sex!” Something about the url “playboy.substack.com” fills me with an unnameable emotion. A recreation of the star map from Project Hail Mary The Swingjugend Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on actually coaxing art out of the machine. As someone…

Forget Victorian children or mediæval peasants; “The American pope closes his manifesto on artificial intelligence by quoting Gandalf” is a sentence that would instantly kill a 2003-era forum user

Say what you will about coronavirus disease 2019, but it did give us some great music. A cool explainer of infrared photography, with even cooler photos Elizabeth Saloka’s painted rock snacks On grey literature The New York Times on minimal-comfort feeding, an emerging middle-ground in dementia care between prolonging unwilling lives and euthanasia Apocalypse Early Warning System: “In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will…

Whenever i hear the phrase “separating the art from the artist” it makes me imagine something like the anti-dæmon guillotine doohickey from His Dark Materials.

The Tyne and Wear Metro is a marvel of the British railway network: the only true metro system outside of London and Glasgow1, with fully accessible stations, beautiful typographic design, and only the occasional closure because someone stole all the copper wiring again. But amongst railway nerds, it is also known for one more puzzling detail: it’s a pretzel. 1 Many sources describe it as a “light rail” network. I would point out that it runs on refurbished heavy-rail lines, spends much of its…

It’s 2026 and, somehow, the most convenient way of getting an image from my phone to my desktop (or vice versa) is still “posting it in a private Discord server with me as the only member”.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Absolute queer cinema. An injection of life in the arm. Possibly the only thing that would make me want to actually go to Australia. (9/10) To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) Unfortunately this loses steam once it stops being a road movie and starts being a True Stories-esque small-wacky-town comedy — which is, uh, most of it. That said, it’s kind of crazy how well John Leguizamo passes. (5½/10) Upgrade (2018) I love…

Before we start — i always feel a little awkward about publishing two link roundups in a row, and three especially is pushing it, so i wanted to assure everyone that i do have some more stuff in the pipe! In the coming months, you can expect (okay, hope) to see, in no particular order: A deep dive into why the Tyne and Wear Metro is the funny shape it is Several short multimedia articles on the Tupaians, Looking at the Big Sky’s closest thing to confirmed first contact with aliens Putting the…

Getting a “Claude is AI and can make mistakes.” tramp stamp

In Europe we call him/them 22.86 Centimetre Nails