VOL 4, NO 12
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Cool as nice. / We spent last weekend at the Calgary Comic Expo, starting with the parade on Friday and then all day on Saturday with the kids. It was delightful and I got a cool mug that is also a dice tower because I am, if nothing else, a goddamned child. What I like about the Expo is that everyone is in a great mood. Seriously — it’s only happy people everywhere and a lot of them are dressed like cartoon characters. The interactions are exclusively positive. I’ve been going to that Expo, off and on, for 17 years and I’ve never seen people even mad at each other. The last three sporting events I went to all had fights in the crowd during the game. Really gets me amped for when the meek finally inherit the earth.
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Confusions. / 💋 What porn taught a generation of women.(Archive) ❝At the beginning of the decade, the provocative, expressive experimentation of artists like Madonna and Jackson had foregrounded women’s desires. By the end, the cultural dominance of porn was pushing a much more regressive set of sexual standards. And the technological mechanisms that helped bolster this dominance would come to underscore—and exacerbate—a potent idea: that women existed only for men’s pleasure.❞ / 🦫 50 years of the beaver. / 📷 New York protests 1980–2000. / Passport photos. / 108 gigapixel Vermeer. / 📻 The episode that changed This American Life forever (or: on the importance of fact-checking). / The Nightly, sad old radio. / Super secret hidden public radio. / 📺 The story of Doctor Who (and a very important note on the Tommy Westphall Universe). ❝The TARDIS was inside the snow globe, yet the snow globe was also inside the TARDIS. That uncanny blue box exists inside television, yet it contains the entirety of television storytelling. This is not rational thinking. It is mysticism. The within is without. As above, so below. The logic of this situation may not satisfy the materially minded – but rationality is not what powers Doctor Who.❞ / TV.garden. (Previously: Radio.garden.) / Hypertext TV. / 🚗 The end of roadside attractions. ❝Few people travel the back roads anymore, and highways are speckled with fast food and chain motels. Postcards and souvenirs are things of the past—no one wants a decorative spoon from every state. We feel like we’ve already seen national monuments in photographs. People get excited by Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon only when someone falls in.❞ / 🤖 An AI-generated article on how to tell if the article you’re reading is AI-generated. ❝Such so is it with the artificially intelligent author, who draws on all clarity ever written to make sure clear is what its writing is the most. If clear is what you’re reading, do not panic: William Shakespeare has not risen from the dead. Nor has the A.I. that wrote what you are reading. It was never alive and it can never die.❞ / 🖥️ Classic computer replicas. / ♟️ One million chess boards. / 📜 Ye Olde Blogroll. / 🪑 Magazine stool. / ✌️
