kixiQu

He's an independent type designer. His site shows properly fleshed out respectable-looking typefaces for respectable-typography costs, but the Font Of The Month Club is the real joy. Whether you're looking for Victorian flavor, elegant text typefaces, design-forward display options, or the latest font feature noodling around (color fonts! color fonts!) there's a fine assortment here to be worth looking through. The Mini license costs are really nice as a reasonable impulse buy for the font-oriented and not too shocking a figure for the non-font-oriented.

I'm not at all a proper Font User -- my website's main typeface is a true abomination I keep only because an SVG filter to replicate the effect sounds hard to get right -- but I love imagining print projects that would merit Polliwog or Klooster Thin.

This is such a lovely video! I'm going to go and watch more of her stuff -- exactly the sort of "lifestyle content" I never seem to find. Friendly energy, syncretic bits of practice and fact, beautiful shots of nature, and some hands-on advice: love it.

I think the lost hollow is my favorite. Which is yours?

I mean, that's one way of handling a housing shortage, I guess?

I think Benedict Evans writes about a lot of really interesting stuff. Sometimes he gets right to the hearts of things. Sometimes he's wrong in important (and interesting!) ways.

This seems to me to be an example of the latter.

However, it often now seems that content moderation is a Sisyphean task, where we can certainly reduce the problem, but almost by definition cannot solve it. The internet is people: all of society is online now, and so all of society’s problems are expressed, amplified and channeled in new ways by the internet.

Fully agreed! Yes! Absolutely--technical problems are rarely just technical problems, but also social problems.

We can try to control that, but perhaps a certain level of bad behaviour on the internet and on social might just be inevitable, and we have to decide what we want, just as we did for cars or telephones - we require seat belts and safety standards, and speed limits, but don’t demand that cars be unable to exceed the speed limit.

This, however, does not follow, and it doesn't follow even for cars. It took a lot of corporate manipulation of people's beliefs for us to start thinking about car crashes as "accidents". It took intense lobbying to create the crime of "jaywalking" where before, people had been allowed to walk in the streets their taxes paid for, and people driving cars had been responsible for not hitting others.

Powerful entities had it in their interest to make you believe this was all inevitable. People made a lot of money from making us think that this is all just How Things Are, that we have to accept the costs and deaths. They're still making a lot of money. Even those seat belt laws exist because the auto lobby wanted to get out of having to build in airbags.

Automotive technology is technology just like the Internet is technology. Where technology lets us leap over natural physical limitations, "human nature" isn't an inherent fundamental to the situation. Why did we build the cars to go fast? Why do people assume they should be able to get around faster in a car than on a bike, even around pedestrians? If I write a letter that tells you to kill yourself and have a print shop blow it up into a poster, is the print shop at all responsible for their involvement in my words? What if they put out a self-service photocopier and choose not to look at what people are using it for? Is it different if it's not a poster but a banner ad? A tweet? Sure, we can acknowledge that it's some part of human nature that we're going to be shitty to each other, but should we be helping each other do it at 70 miles per hour? The speed of light? These are uncomfortably political questions, questions that have power tied up in them.

And that's exactly why I think it's important to reject Evans' thinking here.

Some people argue that the problem is ads, or algorithmic feeds (both of which ideas I disagree with pretty strongly - I wrote about newsfeeds here), but this gets at the same underlying point: instead of looking for bad stuff, perhaps we should change the paths that bad stuff can abuse. The wave of anonymous messaging apps that appeared a few years ago exemplify this - it turned out that bullying was such an inherent effect of the basic concept that they all had to shut down. Hogarth contrasted dystopian Gin Lane with utopian Beer Street - alcohol is good, so long as it’s the right kind.

Of course, if the underlying problem is human nature, then you can still only channel it.

He does not argue in the linked piece that algorithmic newsfeeds are worth their bad effects, only that they're a response to a real problem -- that's why I liked the linked piece!

Let's not make fuzzy comparisons, even with tongue in cheek; Dickens was quite right to note that the "great vice" of "gin-drinking in England" arose out of "poverty", "wretchedness[,] and dirt", which are no more human nature than all the riches of Silicon Valley... and as a non-teetotaler I am free to add without fear of being thought a nag that any quantity of alcohol is bad for your health. There aren't inherent inducements to good or evil in beer or gin. The existing context is too important, and someone's getting rich off of selling you either.

I'm not even sure I believe that we can know anonymous messaging inherently leads to bullying, only that the populations who seize upon it in our preexisting imperfect context are using it toward that end.

But if you're willing to believe that YikYak had to die, why then believe that an engagement-maximization framework -- algorithms harvesting your eyeballs -- is not having significant impact on the way we interact with each other? Is this guy invested in Facebook? Did any philosopher, pessimist or optimist, imagine like count displays in their state of nature?

Ah, blech, the guy's got a history in VC. I shouldn't have opened the Twitter to try to confirm pronouns. There's a very sad genetic fallacy (well, heuristic) we could apply here but I'm too busy to let myself be saddened by its conclusions.

I had death jump out of the deck while I was shuffling a month or so back. I'm still trying to figure out what it means--I took that cliched view of "change!" since I was dealing with a lot of frustration at stasis in my life.

I don't mean the technical term magical thinking as much as the broader set of mind necessary for approaching magical stuff, which then includes a lot of the "assume meaning until proven otherwise" heuristic core to magical thinking qua technical term.

It was one thing when the Surrealists picked up on techniques for making meaning out of what might sensibly assumed to be random. Plenty of them were involved in various flavors of the occult anyway.

But for the Startup Brains to come upon cleromancy and determine it fit for their use -- I will not have it. I will not have it, I say!

(via josh)

Well, hell.

I don't get new versions of things but I'm still fully that person.

Interactive fiction at a solo dev scale is often really really linear. This game structures around that well, I felt -- the repetitive nature of what you're doing is the point, what makes it meaningful even in the absence of alternative choice.

This link argues no. I would argue yes, because of a technical solution and a phenomenon I've observed.

The technical problem:

It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm, where only the most recent N items are shown in one big, combined, reverse-chronological list (much like a Twitter timeline), because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets.

One of the really nice things about RSS is what it doesn't do. It doesn't order your content by obscure algorithms aiming to vacuum you further and further into an advertising-driven time suck, as Twitter now does.

That doesn't mean, however, that your only option is to present behavior chronologically.

The technical solution: I have my RSS reader do a round-robin ordering for each page displayed, so the higher-volume feeds pool at the bottom. This effect is more noted with a larger page size. For me, this works well enough. I don't see why marking "read all" is a bad thing, and I do it decently regularly.

The phenomenon: Navigating directly to lifehacker.com or whatever other high-volume site feels like gambling. All the colorful previews are engaging, and it all seems to grab me more than my staid feed reader's presentation. It's tempting to roll the dice and see if there's something new. It makes me less this to consume everything in my feed reader is what I guess I'm saying. That's valuable to me.

It turns out I'd linked to something really outdated and what's been done since is so great that I just have to share again.

All of the work into establishing visual atmosphere is so communicative.

From Landcraft,

Landcraft is a system designed specifically to be used with earth-centric religion or magic. I don’t like the four elements as they are used in Wicca. I do like the Tree of Life very much. However, both seem a touch…odd and inauthentic to be working with landspirits and fairies. It feels like a rude imposition of an alien system onto spirits which simply don’t fit.

This is spot-on.

There is a series on walking as a spiritual practice that I am going to read seriously.

Their Dreamwidth states "My gender identity is coward", so I'm gonna use they/them for the author here.

There's a lot here. I love, love, love efforts to sever an elemental way of thinking from its gendered history, and the Sun/Moon/Star page gives a lot of that.

There's one aspect that tangled up my brain. From the Key Ideas page:

Landcrafting is: [...]

• A mystery tradition - we draw our myths from publically available texts, but find our power in meditation, speaking with the spirits, dreaming, and other private practices. We maintain our tradition by Staying Silent about key aspects of our work.
• Open-source, decentralised, and anti-authoritarian. We don't have leaders, hierarchies, or holy books; everyone is welcome to participate, and develop their own thing from what is written on this website.

I think this gets at what I find unsatisfying about Internet witchcraft/occultism writ broad. I don't think it is possible to be both a mystery tradition and open-source. (What they're saying here is probably valid rephrased to "A tradition of mysticism") There is something in mystery traditions that is inextricably bound to the social relations along which knowledge is passed. These social relations have historically been thicker than the relation of publisher and audience.

I suppose heavily coded/symbolic means of expression create an alternative to social relations as the functional limits of information distribution that define a mystery tradition. The alchemist who renders her notes unreadable except to the studied adept is not in discourse with the adept, not necessarily socially relating with him; she relies on prerequisite knowledge to suss out who should be given her insights. (Something something and that's why critical theory is unreadable something something.)

All the way over on the other hand, I'm very curious to think what an open-source witchcraft tradition on the internet could look like. The sacred text shall be a wiki... and the edit wars as fierce as any Nicene skirmish.