Links: Reading and history and more
In the way these things happen I seem to have a lot of reading about reading, and also history links, recently.
From Gabby at woolgathering: ratings mean nothing except when they don't. I can't do ratings for more or less these exact reasons.
Obama thinks aliens are real. Most of us agree. from The Science of Fiction.
An amazing video by josh (with parentheses) via Aeon on AI isn’t merely bad at writing. It does not and cannot write. I appreciate the Gertrude Stein frame. Or, because I've just read Monique Truong's The Book of Salt: GertrudeStein.
More AI: Cory Doctorow's The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI.
Gripes against the 'death of literacy' hypothesis from Adam Mastroianni in Text is king.
Another video: What Pompeii Looked Like Hours Before Its Destruction: A Reconstruction from Open Culture.
How far back in time can you understand English? via Cherry's room. The challenge is great and it was fun looking at the sources used. For the record, I could get most of 1300 probably because I did some Chaucer and stuff at uni. But 1200, yeah, that's a whole other language.
Instrumentalisation is making everything a means to an end from Aeon. From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value. But life is about more than material benefits.
I had this last time but didn't link it: what if you allowed indie print magazines to save your life by Emily Spinach.
I keep thinking about ways literature could really make us more social in the way we keep talking about the analogue lives we want. Sitting in a small hall attached to a historic church, for less than £6, I was happy to be reading communally with others for the first time in a good while.
I wish videogame culture would take more cues from readers: 'It's time to ditch the release cycle and select what we play via more interesting constraints.' Found via Saul at Tinkering Just to Feel Something.
Mauro writes about fighting tsundoku with some good tactics.
I love Gerald of Wales's Journey Through Wales for some medieval shenanigans and The Usual Tongues has made a d20 table inspired by it. Emily Spinach recently mentioned a fuck marry kill from the Mabinogion. My kind of history.
Reactor Mag's Unfortunately I am wrestling with genre again asks are genres helpful? Are they necessary? Are they kind?
This whole country is a river poop and here's the sewage map to prove it.
Zachary has written a lovely roundup of the intersecting interests blog carnival. And Winther for the boredom Bearblog carnival.
Everyone's probably already seen You should invite people over to your home regularly by Matt Glassman but I want to have it here. Board game nights. Game days. Exactly this.
Daniel Sell's How To Stop Jumping Ship and resulting Blog Without Organs. He's correct about his newsletter in the first post. It's a great newsletter.
Robot America's a soft stack ecology:
soft stack ecology (sse) is a name for the way i want to make things. not just techy things, or things on the web ... but projects, systems, rituals, workflows, spaces, collaborations, friendships, and whatever else i’m building life with and out of.
KM of Robot America has also started oh my blog! a blog celebrating other blogs and a lovely digital garden. Plus Myths and Legends on stamps by The Postal Museum via oh my blog!
I've been printing some zines recently, games zines, and oh my goodness. I needed How to Not Do Zines Wrong from To Distant Lands to keep me sane.
Last bit of history, should you be a nerd wondering about forms of address, as I was this week: Mistress, Miss, Mrs or Ms: untangling the shifting history of titles.