The cover story for the September 2024 issue of Sound & Recording magazine was Sheena Ringo's latest studio album, Hōjōya (Carnival). The issue has been on my desk for two years, waiting for me to take the time to read it—and finally, I have.
Susurrus is a multiplayer pomodoro-style timer for your group chat, and this is why it looks and works the way it does.
Just because there's nothing useful a cute little desktop robot arm can do doesn't mean we shouldn't make one.
MagicaVoxel is a reminder that computers can still be good.
My favorite example of a literary translation error begins in the year 2000.
The primary theme of Scavengers Reign is right there in plain sight. I think it’s trying to reckon with how we face the overwhelming power of the natural world and its implacable indifference to the individual organisms that make it up.
With the launch of GPTs, OpenAI is letting anyone with a ChatGPT Pro account create and share customized chatbots. The one I made is called The Infinite Library, and it lets you browse the cultural products of an alternate civilization.
The conversation about recent advances in machine learning-driven image generation tools (I don’t like the term “AI art,” but it’s become ubiquitous, and I am caving to the weight of convention) has—like so many other topics in the churn of cultural discourse—quickly become weird. One of
For two years now my waking hours have been marked by persistent neck and shoulder pain. At its worst it was incapacitating and it made basic daily functioning nearly impossible; most days it is merely annoying, representing a measurable but surmountable increase in the volume of the mental static I
It’s funny what sticks in your mind. As a kid I had the standard kid-type obsession with dinosaurs. Having an obsession with dinosaurs is great, or at least it was great in my case, because it mostly manifested itself as a desire to read every dinosaur book on which
I have a few vices. I sleep in. I buy drug store candy and eat it, in volume, at my desk. I put too much cream and sugar in my coffee. I enjoy dirty comic books. But by far my most long-standing and financially deleterious vice is my love of gadgets.
I have the privilege of maintaining the archives for The Sockdolager, an online zine of speculative fiction. Although the zine is currently on publishing hiatus, I feel very strongly about keeping the lights on for the authors who'd done me the honor of letting me publish their work.
I was 11 or 12 for sure; definitely no older than 13.
Upon the metaphorical road's failure to rise up to meet me, I was forced to take a job in Shitty Retail, working the 0400-1200 logistics shift at a Target store in Cheyenne, WY, USA. It was there under the threateningly, vertiginously expansive skies that I learned the way of the world.
Mere days ago, some caprice seized me to write about home robot arms and I tried to think of what you could usefully put on the end of one. All I came up with was "camera," "display," and "pen", totally blanking out on "lamp". Would you be surprised to learn that Apple's machine learning laboratory is smarter than me? There's something to this idea, I'm telling you. (via)
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Maciej Cegłowski has made a persuasive case against human boots on Mars in the foreseeable future. Not only am I convinced that he's right in specific case, but ever since reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora a few years ago, I've largely divorced myself from the romantic falsehood of galactic manifest destiny. Let's just build more telescopes and robots while we work on fixing up where we are always, always, always going to live.
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While acknowledging that not everybody finds deeply technical discussions of things they only faintly understand to be compelling viewing, I found Brian Karis's 90-minute keynote address totally engrossing. He discusses his year-long intellectual journey towards what became Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry technology not in terms of the technical triumph that it ultimately was but rather the messy process of dead-ends, hunches, and lonely groping in the dark that it took to get there.
In his relating of the experience of working on a problem where a solution was far from guaranteed, Karis's humility and curiosity are genuinely inspirational.
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