I'm helping with facilitation of a conference today. The conference is in a hotel near Mount Kenya - 6,800km away from me. I'm sitting looking at an empty room on Zoom - they've gone for lunch - and marvelling at how in my lifetime we've gone from ARPANET to NSFNET and JANET to thinking nothing of being virtually present with people halfway round the earth, collaborating on the same information at the same time. We achieve so much when we collaborate. And we stand to lose so much if we don't.
Even the biggest boosters of crypto are unable to articulate a concrete use case in which it is superior to existing alternatives. https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/62ba500cbcbd490021aaef70/web3-crypto-movement-uses-marc-andreessen/
A new journal has been added to the kiosk (https://kiosk.nightfall.city): https://felix.plesoianu.ro/journal.html (welcome @felix!)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Barry Gehm
"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it."
Florence Ambrose (Freefall, Stanley)
"It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done."
Terry Pratchett
I think what is going on for me is that I'm finding less to draw me in to the Big Franchise Properties, and yet they continue to occupy a massive portion of the creative space/conversation while other compelling works don't get the same push and support.
Did you know not having a child opens up women to increased risk of all types of gynecology cancer later in life? (2-3x increased occurrence of uterine cancer)
I didn't know that. I feel like I should have known that. I feel like everyone with a uterus should know that.
Obv not to challenge/change our choices, but to increase our medical surveillance.
I've been asked why not simply use #Markdown in AntiWiki, and it turns out there are many good reasons:
- Markdown is an extra dependency.
- It's noticeably slow to parse and render.
- It's overhyped and overused. People are fed up.
- There must be better ways to do lightweight markup.
- Only nerds ever liked Markdown to be honest.
Besides, turns out my new markup language is really nice to use. Might as well.
@Tusky Will that happen even if I don't have a push provider and don't want one?
I'm back on my usual bullshit with yet another tool to help people make websites, except a somewhat novel formula for a change: https://felix.plesoianu.ro/web/antiwiki/
@tinyrabbit Follow-up: apparently two early examples are the webcomics Diesel Sweeties and Questionable Content, whose RSS feeds are handcrafted.
@tinyrabbit Yes, it was like ten years ago. Friend of mine knows the author, I can ask. Been keeping a couple of those myself for a while now.
@abetterjulie In The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov also cites a population of 8 billion as the scary figure that forced people into the eponymous covered cities.
Just a lonely orange cat watching the moon from the windowsill on a starry night.