Link tags: story

Dark Ages of the Web

Notes on the old internet, its design and frontend.

We Are As Gods

A forthcoming documentary about Stewart Brand (with music by Brian Eno).

Quotebacks and hypertexts (Interconnected)

What I love about the web is that it’s a hypertext. (Though in recent years it has mostly been used as a janky app delivery platform.)

I am very much enjoying Matt’s thoughts on linking, quoting, transclusion, and associative trails.

My blog is my laboratory workbench where I go through the ideas and paragraphs I’ve picked up along my way, and I twist them and turn them and I see if they fit together. I do that by narrating my way between them. And if they do fit, I try to add another piece, and then another. Writing a post is a process of experimental construction.

And then I follow the trail, and see where it takes me.

NASA Collection

Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.

A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph | Open Culture

I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.

It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.

“Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” by Haruki Murakami | The New Yorker

It’s just about an old monkey who speaks human language, who scrubs guests’ backs in the hot springs in a tiny town in Gunma Prefecture, who enjoys cold beer, falls in love with human women, and steals their names.

A sequel to 2006’s A Shinagawa Monkey, translated by Philip Gabriel.

Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte

2010 was quite a year:

And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.

Nothing’s been quite the same since.

I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.

The History of the Future

It me:

Although some communities have listed journalists as “essential workers,” no one claims that status for the keynote speaker. The “work” of being a keynote speaker feels even more ridiculous than usual these days.

The Stacks Reader | A Treasure Trove of Classic Journalism

Digital preservation of dead-tree media:

The Stacks Reader is an online collection of classic journalism and writing about the arts that would otherwise be lost to history. Motivated less by nostalgia than by preservation, The Stacks Reader is a living archive of memorable storytelling—a museum for stories.

It was 20 years ago today… - Web Directions

John’s article, A Dao Of Web Design, is twenty years old. If anything, it’s more relevant today than when it was written.

Here, John looks back on those twenty years, and forward to the next twenty…

The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [PDF]

A 2015 paper by Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay with a proposal for digital preservation.

We discuss the problem of running today’s software decades,centuries, or even millennia into the future.

6, 95: Barrel aged

Human consciousness is the most astonishing thing, and most of it happened in deep time, beyond the reach of any writing and most legends. Human experience, in general, is prehistoric. And prehistoric experience was just as full as yours and mine: just as deeply felt, just as intelligent, just as real. What we know of it is mostly from durable artifacts and graves. I’m thinking of the woman found near the Snake River, buried at the end of the ice age with a perfectly crafted and unused stone knife tucked under her head. I’m thinking of the huge conical hats, beaten from single pieces of gold and inscribed with calendars, found north of the Alps. I’m thinking of Grave 8 at Vedbæk, where a woman held her premature baby on the spread wing of a swan. These are snapshot that experts can assemble into larger ideas, but what they tell all of us is that we’ve been people, not just humans, for a very long time.

The Worm is Back! | NASA

The return of NASA’s iconic “worm” logo (for some missions).

Home (BBC film of J. G. Ballard’s The Enormous Space) - YouTube

Here’s a BBC adaption of that J.G. Ballard short story I recorded. It certainly feels like a story for our time.

James Meek · In 1348

This makes me want to re-read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror.

So no one told us the internet was gonna be this way | The Outline

An interview with Joanne McNeil about her new book, Lurking:

Someone who was creating, say, a small decentralized community for a specific group of people would not have luck finding investors, as opposed to Facebook, which sought to build a platform for all.

‘Sfunny, when I was on Quarantine Book Club the other day, this is exactly what I talked about one point—how Facebook (and venture capital) moved the goalposts on what constitutes success and failure on the web.

Rise of the Digital Fonts

A history of typesetting from movable type to variable fonts.

Networked information services: The world-wide web [PDF]

A 1992 paper by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and Jean-Françoise Groff.

The W3 project is not a research project, but a practical plan to implement a global information system.

The History of the URL

This is a wonderful deep dive into all the parts of a URL:

scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]

There’s a lot of great DNS stuff about the host part:

Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularily given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.

17th Century Death Roulette ☠️

Spin the wheel: you’ll get a week and a death in 1665.

(Realistically, you probably would’ve died of plague, which outnumbers other causes of death by orders of magnitude.)