Bookin’. — Ethan Marcotte
The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.
Tags: thor
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Saturday, June 3rd, 2023
Friday, May 19th, 2023
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine
But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.
Sunday, May 29th, 2022
OutHorse Your Email
I must remember to try this out-of-office email strategy.
Friday, February 19th, 2021
ignore the code: Bookfeed.io
Such an elegant idea!
Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.
Small pieces, loosely joined.
Friday, November 13th, 2020
An Ocean of Books
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
Monday, May 11th, 2020
Scunthorpe Sans 🗯🚫 profanity-blocking font
Using ligatures to create a s*** font that f***ing censors bad language automatically.
Tuesday, March 24th, 2020
Quarantine Book Club
Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!
A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.
Friday, October 25th, 2019
Why Are Accessible Websites so Hard to Build? | CSS-Tricks
I reckon a lot of websites have bad accessibility not because folks don’t care, but because they don’t know there’s an issue in the first place.
The headline is begging the question (I don’t think accessible websites are so hard to build), but I agree with Robin’s idea:
What if our text editors caught accessibility issues and showed them to us during development?
This is something that Hidde has been talking about recently too, looking at content management systems.
Sunday, June 10th, 2018
“What does that funny squiggle mean?” Playlist - BBC Ideas
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
Tuesday, August 29th, 2017
The Philip K Dick book I love most… | Books | The Guardian
Three authors pick their favourite book by Philip K Dick:
- Nicola Barker: Puttering About in a Small Land
- Michael Moorcock: Time Out of Joint
- Adam Roberts: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017
Brian Aldiss
After the eclipse I climbed down from the hilltop and reconnected with the world. That’s when I heard the news. Brian Aldiss had passed away.
He had a good innings. A very good innings. He lived to 92 and was writing right up to the end.
I’m trying to remember the first thing I read by Brian Aldiss. I think it might have been The Billion Year Spree, his encyclopaedia of science fiction. The library in my hometown had a copy when I was growing up, and I was devouring everything SF-related.
Decades later I had the great pleasure of meeting the man. It was 2012 and I was in charge of putting together the line-up for that year’s dConstruct. I had the brilliant Lauren Beukes on the line-up all the way from South Africa and I thought it would be fun to organise some kind of sci-fi author event the evening before. Well, one thing led to another: Rifa introduced me to Tim Aldiss, who passed along a request to his father, who kindly agreed to come to Brighton for the event. Then Brighton-based Jeff Noon came on board. The end result was an hour and a half in the company of three fantastic—and fantastically different—authors.
I had the huge honour of moderating the event. Here’s the transcript of that evening and here’s the audio.
That evening and the subsequent dConstruct talks—including the mighty James Burke—combined to create one of the greatest weekends of my life. Seriously. I thought it was just me, but Chris has also written about how special that author event was.
Brian Aldiss was simply wonderful that evening. He regaled us with the most marvellous stories, at times hilarious, at other times incredibly touching. He was a true gentleman.
I’m so grateful that I’ll always have the memory of that evening. I’m also very grateful that I have so many Brian Aldiss books still to read.
I’ve barely made a dent into the ludicrously prolific output of the man. I’ve read just some of his books:
- Non-stop—I’m a sucker for generation starship stories,
- Hothouse—ludicrously lush and trippy,
- Greybeard—a grim vision of a childless world before Children Of Men,
- The Hand-reared Boy—filthy, honest and beautifully written,
- Heliconia Spring—a deep-time epic …and I haven’t even read the next two books in the series!
Then there are the short stories. Hundreds of ‘em! Most famously Super-Toys Last All Summer Long—inspiration for the Kubrick/Spielberg A.I. film. It’s one of the most incredibly sad stories I’ve ever read. I find it hard to read it without weeping.
Whenever a great artist dies, it has become a cliché to say that they will live on through their work. In the case of Brian Aldiss and his astounding output, it’s quite literally true. I’m looking forward to many, many years of reading his words.
My sincerest condolences to his son Tim, his partner Alison, and everyone who knew and loved Brian Aldiss.
Thursday, June 9th, 2016
Miscellany № 74: zombies always make a hash of things – Shady Characters
A thoroughly lovely look at the octothorpe that skewers a myth or two along the way.
Tuesday, April 5th, 2016
Future Simple Steps - where to find your favourite ex-Five Simple Steps authors and their books
Now that Five Simple Steps has closed down, the individual authors are in charge of distributing their own books. This site links to all of those books.
Friday, January 2nd, 2015
The Anti-Tolkien - The New Yorker
A short profile of Michael Moorcock’s Elric series (though, for me, Jerry Cornelius is the champion that remains eternal in my memory).
Sunday, December 15th, 2013
Brian Aldiss: ‘These days I don’t read any science fiction. I only read Tolstoy’ | Books | The Guardian
A profile of Brian Aldiss in The Guardian.
I still can’t quite believe I managed to get him for last year’s Brighton SF.
Saturday, September 28th, 2013
Thoreau 2.0 - XOXO Conference Talk
Maciej’s talk from this year’s XOXO—excellent stuff!
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
Internet Archive Search: collection:”thesoundofyoungamerica”
Thanks to Jason Scott, every episode of The Sound Of Young America ever recorded is now stored on the Internet Archive. Get huffduffing!
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Designing the Wider Web
The dominance of the desktop browser is over – the web has become wider. After so long painting in a tiny corner of the canvas, it’s time to broaden our approach.
It’s understandable that the community is somewhat nervous about the changes ahead. So far, we’ve mostly responded by scratching around for device-specific tips, but this isn’t sustainable or scalable. We should transcend “platformism” and instead learn to design for diverse contexts, displays, connectivity, and inputs by breaking devices down into first principles. Instead of the defective dichotomy of the “desktop” and “mobile” web, designers should aim to create great user experiences using the truly fluid nature of the web.
Monday, March 29th, 2010
NYRblog - Atwood in the Twittersphere - The New York Review of Books
Margaret Atwood is all kinds of wonderful.
Friday, January 1st, 2010
Techno-utopian fail - The National Newspaper
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you have created.