Week round-up: March 1
I really can't keep these up. I'm rarely sitting at my desk reading things anymore. Here's a harvest of a bunch of stuff I found all over the place from the last few weeks.
Tomorrow Starts at 4 AM - Mike Egan
I've never agreed more with a blog post. The day ends at 3:59 AM; tomorrow only starts when it's the most painful part of "the morning".
Kaomoji Cool Club
Found this text emoji builder through sweetfish.site, a fantastic blog on neocities. The builder creates those little smiling faces emojis made out of punctuation:
(●ސ●) ⟮⦁‿𖥩⟯ (𖾜꒩␣꒩𖾞)
etc etc etc. You can copy and paste them right out of the composer.
dialed.gg
A color-memory game. I did really well at it, I think? My final score was 38.7. There's a multiplayer mode as well.
Underwater Basket Weaving - Grayson Davis
The phenomenal blog I Might As Well Explain the Joke explains the joke phrase "underwater basket weaving," something I've heard my father say dozens of times in my life. I think the first time I heard him use the phrase, I asked him what he was referring to - whether there'd ever been any real underwater basket weaving course at a university. He was unable to tell me. Grayson's explanation of where the term comes from is fascinating, full of highly specific historical proofs, and absolutely satisfying to my curiosity.
"token anxiety"; or, a slot machine by any other name - Jae Kaplan
This went around very widely a few weeks ago, but if you missed it - Jae writes in response to a post from someone who uses AI agents in a way that looks a hell of a lot like addiction.
many have already observed that coding agents, which require constant attention and often generate low-quality code with (by design) random results, are a slot machine. they are loot boxes. they are gambling. you are constantly pulling the lever and hoping you get the SSR SaaS Passive Income product. you will not get this, but maybe you will. just one more prompt, one more pull, one more revision, one more go at being Absolutely Right.
if you suffer from token anxiety, you have a gambling addiction. I'm sorry that it's not being formally treated as such, but you can take some solace in the fact that novel forms of gambling often take time to be recognized.
List Animals Until Failure - Vivian Rose
I wrote about the webgame a few weeks ago; this blog post explains how Vivian Rose, its creator, made it using Wikipedia and Wikidata.
On Discord alternatives - Soatok
A great post about the difficulty of selecting an alternative to Discord, now that its identity-verification process is known to send your information through tech companies in the US associated with far-right-wing political movements. Discord is many different things to many different people and it's difficult to know what functions exactly each community needs to replace. This post concludes that there is no easy replacement to offer for the service at all which is currently "cryptographically secure."
I like to remind myself that we had the same hesitations around replacing twitter, facebook, etc, and it's never truly been a cataclysm to live through a platform dying and being replaced. Online socialization mutates constantly. There was a time when I believed that "socializing online" meant using oekaki boards specifically. We all evolve; we'll figure something out.
There must be retribution - Peter Shamshiri
I see this emotion expressed constantly among normal people in my life, in regular conversation. It's relieving to see anyone in media (to the extent that Peter Shamshiri's podcasting puts him in the "media" category - I think it does) expressing that same sentiment as clearly and simply as the people in my life are expressing it to one another. Civility in public discourse must be redefined to include these calls for a return to a civil society - through trial, punishment, blacklisting, and many other actions that will look and feel like revenge. There's nothing wrong with it - call it retribution. That's what it will be. Civil people will want it; it's the uncivil who will discourage it.