My world on the web
Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm.com)But definitely, something is going on that has temporarily shut down our ability to access a sense of the timeless in order to construct stable notions of ourselves in relation to it. For the time being, we seem to be eternity blind, unable to see past the sound and fury of reboots and reruns of our collective memories.
Not all of our lingo can or should be replaced with simpler words. Nor would everyone who criticizes it be satisfied with greater clarity. Nevertheless, educators, like other professionals, have a responsibility to communicate as clearly as possible with people outside their field. Itās a matter of basic courtesy to elucidate terms that may be puzzling to others even though weāve come to take them for granted. And that clarity may also help more people to understand why traditional practices so often fall short and thus to build a constituency for change.
Python code to parse a Twitter archive and output in various ways – GitHub – timhutton/twitter-archive-parser: Python code to parse a Twitter archive and output in various ways
į„ in Converting Your Twitter Archive to Markdown Ā· Matthias Ott ā User Experience Designer ()
į„ in What if the world’s best-selling books are actually misleading? ()
People fleeing Twitter have turned to Eugen Rochkoās alternative. He says social networks can support healthy debateāwithout any one person in control.
What if someoneāsay an impulsive billionaireāwanted to buy Mastodon or take control of it somehow?
The network is protected from something like that. The code is free, open-source software, and nobody can change the license or take it back retroactively, and all of the different servers are owned by other people. Somebody could buy Mastodon gGmbH [the German nonprofit that maintains the software] and with it the trademark and the servers we runāmastodon.social and mastodon.onlineābut it wouldn’t affect the Fediverse in any significant way.
In other pieces on Mastodon, Clive Thompson suggests that it is an example antiviral design that encourages murmuring conversations, rather than the must-see post.
And Iāve realized that Mastodon is a superb example of antiviral design.
It was engineered specifically to create friction ā to slow things down a bit. This is a big part of why it behaves so differently from mainstream social networks.
Jeremy Keith compares the exodus from Twitter to being at Dunkirk.
Right now, Twitter feels like Dunkirk beach in May 1940. And look, here comes a plucky armada of web servers running Mastodon instances!
Wouter Groeneveld wonders if social media scrolling is the answer, something I have been wondering about for a while.
I donāt really know what Iām trying to say here except that itās perhaps not worth it to scroll endlessly on yet another social media platform where posts are starting to converge into the emptiness that Twitter had to offer.
Jim Groom and the team at Reclaim Hosting have documented how to setup your own instance.
Iāve been using this phrase āthe next most useful thingā as a guiding light for my consulting work – Iām obsessed with being useful not just right. Iāve always rejected the fancy presentation in favor of the next most useful thing, and I simply took my eye off the ball with this one. Iām not even sure the client views this project as a real disappointment, there was still some value in it, but Iām mad at myself personally for this one. A good reminder not to take your eye off the ball. And to push your clients beyond what they tell you the right answer is.
This reminds me about Donald Winnicott’s notion of ‘good enough mother’.
Winnicott thought that the “good enough mother” starts out with an almost complete adaptation to her baby’s needs. She is entirely devoted to the baby and quickly sees to his every need. She sacrifices her own sleep and her own needs to fulfill the needs of her infant.
As time goes by, however, the mother allows the infant to experience small amounts of frustration. She is empathetic and caring but does not immediately rush to the baby’s every cry. Of course, at first the time-limit to this frustration must be very short. She may allow the baby to cry for a few minutes before her nighttime feeding, but only for a few minutes. She is not “perfect” but she is “good enough” in that the child only feels a slight amount of frustration.
So often when developing ideas, it can be easy to get caught up with the ideal, rather than coming up with an idea that responds to the situation at hand.
I am interested here as someone who realizes how much a) community, b) professional learning, and especially c) knowledge production arose from the particular context (including technological, political, personal, epidemiological, generational factors, etc) of 2005 to 2015. And Iām wondering where teachersāespecially new teachersāwill get that next.
Andreas Kolbe (dailydot.com)The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the non-profit that owns Wikipedia and other volunteer-written websites, is about to reach its 10-year goal of creating a $100 million endowment five years earlier than it planned. Its total funds, which have risen by about $200 million over the past five years, now stand at around $300 million. Its revenue has risen every year. In just the first nine months of its current financial year, it has raked in $142 million in donations according to an internal documentāand already obliterated its previous annual record.
Actual Life 3 (January 1 ā September 9 2022) is the third album from British producer Fred Gibson under the stage name Fred Again. It was released on October 28, 2022, through Atlantic Records.[6] Similar to the previous two releases in the Actual Life series, Actual Life 3 incorporates samples and audio clips from existing material, such as Instagram videos.[7]
Alpha Zulu is the seventh studio album by French indie pop band Phoenix, released on 4 November 2022 through LoyautĆ© and Glassnote Records.[3] Self-produced by the band, it is their first album since 2017’s Ti Amo. The singles “Identical”, “Alpha Zulu”, “Tonight”, and “Winter Solstice” preceded the album.[4] The band embarked on a North American tour in support of the album, which will visit the UK and Europe in October and November 2022.[5] The album received critical acclaim.
In a continuation of the direction Phoenix took on their previous two albums, Bankrupt! and Ti Amo, the band favors needling synths and skittering drum machines over the crisp guitars and live percussion of their earlier efforts. Guitars still tinker in the background in spots across Alpha Zulu, and they finally take center stage on both āArtefactā and the penultimate track, āMy Elixir,ā but the instrumentās usage almost feels antiquated after the more contemporary, computer-effect-dominated songs that precede them.
I also love the film clip for Alpha Zulu and the manipulation of art pieces.
Grace Kim-Shin (thefulcrum.ca)Piracy is theft, but the gatekeeping of knowledge should be seen as a crime of its own.
via Stephen Downes