"I knew that my grandfather had been in an orphanage—didn’t I? Was I learning about this only now, or was I remembering it? How had I not known I knew this?" —Jessica Winter for The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/21/what-i-inherited-from-my-criminal-great-grandparents?src=longreads #mystery #memory #family #essay
"_We all have concerns about property infringement, the loss of jobs, the banality of ideas only formulated by the clunky cobbling together of what’s already been written and fed into the maw of the large language model (LLM)._"
https://electricliterature.com/ai-cant-gaslight-me-if-i-write-by-hand/.
I missed last month's #solarpunk essay from @AndrewDanaHudson , but I think the 10-year-check-in is a worthy read:
https://www.solarshades.club/p/the-political-dimensions-of-solarpunk10
The world has changed. Solarpunk influenced it, even without a single Masterpiece. We are continuing to build from multiple sides.
People are doing a lot on the ground - whether in the North or the South - and we're finally getting a language which can share their stories.
"One afternoon, as I stood in the aisles of the public library, the desire for a coherent cosmology, and rituals to go with it, hit me like a wave of homesickness."
In a new Longreads essay, Erika Howsare reflects on her search for secular ritual: https://longreads.com/2025/07/10/attention-ritual-art-observation/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
I have a new piece at Vague Visages about Dirk Bogarde and the spirit of rebellion in post-war Britain:
https://vaguevisages.com/2025/07/08/dirk-bogarde-essay-movie-film-post-war-rebellion/
“being a script”, the English translation of my essay “être script” is now online!
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https://raphaelbastide.com/etre-script/en.html
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#essay #programming #sciencefiction #freesoftware
To be clear, #THATrpg #essay #lisp
Link: https://www.dreamsongs.com/ArtOfLisp.html
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44281016
Note that Richard P. Gabriel also wrote a book on the practice of writers' workshops including lisp writing as well as traditional writing author communities, which he straddled with his poetry books.
Jun 6
8 min
Gaming out a society of psychopaths. The funny part about.. that I game out, is that no society of psychopaths who all understand that everyone is out to rule the world like they are would ever tolerate any level of wealth inequality. Such as society would tend to converge on constant warfare and destruction or tyranny and destruction…
If we were exactly like what conservatives say you would never tolerate billionaires
"In its simplest form, a whale’s death becomes a source of life for years beyond its time. It is a transformation that turns death into life on an almost incomprehensible scale."
Omnia Saed for Atmos Magazine: https://atmos.earth/after-the-fall/
My analysis of why Donald Tusk's camp keeps loosing elections in Poland:
https://westcountryvoices.co.uk/poland-donald-tusks-liberal-camp-lost-yet-another-election-why/
Five years after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a cracker murderpig named Derek Chauvin, it's easy to look at police murder and use of force statistics, as well as a white nationalist Trump regime, and conclude the 2020 uprising failed; which is precisely what a pro-cop liberal "reformist" chatterati is doing. The reality is however that "a system cannot fail those it was never designed to protect" and the lack of legislative progress to protect our civil rights from police abuses falls on the elected reformers not advocates and abolitionists in the streets. The 2020 Uprising taught us to band together because we are all targets in for the carceral state in the right circumstances; and just in time too, because Donald Trump is dead serious about transforming law enforcement into his own fascist army.
https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/05/30/the-widening-maw-of-racialized-police-violence/
The Widening Maw of Racialized Police Violence
"The reality is that Downmarket Mussolini has only been back in the White House for four and a half months, and these police killing statistics go back years into a Biden administration that was elected in part, to specifically stop racialized police violence in response to the protests; the city where George Floyd was slowly murdered on camera by a sociopathic cop is in a Democratic-controlled State, run by one of the most progressive Governors in America. For a larger liberal establishment in the United States that had no answer for Trump at the ballot box to point at the Kelpto Kaiser’s racist authoritarian regime and declare the movement against police violence and white supremacist policing has failed, is one part deflection, and one part scapegoating. It is ultimately reductive to argue that the 2020 George Floyd protests were by themselves responsible for the broader fascist “white-lash” driving Trump’s second rise to power in an already white supremacist America, and disempowering to believe organized resistance against that white supremacy accomplished nothing merely because a state that was never designed to protect racialized people, or the labor class in general, refused to take meaningful action against police violence. Those hard-fought hours in the streets opened a broad swathe of society’s eyes to the racist and violent nature of American policing, taught communities across the globe how to organize in the face of state-sanctioned repression, and helped make so many young people “woke” that the fascist Trump regime is trying to make “wokeness” illegal. We cannot un-see what we have observed, or unknow what we learned during the uprising, and the affliction of knowing cannot be cured with rubber bullets and tear gas."
Note: I literally had to take yesterday off just to edit this one and find all the source links. It's a bit longer, and this content has never appeared outside NIDC.
"As of his sixth birthday next month, he will have 2,462 seconds, his entire life compressed as I wanted to remember it, into approximately 41 minutes."
Kristin Winet for Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature: https://panoramajournal.org/issues/issue-14-survival/survival-active-recall
"Nowadays I don’t know what story to tell about Flushing."
Jefferson Mao for Urban Omnibus: https://urbanomnibus.net/2025/05/neither-here-nor-there/
If you ever do decide to play with that palette, even just for quick digital doodles, I'd love to see it. #Synthwave is kind of an alternate history of the 80s, based on idealized images of 1980s science fiction, but it wasn't nearly as prevalent as people think it was.
That's kind of the beauty and allure of it, it's a reimagining of the 1980s as this incredibly forward-looking, futurephile era when it was, in fact, a very hum-drum, wood-paneled, boring and even regressive decade in a lot of ways, in terms of day-to-day life.
Ok, I didn't think this toot was going to turn into an #essay. That was wild. 
"Seen his way, all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear—but, like any repression, waste returns in fantastical forms."
Madeleine Adams for The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/latest/w-a-s-t-e-not-adams
In "On (the) Sublime," Caylin Capra-Thomas writes about Sublime's late frontman Bradley Nowell, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction, and limits: https://longreads.com/2025/05/22/sublime-nowell-coleridge-addiction/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
#softwareEngineering #computerScience #programming #commonLisp #history #essay #reading of Whither Original Thought #transcript from @kentpitman
https://screwlisp.small-web.org/show/kmp-whither-original-thought/
with a link to its beginning in the interview.
I chose to hand-transcribe it to remove (and probably introduce) discontinuities.
A central theme is the tyrannies of programming libraries and the question of having exhaustive knowledge of your increasingly numerous dead forebearers.
Read it yourself (and/or listen finally).
#programming #engineering #author #history #commonLisp #lisp #essay #thoughts #interview https://screwlisp.small-web.org/show/Kent-M-Pitmans-Whither-Original-Thought/
My thoughts and vague summary of our conversation with @kentpitman on the #lispyGopherClimate dealing with admonishments to modern authors and programmers not to experience authoring works themselves but to look at what past people did themselves, illustrated by Kent's own (world first) experiences.
You have to listen to it and think yourself too. #retoot ! https://communitymedia.video/w/gUXEKmEnQcamtg4EZk45Un
“Japanese #pencils and #notebooks, German #sharpeners. Sun-bitten Australian #hands.
My habit is quaint, I know, and there are downsides – deciphering my scribbly handwriting is like trying to communicate with the dead. And I’m accumulating piles of smudgy notebooks and stubs of pencils that I can’t bring myself to throw away. But I’m beginning to think all this is more important than I first anticipated.
A #writer friend recently posted that after updating her version of #Microsoft #Word, it invited itself to collaborate on her novel in progress, offering to work on 2,000 words at a time. Instead she workshopped her panic with fellow writers who helped her *unplug the tech*. But this is where we’re at. The question blooms by the day – how are we to know if any #Creative text, #novel, #essay, #poem or #ShortStory is AI assisted, or even #authored? In time, will it be impossible to tell?”
#AI / #Art <https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/23/i-am-writing-this-with-a-pencil-it-could-be-an-authors-last-line-of-defence-against-ai>
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