Links
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No Caul For Them These Days - Vittles
I enjoyed this article about, and recipe for, faggots. I used to like Brain’s Faggots as a kid.
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Young Directors’ Guide to Lighting
A nice guide by Alex Forey to how theatre directors should work with lighting designers. (via Interconnected)
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VQGAN+CLIP (z+quantize method con augmentations, interfaz amigable).ipynb - Colaboratory
Second time I’ve tried this AI image generator “notebook” and, with the aid of translation, it worked this time.
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employee is taking free snacks, Parks and Rec vs. The Office, and more — Ask a Manager
For question 5, about whether Leslie Knope or Michael Scott would be the worse boss.
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Singing the Back Streets | by Andrew O’Hagan | The New York Review of Books
I knew nothing about Nelson Algren and this was interesting and beautifully written.
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Charles Glass · Hush-Hush Boom-Boom: Spymasters · LRB 12 August 2021
Interesting account of how the CIA was formed and quite how often it’s failed.
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Art Machine - Colaboratory
The first one of these Google Notebook things for generating images from a prompt by an AI that I’ve got to work. (via the b3ta newsletter)
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EleutherAI - text generation testing UI
Another GPT-J-6B text-generating tool.
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Text Synth
Easy, working thing that generates further text from a prompt using the GPT-J 6B or GPT-2 language models.
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Snub TV (UK) - YouTube
All the episodes of this 1989-91 show which I assume I watched, given I watched a lot of Def II. (via Web Curios)
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Housed | die Reihe
“the chords from over 250 classic House tracks by 150+ artists”. Side A in random order, side B ordered from shortest to longest. (via The Wire)
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brilliant trees sessions . Berlin . 1983 on Vimeo
Amazing to watch David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, etc discussing and recording the beautiful and strange Brilliant Trees. 38 years ago!
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James Meek · Who holds the welding rod? Our Turbine Futures · LRB 15 July 2021
Long article on making wind turbine towers and the international labour market (which maybe makes it sound duller than it is).
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Place-based carbon calculator
It was interesting to spend a while poking around at the stats for our area. Lots of overlays and things to look at. Generally, our area’s below average. (via Web Curios)
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Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life | thesephist.com
“Monocle is a full text search engine indexed on my personal data, like my blog posts and essays, nearly a decade of journal entries, notes, contacts, Tweets, and hopefully more in the future…” (via @tomcritchlow)
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Oh Hello Ana - So I am now a naturalised citizen…
Even a smooth and successful testing and application process sounds like a stressful, expensive hassle. Nations are weird things aren’t they. (Congrats Ana!)
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Atlas Minor • Fireworks
What a great photo, and a lovely paragraph that echoes my mind at the moment.
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Home | Layers of London | Recording the Layers of London’s Rich Heritage
I think this is a good collection of old maps layered on a modern one although I was slightly baffled when trying it on an iPad. (via Things Magazine)
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Sensemaking: Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps
Lots of interesting advice for structuring Django projects (and some more general advice). (via Simon Willison)
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Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30 | Books | The Guardian
“The term became a meme back when society only had five or six of them a year.” “I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like.”
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Web Badges World | The ultimate archive of 80x15 pixel button art
One for the old nostalgic web folk. (via Web Curios)
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nickjj/docker-django-example
Another handy example project full of experience.
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bfirsh/django-docker-heroku-template
Lots of handy things to copy here.
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In search of the new
Robin Sloan gets lots of recommendations for SF books “that could only have been written in the last ten years, … that hinge on experiences and feelings new in the last ten years, … that represent the current leading edge of the genre’s speculative and stylistic development?”
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Gill Partington · Your hat sucks: UbuWeb · LRB 1 April 2021
About UbuWeb and Kenneth Goldsmith.
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Alternatives to The Guardian - news | Ask MetaFilter
Some suggestions but, unsurprisingly and unfortunately, there’s no one good leftish, UK-based, news source.
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Jean-Luc Godard in the USA | Sight & Sound
I don’t know much about Godard but enjoyed this article from 1968 about him, America and revolution. “A film is a theoretical rifle and a rifle a practical film.”
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Exxon Lost a Climate Proxy Fight - Bloomberg
If every news story’s background was explained as well as Matt Levine explains this Exxon vote thing then I’d have a much better understanding of what was going on in the world.
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LadBaby and the wild rise of the Facebook Famous | WIRED UK
Mainly interesting for the differences between famous creators and the types of content on different platforms. (also via Web Curios)
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Play to Lose — Real Life
A similar theme to the previous, the financialisation of everything, but from a different point of view. NFTs, crypto, Wall Street Bets, etc as “revenge capitalism”, supporting not fighting capitalism. (via Web Curios)