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This garden is in its first season. In the cracks between the concrete, sprouts emerge and take to flower. With time, the roots will grow deeper.
In spite of myself, sometimes I do things with computers.
I am trying to account for the body of a bird I knew. Human metrics for bird bodies tend to be comparative, since their purpose is to discern an individual spotted in the field, perched at some distance or in flight. I should say I knew a passerine about robin-sized, with a long narrow tail like a mockingbird. Depending on the light, the angle, and the season, his feathers appeared blue-gray to electric blue, with a warm gray belly, white neck, dark gray capelet, and white eyebrows. He had a little love song but far more often he had a shout. He was a California scrub jay.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance
Branch is an online magazine written by and for people who dream of a sustainable and just internet for all.
When Eva Dawn Burk first saw Calypso Farm and Ecology Center in 2019, she felt enchanted. Calypso is an educational farm tucked away in a boreal forest in Ester, Alaska, near Fairbanks. To Burk, it looked like a subarctic Eden, encompassing vegetable and flower gardens, greenhouses, goats, sheep, honeybees, a nature trail and more. In non-pandemic summers, the property teems with local kids and aspiring farmers who converge on the terraced hillside for hands-on education.
Will a Native-led initiative spur an agricultural revolution in rural Alaska?
This is smart city thinking. This worldview looks at city services — transit, garbage, water, public works, social services, health — and wonders if the city could be more efficient and better organized if these systems were “smart” [...]
But these systems already are smart. They are all operated by people with intrinsic knowledge — and not just where that one neighbor hides the recycling cans, but also the names of kids and the birthdays of dogs and the needs of elders who can’t make out to the store anymore. This knowledge — human, caring knowledge — does not make it into the “smart city dataset”. But I promise you, give sanitation workers a raise and an extra day off every week and truck that starts up reliably in the morning and less routes to do in more time, the city would be better — if not more efficient.
A City Is a City — Against the metaphorization of data
ASL is a language that uses gestures of the hands, face, and body to communicate.
Toki Pona is a constructed laguage with a tiny vocabulary and a surprising amount of character.
Viossa is a "con-pidgin", an intentionally constructed pidgin produced by a friend group of linguists who decided to try to learn to speak with each starting only with languages that they didn't share in common. This video touched me in a way that really surprised me. Something beautiful, strange, and precious.
I like to make music.
What does a better world look like?
As I read more books, I'll be making pages for them and filling them with quotes I want to hang onto interspersed with my own musings.
Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (Forte & Gilbert, 1982)
Notes on Sexual Hegemony (Chitty, 2020)
Some stories I've read that I liked.
We Have Evacuated, Have a Good Day
Good ol’ Charlie B, a comic by Marina Ayano
I make games. Below are mostly notes for my works-in-progress
Tarot is a way of prompting the invisible forces of the world to speak through your subconscious.
Beautiful Typography done in TeX
This is a list of small, free, or experimental tools that might be useful in building your game / website / interactive project. Although I’ve included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools and toys that are as fun to use as they are functional
Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup
Diagon – Interactive ASCII art diagram collection
This is where I place things that haven’t yet found their own page.
Fundamentally, my work here is about creating a stable foundation of technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves.
In order to enable good teachers, I needed a system with a lot of freedom for judgment calls. On the other hand, if I left the system too vague and wide open, the inexperienced tutors wouldn’t know what to do. They would default to what they had been trained on: paperwork. Without concrete guidance, they were liable to continue handing out packets and telling kids to focus and sit still.
I discussed the problem with my husband in the car on the way to tutoring my students one day. More specifically, I was bemoaning the lack of growth-tech systems for me to use as a pattern. “Huh,” my husband commented, “sounds like an RPG.” He was right, and that basically amounts to the plot twist of this story. Apocalypse World was right there and I’d been missing it that whole time.
The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab. A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes. Memory must be simply something you have, not something you do within a certain context.
Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’
What you put up with is what will continue.
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Written January 31, 2021, last changed October 25, 2021