Kars Alfrink – Page 35

This attempt to build in more non-verbal cues into text chat reminds me of Matt Webb’s Glancing.

This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. … When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created by you, the customer or client of a company. Online check-in and bag drop at airports, for example.

Marx at 193 ( 2 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)

This reminds me a lot of Tesler’s Law which states that the complexity inherent in a system is constant and can only be shifted from product to user or back.

Also found in this week’s Groene: amusing commentary from a Syrian woman on amusement park the Efteling. “You Westerners must be bored.”

Interesting piece in this week’s Groene on John Berger’s book Why Look at Animals. The quote refers to the seemingly contradictory attitude farmers have to their animals: they appreciate them for the live beings they are as well as for the product they become. Something I can relate to, despite being an urbanite who according to Berger can’t really understand.

retro ’80s graphics are sentimental fluff for modern adults who grew up in front of 1980s game-console machines. Eight-bit graphics are pretty easy to carve out of styrofoam. There’s a low barrier-to-entry in making sculpture from 8-bit, so that you can “rupture the interface between the digital and the physical.” However 8-bit sculptures are a cute, backward-looking rupture.

An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com

Which is also what I find so tiresome about much of indie game aesthetics today.

(via 314 – Watch the Road: World’s Earliest SatNav | Strange Maps | Big Think)

So good. At first sight I assumed this was some kind of retro movie prop.

New Fashion Aesthetic

I’m reading De Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness at the moment. Its discussion of the things that determine taste has lead me to wonder what it is people find appealing about the New Aesthetic. A lot of the discussion about it is very cerebral. “What is it?” etc. What I’m interested in is: why do we find it interesting / beautiful / etc. Because after all, “There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.”

(via Paleofuture – Paleofuture Blog – 1999 A.D. (1967))

What’s jarring about this clip is not how they got the tech wrong: “Most food will be stored frozen in individual portions. […] The various portions are fed automatically into the microwave oven for a few seconds of deep thawing or warming.” Sounds about right.

No, what irks me is the extrapolation of a Mad Men like culture of female servitude to men doing absolutely nothing. I guess that’s where future visions go wrong mostly. Tech almost seems more predictable than the culture surrounding it.

(via Sci-Fi Airshow: Eagle 4)

Found this through Matt Jones. Love the way the copy is written in a very ambiguous way. What they’re saying is yes, this is about exhibiting props from movies, but they do fly! Nice and confusing.

I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.