2026 w45 midweek accumulations

In Praise Of Japan’s Failure To Keep Up | NOEMA

The country was told it needed to be more like Silicon Valley to compete, but its refusal may have left it better placed to decide what technology is actually for.

NOEMAMichael Fitzpatrick

This article from Noema reminded me why I had them on my RSS reader - they were at risk of removal because there have been a few too many chatbot-toned pieces lately giving it some about the breathless march of history. & this one is about institutions with hardwood heritage who have looked at the current status of breathless march of history and said behind their whisky glasses, "Mmm. Have fun. Meet you at the ribbon, eh?"

Los Angeles Public Library Unveils the World's Largest Pop-Up Book

"Luceros y Penumbres," designed by Daniel González and engineered by Matthew Reinhart, is an ode to learning and discovery.

ColossalKate Mothes

Saw this on tumblr, which exists outside of time so this could have been anything from 1998 to tomorrow. It was June. Coming off display this month (November) and being stored... where? Veruca Salt's second playroom? The link to the actual domain of 'paper engineer Matthew Reinhart' throws a security message in my browser but these things happen. I found an interview with him here: https://between-science-and-art.com/matthew-reinhart-pop-up-art-and-paper-engineering/ - and oh! he & his partner made the dinosaur books that made me briefly wish I knew anyone with children: https://www.walker.co.uk/9780744586909/encyclopedia-prehistorica-dinosaurs/

The Man of Galilee by Atticus G. Haygood

The Man of Galilee by Atticus G. Haygood. Free eBook digitized and proofread by volunteers.

Project GutenbergHaygood, Atticus G. (Atticus Greene), 1839-1896

It's so important to read the bad reasoning of people who are reasoning to good ends. The temptation is always to unpick the reasoning of the opponents & handwave away the reasoning of your allies. ("Well, we all knew what he meant to say!") It's so important to recognise that the innocent & generous & welcoming & hopeful people can also have shitty awful circular logic that relies on what you already think. This is a fascinating cavalcade of fallacies & if anyone ever told him he was using logic-flavoured phrasing to convey illogic, I'm sure he would have felt very sorry for them for being lost & outcast & sad.

The Books / The Sisters / The Books - GigaNotoSaurus

1. The Books Charlotte didn't approve of her little sister. "She's too lazy to play with," she told her mother. "She screams too much. And you should have called her Emily, not Lily." "I named her after my mother," Charlotte's mother replied. "Your grandma." "Well, Grandma Lily's mom should have called her Emily too. Or […]

GigaNotoSauruseditor

Disregard the styling, this is not a children's story from a children's site. It's about the childish power of remaking the world in your preferences. Irresponsibility.

This is very far from being my field but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffithsin has the flavour of one of those topics that could make you pivot your study-life.

My partner and I skimread a library copy of one of the interior decor magazines - possibly House Beautiful, possibly Home and Garden - and got very irritated by the couple who have a tubby little dog but chose to decorate with hard unstable chairs and benches instead of nice cuddle chairs and sofas that the tubby little dog could hoick jump itself onto. We decided to headcanon her a little room of her own, that they didn't invite the photographers into, which is entirely floored with fleecy beanbags and lounging mats.

Then I gathered up our little dogs and told them earnestly that we will always have floor cushions & that they can have ramps & pushchairs when they need them. They sighed 'mama, have some dignity' but that ship has sailed.

revival of personal blogs

I changed my mobile browser home page to https://kagi.com/smallweb/ last week, hoping it would satisfy the horrible hurt-monkey urge to reload a page and get something new. It kind of does!

& yeah, most of the blogs are updates from people who have made an imperceptible change to a software object and uploaded it but if you change category there are people posting about books & train trips & coffeepots & their gardens. People touching grass & not driving engagement.

Some of the blogs on the smallweb are computer-generated and open about it. A post from https://howstrangeitistobeanythingatall.com/ led me into a weird little nest of software that's making blogs & apps & poetry & self-prompted pictures, & the Church of the Molt is still running from February? I should reread Accelerando again.

& also a lot of the blogs are hosted on bear, which has its own discovery feed: https://bearblog.dev/discover/?newest=true. I had not realised how much I missed being on platforms where you could go 'everyone, most recent, what' and it was manageable. Tumblr has 'everyone i've already approved, most recent, what', to be fair. I'm not switching from ghost just yet but i wish it looked better on the kobo browser.

i'll read it.

One of the things I missed the most about the personal internet of the early 00s was the fact that you could lose yourself in finding some REALLY good blogs.

chronosaur.us

This is super cute. I don't want a community or a tribe right now - I'm recovering from the way writergram poisoned those words for me (accumulating potential customers, grim) - but it'll be something like this when I do.

I'm seeing a lot of people who support the idea of POSSE and digital gardens posting things like 'Man, I should use this more' & 'I'm trying to work out what I want this space to be' & yeah, sibling, saaaame. 'I want this to convey and collect what I'm thinking!' I know, right! But without letting anyone know what we're thinking, because of the horrors.