Posts tagged surveillance
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Link logging
I got older last weekend so took a week off from assembling the link log. Gonna do a bit of ketchup here between playing levels of Baba is You.
Brace yourself!
Academics: it’s time to get behind decolonising the curriculum
Many advocates of decolonisation don’t want to abolish the canon; they want to interrogate its assumptions and broaden our intellectual vision to include a wider range of perspectives. While decolonising the curriculum can mean different things, it includes a fundamental reconsideration of who is teaching, what the subject matter is and how it’s being taught.
Elsewhere in the article,
When we offer white male-dominated reading lists we also teach students the wrong lessons about who is an intellectual authority and deserves our attention.
Privacy’s not an abstraction
Privacy for marginalized populations has never been, and will never be an abstract. Being surveilled, whether by private actors, or the state, is often the gateway to very tangible harms–violence in the form of police brutality, incarceration, or deportation. And there can be more subliminal, insidious impacts, too.
Continuing later,
…there is a valuable lesson here–just not the one that was intended. The idea that surveillance would be used as an assignment on those with no options for consent speaks to how broken our ideas about consent have become, trivializing what to many people is a life and death matter of their lived existence.
To loop back to decolonizing for a moment: this is why I think that “decolonization” isn’t enough — I think we need to go the step further and queer the curriculum (well, I think we need to queer a lot of things, tbh). Queer thought is powerful for a plethora of reasons, none of which I’m qualified to talk about, but I do know that it offers am appropriate framework for including consent, even prioritizing it. So, yes decolonization. Yes queering.
Dream Askew/Dream Apart
Dream Askew
Queer strife amid the collapse. Collaboratively generate an apocalyptic setting. For 3-6 players across 3-4 hours. By Avery Alder
Dream Apart
Jewish fantasy of the shtetl. Immerse yourself in a fantastical version of history. For 3-6 players across 3-4 hours. By Benjamin Rosenbaum
Dream Askew and Dream Apart are two games of belonging outside belonging.
They run on the same system: no dice, no masters, a structured freeform game with shared worldbuilding.
(See also: These Games Prove That Not Every Tabletop RPG Needs a 300 Page Manual, Jack de Quidt writing for Waypoint)
How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger
The power of kindness and patience for a parent. I’ve been trying to take this to heart. And to slow down…remind myself that the “schedule” usually, rarely, really doesn’t matter that much.
You Should Organize a Study Group/Book Club/Online Group/Event! Tips on How to Do It
I’ve tried to start many groups, and have failed most times. This blog post is a good reference for starting something. (Anyone wanna start a thing? Do a thing?)
Tilde.Town : The Hidden e-Village
I’ve been a resident of tilde.town for a while, and since then have explored a couple other tilde servers. I am smitten.
Making books to build communities, building communities to make books.
The power of the web (for better or worse!) might be distilled into two fundamental characteristics:
- the ability to transmit and receive information instantaneously and cheaply
- the ability to gather and harness communities (loosely joined ones like Facebook friends with shared cultural interests, and tightly joined ones like work colleagues collaborating on a project)
(…very tangentially related: iOS “versus” JavaScript: How to Learn From Other Programming Communities)
And some game dev resources
Link logging
Tokyo Neapolitan: The New Wave of Japanese Pizza
If you are gonna do a thing, you might as well do that thing as well as you can. 🍕
The Famous Photo of Chernobyl’s Most Dangerous Radioactive Material Was a Selfie
…I looked through all the other captions of photos similar photos of the destroyed core, and they were all taken by Korneyev, so it’s likely this photo was an old-school timed selfie. The shutter speed was probably a little slower than for the other photos in order for him to get into position, which explains why he seems to be moving and why the glow from his flashlight looks like a lightning flash. The graininess of the photo, though, is likely due to the radiation.
Living Systems | James Grier Miller | 1978
Confession — I haven’t dug into this yet. As someone with 2 degrees in Human Ecology (e.g. the interdisciplinary study of people and our environment) I feel obligated to read this.
Why Toledo Just Gave Legal Rights to Lake Erie
A bit more background on rights for nature.
Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future
What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.
In their simplicity, those protocols are relentlessly generative, producing a heterogeneous mass of material for which the most common descriptor is simply “content.” It took a while for that state of affairs to come about, especially since early Internet service providers like CompuServe and AOL tried to offer proprietary content that couldn’t be found elsewhere, after the model of newspapers or magazines. This model might have worked for a longer period if the Web had been a place of consumption only, but it was also a place of creation, and people wanted what they created to be experienced by the greatest number of people possible. (As advertising made its way onto the Web, this was true of businesses as well as individuals.) And so the open Web, the digital commons, triumphed over those first attempts to keep content enclosed.
Autism from the inside
Reframing,
When I come across instances of this folk understanding of autism, I am reminded of Edward Said’s 1978 description of the orientalist gaze, in which the exoticised subjects endure a kind of fascinated scrutiny, and are then rendered ‘without depth, in swollen detail’.
…In this anaerobic environment, the qualities routinely assigned to autistic people — lack of empathy, unworldliness, humourlessness, the inability to love — are the exact inverse of the qualities that a neurotypical society most prizes.
For a moment, let’s flip things over. To an autistic viewer like me, neurotypical life can seem astonishingly unemotional. I’m so overwhelmed by the sensory onslaught of a busy room that I’m almost tearful, while neurotypical folk appear to wade through clouds of sound, light and odour, entirely oblivious. It’s hard to resist the impression that they’re numb, or unreal somehow. They are certainly displaying a lack of affect in the face of extreme provocation. Where I am in constant movement; they are somehow still.
The incredible nature of Abstract Art and how it can change the way you think about everything.
The point of the art wasn’t what you saw on the original painting, but what it left behind after you had looked at it. The experienced stayed and lingered with you. I thought this was incredible, and beautiful and amazing.
Variations On A Utilitarian Theme
Read along, if you will, as I tell a little story of sorts through a series of excerpts. It is essentially a story about the links among prevalent trends involving surveillance, data, security, self-documentation, and happiness.
The Ones Who Walk Away From…Facebook
How I lost my legs and gained… you want me to say something inspiring here
Don’t miss the author’s sneaker reviews.
Component frameworks and web standards
This post has three parts: in the first, I look at what I like about “the web standards stance” or a “vanilla approach”. In the second, I share what I liked when I used a JavaScript component framework. In the last part, I look at whether these two approaches are actually different: maybe I assumed a false dichotomy?
How to master advanced TypeScript patterns
This Medium post sneaks in a pretty solid overview of currying (as I understand it, at least).
We Need Chrome No More
The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. This in turn results in more users flocking to the browser as their favorite Web sites and apps no longer work elsewhere, making developers less likely to spend time testing on other browsers. A vicious cycle that, if not broken, will result in most other browsers disappearing in the oblivion of irrelevance. And that’s exactly how you suffocate the open Web.
Flashback to the last week’s link log, from Choo’s documentation:
A fun way to think about browsers, is as a standardized Virtual Machine (VM) that includes high-level APIs to do networking, sandboxed code execution and disk access. It runs on almost every platform, behaves similarly everywhere, and is always kept backwards compatible.
The Super Tiny Compiler
Learn about compilers by reading through a very tiny one.
Dynamicland
Our mission is to incubate a humane dynamic medium whose full power is accessible to all people.
Field Guide to Bash Terminals
A bit shorter than the bash man page. Good, basic, info.
A Beginner’s Guide To Dragon Ball
The biggest lie you’ll ever hear about Dragon Ball from both fans and critics alike is that there are long stretches of episodes full of attacks charging and nothing else. It was something I had always heard about the show and was warned about when I decided to check it out. I waited and waited for these fabled episodes and by the end of DBZ, I realized they don’t exist
Once upon a time I watched a ton of Dragon Ball and One Piece…in French. They use the imperative tense a lot. I’d like to re-watch some of each in English one day.