Kate Crawford:
Every photograph from an Apple iPhone is fundamentally an AI image. Every photograph taken by an iPhone camera is actually many frames with different exposure levels melded together as a composite. And each image is broken apart semantically, so that elements like skies, trees, and faces are each treated differently. They are machine learning mosaics, not photographs in the traditional sense. We have moved to a post-optical period of photography, beyond photos and the transmission of light through lenses toward statistical paradigms of image making.
Something that has been in the back of my head while playing Minecraft, ever since Patrick mentioned the book Playing Oppression to me, is this idea that a lot of the most common activities in the game do potentially lend themselves to analogies with colonialism and environmental harm. For example:
- defacing biomes for the sake of resource extraction or new development
- capturing mobs in inhumane enclosures
- various activities surrounding the villager NPCs:
- visiting villages and taking their items from chests
- transporting villagers away from their homes, assigning them new occupations, restricting their movement, and so on
On the one hand it feels absurd to give any credit to these interpretations — it’s a game, after all! No real suffering is being inflicted. And as games go, Minecraft is fairly mild and non-prescriptive when it comes to violence and cruelty. But on the other hand, as players we are very used to interpreting our gameplay through a “realist” lens; indeed part of what makes a video game like this engaging is the feeling of being embodied as an agent in a different reality, empowered to make choices and change the environment.
Of course, the fact that Minecraft’s world is a sort of lo-fi representation of the natural world means you can map all sorts of interpretations onto it. For example, shall we judge a minecraft house for not having a bathroom, since real people need to use the bathroom sometimes? Ought a player add structural support to a minecraft bridge, because otherwise its real-world analog would collapse from its own weight?
Notably both these things are examples of choices players do sometimes make, despite there being no in-game mechanic to reinforce the activity. I think what this says is that on top of the base layer of game logic, players supplement their own elements of storytelling and fantasy. In one of my worlds, for example, I envision myself to be the steward or ruler of a small but prosperous settlement, housing a community of villagers involved in different aspects of its upkeep (farmers, librarians, cooks, and so on).
I think since this is a game, we players do have a level of freedom in deciding what to “sample” from real life and how we want to world-build. There is a natural give and take to this; the game’s inherent analogies are what makes it immersive, so you can’t just entirely disregard those analogies, or else you risk getting bored.
The approach that I’ve decided to take to this is trying to at least be internally consistent about the way I am re-interpreting my gameplay. I do want to interpret my surroundings as a real living environment, and to that end treat it with respect, e.g. by replanting trees after I harvest wood. Similarly I do want to think of villagers as sentient, autonomous, and (somewhat) intelligent entities, and this requires giving them a degree of dignity and compassion. For example if I wanted to bring a villager to my base to perform a job, I would imagine my player befriending or hiring them and getting their consent, and then housing them comfortably in the settlement.
Stephen Witt in reply to commenter David Deeds:
Are we sentient? Is a chimpanzee? What about an earthworm? When, exactly, does sentience appear in the evolutionary ladder? How many neurons does it take to cross this threshold? These questions aren’t that easy to define. People often say that AIs are “just math.” That’s like saying your brain is “just cells.”
Madison Huizinga:
Along with the more chic half of Gen Z, I long for more analog living. I ogle at the novelty of print magazines, handwritten notes, corded earbuds, and even the clickwheel of an iPod. I always chop my onions, I’ll never purchase pre-cut garlic. My grandparents roll their eyes at me. After spending so many minutes and hours of their years on tedious tasks, they don’t understand why I’d want to exude more elbow grease. They don’t know what the opposite is like - what it’s like to forget that you have hands. What it’s like to slip through the day like a raindrop on a window pane. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Madison Huizinga:
Most airplanes also have those screens on the back of the seats where you can watch movies and TV shows and even stream live sports. For some reason, I feel a real sense of righteousness about these screens. Even on long-haul flights, as soon as I sit down, I turn my screen off, switch it to black. There’s something about the sight of everyone being immobile and dazed - wired in - that’s perturbing. WALL-E-esque. You see it as you walk down the airplane aisle, back from the bathroom - everyone staring, mouths slack, eyes glazed over. Tray tables sticky from ginger ale. Kids, teenagers, adults, the elderly - all tuned out, tapped on the shoulder for a refill of Sun Chips
last night i had a dream that i was making a smoothie for hours and hours, finding expensive and esoteric fruits and vegetables for something that was going to be so good. i looked away for just a second, though, and my sister had taken the smoothie and put it into a pie crust and mixed in hundreds of unruly bulbous cherries. she put it into the oven and when we all ate it i had to act like it was what i wanted all along.
when life gives you smoothie make cherry pie
@leslie-liu excellent
@nico-chilla i was squinting at the guy in the back and his visage had me thinking "why do those clusters of pixels resemble Nathan Fielder?"
i scroll 20 pixels down and realize indeed it is the very one; then his part starts and i can only nod in agreement
Ali Smith:
She sat in a clump of grass at the side of the path in the early spring sun. The grass was wet. She didn’t care. There were bees and flies out and about. A small bee-like creature landed on the cuff of her jacket and she flicked it away with a precise flick of her thumb and first finger.
But a fraction of a second after she did she realized the impact her finger must have had on something so small.
It must have felt like being hit by the rounded front of a giant treetrunk that’s been swung through the air at you without you knowing it was coming.
It must have felt like being punched by a god.
That’s when she sensed, like something blurred and moving glimpsed through a partition whose glass is clouded, both that love was coming for her and the nothing she could do about it.
Ali Smith:
This is all in Cennini’s Handbook for Painters, as well as the strict instruction that we must always take pleasure from our work : cause love and painting both are works of skill and aim : the arrow meets the circle of its target, the straight line meets the curve or circle, 2 things meet and dimension and perspective happen : and in the making of pictures and love – both – time itself changes its shape : the hours pass without being hours, they become something else, they become their own opposite, they become timelessness, they become no time at all.
Ali Smith:
I am wondering where it is, grave of my father, wondering too where my own grave, when the boy sits up, faces the woman’s house, holds his holy votive tablet up in both hands as if to heaven, up at the level of his head like a priest raising the bread, cause this place is full of people who have eyes and choose to see nothing, who all talk into their hands as they peripatate and all carry these votives, some the size of a hand, some the size of a face or a whole head, dedicated to saints perhaps or holy folk, and they look or talk to or pray to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons.
Paul Feyerabend:
Dear reader,
In a few pages you will find a story written in a style you may be familiar with. There are facts and generalizations therefrom, there are arguments and there are lots of footnotes. In other words, you will find a (perhaps not very outstanding) example of a scholarly essay. Let me therefore warn you that it is not my intention to inform, or to establish some truth. What I want to do is to change your attitude. I want you to sense chaos where at first you noticed an orderly arrangement of well behaved things and processes. It is clear that only a trick can get me from my starting point — the footnote-heavy essay I just mentioned— to where I would like you, the reader, to arrive.
My trick is to present events which dissolve the circumstances that made them happen.
I’m currently making my slow way through a borrowed ebook on my phone — it’s a practice I’ve gotten into in the past couple years using Libby, an app provided by a DRM content distributor that partners with many libraries, and which allows you to check out digital copies on “loan”.
The main advantage of this is I don’t have to carry any extra weight with me when I travel, which makes it convenient for reading in my commute and during unplanned moments of free time. I also don’t find the material experience of reading something on a screen, even an LCD screen, to be that uncomfortable. All the same I’m inclined to return to physical borrowing in the future, and today a couple reasons for that occurred to me:
A phone engenders something like ”context collapse” on an individual level, in that it condenses so many disparate activities and elements of a life (my web browsing, my work communications, my note-taking, my personal messages, my reading...) into a single physical unit, and not only makes moving between those contexts frictionless, but actively merges and collages them on one surface (e.g.: a slack alert pops over the top of the page while I read). It’s not a new observation, but I think this deteriorates our ability to focus and compartmentalize effectively, and I’d rather my reading not get caught up in the maelstrom.
I have this experience of slight disappointment on the subway every day, seeing (and occasionally participating in) the sea of people all absorbed in their little screens (Oliver Sacks writes on this sentiment very eloquently here). I don’t doubt that at least some of them are doing something vitally important, or something virtuous like reading, note-taking, drawing, or so on. But a phone, in my observation, puts up a kind of psychic wall between you and your surroundings: it actively clings to your attention like a magnet and blocks out your surroundings.
- If a phone is like a car (eyes on the road, hands on the wheel), a physical book feels to me like a bike: you pedal for a while, and then cruise and let the momentum propel you. I often pause after reading a paragraph, and spend a few minutes staring into space and digesting the passage (something, I might add, that I can’t conveniently do with my phone, because my screen shuts off). In this way it’s a much more passive recipient of your attention, although I grant that there are books, too, which ”suck you in”.
(not to mention ebooks are prohibitively expensive for libraries!)
Here are some hopes of mine for the editorial thesis/approach of Making-Remaking:
Underscore the artificial and contingent character of our everyday conceptual categories; the way they transform, fuse, and fall in and out of favor across different speaking contexts and time periods. My hope is this attitude becomes a tool for the reader to use in unraveling everyday metaphysical disputes, and in unlearning our contemporary physicalist dogmatism.
Uncover the mutual relationship between creation and understanding, by which I mean the following ideas:
To properly understand and grapple with a text, a work of art, a technique, etc., you have to treat your engagement with it as an activity rather than a passive receipt of information; through your interpretation of the source material, you engage in a sort of creation.
On the flip side, a recognition that all creative works are derived out of previous works and the surrounding context in which they were produced.
@nico-chilla <3 will think of how to put into words my own hopes
Something I would like to understand better is the modern allure of serendipity, and whether or not it’s justified.
Hilary Putnam introducing “thick ethical concepts”:
The word “cruel” obviously...has normative and, indeed, ethical uses. If one asks me what sort of person my child’s teacher is, and I say “He is very cruel,” I have both criticized him as a teacher and criticized him as a man. I do not have to add, “He is not a good teacher,” or “He is not a good man” I might, of course, say “When he isn’t displaying his cruelty, he is a very good teacher,” but I cannot simply, without distinguishing the respects in which or occasions on which he is a good teacher and the respects in which or the occasions on which he is very cruel, say, “He is a very cruel person and a very good teacher.” Similarly, I cannot simply say, “He is a very cruel person and a good man,” and be understood. Yet “cruel” can also be used purely descriptively, as when a historian writes that a certain monarch was exceptionally cruel, or that the cruelties of the regime provoked a number of rebellions. “Cruel” simply ignores the supposed fact/value dichotomy and cheerfully allows itself to be used sometimes for a normative purpose and sometimes as a descriptive term. (Indeed, the same is true of the term “crime.”) In the literature, such concepts are often referred to as “thick ethical concepts.”
A dream of mine is to build a sort of RSS reader specifically for NYC arts and culture event listings, and to get institutional buy-in from museum, library, and university organizers, so that there would be a common and open way of gathering this kind of information.
The current unacceptable paradigm is that everyone posts on instagram (and occasionally individual event calendars) to get the word out.
Instagram, walled garden that it is, doesn’t give developers access to search or aggregate posts, so effectively the only way for me to find happenings that may interest me is to manually go through the profiles of organizers that I follow, or sift through my non-chronological, ad-crusted feed to discover listings.
i would want to see this tool/platform exist 😭
Would LOVE this
just learned about an interesting LA-based project started by @cole-s that seems to be exploring this territory...
An old professor of mine runs something like this for arts in los angeles. it’s a great reference and resource- http://whatsonlosangeles.com
04/06/2025
Hey Nico, I saw your index viewer— love it 🥺 SUPER HONORED to be one of the example indexes! Hope everything’s well with you ❤️
@selina-kehuan-wu haha thank you! and of course, gotta spotlight fellow power users 🤝 likewise hope all is well :)
When I’m designing, the pathway to making progress is always a lot less straightforward than developing — the latter feels like a linear progression of tasks whose complexity is simple to gauge up front, whereas the former is more of a spaghetti-throwing exercise.
Consequently I’ve been hemming and hawing for a few weeks about how much time to invest in prototyping the goby interface before starting to develop it; it can feel a bit aimless and unsatisfying until you land on a promising direction. But just in the past few days, I’ve been spending my evenings pushing myself to sketch on it, and finding truth in this remark from Hayao Miyazaki:
I must battle my desire to avoid a hassle. All important things in the world are a hassle.
I think I’ve landed on some elements of the design system and a look & feel which “click” for me, although they obviously need refining. What helped in reaching this point, beyond just sitting down to work on it for consecutive days, was a couple approaches:
A return to by-hand sketching! I think this keeps me from getting too caught up in fidelity, and it’s more comfortable/portable than working on a laptop screen. I feel like this is where many of my favorite interface concepts for goby have come from.
Note-taking: specifically, I found it helpful early on to make a list of the minimal elements I would need designed in order to make a basic implementation; it helped me stop thinking about them as individual design components, and more as an interconnected, modular system.
Focusing on functionality: In the past I’ve gotten caught up with testing different styling and type treatments, without being able to land on something satisfactory. This time I tried to start by answering questions about the logic and signaling done by the interface: e.g. how much information will I show to users at different points, how do I make the data structure clear, how can I make this kind of interaction visually consistent, etc. What I found was that this drove me to innovate on the form and find approaches which feel non-arbitrary and stylistically unified.
Natalia Ilyin:
As it turns out, the computer was “a tool,” but not the tool those 30-years-ago “early adopters” believed (because they had been told to believe) it would be. It was no pencil: It made getting into the profession expensive, and the expense of the tools had an immediate effect on who got into the business. The migration of design onto applications and then to internet applications and lease agreements cost money, and now never stops costing money. So that is the first thing. Computers made design a profession for people who had the money to join in. You needed seed money. Before computers, you could own an X-acto knife and a pen and a drawing board and make money. I know because I did.
Second, demanding that designers use computers--making InDesign the industry standard, for instance, pressed people of talent into a regulated way of working that made their work easier to commodify. The universality of the tools took designers from being unique individuals with their own unique voices and methodologies to users of a system of “creation” that was in fact a system of indoctrination and labor exploitation.
are.na index viewer:
@nico-chilla i love this! so simple but so clever :0
@rosemary yay, so happy to hear it! hope you were able to try it out with your profile :)
My eternal frustration with the intersectionObserver API is that it detects intersections based on the portion of the element being observed that is within the observer’s boundaries (configured via the threshold option). This results in a lot of cases where you’d intuitively expect the callback to fire, but it doesn’t; for example, if I have a child element that is taller than the boundary container, it won't necessarily fire a collision once it passes the top of the boundary, since the height ratio that’s in-view hasn’t meaningfully changed.
In my experience it would be far more useful in most cases if it fired entries based on the portion of the root/boundary container that is filled by observed elements. That would allow you to easily detect, for example, when an element covers less or more than 50% of the viewport (you can achieve this now, but only with a bit of non-optimal hacking).
cool website!
why thank you 👉😎👉
right?!
I found your website through Are.na, it's inspired me to pursue my own :)
wow, so happy to hear that! by the way, I like your username (or epic real name??)!
thank you :) happily, my name!
E: I need to pick clothing for tomorrow; what’s the temperature going to be like… I know it’ll be—
N: It’ll be cold!
E: But how many layers of cold?
Greta Rainbow:
Lately, I’ve been parroting the Annie Dillard line “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” applying it to affirm the simple desires of the people I love. My friend wants to go on vacation. My boyfriend wants to quit Instagram. My parents want to move to an island. It’s cheesy, easily found on Etsy as a Papyrus-font poster print, and yet it’s the best I seem to have. Dillard meant it as an aphorism about choosing presence over productivity. Her ideal daily schedule was that of a turn-of-the-century Danish aristocrat who got up at four in the morning to go hunting with his friends. They converged at a babbling brook where they swam, drank schnapps and ate a sandwich, had a smoke, rested and chatted, and hunted some more—until he showered, dressed in formal wear, ate a huge dinner, smoked a cigar, and slept like a log. His wife, meanwhile, birthed and tended to their three children. This is not the writer’s life, but the writer must also contend with a schedule, must build a scaffolding of mundanity that allows the reading and writing to be done. And though each day is the same, “you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
If how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, we will spend much of life hunched over a hot MacBook.
IOS photo captions and OCR:
lina l.:Curious if you've seen Folding Ideas' video on Minecraft & colonialism? Hahaha