Wolfgang Weingart, Erneuerer der Schweizer Typografie, Initiator der Swiss Punk Typo in den 1960er Jahren und Vorreiter moderner experimenteller Typo ist gestorben (Opens in a new window). Seine Arbeiten findet man im New Yorker MoMA (Opens in a new window)  und im Weingart Archive (Opens in a new window) im Züricher Design Museum (Opens in a new window).

“He is a painter, a poet, an explorer, and an artist—in the guise of a typographer. His tools are a proof press, paper, ink, type and film.” —Paul Rand’s 1995 tribute to Weingart

Aus einem 2014er Feature von Design Observer über Weingart (Opens in a new window):

Weingart’s explorations took “Swiss typography” as a starting point, and embraced the constraints of hand-set type and letterpress printing in order to find new design directions. His experimentation with the expressive potential of hand-set type “…was never with the idea of throwing either ‘Basle or Swiss Typography’ over-board but instead, with an attempt to expand them — to enliven and change them with the help of intensively considered design-criteria and new visual ideas.”

His innovations accelerated when Hofmann invited him in 1968 to join the faculty of the newly launched Advanced Program in Graphic Design at the school, which attracted post-graduate students from all over the world, including many Americans. (...)

And there he was, in his white lab coat, guiding his students through a disciplined, step-by-step exploration of typographic basics, pushing around slivers of type, hand-set in the type shop (in 1968, this was the way to generate type to work with on paper). He believed that these elementary exercises were the only way to prepare oneself for the more complex process of self-discovery and visual invention.

Weingart’s own process of discovery was reflected in his method of teaching: as he did in his own work, he encouraged students to first explore every possible technical and visual permutation that could be created with the materials of a type shop (thinking of the type shop more like a printmaking studio); and then, apply those ideas to a particular design problem (a text, form, diagram, announcement, etc).

The extravagant experiments of Weingart and his students are now widely known, but at that time few had yet been published or ever even seen outside of the school. Even during my visit in 1968, there was little hint of what would come.

Kleptones’ OV ER LO AD

Eric Kleptone, neben Danger Mouse der wahrscheinlich talentierteste aller Mashup-Künstler, hat mit OVERLOAD ein Opus Magnum von nicht weniger als 8 Stunden Spielzeit veröffentlich und noch einmal Bonustracks in Form von 4 Mixen obendrauf gepackt. Die Kleptones hatten vor hundertundzwei Jahren mit ihrem Queen-Remix A Night At The Hip Hopera (Opens in a new window) eins der besten Mashup-Alben aller Zeiten hingelegt.

Aus ihrer Mailing-Liste (Opens in a new window):

Release of new four part album - OVERLOAD

A quadriptych (or tetraptych, if you prefer), created between 2018 and 2021.

OV - DOWNLOAD FLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM HERE (Opens in a new window)
ER - DOWNLOAD FLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM HERE (Opens in a new window)
LO - DOWNLOAD FLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM HERE (Opens in a new window)
AD - DOWNLOADFLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM HERE (Opens in a new window)

Accompanied by four interrelated Hectic City Mixtapes:HC20 - Azimuth Divider - Download FLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM (Opens in a new window)
HC21 - Liquid Oxygen - Download FLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM (Opens in a new window)
HC22 - Electromagnetic Radiation - Download FLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM (Opens in a new window)
HC23 - Occipital Vapour - Download FLAC (Opens in a new window) / MP3 (Opens in a new window) or STREAM (Opens in a new window)

Police bulldozes 1000 Bitcoin-PCs

In Malaysia haben sie 1069 PCs einer Bitcoin-Mine beschlagnahmt, nachdem die Betreiber den Strom dafür geklaut hatten, was zu großflächigen Stromausfällen führte. Dann haben sie die Teile mit einer Dampfwalze überfahren (Opens in a new window). Das Video bringt meine Feels bezüglich Bitcoins wunderbar auf den Punkt - kill it with dampfwalze, it's just a "Scam to Help the Rich Get Richer (Opens in a new window)".

Eight people in Miri, Malaysia were charged for allegedly stealing electricity to power a massive bitcoin mining operation involving 1,069 PCs. Malaysia has recently started cracking down on countrywide electricity theft used for illegal bitcoin mining operations.The PCs were confiscated during six raids on properties near an airport in the Sarawak region. The raids were conducted in a joint operation between Malaysian authorities and Sarawak Energy Berhad (SEB). These suspects allegedly found a way to siphon electricity from SEB power lines to power the bitcoin mining machines, stealing nearly $2 million worth of electricity over three months.

Accidental Renaissance (Opens in a new window): Tibetan woman holding flowers, only they're not flowers they're cryptocurrency mining PSUs.

Are We in the Metaverse Yet?

NYT on what some people call the "Metaverse" (Opens in a new window) (as in Neal Stephensons version of virtual reality). A lot of crypto, a lot of games and VR, a lot of Neo-Secondlife. Best sentence may be, that the internet already is more "metaverse than it gets credit for". Just think about the virtual led lives during the pandemic. To me, Metaverse is just another name for the internet as is with technology progressing along. Another buzzword, but a cool one tho.

Mehr Metaverse in Matthew Balls Metaverse Primer (Opens in a new window).

The Metaverse is often mis-described as virtual reality. This is like saying the mobile internet is the iPhone. The iPhone isn’t the mobile internet; it’s the consumer hardware and app platform most frequently used to access the mobile internet.

Sometimes the Metaverse is described as a virtual user-generated content (UGC) platform. This is like saying the internet is Yahoo!, Facebook, or World of Warcraft. Yahoo! is an internet portal/index, Facebook is a UGC-focused social network, World of Warcraft is an MMO. Other times we receive a more sophisticated explanation, such as ‘the Metaverse is a persistent virtual space enabling continuity of identity and assets’. This is much closer to the truth, but it too is insufficient. It’s a bit like saying the internet is Verizon, or Safari, or HTML. Those are a broadband provider that connects you to the entire web, a web browser that can access/render all of the internet’s webpages from a single screen and IP identifier, and a markup language that enables the creation and display of the web. And certainly, the Metaverse doesn’t mean a game or virtual space where you can hang out (similarly, the Metaverse isn’t now ‘here’ just because more of us now are hanging out virtually and/or more often).

Instead, we need to think of the Metaverse as a sort of successor state to the mobile internet. And while consumers will have core devices and platforms through which they interact with the Metaverse, the Metaverse depends on so much more. There’s a reason we don’t say Facebook or Google is an internet. They are destinations and ecosystems on or in the internet, each accessible via a browser or smartphone that can also access the vast rest of the internet. Similarly, Fortnite and Roblox feel like the Metaverse because they embody so many technologies and trends into a single experience that, like the iPhone, is tangible and feels different from everything that came before. But they do not constitute the Metaverse.

This Beach does not exist

“StyleGAN2-ADA network trained in HD resolution 1280×768 on dataset with ~20.000 images of the beach. All of these beaches are AI-generated (Opens in a new window).”

I don’t care, I’m gonna live there.

Here’s a travel through latent space of the rest of my life:

4 Theories of Storytelling

Vierteilige Artikelserie auf Ribbonfarm über verschiedene Theorien des Storytelling:

Harmon vs. McKee (Opens in a new window)
The American Tradition (Opens in a new window)
Mamet’s Conflict Airing Theory (Opens in a new window)
Matthew Dicks (Opens in a new window)

Oral Histories of the Internet

Hübsche Vorträge über die frühen Tage des Internets in den Youtubes der NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery (Opens in a new window), hier Geert Lovink, Douglas Rushkoff und Bruce Sterling:

#5 Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink takes us through his early experiences of the Internet and how they have changed and evolved over time.

#3 Bruce Sterling & Jasmina Tešanović

After 40 years of cyberspace, what is left of the utopian dream? We invited pioneers, artists, leading voices to tell us their story of the Net.

#1 Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff takes us through his early experiences of the Internet and how they have changed and evolved over time.

The Kids are still alright

"Die Jugend von heute liebt den Luxus, hat schlechte Manieren und verachtet die Autorität" (Sokrates, Denker-Legende, alter Sack).

Interessante Studie  über "Why we kids-these-days", über die jahrtausendealten Vorurteile älterer Generationen gegenüber Jüngeren (die nicht mehr lesen und immer dümmer werden, die nur noch Sex und Drogen im Kopf haben oder, ganz aktuell, nicht mehr feiern, saufen und ganz spießig werden, die Ältere nicht respektieren -OK BOOMER- und so weiter fasel bla).

Der Effekt, der anscheinend tatsächlich in jeder Generation anzutreffen ist, wird anscheinend durch Projektion eigener Above-Average-Skills sowie von verzerrten Erinnerungen an diese Skills auf die Jetztzeit verursacht. Intelligente Menschen erinnern sich (oft falsch) daran, als Kind bereits sehr gebildet gewesen zu sein und projezieren diese falsche Erinnerung auf die nachfolgende Generation. Sehr autoritär geprägte Menschen erinnern sich (oft falsch) daran, als Kind bereits sehr autoritätsfolgend gewesen zu sein, und halten die nachfolgende Generation für respektlos. Und so weiter.

Was die Studie über Menschen (wie mich) aussagt, die eher zu "The Kids are alright" tendieren, weiß ich nicht. Wahrscheinlich habe ich keine Above-Average-Skills, die ich verzerrt erinnern und projizieren kann. Damn. Fuck those Kids!

Studie: Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking (Opens in a new window)

Across three traits, American adults (N = 3458; Mage = 33 to 51 years) believe today’s youth are in decline; however, these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits. Authoritarian people especially think youth are less respectful of their elders, intelligent people especially think youth are less intelligent, and well-read people especially think youth enjoy reading less. These beliefs are not predicted by irrelevant traits. Two mechanisms contribute to humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids: a person-specific tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels and a memory bias projecting one’s current qualities onto the youth of the past. When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears. This may explain why the kids these days effect has been happening for millennia.

Psillo Map

Liberty caps - or Psilocybe semilanceata - are a psilocybin-containing mushroom that grow naturally in many parts of the world. We believe that such mushrooms have the power to radically improve the wellbeing of individuals and societies.But precisely where and when can you find liberty caps? Magic Mushroom Map (Opens in a new window) is our best effort at using data to maximise your chance of being in the right place at the right time.

Bunch of Stuff

The Album "Nine (Opens in a new window)" by Sault is a free download, it's available for only 99 Days and its awesome.  You can stream it on Bandcamp (Opens in a new window)too.

Vox has a feature about the most annoying voice (Opens in a new window) on the internet, the voice of Youtubers.

Why Can’t We Be Friends (Opens in a new window): “Podcasts and other forms of “parasocial” media reframe friendship as monetized self-care”.

“Winning the Internet (Opens in a new window) is a data-driven newsletter of links in other newsletters. Currently sourcing from 123 awesome newsletters. (A newsletter experiment by The Pudding.)”

Inside TikTok's booming dissociative identity disorder community (Opens in a new window)

Asher is not part of a typical influencer collective. He is one of many members of a 29-person “system,” all of whom share a single body, brain, and life. Each person, or “alter,” in the system is a distinct form of consciousness. This group of identities live together in the body of a 31-year-old man diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder. The A System’s account — by far the biggest in the DID TikTok community — has amassed 1.1 million followers since February 2021.

FBI Confiscates Alleged Rioter’s ‘Fully Constructed U.S. Capitol Lego Set’ (Opens in a new window)

When the FBI arrested alleged Capitol riot leader Robert Morss, it found a “fully constructed U.S. Capitol Lego set" in his Pittsburgh home. According to court documents first reported by The Smoking Gun, the FBI recovered the 1,032-piece Lego set when it raided Morss’ home, but did not indicate if Morss had used the set in preparation for the Riot.

Lalaland

So yeah that happened.
They brought a dead dinosaur into a church and sang at it.
Because ofcourse.

Satisfying Bullshit sign of intelligence

News from everybodys favorite academic field, the Bullshit Studies. Bullshitting seems to be a strategy to effectively navigate your social environment while signaling your intelligence, and higher IQs actually correlate with the ability to produce "satisfying bullshit", so that's that.

I really like the term "satisfying bullshit", it adds some juice to this particular kind of shit, doesn't it.

Also, I really can’t decide if this is good or bad news. So bullshitting is a skill deployed by intelligent people to show off their smart asses, meanwhile bullshitting is used as a tool to deceive people in frauds, by fake news and snake oil salesmen, and to hide all kind of bad shit that people do. I guess the deeper truth this study is revealing may not be that intelligent people bullshit around, but that evil people are smart.

Study: Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence  (Opens in a new window)

Abstract: Navigating social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has formed to meet the unique challenges that emerge for highly social species. Bullshitting, communication characterised by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for truth, is ubiquitous within human societies. Across two studies (N = 1,017), we assess participants’ ability to produce satisfying and seemingly accurate bullshit as an honest signal of their intelligence. We find that bullshit ability is associated with an individual’s intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be more intelligent. We interpret these results as adding evidence for intelligence being geared towards the navigation of social systems. The ability to produce satisfying bullshit may serve to assist individuals in negotiating their social world, both as an energetically efficient strategy for impressing others and as an honest signal of intelligence.

Vice: Bullshitting Is Actually a Sign of Intelligence, Study Finds (Opens in a new window)

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