LEECHING AND LINKING IN THE HYPERTEXT KINGDOM

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Kicks Condor
28 Mar 2019

Mek, Citizen of the World

Heyo—‘My purpose is to curate a living map of the world’s knowledge.’

I’m fresh into this link—so I don’t quite have a clear picture of this fellow (Michael E. Karpeles)—but I see a kind of h0p3-like thing going on here. A huge, straight-up link directory that is definitely in the public self-modeling vein.

Related project: fromscrat.ch done in the same fashion. This is a rabbithole, no doubt about it. See what you can find.

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default filename tv

Personal vids on shuffle (by @everestpipkin).

Noted by Eli here, this new project by @everestpipkin streams videos that are left with the camera-assigned title (i.e. DSC_5090.MOV, IMG_6715.MP4, etc.) and are likely raw, uncut personal footage.

Some videos I encountered while browsing:

This is a good channel.

Turns out there are some related sites: youhole.tv (similar channel of random obscure vids), astronaut.io (vids with zero views), petittube (same), /r/imgxxxx (subreddit of default filename vids).

Interesting comment on Twitter about these zero view channels:

Interesting—and doesn’t it effectively erase a video from its potential library by having 1 person view it?

An effective obscurity algorithm that likely won’t experience spam and can’t be gamed. Very interesting, indeed!

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Humdrum Life

Thoughts blog that uses the Blot software to mimick something like h0p3’s wiki.

This is Kevin Kovacs’ personal thoughts collection—along the lines of h0p3’s wiki—with daily plans and reviews of the day, link logs. There’s an enclave of others doing this kind of thing with TiddlyWiki—this is an example of how to branch outside of that.

I also think it’s interesting that Kevin has a separate (presumably ‘public’) site at The Independent Variable. It seems that part of the point is to syndicate the ‘public’ site and keep the ‘personal’ site separate—“because of the frequency and mundaneness of posts.” This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been messing with, too—except that I have a home page for broadcasts and an unfiltered page for the raw dump.

Couple things I need to ask Kevin—maybe he’ll see this by way of Webmention, we’ll see:

  • Any reason that ‘humdrum’ has a dark theme and ‘tiv’ a bright theme? I wonder if there’s an internal/external symbolism here. But it also seems like dark and light themes appeal to different crowds.

  • Can’t help but wonder why link logs get posted to the ‘personal’ site, while movie reviews and top ten lists hit the main blog. I think I might do the opposite. How do you know what does where? (Intrigued at the stark division between two sites, one author.)

  • As someone with a ‘now’ page—is it a novelty? Or does it serve a function for you? Or perhaps the function is for someone else— us??

  • Interesting that URL schemes are different for the two sites. Wonder why.

Cool to see more Hypertexting—in the sense of ephemeral stuff piling up into a single body of work. I just keep seeing this.

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27 Mar 2019

Fast FVP

The ‘hot and ready’ style of checklisting.

I am not generally interested in time-management or productivity systems—because I enjoy being such a mess—but this is a case where my study of algorithms kicks in. The Fast FVP system—formerly the Final Version Perfected, previously Final Version, née AutoFocus—is an algorithm by Mark Forster for determining what to work on, given a large list of tasks. (However, since none of those names are descriptive, I think of it as the ‘hot and ready’ system, when I explain it to someone.)

It is based on the question: “What do I want to do more than X?”

The algorithm looks like this:

  1. Put a dot next to the first item on the checklist.
    • That item is now X.
  2. Ask: Am I ready to do X now?
    • If so, you’re done: stop and do it.
  3. Ask: What do I want to do more than X?
    • Scan the list until you encounter a subsequent item which is more appealing.
    • Dot the item. It is now X.
    • Go to step 2.

And then, of course, you come back to the list later and cross off a completed item (re-adding it to the bottom of the list if you have remaining work to do on it) and run the algorithm again.

As mentioned, the development of the algorithm has gone through several variations. This reminds me very much of the recent trend to discover better hashing methods[1] and even extending to things like PageRank or YouTube’s curation algorithms.

What I like about Mark Forster’s approach is that he took the existing algorithms (many involving day planners or things like the GTD processing flowchart) and simplified the algorithm down to its bare essentials, never straying from its core emphasis: ‘psychological readiness’.

This is where FVP really enters new dimensions. By using a pre-selection process, the brain is softened up towards the selected tasks. But this isn’t all. The selection process is based on what you want to do. This colours the whole preselected list so that even tasks which seem like chores get affected.

It seems that, once simplified (made primitive?), an algorithm can then be played with, to try to reconfigure its simple pieces to align it closer to the ideals behind it. I make note of this approach so that it can be applied to the algorithms I (or we) are working on curate links or to orchestrate a crawler.

I also like that this is an algorithm designed for human software. While I sometimes use ‘recipes’ or manual processes as an analogy for algorithms, I like that this one is entirely mental/psychological—it seems perhaps unique in that regard. It is designed to be ‘loaded’[2].

  1. Such as recent developments like XXH3 and HighwayHash. ↩︎

  2. In fact, in the link above, the author simplifies Fast FVP down to the phrase: Ready? More? As if it were code. ↩︎

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25 Mar 2019

Hand Job Zine

Seven issues total in this zine—I’m counting the gorgeous ‘FP’ complementary issues—which brings together scans of human hands caught in the Google Books scanning process. There is another zine out there of the same name; this is the one by Aliza Elkin—who also fashions animated GIFs from her findings. (Some background on this Twitter thread.)

She also points to this cool book from 1977: Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn By Atomic Bomb Survivors. This is all very eye opening. Some of the better high concept zines that I’ve seen!

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H3333333K

Poorly rendered architecture.

Ok, I’ve added the flipflop tag to this blog, based on Brian Jones’ comment on the Hand Job Zine. Robin Sloan’s “Dancing the Flip-Flop” essay was dropped—and this link falls in place as a flipflop.

For H3333333K !Mediengruppe Bitnik translate a digital image error, a glitch, onto the façade of the museum House of Electronic Arts Basel (HeK). Applied directly onto the architecture of the building, the glitch misaligns the elements of the façade, bringing disturbance to an otherwise settled structure.

Yeah, check out the video—the glitch was added to an existing building, as if itself had been poorly rendered back to analog.

I’ve also added this group’s RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER project to href.cool’s Crimes/Simple category. If my flipflop collection gets big enough, I can see it going in the ‘Real/Not Real’ category.

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luming hao

this is a very messy and unstructured inpsiring personal site no actualy it’s more of a collection of txts and links and sometimes it uses html other times it just uses a basoc json file no it’s a blog this person is also on other sites but i’m not going to tell you where becau i have just bought a lettuce form a door to door saleswoman tell me you wouldn’t focus on that if you were it too

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Personal Site Dump

Raw blog/website links to look through.

I’ve stumbled across the link above (a list of personal portfolios compiled by Martin Pitt) and, well, this has been a bit of a recent trend:

I am not going to look through the tech blogs, because I’m not as interested in those. (Except ones like ameyama.com which blends a greater portion of assorted personal thoughts alongside the tech tutorial-type things.)

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22 Mar 2019

Dat Rats

Idea: gang up to cache classic websites.

This is just a zygotic bit of a thought that I’ve been having. A group that would band together to share classic websites (likely on the ‘dat’ network), perhaps as if they were abandonware or out-of-print books. Many of the early net.art sites have been kept up because they have university support; many other sites disappear and simply don’t function on The Internet Archive.

(To illustrate how even a major art piece can go down, Pharrell’s 24 Hours of Happy interactive music video—yeah. that link is broken. You can see kind of see it on YouTube, but… the hypertext enthusiast in me wants to see it live on in its original form.)

Some sites that I really need to reconstruct:

  • Room of 1,000 Snakes. This game hasn’t been playable for a year or two now. I promised a friend I would work on this. (This is an issue with Unity Web Player going defunct.)

  • The Woodcutter. Careful, redirects. This site was a huge deal for me when I was younger. When I started href.cool, it was fine—and had been fine for like fifteen years!—and then it suddenly broke. I think it can be reconstructed from The Internet Archive.

  • Fly Guy. Moved to the App Store??

  • SARDINE MAGOZINE. Charlie is gone now—so I’ve already started doing this.

  • SMASH TV. This suddenly disappeared recently, but I think it’s been restored to YouTube now—I need my copies.

Sites I need to back up; feels like their day is nigh:

  • 1080plus. I’ve already been through losing this once.

  • Bear Stearns Bravo. Yeah, I think so. (This Is My Milwaukee could be recreated too.)

  • “Like a Rolling Stone.” Similar story to “24 Hours of Happy”—this kind of disappears for months at a time, but seems to work as of March 2019.

  • Frog Fractions. This one is probably too adored to disappear—still.

  • Everything in my Real/Person category. These personal pages can easily float away suddenly.

Of course, I’d love to get the point where I have a cached copy of everything at href.cool—there are several Tumblrs in there and Blogspots. I’m not as worried with those, because The Internet Archive does a fine job of keeping them relatively intact. But if a YouTube channel disappears, it’s gone to us.

Along similar lines, I have been trying to message the creators of the Byte app—not the hyped Vine 2, but the original Byte that was basically like an underground vaporwave social network from 2014-2016. I want to secure a dump of the public Bytes from that era. It was sick.

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21 Mar 2019

Internet K-Hole

Not the most obscure link—but I’ve not run across it before, despite it being around on Blogspot from 2010-2014, then on Tumblr until a couple months ago (“since tumblr is full of narcs now”) when it moved to the link above. The pic thief behind the blog is “Babs”—who did an interview with Vice in 2015. I collect these kinds of candid photodumps on my Visuals/Images page. This one mostly focuses on white trash photos dating from about the 1970s.

Relevant comment (to all my fellow hyperlinkers) from the article:

Has it been become more difficult to maintain the same level of quality and find compelling images and videos over the five years you’ve been doing this?

Yeah I feel like it’s harder to find photos actually. I have a bunch of tricks I use to find photos on the Internet and now so many photos I’ve already used come up which can be frustrating. I’ve gotten more submissions lately, which is so awesome because a lot of them send in photos of themselves/their own friends in the 80s/90s, and they’re not already on the Internet.

It’s still strange to think that the early Internet seemed like it was filling up with photos and writings and ringtones—it seemed that it would just be an avalanche from then on. And it is, but it’s all become mostly unreachable, much harder to find. I wonder how much of it is deliberate and how much is the nature of the platforms.

Since zines are also in my wheelhouse, I also want to point out some of the links found in the vicinity of Internet K-Hole, such as:

  • HAMBURGER EYES ZINE. Thirty-seven issues of just photography—in the vein of good, great, jarring photos, based out of the SF Mission.

  • Angel Dust Chicago (short-lived?) junk store. This seems related to some of the tiny museums I’ve linked in the past. Video interview with the creators. (Also see my interview with The Zymoglyphic Museum.)

  • Vermillion and One found photo blog. More of an emphasis on campy art and fashion. I like the kid’s fashion pics—seems like that could be its own genre.

Ok, have your fun.

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I remarked to a friend that alien conspiracies seem to have died down in recent years, while other conspiracies have grown. He said that he felt this was because 20th Century technology was analog—film and tapes could be smudged and warped incidentally, which possibly led to misleading recordings. If there’s anything to this notion, I need to remember to return to it…

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12 Mar 2019

Reply: Feed Readers

Brad Enslen

I am over my limit for feed to follow on Inoreader free. I may have to either pay or move to a different reader. I’ve been experimenting with Wordpress reader but I’m finding it cumbersome.

I don’t know Inoreader—what is keeping you from paying for it? Is it not worth paying for? I also wonder what you are looking for in a reader. I mean if it reads RSS—what else is there? (I don’t understand using a reader and am looking for some enlightenment. Don’t think you’ve written about this yet—is there something you’re looking for beyond basic notification that a new post/comment has materialized? To me, they seem like e-mail clients—not much to it.)

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Reply: Allo

nitinkhanna

href.cool is cool 😃

Hey thanks for piping up. Your blog is neat—I liked the article on treating your blog like a Moleskine. I think this is why I always have used those dreary, cheap composition books. I can make them a mess.

Your Twitter bio: “I tweet seriously, but mostly for fun.” This is chill. An example to us all.

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Reply: Rabbits Are Good People

1uxb0x

But of how many rabbit holes? And how deep are they? And what rabbits dug them?

Tell me, 1uxb0x—your name is so like Linux to me. (Because of ‘fluxbox’ which was my favorite back when I was only probably three times your age.) I think you are still deciding on a name though—is that right?

Your “Notes” and “Free Writing” pages are solid gold.[1] You are clearly a very hard worker—I can’t tell if you are hard on yourself or just very determined. You have a lot of things you want to do in your life, that’s for sure.

I like your “Free Writing” pages—and I do the same thing myself. When I am writing, I like to just write something that I see. Almost like taking a photograph, but I am writing it down. I think most people like to write what they are feeling, but that often causes me to stop and think too much. But I just want to write something—and they are very fun to read back on.[2]

As for your “Notes”—I like pages like this. Or pages like this one about your dad and your sense of morality. You might feel that this page is very disorganized and messy—but I find it to be absolutely readable and I can tell where copy-and-paste is happening and where you are writing.[3] I have a friend who will very much enjoy reading your writings and I hope it is okay if I show him. (He will probably have some excellent advice as well.)

Ok, for now, au revoir, fellow human.

  1. Or, flakes of solid gold, if they happen to be smaller pages. Or boxes of sticky pencils, if they happen to be lists of random thoughts that are in your head that day. ↩︎

  2. My grandmother used to read me her journals when I would visit her. She would start by reading a few funny e-mails she got, but inevitably she would end up pulling out a volume of her personal journals. Many of my relatives didn’t enjoy that she would do this—and they thought it was anti-social or maybe impolite of her—but I always found it quite charming. I loved to drink tea while she would read to me. And her entries were much like your “Free Writing”—It is July 3rd. There is a blue van parked outside the house that has been there all week. One of the kids peeked inside and said that it was filthy. It sure does stink. They are also selling a new kind of cinnamon roll at the grocer’s across the street— ↩︎

  3. Your writing reminds me very much of Édouard Levé. I am sorry to compare you to him—because he killed himself—but I assure you that you only remind me of his writing style. I’m afraid I don’t know you as a person. I hope you realize that I am paying you a very sincere complement. You are doing very well in your writing. I hope you are enjoying it, because it is fun to read. (No lie. I think you could publish a book of these “Notes” pages and it would make waves in the literary world. But don’t do that. I like you better as a wiki kid than as a literary hootytoot.) ↩︎

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11 Mar 2019

Wyrd Britain

I don’t know what it is—but this blog has stuck with me. I can’t even trace the links I went through to get here. (I think I started at either Nannygoat Hill or jill/txt—which are also very interesting blogs that I’m still trying to sort out.) I originally started at the post where a guest author talks about seeing Cocteau Twins for the first time—and then I just started occasionally stopping in to read back. There are some really cool video shorts linked throughout this blog.

I don’t know what you call it when you were nostalgic for times and places that you never experienced—sometimes I can feel this the minute I start some old Russian sci-fi flick or whatever Iranian ‘slice of life’-type footage I happen upon. But this blog has that kind of sensation. (I’m also wondering why I’m just linking to blogs and Tumblrs like these rather than commenting on them and trying to strike up a chat. I’m short on time lately—I need to remedy this.)

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Reply: Supposedly Unreadable Tripe

k0sh3k

I am one of the few people who read everything h0p3 writes. It’s a good thing I read fast. Also, we talk a lot. We started this whole thing by walking and talking and disagreeing on the definitions of ethical and moral and I guess we’ll keep doing this until he realizes I’m right and he’s wrong about the entire nature of the universe.

It might take a while.

h0p3’s wife does a mic check.

(This is sooo cool—to get a response from h0p3’s wife on her own personal wiki. I just can’t believe we’re having these conversations. This was not what I intended to do on this blog. I actually didn’t have any intentions really—I just wanted to mess with hypertext again—which I guess opened me up to reading random TiddlyWikis and having these delightful, possibly pointless, just-for-funsies conversations. It’s better than anything that I could have intended to do.)

k0sh3k! First off, I love ILL, too. I am a massive cheapskate and I try to avoid clutter—but mostly I just like the weird editions that show up. And I like to see where the books come from. (I give a shoutout to this in my Stories/Novels page.)

My favorite was when Denton Welch’s Maiden Voyage came in. It was an ancient hardback from the 1950s. (It was the first book I read by him—I love him now.) As I read, I began to realize that this edition had been published right after he died (at age 33) and it really transported me to that age. I had a hard time giving that one back.

I actually should read The Educated Mind again before I recommend it. I went back and read my review—and some of my perspectives have changed since then. A lot has happened in four years. I still think I would love that the book bows before the visage of Socrates… (I am not a fast reader.)

My favorite poet is e.e. cummings, and if you haven’t read his work, you should.

I loved him in high school—I guess I have forgotten so much about him. I think I liked him at the time for gimmicky reasons. I know I saw past the mere shape of his poems. I thought he was funny. But to hear about ‘anti-industrialist poems’—you shouldn’t have lost that paper.

You’ll have to excuse the place - I only started keeping this to make h0p3 happy and to be a good example to the kiddos, although I’ve started keeping things here just for fun, too.

I am not nearly as good at keeping a wiki as h0p3 is; I haven’t gotten much better on any of this web stuff since the early days of chat rooms.

I think it’s charming. Your worries about organization or curating—sure, it’s fun to spend time on that stuff—but you’ve put a lot of work into what you’ve got already and it’s already very amusing and interesting to idly search and click around. I like that it’s informal. I like that it’s off-the-cuff.

I feel I should apologize for reading. It feels voyeuristic. Or like a robot eating up feelings. (CAN DESPISING AYN RAND REALLY FEEL THIS GOOD.) And maybe I am just scoping up anecdotes and recommendations in slapdash—this is just my own librarian way. It is shameful, it is noble—it is just a way to pass the time.

I think education, across the board, including college level, has hit a rough patch. It’s no longer about helping individuals become good, ethical human beings; it’s about shaping individuals into efficient little workers and consumers. I’m glad we have the chance to raise our kiddos to be good persons, and to recognize the systemic evils that use others as mere means for wealth accumulation.

Most of the teachers I’ve met and worked with are aware of this and frustrated by it, too. It’s strange to me that this awareness has been around since at least the 1970s—yet it’s only gotten worse, I’d hazard.

There was a conversation between Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire back then that really—well, it might have gone too far in places, but I think it’s mostly right on:

Now there comes a time when the infant is seeing a wider world than can be touched and felt. So the questions in the child’s mind aren’t only about this and this and this that I can see, but about something I heard, saw a picture of, or imagined. And I think here the child enters into a precarious and dangerous situation because not necessarily, but, I think, in point of fact in our societies, there is now a shift from experiential learning—learning by exploring—to another kind of learning, which is learning by being told: you have to find adults who will tell you things. And this stage reaches its climax in school.

And I think it’s an exaggeration, but that there’s a lot of truth in saying that when you go to school, the trauma is that you must stop learning and you must now accept being taught. That is stage two: it’s school, it’s learning by being taught, it’s receiving deposits of knowledge. I think many children are destroyed by that, strangled. Some, of course, survive it, and all of us survived it, and that’s one reason it’s often dangerous discussing these questions among intellectual people. In spite of the school what happened to us was that in the course of this stage two we learned certain skills. We learned to read, for example; we learned to use libraries; we learned how to explore directly a much wider world.

Now I think that there’s an important sense in which stage three is going back to stage one for those who’ve survived stage two—creative people in any field, whether in a laboratory or in philosophy—whether artists, businessmen, journalists—all the people in the world who are able, despite all the restrictions, to find a way of living creatively. We are very much like the baby again. We explore; it’s driven from inside; it’s experiential; it’s not so verbal; it’s not about being told.

To me, I agree that the scaffolding is important—but I think we tend to make the whole thing about scaffolding and public school tends to be all scaffolding all the time. But I think of scaffolding as being rough-shod. You hammer together a few planks and then get back to the building itself. The scaffolding goes away with time. You forget it was ever there.

(In case this is too vague—I tend to make ‘scaffolding’ synonymous with ‘adult assistance’, Vygotsky’s meaning, rather than the other meanings that float about from time to time.)

Of course, I think the above goes wrong a bit because I view reading as experiential and driven from inside—and I think even “telling” can be this way. Teaching can be very immersive and very improvisational. It’s difficult to know if it can ever be prescribed. (I don’t often watch television, but I think this is one thing that has kept me watching The Good Place—the main character is provided with a personal philosopher, a man who finds himself given an Herculean chore to try to prescribe his wisdom to her, even though it all is completely applicable. It simply cannot be told I think.)

Thank you for all the books and links—I will always be on the lookout for more and I am glad to know you and your family. While I’m interesting in the pioneering work you all are doing with wikis and such, I think it’s eclipsed by the effort you make among your two children. These words might be, at their height, a ‘model’ of us.

But they are only artifacts compared to the humans behind them. This j3d1h and kokonut seem like great additions to our reality. (Just from things they pop off with in h0p3’s writings.)

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h0p3

Some essentials.

This is my first ‘person’ page. And, of course, h0p3 has been doing this for a very long time and I am only copycatting. His are ‘light-hearted plain-web d0xxings’ or somesuch—email, address, phone number, links to conversations. Mine are just that person’s words and my thoughts in summation—which is far more of a calling card to me, particularly after these other identifiers have expired.

As with most things, though, I am still playing catch-up with him. (He is the premiere modern Public Self-Modeler, in an age where such a thing is possibly dangerous, uncomely and, well, selfie-stickish.

He says in Find the Others:

I believe that by honestly uploading my mind into my wiki, we both have access to an enriched network of references for generating accurate theories of each other’s minds.

Ahh, dear me, so then it takes much more than a page—this entire endeavor is sunk. There can be no eulogy or summation. It would take a massively overloaded TiddlyWiki to accurately describe such an one as this…

To some non-trivial extent, the labels, attributes, characteristics, properties, and models I generate about a person help form a kind of name.

In reply to this, our friend Sphygmus[1] writes:

I want to talk about the vocabulary of “modeling” another person as well. I think I have observed that people don’t understand what you mean when you say you clearnet doxx them in order to better model them. For me, though, that was one of the most intuitive things you say. When I was in college the first time, I worked as an ILL student worker and loved it, largely because it sent me wandering through the stacks to pull out such a varied selection of books. One of the books I pulled that really stuck with me discussed how we form mental models of people in our heads and rehearse conversations with those people at various times, and the ways in which those rehearsals could be helpful or not. If I remember correctly, there were even worksheet-like questions for shaping mentally rehearsed conversations in a more helpful way. Sadly, I can remember exactly where I pulled the book from in the library but I’ve been unable to figure out the title – I wish I could go back and read it again!

Of course it also has to do with the problem of other minds and the unbridgeable gap between me and the outside world. Inevitably we only know others through our construction of them within our own minds.

After a discussion of the merits of psychometric tests between the two, h0p3 says:

I am inevitably forced to use labels, adjectives, etc. to model (boxing things in is what makes it computable information at all for us).

Ah, well—so this page is my box. And these are the things I put it in it.

(If you meet someone—someone with ASCII glasses on, say—and they purport to be a ‘madman in the desert’—then put this page straight away. FOR YOU NOW have the genuine artifact in front of you!)

(However, if you are uncertain, you can do one more thing: you can tell the man a joke. Like: a homunculus and a dark triadic memetic walk into a bar. He will stop you. ‘Let me stop you right there. Before you finish, please know that I am quite literally autistic and your elegant form of advanced humor which you are so carefully deploying might end up lost in my limbic system somewhere. Forgive me, please, and tell your joke, and thank you for saying it is a joke—k0sh3k will laugh at me later for this, but I will test out three interpretations of the joke with you now and then have her review the transcripts later…’)

(These overwhelming feelings of endearment and admiration and sheer pity that are now coming over you will now materialize in the form of laughter. The joke that was designed to pique the curiosity has now been outpiqued by a new curiosity: one in ASCII glasses that has gone to such great extent to analyze the joke that has been placed on the table—and, now look—this analysis has expanded everything in sight. You look at the joke and see that it is much bigger. And the conversation is now expanded, it is bigger. And the table—the table is much bigger, too!)

(Ok, now, tell me: did you laugh? Did you feel some endearment and admiration and some pity? I don’t know if you will enjoy or love h0p3 as much as I do, or as much as I purport to—if not, well, then I understand that, too. There was a time when I thought that I would only frustrate him or that he might just annoy me—I was reluctant to say anything or to take the time to read so very many words…)

(But what is life but a chance to expand a joke, to make the conversation a little longer, or to fancy that maybe even the table at which we sit has now grown?)

I aim to do you justice.

It’s that chivalrous, sensible, steelnivorous h0p3—he steels you up, then it’s all night steel for breakfast!

This short sentence is a trope of h0p3. He ‘aims’—he has a very specific set of purposes in mind for you, good good, his work is a pointed effort. A discovery of truth? A deep sea recovery of some rarified moral sense? I cannot characterize it properly. But to ‘aim’ is truly a bold facet.

True literature can exist only where it is produced by madmen, hermits, heretics, visionaries, rebels, and sceptics.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

That h0p3 labels himself a ‘madman’, a ‘jester’, a ‘retard’ and so on—well, this is a rich tradition and these are rarified, very colorful and storied appellations. I do think of Zamyatin—who is forgotten to our society, but who was prescient to the disasters of the 20th Century that he lived in. We was a catalyst to the entire utopian and dystopian genres. (I have no doubt that my beloved Vigoleis also saw himself among this rabble.)

This is cause for alarm—and I see this in h0p3’s more dismayed dispatches from time to time—the world will not be kind to him. However, he is a heretic—we know this. He must do his work; it is too valuable.

I am wet with paranoid anticipation.

Sweating. Strange. Eager. A fork. I imagine him holding a fork. A big fork for grilling? No, a regular fork. Persperating. Eyes a-poppin. Veiny eyes. Saucer veiny eyes. Really sweet, sweet, shiny fingernails, right? Very eager. Heyooo!

Oh, wait. Wet, hahaha, forgot the best part, yeah, wet-t-t-t!

I’m trying to decide whether this codes as just IAWWPA or something more like just being ‘parawet’. THIS IS VALID HONEST WORK.

  1. A friend. What more do you need to know? ↩︎

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Fill Crawlers

Some notes on how I am using crawlers as I’m collecting links.

I’ve started dabbling in crawlers with two simple prototypes—these may not even be considered crawlers, but simple web fetchers or something like that—but I think of them as being (or becoming) fill crawlers. Most crawlers are out exploring the Web, discovering material and often categorizing them, given some kind of algorithm that determines relevancy. Here, I’m the one discovering and categorizing; the fill crawler only does the work of watching those pages, keeping me aware of other possibly relevant sites and notifying me when I need to update that link.

So, these crawlers are filling in the blanks for certain links. Filling in missing parts that aren’t editorial. This isn’t a crawler that is feeding the site’s visitors—it’s there for my utility.

For href.cool, the crawler isn’t really a crawler, given that it doesn’t do any exploring yet. It just updates screenshots, lets me know when links are broken and tracks changes over time. Eventually, I hope that it will keep snapshots of some of those pages and help me find neighboring links.

Anyway, I’ve had that crawler since the beginning and it will stay rather limited since it’s for personal use.

For indieweb.xyz, I’ve started a crawler that’s also for keeping the links updated. Yeah, I want to know when something is 404 and keep the comment counts updated. But I also want to get better comment counts by spidering out to see the links that are in the chain. This crawler allows indieweb.xyz to stay updated even if Webmentions don’t continue to come in from that link.

I think the thing that excites me the most about this crawler is that I’d like it to start understanding hypertext beyond the Indieweb. I’m hoping it can begin to index TiddlyWikis or dat:// links, so that they can participate. I’d really like TiddlyWiki users to have more options to broadcast that doesn’t require plugins or much effort—they should remain focused on writing.

Both of these projects are focused on trying to help the remaining denizens of straight-up Web hypertext find each other, without it functioning like another social network that becomes the center of attention. To me, rather than giving the crawler the power to filter and sort all these writings, it simply acts as a voracious reader that looks for key signifier that all of normal readers/linkers are looking for anyway. (Such as links in a comment chain or tags that reveal categories.)

That’s all I have to say at the moment. I mostly put this out here so that people out there will know how these sites work—and to connect with other people (like Brad Enslen and Joe Jennett) who are doing cataloging work, to keep that discussion going.

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Normal Horoscopes

Weekly horoscopes that are genuinely invigorating and now I know what to do with my powdered nun corpses.

This feels related to some of the surrealist links that I’m beginning to explore—this is a Tumblr of imaginative horoscopes that has totally drawn me in. Half of what I link to are personal blogs that are confessional or kind of, I don’t know, internally exploratory; some of you might think that a blog like this isn’t very personal—it’s just humor, or maybe even could be thought of as externally exploratory.

However, I view this as a kind of prism into the author’s internal life and can be quite personal as you dig in. The author here is CARETAKER—Dane Asmund, who has a number of interesting projects—such as the Cosmic Mirror Games RPG and DOGS the gaem.

Scorpio: Nothing will ever be the same, the march of time is impossible to stop and boy is that a bummer.

Capricorn: Nobody likes crowds, so that tear gas grenade was for everyones benefit.

Cancer: Careful not to become consumed by the things you struggle with, it is easy to mistake the work for the reward.

Anyway, this has me on the prowl for more zodiac blogs—and for intriguing Tumblrs, to some extent—such as The Creature’s Cookbook, where an anthropophagic cryptid goes to blog.

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02 Mar 2019

Reply: Link Log: Clean It

h0p3

Oddly enough, my favorite part of this site is just the background. Love the balls, and I wish the web moved back to it.

Got damn generosity! Can’t believe you went through all these links, brother. I was watching this go down many weeks ago and just in awe. I mean it’s taken years to collect these links. Now you’re slamming them down like cans of baked beans.

You passed off a bunch of the zine and lit mag stuff to k0sh3k. This got me to pay closer attention to her wiki. Friend-o, I think I’ve bailed on yours to read hers. It’s a trove!

20 May, 2018: Today, h0p3 was wrong… He claimed I had a list of 11 books for him to read, but I only had 10. I even told him there were only 10 on the list, but he was quite sure there were 11. There are only 10, though.

This is XD. Love her quotes collection—it rivals yours. I appreciate the papers she links to, and I’ve liked discovering things like John Ayliff’s site and the Dante’s Inferno Topography. Tell her I’d be interesting in seeing more of her fiction recommendations—not just novels, but any short stories or poems she’s encountered.

(Actually, for both of you: what would you add to href.cool—like given everything else I’ve linked to, what notable omissions are there??)

Oh and I am most intrigued (and grateful) for her pages on homeschooling. For me, this is an ideal. I don’t work in public school because I feel it’s an ideal—it’s just the common experience, so it’s very important. But if every kid could have the freedom to learn at home and have the guidance of their parents—man, that is a dream. I do follow a similar schedule to hers during the summer with my kids. (I must highly recommend Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind—this book is not some tips-and-tricks book, it backs you out from all that to look at wtf we’re doing. I would bet it’ll confirm some things for her.)

I also love that she says “blargle” just like you. Come on—she writes it in the same way with the same letters. It hits with the same quality.

Feels weird that I’m addressing you rather than her. I figure that if she wants to reply on her wiki, then it’ll be a real conversation. Otherwise, you can just pass on my sentiments. (This is one of the interesting things about this format where we’re openly conversing—not on a forum or on an e-mail list, but just by loose association on the web—this isn’t a conversation where I can sense who’s in on it. Compare this with some of the conversations that your bookwyrm has had lately—with people dropping in and chatting her face off from time to time. She can choose to read this on her own time, listen to it or ignore it, maybe continue it. That such an advantage and I will gladly trade that for the uncertainty of whether it actually ever reaches her.

I also feel a bit like I end up talking about you and Sphyg and the other self-modelers out there, without considering that this is a family effort for you all. And your whole house is doing a bang-up job showing how to participate in each other’s lives in this way.

Can you tell me—am I okay to link to the other wikis in your family? Like on href.cool and on my home page? I feel like they are designed to be a bit more private, but perhaps I’ve invented that.

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So, as a result of the work Chris has been doing in Wordpress, making it easier to post to Indieweb.xyz, I’ve started “rolling up” all the posts by each user on the home page. I’m just trying this to see how it feels. I’m going to try quite a lot of things over the next few months. Let me know what works for you.

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09 Feb 2019

Reply: To All the Bizarre Corners

Hey, glad you opened this tear in the hrefs—I love what you’ve got going here! Yours is just the sort of blog I live for. The badges are fly. (Posted about them on HrefHunt!.)

You mention you have a personal wiki on your blog—is it hidden? I collect links to those. But also understand if its hidden. Keep it on the downlow, keep it discreet.

Your modular synth is a feast for the eyes. It’s like NASA Mission Control if it were made from marker and wood. Damn—going to try to find a place for this on href.cool.

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Reply: Godzilla

Eli Mellen

I’ve got a quick confession: I love Godzilla. This post encompasses all the things I like about Godzilla. You’ve got some cultural production stuff, you’ve got climate and ecology stuff, with a smattering of socio-political stuff all wrapped up in a rubber dino-monster suit. What isn’t to like!?

I am lockstep with you, man. I love Godzilla—love the sound the thing makes. The closer it gets to the wail of tearing metal the better. Love the waggly-eyed floppy version that waddles through the harbor in Shin Godzilla. Love the rigid linear path of the original. Love the lasers out of the back and such.

It gets a little like Power Rangers with the King Ghidorah stuff—which is amazing!! But I prefer even stuff like the U.S. version where the camera can’t seem to get the whole thing on tape and there’s just these shadows stalking through the mist.

I don’t know if the article is suggesting this, but I don’t think Godzilla has become unmoored from its origins. I love it because of its history—and most fans I meet know the history. I didn’t experience the bombing, but it’s horrific to me. (I have witnessed a horrific accident that was like an atomic bomb to me. And I think even one who experiences horror can’t completely internalize it—the whole scene is still left to the imagination and to the psyche—the moment is a flash.)

Great article—this might land in href.cool. If so, I’ll leave a ‘via’ for you.

Really appreciate these thorough linklogs. I’m way into these. Love Robbe-Grillet, too. Djinn was a favorite. Not recommending it to anyone, though.

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Joe’s Syndicated Links Considered ‘Spam’ By Some Mastodon Instance

I actually kind of understand this—only because I think Mastodon is at odds with the Indieweb.

After only eight posts syndicated to Mastodon, Joe Jenett—who I really respect as a linklogger—he’s one of my main links on the right-hand side of my home page—has been removed from their public timelines. I’m not trying to stir up controversy and say that this is the wrong call—posts syndicated to messaging platforms can look like noise to them—but I think it’s good to talk about what’s up here.

Toot.cafe

The problem (from the Indieweb point of view) is that the Mastodon public timeline (toot.cafe pictured at left) is a place to participate in the overall conversation—that instance’s inside jokes and tags. So it has a somewhat narrow view of what’s ‘relevant’—it expects some degree of participation.

However, I see that Eli Mellen is also active on Mastodon and does some syndicating there—although I don’t think it’s automatic. It looks like he does it by hand.

Which is something I’ve noticed as I’ve been syndicating to Twitter. Some posts just get mangled in the conversion and look more like noise than actual participation. I start to feel like I’m syndicating to a random forum where I’m still a foreigner. It feels like senseless self-promotion, rather than when I syndicate to IndieNews because I have something that fits the topic.

(As an aside, it might be interesting to start a Mastodon instance that basically acts like micro.blog. It’s for syndication, but also feels like a community where you go to find other blogs. Huh—this could work.)

It’s possible that Joe just found the wrong instance for his stuff—perhaps someone out there can give him some advice on that. I tend to think, though, that this does somewhat show that Mastodon is still a type of walled garden. It wants its own original ‘content’ so that it can be the center of the conversation.

This situation feels a bit gross, though, because you wish that the friction wasn’t there. That Mastodon could be another asset for hypertexters. Seems like another case of Wars of Conflicting Webs. Or maybe it is an asset—and it just has a narrow aim. It’s difficult because sometimes it feels like it’s positioned itself as more of a protocol than a Twitter replacement. I dunno—what’s the take here?

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Going through the recent Hacker News thread and Twitter, scanning for new personal blogs and websites—excavating some great stuff: HrefHunt! I really dig christine.website. It’s a good day.

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06 Feb 2019

Reply: Migrating Comments to Micro.Blog

Brad Enslen

Okay, I added the Webmention.io codes to the footer on Micro.blog. I don’t really have ready access to the header space. We’ll see if this works and if the codes will work from the footer. It takes Micro.blog some time to update changes so I’m just going to let things set for a bit while that footer updates.

That’s not going to work—for a number of reasons. For one, I forgot that micro.blog already stores your Webmentions. I think, though, that if you can either provide a dump of your Wordpress Webmentions or put your old ‘ramblinggit’ up at another URL, it should be possible to get micro.blog to store all of them.

What I’m thinking is that I’d take all the URLs for those Webmentions and feed them all into micro.blog—as if I was sending the Webmentions from those different blogs. Micro.blog should then verify all the Webmentions on the original blogs and store fresh copies. This could work better than an import—because sometimes HTML gets mangled when importing from one blog engine to another.

As long as I can get a complete list of those Webmention URLs, it should only take a few minutes to feed them all in to micro.blog.

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Reply: Ramblin’ Git Rambles Off

Brad Enslen

After #3 above. I’d like to import my comments from Wordpress into that third party comments do-hickey. I really hated losing those comments in the migration. There were some long comments by others that were brilliant and some long threads. That was a high toll to pay, but maybe reversible.

I wonder if you could import into Webmention.io? I just love that all my interactions are stored there and it can easily be hooked up to a new blog or imported/exported elsewhere.

Actually—I’m sure you could! I might take a stab at this, if you’re interested.

Oh also wanted to say that none of my links to you seem broken. So that’s cool!

Can’t wait to hear how this goes for you wrt Wordpress vs. Micro.blog. I also wonder if you could map out your ideal blogging platform at some point. Where you’d like to see things go… Or have you already posted that line of thinking somewhere?

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05 Feb 2019

Reply: Eli’s Pastel Bubbles

Eli Mellen

Also, are they gonna make a 3rd National Treasure movie? I’m ready for it.

Ooooeeee!

Hoooaaaa! This site is lookin might fine, Eli. Total La Croix vibe. Or maybe the carpet at a laser tag place. The posts are long like elegant grocery receipts.

Don’t know if the world can handle a third National Treasure. Don’t know if it deserves another one. Wouldn’t be surprised if they filmed three sequels but had to shelve them until some future age. People just aren’t into rare coins and the Continental Congress like they could be.

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25 Jan 2019

Reply to BeachPackaging

Hey, this was a good read. And I think your blog exemplifies moving away from ‘big attention’. Covering a niche inherently disqualifies it from the mainstream—although occassionally things like Primitive Technology become somewhat mainstream. Thank you for the interesting links you’re providing!

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Unboxing ‘Celestine’ on Mr.Kapowski

I really like the gallery thumbnail blog post that Chris has going here. His “K” theme for Wordpress seems very important to me. The most difficult part of the Indieweb is the microformats—and more templates like this will help things become more robust. (Because someone could base their own templates on “K”.)

Also, Jacky Alcine’s work on Koype is exciting. We know the Indieweb needs better software—everyone talks about this. But also: the more choices we have, the less the Indieweb will become a massive silo. (Which I worry about micro.blog becoming, if it becomes the de facto Indieweb hosting service. Which it probably already is!)

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Reply: Should We Pool?

Joe Jenett

Since 1997, Ive spent, on average, about 4 hours per day grinding away on my web linking projects, which also included coolstop.com (daily site reviews) from 10/1997 thru 9/2010. I cant conceive of the notion of waiting for links to come to me, which leads me to the other part of your comment.

Ok, interesting—yeah, I’d agree, hunting can suck up hours of time. And, yeah, if you are spending four hours per day, I’m not going to keep up, since I’m lucky to get in four hours per week.

Glad for your honest reason. Very glad for ‘brutal’ honesty—to just have your thoughts succinctly, rather than to beat around the bush for three months.

What I mean to say is that I’m not looking to combine my efforts with yours (or vice-versa). We’ve already shared knowledge and our enthusiasm for the medium and our love for linking—that’s sure to be an ongoing (enjoyable) thing. But pooling our knowledge, or collaborating between sites on some type of joint effort is different than simply communicating between sites, and between us, in my mind.

Right—I don’t mean to say that we’re going to just merge our sites together—although I did discuss trying to be clear about link-finding strategies, which borders on a trade secret I suppose. (Especially where you’ve been doing this for several decades.) And I am happy to rescind that request—I’m not trying to steal your strategy, even if I am planning to clearly lay out mine.

But let’s back up: I think we must have a fundamentally different view of where the Web is today. (imho) Link-finding has changed dramatically from the early days of the Web. Back then, everything was a link. The whole landscape was personal home pages, web comics, and niche forums. Magellan-level exploration.

Today, the Web we’re inhabiting is a niche. There is very little growth out here by comparison. Surely, there is still an infinite landscape to explore, but much of it is ad-ridden, startup- or software-focused. ‘Bloggers’ are moving toward ‘influencers’. When people talk about ‘the blogs’, they think about pundits, TMZ-type Paparazzi and minor celebrities. The rest of blogging has become an extension of Pinterest: personal recipe and home decor blogs dominate.

The ‘Indieweb’/‘Indie Web’ is a niche like vinyl collectors. It won’t ever achieve mainstream significance again. When I talk to meatspace friends about The Web, they look at it as a quaint little city that doesn’t really offer them anything new. And the only thing I can appeal to is a type of idealism: aesthetic and political idealism.

So, whereas link-finding use to be the essential task of mapping out the frontier, our new task is different: to broadcast the location of our outpost so that the holdouts who are still blogging and the wanderers, who happen to be drawn to experiment with a blog, know where we are.

I really think that an important part of our work will be to lay out how we link-find—not so that newcomers can just copy the technique—but so that they know where we’re looking. If we’re looking at tags on Pinboard, then they know where to post on Pinboard. If we’re sharing on certain hashtags on Twitter, then they know. In the past, this might have caused those channels to be oversatured—but I really don’t think spam will be our problem. Our problem is survival.

Of course, we wish the old days would return. But the future will be better, somehow. I just don’t think it will inhabit The Web again.

If you disagree or roll your eyes at any of this—no problem, no problem whatsoever. The invitation is soft—no need to get involved with anything. Focus on your work. (Fantastic work!) I just hope that my efforts won’t be upsetting you in some way. I’d rather be of a benefit, if that can possibly be the case.

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23 Jan 2019

Reply: New Duds

Joe Jenett

Here’s a little sneak preview of a redesign I just started working on.

This has been cool to watch—you’ve managed to bring over all your old links, everything looks good—and we can now crosstalk directly on your pointers pages and blog entries. This is great!

It’s funny—I stumbled across the VISUAL OBSERVER link around the same time as you. I think we’re both plundering a lot of the same tags and users on Pinboard. This has made me want to pool our link-finding knowledge, in the hopes of discovering where we’re being redundant and where we might want to venture out further. (I need to make a list of my main discovery avenues.)

To what degree do you grind away, looking for links? Or do you wait for them to come to you?

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Reply to BeachPackaging

Haha! (Re: self-sabotage.) See, I would think that a ‘good for business’ effort would be entirely ‘social’ these days. In my hunting, there are many defunct smaller blogs—only the larger ones have survived a decade. (Or perhaps you can point me to others like yours?)

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22 Jan 2019

Reply: Obtaining Dehydrated Water

Ron

I wonder whether the preppers have triggered a run on Dehydrated Water?

I hope not—I would very much like some myself…

(Also, to anyone who is enjoying Box Vox, the author got in contact via Twitter.)

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Reply to BeachPackaging

It’s a pleasure to meet you! I’m quite in awe of the formidable breadth of your blog—and amazed that you have kept it so full of personality and fervor. Can I ask: how have you been able to keep Box Vox going so strong for TWELVE years??

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Box Vox

Where does one put company blogs?

I confess to having many sour feelings for capitalism—so I don’t ever link to company blogs, out of a kind of disgust. But I am trying to do better: I can’t let those feelings turn into yet another kind of misanthropy. Here I’ve found a splendid blog about packaging design that has been running since 2007, authored by Randy Ludacer.

It’s difficult to gauge the obscurity of a blog, but this one seems to have few comments and few incoming links, given its age. Perhaps it is quite prestigious in some circle out of sight—well deserved, if so. It is a trove of exquisite shapes and diagrams. The author has a true passion for the crafting of cans and boxes. The age of this blog has also paid off—many of its posts go several levels deep with an investigation.

Nearly every post has something good. A sampling to start with:

FURTHERMORE: Randy has an album of Songs About Packaging? This is above and beyond, mate.

This 7 song CD is part of larger project, partly funded by COAHSI-(Council on the Arts & Humanities on Staten Island)-including a live performance at the former Staten Island landfill, now Freshkills Park.

My god—I think Charlie McAlister would get a kick out this! Freshkills Park!

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'The splinter group on the other hand, the Agama Expedition, is more eclectic as it combines surrealist games and creativity (and a group exhibition) with anarchist activism, makes a brief plunge into Romanticism, considers situationist theory; and it takes part in another part of the surrealist movement, the “dissident networks” flourishing this decade, thereby eventually merging with the “Dunganon” activity in Skåne, before fading out together.`

— p.2, EXPERIENCE.pdf, 2010

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18 Jan 2019

Reply: Future Directories, Future Webrings

Brad Enslen

What is swirling around in my head is some sort of fusion of NowNowNow, Microcast.club and webmentions like href.cool can send, plus a conventional directory script for those backend admin tools.

There was a similar train of thought in the thread we were having with Dave Weiner, Don Park and Greg McVerry some time ago. It kind of got lost, but I had a similar webring-like idea for the Ad-Free Blog website. (Which is no longer around, as of last month, it seems.)

I’ve been wondering if they could do a similar thing with http://www.adfreeblog.org/ - a ‘general’ blog community could be established around a simple ideal like that.

Might look like this:

  • A blog links to adfreeblog.org on their home page.
  • Adfreeblog.org notices visitors coming from that page and checks that page for the link and the image.
  • If found, it adds the blog to a directory, using the meta description and keyword tags.

The adfreeblog.org home page then becomes a directory of the community. So, kind of like a webring, but actually organized. With Twitter cards and such floating in the metadata, it is probably much easier to extrapolate a good directory entry.

As you say, the “mandatory reciprocal link” is not something you’re comfortable with—but I think it has its uses. I have no care in the world whether any of the sites I link to at href.cool ever link back to me (in fact, I’d prefer if they would just keep doing what they’re doing) but I think a directory that’s trying to provide a more census-like approach could really use this strong, two-way link.

I think it would be really cool to have an emergent directory where everyone self-categorizes. You get to be in one category—where do you put yourself? And, yeah, have a bit of moderation in there to weed out spam. It would likely be very difficult to sort through its problems—but it would be fun to try. (The Indieweb.xyz blog directory is as close as I’m going to get to that effort for the present.)

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Reply: Grant Richmond: My New Posting Workflow

Chris McLeod

This looks really cool. I’m not a fan of Gutenberg yet (and can’t use it anyway, due to the Post-Kinds plugin), but I do like the idea of a “blocks” editor, and Grant’s implementation looks really nice.

Just wanted to say that I’m enjoying the stuff you’re sharing on Indieweb.xyz! The ‘boots’ quote the other day. A nice contribution to the book quotes sub.

You mentioned having some difficulty with my scraper getting identified as a malicious bot or something—any idea why I might be triggering Wordpress in that way? I can train it better.

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PLUNDER THE ARCHIVES

This page is also at kickssy42x7...onion and on hyper:// and ipns://.

MOVING ALONG LET'S SEE MY FAVORITE PLACES I NO LONGER LINK TO ANYTHING THATS VERY FAMOUS

glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.

jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.

maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.

hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.

yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.

surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).

fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.

constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy

indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.

nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.

true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.

chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.

neil c. "some..."

the world or cate le bon you pick.

all my other links are now at href.cool.