- China is building an AI supercomputer network in space
- hermits who became medieval celebrities
- the new rules of subculture (podcast with the author of ANTIMEMETICS, which I’ve pre-ordered)
Category: marks
- Leos Carax is making a new film (with Adam Driver and Lea Seydoux), all hail
- ten themes from the Venice Architecture Biennale. Gorgeous photos:
This is also where I do a search and find out Parfrey died nearly ten years ago. I knew nothing about him beyond having admired his book APOCALYPSE CULTURE back circa 1990. The article is a weird read.
Comments closed- The Fyre Festival of romantasy BookTok (that’s a lot of memeologisms in one phrase)
- yes memeologist is a word now
- Finding Your One Thing and Becoming Who You Are
- Radio Utopia and other pirate radio stations of the past
IShowSpeed Gets Uploaded by EDGLRD
“If EDGLRD’s aesthetics could be boiled down into brain rot lingo, it might be that they find joy in the idea that the flavour profile of a single Dorito would have fatal implications on a Victorian child. Where other cultural observers see Speed’s content as over-injected with processed ingredients, EDGLRD sees a fellow risk-taker who opts out of 2025’s boring-dystopia, nostalgia-porn culture.”
umbrella, bicycle, sewing machine
May 15, 2025 at 04:02PM
Comments closedThis spring’s mens colours are apparently “please don’t notice or deport me”
Guess the boom boom memo didn’t make it too far.
Kind of wonder if there’s not some low-key semiotic shriek at padlock jewellery coming back, too.
Comments closedMilwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing.
SHADOW TICKET, a new Thomas Pynchon novel. Sounds a little like it’s operating in the AGAINST THE DAY space.
CONNECTED:
Comments closedThe UK government is developing a “murder prediction” programme which it hopes can use personal data of those known to the authorities to identify the people most likely to become killers.
Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.
The scheme was originally called the “homicide prediction project”, but its name has been changed to “sharing data to improve risk assessment”. The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it “chilling and dystopian”.
One of those Torment Nexus moments where apparently nobody said “should we really create the pound-shop version of Minority Report?”
Comments closedComments closedA new study uses digital tools to analyze nearly 1,000 Syriac manuscripts from the British Library, focusing on how scribes and editors selected and rearranged parts of texts—a practice known as excerpting. Researcher Noam Maeir introduces a new measurement called Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) to track how often this happened. This approach reveals that the people who copied and compiled these manuscripts were not just preserving texts—they were actively shaping what future generations would read and remember.
By highlighting these editorial choices, the study shifts attention away from authors alone and shows that scribes played a key role in organizing knowledge, adapting texts for new purposes, and influencing how Syriac literary culture developed over time.
What Syriac scribes chose to keep: A digital dive into 1,000 manuscripts