Michael Sippey

a pandemic of selfies

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 14:25:00 -0800

Specialist insurer Hiscox has reported a trend of selfie-taking visitors damaging valuable paintings, objects, and installations by walking into them backward. … Hiscox’s head of art and private clients, Robert Read, dubbed the phenomenon “a pandemic of selfies,” as the consequences are happening at prominent art institutions across the globe.

Emphasis mine, because “a pandemic of selfies” is the perfect collective noun.

the surface you paint on

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Emanuel Derman in WITI on watercolor technique, but not really…

The surface you paint on determines what you can achieve.

torturing poets

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 23:34:00 -0800

Of course The New York Times sought out actual poets who would comment on the title of the upcoming Taylor Swift album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” Some loved it! Some were worried about the whole “tortured” typecasting thing! And one even likened Taylor to Wordsworth!

But this 35 word sentence towards the end of the piece floored me.

Some hoped that Ms. Swift’s next era would increase interest in American poetry, a precarious market for academics in real-life poetry departments — usually subsumed by English departments, which themselves face existential threats — across the country.

There’s a lot going on here. It kicks off with the classic indefinite subject (“Some”), and then pins a massive subordinate clause on “hoped” and then twists and turns through…the politics of academia?

My brain hurt trying to deconstruct it all, so I did what any diehard Swift fan / long lost English major would do: I went to Chat GPT and asked it to diagram this sentence.

Alas, GPT-4 was sort of cantankerous, and while it did a lovely job explaining different parts of grammar, it wasn’t terribly helpful in actually drawing anything.

While I can’t draw this visually here, imagine the main clause as the top line of your diagram, with each additional element branching off below it according to its function in the sentence. Each level of the diagram would represent a different layer of complexity within the sentence, from the main clause at the top to the most detailed modifiers and descriptive elements at the bottom.

OK! Yes! That’s what I was imagining!

For actual diagramming, drawing software or a pen and paper would be best to accurately represent these relationships visually.

Oh…OK, sure.

Thank goodness for the marketplace of ideas, because it turns out that Bard is an excellent sentence diagrammer. It spat out an ASCII representation of the sentence diagram in Reed-Kellogg format (full text here, image pasted below), as well as a very detailed description of what’s going on in this sentence.

Main Clause: The main clause of the sentence is “Some hoped,” which establishes the basic subject-verb relationship. “Some” acts as the indefinite subject, and “hoped” is the past tense verb.

Subordinate Clause: The clause “that Ms. Swift’s next era would increase interest in American poetry” modifies the verb “hoped.” It functions as an adverbial clause, providing more context about the object of hope.

Subject: “Ms. Swift’s next era” acts as the subject of the subordinate clause. The possessive construction “Ms. Swift’s” indicates ownership of the “era.”

Verb: “Would increase” is the modal verb combined with the base verb “increase,” expressing a conditional possibility.

Object: “Interest in American poetry” is the direct object of the verb “increase.” The prepositional phrase “in American poetry” clarifies what is being increased.

Appositive Phrase: The phrase “a precarious market for academics in real-life poetry departments” serves as an appositive to “American poetry,” providing additional information and clarification about its nature.

Adjective: “Precarious” modifies “market,” describing its uncertain and unstable nature.

Prepositional Phrase: “For academics in real-life poetry departments” clarifies who is affected by the precariousness of the market.

Preposition: “For” indicates the beneficiaries or recipients of the precarious market.

Noun Phrase: “Academics in real-life poetry departments” specifies the group facing the precarious market conditions.

Noun: “Academics” refers to the people working in the field.

Prepositional Phrase: “In real-life poetry departments” restricts the type of academics to those specifically associated with poetry departments, excluding theoretical or purely literary-focused academics.

Participial Phrase: The phrase “usually subsumed by English departments” modifies “poetry departments,” providing further context about their status.

Participle: “Subsumed” is the past participle of the verb “subsume,” indicating an action that has already happened.

Prepositional Phrase: “By English departments” clarifies who is doing the subsuming.

Relative Clause: The clause “which themselves face existential threats” modifies “English departments,” adding another layer of information.

Subject: “English departments” acts as the subject of the relative clause.

Verb: “Face” is the present tense verb indicating an ongoing situation.

Object: “Existential threats” is the direct object of the verb “face.”

Reflexive Pronoun: “Themselves” emphasizes that the English departments are facing the threats directly.

Adverbial Phrase: The phrase “across the country” modifies the verb “increase,” specifying the geographical scope of the potential rise in interest.

I hope this more detailed explanation clarifies the sentence’s structure and the relationships between its parts!

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, tortured poets. April 19. Can’t wait.

radical statement

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 16:50:00 -0800

Anil Dash:

Being able to say, “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

it's a fucking nightmare

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

M.G. Siegler, Unchoking the Web:

It is absolutely not enjoyable to visit many websites of today. Especially content-focused websites which have become an absolute cesspool of obnoxious ads which at best distract from and often outright block the content. And that’s if you can get the pages to load, which is a chore in and of itself because of all the scripts these pages are running to be able to glean more insight so as to get more information to serve up said shitty ads. It’s a fucking nightmare.

Arc Search is currently my default mobile browser for three reasons:

It opens right to the search experience.
The “let’s make a web page for you” is a clever solution to a real problem that M.G. so correctly outlines.
The whole experience is just delightful.

bobby koons

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 22:52:00 -0800

Somehow I missed Andy Baio’s post from May of last year, The Unhinged Miniature World of Bobby Fingers. As usual I’m late to this party.

If you haven’t seen them before, Bobby Fingers makes elaborate 1:9 scale dioramas depicting embarrassing moments in the lives of famous men, showing off his talents in model-making with a range of techniques from Bronze Age wax casting to modern 3D laser scanning.

But I discovered Mr. Fingers’ work today, thanks to Kevin Kelly’s tip in Recomendo, who calls them “Dada YouTube.”

His long videos are masterpieces of meticulous art craftsmanship, elaborate prank puzzles, indie music, deadpan comedy, all disguised as one of the best maker tutorials I’ve ever seen. It is very hard to describe their obsessive weirdness and elegant absurdity.

Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama is the best place to start, but Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama deserves a spot in the contemporary canon alongside Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles.

books finished, jan 2024

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 11:36:00 -0800

I’ve been reading a lot; here’s a ranked list of books I finished in January, with one pertient highlight pulled from each. Thank God for Readwise or I probably wouldn’t remember a thing.

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by William Eggington

The soul or consciousness, in fact, is nothing but the unity of a sense of self over time, the bare fact that to perceive and then to articulate our perceptions something must connect from this very instant to another, and another after that. This connecting of disparate slices of space-time is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowing anything at all, but it is not itself a thing in space and time, a thing that survives our existence on Earth.

Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, by Neil Theise

You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, Planck moment by Planck moment. This very body and mind, this very heart and soul is the transcendent reality. It was never somewhere else, something we had to reach for or travel to; it was just this body in just this moment.

The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner

Stop, I interrupted, just stop for a second, John, and listen. Listen to the wind in the birches, a stream of alephs, the room tone of the forest, sirens in the distance, folk music, unnecessary but sufficient. I personally need cities at night, clear glass pavement, impurities, writing paper, all forming together an immense patchwork curtain. I’m listening now, John, Jack, Josh, Josiah, James. Tell me what you need.

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture, by Jenny Odell

The world is ending – but which world? Consider that many worlds have ended, just as many worlds have been born and are about to be born. Consider that there is nothing a priori about any of them. Just as a thought experiment, imagine that you were not born at the end of time, but actually at the exact right time, that you might grow up to be, as the poet Chen Chen writes, “a season from the planet / of planet-sized storms.” Hallucinate a scenario, hallucinate yourself in it. Then tell me what you see.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, by Heather Cox Richardson

The fundamental story of America is the constant struggle of all Americans, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities, to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our democracy come true. We are always in the process of creating “a more perfect union.”

Psych: The Story of the Human Mind, by Paul Bloom

Why would language make us better at thinking about other minds? The obvious theory is that engaging in linguistic communication conveys more and more information about the minds of other people. But a more radical theory is that it’s the structure of language that does the trick.70 The syntax of language allows for a superior understanding of how the world is seen by others.

The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, by Kyle Chayka

How do you find a way to live the life that you are born with and stake out a space for yourself in the tumultuous present?

links for mar 22 2023

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 12:30:00 -0700

Jacobin: We’re Still Living in Don DeLillo’s White Noise:

To consume is ultimately a passive experience: receiving something from outside the self. And our consumption is not limited to the products we decide to purchase. Without our choosing, we absorb what Jack calls “waves and radiation” — the chatter of television, the messages of advertising, the chemicals in the air and water. The control that we feel at the mall and the supermarket conceals our greater powerlessness against the white noise of consumer society. “The flow is constant,” says one of Jack’s colleagues. “Words, pictures, numbers, graphics, statistics, specks, particles, motes.”

Greil Marcus: A Brief History of Chez Panisse in Four Parts:

It would be a little French restaurant where people would meet, find inspiration, renew old friendships, establish new ones, talk, and discover. There would be work for people to do, and while it might barely pay the rent, it would be more fulfilling than any work they had done before. People would leave their tables with a feeling of surprise at how good something could taste. The way a peach or even a green salad could taste so fully of itself, as if it were both a thing and the idea of it, would suggest that other parts of life, outside the restaurant, could achieve the same rightness.

shit gets weird

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 23:59:00 -0700

Inspired by the conversation between Gruber and Kottke on The Talk Show, I kicked off a weekend project: a simple script that would cycle through my blog archives, extract every URL I’ve ever linked to, and then load them to see if those pages are still up. My hypothesis: more than 50% of the URLs linked to more than 10 years ago are gone, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics.

It’d been a while since I’d written any Ruby, so I fired up Chat GPT and asked it this prompt as a starting point:

can you help me write a ruby script that will loop through a folder of markdown documents in order to build a CSV with columns for date (pulled from YAML frontmatter), date (also pulled from YAML front matter) and URL, where each row in the table is every anchor HREF tag in the body of the document

And, of course, the response wasn’t perfect out of the box, but it was pretty damn good – and it included a description of how the script works! As I’ve been tweaking it, debugging regex bullshit, adding functionality (follow redirects, anyone?) my robot overlord has been with me all along the way, a patient teacher with perfect context of our whole conversation. And it will be there tomorrow when I pick this weekend project back up.

I know this isn’t exactly the freshest of news or the hottest of takes, but this is just a reminder that AI tech is making computers fun again. And when tech feels fun, tech has a high likelihood of getting weird. This shit’s gonna get really, really weird.

gecs, heads.

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Pitchfork gives the new 100 gecs record (10,000 gecs) an 8.2:

On the surface, gecs are the least serious group this side of early-’90s Ween, always game for a deceptively asinine good time. That the few samples on this album come from Cypress Hill, Scary Movie, and Lucasfilm, in the form of the THX Deep Note, tell you all you need to know: The internet is an earwig that has broken millennials’ brains. 10,000 gecs sounds like being hit in the face with pies for approximately 26 minutes, two best friends having the greatest time throwing all the dankest shit from their musical file cabinet at you while you accept your ridiculous fate.

I saw them last summer at Outside Lands, and though I’m not a millennial, they absolutely broke my brain in the best way possible.

On the other end of the spectrum, and something that feels a bit more age approprite, A24 announced that they’re releasing a newly restored 4K version of Jonathan Demme’s 1984 masterpiece, Stop Making Sense. It’s wild to rewind and read through a contemporaneous review of the film; here’s part of Pauline Kael’s take:

Byrne has a withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality, and though there’s something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun. He gives the group its modernism — the undertone of repressed hysteria, which he somehow blends with freshness and adventurousness and a driving beat. When he comes on wearing a boxlike “big suit” — his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys’ large suit of felt that hangs off a wall — it’s a perfect psychological fit. He’s a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.

Can’t wait to see this in theaters. Again.