people still get in my mentions a lot about the possibilities of [clean nfts for education] or the [next big proof of, idk, trying to tie coin ownership to tree planting or w/e] and here's the thing; the financialization of the world is simply not- and never will be- a good thing even looking past the baseline criticisms of these claims (and there are many- ecowashing, laundering money, these are scams, you can't ever fully unbuckle from PoW, they reward the rich, etc, etc) and taking the idea of clean, socially directed, ethical crypto as possible;

while the main takeaway here is cops are scum and social media is surveillance, i've been thinking a lot about the kinds of "fun internet tools" like thispersondoesnotexist that are weaponized- often instantly- by bad actors

https://twitter.com/caro1inehaskins/status/1479145991936913413

technologies like face generation exist without the friendly interface of tools like thispersondoesnotexist, and yes, the power to make fake avatars would still be available to police if it wasn't wrapped in a website. however

been revisiting Ursula Franklin's the Real World of Technology lectures from 1989 and they're just such a compelling framework for discussing technologies and their operations on and through human society archive.org/details/the-re… listening to them is wild because the field simply did not adopt her framework of work vs control technologies or holistic vs prescriptive technologies BUT I SURE WISH IT HAD they're WILD and extremely useful, even when in practice the boundaries are often blurred to obfuscation

something i think about a lot is how the closest mass transit to where i live is a grayhound station 73 miles away

https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1467928177787998208

there is a real love for- and dependence on- vehicles here because to not have one is to lose connection on your own terms to healthcare, entertainment, groceries, work, and other people

web3 is silly for lots of reasons but among them is it is questionable if you could even have individual ownership over abstract objects in an truly decentralized value system once ownership is supposed to be something beyond "a thing i carry around with my body" what you need to hold that up is a state- or collective-backed understanding of what it means to own something abstract

i think a lot about how the conditions of rapid climate change mean living a human life in a geologic timescale and how absolutely scary that can be its one thing to know that there used to be an ocean here because the rocks are made of marine limestone and you get little fossils when you dig out the garden. and its another to watch the water come in the front door

something i hear a lot re: endtimes is "if shit hits the fan i'll just tap out, i'm not made for the apocalypse" but that isn't how collapse works. it is slow and plodding and despite moments of specific calamity many people just keep going, even as things keep getting harder? this feeling has got to be familiar because we're well in it? like even the "best-case" scenario of late stage capitalism + climate collapse, even in the richest country in the world, is going to be brutal *and truly it already is*

went to the reddit thread it see what was above 0:00:09 (it's "repeat until timer ends") and the comments have an equally dystopian solution to skip the mandated Savoring time, which is apparently to bring a printed out barcode of a period and scan it every time this pops up

https://twitter.com/msainat1/status/1390784754434199554

remembering this worker verification from an amazon mechanical turk HIT a couple years ago

i hope people understand that the ecological cost of crypto is not an ‘unfortunate side effect’ but is instead the very means by which it claims value at all proof of work- which, despite lots of talk of alternatives is the only schema in place at scale- places a direct lien against the future. it is a luxury good- it says, i will burn this resource for no reason except to turn it into an investment.

ok if you're craving neon future without the transphobia and crunch here is the thread

starting with DIARIES OF A SPACEPORT JANITOR
this game slaps. incinerate trash. get lost in the spaceport. you want gender? it comes from a vending machine. be haunted

tinybuild.itch.io/diaries-of-a-s… next up, A MIND FOREVER VOYAGING.

still relevant all the way from 1985. play PRISM, the world's first sentient computer caught in a decades-long simulation. you can play it emulated in the browser for FREE, whats more cyberpunk than that: archive.org/details/msdos_…

every few years i email neopets support asking if they can help me log into my childhood account and (unsurprisingly, tiny team, millions of old accounts) i've never heard back my childhood neopets account recovery was on an email address i haven't had in decades, which was linked to my father's long-defunct aol account. i also used some fake birthday to access the age-limited forums (which you have to provide) so i figured i was locked out for good

while we're talking about internet backbones - do y'all know the story of the 1998 "test" of DNS namespace instigated by Jon Postel? okay so Jon Postel was one of those old-school internet guys who were mostly posted up in California. he was around for a lot of ARPAnet and TCP/IP stuff in the 60s and 70s, first as a grad student then a postdoc. classic weirdo professor afaik

i have a new project launching today at thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/digit…

its a browser-based cycle of thousands of videos curated and altered from a machine-learning dataset. each is slowed down, interpolated, and upscaled immensely, one flowing into another (it plays in an iframe over a companion essay from Adam Milner and the right of the site, so you can leave them playing as you browse & read, or full-screen it on a second monitor)

i built a tool for quickly scrubbing metadata from images and selectively blurring faces and identifiable features. it runs on a phone or computer, and doesn't send info anywhere.

process your images so that you and others are safe:

everestpipkin.github.io/image-scrubber/ (also - i built this in about 24 hours and the code is /messy/- i'll keep fixing it and cleaning things up, but i'm actively soliciting bug reports ! especially if you're on android)

🌫🌫🌫

many ways to make an island

an (ongoing) thread of physical map generation games

🌫🌫🌫 1: memory palace (for one):

> get a piece of paper
> remember all the places you have lived: try to visualize their layouts
> draw a top-down floorplan of the first bedroom you can remember, especially marking the doors

last weekend i made this short, gamelike piece of hypertext / hypermedia for #speculationjam

everestpipkin.itch.io/gift-game

its a brief synthesis of a lot of recent reading and thinking about what the internet could be, and maybe, with work, will be like so many of us, i can't imagine an internet shaped like this in the future

this is partly because- does this ungainly, physical, VC-backed thing actually survive energy scarcity + climate collapse? and, yeah

but also because i'm truly convinced we can build something better

okay so last week i posted a rundown of my intro class from the fall semester (thread here- >

https://twitter.com/everestpipkin/status/1207502480042536960

), but now i want to get into my advanced elective, Data Gardens.

~

the class syllabus / website: everestpipkin.github.io/datagardens/
student work: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students… Data Gardens was the first class i've designed from the ground up, where the skillsets and tools and metrics of success were all up to me, rather than required by the department. this was both a total gift and a real challenge! teaching is no joke

i've wrapped my first semester as a professor! i'm so impressed with my students and all the work they've made

partly for me + partly for others, i thought i'd do a brief post-mortem on my classes, starting w Introduction to Interactivity (syllabus -> everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/) EMSII is a (required!) creative coding class. all art undergrads take it at CMU, so it has both the challenges + the rewards of teaching folks who often use very non-digital mediums. it can be hard to start from the ground up, but the work is sometimes really surprising and new

Houseplant thread incoming --- >

One of the biggest joys in my life right now is my moss gardens and I thought I'd share some info about keeping moss in your own home since its not a very common hobby or resource. Although moss can be particular, it is not a bad houseplant! It tolerates low light levels and can generally come back from some pretty rough conditions and all around is pretty badass.