Jeremy Keith

Humans did not invent art. It was the other way around | Aeon Essays

The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted.

Why We Like Things—Asterisk

A fascinating essay by Celine Nguyen on the history of taste; not changing tastes but the very concept of taste throughout history.

DOC • We used to log off

Seams!

Mark Weiser, the person who framed ubiquitous computing, never said the goal was seamless. He warned that making everything seamless is the same as making everything uniform, and he argued for seamful systems, ones that let each part remain itself. Chalmers and MacColl turned this into a full design position: questioning the assumption that seamlessness is a requirement, and arguing that visible seams can be useful, even appropriated by people for their own ends.

Michelle Barker | Little Websites Everywhere

Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads. Making fun websites, helpful websites, pointless websites (the best kind) that serve no purpose other than to manifest someone’s spark of creativity. Ignored by the lumbering giants that have gorged themselves into a stupor, keeping low under the radar of the hungry LLM crawlers eager to voraciously gobble up the last remaining crumbs of the free web.

Looking for something to do in Brighton this weekend? I’ve got ya covered.

Come to the excellent Prince Albert pub on Trafalger Street at 8pm on Saturday, September 5th. Head upstairs with your ticket. There you will be treated to an excellent triple bill.

First up is Figure In The Half Light AKA Charlie McConnochie:

Expect dreamy, fractured songs of dark and light.

Then it’s The Self Help Group:

Americana-influenced vocal harmonies, emotional tales and intertwining melodies.

The headliners are Salter Cane. Hey, that’s my band!

Johnny Cash meets Joy Division: that’s one attempt to describe the sound of the legendary post-punk folk-noir band from Brighton who are back with their new album, Deep Black Water.

Entry will be £10 on the door, but advance tickets are £8 so get yours now and I’ll see you on Saturday night!

CSS is Still Awesome • Jason Santa Maria

CSS finally gave the web its own grain.

And the real crazy part is that my bad decades-old code still renders fine in today’s latest web browsers! I would be sad if it didn’t, but I also wouldn’t be surprised. How is this stuff still backwards compatible!?

How much of your software from 20 years ago runs on your devices today

I try to see my friends Dan and Sue as often as I can. The problem is that I live in Brighton and they live in Baltimore (that’s Baltimore, Maryland not Baltimore, West Cork).

We sometimes make it work though. Like crossing the Atlantic together.

Dan and Sue were in Italy last week. Their son Rex was attending a mandolin academy in Acqui Terme as part of the terrific Mando for Kids programme. As a mandolin player myself, this very much aligned with my interests.

Jessica and I flew out to meet up with them and spend a lovely few days enjoying the Italian food, landscape, and culture. And I got to hear the magnificent sound of massed mandolins, tremeloing together to create lush waves of beautiful music.

Somehow I got roped into a little demo of Irish tunes on the mandolin. It was a bit nerve-wracking, and I totally flubbed some of the tunes, but the lovely audience was very forgiving and receptive.

What are we not talking about anymore? - Nerd

I try to keep on doing what I do in order to stay sane. I keep on teaching about the wonderful web to my students, even if nobody will ever hire a talented, creative, junior developer again. I keep on teaching about the consequences of the open web, even if it’s harder and harder to find anything open in this monopolised web anymore. And I do that because I still care.

An fuireachas le Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann

Ag fanacht…

Michelle Barker | In Praise of Libraries

For me, libraries are about books. Worlds undiscovered, ideas to devour. But they are so much more. For others they offer a lifeline. A place to learn, to connect with the community, to access vital resources. They have meant all these things to me over the years.

Remember when I wrote about a session I was at in Belfast where I was sitting next to a fiddler who it turned out had written a book and then I ended up reading the book? Quite an unusual occurrence, right? Definitely not the kind of thing that’s likely to happen twice (you can see where this is going…)

During the Fleadh, I went to quite a few sessions at Cumann Cultúrtha Mhic Reachtain. I ended up chatting to a fiddler named Rus from New Mexico. He told me about a book he had written twenty years previously about his time in Kerry coaching a basketball team and learning Irish music.

I had heard of this book! I can’t remember where exactly, but there aren’t that many books with a connection to traditional Irish music, so it’s no surprise that it was on my radar.

Anyway, Rus very kindly sent me a copy to read. It’s called Paddy On The Hardwood.

While it’s ostensibly a mix of basketball and trad, it’s actually about 90% basketball and 10% trad. But that 10% is great. Rus was learning from the late great fiddler Paddy Jones.

While I wish that there was more of that, I understand that is not really a book aimed at me. It’s a book aimed at Americans who might not know anything about Ireland but already understand basketball. As someone who doesn’t know anything about basketball, I was left to flounder in jargon and acronyms.

But even as someone who doesn’t have much interest in sport, I felt kind of uncomfortable about the way different sports were presented. There’s exasperation that basketball isn’t more popular in Ireland. The popularity of Gaelic Football is only described as something that gets in the way of basketball. The interest in Irish culture extends as far as music, but not indigenous sports.

I was also really uncomfortable with the level of fat-shaming. This is from the very first page of the book:

A chunky girl with a navel that shoudn’t have been exposed leaned against the wall behind him.

I rolled my eyes and hoped that would be the end of it, but it only got worse. There’s a barrage of “humourous” remarks from this white coach about the weight of a Black player on his team. The power dynamics alone made that a poor decision.

Whenever there’s a fish-out-of-water story, the humour can come from two sources; the fish or the water. You can tell a self-deprecating story about yourself, or you can point and laugh at everyone different to you. There was a bit too much of the latter for my taste. The punching down grew tiresome.

The book was written two decades ago. Were it written today, I would hope it would be less mean-spirited and colonial in its outlook.

While this mostly isn’t a book for me (apart from the musical excursions), you might like it if you’re into basketball and you’re okay with some outdated attitudes.