Some good links (week 52)

Tech

Abby Franquemont, whose praise I've sung before, shared this 2005 piece from Ursula K. Le Guin via Paris Marx on Blue Sky: Ursula K. Le Guin - A Rant About "Technology". I am nowhere near as frustrated as Abby about the tendency to forget that textile is tech - give me another 30 years to get there - but I certainly wish that more people saw more of the obvious connections between crafts and tech.

You've likely seen it by now, but Polish hackers brought us a fascinating (and hilarious, and depressing) story about DRM... on rails: Dieselgate, but for trains. I haven't followed the fallout from this story but I certainly hope the hackers avoid trouble. Planned obsolescence should be a big no-no to begin with but especially in this kind of context, geez. (Via evilrooster on Blue Sky)

I was explaining to people that digital colors are the worst and remembered than Björn Ottosson has published stuff about a better colorspace. Turns out that includes a genuinely excellent primer about color blending in different spaces and some clarity about sRGB: Björn Ottosson - How software gets color wrong. (I took special notice of Björn's work on color when it crossed my feed because I'm quite intimately familiar with some of his prior math-heavy work, which I committed SIMD crimes with during my internship at DICE)

Bodies, food, and politics

Since fishing out rahaeli's excellent MCAS primer is something that I keep doing, might as well put it somewhere. MCAS (Mast Cell Activation Syndrome) is a weird one, a lot of long covid looks an awful lot like it, and rahaeli is as thorough a patient-expert as one can find out there. Highly recommended read if you've got unexplained body wonks: synecdochic - Mast cell activation syndrome 101 (rahaeli was previously quite active on Twitter and is now mostly found on Blue Sky)

My roots are in Northern France, but I've always hated speculoos with a passion. Nonetheless, it's local, it's everywhere here, and this is an excellent read about the stuff: Regula Ysewijn - Speculaas or Speculoos, that is the question. Might need to go source the Real Stuff next time I'm in Brussels so I can see whether I hate all of it or just the Lotus take. Though now I mostly want candi rock sugar and even here that's needlessly hard to find. (Via someone in an artist's Discord server I'm in. Also yes I know Substack sucks but until everyone brings back blogs, I'm not going to abstrain from linking to free pieces that are great)

Also related to food, this deep look into one of the seemingly-popular-online "tradwives" and what actually enables the performance of old-fashioned cooking is fascinating: Gaby Del Valle for The Baffler - Land Ho. It's also a primer on how political this type of online performance truly is. Flavia Dzodan wrote about similar topics years ago and her work is always worth revisiting, for example this piece about Alt-Feminism and the white nationalist women who love it. (Baffler link via Radiator Yang on Blue Sky)