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When I lived in Madrid, I loved seeing the painters at El Prado every time I visited. It felt anachronistic given all the digital access we have to art, that someone would need to visit a museum to copy a painting by hand. But as Jas Knight points out in this YouTube video, you can't copy a painting until you've actually been able to walk right up to it and see it. Part tradition, sure, as Kottke points out this Copyist program has been around since 1872, and maybe a right of passage. But also, there's just no other way. It's necessity. Tough, then, to have to navigate the tourists who stumble upon your work, as I did, and gawk at an art feeling so alive and well in a stagnant, stuffy gallery, as if it had died and been resurrected.

Poetry Camera is an instant camera that attempts to capture a moment as a text poem, rather than a photo. I love this idea so much, and on first pass I love the product, too. The camera looks cute and the whole thing is delightedly low-fi in a GameBoy Printer kind of way. But the poems themselves are a bit of a let down. Passeable, sure, they have all the parts of a poem, they're easily identified as poems by just about everyone. But like a lot of purely generated LLM art, they miss the mark in every way you wish they wouldn't. They're uncanny in how well they feign depth and authenticity. This isn't a failing of the design and ingenuity of the camera makers, but more representative of the state of AI art in general. Maybe this is why, in their FAQ, Poetry Camera's creators include the question, "Can AI make art?"

" While we don't see the poems themselves as art, we see them as ingredients and materials in a new art form. We humans are used to thinking of poems (or paintings, or novels) as the end result of a laborious creative process. Generative models can create infinitely many words and images in an instant, which gives us the opportunity to use poems (or images) as intermediaries in a new type of creative process. What then becomes the end result? What are we putting our effort into creating?"

Poetry is only differentiated from other creative text when it does something remarkable, when it says something that can't be said in any other way. Otherwise, it's just fancy prose. I realize that sounds like gate keeping, but I've continually asked myself "what is poetry?" for years and that, for me, is the only definition that continues to hold up under scrutiny. And that makes the notion of throw away poetry troublesome, the notion that a poem shouldn't be a summation of effort.

A cheap instant film camera doesn't forfeit authenticity or depth by greatly limiting the level of control one has over the end product. In fact, usually the cheapness imparts some particular aesthetic that brings about, if nothing more, a compelling novelty. But a cheap camera doesn't eschew the effort that goes into creating a compelling photo in the first place, it just helps speed the physical end result. A skilled photographer can subvert expectations and adapt to the camera to still create compelling art, but aside from the existence of happy accidents, it still requires skill and effort.

I think the problem is dressing up these artifacts up as poems in the first place. Why force the camera to produce a formal poem, if the poem itself is meant to be discarded or absorbed in other work? Why not let it breathe something unrestrained? If these poems aren't meant to be seen as art at all, but something we use to get to the art, why make this weird restriction on their output to have to look and feel like a poem, knowing it'll never make a good one? In the same ways, we might look to the history of the camera for guidance. Early in the art form, the camera stood in for the painter but the subjects remained staged in painterly ways. The art eventually freed itself of these constraints and became more dynamic and unexpected when we moved away from the pose. Maybe now is the time for this technology to do the same.

This is, of course, not to say I think Poetry Camera has failed. I think it's wonderful, I just think it has yet to hit its mark.

This is incredible: "Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype's ligature substitution does the rest." It's so cool, in fact, that even though I don't have an obvious need for it, I'd be fully willing to invent a use case for this site just to implement it.

Judge a book by its first page; no cover, no title, no byline.

Verba Prima is a collection of famous first lines. Not a bad way to spend a morning.

Seems like a lot of us are waking up and wanting something different from the internet. Terry lays out what tech we own today, the tech that underpins the internet, and what they (the big platforms) can't take away from us. Understanding why this matters is the fix to the feeling many of us have of not owning our tech, but I know from experience that some look at this technology and see something they think they can never understand. It's not intuitive to everyone, and so if things "just work" it's good enough, even at the risk of becoming the product and extorted. Still, the argument is pertinent and valuable; it's the only argument, really.

This series of websites is a remarkable effort to capture a moment. Every volume is worth exploring; Vol. II: What Color Was the Sky rather poetically paints the picture you might not have seen last night as the sun set, and is my favorite. They just released Vol IV: taken, an alarming look at how much information you forfeit just by visiting a website, and how easy it is to track you based on that information. Great website authorship, through and through.

Mike Carson bought the domain and rights to Friendster and is planning a reboot. The catch: you can only become friends with someone by physically tapping phones together. Does this bring genuine interaction back to social networking, or will it be a gimmick that hinders meaningful growth? I guess time will tell, but I'm rooting for him.

I'm enabling an optional notifications feature, should anyone decide to install this site as a PWA. I know the oldschool among us will prefer RSS or social media, but maybe someone's crazy enough to want notifications.

David has put together an excellent list of web development tools. I've known about a few of these but never bookmarked them, now I can just bookmark David's website instead.

The 90's internet aesthetic never died, it transcended itself to an art form, and maybe Melonland is the single greatest collective example I've ever seen of such art. So much instant nostalgia, my heart has been aching for this. What a wonderful website. I'd love to link every page but that'd be nonsense, so just go click around and be delighted.

The easiest path to a presence online is without a doubt social media. And some platforms, like Facebook, have done a passing job in supporting small businesses on their platform. But interacting with a restaurant or other brick and mortar business that's ONLY on social media, especially a social media that gates their content behind an account login like Instagram, is a surefire way to dissuade me from giving them my business. A bit crass, but small business owners need to hear this message.

I'm attempting to integrate ActivityPub with my website. If this makes it to the fediverse, hello!

When I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius I was gobsmacked by Eggers' use of footnotes, drawing, and other literary accoutrement; it felt like he used every feature of the printed book form to tell a story. HTML Review delights the same senses for online works. Even if you don't like the words, what the works here accomplish in form and ambition is, well, staggering.

Katsushika Hokusai drew tentacled sea creatures in the 1800s. H.P. Lovecraft built a mythology around them in the 1920s. Japanese illustrator Goki Yamada has now put them together in Thirty-six Views of Evil Gods (邪神三十六景), a 128-page art book that inserts Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and other Great Old Ones into every plate of Hokusai's famous ukiyo-e series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" — the woodblock prints that gave us "The Great Wave off Kanagawa."