Across the Transom: January 2023

Capitalism thrives on sadness. It's used to make more money again and again and again. And so, to get to your question, confessionalism is important, but we have to know what we're doing it for. I'm open about most of my life—so many writers write from experience and wonder about how to make that work in a story—but you couldn't pay me to confess. You couldn't pay me to sensationalize. These two elements are not just prevalent in literature: they're literally the way our country works. It thrives on them.

i never said my goal was equality. for me black feminist praxis is not about ‘a seat at the table’ next to a white man; it’s another galaxy where there is no concept of a table and there are others forms of communing not based on exclusion, which is what the table metaphor is btw

There is a modification, a little dance, and a promise. It is seductive, possibly, and a little nervous. What is the real agreement to which the reader is asked to subscribe? Maybe it is this: “This magazine will appear to report on events in the world of tennis but will in fact strive to make the reader envy and emulate a certain group of people, who will be made to appear at ease in the world of tennis.” Maybe it is even this: “This magazine will seek to make its readers uncomfortable by the calculated use of certain icons associated with tennis, so that the readers will turn, for comfort, to the products advertised in our pages and buy them.”

Fortunately, many institutional repositories provide routes for uploading files and metadata which allow for the process to be automated, as an alternative to the standard web browser user interface. Different repositories offer different routes, but a large proportion of them are based on the same technologies. By experimenting with a handful of repositories, we were therefore able to investigate workflows which should also be applicable to a much broader spread of institutions.

Many strands of contemporary activism risk emphasising the self over the collective. Yet organising is cooperative by definition: it aims to bring others into the fold, to build and exercise shared power. The sociologist Jonathan Smucker defines organising as turning ‘a social bloc into a political force’. Today anyone can be an activist, even someone who operates alone, accountable to no one. Raising awareness, a preferred aim of contemporary activism, can be extremely valuable. But education is not organising, which involves not just enlightening, but aggregating people around common interests so that they can strategically wield combined strength. Organising is long-term and often tedious work: creating infrastructure and institutions, finding vulnerabilities and leverage in the situation, and convincing scattered individuals to recognise that they are on the same team.

This pattern was not only harmful to teachers and teacher assistants

The only way out of the morass is to wait for more earthquakes to happen.

Unknown to us, the case had been found by a patriotic citizen who opened it, discovered the code key, recognized that it must belong to a Japanese spy and turned it over to the FBI This was in 1943, just after citizens of Japanese descent had been forced off their property and taken away to concentration camps. I remember hearing that a local grocer was secretly a Colonel in the Japanese Army and had hidden his uniform in the back of his store. A lot of people actually believed these things.

Finally, small amounts of randomness controlled by value and speed were essential to enhance the playability and the sonic results.

The real internet isn't gone. It's been marginalised and sidelined and it's likely going to stay that way forever now, but nobody can completely take it away from us as long as the TCP/IP bedrock is still there. The small internet movement is exactly this kind of DIY cyberspace colony,

I had compiled a lot of information from studying the Schillinger system and other areas of study also. I had amassed all of this information about composing and it wasn't necessarily a mainstream approach, so I needed some apparatus in order to write this music and express it. So as a result, I organized the Experimental Band for that purpose, and also to attract other composers so they could develop their skills in writing for the group ensemble also.

When I began this research as a graduate student, I told Abrams that I wanted to accurately represent him and his music in my writing, referencing white academics’ many years of misrepresenting Black musicians. He replied that it was not my job to represent him, that he and his work are their own representations. Rather, he suggested, I should discuss and analyze his music with integrity, and that what I find represents my engagement with his work.

Personal computing got applianceified, consumption got prioritised over production, video and audio got prioritised over text, the internet became more centralised and more commercialised, and some parts of the end result honestly resemble nothing so much as all the worst parts of the previous century's broadcast media turned up to eleven. The internet gave us an amplified version of exactly what it was supposed to save us from! How could anybody not feel a sense of loss?

We are the generation that see the rot under the surface. That see walled garden web silos and sideload-locked devices as steps backwards. We had it all and lost it.

But that’s the thing about that whole dumb blonde trope, Ms. Anderson says wryly: “I can only surprise people.”

The crowd thinned out and the blockades ended, and we were met with a giant traffic sign illuminated with the words quiet please.

Quantum mechanical ideas can also be explored using granular synthesis. By correlating the bright lines appearing in atomic spectra to audible tones, individual atom notes can be identified. These notes then comprise musical tones that are unique to each element. Additionally, individual musical scales can be created that allow the students and musicians to compose music. This paper presents three methods to investigate the atomic world.

They were simply obeying the rules of capitalism, the rules so many of us have internalised as though they are natural law, and were trying to maximise their economic return – which is a perfectly valid game to play.

I feel like we're actors and the nice thing about actors is we don't leave anything behind. We don't leave shit behind, paintings, books, whatever. We're just here for a bit, then we die and we're gone.

So maybe the legacy is about making something that has had a healing effect. That's a very nice feeling. They're like little healing stitches where there were wounds, maybe something that we do as actors, where something that we're able to express can just stitch that little wound together. And if we leave a few stitches in the great tapestry, that's enough. Right?

In the video, Penny adds some col­our to the story of the in­ter­ro­b­ang’s birth. Out to din­ner one night, she says, Mar­tin was fret­ting over the four pages left to fill in the latest is­sue of Type Talks, the pair’s magazine on ty­po­graphy in ad­vert­ising. Apro­pos of noth­ing at all, he an­nounced his idea for a new mark of punc­tu­ation and dashed off to call their agency’s favored art stu­dio. “Is there any­body there who can draw?” The Speck­ters made their way to the stu­dio and stayed for hours, hash­ing out what would be­come the in­ter­ro­b­ang’s earli­est visual forms.

It’s important to note that the league only called the game after player reps from both teams contacted the union, the NFLPA, which informed the league that the game was done. This was a workplace action. Participants exercised their collective power and demanded that their trauma, their grief, their very humanity be recognized.

If you read investor’s bulletins about the company, they take for granted that Spotify will never turn a profit from music. The question they ask is, can the company redirect the money it draws out of music into a more profitable pursuit.

There is motion, to be sure, but sometimes the forward thrust is so slow time almost seems to move backwards.

That last part is the big one: they run because it’s important and meaningful to them. There are some beautiful passages in the article where the Tarahumara elders “likened the effort of guiding the unpredictable ball over the lengthy race to navigating the complex, chaotic journey of life.” It’s a form of prayer and of forging social ties within and among communities.