Weekly Notes

Recap

On Saturday we were in London to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Old Vic. A reasonably good production with an impressive (mostly) black cast. Unfortunately the actor playing Nurse Ratchett was the understudy's understudy and so was a little weak, which is a bit of a problem when compared against the extraordinary performance of Louise Fletcher in the film.

We went for tapas at Meson Don Felipe beforehand.

On Monday morning we went to the opening exhibition at the newly opened V&A East - The Music is Black: A British Story . This was a very interesting and comprehensive survey of Black British music history. It was quite weird to see various elements of my own cultural history now being presented in a museum context. Made me feel quite old.

When I got back home I planted up a couple of plants my brother had given to me for my birthday - a Loganberry and a Gojiberry.

This week I got a new laptop (ASUS Vivobook S16), this was to replace both my old laptop and desktop computers both of which were very under-powered and pretty useless machines.

Links

lexicon - Tokenize all the prose, tag each word against four open lexicons (NRC emotion, Brysbaert concreteness, AFINN sentiment, SUBTLEX baseline frequency). Source can be a Bluesky archive or an uploaded plain-text / markdown document. All deterministic; no inference; nothing leaves your browser.

p4lette - a one-page color palette tool. Drag, click, lock, randomise, name, and export.

The Hidden Sungemite Archipelago - Diffusion models as speculative ethnographic instruments: toward a practice of AI-assisted world-building as personal epistemology

Brik Tools Gallery - Brik bridges creative coding and motion design, giving designers both high-level AI generation and fine-grained control over interactive behavior.

Room and Book - an online second-hand art bookshop. Room & Book stocks second-hand art, architecture and design books, as well as exhibition catalogues and ephemera, with a focus on material from 1890 to 1980. Emphasis is given to books, exhibition catalogues and important periodicals relating to modern British art and international modernism, particularly sculpture.

Reality emerges - Particles are nature’s smallest constituents, but that doesn’t mean they’re fundamental. So what is the Universe made of?

British Landscape Paintings

William Lyons Wilson,Devon Lane with Woodsman Sharpening Scythe, c. 1930

Dirty Little Library - Zines built with Dirty Little Zine, collected here.

klattsch - a retro formant speech synthesizer.

In Tune Mixtape Fan Club - The In Tune Classical Mixtape is a weekdaily half-hour of uninterrupted music on BBC Radio 3. Here we hold an archive of all the Mixtape episode details since it started in October 2017.

Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise - An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction.

UK brands found in ‘fast fashion graveyard’ in African conservation area - Discarded clothing from Next, Asda, and M&S found in protected wetlands threatened by new waste dumps near Ghana’s capital