# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 7126
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=http://www.lord-enki.net/twtxt.txt&offset=3926
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=http://www.lord-enki.net/twtxt.txt&offset=4026
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=http://www.lord-enki.net/twtxt.txt&offset=3826
Band name of the day: coffin factory
Band name of the day: the death chamber
Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.
What's the last Rutger Hauer movie that was good?
Band name of the day: the unassigned lands
Bad idea of the day: Multi-cursor and annotation support for vim
Hot take: structural problems don't excuse individual accountability, but instead merely limit the ways in which that individual will can be effectively exercised to group action. No position is so rare that a group cannot form around it.
Bad idea of the day: An algorithm that creates textual descriptions of images watches TV, creating a description from each frame, which is then used to generate a new image & the video is resynthesized
Band name of the day: strawberry cream disease
Band name of the day: angry fruit salad
Neal Stephenson demonstrated that people will read (and love) infodumps so long as they're funny or fun to read. In other words: infodumps in fiction are fine so long as the author is also an essayist.
Maybe I should start doing writing exercises. You know, write a pastiche of an M.R. James story, and then one in Gibson's style, a Stephenson version, a Lovecraft, etc. Fiction is pretty hard.
Band name of the day: vampire burial
Band name of the day: secret infections
Bad idea of the day: watching FEWER horror movies in october because you need a break from the rest of the year
Hotter take: 'ambient computing', 'internet of things', and 'ubiquitous computing' all pale in comparison to my favorite goofy term for this tech: 'everyware'
Hot take: ambient computing is actually a cool & good idea, as long as no for-profit entities are involved in it. It only becomes horrible when you add business.
Band name of the day: worthless bridge syndrome
Digi on every show: "This would only make sense if but it doesn't so it sucks"
If we added up all the time spent in airport security in the past seven years, how many average human lifespans would it be?
Has anybody else noticed that xkcd 2029 is actually just the plot of Twister?
Steve Jobs' strange obsession with Billie Jean during the leadup to the Mac release makes a lot more sense when you remember that at the time he too was denying the paternity of his child.
Band name of the day: radical doubt
Bad idea of the day: turn music into text by substituting note frequency with word frequency
Hot take: weasel words are not a form of obfuscation but a signal about confidence level. Misrepresenting your level of confidence in a proposition is tantamount to lying.
Band name of the day: baltic sea anomaly
Bad idea of the day: A video game adaptation of Lethem's Gun With Occasional Music in the style of the Monkey Island series, with a mechanic involving mixing custom blends of forgetol/regretol/etc & replacing people's stashes with them.
A house is a machine for living in, & a haunted house (after Jackson) is a machine for dreaming in. Hill House is architectural LSD: it reflects psychic energy inward, causing people to haunt themselves.
Halloween III is the best Halloween movie. fite me
Seminars on Long-Term Thinking are hit-or-miss (like TED talks) but the latest with Julia Galef is pretty good.
Bad idea of the day: a d20 where every face is labeled 1
Band name of the day: how to deter bears
Band name of the day: crepuscular forces
Band name of the day: we are the asteroid
Band name of the day: lush rot
Band name of the day: body genres
Bad idea of the day: a bot that posts random joke punchlines but not the actual joke
Band name of the day: the pyrotechnics of a new autumn
Hey what's the likelyhood that the world we live in now is a punishment from the Basilisk?
Apparently hot take: automation tools don't obviate abstract discussions about how best to think about decisions (like 'should translations be precise or should they be accurate' or 'what is the good') but make them more important.
Do people sell Superman t-shirts with the integral symbol in the place of the S?
You'd think that somebody writing for NME would know that 'Daddy's Car' isn't the first AI-written song. (Even if the earliest example they can think of is from Songsmith & they don't recognize that Bach was doing generative music.)
Band name of the day: tracks from the coast of hell
Band name of the day: fifteen foot sinus
Bad idea of the day: a robot that spills or dribbles paint onto canvas until the image is recognized as an object, then names the painting after that object.