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Covered was a blog from the late 00s where artists would redraw famous comic book covers and they’d be shown side by side.

I never managed to submit anything but I was reading along, I loved it. This one, a cover of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories 211, was my fave.

A catalogue of aesthetic trends in popular culture.

I’ve been asked a couple of times if I came up with this word.

Noгma is a non-graphic design studio in Turin, Italy, that explores the nihilistic possibility of eliminating aesthetic choice from the transmission of information. Noгma does absolutely nothing special.

@alex@social.alexschroeder.ch has a post about why blogging.

One speaks to an imagined audience.

(Me referencing “More hexes more spells” last post made me wanna see if Hellstar Plus has made any music lately and she had but also she had linked to this synaesthetic masterpiece by Saul Steinberg.)

For readers, they look just like normal blog posts, there’s RSS and there’s a normal web view. The weirdo chat bubble interface is only for the person writing them.

It’s supposedly a way to overcome writer’s block. I haven’t tried the app (and not gonna), but I do believe that this does work.

My “scaling algorithm threefold” 💁🏻‍♀️

Turns out there is a formal way to use language like “fish” but not also mean the various cladistic subgroups of fish (such as horses, birds, and piano players)—to use a paraphyletic subset. “All fish except tetrapods” can be paraphyletically called “fish”, “all wasps except for ants and bees” can be paraphyletically called “wasps”.

This is a thing in biological cladistics and in linguistic history, but it gets further tangled up when talking about groups that are more fuzzily defined, like music genres. If you paraphyletically refer to rock in a way that excludes punk, what happens when a punk band finishes a set with a cover of Born to be Wild?

Starting from this point we can begin developing the practice of Code Criticism. I suggest two things we need to jump this program, 1) the beginnings of a shared vocabulary of style and 2) example close readings of programs. If we are going to develop any ideas about what code criticism looks like, what its forms ought to be, what theories about it we ought to accept, we need to start by attempting it. Practice almost always precedes theory.

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Covered was a blog from the late 00s where artists would redraw famous comic book covers and they’d be shown side by side.

I never managed to submit anything but I was reading along, I loved it. This one, a cover of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories 211, was my fave.

Feels great to see some downsides of edgelordery of the eighties music scene being explicitly acknowledged:

“We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony. If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit mistaken notion that things were getting better.”

Petuh is a mix of Danish and German that was spoken by season pass ticket holders in the Flensburg ferry system in the first half of the 20th century.