Aku Aku

7 of 52: Curves, Dots and Light

I took this photo a couple of days ago and really liked it. Kind of abstract. Thus, since I'm on vacation in Hawai'i and have been mostly slacking, I'm using it as my art thing for week 7. Anyone know what it's a photo of?

Mouths in Accelerando

In case you're curious, here is every sentence in Charles Stross' Accelerando with the word mouth (or a derivative) in it.

Chapter 1 

1 " Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer 

2 Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful 

3 He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. 

4 six million that isn't going into your virtual children's mouths. 

Chapter 2 

1 like Australian with a plum in its mouth. 

2 His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb, and his eyes don't want to open. 

3 he finds that his mouth tastes like a dead trout, 

4 Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. 

5 He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. 

6 He takes another mouthful of coffee. 

Chapter 3 

1 Annette has to make an effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly   dubbed video. 

2 but the mouth produces no saliva, 

3 What comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. 

4 baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. 

5 swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth,  

Chapter 4 

1 "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. 

2 If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five. 

Chapter 5 

1 the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. 

2 She opens her mouth: 

3 Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, 

4 From time to time, it raises the glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular interior. 

5 Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. 

6" He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. 

7 Its mouthparts move ceaselessly  

8 There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. 

9 Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes forth. 

10 Heart in his mouth: "I'm with you." 

Chapter 6 

-no- 

Chapter 7 

1 "Hah!" Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. 

2 she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good reason. 

3 Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, 

4 Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth, 

5 His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. 

6 "For fuck's sake!" It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth.

7 I got the whole story about your passenger from the horse's mouth. 
 
Chapter 8 

1 He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly. 

2 Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth - then stop.

3 "She's what?" he asks again, his mouth dry. 

4 Manfred takes a mouthful of beer  
 
Chapter 9 

1 Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth 

2 He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. 

3 "What is this?" he asks, his mouth dry. 

4 And because he's still basically a little kid, and not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook so that he isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents and authorities.

5 Pamela opens her mouth, ready to speak, 

6 She looks right back and - a shock goes through him - nods and closes her mouth.

7 if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your tongue.

Anti-Boot/Tow Modifications?

This van has been parked for a few weeks now on the 23rd street bridge that spans the 101 highway between the Mission and Potrero Hill. It has all these modifications that cover the underbody and tires, which I assume is to keep the city from towing it or applying a boot.

I'm really curious about this. Is it really effective? Why couldn't the city just break the locks and boot it? Is this really all it takes to make your vehicle impervious to towing and booting? The other thing I'm curious about is what the heck is it there for? The side facing the 101 north traffic just has this blown up photo of some woman I don't recognize on it. If this is guerrilla art, it's awesome, but it seems like anyone who would go through that much trouble would have a clearer message.

6 of 52: Potrero Past

This week I printed out five photos of Potrero Hill in the 1960's from the SF Public Library Historical Photograph Collection and mounted them on wooden signs. Then I placed the signs near the location of the photograph. I intended to shellac them to make them weatherproof, but I wasn't able to find the right sort of goop. I put some varnishy stuff over the photos but they probably are only going to last a week or so with that.

Is this art? I'm not sure to be honest. I like it though.

I used the following five photos:

• AAB-4746 Authorities examining a new crater on Missouri Street as residents stand and watch in the distance
• AAB-5597 Neighbors working together to beautify Vermont Street
• AAC-0364 Group of Potrero Hill residents planting wildflower seeds at Vermont and Seventeenth streets
• AAC-0356 Intersection of Rhode Island and 23rd streets in the Potrero Hill district
• AAC-0361 Young volunteers helping to restore Ida Hamrin's Potrero District home after it was nearly destroyed by vandals and fire

Neo-con Halloween Dinner

My friend D will soon be doing a major remodeling of his home in Greenwich Village, NYC, so for his annual Halloween bash he hired an artist to cover his soon to be torn down walls with various cartoon depictions. I requested "Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice eating a baby." Two out of four ain't bad.

Bush_baby

Original and more here.

Designed By a Tree

I love this concept of creating a font which is carved into a tree and then updated yearly by capturing how the tree has modified it by growing.

 

 

 

Food Delivery 2021

Ran across an interesting project which at initial glance is about food delivery called Free Food. As I explain below, that's free as in speech not beer.

The creator of it, Noah Levenson, has a pretty good intro video:

Given the project name, at first I thought it was about getting food that would be thrown out distributed to hungry folks, but watching the video, it became clear that this is more about being able to order food directly from verified local restaurants on a decentralized trust network and avoiding the (almost criminally) inefficient middle man services like DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc. The README for the project explains the goals well and has a quick run down on why the middle man food "delivery" apps/services are so bad.

Using a decentralized network (think BitTorrent more than BitCoin) it allows for restaurants owners to verify their ownership of a particular local restaurant and publish their menus. This protects against the type of unauthorized listings and other fakery that the middle man services engage in, so you know you're dealing with the real restaurant. Hungry people can find the menus of nearby restaurants and place orders. Reference implementations of the diner and restaurant clients are shown, although I didn't see the source for them available. Presumably the restaurant uses its existing delivery staff for the delivery, or you can pick up.

This is an interesting project, particularly because it's potential goes well beyond just restaurant delivery. Really any resource that can benefit from decentralized (no valueless middle man required) localized (relevant to you, where you are now) discovery can benefit from this type of system. In theory a delivery drivers could advertise themselves as resources and the system could do the matchmaking. Since the network is decentralized this would mean they wouldn't have to share their fee with a middle man network provider.

I'd definitely give this a shot if it started up in my area. In the meantime there is a better sort of food delivery service that I've been using lately and have been quite happy with. It is called Club Feast (use my referral code dav1 if you try it out!). While it still is a middle man service, they have a twist on it that should benefit both the restaurants and the delivery drivers. It requires you to order your meals hours in advance (it used to be the previous day but in the past month they have been able to move it up to same day). This allows the restaurant and delivery network time to optimize the food preparation and the routes. It is a subscription service, which means you sign up for a certain number of meals a week and pre-pay for them as credits. It lets unused credits stack up and you can pause, so it is fair to the subscriber. The meal credits themselves are $7 each, so the meals are inexpensive although limited to what the restaurant decides to make available for $7. There are tons of options though so that has not been a problem for me in San Francisco. It seems like a great win-win-win compromise for the restaurants, drivers and customers, although I would love for a journalist to investigate and report on the actual outcomes.

Would a robust Free Food network be better than Club Feast? Perhaps? CF optimizes a somewhat different problem, but perhaps that could be layered into FF as well? Is there additional value CF could bring that benefits from its centralization? Not really sure. Some things I am sure about are that both of these are better than the dominant centralized apps, and that Free Food really needs to change its name, and the paltry amount of tests in `libfood` is scary 😂.

 

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Fighting Date Rape With Nail Polish

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered.

Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie).

 

It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too high? Hopefully they are still working on the more subtle version.

Post Pandemic Predictions

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.

In no particular order:

• Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
• 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
• It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
• 2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
• The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.