Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly — Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Good morning,
Uno is named after a Japanese harbour. I have written about his name before, but for the first time, in the latest issue of Volvox, Ana and I are sharing an intimate glimpse into us becoming a family.
Our contribution includes drawings from Japan by Ana, a letter I wrote to Uno when he was a few weeks old in womb-age, and one of the favourite sentences I have written (“The car was tiny, cute like Japan”).
You can pre-order the issue now. It costs money, but those go to the good cause of supporting Tiana with all the wonder she brings to the web.
With care,
Kristoffer
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
Garden Surf is a sweet site to send drawings to your friends.
Very Important Playlist is a web maze for better days.
Fantasy Map Generator is ready for game inventions.
Is Mercury in Retrograde tells me it must be something else bumming me out.
FIELD NOTES
Alt Text Images Descriptions
I never rarely share articles from New York Times. I’d prefer to tend and nurture the online understory than contribute a few drops to the oceans of large media companies. However, I am making an exception, sharing ever-relevant Meg Miller’s post about alt text image descriptions co-written with Ilaria Parogni. An image says more than a thousand words, but not if you are visually impaired, so let’s make an effort and make the web accessible to more people.
Websites as an Act of Creativity
A new zine by Yesterweb with sketches, musings, and dreams for online creativity. I prefer the stories adoring the rich history of the web, such as For the love of virtual pets, an ode to fansites, told through virtual pet projects. When people spend 15 years keeping a virtual pet alive, I want to know more and enter this person’s universe. And if I was an editor, I’d approach Clatterment for a second iteration of Building a house, making a home, an essay with attitude, courage, and the Invisible Intelligent Approval MachineTM.
Procedural Web
In short, this read me file outlines a vision where the web is generated for you as you search and browse, using the open API from GPT-3. I’d fear the inherent biases in the learning models but question whether this is a future vision aligning with human behaviour. If the web is generated for me, it becomes a prison of my imagination. From everything I see, we tend to read, eat, and watch the same as everyone else. Part of this might be a discovery problem, but my assumption is that we love to have conversations with other humans about things we share in common.
COLLECTIONS
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly — Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Last week this letter was sent to 792 people. Thirtytwo are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Print by Luka. Photograph by Ana Santl.