martin @mewo2@friend.camp

Hey, I'm starting a newsletter! If you want to subscribe in advance, that's a thing you can do. First edition later this week: https://mewo2.substack.com/

no gods no thought leaders

did you know that in 1950 alan turing predicted the argument that we are morally required to create zillions of fake machine people

I did a workshop run by @harriethw this week where I made a little website about blobjects: https://www.htmlpoem.com/blobjects/blobjects.html

did you know you can just make a website? nobody can stop you and it's good for your soul

tired: eat the marshmallow
wired: wait, and get two marshmallows
inspired: donate your worldly belongings to the marshmallow research institute so that in the distant future all the matter in the galaxy will be turned into 10^53 marshmallows

I'm generally happier now that I'm not a professional scientist any more, but sometimes I'm reminded of the kinds of places I used to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GU8BpZg648

if you don't want to hoist your own petard, store-bought is fine

love how I can be just minding my own business, getting through the day, and then out of nowhere someone reminds me that the australian national football team are called the "socceroos"

a part of me had completely forgotten that the original version of suicide is painless isn't the manic street preachers one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y11f8Oc25AI

remember that time when facebook fucked up their bgp routing and accidentally shut everything down and locked everyone out of the building so they couldn't fix it? that seemed pretty silly at the time didn't it

man, some day I should make something with some colours in it huh?

I assure you I am not one of those monochrome men in person

this feels a bit like when you've been living in a new place for a while but you finally get around to hanging some pictures

I've ported three of my more popular generative art bots over to the fediverse. you can catch them at:

@unchartedatlas
@metropologeny
@brutal_exe

or you can see the full feed from all three at https://bots.mewo2.com/ (although be aware that there are no humans on that instance, so it's a bit bare-bones)

I know it irritates us old-timers, but I think it's a good thing that a bunch of people are turning up spouting poorly thought out ideas about how federated social media should work

an important thing about federation is that people are able to try stuff out! some of it will suck (most of it will suck). but a million randos trying dumb ideas is much much better than one billionaire imposing his will on the rest of us

let the kids have some fun for a bit, they'll calm down eventually

I bet there's something you could do with the fact that sam bankman-fried, the disgraced former ceo of ftx (a company that sort of acted like a bank), has "bank" as part of his name. I imagine there are several mildly amusing puns that could be made there

also, I've just noticed this, but his name also contains "fried", which (taken as the past tense of "to fry") could be used as a metaphor for what has happened to him

anyway just some imo quite original ideas for humour

hello new followers, welcome to the fediverse

I know we're all very excited about The Future Of Social Media this week, but for some reason I was compelled to write instead about cyberspace and the metaverse, where we imagine they are, and what that says about them as conceptual frameworks

https://mewo2.substack.com/p/on-the-placement-of-the-metaverse

thinking fondly of all the tourists who would wander around the World's Worst Hardware Store looking at the stock of obsolescent lightbulbs as though they were at disneyland