Sunday, June 05, 2022

Chained to the desk: An Ode to the Card Catalog

  “I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.” 

-Rodney Dangerfield


 “I’m probably the most uncool guy that [my daughters] know—as far as they are concerned anyway—‘cause I’m Dad. I mean dads just aren’t cool—especially when I dance! They don’t want me to dance.”

 -Tim McGraw


Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle.  She covered 3000 miles in the 1960s, and as she notes in the introduction: “Epictetus put it in a nutshell when he said, “For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.”   But don’t be fooled by the title — hardly any of the narrative takes place in India.


An Ode to the Card Catalog

Before books were easily printed and accessible to nearly everyone, before they even took the form of books specifically, there was a different story. Information was scarce in its written form, and so scribes and scholars developed a meticulous system for organizing libraries of tablets. That’s right: the oldest known form of organizing books predates…


Chained to the desk


‘Metaphorically sticking an ice pick into the heart of parliamentary debate‘ / poorly photoshopped/staged family photos from films, via the Guardian / a comprehensive post on a frighteningly talented AI illustrator / see also infinite brushstroke landscape / ‘This Deadly Isle charts puzzling murders, strange disappearances and devilish mysteries from the Home Counties to the Hebrides, all painstakingly documented in a map redolent of the era.’ See also Agatha Christie’s England / Wikipedia’s List of Software Bugs, chronicling lost spaceship, wayward fighter jets, and awful medical equipment malfunctions / a map of the blogosphere. You don’t seem to be able to click on the blogs and/or search it, which is a bit frustrating / r/Mazes / see also the Video Game Atlas and some Spectrum maps for old times’ sake / we remember when the relatively mediocre po-mo office block at Angel went up. Now the owner wants it to come down. Is this just the inevitable lifecycle of commercial buildings or should we be being a bit smarter? / hours of old films at Pizzaflix / a collection of old movies, colourized and upscaled to 4k and 50 fps / Wikipedia’s list of magic tricks / Laputa, Jonathan Swift’s flying island / the proposed design of the Whale Museum on the Norwegian island of Andøya / Return of the Slimepires, a fun pixel game / music from Grok / What Colour is Sound, ‘Label specialising in compilations of the wyrd and wonderful. Indie folk. acid country, European chansons, psych rock, electronica, experimental and beyond’ / we’re very fond of tumblr, so stories like this, the inside story of how Tumblr lost its way, are fascinating and a little bit sad (and don’t even get us started on Flickr…) / a homage to trackers, the pioneering music sequencing software / Spain in Ugly / This bench does not exist, more AI experiments. Big datasets, that’s what it’s all about / NicheMuseums, a wonderful collection. Both via b3ta / Google’s Earth Day Doodle / Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Cafe ‘only allows writers on a deadline, and won’t let them leave until finished’.


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