seeing http://worrydream.com/July2023/ i’m struck by the idea that dynamicland as it exists is a project that is defined by its main steward and locale but not by a greater audience that might be capable of deploying it or even interacting with it. his reluctance to general adoption reminds me of the way that people carp about Major Players embrace/extend/extinguish strategy with open protocols at the same time that they try to advocate for retaining control of the protocol.

bret operates like an Artist but it’s hard to square the way he wraps it in the trappings of Academic Research, that is, he’s making his own thing, has a body of work, has a clear Direction and Process but is wholly uninterested in other people generally doing his thing. arguably most researchers are not super invested in ‘a working dialog’ with some random crank with a github account, but it’s, i think, telling, that nobody has been invested enough to try to reproduce the DL Magic™ and he seems uninterested in it becoming an actual general purpose environment, more than he’s interested in it being his own kind of Warhol Factory (or parc, yes, yes, i know).

in the sense that DL has felt unsatisfying, it’s probably largely to do with the tension between it being very obviously a working Studio centered around bret’s practice but attempting to operate like a research group.

Duolingo’s new Unicode lessons just dropped.

when i posted this in… 2019, it struck me as indicative of how upper middle class people had rationalized their “economic anxiety,” the realization of visible, tangible achievement marred by the post-2008 reality of its precariousness compared to their parents or older siblings.

but looking now, i feels it better captures the nonsense behind crypto and web3—a whole cohort of people roughly my age who missed, by virtue of age or being in school, the spoils of both web 1.0 and 2.0, who had arrived at well paying tech jobs just a little too late for the golden equity offer, felt they had accepted the right job at the wrong startup, or just not exited as early as they had hoped and who desperately wanted, needed, to find a way to manufacture a movement they could helm, that would lead them to the kinds of prosperity they had seen as just out of reach during the years they were still struggling to establish themselves.

https://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/184259789624/its-good-to-be-in-something-from-the-ground

In his 1963 book *Misreadings*, Umberto Eco presented a structuralist schematic for generating Jean-Luc Godard films. I've implemented it on @glitchdotcom: https://godard-film-generator.glitch.me/

Gil Strang is retiring, and his final lecture is on Monday:

https://grinfeld.org/strang/

His 18.06 videos are one of the Internet's great treasures. Strongest possible recommend.