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Update postroll and 2024wa29. Publish 2024wa30.
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This list is numbered chronologically, with "1" indicating the newest addition to the list. (It feels worth reiterating: `1.` **does not** mean "best", and it is also unrelated to when the post was published. The first link is just the most recently thing I've added to this list.)

1. As soon as you encounter the three-digit number in the title of John Coulthart's [Weekend links 732](https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2024/06/29/weekend-links-732/), you can realize how long this blog has been running. It's been a constant in my RSS readers for coming up on two full decades—I feel like I probably first heard of it through Arthur magazine or something! This particular week includes a mention of a new album where Shackleton (purveyor of often-otherworldly bass & percussion music) collaborates with Six Organs of Admittance (conjuror of often-psychedelic folk), links ranging from a pulp paperback book artists to a Wire magazine article on experimental radio to a collection of 60s acid rock buttons, and a great Japanese woodblock print from the late 1800s.
2. Anil Dash's [Today's AI is unreasonable](https://www.anildash.com/2023/06/08/ai-is-unreasonable/) succinctly describes what I also find regrettable about the current generative AI hype: they generate [bullshit](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5) by design, this bullshit is inconsistently generated in ways that cannot be easily debugged by users, and systems designed around these types of unpredictability and unreasonableness tend to remove agency from users.
3. Sara Joy's [This is My Church](https://sarajoy.dev/blog/my-church/) resonates with me both regarding particular communities (I helped start a swing dancing club at UC Riverside as an undergrad) and regarding the ways that social media and blogging communities feel to me now.
4. Tracy Durnell's [The injustice embedded in our infrastructure](https://tracydurnell.com/2024/06/16/the-injustice-embedded-in-our-infrastructure/) quickly weaves together a game, a book, an email, a city's community budget process, and other people's blogs while making the post's point. This is a really nice example of how a blog post can act as a condensed essay, taking a reader on a quick travel through a set of ideas and perhaps coming away with a changed perspective.
5. John M. Jackson's [Befores and afters](https://www.johnxlibris.com/2024/04/befores-and-afters/) profoundly resonates with me in terms of no longer feeling like I'm "part of the new guard." Although I'm actually new enough as an instructional designer to not even know whether there's as much of a sense of "newer" and "older" guards in this field as there is in librarianship, I definitely feel like I'm traversing similar thresholds in life. As a side note, I also appreciate how John tends to add sections like "What I'm reading" and "Garden update" to his posts.
6. Keenan's [An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch](https://gkeenan.co/avgb/an-alarmingly-concise-and-very-hinged-summary-of-what-it-was-like-to-build-this-site-from-scratch/) relates how they built their site… a story told with enough zest and humor that I feel better about the peculiar blend of empowerment and continual facepalming that drive my own site.
7. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's [Generosity and Pragmatism](https://kfitz.info/generosity-and-pragmatism/) shares an insight from Deb Chachra's _How Infrastructure Works_ about how being generous is simultaneously being pragmatic. This post is also a great example of a type of blog post that hovers somewhere between a long social media post and a miniature essay.
8. Arthur Boston's [When Do Checks Become Review?](https://aj-boston.pubpub.org/pub/mtrwtisx/) asks what lines we can draw around peer review and integrity checks.
9. Olu Niyi-Awosusi's [Weeknotes #4 (Week 24, 2024)](https://olu.online/weeknotes-4-week-24-2024/) showed me how nicely one can style a site made with [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/)—and the look of Olu's [Bear](https://bearblog.dev/)-based blog inspired me to trim the author sidebar links and some other elements from most of my own blog pages. Their various weeknotes are also a great example of that genre of blog post!
10. Spoiler alert! W. Evan Sheehan's [Twelve favorite problems](https://darthmall.net/weblog/2024/twelve-favorite-problems/) currently only has a list of 5. I can't remember previously hearing about this "favorite problems" framework, which Evan ascribes to Richard Feynman, but I'm instantly a fan.
11. Vic Kostrzewski's [My mental health stack – everyday things I use for my mental health](https://vic.work/51713/my-mental-health-stack-everyday-things-i-use-for-my-mental-health) shares a lot of technologies that I don't use, but I deeply appreciate this sharing of struggles and approaches.
12. Mandy Brown's [Common future](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/common-future) reading note connects Ursula Franklin's earthworm theory of social change to climate change, since talking about the weather is increasingly one way of talking about our common future.
13. Sri Seah's [GHDR Report 0404: Powered by Prosocial Motivation](https://dsriseah.com/ghdr/2024/0404/) shares a great insight into motivation—and I think I'm often motivated similarly, by feeling connections with other people. (The post also touches on how Sri has "conversations" with ChatGPT, a use I'd rarely considered before outside of working with students.)
14. John Maxwell's [All I Need to Know about DH I Learned in a MOO](https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2023/everything-moo/) shares welcome insights about some early formats of online communities.
15. Robb Knight's [Slash Pages](https://rknight.me/blog/slash-pages/) is a brief and welcome backstory for why he started [Slashpages.net](https://slashpages.net/).
16. P.L. Thomas's [What Works?: The Wrong Question for Education Reform](https://radicalscholarship.com/2024/06/17/what-works-the-wrong-question-for-education-reform/) shares his personal educational history as well as pointing out various ways that "what works?" is untenable as a question for education reform.
17. Brandon's [On Adding A Blogroll Slashpage](https://wand3r.net/blogroll-slashpage/) gave me the idea for this alterative format in the first place.
1. Ernie Smith's [Cassingle Culture](https://tedium.co/2024/07/27/music-industry-cassette-single-cassingle-history/) weaves a ton of punk / (indie) pop culture / media history into a breezy yet deep narrative of cassette singles. Bow Wow Wow? Boy George? Malcolm McLaren? Yep, they're all in just the first few paragraphs, before we even get to the Go-Go's and R.E.M.
2. Jacky Alciné's post about [not bothering with electoral politics online anymore](https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/not-engaging-with-politics-online/) provides me a very welcome reminder of what's behind **some** people's reasons to avoid discussions of elections online.
3. Jason Heppler's [How I use Obsidian](https://jasonheppler.org/2024/07/15/how-i-use-obsidian/) post covers a lot of the strengths to using Obsidian for notes and longer-form writing. Although I don't currently use any of the plugins or organizational strategies discussed here, I'm considering making a Dataview-powered way of searching my literature notes along the lines of the [Doing History with Zotero and Obsidian](https://publish.obsidian.md/history-notes/01+Notetaking+for+Historians) guide by [Elena Razlogova](http://elenarazlogova.org/) linked to from this post.
4. James's reflection on [four years of the personal web](https://jamesg.blog/2024/07/10/the-personal-web/) mentions a lot of same things I find so compelling about maintaining a website / blog / digital garden. You can do things with less worry about other people's expectations.
5. As soon as you encounter the three-digit number in the title of John Coulthart's [Weekend links 732](https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2024/06/29/weekend-links-732/), you can realize how long this blog has been running. It's been a constant in my RSS readers for coming up on two full decades—I feel like I probably first heard of it through Arthur magazine or something! This particular week includes a mention of a new album where Shackleton (purveyor of often-otherworldly bass & percussion music) collaborates with Six Organs of Admittance (conjuror of often-psychedelic folk), links ranging from a pulp paperback book artists to a Wire magazine article on experimental radio to a collection of 60s acid rock buttons, and a great Japanese woodblock print from the late 1800s.
6. Anil Dash's [Today's AI is unreasonable](https://www.anildash.com/2023/06/08/ai-is-unreasonable/) succinctly describes what I also find regrettable about the current generative AI hype: they generate [bullshit](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5) by design, this bullshit is inconsistently generated in ways that cannot be easily debugged by users, and systems designed around these types of unpredictability and unreasonableness tend to remove agency from users.
7. Sara Joy's [This is My Church](https://sarajoy.dev/blog/my-church/) resonates with me both regarding particular communities (I helped start a swing dancing club at UC Riverside as an undergrad) and regarding the ways that social media and blogging communities feel to me now.
8. Tracy Durnell's [The injustice embedded in our infrastructure](https://tracydurnell.com/2024/06/16/the-injustice-embedded-in-our-infrastructure/) quickly weaves together a game, a book, an email, a city's community budget process, and other people's blogs while making the post's point. This is a really nice example of how a blog post can act as a condensed essay, taking a reader on a quick travel through a set of ideas and perhaps coming away with a changed perspective.
9. John M. Jackson's [Befores and afters](https://www.johnxlibris.com/2024/04/befores-and-afters/) profoundly resonates with me in terms of no longer feeling like I'm "part of the new guard." Although I'm actually new enough as an instructional designer to not even know whether there's as much of a sense of "newer" and "older" guards in this field as there is in librarianship, I definitely feel like I'm traversing similar thresholds in life. As a side note, I also appreciate how John tends to add sections like "What I'm reading" and "Garden update" to his posts.
10. Keenan's [An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch](https://gkeenan.co/avgb/an-alarmingly-concise-and-very-hinged-summary-of-what-it-was-like-to-build-this-site-from-scratch/) relates how they built their site… a story told with enough zest and humor that I feel better about the peculiar blend of empowerment and continual facepalming that drive my own site.
11. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's [Generosity and Pragmatism](https://kfitz.info/generosity-and-pragmatism/) shares an insight from Deb Chachra's _How Infrastructure Works_ about how being generous is simultaneously being pragmatic. This post is also a great example of a type of blog post that hovers somewhere between a long social media post and a miniature essay.
12. Arthur Boston's [When Do Checks Become Review?](https://aj-boston.pubpub.org/pub/mtrwtisx/) asks what lines we can draw around peer review and integrity checks.
13. Olu Niyi-Awosusi's [Weeknotes #4 (Week 24, 2024)](https://olu.online/weeknotes-4-week-24-2024/) showed me how nicely one can style a site made with [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/)—and the look of Olu's [Bear](https://bearblog.dev/)-based blog inspired me to trim the author sidebar links and some other elements from most of my own blog pages. Their various weeknotes are also a great example of that genre of blog post!
14. Spoiler alert! W. Evan Sheehan's [Twelve favorite problems](https://darthmall.net/weblog/2024/twelve-favorite-problems/) currently only has a list of 5. I can't remember previously hearing about this "favorite problems" framework, which Evan ascribes to Richard Feynman, but I'm instantly a fan.
15. Vic Kostrzewski's [My mental health stack – everyday things I use for my mental health](https://vic.work/51713/my-mental-health-stack-everyday-things-i-use-for-my-mental-health) shares a lot of technologies that I don't use, but I deeply appreciate this sharing of struggles and approaches.
16. Mandy Brown's [Common future](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/common-future) reading note connects Ursula Franklin's earthworm theory of social change to climate change, since talking about the weather is increasingly one way of talking about our common future.
17. Sri Seah's [GHDR Report 0404: Powered by Prosocial Motivation](https://dsriseah.com/ghdr/2024/0404/) shares a great insight into motivation—and I think I'm often motivated similarly, by feeling connections with other people. (The post also touches on how Sri has "conversations" with ChatGPT, a use I'd rarely considered before outside of working with students.)
18. John Maxwell's [All I Need to Know about DH I Learned in a MOO](https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2023/everything-moo/) shares welcome insights about some early formats of online communities.
19. Robb Knight's [Slash Pages](https://rknight.me/blog/slash-pages/) is a brief and welcome backstory for why he started [Slashpages.net](https://slashpages.net/).
20. P.L. Thomas's [What Works?: The Wrong Question for Education Reform](https://radicalscholarship.com/2024/06/17/what-works-the-wrong-question-for-education-reform/) shares his personal educational history as well as pointing out various ways that "what works?" is untenable as a question for education reform.
21. Brandon's [On Adding A Blogroll Slashpage](https://wand3r.net/blogroll-slashpage/) gave me the idea for this alterative format in the first place.

## Other Peoples's Postrolls (OPP)

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---
title: Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week WW
last_modified_at:
title: Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 29
last_modified_at: 2024-07-28
categories: [weekly-assemblage]
excerpt: 'Extraordinary Birder, Hyperlocal Psychogeography, and External Link Indicators.'
tags:
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---
title: Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 30
last_modified_at:
categories: [weekly-assemblage]
excerpt: 'Easy A, electoral politics, ethicswishing, etc.'
tags:
- notetaking
- electoral politics
# header:
# image: /assets/images/weekly-assemblage.png
# caption: 'Photo credit: [**Unsplash**](https://unsplash.com)'
published: true
toc: true
comments:
date: 2024-07-28T12:05:30-6:00
---

[Weekly Whaaa…?]({% post_url 2016-01-09-weekly-whaaa %})
{: .notice}

I use the [ISO weeks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date) from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week 30 is the week of 2024-07-22/2024-07-28.

## Viewing

### Easy A

Emma Stone stars in [_Easy A_](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/easy-a), a film inspired by (and earnestly referencing) _The Scarlet Letter_. It is set and entirely shot in Ojai, California.

Among the other great actors, it has Malcolm McDowell in a minor role as the school principal. This casting is extra fun because my friend Andrew, who grew up in Ojai, was very proud of having McDowell be (in Andrew's learned opinion) the second-most famous celebrity who chose to live in Ojai (Sergio Aragonés, the _Mad_ magazine cartoonist, was the first).

### Olympics2024

Yep, we're streaming some of the Olympics online!

## Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

- Jason Heppler's [How I use Obsidian](https://jasonheppler.org/2024/07/15/how-i-use-obsidian/) post covers a lot of the strengths to using Obsidian for notes and longer-form writing. Although I don't currently use any of the plugins or organizational strategies discussed here, I'm considering making a Dataview-powered way of searching my literature notes along the lines of the [Doing History with Zotero and Obsidian](https://publish.obsidian.md/history-notes/01+Notetaking+for+Historians) guide by [Elena Razlogova](http://elenarazlogova.org/) linked to from this post.
- Jacky Alciné's post about [not bothering with electoral politics online anymore](https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/not-engaging-with-politics-online/) provided me a very welcome reminder of what's behind **some** people's reasons to avoid discussions of elections online.
- Ernie Smith's [Cassingle Culture](https://tedium.co/2024/07/27/music-industry-cassette-single-cassingle-history/) weaves a ton of punk / (indie) pop culture / media history into a breezy yet deep narrative of cassette singles. Bow Wow Wow? Boy George? Malcolm McLaren? Yep, they're all in just the first few paragraphs, before we even get to the Go-Go's and R.E.M.

## TWI(R)L

This week I (re)learned… 

- The concept of [ethicswishing](https://berjon.com/ethicswishing/) (via Adactio).
- Apparently Seattle is the one place in the USA where Generation X has outnumbered other demographics, and it's informed their [move beyond Boomer politics](https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/07/17/the-long-arc-of-boomer-politics-of-resistance-and-what-millennials-zoomers-can-win-starting-now/). (Via [blogdiva](https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/112828235528092192) on Mastodon.)
- The utility of turning off all unnecessary plugins when you start experiencing weirdness in software. For the last month or more, Obsidian on my phone has frequently crashed when I select words or edit a line in a bullet-point list. This stopped after I turned off a couple plugins I wasn't really using, but which were probably consuming a lot of memory.

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