Please standby
Seems the blog’s database is corrupt — which has screwed up rebuilds, feeds, and search. Movable Type recommends upgrading to 3.2 and starting from a fresh db instance. Ugh.
So buckle up. It’ll be a bit bumpy around here for a while.
Hi, I’m John Tolva!
Here's a little bit about me and how to get in touch.
The Ampcamper
Views From The Tank
Full coralscape
The Terror Tourist
Latest: The Ghosts of Colorado
A roughly monthly essay on places in horror filmmaking — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show podcast.
Marginalia
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What if the decline of Cahokia and over great cities of indigenous North Americans was a deliberate response to The Little Ice Age?
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The religious right would claim this as existence of humans living during the time of dinosaurs.
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Generative AI for participatory planning (by humans!)
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I agree with this: “We’re all for ketchup — up to the age of decision,” Tom McGlade, then a spokesman and vice president for Vienna Beef, said in 2017.
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Ring the bell to let the fish pass through the boat lock in Utrecht. This is what the Internet was made for.
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"It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does."
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I'd watch a modern day Western flick based on this.
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This fossil is 100 yards from my old house. A welcome friend on the walk to/from the L. (But it's a squirrel impression!)
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How do you make sense of a world sloshing around in AI-generated content? The liberal arts.
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Estimating the size of YouTube by "drunk dialing" URL strings.
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Is it urban form itself that makes ghosts or the lack of community?
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If they can pull this off in Phoenix, it can be done anywhere.
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"Our universe's history, fossilized in light."
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Thinking like Africa is a solution.
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The hack that made my summer camper trip possible.
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Live air traffic audio from the world's airports overlaid on ambient tunes.
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See where any living thing exists in a beautiful interactive taxonomy visualization.
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Flipping between channels of my childhood.
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More impressive than tool-usage.
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Type at work in the real world.
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You're probably not prepared for how enthralling this is.
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Anti-bird spikes as nest material, keeping other birds out!
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B♭ C A♭ 8vb A♭ E♭.
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Trains, automobiles, and rocket ships, basically.
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"The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human."
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Sara Benincasa on the beauty of The Bear.
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Two writers facing one Turing test: A dialog in honor of HAL between Richard Powers and Bruno LatourPrescience for our current world from 1998.
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"History is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it. We will concede this trivia game (after a very long run as champions), and find another in which, aided by our compounding prosthetics, we can excel in more powerful and ever more terrifying ways."
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AI neologisms. Could just link #termsfromtoday to this and never manually post again.
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Science fiction becomes reality for fossil literature.
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So much worse than the passive voice.
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AI-generated imagery in the service of mythopoeic storytelling on a small town scale. (Follow via Instagram.)
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"Dark magic box": The unique design opportunity of designing a marine ecosystem experience for visitors.
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"A book with feedback"
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Matt Kirschenbaum writes his own words about the "ongoing planetary spam event."
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Meaning isn't 100% transitive.
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A one-shot music video performed using only the reel-to-reel tape recorders.
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Just because it was inevitable doesn't mean it isn't glorious.
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Dan makes me nostalgic for Twitter 2007-2013.
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Incredible instrument made from two Commodore 64s, floppy disks, tape and a giant dose of nerdery.
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‘Oh, that’s tennis for non-athletes.'
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Answer: barely, with a few modifications.
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Some behind-the-scenes of my work life.
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The All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club!
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"Hell's Aquarium"
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"Before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive."
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"The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone."
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Same with me, clowns, same with me.
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I'm here for the needless politicization of tennis versus pickeball.
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Biomimicry meet reclaimed waste product.
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"Cities are where we see each other. People who don’t want to see hate that."
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How much do you know about lines?
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Documentary on Minnesota's failed attempt at a city of the future in the late 1960's.
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"Humanity, how are you doing on this beautiful Monday?"
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Amazing visualization of European lighthouses showing light color, actual pattern, and radius of visibility.
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An interesting data point, for sure, but this metric may be the best part: Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score.
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The exact time of day, pulled from books.
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Einstein confirms.
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Mapping magnetic fields to the audio spectrum.
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So pretty you often don't stop to listen.
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The greatest tribute ever penned by a child for a parent.
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Humans walking through a city don't take the shortest route but the one that physically points them at their destination most consistently.
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Placing this here to remind future me.
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LIght pollution of course ruins this.
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Clever. Would be even better using LEGO's bioplastic bricks.
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It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job.
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Eno on urban design is masterful.
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Railroad marketing ploy. But it's still quite nice here.
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Particularly proud of this project from the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance.
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"'There is an Italian phrase,' said Marco after we ordered our food. '"Li ti avvelenano", which translates to "there they will poison you." This is my prediction for the night.'"