#printingpress — Public Fediverse posts

Devastating news from Kozhikode as a major fire guts the Red Star printing press in Vellayil. Massive losses reported, including ₹1 crore worth of paper reels. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/major-fire-breaks-out-at-kozhikode-printing-press-massive-losses-reported-fiv87i6k?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Kozhikode #Vellayil #FireAccident #KeralaNews #PrintingPress

Devastating news from Kozhikode as a major fire guts the Red Star printing press in Vellayil. Massive losses reported, including ₹1 crore worth of paper reels. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/major-fire-breaks-out-at-kozhikode-printing-press-massive-losses-reported-fiv87i6k?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Kozhikode #Vellayil #FireAccident #KeralaNews #PrintingPress

Devastating news from Kozhikode as a major fire guts the Red Star printing press in Vellayil. Massive losses reported, including ₹1 crore worth of paper reels. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/major-fire-breaks-out-at-kozhikode-printing-press-massive-losses-reported-fiv87i6k?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Kozhikode #Vellayil #FireAccident #KeralaNews #PrintingPress

Devastating news from Kozhikode as a major fire guts the Red Star printing press in Vellayil. Massive losses reported, including ₹1 crore worth of paper reels. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/major-fire-breaks-out-at-kozhikode-printing-press-massive-losses-reported-fiv87i6k?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Kozhikode #Vellayil #FireAccident #KeralaNews #PrintingPress

Devastating news from Kozhikode as a major fire guts the Red Star printing press in Vellayil. Massive losses reported, including ₹1 crore worth of paper reels. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/major-fire-breaks-out-at-kozhikode-printing-press-massive-losses-reported-fiv87i6k?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Kozhikode #Vellayil #FireAccident #KeralaNews #PrintingPress

#PrintingPress #Press #Machine #Ink #Mechanism #YouTube #Video #Historical #History #Printer #PrintingMachine #Machine #Machines #Technology What a fantastic machine, and in many respects it’s one of the most important ever created…
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Tf0frWnRvT8

A printing press for biological data

https://www.owlposting.com/p/the-printing-press-for-biological

#HackerNews #printingpress #biologicaldata #innovation #technology #science

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https://openpressproject.com/products/open-print-exchange-2026

#Letterpress #printmaking #printingpress #Pixelprint #LEGOprint

The Weekly: AI creates no medium

I was going to continue by exploration into how AI is doing Art dirty. And I do. But instead of looking at any one particular form of art or creation, I ended up going meta. Instead of looking at the creation, I realized that there might be something to the medium in which we create, and how it ties back to AI-timeline we find ourselves in. I start with a basic question: does AI create a new medium for creation?

AI creates no medium

McLuhan famously claimed that the medium is the message. There is plenty to support this thesis. I stand in agreement. Technological breakthroughs have always created new ways to communicate and create. Chalk, ink, paint, the printing press, the PDF, software code, the internet, the camera, and dare I say, Photoshop. These are technologies that we take for granted but they have progressively given us newer ways to communicate and create. Many consider photography to be an art form, which would not have existed if it were not for the camera, and later Lightroom. And I will forever be reminded of the “what is a photograph?” question that The Verge has been asking for a while now, with its coverage of tech ranging from image editing, computational photography and now GenAI.

Not long ago, writers once only had to contend with writing on paper. Even with paper, the choice of pencil, ink or a typewriter changed the way a writer would approach their work, the audience of their words, and it all got distributed. PhD dissertations would happen orally back when Greeks were busy inventing democracy. Up until the invention of the printing press, a doctoral dissertation would be nothing more than a one-pager – highlighting the key points of a candidate’s thesis and examination. Once humans could print and reproduce the written word more efficiently, the length of those dissertations sky rocketed. I have not plotted it yet, but pretty sure that the number of scientific publications in the world saw a sizable increase with advent of the internet. (As an aside, creating that plot seems like a fun challenge that I might do as a follow up post 📊) That transition for the written word from paper to PDF and eventually to the internet kept offering newer mediums where creating and publishing text-based works saw massive reductions in cost, coupled with unthinkable boosts in access.

Interestingly, photography did not diminish oil paintings. Cinema did not upend theatre. Streaming and binge watching did not crater the demand from movie goers who still yearn to see movies on the big screen. Streaming, I imagine is going to be a controversial example of a newer medium. The way Netflix shortchanges writers’ rooms and has created economic uncertainty for creators in the cinema and TV industry is real and must be contended with. But I have also watched numerous short films and shows – on streaming platforms like Youtube and Netflix – that were produced on small budgets, by independent artists whom I never would have heard of otherwise. In fact, I would argue that TV shows have adopted newer/different narrative devices in the face of binge watching – a distinct gift/curse of the streaming-era. Streaming has also push movie makers to go bigger and bolder with their theatrical releases. Movie makers are going for ever-bigger, -taller and -wider screens, in order to compete with the television in our living rooms.

My thesis is that each of these technologies created a new medium for creation. And as long as a technology introduces novelty in the space of mediums themselves, it ends up creating a net-new expansion of the creative and artistic industry: both in terms of economics, and the number of works. For me, generative AI fails that test.

AI is not creating a new medium for artists, creators or engineers to play with. In my estimation, it is (re)using existing canvases of creation. At its best, it is opening up existing mediums to newer players. Code generation can now allow a painter to write (and perhaps deploy) software code. Image generation may allow a programmer to create images that look and feel like works of art. But in either case, it’s old mediums with new players.

Back in 2023, I mused about AI and virtual/augmented reality.

https://rant.vpalepu.com/2023/06/10/spatial-computing-does-not-scare-me-artificial-intelligence-does/

One phrase struck me when i was re-reading that last week: “artificial intelligence’s end goal is to mimic.” Lost in all the hype is this base reality that AI is just mimicking what already exists. There is no net new medium or form factor for doing things. Not even newer business models. It might enable or economize creation in existing forms of creation: the written word, visual renders, sounds, or programmable software, to name a few. But it hardly a new form onto itself, nor is it inspiring new mediums for any of our messages.

Can mimicry give way to a newer medium? Can it inspire it? Perhaps. Is mimicry a medium by itself? I contend not.

Life is for Living: Walk in the Park

Instead of rushing through life, I find myself standing still more than I used to. It has allowed me to notice life around me. And when not intensely private, I capture it with my camera.

The Pixel Art Camera app is turning out to be a fun experiment in point and shoot photography. This batch is from a park where I go for my evening walks. The iPhone camera makes everything look so perfect. But in expecting perfection, it has made me worry too much about how a shot looks. Deliberating pixelating my pics has injected some fun and whimsy about my photography.

Stack of Stuff

Everyday I come across some really interesting creations. They tend to be inspiring works of art. Cool gadgets and tech. Provoking reads. Figured it was time to start piling them into a stack, in no particular order.

• Public Domain Image Archive is fantastic curation of images and artwork available in the public domain. Beyond wanting to use any of these creations, I love browsing through this collection. A wide array of works. Eclectic, diverse, colorful.
• TRMNL is such a cool device. Had I not gotten a Pixel tablet recently, I would certainly gotten this. I use the Pixel as a shared device at home to keep track of doctor’s visits, groceries, bills, birthdays, the weather and to read books. Other than for reading books, the TRMNL seems like such a cool (and economical) alternative. It helps that it sports an open-source ecosystem of apps and widgets.
• Project Gutenberg is collection of books available in the public domain, as defined by the US Copyright law. There are few exceptions. The books are available as eBooks, in numerous formats, but most notably, as plain HTML files – so you can just read them directly in the browser.

#art #code #GenAI #Internet #medium #movies #Netflix #paper #PDF #Photography #printingPress #streaming #Youtube

Hello la communauté de la typo 🖋️

Depuis mi-septembre, BBB est en résidence à La Fraternelle, à Saint Claude dans le Jura. On a plongé dans les archives de l'imprimerie, redessiné des lettres jamais numérisées pour leur ajouter des glyphes post-binaires. Et puis, on les a découpées dans du hêtre pour ajouter les glyphes à la casse de bois. We're so emotionnal about this!!! 😋 Merci la Fraternelle ❤️

La fonte sera bientôt disponible pour vos ordinateurs, et on vous invite à La Frat' le vendredi 31 octobre à 19h pour notre sortie de résidence. Au programme, lectures, impressions collectives sur presses, et dj set de @Ludi . On a hâte!

Léna, Marouchka & Sophiə
@lena_slbrt @Butchaoreilles @sophie_vela
Photos: Sophiə
#typography #typedesign #typo #queer #typographie #print #letterpress #printingpress

A tiny #printingPress that can be #3dPrinted

https://openpressproject.com/

The Small God of the Internet

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

Heavily edited sloptraption.

1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
   ↩︎
6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎

#AI #algorithmicFeeds #blogging #blogrolls #Discworld #doomscrolling #feedReaders #GoogleReader #history #IndieWeb #internetFolklore #openWeb #OPML #personalWebsites #philosophy #POSSE #printingPress #quietWeb #RSS #smallGods #TerryPratchett #webStandards #writing

The Small God of the Internet

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

Heavily edited sloptraption.

1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
   ↩︎
6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎

#AI #algorithmicFeeds #blogging #blogrolls #Discworld #doomscrolling #feedReaders #GoogleReader #history #IndieWeb #internetFolklore #openWeb #OPML #personalWebsites #philosophy #POSSE #printingPress #quietWeb #RSS #smallGods #TerryPratchett #webStandards #writing

The Small God of the Internet

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

Heavily edited sloptraption.

1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
   ↩︎
6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎

#AI #algorithmicFeeds #blogging #blogrolls #Discworld #doomscrolling #feedReaders #GoogleReader #history #IndieWeb #internetFolklore #openWeb #OPML #personalWebsites #philosophy #POSSE #printingPress #quietWeb #RSS #smallGods #TerryPratchett #webStandards #writing

The Small God of the Internet

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

Heavily edited sloptraption.

1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
   ↩︎
6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎

#AI #algorithmicFeeds #blogging #blogrolls #Discworld #doomscrolling #feedReaders #GoogleReader #history #IndieWeb #internetFolklore #openWeb #OPML #personalWebsites #philosophy #POSSE #printingPress #quietWeb #RSS #smallGods #TerryPratchett #webStandards #writing

The Small God of the Internet

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

Heavily edited sloptraption.

1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
   ↩︎
6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎

#AI #algorithmicFeeds #blogging #blogrolls #Discworld #doomscrolling #feedReaders #GoogleReader #history #IndieWeb #internetFolklore #openWeb #OPML #personalWebsites #philosophy #POSSE #printingPress #quietWeb #RSS #smallGods #TerryPratchett #webStandards #writing

🆕 The book published as result of the IHC-APIGRAF research project on the history of the national printing industry, was the Gold Winner in the Editorial Design — Book category at Portuguese Creativity Club Festival. 🤩

👉 https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/obra-ihcapigraf-premio/

📷 APIGRAF

@bookstodon

#Histodons #PrintingPress #GrapgicDesign #Design #AwardWinningBooks #EditorialDesign #BookDesign #PrintingIndustry #HistoryInThePublicSphere #APIGRAF #IndústriaGráfica #LivrosPremiados #DesignEditorial #ClubeDaCriatividade

https://youtu.be/HUtJO59eKJ8

This is better

Also if you are interested in the etymology of the Linux 'cat' command, ..., wait I assure you it is interesting, like AOC saying she wanted to be an accountant because she wanted to avoid talking to people

#printingpress

Priceless, 570-year-old Gutenberg Bible on display in Warsaw.

The Bible, on display at the Medieval Art Gallery in Warsaw, was printed more than 570 years ago by Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press.

It is one of the few preserved copies in the world and the only one in Poland.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20250315-priceless-570-year-old-gutenberg-bible-on-display-in-warsaw?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

#Gutenberg #Book #PrintingPress #JohannesGutenberg #GutenbergBible #Bible #Warsaw #Poland #Museum #History

That path forward on social media, as it relates to protecting the republic, has never been made clearer.

LINK: https://substack.com/home/post/p-156469257

#radio #socialmedia #trump #unitedstates #printingpress

“Love In My Pocket”: How Writing in Modern, Accessible Language Connects Contemporary Audiences with Timeless Ideas

Preface: I was listening to one of my favorite songs, “Love in my Pocket” by Rich Brian, this morning, when I conceived a shitpost idea about an imaginary essay on this very thing. I posted the shitpost (which I’ll include a screenshot of below). I knew I would probably get at least one person jokingly asking “where’s the essay, OP??”, in the comments. So I decided that even if no one asked, I would give them the goddamned essay whether they wanted it or not, because I am bored and miss writing essays. I also love this song. It will likely be genuinely academic in nature but conversational in tone, with direct links to citations rather than a formal bibliography because I’M TIRED. However, if this genuinely attracts attention, I will go back and make a formal bibliography. So, without further ado, here’s the essay.

“Love In My Pocket”: How Writing in Modern, Accessible Language Connects Contemporary Audiences with Timeless Ideas

For centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire at the hands of Odoacer in 476 AD, the only semblance of law, order, and knowledge in Europe came at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church kept Latin alive in their services and texts, and it became the language of the rich and educated. Much of the poor population never learned to read in their mother tongues, much less Latin, as before Johannes Gutenberg brought the printing press to Europe around 1440, books were painstakingly written and copied by hand in monasteries and were prohibitively time consuming and expensive to make. As a result, knowledge, and therefore power, was almost exclusively in the hands of the wealthy and powerful and entirely outside of the hands of the lower classes. This created a system of government known as feudalism, with the Pope, the head of the Church, as the most powerful force in the land, the kings subservient to him, various lords and knights subservient to the kings, clergy to enforce the Pope’s will, and an entire set of classes of people beneath all of them who couldn’t own land, who were the property of the lords, and were deliberately kept from knowledge so that they could be easier to control. Is any of this starting to sound familiar to you, dear readers? Does it perhaps resemble our modern system? Don’t worry, I’m getting to my point.

All of this started to change when a few things happened. First, there was a devastating pandemic that swept through Europe that became known as the Black Death. A particularly nasty strain of the bubonic plague that was transmitted initially by infected flea bites, it quickly hopped from fleas to rats that had stowed away on Asian ships that were on their way to besiege key European ports, to the infected corpses themselves that were then used as biological weapons against the besieged ports.

The Black Death then swept through Europe, killing millions and causing an enormous labor shortage. The surviving peasants quickly realized that they had an advantage over the surviving landowners, and banded together to form guilds to leverage their skills and collectively bargain for better wages, treatment, and power. This tactic worked, as the landowners really had no defense against the peasants at this point, as everyone they knew was dead, there was no one left to back them up, and they had to bargain with the guilds to get anything done. The guilds then started to get rich and powerful for the first time in European history, giving rise to what is now known as the middle class as they soon got wealthy enough to own land of their own without the previous requirement of a title. Welcome to the early Renaissance, people.

Then, something else happened. Remember that Gutenberg guy? He was a goldsmith and he wanted to make books faster and easier to make. Improving on screw presses already available, he made a commercially viable movable type printing press around 1440. Boom. Books. Books galore. Now the people didn’t have to copy books by hand. They could simply print them and they were in business.

However, that wasn’t the only interesting thing happening. The common people weren’t just interested in breaking away from the lords. They were giving the Church the finger, as well. Remember, many people didn’t understand Latin, the language of the rich and educated. So they figured, “We’re not clergymen or princes. Why should we write in Latin?” When these mass produced books started coming into fashion, people started writing in their local language about what was going on about what was going on around them. This phenomenon is called “writing in the vernacular”.

Two very popular stories at the time that the common people connected with were about people hanging out in the Black Plague and written in the common people’s respective vernacular. One, written in the form of English spoken at the time, was the Canterbury Tales, written by the poet, diplomat, and civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer from 1387 to 1400. It technically predates the printing press by about 40 years, but it’s bawdy, it’s sad, it’s high drama for the ages. It connected the common people with themes that they could relate to in language they could understand and it entertained them during a very dark time.

Another, the Decameron, was written in Italian by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, for Italians. It’s another high drama vernacular story intended to completely make fun of the city-state of Florence in a wickedly black comedy style and tone. Yet again, the vernacular connected the people of the time with ideas they resonated with using accessible language with a healthy dose of dark humor and wit.

Similar things are happening today. We may not have a printing press, but we saw similar things happening during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns with people connecting on apps such as TikTok over people and topics that were accessible to them for perhaps the first time in their lives.

Much of academia and literature is written and taught to young people in a way that is inaccessible to them, and many educators don’t know, don’t care, or do not have the means to connect with their students, as the public school system in the United States is ill equipped to prepare students to be anything different than the modern equivalent of the peasants of the Middle Ages, and teachers are burnt out and exhausted.

Therefore, I would argue that modern music that uses language that is accessible to the young people of today is no different than the authors of the early Renaissance who wrote in their local vernacular, and they are following in that proud, rebellious tradition. An excellent example of an artist who connects with his audience using modern vernacular is the singer and social media star Rich Brian. He was discovered via various social media platforms, and his music took off. He blends shock, awe, comedy, relatable themes and lyrics, and catchy hooks to create a distinct sound that sounds like he’s having fun. He has made mistakes in creating a name for himself just like any human being, but has apologized and taken accountability for those mistakes. He’s also an immigrant and overall I love his music and his story.

Take his song “Love in My Pocket,” for example. When he sings, “I’ve got love up in my pocket, and I don’t know what to do with it,” he is making the concepts of unrequited love and grief accessible to a modern, common audience just as the early vernacular writers of the Renaissance did when they stopped writing in Latin and started writing in their native tongues.

In conclusion, the next time you’re tempted to scoff at modern popular music, ask yourself what themes the artist is trying to convey to their audience in the artist’s (and the audience’s) vernacular instead. Unrequited love? Grief? Wonder? Anger? Language changes, people, and writing in one’s own vernacular as well as the free spread of information is a proud, rebellious tradition that helps the common people break free from oppression and fear.

QED, or as they would say in the modern vernacular, mic drop.

Stay tuned for more magic, people. I love y’all immensely. ✨

Your now very brain fogged sorcerer (I chugged a Red Bull to make this essay happen), Lazarus.

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#Boccaccio #CanterburyTales #Catholicism #Chaucer #christofascisn #declineAndFallOfRome #education #essay #freedom #IMissWritingEssays #IMBored #JohannesGutenberg #MiddleAges #oppression #printingPress #publicSchools #serfdom #TikTok #vernacular #worldHistoryISMyRomanEmpireGoddamnit #writingInTheVernacular

@bookgaga @annickmacaskill

A lovely article on this remarkable publishing and printing outfit. Sad that they won't continue in their current form, but, hey!, change is life. They have other things to pursue. For me, the main message is that their is always room for unusual projects if there is a vision, skill, and the will to do the work. I feel uplifted from reading this article.

#publishing #printing #poetry #SmallBusiness #printingpress #GaspereauPress

@atpfm I believe I am roughly the same age as @siracusa and it’s not a 90s kid thing. CD-Rs are clearly S. The arguments of @caseyliss and @marcoarment were spot on. #printingpress.

"The First Printed #World Map from #IsidoreOfSeville's '#Etymologies', [...] often referred to as the first #encyclopaedia. It contained information on a very wide range of topics. The 'Etymologies' were a hugely influential source of knowledge for many centuries. [...] The use of stunning rubrication - applying red highlights by hand to significant printed capital letters - shows the intersection between #handwritten #manuscripts and the newly invented #printingpress. The T-O #map illustrating this page is the earliest printed European world map. [...] Date of production : 1472."
https://oculi-mundi.com
This is one of the 120 maps of the #Sunderland collection, "[...] a #Swiss investor and specialist in corporate finance [...] began his professional career at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [...] He subsequently joined [...] #UBS [...] In 1983 [...] CEO of #Elders Finance and Investment Company in Melbourne [...] returned to Switzerland in 1989 and acquired Adinvest AG [...] Key investment themes included life sciences, e-commerce, fintech and the digital economy. [...] a PhD [...] addressed the stability of funds in the banking system."
That fascination for #maps, the eye (gaze) and #immersiveinterfaces of wealthy men specialized in #extraction.
Thanks @sto_bxl1965 for the ref
#cartography

Contrary to what we tend to be taught in school, the #printingpress did not cause the scientific revolution. It took 200 years.

The first best-sellers were extremist religious texts and witch-hunting manuals.

Dare I say it’s happening again? 🤔
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAB356kx-x8/?igsh=cmpkMnBzdWd2M2lt

https://sarahwallinhuff.com/2024/09/05/unit-5a-the-development-of-print-culture/

#culture #history #Music #notation #printingPress #renaissance

A Teeny 3D-Printed Printing Press, Thanks Gutenberg https://hackaday.com/2024/07/12/a-teeny-3d-printed-printing-press-thanks-gutenberg/ #3dPrinterhacks #printingpress #3dprinter #Gutenberg #3dprint

A Teeny 3D-Printed Printing Press, Thanks Gutenberg - The printing press was first invented in 1440 AD by Johannes Gutenberg. It’s not s... - https://hackaday.com/2024/07/12/a-teeny-3d-printed-printing-press-thanks-gutenberg/ #3dprinterhacks #printingpress #3dprinter #gutenberg #3dprint

Mini 3D-Printed Press Is Sure To Make An Impression https://hackaday.com/2024/07/04/mini-3d-printed-press-is-sure-to-make-an-impression/ #reliefprinting #printingpress #spring-loaded #3dprinting #MiscHacks

Prueba de vida (al estilo del siglo XX).
#selfie #retrato #semitono #semitone #PrintingPress #imprenta #retro #nostalgia

One of my favorite historical religious events is the #Beeldenstorm aka the #IconoclasticFury.

After the #printingpress allowed mass distribution of the #Bible in common language, #tracts and religious #polemics became common. In the mid #16thCentury #Protestants rose up against all the pervasive #Catholic #idolatry and church wealth. They stormed churches throughout the #HolyRomanEmpire, tearing down idols.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeldenstorm

#Iconoclasm
#Histodon

More tags:
#17thCentury
#Ballads
#Broadsides
#BookBinding
#BookHistodons
#DigitalTexts
#Histodons
#Italian
#LabouringClass
#Litodons
#Manuscripts
#Printing
#PrintingHistory
#PrintingPress
#WomensHistory
#WorkingClass
#WritingManuals

Today's #TodayILearned and #etymology eyeopeners involve quite some typesetting related things, inspired by #StephenFry's #GreatLeapYears #podcast episode A Faustian Pact:

#font:

font (n.2)
"complete set of characters of a particular face and size of printing type," 1680s (also fount); earlier "a casting" (1570s); from French fonte "a casting," noun use of fem. past participle of fondre "to melt," from Latin fundere (past participle fusus) "to melt, cast, pour out" (from nasalized form of PIE root *gheu- "to pour"). So called because all the letters in a given set were cast at the same time.

#matrix:

matrix (n.)
late 14c., matris, matrice, "uterus, womb," from Old French matrice "womb, uterus" and directly from Latin mātrix (genitive mātricis) "pregnant animal," in Late Latin "womb," also "source, origin," from māter (genitive mātris) "mother" (see mother (n.1)).

The many figurative and technical senses are from the notion of "that which encloses or gives origin to" something. The general sense of "place or medium where something is developed" is recorded by 1550s; meaning "mould in which something is cast or shaped" is by 1620s; sense of "embedding or enclosing mass" is by 1640s.

And apparently Johannes #Gutenberg's full name was "Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg", where #Gensfleisch basically means "goose flesh" and Gutenberg was the name of their family house in Mainz.

(Before his development of the printing press, he was involved in "making polished metal mirrors (which were believed to capture holy light from religious relics) for sale to pilgrims to Aachen".)

I thought it kinda interesting that Gutenberg's investor for the Bible printing workshop was Johann Fust, or... #Faust.
Given how this investment kinda lead to Gutenberg losing control over the Bible printing workshop, one could argue Gutenberg had kinda sold his soul in a Faustian way. ;)

#TIL #TodayILearnt #language #PrintingPress #history

Putin just labelled the #monetarySystem out of the #USA as a "#printingPress".

An Oof… to some.

One of our favourite books from the decade has to be '#GrowingForBroke' (2016) by the late #PeterNorth. It described how the obsession with #GDPGrowth was not only wrecking havok on #Australia's #environment and globally but also set to destroy our #economy.

We talked about it extensively, but the #growthObsession only took a breather during #COVID.

#bitcoinFixesThis #moneyPrinterGoDrr #putin