02023-09-16 | Internet
One night he sat next to a couple and observed them as they ordered the most expensive dishes, drank the wonderful wine, and left, after paying, thanking the staff for the amazing evening. The next day, they emailed the restaurant detailing how they had been rudely treated by the staff, saying that the food had been vile, and asking, before they wrote a review online, how they might be compensated. My friend suggested a free glass of wine on their next visit, so they posted a scathing online review. He’s also had people eat a sandwich but return the last bite saying that it tastes off and could they please have their money back – or else. The online review is the preferred weapon of the modern extortionist.
Saturday 29 July 2023 – Monocle Minute | Monocle
The Food and Beverage business is hard. I don’t think I have ever written to a restaurant. If the food is great, I will be back often. If the food isn’t good, I won’t go back. Unless it seemed like an off night, in which case I would always give the restaurant a second chance. All of us have a bad night now and then.
We have had to learn how to read online reviews, especially how to ignore the stupid ones.
02023-05-16 | Coffee, Internet
I want to create a place where the flow of time is slow. The private library and cafe designed for that purpose are “Donko Donkou/Cafe Yoshi Kissa Fang”.
As the daily flow surrounding people accelerates, it is daring to be slow from the speed required by social systems and technologies. And to continue to think spontaneously about pleasure and health as a person. That’s the time I want to encourage with “dumb thinking”.
Read a book while tasting the coffee slowly roasted and carefully brewed. I believe that the lonely time of nothing and the fellowship with someone in the past called books will be the foundation of human’s ingenuity and wealth in the future, and I will open up “dumb thoughts” here.
BACH Kyoto branch office Donko donkou/喫茶芳
Machine translation isn’t perfect, but sometimes it comes up with good phrases. I like this:
I want to create a place where the flow of time is slow.
Check out the photos on the website. I also love the blue drop animation. I admit that I scrolled down several times to watch it disappear in the puddle at the bottom.
02023-04-23 | Internet
I recall buying his solo debut, Movies, when it came out in 1979. I returned it after a couple of listens. But 6 months later, I found an entry into his Dadaesque world and Movies became one of my favorite albums with his mix of hipster lounge exotica on “Cool in the Pool” countered by the epic expanse of “Hollywood Symphony.” That album is my first pick for essential Holger Czukay CDs.
HOLGER CZUKAY TURNS 70 – Echoes
I love stories like that. It’s happened plenty of times to me, too. And not just with an album of music, also with painting styles, or with food. Some things we need to approach slowly, some win us over immediately.
Does this happen anymore, in a time when all music is available and streaming everywhere? I suspect that a lot of people stick to the stuff they like and thus get challenged less in a streaming world. Radio used to be a great medium to get challenged by… but that was a long time ago.
This hasn’t happened just to music, but to much of culture, including politics. Fences are higher than ever and people stay in their group. Tell me the stuff I want to hear, play the music I already like, and don’t make me deal with anything different. The internet created more walled gardens, not less. That must have surprised the people who designed the internet.
02023-04-20 | Computer, Internet
RANK – DOMAIN – TOKENS – PERCENT OF
ALL TOKENS
768,560 – ottmarliebert.com – 30k – 0.00002%
See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart – Washington Post
It would be one thing if we were building something together, some kind of open source chat bot, but instead this is all fodder for a proprietary, corporate machine that costs money to use.
The three biggest sites were patents.google.com No. 1, which contains text from patents issued around the world; wikipedia.org No. 2, the free online encyclopedia; and scribd.com No. 3, a subscription-only digital library. Also high on the list: b-ok.org No. 190, a notorious market for pirated e-books that has since been seized by the U.S. Justice Department. At least 27 other sites identified by the U.S. government as markets for piracy and counterfeits were present in the data set.
See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart – Washington Post
I get that wikipedia would be ranked highly as it is a free online encyclopedia, but how did they gain access to the subscription-only digital library, ranked third? Did someone pay for an account and then use the account to scrape the entire website? And a market for pirated e-books, since seized by the U.S. Justice Department?!?!
Interesting times!
02023-03-07 | Internet
So here’s my 2023 experiment. Building LTD up in a sustained way without doing the thing everyone’s been doing since the 2010s – leaning on social media as the one and only growth tool.
Let me point you now to ooh.directory, Phil Gyford’s growing directory of living blogs. And it updates live when any of them post a new piece. That’s one plank in a new stage for personal publishing. (Great job, Phil, by the way.)
How To Build A Blog Without Social Media – WARREN ELLIS LTD
I think we already had the right ingredients – blogging, RSS, personal websites, podcasts – but then we were tempted and distracted by the big, shiny social media corporations. Then they became a huge problem… but we have something to fall back on. Back to the roots.
02023-03-03 | Art, History, Internet, Santa Fe
From this article on Nam June Paik I clicked to an article about Making Buddhist Art Today, a very brief stop which led me to this piece on Installation Art, which led me to this page about the Native American artist Jamison Chas Banks, where I found this short video about his installation at SITE Santa Fe in 2014.
Jamison Chas Banks from SITE Santa Fe on Vimeo.
One says that home plate is stolen in Baseball. The artist compares that to American history and says stealing home is maybe a very American thing. It’s a remarkable installation piece that makes me realize how art installations can be powerful storytelling. This piece is also a reminder that there is a lot of unfinished history that needs to be untangled. Until we do we will always build on top of quicksand.
Interesting how this post creates a circle for me. From Nam June Paik, who I met in Köln, where I grew up, to Jamison Chas Banks, who lives in Santa Fe.
