Maxwell Neely-Cohen @mncmncmnc@post.lurk.org

sentient octopi destroy human civilization RTS

So here's a weird one: a couple days ago @zachkrall pointed out to me that all these book metadata aggregators had reported me as a contributor to Golan Levin and Tega Brain's CODE AS A CREATIVE MEDIUM, an excellent book that I had absolutely nothing to do with.

I couldn't figure out why, frantically searched my copy's the index and footnotes but my name wasn't mentioned anywhere. Then today, trying different search terms, I found that on page 77 is a picture that included a 2016 tweet response I made to Jeff Thompson's "Art Assignment" twitter bot real tiny in the corner of a photograph.

so what I can only assume to be some image scraping AI "read" the book for Google or Amazon or both, looked at the picture, read my tiny name, and automatically added me to the book metadata...
So the bots are reading bots while reading the book on creative code watch out lollllll

On this subject, lately I've become obsessed with personal libraries and archives, both physical and digital. I don't have a grand thesis yet, but there's something to the role an individual's practice of collecting and curating can lead to a distributed system of stored knowledge, particularly in arenas traditional institutions miss, but even just as a caretaking mentality, library as practice

An underrated feature of physical books is how through used bookstores, estate sales, etc., they flirt with being a form of temporally resilient communal resource.

I have a couple books that are in their fifth century of life. They are not expensive or rare, just sets of words that have had 400+ years of people using them, kept in good shape and passed from caretaker to caretaker ("owner" isn't the right word in this case. I am caretaking for it. We are all librarians)

Started work today on the design for a little Boolean logic gate drum sequencer, inspired by #orca and how much fun I had years ago building physical analog logic gates that could be connected by patch cables. This is just a mock-up drawing, wanted to figure out the look first, but working on it :)

Amazing artists like @neauoire and @yaxu and @ojack have convinced me of the value of building one's own tools by hand, so going to give this a shot

I've been really hating the experience of twitter/instagram and traditional for-profit social media of late. Need to learn more about Mastodon in case any of the few people who follow around here want to give me some primers / wisdom