The Offline Report

From the surrealist and highbrow show "Atlanta" we learn media literacy from "Alfred" who is the alpha of his crew (and he watches the news): News Silo Hoppers This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

MidJourney is the name of the AI art generator which scanned thousands of human-completed works on the internet to help user Jason Allen compose a picture which beat out other human-made entries to win the a state fair art competition prize. The Pueblo Chieftan newspaper reported the event. The Colorado State Fair defines "digital art" as "artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process." They then imply Allen's entry is digital art, period. But the MidJourney software creates something which exceeds that definition of digital art. A strictly digital art tool such as Gimp or Inkscape provides stripped-down paint stroke commands for a human to use to create a picture, from scratch. MidJourney uses human-completed pictures and words that describe them to help a human create a new picture. So which human-completed paintings or photographs helped MidJourney *and* Jason Allen compose his Space Opera picture? The Pue...

According to scholar Walter J. Ong, pre-literate and regressed-literate social groups organize memory differently than people who read. I learned this in the 2007 New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain . According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. Anybody can be a regressed literate through different life stages. Adults don't always realize they should try reading glasses. Some get eye injuries. A friend with early Parkinson's disease got Lasik surgery twice and may need it a third time. Parents of young children rely on TV and radio/smart speakers while their hands and eyes are occupied caring for infants. But TikTok is not a replacement for newspapers and local news under FCC perview. TikTok is all video and no text, and the messages there can more easily bypass viewers' critical thinking faculties than news found on newspaper sites. Spe...

Competent public works directors missed an opportunity this week when promotors for its public grand opening celebration stuck to confined internet silos for its promotion target audiences. [Shaking our collective heads.] Online version, if you must, is at this link [ Letters to the Editor: Boyle Heights elders feel left out of 6th Street Viaduct celebration .] Read the architectural review of this unusual span which hovers not water, but urban life " Dramatic new 6th Street Bridge opens, delivering a ‘love letter’ to Los Angeles ". It's a very 'grammable piece of civic engineering. "The new 6th Street Viaduct crosses more industry than water, spanning a scruffy flat of lofts, warehouses and rail lines," wrote reporter Rachel Uranga. It neither soars the East River nor gilds the San Francisco Bay, she wrote, but the 10-arch road above "is the largest and most expensive bridge the city has ever erected, connecting downtown to Whittier Boulevard...

Staring at the computer screen tricks your brain into thinking you're working when you're not. The internet starts to think for you instead of the other way around. Getting away from the screen is crucial for productivity. But it's hard, so try if you can to make the screen-breaking chair more soft and inviting than the screen-facing seat. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I was driving to downtown San Francisco to look for a summer job. We listened then to KGO AM 810 radio nearly round the clock. The familiar friendly voices of KGO turned serious before the 9AM talk show hour to deliver breaking news: a middle-aged man had "gone postal" on his ex-coworkers at a city high rise at 101 California street. It was still far away, off in the radio, in the media. I found parking and job-hunted at the restaurants I planned to ask for waitress positions. I kept hearing "101 California 101 California" over the airwaves of passing cars, the way we attuned to same media among strangers back then. (Neighboring cars co-listening to the same radio is depicted in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". It was like that. Empathy weaver built-in.) So I meandered down to 101 California and turned a corner to see a scrum of reporters at the corner. Boom michs, TV cameras, people writing into notebooks. Some serious, some relieved after hours of cove...

July 6 "After his death, many Chinese lawyers offered tributes. But the authorities kept his funeral brief and limited attendance to 20 people, citing Covid limits, Mr. Pu said. Their real worry, he said, was Mr. Zhang’s legacy."    nytimes.com How Do I Prove That I Can Pay the Rent if I Don’t Have a Monthly Salary?     nytimes.com "In so doing, it favorably cited Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the abortion case overruled alongside Roe last month, for the view that decisions 'involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the 14th Amendment.'"    nytimes.com “No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”    medium.com...

Mar 30 Watchdog Group Publishes Encyclopedia of All the Nasty Things Big Tech Has Done:     gizmodo.com Mar 26 "A prominent San Francisco LGBTQ+ rights activist is being uprooted from his home in the Castro neighborhood after the new owner of the property nearly doubled his rent to $5,200."    theguardian.com "And yet, he says, this sort of energy efficiency is not taught, and it’s certainly not in any government study or climate model. Why not? 'Because it’s not a technology. It’s a bloody design,' he says."    theguardian.com Mar 23 "Most Western-run social media such as Facebook or Instagram are banned. YouTube appears to be on the verge of being banned. Twitter has been slowed down significantly. According to a recent report, Chinese TikTok does not allow any foreign content anymore for users in Russia."    latimes.com Mar 2 2022 No military bases in ex-Soviet countries, Russia tells West   ...

Feb 2 2022 "Much more interesting than the marriage is the show’s portrait of the internet’s early days. When Pam and Tommy express hope that the tape can be suppressed, it’s not because they’re naive. It’s because it’s the ’90s, when a public embarrassment could disappear as quickly as a day-old newspaper instead of following a person until the end of time."    sfchronicle.com   📰 "'The Ballingers are disappointed that the court failed to recognize that the Oakland law forcing them to pay their software industry tenants $6,500 before they could re-occupy their own home, in accordance with the terms of lease executed before the law was even enacted, is unconstitutional,' Breemer said.”    sfchronicle.com   📰 Feb 1 2022 S.F. has 40,000 empty homes. Would taxing them help solve the city’s housing crisis?:     sfchronicle.com   📰 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu...

"Trauma bonding is a psychological response to abuse. It occurs when the abused person forms an unhealthy bond with the person who abuses them." - Medical News Today ----------------------------- Further Reading: Opinion: Marjorie Taylor Greene is a wart on the body politic. Facebook is a melanoma.:     washingtonpost.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Jan 31 2022 Supply of homes for sale in U.S. hits lowest level in more than two decades:     latimes.com   📰 COVID-19: The coronavirus pandemic is far from over:    Deutsche Welle via msn.com "They decided that the project should be sited and built at the United States Postal Service, which not only had the national database of valid addresses, but would ultimately deliver the packages."    wired.com "Some studies have shown that GI symptoms can manifest before the onset of typical respiratory symptoms [2,59]. The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the US presented with a two-day history of nausea without respiratory complaint."    ncbi.nlm.nih.gov "By his count, there are 600 FBI agents who are certified as UCEs (undercover employees). But some of them do the work of 'backstopping' agents: creating false credentials and social media profiles for UCEs working in the field."    rollingstone...

Dec 30 Feb. 25 No more ‘Mr.’ Potato Head: Hasbro makes classic toy gender neutral:     washingtonpost.com 5 GOP-led states extend unemployment aid to workers who lose jobs over vaccine mandates Critics says the rule changes in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee are incentivizing people to skip shots, and undermining the White House’s pandemic response.:     washingtonpost.com Opinion: It took witnessing an act of violence for me to get to know my Capitol Hill neighborhood:     washingtonpost.com Opinion: The bad guys on social media are learning new tricks:     washingtonpost.com A doctor struggled with a rare, incurable syndrome. Now she helps others overcome it. Patients with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome are often misdiagnosed or dismissed as hypochondriacs. That’s what happened to Dr. Alissa Zingman.:     washingtonpost.com It Keeps on Raining Too Much Too Fast Even an inch of rain, if it ...

Jony Ive misses Steve Jobs , ten years after his passing: As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he [Jobs] recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient. ... ... I had thought that by now there would be reassuring comfort in the memory of my best friend and creative partner, and of his extraordinary vision. But of course not. Ten years on, he manages to evade a simple place in my memory. My understanding of him refuses to remain cozy or still. It grows and evolves. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I first discovered the author of the beguiling polemic "Surveillance Capitalism" on BookTV's After Words program . The Verge's Nilay Patel interviewed Shoshanna Zubofin the early days of her book's availability. She was hypnotically compelling, but with time I snapped out of it and categorized her book as a polemic. However I did notice the extroverts in my life who don't care for "privacy" are quite taken with Zuboff's framing, which is very much for privacy. She gets through to some. Friday Zuboff published an update to her stance, articulate as ever, each sentence building on the next. Here she uncovers the tragedy of the uncommons : The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit. The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves ...

Current Affairs interviewed a local S.F. city supervisor who voted against new housing construction on a heavily-used Nordstrom parking lot: ROBINSON Is that because it would just take such a colossal amount of new housing because a lot of what would be built is just going to be bought up and held as investment property? You know, it’s funny. I live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which is similar to parts of San Francisco in that it’s a quaint historic district, and I look out my window at night and see no lights in the other windows because so many of the properties are so valuable that they are just held by people as assets. If you built 10% more of them, it would just be 10% more that were being held as assets without ever actually being lived in by the people of New Orleans. Housing is a climate issue. ------------------------------------- Further Reading: "Homeowners, already more than 40 times as wealthy as renters, were more likely to keep their jobs, profit f...

Nov. 30 "Residents told CBS News that Boise's housing market has changed the city. Young people squeezed out of buying their first home are moving away, along with older residents who are cashing out."    cbs.com "For years, Mendocino Railway and Fort Bragg have battled over land rights, with fights growing increasingly nasty over time. Last year, Mendocino Railway cut down trees on lands owned by residents and had to apologize to the land owners."    sfgate.com   🐤 Even on U.S. Campuses, China Cracks Down on Students Who Speak Out | Students and scholars from China who criticize the regime in Beijing can face quick retaliation from fellow students and Chinese officials who harass their families back home. U.S. universities rarely intervene:     propublica.org   📧 Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight:     propublica.org   📧 Nov. ...

From the Wall Street Journal's article on Robert Woodson : Mr. Woodson has also taken note of a spate of 10 teen suicides, many committed on train tracks, that shook my hometown of Palo Alto between 2009 and 2015. He likens that tragedy to the epidemic of murders in many U.S. cities. “If you devalue your life, you’ll either take your own, or you’ll take someone else’s,” Mr. Woodson says. “But they’re different sides of the same coin.” In both cases, young people “are dying in acts of self-hatred.” Robert Woodson, a self-proclaimed conservative who sounds apolitical to today's reader, is stepping down from his leadership of The Woodson Center. He also worked with Alliance of Concerned Men to diffuse gang violence. He partnered in the 1980s with an enterprising single mother of five named Kimi Gray to bring tenant stakeholders into the public housing management circles, resulting in President Reagan signing public housing reform. ------------------------------------------- Fu...