Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 05

Weekly Whaaa…?

Mention of the Week

Amy Minervini, an English professor at Lewis and Clark State College, recently published an open textbook called Music in Your Own Words. It’s a “music-inspired composition guide” for first-year English writing courses, and it looks fantastic.

She wrote this work along with her students, and was kind enough to mention my Booky McBookface training guide for Pressbooks in their book’s introduction.

Viewing and Listening

Star Trek: Enterprise

As part of our viewing alpha, we’re getting close to the end of Star Trek: Enterprise’s first season. Unlike many of the other series, Enterprise gets into stride right off the starting line.

Watching it provides a fun, minimal version of the Brechtian estrangement effect where we continually realize “oh, we’re watching this story establish its fictional pre-history, before this device or that purportedly emerged.” For instance, only does the story take place before the Federation of the original series exists, but in the middle of about the 17th episode we realized “wait, they don’t have communication badges yet!”

In other words, it’s enjoyable both for what you see and for what you realize you’re not seeing.

Plant43 eps

I picked up a few of Plant43’s releases recently. If you enjoy the overlaps between B12-style UK techno and electro, you might also find these moving your feet and making your head nod.

His trio of eps on Semantica Records are where I first heard him: Dreams of the Sentient City, The Sentient City Awakens, and Return to the Sentient City.

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

• Mita Williams pays close attention to language in her excellently-titled I will dropkick you if you refer to an LLM as a Librarian. She provides a great round-up and contextualization of how people position “artificial intelligence” through the words they choose. As just one example, she compellingly suggests using the word associated instead of learned, and helpfully links to Alison Gopnik while sharing the idea that “large language models” (LLMs) are better understood as cultural artifacts than agents. Her post is worth reading, re-reading, and then following up on the cornucopia of links to the people she’s thinking with! (That last bit is what I’ll be doing throughout this week.)
• As part of their Groundhog’s Day Resolutions this year, Sri Seah is refining their plan in public across a series of posts. I really appreciate this sort of working where others can learn alongside you!

TWI(R)L

This week I (re)learned… 

• The Tasks plug-in for Obsidian recognizes a difference between “due before in one week” and “due before next week.” The first will keep a rolling 7-day window into the future. The second will only pull from this “week” on the calendar, with the “week” boundary apparently being Sunday/Monday.

Site Refinements of the Week

I re-named my Links Rhizome page to be an Elsewhere page, as that seems to be the emerging convention… but I also decided to keep the first one to explain why I find a “links rhizome” such a compelling image.

Not yet a refinement, but I also realized that the “view page history” and “view page source” links (under the “Page Source” heading) work just fine on posts in my blog and notes in my digital garden, but don’t behave the same for stand-alone pages like the ones in that last paragraph. I’ll have to investigate further to figure out if I’m linking to slightly the wrong thing, if that’s just one of Jekyll’s weird inconsistencies, and/or if I need to refine the code with some kinda “if/else” statement in Liquid.