Better Call a Website
Internet Phone Book, Crawl Space, PBS of the Internet and more :)
Dear reader
How are you? Are you enjoying your summer/winter? I’m writing to you from our home in Athens, Greece. It is hot here. Above 36°C for weeks, translating to a dance around 100°F for those speaking that language. But compared to last year, our first summer in Greece, I’m coping with the heat much better. I don’t experience the same short moments of dizziness. I’m also less tired. Part of it is physiological; for better or worse, my body is used to the temperature, but I also suspect a lot of it is cultural.
Growing up in Denmark, I was taught to appreciate the sun. In Denmark, the sun is a rare guest. Even during summer, you can’t count on temperatures above 20°C (68°F). As a result, I was soft-wired to believe that I must enjoy every hour of sunshine outside. Without being too dramatic, I think it is a cultural survival virus; every Dane needs those D vitamins from the sun. It is a public health concern.
Here in Athens, the situation is flipped on its head: the sun and heat are serious threats. I already knew this last year, but it took another year of living here before the cultural norms of Greece overrode those initially installed. I only now find it easy to stay inside during the afternoon.
Why am I writing this to you?
In honesty, I don’t know.
I was supposed to introduce a new dream project I’m working on with Elliott Cost. We are making an Internet Phone Book: a physical directory of people and their personal websites. It is becoming an incredible reference with hundreds of lovely personal sites. In case you haven’t already submitted your site, I encourage you to do so on https://internetphonebook.net, and then I promise to return with more background on the project when the book is printed.
With care
Kristoffer
Wayside flowers
https://internetphonebook.net/
https://www.robinsloan.com/tap/tour/
Field notes
1.
Crawl Space Issue Four. My verdict: it may be their best edition of web poetry and writing to date. It feels like they are finding their voice, or maybe the contributors are finding them?
Read the editorial note, and remember to View Source to find short Q&As with the contributors about their work and inspirations. I particularly liked Jo Suk’s answers.
3.
»Until—tucked away in a corner—I stumbled upon the craggy hills of her old website (…) Inside was an uninhibited, half-alive place, the code struggling to articulate what Le Guin had intended; blog posts with the formatting mangled, partially-bulleted lists of books she’d enjoyed. The website was started in 2006. It had come to resemble what I understood of Le Guin: pioneering, inventive, and rapidly fading.«
— Meghna Rao on Ursula K. Le Guin’s early Internet blog.
4.
Did we need a reprint of a 2020 article reminding us that The Internet Exists on Planet Earth? Probably not.
However, it is a welcome reminder of the progression in our understanding of the Internet. What Mindu Seu surfaced in the article no longer feels novel. Today, (I believe) we know that the Internet consumes electricity, requires materials, and runs in undersea fiber-optic cables. You’ll find a dozen contemporary references in the Ecology section of Diagram.website.
5.
From the Poetic Web Calendar: Today 21st, Spencer Chang hosts a Touching Computers Workshop in Berlin. Friday 26th, Chia Amisola performs the browser and hosts an Internet Ambient Workshop in San Francisco.
6.
From Call for Participation: Taper invites submissions in response to superstitions. ABC Glossary is accepting new language for computing terms. Compost Party is looking for things to host.
Collections
Last email was sent to 3328 inboxes. Logo by Dreamsâ„¢. Photograph by Ana Å antl. And you can reach me at kristoffer@naiveweekly.com.