parker higgins

Joe Brainard’s 1975 book “I Remember” is an incredible work of poetry. The New Yorker called it “his miniaturist memoir-poem,” and Paul Auster’s blurb for the 2001 edition gives a good sense of it:

After five amazing years, I’m done (for now) at EFF. It’s impossible to boil the experience down into numbers, but here’s a big one: 215 Deeplinks blog posts bear my name as author. Here they are, collected in one place for posterity. After the first hundred and the second hundred, I picked out some of my favorites.

Building on the previous cyber-supercut, here’s a new video that incorporates all the cybers from all of the general election debates, both Presidential and Vice-Presidential, set to music from Mr. Robot.

Many obituary headlines follow a standard formula: “Firstname Lastname, Who You Know From That One Thing, Dies at Age.” It’s a tendency I’ve counted on before when extracting names from obituaries for FOIA The Dead, but tonight it also got me thinking about the “who phrase”: the relative clause that condenses a lifetime of context into a handful of words.

The first debate between Clinton and Trump featured the word “cyber” 11 times. With any luck, the next one will have even more. Here they all are:

In an effort to explain trigger warnings and safe spaces to people who clearly don’t understand them—like the University of Chicago’s dean of students—a few folks have compared them to the movie ratings and trailer cards that list potentially offensive material. It’s a useful analogy, but not likely to be much comfort for people concerned about trigger warnings.

I’m trying to take more pictures with my mirrorless camera, especially when I travel or walk around the city. I’ve always been a big fan of Unsplash, which curates high-res user-submitted photography and releases “packs” of images completely free to the public domain. So for now, I’ll be releasing some of my favorite shots to the public domain and hosting them there.

AOL’s “carpet-bombing” free disk campaign in the 90s and 2000s worked incredibly well. But the woman responsible for it, Jan Brandt, wouldn’t let anyone acknowledge that, for fear of encouraging copycats. And while she didn’t speak much to the press at the time, she let loose in an interview with the Internet History Podcast in 2014. (Side note: I’ve been listening non-stop to episodes of this show, and they’re amazing.)

I’ve been attending (and livetweeting) the Oracle v. Google jury trial for the last two weeks, and have had a lot of conversations and made a lot of jokes about it. One joke that went surprisingly well was an image I made and tweeted without context:

I spent Friday and Saturday at Shift CTRL, a great academic conference in Stanford. There was a little more free time to explore the campus than on previous times I’ve been down there, because I had a bike and was by myself. Fortunately, I got tips to visit the cactus garden and the Stone River sculpture, both of which I recommend very highly as quiet, beautiful, contemplative spaces. Some pictures below.