Bruce MacEvoy, has an awesome website for water colour painters.

The Everdeck is a versatile 120-card system designed to support a wide range of traditional and modern card games. Its design weaves together mathematical and linguistic patterns, allowing it to map cleanly onto many existing systems, standard decks, Tarot, Hanafuda, and more, which makes it especially interesting as a piece of universal game infrastructure.

Harriet Baker reviews Sophie Calle’s first book Suite Venitienne, which documents her pursuit of one man through the streets of Venice.

Sharon Ruston surveys the scientific background to Frankenstein, grounding its horror in real debates about resuscitation, galvanism, and ambiguous states between life and death.

Cristian Băluță writes about he moded a Panasonic Lumix G9II into a Leica M-Style camera.

Henry Desroches makes a thoughtful case for reclaiming the Web we actually want by embracing personal, hand-coded, syndicated websites and protocols like RSS & Webmentions.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

Bryan Cantrill shares Oxide’s internal guidance on the use of LLMs in RFD 576.

Empathy: Be we readers or writers, there are humans on the other end of our language use. As we use LLMs, we must keep in mind our empathy for that human, be they the one who is consuming our writing, or the one who has written what we are reading.

Marcus Olang’ reflects on being told his writing sounds like ChatGPT. As a Kenyan, he reframes the comparison: ChatGPT writes like him and like many others shaped by the same educational system.

I am a writer. A writer who also happens to be Kenyan. And I have come to this thesis statement: I don’t write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. Or, more accurately, it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape.

Swiss mapmakers have been quietly seeding their work with little doodles—marmots, spiders, even the occasional hidden hiker—inside official maps.

It also implies that the mapmaker has openly violated his commitment to accuracy, risking professional repercussions on account of an alpine rodent. No cartographer has been fired over these drawings, but then again, most were only discovered once their author had already left. (Many mapmakers timed the publication of their drawing to coincide with their retirement.) Over half of the known illustrations have been removed. The latest, the marmot drawing, was discovered by Swisstopo in 2016 and is likely to be eliminated from the next official map of Switzerland by next year. As the spokesperson for Swisstopo told me, “Creativity has no place on these maps.”