🍄 Flying Mushrooms, Elf School and Pocket Pets
Also I get sad about loosing things on the internet
When I was 4, my grandma knitted me a beanie with a pocket in the front. In that pocket sat a tiny knitted mouse. I adored it. So this week I went to find the pattern online to recreate myself; to no avail. I scoured knitting sites, forums, everywhere; nothing. It’s rare I know something the internet has no awareness of.
I tried for 20 minutes to recreate the beanie on ChatGPT. I ended up with a messed-up hat. Worse, ChatGPT insisted it had followed my instructions. Lying scumbag.
It’s made me think about all the knowledge that never makes it into the internet- the knowledge of silenced and lost cultures and crafts. It then made me think of all the knowledge that is lost on its way out of the internet; mediated through generative AI and search algorithms.
Knowledge that can’t be recombined. Knowledge that we’d prefer preserved not predicted [more on this in the Slow Zone section].
Let’s dig in.
Get writing! Here's a tiny prompt that may spark new story ideas
This 6-year-olds love of mushrooms as the main character got me thinking and foraging.
My 6yo daughter has somehow acquired a “mushrooms of the redwood coast” and is now cataloguing her favorite shrooms, asking for shrooms as a pet, and asking to go foraging. what do I do @saranormous [image on right]
I discovered that whilst mushroom fact books are plentiful [middle image], mushroom adventures are nearly non-existent. All I could find was the long out-of-print Mattie Fritts and The Flying Mushroom [image on left]- so snapped up a secondhand copy.
I have a rant lined up about rigid publishing categories [is this fiction or non-fiction? oh it’s a blend? sorry we don’t have a category for that] which reduces the amount of books published in the fantastical middle. I’ll leave it for another week. For now, go forth and write a mushroom adventure. For the children.
My favourite playful web picks for the month.
Jump scares for your desktop: add this tiny ghost to your desktop and enjoy. I’m obsessed (but it could be a little less frequent tbh).
Elf School (it’s a real thing); I’m returning to school to study this year. Sadly, it’s not to learn about elves in Iceland where…
Road crews in Iceland occasionally hire folklore experts to determine if certain boulders are home to elves. If little people are thought to live in the rocks, crews divert the road around the rock.
Pills that vibrate in your guts: When researching devices for my sci-fi MG fiction, I went into a rabbit hole of pills that vibrate once ingested and help with constipation and weight loss. No chemicals, only shimmy shimmy.
Poems on playing cards: by comedian Tim Key. Tim’s recent book of poems was gifted to my partner and I cackled and cackled. Recommend.
Playrooms by grOH! Design: I’m about to embark on a renovation, and am looking to squeeze play into every doorknob, step and cupboard. Inspo here.
Mute distracting notifications, grab a warm cuppa and find a seat in the sun.
Two reads that circle around the topic of lost and blurry knowledge on the internet.
By working with Traditional Owners, monitoring systems were able to be programmed with geographically-specific knowledge, not otherwise recorded, reflecting the connection of Indigenous people with the land. This collaboration highlights the need to ensure Indigenous-led approaches.
If Indigenous peoples don’t have sovereignty of their own data, they will simply be re-colonised in this information society.
Outputs: ChatGPT is a blurry jpeg
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation.
Something well thunk and beautifully made!
I’m still lamenting my lost mouse beanie. So here are some pocket animals I found. Not much more to say really, except oh how I would go about my day with more joy if only I had a tiny pet in my pocket.
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