It is sad. When I was a kid we called up BBS’s that were hosted in people’s homes; when I was in high school we downloaded music from public FTP addresses; when I was in college we set up our own websites. Anyone could set up a server, and that server was just as much a part of the Internet as any other server; that’s simply not viable any longer, even if you weren’t worried about making money. The Internet as we knew it is dead.
There are, however, green shoots of possibility, and once again the answer is to go smaller. When anyone can make an app, the answer is not to try and make a quick buck in the App Store; in fact, the surge in slop will make the market worse for everyone. Rather, it’s to make something for yourself and a small group of trusted friends and colleagues.
Three Italian ‘hobbits’ flew to Ireland to return this man’s ring
Filippo Palagi, one of the three friends, along with Nicola Malloggi and Edoardo Poggi, says they weren’t particularly optimistic. Like Mohr, they assumed the ring was gone for good.
But hoping to lift Mohr’s spirits, the three men conjured up a legend of their own: they would find the golden ring and return it to its rightful owner in a Lord of the Rings-style quest — an epic journey that, they joked, would take more than a thousand years.
Three Italian ‘hobbits’ flew to Ireland to return this man’s ring — and it was precious | CBC Radio
The Library Is Closed. Feel Free to Come In.
The Wyoming branch library is home to a new ECRL initiative called “extended access,” which allows users to access a library branch when it is unstaffed. “We hope that it allows more people to use the facility, in particular those who may not be able to get to the library during otherwise limited hours due to work and family schedules,” ECRL executive director Carla Lydon wrote in an email.
ECRL is one of a handful of rural library systems across the United States to offer such a service, increasing library access at a time when libraries are struggling for funding.
— Read on reasonstobecheerful.world/the-library-is-closed-feel-free-to-come-in
Of Course Muslims Can Be Republicans – by Shaun Kenney
Politics is downstream of culture; freedom is the necessary condition for any virtue. Some people are awfully fond of quoting John Adams when he says that the Constitution is formed for a moral and religious people and none other. We tend to forget that Adams meant these in a classical sense of both morality and religion and not an evangelical one.
Freedom is the prerequisite for America. For a religious test to be the delimiter for participation in public life is odious in the extreme.
…
This is a dumb argument to be having at any level or at any time. Of course, Muslims can join the Republican Party of Virginia. Of course,they are welcome within the conservative movement. Of course, we should be welcoming everyone who understands and celebrates the role of free minds, free markets, and a free society. Of course, we should be welcoming everyone who loves America into our ranks. Of course, we should be running Muslims for public office if they are so inclined to do so — it’s a thankless task, but we could sure use the leadership.
Of course, they should bring falafel to the next unit committee meeting.
Tokyo Underground Club Turns Its Dancefloor Into a “Reading Rave” – EDM
SPREAD, an underground club located in Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa neighborhood, hosted ‘JUCY BOOK RAVE,’ a daytime event that temporarily transformed its dancefloor into a dimly lit reading lounge on September 26th.
Running from 10am to 2pm, the event covered the club floor in carpeting so attendees could sit, recline against the walls or stretch out with a book while ambient music played around them. After 1pm, organizers gradually raised the volume, giving guests the choice to continue reading or hit the dancefloor in the more traditional sense.
— Read on edm.com/events/tokyo-underground-club-reading-rave/
Still On Its Way to Cleveland – Longreads
Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.
Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.
— Read on longreads.com/2026/09/22/family-road-trip-early-internet-90s/
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible | ‘ERE I AM – JH!
The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.
I knew that even ChatGPT was capable of a broader variety of styles than this, so I set out to prove it.
What Time Is It?
Researchers at several universities in China, in a study involving more than 1,500 high-school students, found that their future time perspective was damaged by a steady diet of such short-form videos.
These videos, in particular, activate the reward circuitry of the brain with their novel, engaging and effortless nature, leading to instant and constant gratification. We already saw in a previous study that this type of engagement activates the addiction centers of our brains, and in some cases makes it hard for us to stop viewing.
Now, it’s also making us less able to plan for the future, or even care about it.
Teens Who Can’t Put Down TikTok and Instagram Are Losing Their Sense of Time – WSJ
Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid | NBER
Exploiting the administrative timing of aid tranche arrivals, we find sharp, short-lived surges of crypto activity at the disbursement month, driven mainly by anonymous and newly created wallets on both tax-haven and mainstream exchanges. Blockchain forensics reveal patterns consistent with the placement, layering, and integration sequence of conventional money laundering. We estimate an implied leakage of 2 to 6 cents per aid dollar, which amounts to roughly 1.7 to 4.4 billion dollars of aid diversion across the tranche arrivals we study.
— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w35655
Prince Was One of the First Players of The Oregon Trail
The basic story is that a college history major (Don Rawitsch) teamed up with two friends (Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger), both of whom were math majors and had some programming experience, to make a computer game to liven up the history class that Rawitsch was student teaching. While developing the game, Heinemann & Dillenberger tested it out with some kids at the high school at which they were student teaching…and one of those kids was Prince Rogers Nelson.
— Read on kottke.org/26/10/prince-was-one-of-the-first-players-of-the-oregon-trail