Rafael Fajardo

I am a designer, researcher, and educator. This blog contains thoughts on electronic, experimental, emerging media art & design. I also contribute to the Emergent Digital Practices, Humane Games, and Critical Toys tumblrs. I try not to repeat posts among them. This one began activity 2010 03 22. All my links can be found at my links page

[billy-pilgrims-steering-wheel]

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”

— James Baldwin

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

2001 a space odyssey stephen sandoval film art poster

[rafaelfajardo]

Could their name have been Esteban Sandoval? (speculative query)

[a-book-place]

This library was found in the Sakya Monastery, Tibet, containing 84,000 secret manuscripts, including the history of mankind for over 1000 years. It was discovered behind a huge wall. It is 60m long & 10m high.

— Antoine Taveneaux

‘As to the great library of Sakya, it is on shelves along the walls of the great hall of the Lhakhang chen-po. There are preserved here many volumes written in gold letters; the pages are six feet long by eighteen inches in breadth. In the margin of each page are illuminations, and the first four volumes have in them pictures of the thousand Buddhas. These books are bound in iron. They were prepared under orders of the Emperor Kublai Khan, and presented to the Phagpa lama on his second visit to Beijing.’ — Wikipedia

‘Sakya Monastery houses a huge library of as many as 84,000 books on traditional stacks 60 metres (200 ft) long and 10 metres (33 ft) high. Most of them are Buddhist scriptures, although they also include works of literature, history, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, agriculture, and art. One scripture weighs more than 500 kilograms (1,100 lb), the heaviest in the world. The collection also includes many volumes of palm-leaf manuscripts, which are well-preserved due to the region's arid climate.

— Richard Mortel

‘In 2003, the library was examined by the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences. The monastery started to digitize the library in 2011. As of 2022, all books have been indexed, and more than 20% have been fully digitized. Monks now maintain a digital library for all scanned books and documents.’ Wikipidia

source

[amatlcomix]

Inclusive Sans expands upon Penguin’s history with playfulness and curiosity

Accessibility and boldness are the key focus in Olivia King’s customised typeface for the publishing giant.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine."

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

Close To the Machine is Ellen Ullman's classic memoir of writing software in Silicon Valley at the start of the dotcom bubble; it was originally published in 1997 and reprinted in 2022 for the 25 anniversary by Farrar, Straus and Giroux's MCD books:

https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/close-to-the-machine-25th-anniversary-edition

I somehow never read Ullman's book; having read it now, it's easy to understand how this beautifully rendered snapshot of life at the end of the 20th century became a touchpoint for multiple generations of coders and technologists, and why it's still in print, 27 years later.

Ullman's subtitle for the book is "Technophilia and its discontents," and therein lies the secret to its magic. Ullman loves programming computers, loves the way they engage her attention, her consciousness, and her intelligence. Her descriptions of the process of writing code – of tackling a big coding project – are nothing less than revelatory. She captures something that a million technothriller movies consistently fail to even approach: the dramatic interior experience of a programmer who breaks down a complex problem into many interlocking systems, the momentary and elusive sense of having all those systems simultaneously operating in a high-fidelity mental model, the sense of being full, your brain totally engaged in every way. It's a poetics of language that meets and exceeds the high bar set by the few fiction writers who've ever approached a decent rendering of this feeling, like William Gibson.

These glittering moments are fleeting, though. No code project survives contact with the computer, a brutal and unforgiving cognitive partner that ferrets out every error in your thinking, every trap you've unknowningly fallen into. Here again, Ullman shines in her renderings of the ferocious mental combat that programmers must do with their computers, grueling matches that are made all the worse by the certain knowledge that the only way to win the bout is to discover and fix your own flaws.

These set-pieces make for great branching points into the three other components of Ullman's classic: first, there are the stories of high-tech institutions. We follow Ullman – a contract programmer who is hired to assemble teams to run specific projects – as she works on a gnarly all-in-one tool for matching people with AIDS with a spectrum of public services; and when she is brought into a failing startup as part of an abortive turnaround attempt.

All of this is happening just as the web and the internet are devouring all high-tech projects, and Ullman – a techie who is an old hand at networked communications, but it professionally part of a breed of coder who specializes in standalone and modem-based services – finds herself sitting opposite glittering new-breed hackers who have arrived to eat her lunch. Here, too, Ullman absolutely nails the experience of a technologist who has transitioned from surfing the cutting edge to being decapitated by it. This sequence is made all the more poignant by a series of scenes in which Ullman confronts the impossible knot of writing code that benefits marginalized, at-risk users (people dying of AIDS) while satisfying the political and bureaucratic imperatives of multiple charities, government agencies, and advocates. Ullman has finally wrestled all of these stakeholders into a stable configuration, only to have these shiny young people show up and tell her that she – and everything she's done and everything she stands for – is obsolete. It's a gut-punch of a scene.

That's the third component of Ullman's memoir – the workplace culture of a programmer who must answer to (and assuage) a variety of nontechnical people who flip from awe to seething resentment of you and your work. Ullman, who lives the simultaneously precarious and lucrative life of a high-paid, much sought-after freelancer, is at the mercy of so many people who have terrible power over her, little empathy for her, and an almost total lack of understanding of what she does (imagine Dilbert, but written by a smart and aware person, not a humorless asshole).

The final quadrant of Ullman's book is the memoir itself – the story of her life growing up in the shadow of a driven, striving Jewish immigrant in New York City whose manic entrepreneurship and minimal self-awareness transforms him into both a source of inspiration and an object of pity for Ullman. Ullman's personal life in San Francisco is painted with equal fidelity, from her bisexual, polyamorous romantic life to her camaraderie with other hackers (some of whom end up in her bed). Ullman introduces us to characters that are instantly recognizable today, from the cypherpunk who dreams of setting up an anonymous digital cash system that is financed by an offshore porn empire to a semi-libertarian young man who can't imagine why the law would set limits on when a worker can be treated as an independent contractor.

These are timeless avatars for the kinds of people whose live "close to the machine," whose brains are easily and productively ensnared by digital computers and their pitiless logic. Despite that, this volume is also a perfect, high-fidelity capture of Silicon Valley at the start of one of its many (many, many) bubbles. I was there, then, working as a contractor (what else?) for a Unix shop and learning on the job as we tried to figure out whether our customers would expect to access our tools through a browser rather than at the console of a quarter-million dollar SGI machine. Though I'm a generation younger than Ullman, I was in the same place, time and milieu as she was when this book was written, and all of it rings utterly true.

What's more, Ullman's work here preserves and reveals the extent to which the best and worst aspects of tech culture have been present since the earliest days, and gestures at the causal relationship between those aspects and the intrinsic nature of the work of programming computers. While Ullman doesn't advance an explicit theory relating the attitudes and conundra of her field to the nature of computer programming, this work is implicitly webbed over with gossamer threads joining all these phenomena.

That's something I've tried to do in my own fiction, particularly with my Martin Hench novels, which visit different moments in Silicon Valley history (the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s) through the eyes of a forensic accountant who unravels tech scams and, in so doing, traces those same threads:

https://us.macmillan.com/series/themartinhenchnovels

This 25th anniversary edition features a beautiful introduction by Anna Wiener, author of the extraordinary 2020 Silicon Valley memoir Uncanny Valley. Wiener is the perfect choice to introduce this volume, connecting the present moment with the first days of the commercial internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley_(memoir)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease

[vertigoartgore]

1988's Concrete Vol.1 #10 cover by artist Paul Chadwick.

[toomanydesign]

Manita Songserm

[finitestateai]

Robot girl who's overclocked so much that she physically can't take things easy and relax. But also completely breaks down after each short burst of work.

[myjetpack]

My latest cartoon for Guardian Books

[brucesterling]

*"Spider Rose." A science fiction character I created 43 years ago that suddenly appears in public and looks like a collectible action-figurine. #LoveDeathandRobots

*A pretty good one, actually. That Netflix design team was really doting on her cyberpunk detailing. Even her house and her house-pets look freaked-out and nifty.

[biglawbear]

I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

[biglawbear]

You have to understand. I watched the movies maybe once as a kid when they came out twenty years ago. I've somehow avoided learning like anything about these books my entire life. Literally everything about these books was a complete unknown and surprise to me. Totally blank slate going on. I barely even knew how it ended.

Holy shit.

[biglawbear]

Frodo didn't complete his task. Sam literally carried him up Mount Doom. And when he got to the end, he couldn't throw the Ring away.

But for Gollum biting it off with his finger, it wouldn't have been destroyed.

So Frodo's journey saved the world nonetheless.

And it broke him.

It was too much for him to bear. He could no longer live in the Shire or live in Middle-Earth. He wasn't of the world anymore. He had to go to the Undying Lands.

He took on the task that no one else would. He saved the world. Everyone got a happy ending. Aragorn became King, Sam rebuilt the Shire, Merry and Pippin became heroes. They all lived in renown.

But Frodo had the hardest task of all. No one else would do it. A simple hobbit who came by the Ring by chance. Not a King, not an immortal. Not a wizard. No power save his will and his friends. And he did it and saved everyone.

And he never got to rest. He never got to remain in peace. The task destroyed him. It was too much.

But there was no other way. Nobody but a simple hobbit could bear the ring all the way to Mount Doom and resist its power so long. Not a man, not an elf, not a wizard; they would have succumbed. Gandalf knew this, which was why he chose the hobbits in all his designs.

It's amazing that one of the precedent setting works in the fantasy genre holds up so well because it subverts what ultimately became the genre's core tropes. The hero was not the King, or a chosen one. In fact, the hero not being the King was a key point that allowed Aragorn to distract Sauron and allow the task in the first place. The hero was someone unassuming but courageous, who did the thing because no one else would, even though it was just by chance he came upon it.

But Frodo couldn't resist the Ring completely. He wasn't superior to anyone else in that way. And in the end it left him broken. The burden crushed him. No one else could do it, and in the end, he couldn't either. He wasn't so special that he was invulnerable.

I'm not okay. Holy fuck you guys.

[biglawbear]

It's been a week and I'm still not over this, I'll never get over this.

Something that I've been thinking about, as I struggle with depression and anxiety and *another vague gesture at everything* is that LOTR does not criticize Frodo for being broken. It does not shame him or deny him what he needs.

The task was too much and it broke him and that's okay. His friends nonetheless take care of him and let him go with understanding. The book doesn't treat it as a bad thing.

This seems to be a theme throughout the books. The characters rest and heal. They spend time recovering in Rivendell, Fangorn, Lorien, Ithilien. It's treated as good and necessary. They don't heroically endure endless torment from the second they set out until they're done.

And in Gondor's march from Minas Tirith to Mordor, Aragorn recognizes that some of the very few men he's taking with him don't have the heart to go to battle against the Enemy. And he says that's okay. He gives them other tasks the they can do. They hold other strategic points. They aren't shamed for not going all the way, or kicked out, or told that they aren't manly or whatever. Their limitations are recognized and respected. The task was too big and it was okay that they couldn't do it.

I don't know man. I've held on through some absolutely crazy shit. White knuckled through mental health crises when my doctors were begging me to take a break, to go to the hospital before I hurt myself. My therapist has tried to slow me down and tell me that I've been going through it and it's understandable that I am feeling some kind of way. Even one of my colleagues remarked that I've had an absolutely fucking wild career and that I've seen more as a lawyer of seven years than she has as a lawyer of forty. But I've gotten it into my head that I have to be strong, I have to be independent.

Fuck me, man, I'm currently white knuckling through life and hanging on by a fucking thread. A few weeks ago I was about an hour away from checking myself in to a mental health facility until my best friends swooped in to help me. And then I went right back to work.

And then I read this book. This fucking brilliant and beautiful book written by a man who had seen the horrors of war and spilled it all over the page. And I read it for the first time as an adult with full understanding and experience of what it all means. And it hits me like a fucking truck.

And it says that you can't endure everything. That at some point you need to rest and heal. That if you take on too much you will break. And that all of that is okay.

How am I supposed to move on with my life after reading this?

[sympathyfortheartgallery]

“Contemporary artists have to be way ahead of curators. If not, they become illustrators of curatorial concepts.”

— Anton Henning (via originalgiantcontent)

[rafaelfajardo]

It's my 15 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[rafaelfajardo]

I am pleased to share more news from the University of Denver’s interdisciplinary Emergent Digital Practices (EDP) program.

EDP seeks to fill a Teaching Assistant Professor position starting September 2025. We are searching for a colleague who will bring community-engaged practices into the classroom. We are specifically interested in a teaching-oriented colleague who will further develop EDP curriculum around topics such as design justice, intersectionality and technology, computing and post-colonialism, sustainable systems design, and ecology-based practices for the public good. We are interested in candidates whose teaching will advance EDP’s capacity to engage marginalized and minoritized positions in the classroom and beyond. We are also interested in candidates demonstrating their potential to conduct community engaged work at the undergraduate level.

The deadline for applications is December 9, 2024. For consideration, candidates must apply through the following link, which provides more information and context for the search.

Teaching Assistant Professor of Emergent Digital Practices: https://jobs.du.edu/en-us/job/497611/teaching-assistant-professor-of-emergent-digital-practices

Please forward this notice as you see fit.

[laughingsquid]

James Earl Jones Recites the Alphabet and Counts to 10 on ‘Sesame Street’ in 1969

[cuterefaction]

Happy Bell Riots day to all who celebrate!

[rafaelfajardo]

Happy launch day anniversary to Juan Valdez, the fictional amalgam of Colombian coffee agriculture advertising published on this day August 30, 1960.