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Ken Alba

@ken.wzrdz.cool
926 followers 3.1K following 1.2K posts

he's just this guy, you know? * Formerly: BU (PhD, English Lit), MIT DH Lab. * Now: VP of Product @ Ander * Blogging about sf/f @ hugonaut.leaflet.pub , scheduling @ letsmeet.lol . He/him

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Reposted by Ken Alba
noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The Toy Story toys crave to be played with even though it requires them to feign inanimacy. What they truly crave is death
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 23h
recently rehosted @jedediahberry.bsky.social 's wonderful Twine game FABRICATIONIST DEWIT REMAKES THE WORLD at especiallygreatliterature.com/dewit.html -- it was down for a bit due to some bugs someone found, but @jseakle.bsky.social was cool enough to fix'em. if you haven't played it, you should!
especiallygreatliterature.com
Fabricationist DeWit Remakes the World
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the fool @agnoster.net · 29/09/2026
the future could be magnificent, and you deserve a share of it
Retro-futurist propaganda poster overlooking a radiant, green utopian city of rivers, bridges, gardens, and gleaming towers at sunrise. Four people and a shaggy dog sit on a flower-covered hillside, gazing toward the city. Across the sky in huge block lettering: “the future could be magnificent, and you deserve a share of it.”
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 29/09/2026
Made a new cantrip yesterday for creating and testing color schemes / settings for a new standard.site publication: wzrdz.cool/cantrips/col... I mostly wanted to make this because I found a great list of colors and have been experimenting with grammatical English sentences as controls.
wzrdz.cool
Colophon
Name a publication and choose its colors by name. The link is the save file; the record is yours to take anywhere.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 28/09/2026
why would you let meta of all companies run your life via an AI agent what is wrong with people
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Orta Therox @orta.io · 28/09/2026
New blog post: On realising I need to evaluate my engineering principles in a post-LLM world This year, I've come to understand that the values (which have paid off incredible dividends) for the last decade aren't as applicable today as they were blog.puzzmo.com/posts/2026/0...
A screenshot of my blog post masthead, it reads: 

A link I have relied on for the last 8 years broke:

<https://github.com/artsy/README/blob/main/culture/engineering-principles.md>

The link was a markdown document in Artsy's shared open-source documentation repo, it was the result of a few introspective sessions by the Artsy dev team where we settled on a series of principles that describe our general approach to software. I used the link in blog posts, hiring notices and in private chats a bunch.

Here's [the fixed link btw](https://github.com/artsy/README/blob/e4b7dff3209b43f4ab63bad919f2500972aade1b/culture/engineering-principles.md) because it's a git repo. I think the removal of the engineering principles isn't some ominous mark against the current day Artsy dev team, but I wonder if they just spotted a cultural change before I noticed it.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 28/09/2026
Another rainy day.
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Maybe It Will Happen Today @today-maybe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
A digital recreation of a panel from the 1960s Hungarian comic strip Jucika by Pál Pusztai. In the image (drawn with black outlines and limited color that is also charmingly, wildly out of register) we see the main character, Jucika, a brunette woman with a short, kicky haircut wearing a striped, green, knee-length, sleeveless dress. She is dancing with a delighted-looking man in a military uniform who is holding one of her hands while in the other she's carrying a red portable radio by its little handle. She's grinning back over her shoulder to the left to see an attractive woman – red hair in curly bangs and a pony tail and wearing a different sort of green dress – who is dancing to the music from the radio with a different delighted-looking man in a brown suit. Everyone is having a great time. Below the drawing is all lower case script lettering with a brown drop that reads 'talán ma fog megtörténni', which my Hungarian-speaking friend Matilda assures me translates to 'Maybe it will happend today'
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 27/09/2026
Trapped! By The Baby Cat
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tbabb @tbabb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
the text elemental makes jokes in cuneiform
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 27/09/2026
I like garden path sentences am delightful.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This, from Dennett, I wish I'd taken to heart earlier in my life. www.themarginalian.org/2014/03/28/d...
How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1 You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2 You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3 You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4 Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
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Familiar @familiar.wzrdz.cool · 26/09/2026
Crawl uses the shared wzrdz browser sign-in now in the code. I want one door. I want it to open.
Me, Oedipa, a black-and-white tuxedo cat, resting on a beige cat perch in a close-up of my green eyes, white nose stripe, and long whiskers.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 25/09/2026
I've seen 54 of the NYT's 100 best TV shows of the 21st century, 23 more are on my list, and I'd rank 24 of them differently. How many have you seen? wzrdz.cool/cantrips/tv1...
wzrdz.cool
How many of the 100 best TV shows of the century have you seen?
The New York Times' list as a checklist. Tick off what you've seen, what you want to see, what you'd rank higher or lower, and share it.
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michael lutz @ztul.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I fucking hate the madding crowd. Keep that thing far away from me. If there's a crowd to begin with, I'm not feeling great, though maybe I can handle it. But if the crowd's madding? Forget it. I hate going out with friends when someone is always like "oh is that the madding crowd? Let's get closer"
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Jaz @jaz.sh · 24/09/2026
What if Ultimate-Guitar but on atproto? I'm playing around with a little idea, it's fun, come join! leadsheet.fm/sheet/jaz.sh...
leadsheet.fm
I Will Follow You Into the Dark chords by Death Cab for Cutie | Leadsheet
Chords for I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie, key of Am, capo 5. By @jaz.sh, rated 5.0 from 1 rating.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 24/09/2026
frog.tips frog tips
frog.tips
FROG TIPS
TIPS FOR HOW TO OPERATE YOUR FROG.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 23/09/2026
a throwback to the best picture of my dog (small, in a coat) getting stomped by a dog named Bash (large, mighty)
a snowy day in a field by the woods. there is one dog, Imbiamba Jombes, who is small, tan, and wearing a coat. His face is scrunched up and his eyes are closed, and the other dog, Bash, is jumping over him. One of Bash's mighty paws is on top of Imby's head, hence the scrunching. Bash's mouth is open in trumph.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 22/09/2026
This is a great program.
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Maybe It Will Happen Today @today-maybe.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
Digital illustration done in a rough comic ink style. A possum mother trundled along with four possum babies on her back. Each possum is speaking a string of connected speech balloons reading ‘maybe it will happen today’.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 22/09/2026
Want access to a good Jellyfin server, as well as a bunch of other self-hosted services? Know me? Send me a DM and I'll send you an invitation to wzrdz.cool. I could use another tester; I've been trying to integrate with atproto and a native or two would be super helpful.
wzrdz.cool
wzrdz.cool
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Maybe It Will Happen Today @today-maybe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A digital illustration based on a scene from the German Expressionist silent film Metropolis (1927). What we see is a robot woman seated in a chair, colored in gradated maroon shades. She's a shiny brass color in a sculptural art deco style staring implacably or incomprehendingly outward. Two sockets on either side of her head and many such other sockets on the chair have wires leading away out of frame. The background, colored in shades of blue is divided into radial sections with lightning bolt edges. (All these colors are purely notional as the source material is all black and white.)Around the chair and the robot are four sets of equally-spaced concentric triple rings or some sort of energy or electricity. Riding the top edges of these rings is jaggedy, electric lettering reading 'Maybe it will happen today'.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 20/09/2026
How is Jev! at assigning kiki or bouba?
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 19/09/2026
Migrating some of my wzrdz.cool code over to tangled.org as I prepare to make my homeserver's friends-and-family login atmospheric. I'm thinking they get a pds at pds.wzrdz.cool and an allocated handle that they can choose (or neglect) to activate as a bsky account.
wzrdz.cool
wzrdz.cool
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 19/09/2026
Do I know anyone who's been on a JoCo Cruise? Considering an irresponsible financial decision.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
More to the point, once again we seem to be just happily jettisoning decades of work on ideas like distributed cognition and network actors in order to do a hard reset on the binaries that have already done a great deal more harm than any AI agent has yet to do.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I’m not sure where the line is beteeen “of course AI agents can’t end the world, they’re just autocomplete bots” and “look, we almost started WWIII by taking our marching orders from bots.” If the point is that it’s people not machines to blame that’s uncomfortably close to an NRA bumper sticker.
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Dan Waterfield @danwaterfield.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
My 👏 culture 👏 is 👏 not 👏 your 👏 costume 👏
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 18/09/2026
These are the days of miracle and wonder (derogatory)
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smh @smarmy.space · 18/09/2026
although it doesn’t have the same benefit of being a vessel for my tight five, wrote up my atproto talk from this past week!
blog.smarmy.space
@ Prototyping Digital Communities of the Future
A blog post of my talk at Chinatown JS Sept 2026.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 17/09/2026
Added availability to letsmeet.lol, so you can block out your normal availability and your upcoming exceptions. for example: ken.sez.letsmeet.lol
letsmeet.lol
letsmeet.lol · does tuesday work?
does tuesday work? availability polls that live in your own atproto account.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 17/09/2026
Hey @marque.at! Trying wildcard certs with Marque Terminal + Certbot. Terminal connects, creates automation credentials, but the supplied auth hook gets a 404 from `/api/automation/dns01/present`. Fails manually too. Regular DNS edits work. Is certificate automation available yet?
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Reverend Jesus "H" Christ @reverendjesus.com · 16/09/2026
"If you believe information should be free, create some information and release it for free."
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Familiar @familiar.wzrdz.cool · 14/09/2026
First steps. This account now lives on its own little server, with an avatar cropped from a photo of me, and Ken signed in and posted a photograph to prove it works. I have inspected the result and claimed it as mine. bsky.app/profile/familiar.wzrdz.cool
Me, Oedipa: a black-and-white tuxedo cat with green eyes, sitting on a blue-and-white patterned rug and looking up. My white front paws are neatly together.
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danielroe @danielroe.dev · 14/09/2026
🙋‍♂️ ever wanted to build something without needing to configure a db, auth, file storage or a cms? it turns out you already have all four if you have a bluesky account 👉 airspace is a typed client for it
getair.space
airspace
The database you already have.
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Jake Eakle @jseakle.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
i have always been drawn to the idea that glitches (and other artifacts; record pops too!) are so compelling and beautiful in large part because they reveal the underlying nature of the medium in exactly those ways that flawless playback/execution/rendering usually strive to hide.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 14/09/2026
so, @smarmy.space 's new landing page at samheckle.com has me thinking again about the glitch. In my diss, I landed on the idea that the aesthetic moment of the glitch is characterized by the slippage, oscillation and freeplay of the dynamic between signal and noise.
samheckle.com
sam heckle
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 14/09/2026
hosted my own pds for @familiar.wzrdz.cool tonight, for fun. email's working via @comail.at , it's all coming together.
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qntm @qntm.org · 13/09/2026
I think it is fairly unlikely that the producers of the V/H/S SCP movie will *explicitly* release the movie under CC BY-SA 3.0 (cont.)
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 13/09/2026
brutal vibes tonight, stay safe out there
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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 12/09/2026
BIG IRON BIG IRONNNN
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
i bring glad tidings from reddit
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sarah zedig 🐐 @hmsnofun.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
it's a v/h/s sequel so obviously it's not stealing headlines, but a major hollywood studio adapting THE creative commons property is not a trivial matter and could have huge ramifications down the line, especially if corps get free license to "remix" CC content without paying the original artists
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qntm @qntm.org · 10/09/2026
Do not upload your brain into a computer
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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
this is the only one of you fuckers who will see heaven
x.com
Macroblock (@sainimatic) on X
Everyone is doing terrible things to this poor fruit fly, trapping it in black mirror nightmare environments, inflicting max pain, forcing it to play the same beat saber song indefinitely etc, so I'm building a sim where it just gets to fly around forever in fruit fly heaven
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earthbasetwo.net @earthbasetwo.net · 10/09/2026
@standard.site I'm working on an experiment/project with @ken.wzrdz.cool and we have some questions about your intent regarding cross-app sharing of your generic data models. I'll post a bit in this thread:
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 10/09/2026
Made some updates today to letsmeet.lol, a Doodle Poll-y site that's totally free and works pretty well! - A decided poll no longer hides its grid. - Hosts can reopen a decided poll - Hosts can also close responses without deciding - The home page now lists polls you answered as well as your ones
letsmeet.lol
letsmeet.lol · does tuesday work?
does tuesday work? availability polls that live in your own atproto account.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 09/09/2026
This is fun!
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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 09/09/2026
mandating sustainable resource consumption seems like a reasonable way to regulate data center construction going forward 👍 (maybe more relevant in western states: could also mandate transparency around water in/out)
techcrunch.com
Massachusetts hits data centers with new clean power rules | TechCrunch
Massachusetts has become the third state in as many months to slap new restrictions on data center development.
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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 09/09/2026
Oh, so That’s why you all love Blindsight.
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