I fondly remember creating simple narrative stories and games with HyperCard at 6 years old on my dad's Macintosh SE. It was my first contact with programming and a fundamental seed to using the computer as a creative tool. It has shaped my life in a substantial way. RIP Bill - HN bar should be blacked out.
The argument agains nuclear is not irrational. The true cost of nuclear is not sufficiently priced in. Example from recent history here in Germany the nuclear interim storage mine Asse is leaking and the garbage has to be recovered. Cost estimated to be 3.7 billion tax payer money. There is no solution for safe nuclear garbage storage in sight.
I mean, this sounds like the true cost of being insanely bone-headed. And in some sense nuclear lets you be bone-headed in novel ways, which is a risk, but being this irresponsible is not a necessary condition.
> The mine near Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony is the perfect example of how a final storage facility for nuclear waste should not be built.
> Between 1967 and 1978, around 126,000 metal barrels containing low and medium-level radioactive waste were stored in the former salt mine. They contained contaminated laboratory waste, construction rubble and scrap metal, mainly from nuclear power plant use. Officially, it was an "experimental mine" in which the long-term storage of radioactive material was only to be tested. In fact, many of the barrels were simply dumped into the emptied salt chambers.
> The Asse became a problem in 1988. At that time, the operator at the time discovered that water was penetrating the mine. To date, 350 active and now dry areas have been found. The water is collected and brought to the surface - an average of 12.5 cubic meters per day. Without this work, the mine would flood. Recovering the waste, as decided by the Bundestag in 2013, would be impossible.
Perhaps a minor nit (or maybe not), but when you say
> The true cost of nuclear is not sufficiently priced in.
That's also the case in general for fossil fuels too. Pollution from burning fossils kills. (And this extends of course - be it lithium mining or recycling PV panels or composites in wind turbines.) There are very few, if any, truly priced-in mass-market commodities I can think of.
(Another not so minor nit is fortunately the EU-ETS exists, but it has its own issues/criticisms which might get too long for this comment.)
I have this issue with all my sites on Cloudflare since about three weeks, it seems to be limited to the Germany region. Most of the time all my sites load extremely slow and are unusable. I don't know what to do here, really frustrating.
The YouTube algorithm actually values videos higher that people watch for a longer time, so there is an incentive for the creation of this kind of content
This is not really what brutalism is about. Brutalism in architecture is often very playful and indeed more like a poetry and celebration of the raw materials and structure, not at all about the pure functionality absence of any aesthetic as formulated in that text. Brutalist buildings often neglect functionality in favour of architectural idiosyncracies. Like for example Trellick Tower: the elevators are in a separate tower outside the building and only serve every third floor. Brutalism celebrates raw form over function, and mostly people really don't enjoy living in these buildings.
Brutalism is one of those things that means many things to many people, and gets brutally simplified (heh) in the public eye. There's more to any brutalist building than the architect's own idea of brutalism, and of course each architect's idea of what brutalism can be is more than the stripped-down least common denominator definition.
For example, one of the ideas behind using raw concrete for public buildings instead of something sleeker and more expensive is to make public institutions more welcoming and accessible to ordinary people. Traditionally, public buildings were built to project the prestige and power of the class of people who ran elite institutions, at the expense of common people who themselves might feel a bit raw and brutal compared to the sleek and expensive buildings where the sleek and expensive elites ran the world in their sleek and expensive suits. Raw concrete is supposed to communicate that the building, and the institution inside, is (at least supposed to be) working for the public, not spending their money to elevate and aggrandize the people in power.
In other words, in those cases, concrete is meant to create a relatable and accessible rawness, like Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot.
I think it works out a lot better in reality than people think, when a building is well-designed. Architectural photography can hide ugliness — almost every building has its equivalent of the flattering "Myspace angle" — but it can also manufacture it, and with the right lighting, angle, and exposure, it's easy to make any tall concrete building look like a gloomy looming hulk.
Local feelings are a better guide to whether a building is good or not than the feelings of people who have never seen a building in person and have been primed by tendentious photography.
My favorite architecture combines raw elements (concrete, brick, structural supports) with softer touches. To me, the exposed skeleton denotes honesty and stability.
When I was in Switzerland like ten years ago a lot if newer buildings had both exposed concrete and wood. Not a lot of wood, but enough to provide some accents in the otherwise gray texture.
This is always mentioned, but the term is growing on me. I think we just want websites that are easy to load and read that don’t make a few tabs on chrome take 3GB of memory.
but the word brutalism is just too delicious to let the architects have it for a style they've moved on from based on a building material that's so specific to buildings. It's like modernism, there's always a new modern.
and I'm not joking, I think the word brutalist is so attractive to people that it begs to be recolonized regardless of the narrow context in which it once thrived.
I like your thinking, but there could be confusion if used imprecisely. Namely, people might think it's a website that isn't broken (this could be seen as a benefit for the playfully opinionated), or a website made primarily with functional languages/programming style.
I suppose you'd have to refer to a site as Functionalist.
To echo you, I was going to say myself that if anything current web design is more like brutalist architecture. It is a celebration of the raw materials and structure: HTML, CSS, JS. There are confusing features, technical flourishes, … well, maybe not so much poetry. Maybe roccoco, not brutalist?
>not at all about the pure functionality absence of any aesthetic as
That's exactly the vibe I got from https://brutalistwebsites.com. Like many, I like both the aesthetics of brutalist architecture and brutalist websites – but that doesn't mean "form follows function" can be applied here. Many "brutalist" websites are very confusing, inaccessible, and/or impracticable. I suspect that minimalism or simplicism would be a better term for what the guidelines want to achieve.
Nevertheless, it is quite possible to combine playful aethetics with accessible technology, but that requires compromise and a lot of experience.
Yeah, I can acknowledge that. Though surveys do show that most people tend to favor classical architecture.
There's also the matter of what you're comparing it to. Some brutalism may not be beautiful, or as beautiful as something classical in form, but the best examples are just interesting in a way that a generic 5-over-2 building isn't.
I think maintenance of materials matters a lot as well. Concrete's aesthetic really depends on it being clean and crack-free.
> Concrete's aesthetic really depends on it being clean and crack-free.
... unless you're into the aesthetic of crumbling urban decay? I mean I should know better than to pick pointless fights on the internet, but you kinda teed it up
I saw it in a movie theater a long time ago, the images where exiting, the music unlike anything I had every heard... It was stimulating and at the same time uncomfortable, I remember I was glad to finally see the credits after 1.5 hours of a bombardment of sound.
Still it made a big impression on me and made me discover a whole new genre of music and composers.
I've had absolutely excellent experience with my Brother black and white laser printer, cost 100 €, with casual printing I only had to replace the toner cartridge once in about 5 years for 25 €
A charge lasts me about a month of all day use, so this is still a non issue for me. Let's see how long until the battery becomes weaker. Enjoyed working with the mouse for a year so far.
Honestly, the battery status is within reach of just a single mouse click in the Mac OS menu bar, I check it maybe once a week. I think there is even a warning when it reaches very low levels. In the rare case I forget to charge and run out, it is enough to charge it for like 15 minutes to keep working for the day.
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