Inside the Little Plastic Castle

More soothing video.

Rosie Heydenrych is a UK luthier who makes Turnstone guitars. Follow along as she makes an instrument for Martin Simpson—in prose and/or via YouTube video playlist, autocraptions). How does it sound? Guitar World reviews another Turnstone instrument with words as well as video (17:11" YouTube Link, more autocraptions). Zip to 13:27 to enjoy Clive Carroll making beautiful music on it.

(crossposted to Metafilter)

...here's an excellent use-case: feed your strong passphrase text as a prompt to an image generator

from the passphrase string "fabulous tattoo Harvey", Reddit user u/waydomatic and ChatGPT made ( this cheerful example )

The LLM thinks Harvey is a muscular white guy wearing a skimpy purple Speedo; arms, shoulder and upper chest covered in rose tattoos. He flexes his right arm and flashes a big white smile under his handlebar mustache. Of course he's wearing a rose crown.

Saving the generated image would certainly be more secure than writing down the password.

Robert Bringhurst's remarkable reference work, The Elements of Typographic Style, provides a full semester of type history in less than 400 pages. It's not just the book's elegant design nor well-chosen exemplars that so thrilled me I read both the 2nd and 3rd edition, dropping more than 50 stickies along the way. The current edition, version 4.3, is out of print and still focuses exclusively on printed material.

Bringhurst is a poet and translator. That last vocation has brought him into regular contact with non-Latin alphabets, and the Elements of Typographic Style provides the best advice I've ever seen in English regarding how to set type with accents, diacritics, and other "analphabetic characters."

( context: why I care )

( Archived links )

I drafted this review a decade ago, and I still believe it, so it’s a proof of life post.

No embeds this time, just links.

Everyone is calm and competent and cooperative

CalamityKim1 is a 20-something woman who loves driving big rigs and fixing machinery and narrates as she goes, but autocraptions. In September 2025, she drives a tractor trailer through small-town Britain, carrying a piece of metal so large it requires a police escort—her typical length is 30 minutes. Moving traffic, but no flashing lights.

Ocean Creatures

ExploreOceans features both livestreams and highlight reels. Super soothing is the 2025 Highlights of Pacific Walruses Hauling Out on a Beach—no narration or music, just surf on the beach and moaning walruses for 25 minutes. It’s part of the explore.org network, which I discovered via their delightful Fat Bear Week contest.

Admire Our Planet from Space

I love astronauticast’s 3-5 minute timelapse compilations from the International Space Station. They’re compiled by ISAA, the Italian Space and Astronautics Association. They travel at a steady rate over various parts of our globe, with a handy reference diagram in the upper left corner. Witness hundreds of thunderstorms from the west coast of Mexico all the way to Portugal. Admire auroras and airflows above North America. I shouldn’t have been surprised that deserts are readily visible because so few clouds. No words—pleasant classical-ish music.

The American Foundation for the Blind is researching AI:

( details on how to participate )

In addition to the environmental and ethical violations which LLMs/AIs depend on, the endless hype and inaccurate performance make me shudder and growl. Yet I admit I’ve used neural text-to-speech voices for casual audio reading. The neural voices require an internet connection and they lose intelligibility at speed. They’re best as substitutes for human readers.

Blind computer users set their on-device system text-to-speech (TTS) at high speeds. Three hundred to five hundred words per minute are often cited. For screen reader applications, a robotic voice is a feature, enabling bits to flow from device to brain with minimal interpretation.

Neural voices produce much higher quality than system-level TTS. When fed appropriately coded input, they can laugh, whisper, and sound sarcastic as well as "analyze" an essay to produce a "podcast" dialog between two synthetic discussants. Some samples here: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/

But I know well the expertise that skilled human narrators bring to their work—whether it’s commercial audiobook production, volunteer alternative-format creation, or podfic elves making magic. I don’t want a world where those jobs are outsourced to computers.

On the gripping hand, I remember when skilled Linotype operators--many Deaf--were obviated by computerized systems where reporters keyed their own copy. I used the bridge technology of phototypesetting, as well as pioneering desktop publishing. It's expected that admin workers now create flyers and graphs and charts.

Have you tried neural voices? Recognized them on YouTube or TikTok or your recent tech support call? Do you have thoughts for or against?

An acquaintance asked me basic questions about “how to get disability benefits” in the USA. Might as well share it here.

I call myself a “disability doula” because I’ve helped many folks through the process of understanding available services, finding disability community, and accepting a new way of life and identity. Except where noted, I’m happy to answer questions.

Local face-to-face free help

Centers for Independent Living (CILs) have been serving disabled people since the late 1970s.

Find one near you: https://ncil.org/about/find-your-cil-list/

( eight relevant topics )

@etymologynerd on TikTok • etymology_nerd on YouTube (note underscore)

My first fandom is language. Let me enthuse about the Etymology Nerd Adam Aleksic. He's a short-form video presenter, essayist, and recently-published author. He started on Reddit, but attained fame on TikTok, and his YouTube is 90% shorts (but not every TikTok has made it to YouTube). It's important that his videos are accurately captioned, cause he speaks faster than an auctioneer on meth. No video description and his hand-held camera means flashing and shaking images. The videos reward multiple views.

( six links to short videos, accurately captioned without video description )

Three Essays to Read

If you prefer prose, his Substack newsletter offers RSS at https://etymology.substack.com/feed or luck into one of his maybe-monthly essays here via etymologynerd_feed (DW feeds only go back two weeks).

• why BDSM can be surprisingly useful in linguistics — i'm serious
• slop capitalism and dead internet theory: viral ai-generated memes
• technofeudalism and the death of serendipity: why the grocery store is better than an app

Want more? My first internet #lingcomm crush interviewed Aleksic on Lingthusiasm podcast 105—both audio and transcript there, with insights into best practices in vertical video and why it feels different than old-style horizontals.

Any linguistic communicators making you happy?

I go to this annual celebration because it’s a time and place where I am entirely comfortable. That I can do some things and can’t do others is a given. Almost everyone there has been through the process of accepting their disabled self—the non-disabled people are in my experience, enthusiastic allies.

Folks sell things they’ve made, organizations advertise for participants or employees, political folks recruit advocates, there’s music, there’s free food. It’s a hoot!

https://www.disabilitypridemadison.org/festival-2025

I was thrilled to run into half of the staff of adhdcleaning.com, who proclaim they will Clean All The Things and invite passers-by to share their special enthusiasms.

Their promo material is brimming with disability pride:

Accommodating, Compassionate Help Tailored to Your Needs

• Flexible Scheduling, Easy to Cancel
• Allergy/Asthma-friendly vacuum with fully sealed HEPA filtration system
• Keep two disabled adults happily employed!
• Commercial steamer for chemical-free clean
• We care about you and your pets
• No guilt or judgment, ever

They continue with cleaning tips for cool, imperfect humans

( five important points )

This pair of people were dressed up to spread joy

( what a couple! )

From an earlier festival, I captured a Disability Pride Strawberry, in two photos

( whole and dissected )

fan_writers community -- for meta about writing

Moderated by china_shop and mific

I’m up near Rhinelander staying on Flannery Lake. I’ll be reveling in 15:45 hours of daylight on the summer solstice. Today there’s zero wind, while the second-growth white, yellow, and red pine trees are pumping out their jizz with enthusiasm. The lime-yellow grains appear darker as they overlay almost every square inch of the water, with wild swirls and eddies that extend many feet off shore until eventually the black surface reflects many puffy cumulus clouds in a light blue sky.

Lovely to look at, but not so great to breathe. At least we're not bedeviled by wildfire smoke.

( click for pic )