Welcome back to Noticing, the only newsletter for Kottke.org with more than 10,000 followers. This is Tim Carmody, your newsletter and Friday editor. Here and at Kottke.org, I promise not to talk about Jeff Bezos or Jeff Bezos's wang; for my thoughts on that, you'll have to subscribe to my other newsletter (with more than 4,000 followers!), The Amazon Chronicles. (Plug plug plug.)

Let's get into the best of the rest of the internet this week.

Revisiting History

We got to look more closely at ancient scripts and the history of writing, from proto-cuneiform to Luo, an African script that began being used in 2009. One terrific resource for this is The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, a collection of “indigenous and minority writing systems” that have been threatened with extinction. This includes Thaana, which I picked somewhat at random, but has an amazing story:

Thaana, the script of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, is probably the only script in the world to have been ousted in a linguistic coup, only to return in triumph after two years in exile. It is also probably the first, but almost certainly not the last script to be threatened by global warming.

Thaana, which seems to have been invented in the eighteenth century, is unique in other respects, too. For one thing, its letters are based on numbers — but numbers from two different number systems. The first nine letters (h–v) are derived from the Arabic numerals, whereas the next nine (m–d) were the local Indic numerals. The remaining letters for loanwords (z–ch) and Arabic transliteration are adapted from native consonants, with the exception of y, which is of unknown origin.

The Thaana alphabet doesn’t follow the alphabetical order of other Indic scripts or of the Arabic script. There is no apparent logic to the order; it has even been suggested this was an attempt to keep it secret.

A street photo of Thanna, taken by Eric Lafforgue.

Of course, it would be easier to preserve indigenous and minority scripts if European and other majority cultures weren't busy killing all the indigenous and minority peoples, including the users of those scripts. Research suggests that Columbus's first contact with the peoples of the Americas so devastated indigenous human life on the continent that it caused land previously cleared by native peoples to reforest. Those trees in turn sucked up extra carbon dioxide, triggering the "Little Ice Age" of the 16th to 19th centuries. This theory's been floated by historians and climate scientists before, but this new paper by researchers at University College London seems to really have the goods.

More history we need to revisit (in some cases, whether we like it or not):

• "Melting glaciers reveal ancient landscapes, thawing mummies, and long-dead diseases."
• Jamelle Bouie asks, "what if Batman were black?" (This has been explored in the comics at least twice, with the alternate characters Night Thrasher and Nighthawk, but Jamelle's thoughts are really good).
• James Baldwin is still totally worth revisiting in the 21st century, even though (to the best of my knowledge), he never wrote about Batman. (Prove me wrong, Baldwin heads. Prove me wrong!)
• A black family business invented Nashville Hot Chicken more than 80 years ago. Now everyone else is getting rich off of it.
• Pizza in New York may have started in the 19th century, not the early 20th as previously thought, and owe much of its origins to a baker named Filippo Milone, who started the pizzerias that became Lombardi's on Spring St and John's on Bleecker St.
• MoMA (New York's Museum of Modern Art) will be closing this summer to renovate and "focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other overlooked artists." Sounds both good and downright modern to me.
• Punk rock didn't start in the 1970s, and it didn't start in New York or London. In fact, one city that has a respectable claim to being the True Birthplace of Punk is my own hometown of Detroit.
• This one's more fun: an oral history of Office Space, the movie that didn't quite make anyone a star, but created some unforgettable characters and moments.

The Internet Is Still Weird

This essay by Violet Blue made me sad and angry: "How sex censorship killed the internet we love":

Facebook recently banned sexual slang; YouTube bans users for sex ed or LGBTQ content because it might be about sex; Twitter has a mysterious sex-shadowban that no one can get a straight answer on. Tumblr can't tell a potato from a boob. Guides on sexual self-censoring are popular — and necessary. Google Drive scans your files and deletes what it believes to be explicit content. Apple just straight-up hates sex.

It's critical at this harrowing juncture to understand that apps won, and the open internet lost. In 2013, most users accessing the internet went to mobile and stayed that way. People don't actually browse the internet anymore, and we are in a free-speech nightmare.

It made me look for things on the internet that still inspired weirdness and joy. Violet's right; the walled gardens won, and they're hostile to sex. But we still need to find ways to inspire openness and wonder. That's what we came to the World Wide Web for, and it's why we keep coming back. Here are some that Jason and I found.

• Mad Men but with All the Cigarettes Replaced by Kazoos. Does what it says on the tin. Check it out while it lasts; the fair use status on this one is questionable.
• Happiness Spells: A Podcast About Everyday Joys. "When a friend texts to cancel plans just as you were debating texting them to cancel." I love that.
• Merle Hazard, "America's foremost country singer/economist," singing about the history and beauty of atonal music.
• "opsec and beauty," a series of videos by artist Addie Wagenknecht that combines beauty product reviews with tips about proper cybersecurity. Truly the perfect video product for 2019.
• A new book from XKCD creator Randall Munroe, titled How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. Munroe's continued success (and his largely uninterrupted string on one of the best webcomics ever) makes me very happy.
• Confessions of a Letterhead Collector, a form which (as Jason notes) greatly influenced the design of blogs (along with newspaper mastheads).
• Threadstories, a visual artist on Instagram who creates amazing masks to both be beautiful and pose charged philosophical questions:

I don’t have any one line of enquiry or source of inspiration. Everything from traditional basket making to Francis Bacon's portraits to the sight of someone with really crooked teeth or an episode of Blue Planet might inspire a mask. Thematically I am questioning how the erosion of personal privacy online effects how we view and portray ourselves. I am constructing facades — masks in response to these questions. We are all so over exposed and to what end? Privacy is precious.

Does any of this make up for the fact that sex workers can't openly talk about what they do without getting censored and possibly arrested for it? Not really. But I still think it's important to treasure what's weird about the web, to keep the web as weird as we can, and push back against the forces that want to homogenize and gentrify it.

This is our bar, assholes. You don't get to push us around in the place we built brick by blood-soaked brick.

What's Beautiful?

I like this 4K time-lapse photo of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Jason says it broke his brain a little. I think both reactions are perfectly natural.

More crowd-pleasing, maybe: Purl, an animated short by Pixar, "about a ball of yarn that starts a new job at B.R.O. Capital and quickly feels out of place among all the men in suits. The story was inspired by [director Kristen] Lester’s experience working in animation as the only woman at her company."

I was mildly surprised how many Kottke fans flipped for this new line of stamps based on the artwork of Ellsworth Kelly, but as Jason writes, "Kelly’s stripped down abstracts look like they were specifically designed for postage."

The screenplay for Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin, revised by Harold Ramis, and augmented with improvisations from the cast, is magnificent. This video essay from Lessons From A Screenplay explores how the script makes the thoroughly unlikable Phil (Bill Murray's character) someone you nevertheless come to root for and identify with by the end of the film.

And if watching a sleazy weatherman slowly reform his life by reliving the same day over and over doesn't do it for you, try watching a single cell become a complex organism (in this case, a salamander tadpole) in just six minutes. It's astonishing.

Look at what we can do, if you give us a chance. Look at what we can do, if you give us what we need to thrive, and then get out of our way.

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