#Open Circuits

[commodorez]

A series of components that were featured in Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer's book, Open Circuits. I highly recommend checking out that book.

[welcometogrouchland]

Extremely bad batgirls comic I made featuring Steph's sex life and Cass' ability to read everything but the room

[pizza-and-ramen]

I picked up a copy of Open CIrcuits from VCF West!  Highly recommend!  It’s beautiful!  I’ve already flipped through it twice!

Open Circuits

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet that picks up where the old, good internet left off. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Every trip to Defcon – the massive annual hacker-con in Las Vegas – is a delight. Partly it's the familiar – seeing old friends, getting updates on hacks of years gone by. But mostly, it's the surprises, the things you never anticipated. Defcon never fails to surprise.

I got back from Vegas yesterday and I've just unpacking my suitcase, and with it, the tangible evidence of Defcon's cave of wonders. My gear bag has a new essential: Hak5's malicious cable detector, a little USB gizmo that lights up if it detects surreptitious malicious activity, even as it interdicts those nasty payloads:

https://shop.hak5.org/collections/omg-row2/products/malicious-cable-detector-by-o-mg

(In case you're wondering if it's really possible to craft a malicious USB cable that injects badware into your computer and is visually indistinguishable from a regular cable, the answer is a resounding yes, and of course, Hak5 sells those cables, with a variety of USB tips:)

https://shop.hak5.org/collections/omg-row2/products/omg-cable

But merch is only a sideshow. The real action is in the conference rooms, where hackers update you on the pursuit of their obsessions. These are such beautiful weirdos who pursue knowledge to ridiculous extremes, untangling gnarly hairballs just to follow a thread to its origin point.

For the second year in a row, I caught a presentation from Joseph Gabay about his work on warshopping: slicing up shopping cart wheels and haunting shopping mall parking lots during resurfacing to figure out how the anti-theft mechanism that stops your cart from leaving the parking lot works:

https://www.begaydocrime.com/

And of course, I got to give one of those presentations, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," to a packed house. What a thrill! It was livestreamed, and if you missed it, you'll be able to catch it on Defcon's Youtube page as soon as they upload it (they've got a lot of uploading to do!):

https://www.youtube.com/@DEFCONConference/videos

After my talk, I went back to the No Starch Press booth for a book signing – which was amazing, so many beautiful hackers, plus I got to share a signing table with Micah Lee. As I was leaving, Bill Pollock slipped me a giant hardcover art-book, and said, "You're gonna love this."

I did. The book is Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, by Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer, and it is a drop-dead gorgeous collection of photos of electronic components, painstakingly cross-sectioned and polished:

The photos illustrate layperson-friendly explanations of what each component does, how it is constructed, and why. Perhaps you've pondered a circuit board and wondered about the colorful, candy-shaped components soldered to it. It's natural to assume that these are indivisible, abstract functional units, a thing that is best understood as a reliable and deterministic brick that can be used to construct a specific kind of wall.

But peering inside these sealed packages reveals another world, a miniature land where things get simpler – and more complex. Inside these blobs of resin are snips of wire, plugs of wax, simple screws, fine sheets of metal in stacks, wafers of plain ceramic, springs and screws.

Truly, quantity has a quality all its own. Miniaturize these assemblies and produce them at unimaginable scale and the simple, legible components turn into mystical black boxes that only the most dedicated study can reveal. Like every magician's trick, the unfathomable effect is built up through the precise repetition of something very simple.

A prolonged study of Open Circuits reveals something important about the hacker aesthetic, a collection of graphic design, fashion and industrial design conventions that begins with this realization: that the crisp lines of digital logic can be decomposed into blobby, probabilistic lumps of metal, plastic, and even wax.

It reminds me of George Dyson's brilliant memoir/history of computing, Turing's Cathedral, where he describes how he and the other children of the scientists building the first digital computers at the Princeton Institute spent their summers in the basement, hand-winding cores for the early colossi their parents were building on the floors above them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/12/george-dysons-history-of-the-computer-turings-cathedral/

You can see my hacker aesthetic photos in my Defcon 31 photo set:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=defcon31&user_id=37996580417%40N01&view_all=1

In this video, Eric Schlaepfer illustrates the painstaking work that went into decomposing these tiny, precise components into their messy, analog subcomponents. It's pure hacker aesthetic, and it's mesmerizing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKyJ0b04Lo

But Open Circuits isn't just an aesthetic journey, it's a technical one. After all, Oskay is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Labs, one of the defining places where hardware hackers gather to tear down, pick apart, mod, improve and destroy electronics. The accompanying text is a masterclass in the simple machines that combine together to make complex assemblies:

https://www.evilmadscientist.com/

Defcon is a reminder that the world only seems hermetically sealed and legible to authorized parties with clearance to crack open the box. From shopping cart wheels to thermal fuses, that illegibility is only a few millimeters thick. Sand away the glossy outer layer and you will find yourself in a weird land of wax-blobs, rough approximations, expedient choices and endless opportunities for delight and terror, mischief and care.

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

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/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/#making-the-invisible-visible-and-beautiful

[opendirectories]

[urielbestgirl]

Very late to the party, but I just found out they're moving the spanish gp to another location

So that means, goodbye to the circuit where this happened, and just a yr short of its 10 yr anniversary 🥹

[twilightakiishi]

thinking about early stages of endochika living together and the first time takiishi lets endo remove his extensions. first of all he’s freaking out (permission to touch??!?!!!) doing breathing techniques as he stands behind him not even sure where to start because he doesn’t wanna fuck up and rip any of takiishi’s hair out. but when he touches, takiishi stays still. there’s an ingrained flinch in endo’s body, but takiishi doesn’t actually give him a reason to this time. he kinda forgets they’re sat in front of a mirror and takiishi can wholly see him biting his lip and trying to hold back tears.

and then once they’re out endo feels the level of relief a servant would feel after just barely getting through the kind of task that would grant them a beheading in the case of failure. and then he still has to shampoo and condition him. and it’s not like he hasn’t seen takiishi shirtless— he’s tended to his wounds before. but this is different because for one, he has no injuries at the moment, and two, he is fully naked under that bathrobe.

endo genuinely feels like his brain is unraveling in his head and coming out of his ears at all this intimacy takiishi is letting him indulge in. the tips of his ears are on fire and he’s massaging shampoo into his beloved’s scalp and he mistakes takiishi’s relaxed sinking into the tub as the beginning of a reprimand and he pulls his hands away, only to be grabbed at the wrist and drawn back in. all the weight that drops off his shoulders sinks into his belly.

and he realizes, oh, I can relax now. I don’t have to be so guarded. it’s the most romantic intimacy they’ve ever shared and endo quite honestly can’t fathom how he’s not fainted yet. though he comes very close when takiishi lets out a quiet yet drawn out hum of pleasure when endo finally works his fingers into his scalp without hesitation. suddenly the room is tear-blurred and his ears are ringing but he wouldn’t dare stop at this point.

[cult-of-the-eye]

Obsessed with the idea of Jon seeing ghost boy come out of a book and his first thought being shit he's hot

[sophsun1]

Queer as Folk – 5.13: We Will Survive!

[daily-public-domain]

Day 425: Game Boy

link

–These images are part of the public domain, meaning you can do anything you want with them! (you could even sell them as a shirt, poster or whatever, no need to credit them!)–

[parakeet]

Got a copy of Mario kart today for free because it doesn’t work and I was like I’ll be the judge of that and well would you look at this 👆 first try too

[staticbluue]

Spotify 100 Day 11: Never Love an Anchor

I originally drew this in yellow instead of green (blue? turquoise?? this is the most controversial color), which didn't really make sense because I'm going for a very cool-toned look for the whole story, so I changed it.

I've made a lot of changes to Circuit so this scene will be VASTLY different in the final story (if it even shows up at all) but aesthetically, it looks great! And either way, this song still applies.

Characters: Phoenix (she/her, but she doesn't really care) and Kestrel (he/him)

(More Star Trek art soon, I promise!!! But I am also very much an OC artist <3)

[hrtzbeat]

they just found out about the beginning of book 3 and they're laughing at him 💔

also HIII GOOD MORNING!!! 🫶🫶 ive been wanting to make a gift for u for like.. forever 🥲

THIS WAS THE FIRST THING I SAW THIS MORNING I HAD TO TAKE A SECOND OMG... LOOK AT THEM!!! THEYRE SO CUTEEE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS SO PERFECT 💖💖💕💖💖💕💖💕💖💖💖💖💖💕 OFC I BET THEY LAUGHED THEIR ASSES OFF RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM FOR A GOOD FIVE MINUTES

[lambda-core]

red jet looks different every time i draw him ngl but i really wanted the "game model jet + sark" influences to be a clear with this one

[iorepairs]

A poem about Sark, made with screengrabs from (of all places) Dunkey's Tetris video.

[tvt1me]

Anyone have a NOT SO WIRE AND MOTHERBOARD BURNING substitute for Battery Acid? Asking for a friend.

[catstar91]

“Average portal to hell requires human sacrifice” actually statistical error. Fenton Works, who’s killed 2 people in portal related accidents and the only ones to make an artificial portal to hell,