@clive@saturation.social

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://www.weirdoldbookfinder.net/

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

This was a search for "mastodon"

A screenshot of the Weird Old Book Finder, showing the book returned for the search "mastodon" -- the book is "Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man"

Clive Thompson
@clive@saturation.social

Super piece by Adam Serwer, who reported on the everyday Minnesotans who are observing and protesting ICE's actions, while delivering food to their neighbors who are afraid to leave their houses

His key, bang-on point, is this: All assumptions the White House makes -- about how society works, how culture works, the nature of bravery and identity --- are completely wrong

it's why Trump's attack on Minnesota is foundering

The piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/TRsdI

Screenshot reading:

The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” Vance said in a speech last July. “If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.” Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities, whose people do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.

Screenshot reading:

A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying IMMIGRANTS WELCOME, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.
And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders. But it is not true of millions of ordinary Americans, who have poured into the streets in protest, spoken out against the administration, and, in Minnesota, resisted armed men in masks at the cost of their own life.

Screenshot reading:

The MAGA faith in liberal weakness has been paired with the conviction that real men—Trump’s men—are conversely strong. Consider Miller’s bizarre meltdown while addressing Memphis police in October. “The gangbangers that you deal with—they think that they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are,” Miller said. “They think they’re hard-core? We are so much more hard-core than they are.” Around this time, Miller moved his family onto a military base—for safety reasons.

The federal agents sent to Minnesota wear body armor and masks, and bear long guns and sidearms. But their skittishness and brutality are qualities associated with fear, not resolve. It takes far more courage to stare down the barrel of a gun while you’re armed with only a whistle and a phone than it does to point a gun at an unarmed protester.

Screenshot reading:

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Clive Thompson
@clive@saturation.social

you know, if I were gonna mount a super difficult trip to the arctic in 1845 ...

... courting a frozen death at every turn ...

... I think I'd pick ships with cheerier names

"So what have we got"

"this one's called the 'Terror'"

"wtf. What's that one called?"

"the ... Erebus"

"ffs ... the ancient greek personification of darkness"

"yeah"

"jesus"

"yeah, that's all we got"

"okay, I'll take them"

Clive Thompson
@clive@saturation.social

behold the "HTML bomb"

it's a defensive counterattack on AI web-scrapers that persistently scrape and rescrape your web site, even when you tell them not to

the bomb file looks like a tiny HTML page, but when scraped -- or even requested by a regular browser ...

... it unpacks into a huge-ass 10-gig HTML page ...

... which quickly crashes any browser or scraper

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-37-wind-theft-an-html-bomb-and-the-rice/

A Chrome browser error page displays the familiar “Aw, Snap!” message, indicating that something went wrong while loading a webpage. A pixelated frowning file icon with Xs for eyes appears at the top left. Below, the error code reads “Out of Memory,” suggesting the browser ran out of system resources. The page includes a “Reload” button in blue on the bottom right

Clive Thompson
@clive@saturation.social

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://www.weirdoldbookfinder.net/

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

This was a search for "mastodon"