Not counting Panjiayuan Antique Market in Beijing, I hadn’t visited a flea/antique market in ages; thus, I went to Aachener Platz Flea Market in Düsseldorf yesterday, motivated by my current you-need-to-get-out-more policy. While I was glad I went, it turned out to be underwhelming. Apparently, flea markets lose much of their appeal if you’re not hunting for, say, attire and equipment accessories for your Gray Elf character (before LARPs jumped on the professional costumes train). Apart from that, I think the gap between antique dealership businesses and unadulterated crap has widened, and that most of the interesting niche stuff in between has migrated online. But at n=1, that impression might not be generally true :) Needless to say, getting there and back through city center demonstrations and Rheinbahn weekend track work was a major hassle, because Düsseldorf. In this town, getting anywhere on a Saturday is a cultivated challenge.

Finally, I managed to scale back on LLM-related posts last week; but the time saved was gobbled up by summer term issues, so I didn’t write all the other posts I’d wanted to write. Accordingly, there’s only one post—albeit a lengthy one—at my secret level just drafts on Eliezer Yudkowsky’s unhinged Time op-ed, and that’s it. As to photos, there’s a new album on Flickr with twelve images I took in and around Dongzhimen in Bejing; my daily vintage-style travel squaries at Pixelfed; and several posts at my betweendrafts and voidpunkverse Instagram accounts.

For the Sunday funnies, please enjoy these sleeping kittens and this early version of an emacs keyboard setup. But also this incredible website, floor796.com—an “ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of a huge space station, with many references to movies, games, anime, and memes.”

J.