I’ve never read any of his books. Which do you think is the most exciting to start with?

Absolutely 100% expected. May Labour keep sinking into ever more meaninglessness and failure. You’d have to be emotionally stunted to actually believe that Burnhan stands for something

What a banging read. Thanks for posting it

I’m almost done with The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, and I have to admit, I have no clue what’s going on and am totally disengaged. The beginning and middle were so much more compelling and the book takes such a strange turn when he leaves the citadel. Everything afterwards reads like some sort of dream sequence where no one’s actions or behaviour make any sense.

If they had even the slightest rumour that it was Russia then it would be plastered all across news in Europe

I don’t know why you’re getting pushback on this, what you’re saying is 100% correct. I spent around a decade just using Usenet and not bothering with torrents. Then I got into one highly sought after private tracker. I spent several months not downloading a thing except freeleech to create a buffer, which was going absolutely nowhere. Then recently I decided to test out this seedbox thing I’d heard so much about. I set it up to automatically download freeleech torrents the second they’re posted. Even with that setup I discovered that I still can’t get a 1:1 ratio. A bot that downloads the freeleech torrent the instant it’s posted still only achieves a 0.5 ratio. It’s madness. Within 20 minutes of being posted, the torrent will have 150 seedbox users seeding it and no one else will be able to upload a single byte.

Before this I was manually downloading freeleech torrents that I found interesting, and was literally getting a 0 ratio by doing that. Now I know why. This system encourages everyone to buy seedboxes, which then makes it impossible for regular Joe shmoes to use private trackers, unless they signed up back in 2013 or something

So I discovered and bought the DVD for Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Heurtley House and also Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio. And because I’m a nerd and it popped up as a ‘you might be interested in this’, I got a CD titled Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, which is a catalog of plans and sections of varying quality. I also managed to find torrents for An American Home - Frank Lloyd Wright’s B. Harley Bradley House. Didn’t love that one honestly as there was very little content about the house itself and more about the history of the area and the people who owned it.

What about you? Curious to hear if I’ve missed any good ones

Because everyone these days is used to the USraeli style of warfare where you just target schools and hospitals and bridges.

I did exactly this. Generally find everything on Usenet, but I’ve bought several DVDs of things I couldn’t find. Most recently some really niche Frank Lloyd Wright documentaries 😆

What is eyedex? Never heard of this before

Wow what a flashback. I was using that about 15 years ago at university

Infomaniak Ksuite. Migrated a year ago and been happy so far.

Other options I looked at:

Murena

Internxt

PeerGOS

Pcloud

I migrated from Gmail and Google Drive to Infomaniak about a year ago and have no complaints at all. I really liked Tuta as well, but they don’t have a Drive replacement yet

I’m so glad I went with Infomaniak instead of proton. And when Tuta comes out with a drive replacement I’ll try that too

There are many subs that are downright unusable now. Some are so insanely rightwing I don’t know if this is actually what society is like or whether these are all bots stirring shit up and masturbating each other

The Phoenician alphabet descends from the Proto-Sinaitic script though. So a bunch of nomads developed Egyptian hieroglyphs into a script to write proto-Canaanite inscriptions, which was the common ancestor of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, the Ancient South Arabian script, and the Phoenician alphabet

Al-Ahmadi was also racially segregated like Aramco’s Saudi and American camps, Anglo-Persian’s earlier oil-town in Abadan, Iran, and Corbusier’s contemporaneous masterplan for Algiers. The town was split into 3 sections, with Brits and Americans in the northern section, Indians and Pakistanis in the middle section, and Arabs and Iranians in the southern ‘Arab Village’.

The lead architect, James Mollison Wilson, had worked with Edwin Lutyens in India during his youth, and it was this, perhaps, that made Al-Ahmadi a hybrid of a British New Town and a British-Indian colonial town. These segregated towns were the start of the ‘single-male-labourer’ housing model in the Gulf region today.

In 1951 another British firm, Minoprio, Spencely, & MacFarlane, led by Minoprio, were appointed to masterplan Kuwait. This masterplan created not only Kuwait City, but much of the state of Kuwait as we know it. Macfarlane would state that the project was “indeed a town planner’s dream.”

In the 1950s British architect John Harris met Donald Hawley, Britain’s serving Political Agent to the Trucial States, at a garden party in Campden Hill Square. This would prove a fateful meeting, as Harris’ entire career would be shaped by his Middle Eastern work. In 1960 he was appointed to masterplan Dubai; in 1962 he submitted an unbuilt masterplan for Abu Dhabi, and in 1967 he submitted a masterplan for the Omani cities of Muscat and Muttrah.

In 1968 Colin Buchanan Partners, who had a year earlier competed in the masterplan competition for Milton Keynes, were appointed to review and update the masterplan of Kuwait, and the American-Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis masterplanned Riyadh according to his ‘Ekistics’ planning principles that fetishised rationality, order, and functionalism.

In 1970 Peter and Allison Smithson designed an unbuilt vision for downtown Kuwait, and in 1971, the British firm of Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker, & Bor, led by the Bartlett professor Lord Richard Llewelyn-Davies, masterplanned Doha, Qatar. That same year, after months of discussions with the Omani Minister of Economy in London, Lord Llewelyn-Davies was invited to visit Oman with his team, but a formal regional masterplan for Oman was only submitted by them in 1982. Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, took its modern face from British architect John Elliott and American-Japanese planner Katsuhiko Takahashi in 1967.

Saudi Arabia unveiled in 1970 a new ambitious five year plan which divided the country into five regions. The western region was awarded to Scottish firm RMJM, who would then masterplan the city of Jeddah in 1973. The central and northern regions were awarded to Doxiadis Associates who had masterplanned the capital city Riyadh. The eastern region was awarded to George Candilis and French consultancy Metra. And the southern region was awarded to Kenzo Tange and UTREC.

In 1977 Shankland Cox, who had also pitched for Milton Keynes, was appointed to expand the masterplan for Kuwait. Sir William Halcrow, a sort of imperial establishment civil engineer, worked on civil projects in Kuwait, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah. In 1976 Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister of town planning unveiled another urban development milestone, its ‘Action Master Plans Projects for Seven Cities’.

And so it went, until the architecture critic Udo Kultermann opined that if it was possible to over-plan a region, then the Arabian peninsula would be it. The recent mega and gigaprojects such as Neom and The Line, developed by practices such as HOK, BIG, and Morphosis, are simply the latest additions to 80 years of continuous western planning and architectural design in the region.

I think there’s a single article limit, and if you leave or refresh the page you get hit by a paywall, so here’s the full text:

From New Towns to new countries: the overlooked history of masterplanning Arabia

Western planners and architects oversaw a paradigm shift that built the modern Arabian peninsula, influencing its modern culture, and imposing new typologies that persist to the present day

What if I told you that Kuwait is the cousin of Crawley and that Doha is the sibling of Milton Keynes? There is an Orwellian memory-hole in the architecture community, and it relates to 20th century western design and planning in the Arabian peninsula.

Books and exhibitions on modern and Modernist city planning typically discuss famous case studies such as the City Beautiful movement, Garden Cities, Ville Radieuse, the New Towns Act of 1946, and the Voisin Plan. They may also discuss neighbourhood planning projects based on Modernist principles such as Karl-Marx-Hof, Pruitt-Igoe, the Barbican, the Bijlmermeer, etc. But the Arabian peninsula figures neither in the discussion of British New Towns, nor in discussions of Modernism, nor British colonial architecture. It is glaringly absent.

In the words of the planner Sir Anthony Minoprio, the British New Towns were “great social experiments.” His firm would go on to design Kuwait as we know it. The British New Towns could not up-turn the culture, social relations, living standards of Britain on a national level. But the masterplan for Kuwait did precisely this. So did the masterplans of Doha, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Dubai. In the Arabian peninsula state formation, oil discovery, and urban planning were all inextricably tied together by the hand of Britain’s imperial political agents.

Between World War One and 1970 these states were formed according to British political goals, their earliest institutions created with British oversight. Oil was discovered by British and later American oil companies, and new cities were masterplanned by British and American planners. This all took place while much of the region was still formally (with the exception of Saudi Arabia) under British protectorate status.

The historian Elizabeth Monroe referred to this period as ‘Britain’s Moment in the Middle East’. Teams of political residents and agents were dispatched to the Arabian peninsula with the goal of protecting British oil interests, removing threats to those interests, guiding local rulers, and perhaps most importantly: to ensure that oil revenues were used to purchase products and services from British companies.

The term “British quality” was often used in Foreign Office memos, and appeared in the pamphlet “Hints to Business Men Visiting the Persian Gulf,” issued by the Board of Trade in 1960. Each new state followed a familiar pattern of development that tracked closely with Peter J. Cain’s concept of ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’, where the first modern institutions established by the Political Agents were typically those of finance and coercion: the banks and police.

In 1938 the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California and later renamed the Arabian-American Oil Company, or ARAMCO) built a ‘Saudi camp’ and an ‘American camp’ for its workers in eastern Saudi Arabia. This was the Gulf region’s first western piece of urban planning, consisting of an orthogonal gridiron street network and detached villas with pitched roofs. An image of Texas in Arabia.

Aramco, currently the world’s largest company, then masterplanned the cities of Ras Tanura, Abuqaiq, Dammam, and Khobar. Dammam is where Aramco’s headquarter is located today, and one of Saudi Arabia’s largest cities. Aramco job ads of the time stressed that the nascent cities were more American than America, with imported turkeys for Thanksgiving and one memorable ad containing a photograph of four blond boys playing baseball, with the caption ‘Jeffrey of Arabia’.

In 1934, the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British-Petroleum) and the American-owned Gulf Oil created the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) as a joint venture. KOC then appointed the British firm Wilson Mason & Partners to design the town of Al-Ahmadi. This was designed as a more sprawling version of an English Garden Suburb, with winding lanes, grassy front lawns, pitched roofs and fully functioning fireplaces and chimneys. It introduced the detached villa to Kuwait, which is today almost the only housing typology for locals.

I spent 13 hours at work yesterday. So no fun whatsoever

I remember in high school 20 years ago having to write an essay about how the League of Nations failed because it couldn’t stop the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Well if that’s the case the wtf is the UN still doing here? Why are we all pretending that the Security Council and veto power benefit the world in any way?

If any leaders had guts they would create a new UN without the veto and exclude the US, UK, France, Russia, China, and Israel from it