kat

@katbamkapow

over-explainer for fame & fortune, analog enthusiast, 9-5 academic. informatics PhD (computer/networking histories, LGBTQ+ activism, STS & HIV/AIDS). you might know me from video games once: uc irvine now: u of michigan 💾🌿💽 kb.place 💽🌿💾

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kat@katbamkapow· Jun 29

children rise up

2600 herts. Main article: 2600 hertz. The origins of phone phreaking trace back at least to AT&T's implementation of fully automatic switches. These switches used tone dialing, a form of in-band signaling, and included some tones which were for internal telephone company use.[citation needed] One internal-use tone is a tone of 2600 Hz which causes a telephone switch to think the call had ended, leaving an open carrier line, which can be exploited to provide free long-distance, and international calls. At that time, long-distance calls were more expensive than local calls.[9]

"A Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal toy produced a 2600 hertz tone." A very smooth red plastic horn.

kat@katbamkapow· Jun 22

i've got your steam machine right here

black and white picture of a gigantic freaking train, a steam locomotive. it is big boy, the train. caption from its wikipedia article: Publicity photo of Union Pacific Big Boy No. 4000, the first of the class, taken in 1941

kat@katbamkapow· Jun 19

blue prince looks different

a slide from a computer history lecture about world war ii applications of computing, feat. colossus, mark 1, and eniac

kat@katbamkapow· Jun 16

fun error message from institutional website i am required to use

kat@katbamkapow· Jun 9

the norman rockwell spiritualists are on an entirely other level

norman rockwell illustration for saturday evening post from may 1920, a man and woman sit on two floral ottomans/chairs, their knees touching, holding a ouija board across both or their laps and tbh this is giving off limitlesssssss romcom energy

kat@katbamkapow· Jun 1

this note is currently pinned on a chalkboard where i keep a few renderings of my cat

a note pinned in the upper left corner, many chalk drawings of cat in various postures surround

kat@katbamkapow· Jun 1

i made this little note on a piece of paper about the cool summer of streams. when we have our game schedule i'll make another one (that is easier to read & higher contrast) :)

handwritten note:

JACK + KAT'S COOL SUMMER OF STREAMS
all june long & some july too
Tuesdays
Thursdays
& every other sunday.
6.30pm ET

twitch.tv/katbamkapow
buttondown.com/katbamkapow

kat@katbamkapow· May 21

kat@katbamkapow· May 14

i am opting to selectively read feedback from my co-authors today

kat@katbamkapow· May 9

thank you yes very good i had fun

slay the spire 2 statuses including: 32 strength, 1 plating and a few others that are uhhhh an axe?, a hand?, +6 to shiv damage, 2 shivs every turn, and shivs deal damage to all enemies

floors climbed: 48
gold gained: 787
elites killed:12
bosses slain: 3
ascension: 3
mouse is hovering over "perfect: defeated 3 bosses without losing HP"

kat@katbamkapow· May 8

kat@katbamkapow· May 7

he got into canvas

image from max headroom signal interruption. masked man in sunglasses and a suit leaning forward in fram, glitched out corrugated metal behind him

kat@katbamkapow· May 4

buying tech in 2026 pick two

a triangle with "no AI" "user friendly" and "privacy focused" at each point. in the middle it says "2026 tech pick 2"

kat@katbamkapow· May 4

this is the room, btw, so you can see why they were like "i must build this"

a 3D rendering of the 1970s chilean project cybersyn room, with a bunch of white chairs in a circle surrounded by (what appear to be) screens on the wall. there is wood paneling because it is the 1970s

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 28

im experiencing the comic

saturday morning breakfast cereal webcomic from june of 2009 lmao sorry it's two kids in the backseat of a car and one of the kids is saying "mom, dad! i have ennui!" and dad says "well you should've made peace with the absurdity of human existence before we started driving!" and the caption reads: Dad eventually pulled over at a frozen lake, which represented the sublime beauty of impermanence but he was pretty annoyed about it.

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 28

feel like shit just want him back

microsoft office assistant select screen, feat merlin with a blue robe covered in golden stars and moons. he's got a big white beard and a little blue cap

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 28

i want it to be like this

cover to personal computer magazine with beige boxy computer, monitor, keyboard surrounded by 3D shapes in primary colors and a green pyramid

cover to personal computer magazine of a beige boxy mac II in a limitless digital horizon with multicolored and prismatic apple logos

cover for a videotape collection for season 12 of newton's apple, featuring an oldey timey man behind a window looking out into a chaotic swirling collection of prismatic apples and earths and microscopes and bugs

cover for a game -- microsoft's explorapedia -- featuring that green 90s tree frog that was everywhere back when they wanted us to "save the rainforest" a lot? there's also a cartoon frog on what i can only assume is a comet or a rocketship

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 26

honorable mention goes to whatever was happening in this corner

a mess of diagrams with "id, ego, superego" "tripartite model of self" "douglas crimp" "dl miller" "mourning and militancy"

a bunch of arrows around words like "ego" "symbolic. real, imaginary"

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 26

found my MS paint guide to silent hills 1 and 2 that i used to summarize the games when jack and i played SH3 lmao

silent hill 1: harry, cybil, cheryl, dahlia, alessa, dr. kaufman, lisa. harry is saying "have you seen a little girl..." there are drawings of esoteric symbols, a sad looking nurse in a red cardigan ("lisa"), a sad girl in a black dress ("alessa"), and an evil looking woman in a big shawl saying "im dahlia and im evil". another person in a police hat is smiling and saying "i love gun :)". then tehre's a flying wolf bat thing and it says "where are these now?"

for silent hilll 2 it says: james, mary, maria, laura, eddy, angela. there's a sad man with a gun thinking "mary?" and a woman in a miniskirt thinking "am i real???" pyramid head is also there. next to him it says "i'm pyramid head :)" then there's a bubble nurse saying "help me :)" and then tehre are three figures, a girl and a woman and a boy and they're all saying: "we're miserable!"

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 22

please, doctor

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 11

made a fun new print today

a binder clip holding a piece of kraft paper that reads

NOTHING CHANGES IF NOTHING CHANGES over and over again

kat@katbamkapow· Apr 8

when i say this i am quoting the one more lane meme idk if that's what other people think but i am just letting you know. thanks

top: bro this is a different highway expansion bro its a new design it will enhance mobility bro this will fix traffic i swear bro just one more lane please just build it bro it has a boulevard bro there are managed lanes please
bottom: image of a truly unhinged 12-lane freeway map overhead

kat@katbamkapow· Mar 29

not to put too fine a point on it, but the fear that people are shaping themselves into forms that are legible to AI systems, thus dehumanizing themselves/others & ceding control, is something that kate crawford identified before the chat open beta debuted (the "labor" chapter in atlas of AI, 2021)

there, we can begin to consider the question of how labor, capital, and time are entwined in AI systems. Rather than debating whether humans will be replaced by robots, in this chapter I focus on how the experience of work is shifting in relation to increased surveillance, algorithmic assessment, and the modulation of time. Put another way, instead of asking whether robots will replace humans, I’m interested in how humans are increasingly treated like robots

kat@katbamkapow· Mar 19

btw, there is legislation that was introduced & successfully passed in the house that would (as i understand it) stop people from being able to purchase this information. it's called the fourth amendment is not for sale act and it stalled out last april in the senate.

H.R.4639 - Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act 118th Congress (2023-2024)
BillHide Overview
Sponsor: Rep. Davidson, Warren [R-OH-8] (Introduced 07/14/2023)
Committees: House - Judiciary; Intelligence (Permanent Select)
Committee Meetings: 07/19/23 9:00AM
Committee Reports: H. Rept. 118-459
Committee Prints: H.Prt. 118-28
Latest Action: Senate - 04/18/2024 Received in the Senate. (All Actions)
Roll Call Votes: There have been 2 roll call votes
Tracker: Tip

This bill has the status Passed House

Here are the steps for Status of Legislation:

Introduced | Passed House

kat@katbamkapow· Mar 18

thank you,

Hi, Kindly, Doctor, I hope you're feeling great when you read this e-mail

kat@katbamkapow· Mar 14

like..................

kat@katbamkapow· Mar 14

there are musicals about tractors, JC penney, paper, silicone, making sales... it's my dream come true and i think it will be yours, too please go and listen to this hour please please please i would share a direct link but i can't bc of, im sure, radio licensing ??? please please PLEeeeease !!!!!!

The_Leisure_Experiment_with_rotating_hosts-2026-03-13-1900

kat@katbamkapow· Mar 8

me when im fighting this mf

the shrinker beetle from slay the spire but it has its name cropped out bc i copied this image from an image search. it's a beetle with wiggly antennae and beetly little legs and 39 health. it will shrink you next turn

kat@katbamkapow· Feb 25

whenever i read pieces critiquing the adoption of cloud computing from the early 2000s, it's invariably soundtracked by the jaws theme

ly on privatized communication networks and data storage facilities to access and manage an array of goods and services, from personal documents and music files to online shopping and e-mail. It is presaged by applications like Gmail and Google documents, which provide users with large amounts of storage space on Google’s servers to store their personal documents and correspondence. In return for this convenience, Google reserves the right to mine its rapidly expanding databases for commercial purposes. If this business model is still in its infancy, one of its dominant emerging characteristics has become evident—a reliance on the interactive capability of networks to gather information about users. The terms of access to the “cloud” will include the capture and commodification of information about how, when, and where, we make use of its resources, a fact that renders the metaphor doubly misleading. The portrait of user activity made possible by ubiquitous interactivity will not be ephemeral, but increasingly detailed and fine-grained, thanks to an unprecedented ability to capture and store patterns of interaction, movement, transaction, and communication. Patterns of users’ Web browsing, for example, could be correlated with those of online shopping, communication, and, eventually, advertising exposure. The information clouds here are far from ephemeral, fleeting forms: their details are captured and fixed in a manner

kat@katbamkapow· Feb 19

hahaha