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Robot Umpires, Skatepunk Photography, and The Joy Of Watching Robots Screw Up

I bring you the finest Internet reading in my weekly Linkfest

Clive Thompson
9 min readJul 6, 2022
by Clarence Klingebiel

It’s Wednesday.

You’re ploughing through a short workweek, if you’re in the US of A.

Celebrate getting through the first day …

… with this Linkfest: My collection of the finest reading material on the Internet!

To begin …

1) 📷 Skateboarding photos of Clarence Klingebeil

My friend and bandmate Betty Wiles recently met Clarence Klingebeil, a photographer with an astonishing eye for light. Over at his web site he hosts images of his longtime “Skate Homies” project, which consists of gorgeously contrast-y black-and-white photos of skateboarders. (One of them is above.)

Klingebeil has a pretty remarkable story — after surviving cancer, he went into cardiac arrest, and upon recovering from that, he found he had a blood clot in his right arm so perilous the entire arm needed amputation. Despite losing his dominant arm, and wrestling with serious and ongoing phantom-pain, he’s returned to doing remarkable photography.

Part of his return to photography meant leaving analog film behind and embracing digital tech, as he tells John Pearson in this story on his life:

“Ironically, I was kind of saved by the digital revolution,” he says. “Film would have been tricky. Initially, I wasn’t sure if I could still shoot hand held. The first time I went to shoot, I had a tripod and had someone help me. But then I quickly became frustrated with the tripod and started trying hand held. And while a little clumsy and perhaps not too elegant at first, I learned and it’s totally doable now.”

You can see his work at his site, and also buy one of his Skate Homies photography books. I’m gonna get one of these now!

2) 🤖 The joy of watching robots screw up

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Clive Thompson
Clive Thompson

Written by Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net

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