Exploring Ephemera is “The official blog from Ephemera Society”; from the About page:
Founded in 1975 by the designer, photographer and writer Maurice Rickards (1919-1998), the Ephemera Society champions the very special contribution made by ephemera to an understanding of our past. Dedicated to the collection, conservation, study and educational use of ephemera, the society’s fairs, journal, blogs and website provide opportunities for collectors and researchers to share their expertise and enthusiasm. […]
Our Pepys logo pays tribute to the celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). Probably the first ‘general ephemerist’, Pepys included in his collection trade cards, board games, labels, ballads and other street literature. The Society’s Pepys medal, for excellence in ephemera studies, has been awarded to 16 recipients.
Just scroll down the main page and you’ll see all sorts of intriguing posts, like “Undies Without Coupons” (“Who would have thought that a wartime parachute could find a second life as nightwear?”); there are more at the MeFi post where I got the link.
And if you don’t care about ephemera, try John R. Gallagher’s The Curious Question of AI-written Lists: Or, LLMs are Genre Machines; it’s full of useful observations, like:
A good way to think about the output of LLMs is not an instance. It’s not actually a concrete piece of writing. The sentences aren’t sentences. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of what LLMs are doing. LLMs, as genre machines, produce the most abstracted patterns of genre signals possible. Then they write out that abstraction as a set of sentences. That abstraction, when you just glance at it, when you just skim it, feels fine. But when you stare at it with intent, when you close read it, you realize there is nothing there but signals that require interpretation.
Thanks, Leslie!
My parents’ generation were adults during WW2, so I was familiar with the concept of ‘making knickers out of parachute silk’ (which the article says was actually nylon).
There is a scene in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory where doughty London women fight over the parachute from a downed Luftwaffe pilot.