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kellypendergrast.bsky.social
kelly pendergrast
@kellypendergrast.bsky.social
3K followers 610 following 980 posts
technology // aesthetics // labor // shapes

writing: kellypendergrast.com
working: antistaticpartners.com
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kellypendergrast.bsky.social
kelly pendergrast @kellypendergrast.bsky.social · Apr 27
New open invitation - DM me if you are (ever) in the Bay Area and want to meet up irl - it’s 2025 & we’re going offline, comrades!
kellypendergrast.bsky.social kelly pendergrast @kellypendergrast.bsky.social · Nov 16
Open invitation for anyone to DM me if you want to gossip
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
I hated every pop song in Marty supreme! Tortured anachronism. Wow u got a choir of children to sing Forever Young by Alphaville?? Should we throw a party? Should we invite the PS22 Chorus???
December 26, 2025 at 5:59 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Rush hour at Berkeley Bowl
December 23, 2025 at 10:52 PM
Reposted by kelly pendergrast
badfriendclub.bsky.social
Longest night of the year, new moon, earthquake storm, nearly half of sf is without electricity. It’s a night of great power
PG&E outage map showing most of the northern half of SF in red
December 21, 2025 at 3:19 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
I do not welcome The Big One!!!
🪨⚡️🚫
December 21, 2025 at 2:33 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Funny to me how much juice and staying power the idea of "slop" has had (ie just read the new max read on slop maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...). Slop is a useful concept, I guess!

Anyway I made another brief note on some of my thoughts on slop, stagnation, and taco bell
Slop/combination/stagnation Taco Bell theory: at Taco Bell there are about 10 key components on offer, and everything is a combination of those components. Ground beef sour cream lettuce grated cheese hard tortilla soft tortilla etc. Most of the “innovation” at play comes from combining the components in a new way. Crunch wrap supreme, etc. Occasionally a new component enters the picture — Dorito cheesy dust, Flamin Hot spicy dust — but mostly these new elements are existing branded components ported in from other popular junk food brand, and often available for a limited time. Kind of like a crossover ep in the marvel cinematic universe. This combinatory logic is widespread. You can see it at play in many spheres. Fast casual food concepts. Superhero movies. Trope-centric genre fiction. It is often perceived as freedom. The Starbucks drink, where the customer can have anything they can imagine that can be created from the list of components. It is, I think, specifically American. The salad with protein in a plastic clamshell. It reveals a kind of cultural stagnation. Taco Bell logic does not enable truly new things to be produced. But it does enable an almost-endless or seemingly-endless set of combinations to be constructed within a certain container (a mass-market paperback, a plastic clamshell, a 20oz drink cup, a streaming platform). Generative AI image slop can be considered a new iteration of this combinatory logic. Ultimately stagnant, produced from recombined input components, perceived as limitless and creative, favoring consumer choice over artistic integrity, trending towards conservatism.
December 19, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Reposted by kelly pendergrast
evacide.bsky.social
The US TikTok sale has been signed. The company will be controlled by a joint venture including Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Adding a UAE company really makes it clear that this was never about national security concerns.

www.axios.com/2025/12/18/t...
Scoop: TikTok signs deal for sale of U.S. unit after yearslong saga
The deal would end a yearslong saga to force TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance to sell the company's U.S. operation.
www.axios.com
December 18, 2025 at 11:35 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Fact is, I don't want to be looked at by machines
December 19, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by kelly pendergrast
benwurgaft.bsky.social
Recent editorial exchanges remind me to broadcast: I maintain a small freelance editing practice, and will have some space free for new clients in the new year. I help writers both scholarly and otherwise, as well as institutional clients. A short description here: benwurgaft.org/editing/
An Olivetti typewriter sitting on a wooden table, photographed in the Olivetti showroom in Venice, Italy, which is pretty gorgeous if you get the chance to visit.
December 17, 2025 at 8:19 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Vital new scene reporting from Jimmy Wu at Bay Area Current: on the rise of the EA, rationalist, and right-leaning journo/writer scene in the Bay Area. I unwittingly attended one of these happy hours ("writer and publisher meetup!") and met Curtis Yarvin's ex. bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new...
Meet the New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia
Libs and the far-right ‘link and build’ in the Bay’s tech publication scene.
bayareacurrent.com
December 16, 2025 at 10:09 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Bay Area folks: it's time to buy your tickets to my favorite month-long charity rummage sale (Oakland Museum White Elephant Sale). I volunteer here and it's the joy of my life haha. Tix do sell out, so buy now and put it on your calendar: www.whiteelephantsale.org/tickets
Tickets | White Elephant Sale
www.whiteelephantsale.org
December 16, 2025 at 6:57 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
New project alert -- me and @annapendergrast.bsky.social having fun and learning things in 2026 www.everyobject.org
Every Object an Archive
www.everyobject.org
December 16, 2025 at 12:46 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Damn, big gossip in the Bay Area dork ass woodworking community -- Jay van Arsdale's legendary Japanese Joinery program is not being offered by Laney College wood tech department next year, for the first time since 1999. Pretty much the only course of its kind on the West Coast!
December 15, 2025 at 7:32 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
This OpenAI employee merch website is such a rich text, truly a tryhard mashup of about 8 different design and apparel and retail trends of the past decade. supply.openai.com
OpenAI Supply Co.
Explore curated, brand-designed pieces that reflect our vision, milestones, and creative spirit.
supply.openai.com
December 15, 2025 at 5:44 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Kind of impressed at the longevity of the current extended wave of riso print zine/poster culture. For the past few years I’ve thought “damn this shit must be almost on its way out” every time I go to a small press sale or art book fair but no it’s only intensifying!! www.404media.co/404-media-is...
404 Media Is Making a Zine
We are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.
www.404media.co
December 8, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Reposted by kelly pendergrast
shannonmattern.bsky.social
We're hosting a zoom info session today at noon ET! Registration info in the doc below!
shannonmattern.bsky.social Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Nov 18
Apps are open for our spring session of the Cross-Reference Coalition! We're exploring Search & Discovery! "Our journey will encompass the history of exploration + cartography, legacies of inquiry, tools of discovery, theories of curiosity, and counter-algorithmic means of 'finding things out.'"
December 8, 2025 at 6:23 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Just pulled out a time capsule from 2003
An open page from a CD binder showing 4 CDs (each of the four images attached to this post shows a different spread of CDs)
December 7, 2025 at 8:01 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
The way Peter thiel is fixated on Greta as the biblical antichrist when this man is right here!!
junlper.beer onion person @junlper.beer · 22d
oh that’s good. not enough of every aspect of our lives were financialized quite yet
December 4, 2025 at 10:11 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
For the past 5 years we've been sadly planning to get rid of our 1991 volvo 240 wagon which is increasingly unreliable but has valiantly served ~350k miles, and get a Prius or Honda Fit or something.

But I just saw this mint 91 Subaru on FB with only 114k miles and now I'm like hmmmmmm
Red boxy subaru wagon sitting in a parking lot in front of a marina, looking glamorous in the sunset.
December 3, 2025 at 8:27 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
so many newsletters so little news
December 2, 2025 at 10:09 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
If you would like to read more from the already-existing field of maintenance studies, The Maintainers Study Guide is a great place to start. I am proud to have contributed editing + design labor to this project!! themaintainers.org/study-guide/
Cover of the Maintainers study Guide document. The title sits above an image of a garage workshop. Below the image is the subtitle "A guide to ground your practice in principles of maintenance, repair, and care."
December 1, 2025 at 10:09 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
hahahahahaha

Some might say that the existence and expansion of the billionaire class is antithetical to the maintenance, flourishing, and survival of our planet and people, but NOT STEWART BRAND!
Tweet from Stewart Brand saying "This convinces me there's such a thing as Spending Momentum. (I generally like and approve of billionaires). They travel a lot and do need security and can easily afford as much as they want. It's not surprising that some carry on to fantasizing and building underground castles..." followed by a retweet about billionaire survivalists.
December 1, 2025 at 9:37 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Only 56 years after Mierle Laderman Ukeles (and 10 yrs after the establishment of The Maintainers), Stewart Brand comes out with his own maintenance manifesto, exploring "the insights that can be gleaned from the maintenance of sailboats, vehicles, and weapons" ok🙂

press.stripe.com/maintenance-...
Stripe Press — Maintenance
An in-depth exploration of maintenance, and a powerful argument for its civilizational importance.
press.stripe.com
December 1, 2025 at 7:21 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
organizing my archives (aka deleting old screenshots) and finding some good stuff. never did figure out if Christo is cool.
screenshot of a google search "is christo cool" where the auto response is "did you mean: is christ real"
November 30, 2025 at 10:51 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Really not enjoying the way various tech-adjacent thinkfluencers are deploying Ozempic as an imaginative tool // futuring technology // rhetorical cudgel.
Tweet from Bryan Johnson: "There’s an argument that GLP-1s are playing a critical role in society, not just for weight loss, but as a technology of imagination. Something humans are in desperate need of as we try to reconcile with AI becoming the new fabric of society. GLP-1s expand human imagination by breaking psychological ceilings. Important because AI expands human capability without necessarily expanding self belief. The future requires us to imagine new versions of ourselves and GLP-1s show humans how a simple injection remaps what they can aspire to become. Most people live with a fixed self-model. Something like “I’m addicted,” “I’m obese,” “I can’t change” or "I can't do that." Their mind struggles to simulate a different version of themselves, especially after countless failed attempts to change. When someone takes a GLP-1 and their cravings collapse overnight, or they overcome some other addiction, their imaginative horizon expands. They now see a future self that previously felt impossible." Quote tweet from @growing_daniel: "It's amazing the effect Ozempic is having on people's genetics", responding to a tweet from Ellie X saying "work in progress" and a selfie on the left of a small-fat woman (presumably herself), then a selfie on the right of a thin woman (presumably also herself) with a hand placed on her stomach to show that it is small. Daniel's implication being that people who had claimed that their weight was grounded in genetic factors are lying, because if they take Ozempic they can become skinny.
November 25, 2025 at 10:57 PM
Reposted by kelly pendergrast
grenzfurthner.bsky.social
Good old Woz. Good for him.
November 21, 2025 at 8:06 PM