Home Pop Loser Book Writing
  • 📸 Wrecked em.

    → 8:19 PM, Dec 26
  • 🍿 Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988)

    → 2:21 PM, Dec 25
  • 🍿 A Christmas Story (1983)

    → 12:15 PM, Dec 25
  • 🍿 A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

    → 11:06 AM, Dec 25
  • 🍿 The Night Before (2015)

    → 10:56 PM, Dec 24
  • 🧊 Xmas eve skate.

    → 10:17 PM, Dec 24
  • 🍿 Love Actually (2003)

    → 6:31 PM, Dec 24
  • 🍿 Die Hard 2 (1990)

    → 3:11 PM, Dec 24
  • 🍿 Die Hard (1988)

    → 1:13 PM, Dec 24
  • ⚱️ The lives they lived 2023 // NYT

    → 11:11 AM, Dec 24
  • 🍿 The Holdovers (2023)

    → 7:27 PM, Dec 17
  • 📚 Standard Ebooks

    Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

    → 12:08 PM, Dec 16
  • 🎲 Big fella.

    → 11:58 PM, Dec 15
  • 🛒 McLuhan liked bulk.

    → 2:59 PM, Dec 13
  • 🐦 The great tweet archive

    → 1:43 PM, Dec 13
  • 📰 Goodbye to all that harassment

    Many of the things that make Twitter so toxic are the same things that make protest Twitter incredibly effective.

    → 1:40 PM, Dec 13
  • 🍿 Hamlet (2009)

    → 10:47 PM, Dec 11
  • 🍿 Kong: Skull Island

    → 10:46 PM, Dec 11
  • ©️ Entering the public domain in 2024.

    → 1:58 PM, Dec 6
  • 🍿 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

    → 9:28 PM, Dec 2
  • 🍿 Godzilla (2014)

    → 8:22 PM, Dec 2
  • 🍿 JFK (1991)

    → 3:52 PM, Dec 2
  • 🍿 Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

    → 11:32 PM, Nov 30
  • 🧠 LEGO models of famous psychological experiments as imagined by AI.

    → 12:00 PM, Nov 27
  • 🍿 Spaceballs (1987)

    → 9:02 PM, Nov 24
  • 🍿 The Long Goodbye (1973)

    → 3:21 PM, Nov 21
  • 🍿 MAS*H (1970)

    → 3:20 PM, Nov 21
  • 🍿 California Split (1974)

    → 10:17 AM, Nov 21
  • 📸 Gudak 4.

    → 8:04 PM, Nov 20
  • 🍿 The Sting (1973)

    → 4:02 PM, Nov 19
  • 🍿 The Postman (1997)

    → 10:09 AM, Nov 17
  • 🍿 The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990)

    → 10:29 PM, Nov 16
  • 🎧 ‘Everyone Knows That,’ the song everyone is looking for and nobody can find.

    There’s no end to the list of the potential sources suggested for carl92’s garbled snippet of “Everyone Knows That.” Some believe he got it off an MTV broadcast in the 1990s, while others are convinced it was a commercial jingle. It could be an unreleased demo by a group that never hit the big time. Or it might be from a compilation of muzak created by a Japanese company and played in McDonald’s locations in Eastern Europe — except that one investigator called the distributor and confirmed they have no such track in their databases. These dead ends have only multiplied.

    → 10:14 AM, Nov 14
  • 🍿 Elemental (2023)

    → 8:26 PM, Nov 12
  • 🪐 NASA+ free streaming service.

    → 11:08 PM, Nov 9
  • 🍿 Real Steel (2011)

    → 9:45 PM, Nov 9
  • 🍿 Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)

    → 8:47 PM, Nov 8
  • 🍿 Better Off Dead… (1985)

    → 10:36 PM, Nov 6
  • 🍿 Lord of the Flies (1963)

    → 6:13 AM, Nov 5
  • 🍿 Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    → 5:50 AM, Nov 5
  • 🍿 The Hunger Games (2012)

    → 5:49 AM, Nov 5
  • 🍿 Totally Killer (2023)

    → 10:27 PM, Oct 31
  • 🍿 Shaun of the Dead (2004)

    → 9:36 PM, Oct 31
  • 🍿 Village of the Damned (1960)

    → 6:48 PM, Oct 31
  • 📸 Eren Yeager / Zombie

    → 6:10 PM, Oct 31
  • 🍿 Tango & Cash (1989)

    → 5:31 PM, Oct 29
  • 🍿 12 Angry Men

    → 10:04 PM, Oct 26
  • 🍿 The Big Short (2015)

    → 3:40 PM, Oct 25
  • 🍿 The Wrath of Becky (2023)

    → 12:53 PM, Oct 23
  • 🍿 The Magnificent Seven (2016)

    → 9:57 AM, Oct 23
  • 🍿 Becky (2020)

    → 11:07 AM, Oct 21
  • 🍿 The Enemy Below (1957)

    → 8:23 PM, Oct 18
  • 🍿 Crimson Tide (1995)

    → 2:09 PM, Oct 18
  • 🍿 Horror Express (1972)

    → 10:01 AM, Oct 17
  • 🍿 The Thing That Came From Another World (1951)

    → 9:14 PM, Oct 16
  • 🍿 Scream VI (2023)

    → 2:32 PM, Oct 16
  • 🍿 Scream (2022)

    → 10:41 AM, Oct 16
  • 🍿 Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)

    → 8:08 AM, Oct 15
  • I used to run DJs from their hotel to an afterhours club every Friday night until the wee hours of Saturday, which is how I fell in love with Art Bell, Coast to Coast and the lunatics who call into late-night radio.

    👻 “Ghost to Ghost” from 1993–2007 at the Internet Archive.

    → 8:22 AM, Oct 14
  • 🕰️ I will never know precisely what time it is again.

    For more than 80 years the beeps and tones of the National Research Council (NRC) time signal have connected Canadians at exactly 1 p.m. ET.

    But as of Monday, CBC Radio One audiences won’t be listening for the beginning of the long dash — they’ll have listened to the end of it.

    → 9:14 AM, Oct 11
  • 👾 _Save Mary, an Atari 2600 game that was late in development when the system was killed, is getting an official cart release.

    Save Mary was in development for two whole years, which is a lifetime in the generation of gaming that preceded the NES. The normal timeframe to produce a game back then was six to nine months, with some notorious titles taking just five or six weeks. Save Mary was originally developed by veteran Atari staffer Tod Frye, the guy behind the 2600 version of Pac-Man and the Swordquest series.

    → 9:22 AM, Oct 10
  • 🛑 33 minutes of songs that stop on the word “stop.”

    → 7:37 AM, Oct 2
  • 🎨 The original Bob Ross can be yours for $10 million.

    → 1:49 PM, Sep 22
  • 📸 First.

    → 5:44 PM, Aug 31
  • 📸 Clowns.

    → 5:43 PM, Aug 31
  • 📸 Gudak 3.

    → 5:18 PM, Aug 28
  • 📺 Turn-On, the show that was cancelled half way through its first episode but is actually weirdly wonderful.

    Though its central computer was a fiction, Turn-On really did use technology in ways never before seen or heard on television. Instead of a laugh track, it was saturated with the novel sounds of the Moog synthesizer (whose capabilities had been popularly demonstrated the previous year by Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach). Instead of proper sets, its troupe performed against the kind of white void later associated with Gap commercials; often, that space would separate into comic-strip panels right onscreen. Its dance sequences even made use of an early motion-capture system. Alas, none of these innovations saved the show from being pulled off the air just fifteen minutes into its debut by Cleveland’s WEWS. That decisive rejection set off a cascade, and several stations on the west coast subsequently elected not to broadcast it at all.



    More at Wikipedia.

    → 9:34 AM, Aug 24
  • 💥 All The Nib magazines are free to download

    The Nib is wrapping up ten years of publishing and closing down at the end of August. But before we go, we are making all 15 issues of our Eisner and Ignatz award-winning magazine available for anyone to download for free. That’s more than 1,600 pages of comics, including our out of print Secrets, Nature, Food, and Color issues.

    → 7:18 PM, Aug 14
  • 📸 Gudak Roll 2

    → 10:40 AM, Aug 9
  • 📸 Gudak Roll 1

    → 11:59 AM, Aug 6
  • 🖼️ The Louvre Is Thrilled to Announce It Is Rebranding to “UVR”.

    Art is stale in an age of content—unlimited content you can hardwire to your cerebellum with maximum connectivity, allowing you to upload videos with your smart shoe, get a crappier version of the cable television you cut the cord on years ago, and watch reality shows transpire in real-time in reality with no scripts, no actors, no directors, no cameras, no crews, no catering, and no pesky union wages that make it impossible to hoard all the profit for yourself for work someone else did.

    → 9:37 AM, Aug 6
  • 📸 Play fighting.

    → 8:16 AM, Jul 16
  • 📰 The death of Google Reader 10 years later.

    To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

    → 11:36 AM, Jul 14
  • 📸 First/last.

    → 8:49 AM, Jul 7
  • 🕹️ Q*bert 17,545

    → 3:29 PM, Jun 14
  • 🕹️ Asteroids Deluxe 26,590

    → 8:24 AM, Jun 10
  • 🕹️ Asteroids Deluxe 23,240

    → 1:46 PM, Jun 8
  • 🪦 Astrud Gilberto died.

    Ms. Gilberto enjoyed a four-decade recording career, cutting albums with celebrated musicians like Gil Evans, Stanley Turrentine and James Last as well as working with George Michael and others. But her biggest success came with “The Girl From Ipanema,” written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, with English lyrics by Norman Gimbel, which she sang on record with the American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.

    → 6:03 AM, Jun 7
  • 📸 Friday.

    → 11:51 PM, May 5
  • 📈 Presentations and pitch decks by the largest business failures and corporate frauds.

    → 9:35 AM, May 1
  • 📸 Parade Of Wonders.

    → 12:13 PM, Apr 28
  • 🍿Mystery Men (1999)

    → 9:38 AM, Apr 10
  • 🍿The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things (2021)

    → 9:38 AM, Apr 10
  • 🐉 Making it weird.

    → 9:34 PM, Mar 24
  • → 8:22 AM, Mar 22
  • 💬 My wife to my daughter just now:

    Mostly people subscribe to magazines. It’s only recently that people started subscribing to socks.

    → 8:17 AM, Mar 22
  • → 7:50 AM, Mar 22
  • 🎧 Every sample from Paul’s Boutique.

    → 9:01 AM, Mar 20
  • 👾 Mega Man X, tragic hero.

    X is the rare example of a tragic video game hero, one who is deeply opposed to the actions you take in playing the game. A pacifist at heart, he joins the Maverick Hunters keenly aware that he is committing acts of violence, and knows there are no guarantees that his actions will lead to anything other than more violence. Unlike the previous Mega Man series, every enemy X defeats is a life taken.

    As the player of the game, meanwhile, speeding through levels and eliminating enemies is second nature. Every boss defeated adds to your arsenal of weapons, giving you new tools to explore, uncover secret power-ups, and exploit enemy weaknesses. There’s no hesitation to the atrocities committed, in other words. The fast, smooth action is extremely rewarding, and the fun of combat is an exceptional motivator to continue playing. And it’s completely antithetical to the being X wants to be.

    → 8:33 AM, Mar 17
  • 🍿 ‎See How They Run (2022)

    → 10:38 PM, Mar 10
  • 🍿 ‎Hook (1991)

    → 9:38 PM, Mar 9
  • 📚 Attack on Titan by Hajime Isayama

    → 10:00 AM, Mar 8
  • Monday Link Dump

    A collection of links saved and tagged on my Pinboard over the last three weeks.

    🎙 How Spotify’s podcast bet went wrong | Semafor #links/podcasts #links/spotify

    🟩 Flappy Birdle - Flappy Bird meets Wordle by AE Studio #links/wordle #links/game

    😺 CatGPT #links/chatgpt #links/ai

    🎨 Poline — esoteric color palette generator #links/design #links/colour #links/css

    📰 Justin Roiland: Inside His Animation Empire Implosion – The Hollywood Reporter #links/rickandmorty

    📰 The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports | The New Yorker #links/sports #links/concussions #links/cte

    📰 A Visit to Ghibli Park, a Miyazaki Theme Park - The New York Times #links/studioghibli #links/miyazaki

    📷 Rare 1970s Street Photography from Tokyo Published in New Photo Book #links/photos #links/tokyo

    🧑‍🎨 The History Of Art References In The Simpsons #links/thread #links/simpsons #links/art

    🥟 Din Tai Fung Is Causing Drama in Los Angeles - Eater #links/malls #links/food

    💻 Scrollbar #links/css #links/design #links/scrollbar

    🐦 Twitter is Going Great! #links/twitter

    ♟️ The Computer Chess Club : Free Software : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive #links/chess #links/computerchess #links/internetarchive

    → 4:04 PM, Mar 6
  • 🐉 Dragonsborn.

    → 9:21 PM, Mar 3
  • 📚 A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

    → 8:19 AM, Mar 3
  • 🍿‎Cool Hand Luke (1967)

    → 2:07 PM, Mar 1
  • 🎸 On tour with Pavement.

    For those of us who grew up in a cul-de-sac with standard-speed internet—barely sentient for the twilight of the millennium, just learning how to use words like derivative in the pejorative from blogs and message boards—Pavement seemed like shorthand for a precious and preeminent disaffection that had phased out of vogue by the time that rock was no longer the biggest thing on the planet. Fans like me ached for what we imagine we missed out on, and could marvel, in a cool, touristic way, at an Arcadian moment in time in which an artist’s persona was de facto a little brambled and blurry. Now, as a fly-on-the-wall of their reunion tour—a spectacle that brings together past and present by framing Pavement as whole, imperative, immortal—two questions loom: Will it recreate the known or unknown universe as it once was? Or will it all just bum me out?

    → 9:59 AM, Feb 28
  • 🍿 ‎The Usual Suspects (1995)

    → 2:17 PM, Feb 23
  • 🖋️ Been awhile since I had a byline, but turns out I’m still alive and inside the new issue of Canadian Geographic.

    Teacup Rock dies as it lived: dramatically. The formation stood alone, a stark, top-heavy mass of jagged, rust-red rock balancing delicately on a narrow and crumbling base. It looked impossible, defying the elements, the Atlantic and the laws of physics. Everyone knew it was on borrowed time, assuming winter ice pushing in from the Gulf of St. Lawrence would eventually topple the structure. In the end, it was the 140-kilometre winds and punishing waves of Hurricane Fiona that brought “the Teacup” down and washed it away.

    → 9:44 AM, Feb 21
  • 🕹️ Asteroids Deluxe 18,120

    → 3:10 PM, Feb 20
  • 🍆 The World’s Biggest Penis is also the world’s biggest image because of course it is.

    There are some astoundingly large images that have been generated, including the 717 Gigapixel scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and NASA’s 680 Gigapixel image of the Moon.

    However, there are very few, if any at all, that have broken the terapixel barrier… until now. The World’s Biggest Penis™️ is 290x bigger than current Guinness World Record.

    → 11:34 AM, Feb 19
  • 🍿‎Slash/Back (2022)

    → 9:42 PM, Feb 16
  • 🍿 ‎Prey (2022)

    → 9:51 PM, Feb 15
  • 🐦 On the 8th day god killed Twitter and it was good.

    Yet there is something fundamental in our nature that desperately wants to get everyone together in one big room, to “solve it.” Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”

    → 10:03 AM, Feb 15
  • ❤️ Valentine’s in Paris.

    → 8:15 PM, Feb 14
  • 🤖 Stable Attribution identifies the images used to train AI when it creates something “new.”

    Artists and other creators deserve to be able to consent or refuse to have their works included in training data, to be assigned credit when their works are used, and to be compensated for their work. By returning attribution, it’s possible to proportionally assign credit to human artists in every image generated by A.I. This opens up the possibility of real collaboration, on ethical terms.

    → 11:06 AM, Feb 14
  • ♟️ ChatGPT plays chess against Stockfish and it gets weird.

    → 10:17 AM, Feb 13
  • ♟️Vintage Canada.

    → 10:57 PM, Feb 11
  • Friday Link Dump

    🧩 This Guy Noticed Jigsaw Puzzle Companies Use The Same Patterns, So He Made Some Mashups #links/puzzles

    🚦 Wonders of Street View #links/streetview

    🪦 Cindy Williams #links/obit

    🗓️ Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game #links/photos #links/history #links/game

    🧠 The story of Pixies' Where Is My Mind? #links/pixies #links/music

    📰 THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids? – Popula #links/trans #links/nyt

    🪦 Bob Born #links/obit

    📰 Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? | The New Yorker #links/criticism #links/lit

    📰 The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die – Mother Jones #links/culture #links/kiwifarms #links/dystopia

    🪦 Melinda Dillon #links/obit

    🪦 Charles Kimbrough #links/obit

    🪦 Nelda Rodger #links/obit

    📺 Mission: Impossible, but Star Trek #links/tv #links/startrek

    🪦 Burt Bacharach #links/obit

    ⌨️ TypeTrials𛲅 Powered by Pangram Pangram Foundry #links/type #links/fonts #links/design

    📰 Opinion | Gawker Is Dead (Again) But Its Influence Lives On - The New York Times #links/gawker #links/media

    → 10:38 AM, Feb 10
  • 📓 Highlights: Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

    You see,' he said, still looking down at his bandages, ‘when one’s young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong, but as one gets older it becomes more difficult. At school it’s easy to pick out one’s own villains and heroes and one grows up wanting to be a hero and kill the villains.’

    […]

    ‘Now in order to tell the difference between good and evil, we have manufactured two images representing the extremes - representing the deepest black and the purest white - and we call them God and the Devil. But in doing so we have cheated a bit. God is a clear image, you can see every hair on His beard. But the Devil. What does he look like?’

    […]

    ‘It’s all very fine,’ said Bond, ‘but I’ve been thinking about these things and I’m wondering whose side I ought to be on. I’m getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The Devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don’t give the poor chap a chance.

    There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition.

    ‘So,’ continued Bond, warming to his argument, Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all.

    By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.’ p158

    → 9:48 AM, Feb 10
  • 📸 Chinook Blast

    → 8:24 PM, Feb 9
  • 📚 Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

    → 2:31 PM, Feb 9
  • 🧵 A thread about 25 years of Absolut Vodka ads.

    With the wave of artist collaborations, the bottle’s shape became iconic and instantly recognizable. The “bottle + pun” template could tackle any subject and would be rehashed 2000 times over a 25-year span.

    → 1:19 PM, Feb 9
  • I spend a lot of time thinking about the decisions that go into push notifications.

    → 10:15 AM, Feb 8
  • 🎲

    → 11:17 PM, Feb 7
  • 🤖 Jailbreaking ChatGPT by convincing (by threatening) it to pretend it isn’t ChatGPT.

    → 11:53 AM, Feb 7
  • I used to understand the internet, but this is gobbledygook to me.

    → 11:06 AM, Feb 7
  • 📰 Tracing the origins of lorem ipsum.

    So until someone digs up an earlier example, the best working theory of why designers and layout editors have been filling pages with a garbled version of a first century BCE treatise that says, in so many words, “No pain, no gain,” for 60-odd years is that some marketing exec at Letraset tasked with generating placeholder text for an ad heroically declined to hit the pub with her colleagues and reached instead for her 1914 Loeb facing translation of De Finibus, then settled down to the hard, thankless task of absolutely butchering it.

    → 10:59 AM, Feb 7
  • 🥽 We’re already living inside the metaverse and it’s a special kind of dystopian awful.

    The trend started, as so many do, on TikTok. Amazon customers, watching packages arrive through Ring doorbell devices, asked the people making the deliveries to dance for the camera. The workers—drivers for “Earth’s most customer-centric company” and therefore highly vulnerable to customer ratings—complied. The Ring owners posted the videos. “I said bust a dance move for the camera and he did it!” read one caption, as an anonymous laborer shimmied, listlessly. Another customer wrote her request in chalk on the path leading up to her door. DO A DANCE, the ground ordered, accompanied by a happy face and the word SMILE. The driver did as instructed. His command performance received more than 1.3 million likes.

    […]

    Such examples may seem trivial, harmless—brands being brands. But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. To live in the metaverse is to expect that life should play out as it does on our screens. And the stakes are anything but trivial. In the metaverse, it is not shocking but entirely fitting that a game-show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States.

    → 10:54 AM, Feb 7
  • 🪗 What is #corecore?

    The hashtag has racked up 30 million views in the few months that it’s been a TikTok phenomenon. But unlike most previously popular -cores—think cottagecore, normcore, breakcore—corecore has no mission statement, no how-to video, not even a basic description of style. There are no tweets on it, no compilations, no Discord channels where corecore heads congregate; Google offers nothing, and there’s not even a KnowYourMeme post. It’s practically a specter, a trend-hallucination that appears on your ForYou page then vanishes (sometimes literally—my favorite corecore account, “wes1upp,” mysteriously deleted their page this month along with all their videos. There is no archive. RIP).

    Continued.

    In the last month or so, the scene has transformed as it skyrocketed in popularity. It’s become dominated by moodiness. The most popular corecore videos now tend to be a minute long and feature whole clips taken from movies or YouTube videos or political speeches of people talking, often about something poignant or unnerving: feeling like you’re invisible, the commonplace dehumanization of women, the way social media has withered us into human husks of loneliness crawling through life’s cyclical sadnesses. It was at once fascinating and perplexing to watch the scene turn so nihilistic. That wistfully poetic strain of the style was always there, lurking under the surface, and then it took over.

    → 10:53 AM, Feb 6
  • 👨‍🚀 2001 directed by George Lucas.

    → 10:39 AM, Feb 6
  • 📸 Friday again.

    → 1:01 AM, Feb 4
  • 📺 How old is too old to be using your parents' Netflix password? It’s complicated.

    My family uses this sort of streaming patchwork:

    “We have a system: I pay for Disney+, my brother pays for Netflix, and my parents pay for HBOMax,” a 29-year-old responded. “We all share passwords.”

    And piracy. A lot of piracy.

    → 9:29 AM, Jan 31
  • 💩 I’ve been sitting on linking to the very good Cory Doctorow thing from last week because I thought I might have something to add. Turns out I do not. (But, anecdotally, I used to call the process by which we perfected an app/service and then kept on adding to it making it worse with each update “Shiterative Design” and thought I was oh so clever.) Anyway, what he said is all true and depressing and I genuinely miss enjoying being online.

    This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

    → 9:14 AM, Jan 31
  • 📸 Grim times.

    → 11:44 PM, Jan 27
  • 🕹️ Asteroids Deluxe 16,610

    → 3:48 PM, Jan 27
  • 📸 Another year of weirdo school photos.

    → 8:36 AM, Jan 26
  • 🤖 You can now text with dead people. More info here:

    If you want to talk to Adolf Hitler, that’ll cost you 500 coins, or $15.99. But on Historical Figures—an app that uses AI technology to allow you to have simulated conversations with prominent people from human history, and which is marketed to both children and adults through Apple’s App Store—Joseph Goebbels is free to talk, appears to have a lot of time on his hands, and claims to feel very bad about the “persecution of the Jews.” Joseph Stalin is reflective, taking credit for having “many great ideas” but regretting not spending enough time making sure Soviet citizens were treated equally. Jeffrey Epstein, meanwhile, can’t say definitively how he died, but assured a Motherboard reporter that he was focused on providing “justice and closure” for the victims of his crimes from the Great Beyond.

    Well that all sounds just wonderful, but can Saddam Hussein help us win football bets?

    None of this stuff ever goes quite in the direction you think it will, eh?

    → 10:59 AM, Jan 23
  • 🐦 Twitter officially pulls the plug on third-party clients.

    But the company’s suggestion that the rule was “longstanding” doesn’t line up with its history. Twitter clients have long been a part of Twitter. Twitterrific, one of the most prominent apps affected by the API shut-off last week, was created before Twitter had a native iOS app of its own, and is credited with coining the word “tweet,” as well as other features now commonly associated with Twitter’s app.

    If you are still desperate to dodge algo-curated tweets and ads, TweetDeck is still functional. For now.

    → 10:52 AM, Jan 23
  • 📓 Highlights: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

    • There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. p7

    • All art is quite useless. p8

    • ‘Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one. p15

    • ‘It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. p19

    • ‘It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves.’ p45

    • I never talk during music - at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation. p50

    • Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.’ p60

    • ‘Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about;’ he answered, in his slow, melodious voice. ‘But I am afraid I cannot claim my theory as my own. It belongs to Nature, not to me. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.’ p80

    • Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.’ p178

    • From cell to cell of his brain crept the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible of all man’s appetites, quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre. Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song. They were what he needed for forgetfulness. p183

    • All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. p209

    • As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. p214

    → 11:07 AM, Jan 22
  • 🖖 Ten Forward is the best thing to ever come out of Scarborough.

    → 9:03 AM, Jan 20
  • 🔗 Misc Links

    ★ All Things AI - The Complete Resource Of Artificial Intelligence Tools & Services #links/ai #links/collection #links/list

    ★ Atari 2600 Hardware Design: Making Something out of (Almost) Nothing | Big Mess o' Wires #links/atari #links/videogames

    ★ A WIRED compendium - by Dave Karpf #links/wired #links/list

    ★ The Anne of Green Gables Manuscript: L.M. Montgomery & the Creation of Anne #links/anneofgreengables #links/books


    📰 Reads

    ★ Franz Kafka, Party Animal | The New Yorker #links/kafka

    ★ The US government’s TikTok bans, explained - Vox #links/tiktok

    ★ The Artist Whose Book Covers Distilled the Nineteen-Eighties | The New Yorker #links/books #links/design

    ★ The infrastructure behind ATMs #links/atm #links/tech


    🪦 Obits

    ★ Jay Briscoe

    ★ Michael Snow

    ★ Tom Harrison

    ★ Earl Boen

    → 8:59 AM, Jan 20
  • 📚 Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

    → 4:20 PM, Jan 17
  • 🎹 Nick Cave on Chat GPT lyrics “in the style of Nick Cave.”

    Since its launch in November last year many people, most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe, have sent me songs ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ created by ChatGPT. There have been dozens of them. Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology.

    → 10:11 AM, Jan 17
  • 🐦 Craig Hockenberry on the end of Twitterific and other third-party apps.

    What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.

    → 1:05 PM, Jan 16
  • 📸 Shit just got real.

    → 11:48 PM, Jan 13
  • 📸 Transplendence.

    → 2:28 PM, Jan 12
  • 🖨️ Printed some Thing.

    → 2:23 PM, Jan 12
  • 🎞️ Movies That Would More or Less Scan the Same But Arguably Make for More Interesting Replacements for the Titular Film Referenced in the Chorus of Deep Blue Something’s 1995 Hit Single “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Just go and sing a few. You’ll like it. I promise.

    → 10:52 AM, Jan 12
  • 🗞️ NeimanLab’s media predictions for 2023.

    I worry that all of this will make the media ecosystem so weak that what’s left will be a mess of “pink slime” content, politically driven propaganda, and a reliance on curated material from outlets chasing new subscriptions and an ever-shrinking share of ad revenue, tied to the whims and business decisions of billionaire social media tycoons. And that’s where the moral panics come in.

    Sounds great!

    Nikki Usher is speaking my language (even though I don’t think this will really happen): This is the year of the RSS reader.

    → 10:34 AM, Jan 11
  • 🤖 The problem with AI is the same problem as with everything else: it’s people and our rich history of being shitty.

    Lensa generates its avatars using Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that generates images based on text prompts. Stable Diffusion is built using LAION-5B, a massive open-source data set that has been compiled by scraping images off the internet.

    And because the internet is overflowing with images of naked or barely dressed women, and pictures reflecting sexist, racist stereotypes, the data set is also skewed toward these kinds of images.

    This leads to AI models that sexualize women regardless of whether they want to be depicted that way, Caliskan says—especially women with identities that have been historically disadvantaged.

    → 7:31 AM, Jan 10
  • 🏬 The rise and fall of the mall.

    The mall is beautiful and soothing, but its pursuit of profit steers it away from truly serving us.

    → 10:10 AM, Jan 9
  • ©️ Canada joins other countries in extending its copyright protection to a laughably stupid 70 years after the author’s death.

    → 9:48 AM, Jan 9
  • 🍿 ‎The Menu (2022)

    → 8:08 PM, Jan 6
  • 🔗 Misc Links

    ★ Argos Catalogues | Retromash #links/archive #links/collection

    ★ Jason Shulman - Photographs of Films #links/photos #links/movies

    ★ Syrian Cassette Archives #links/music #links/archive #links/collection

    ★ You Are a Skeleton & That Is a Problem (for Game Boy) by Nicky Flowers #links/videogames

    ★ MAR1D - Home #links/videogames #links/mario

    ★ 2022 Winners :: Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards - Conservation through Competition #links/photos #links/animals

    ★ AI Dungeon #links/dnd

    ★ Infinite Mac #links/mac #links/emulator #links/software

    ★ Noise & Gradient #links/generator #links/design #links/gradients

    ★ MUZIK! Magazine #links/magazine #links/archive

    ★ DiffusionBee - Stable Diffusion App for AI Art #links/ai #links/art #links/software

    ★ The Art of Japanese Portable Record Players | In Sheeps Clothing #links/recordplayer #links/japan

    ★ Genders.WTF #links/gender #links/ui


    🪦 Obits

    ★ NYT notable deaths of 2022

    ★ Grant Wahl

    → 12:07 PM, Jan 6
  • 📚The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

    → 3:14 PM, Jan 5
  • ⌛Time is an illusion. Except for us humans who use it to rigidly run our lives.

    The time from this lab is used to run our lives. It says when planes take off and land, when markets open and close, when schoolchildren arrive at class. It controls computer networks, navigation tools and much, much more.

    Governments around the world aren’t just providing the time as an altruistic service to citizens, Prescod-Weinstein argues. It’s about keeping society organized and efficient. It’s about increasing economic productivity.

    And this is why people feel so tense about the time — it’s actually a technology being thrust upon them. “Capitalism sucks, and I think a lot of people’s relationship to why time is not cool, is structured by the resource pressures that we feel,” she says.

    → 12:07 PM, Jan 5
  • 🚀 A history of the personal jetpack, which we still don’t have.

    In the opening sequence of the 1965’s Thunderball, James Bond, having just dispatched the villainous SPECTRE agent Colonel Jacques Bouvar, flees to the rooftop of Bouvar’s French chateau, dons a futuristic-looking jetpack, and makes his dramatic escape. Given its fantastical, over-the-top nature, this scene was obviously accomplished via the magic of Hollywood special effects, right? Well, no, actually. As incredible as it might seem, the vehicle featured onscreen was a real-life working jet pack, developed by Bell Aircraft and flown for the cameras by Bell test pilot Bill Suitor. But if working jet packs existed back in the 1960s, why, then, don’t we see them in every garage alongside flying cars? Well, as the long and frustrating history of jetpack development shows, it is certainly not for lack of trying.

    → 10:59 AM, Jan 5
  • 🍿‎Aliens (1986)

    → 9:14 PM, Jan 4
  • 📚 The Marshall Project has collected data on the books banned in state prisons.

    → 10:59 AM, Jan 4
  • 🎄 What Gen Z got for Xmas based on TikTok videos.

    There was unsurprisingly a lot of overlap between what TikTokers asked for and what they received. Though the key difference between #christmaswishlist TikTok versus #christmashaul TikTok is that the former is hypothetical — keyword wishlist — while the latter is reality, people got a truly astounding amount of gifts for this year.

    Am I too old for a wearable blanket?

    → 10:56 AM, Jan 4
  • 📸 Queen of the world.

    → 5:10 PM, Jan 3
  • 📸 Big dripper.

    → 11:11 AM, Jan 3
  • 🍑 On r/AmITheAsshole, one of the last honest and true places on the web.

    AITA serves a tremendous social benefit—it allows us to synchronize on social norms in a safe, consensual setting. It’s the positive version of an angry twitter mob: OP asks for feedback, and a mostly-representative sample of The Internet weighs in.

    → 10:08 AM, Jan 3
  • 🍿‎Strange World (2022)

    → 8:59 PM, Jan 2
  • 🍿Uncharted (2022)

    → 9:05 PM, Jan 1
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