VOL 2, NO 3
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I put these posts together using a running text file on my phone, which I then publish when it feels full enough. After a few months of playing with form, the text file’s structure includes this space up top. An opener! A place for my thoughts and writing that’s separate from what’s below and clearly more important because it’s first. In the last post, its said “Happy Rex Manning Day” and then referenced the deleted and re-inserted blue-cheese-salad-dressing-on-the-dick scene. My thoughts! My writing! They can’t all be bangers, I guess.
Anyway, here’s a pretty great takedown of columnists and columns, so, at least for today, I can fill this space with a related and amusing pull quote.
❝Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. Even the sharpest thinkers on matters of politics and policy and global news can have, at best, one or two good ideas a month, and by definition most of the population of columnists are not the sharpest thinkers in that same population. […] The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions.❞
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Read Swish, boo Swish (and other confusions) / 🛳️ Time is a flat circle (though, as my wife says, all circles are flat) and we’ve come all the way back around to cruise ships are a metaphor for the end of society. (Again!) / 📸 Jamie Livingston’s daily Polaroids are back. / 📰 Kara Swisher’s attempt at retconning tech journalism and her rather significant role in its many failures continues to go poorly. ❝The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price.❞ / ⚱️ Peter Higgs and Pat Walsh died. (You don’t know Pat, but he was a friends and the best teacher I ever had.) / 🎥 An unintentionally (I think) amusing (or mean) pair of New Yorker movies pieces: John Cazale’s Barbaric Squawk and Can a Film Star (who presumably isn’t John Cazale) Be Too Good-Looking? / 🎸 Udio lets you “make” AI music and it’s simultaneously deeply satisfying and deeply concerning. / 📝 Love Song, with Removed Cyst. / 🎹 15-note poly tempo pendulum. / 💩 Dog Poo Golf. / 🏞️ One Minute Park. (Summer goal: contribute a few of these.) / 🗄️ The Fictional Brands Archive. / ⛹️♀️ Sports teams named after technologies. / 👆 QWANJI. / 📺 I also hated Succession and now I have a champion. ❝More people need to admit that this is the central viewing experience of Succession: you were either waiting for a good moment to screen grab and turn into a meme, or you are now watching to understand the deeper meme lore. No one actually talks to each other in this show, every sentence is delivered like a bitter slap in the face. Oh, we’re not supposed to like any of these people? Yeah, I think I got that.❞ / 🚀 Space Trash Signs.
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