VOL 3, NO 10
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Social needia. / Yes, I am on Bluesky. And Mastodon. And even Threads, although I mostly hate Threads. I’ve been watching the Bluesky cuddle puddle with fascination and I am enjoying everyone’s enthusiasm, but it feels like a lot of people are running headlong into the same issues we had with Twitter, which was a problematic, usually awful and occasionally dangerous place a long, long time before Elon showed up.
I don’t know, follow your heart, I guess.
But, at the very least, be cautious about the time you’re sinking into building an audience on another privately owned service with buckets of VC cash and no current revenue model, because on a long enough timeline they will probably fuck you. I only say this because they pretty much all have fucked us — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, TikTok, etc., etc., etc. Cory Doctorow has thoughts that are worth reading before you’re in too deep.
And probably that moment you’re trying to recapture, that slice of time in internet history (which was really nice and I miss it too), is over forever and while we can mimic those vibes for a short period, the Bluesky push is just a relapse and not a cure for anything.
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Confusions. / 📰 If Wikipedia is truth, then what’s happening in Gaza is genocide. ❝Editors supporting the inclusion argued that it met the page’s criteria of events “classified by significant scholarship” as genocide. They also pointed out that the Gaza situation had stronger scholarly consensus than some existing entries on the list, such as the Darfur and Rohingya genocides.❞. / Related: A rupture in time. ❝A year: a calendar, or weight, or knife. Each body an archive, dense and beautiful as life itself—and more of them crushed, starved, incinerated every day. For the perpetrators of the genocide, temporality is something to be mastered, bent.❞ / 🗒️ A nice story about technology. 🪑 Mid-century modern, I love you but you’re bringing me down. ❝It’s not the fault of a bunch of attractive designs that this proved to be a mirage, even a fraud. But mid-century modern was wrapped up in that delusion, even contributed to it. And the design industry enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, the ride just a little too much.❞ / 🍿 Cult Cinema Classics. / World War II, a supercut. / Yes, it is okay to pirate (some (but kinda most)) movies. ❝The work that survives, it turns out, is the work that is out there to be seen.❞ / An analysis of title drops in movies. / Movies that sound like Fortnite locations. / 💿 Tinfoil, early recorded sounds. / 🎧 I don’t have Spotify. / Quincy Jones tribute on BBC 6. / 🎹 Draw.audio. / 📻 RadioBrowser. / 🎨 Fakes news. / Do dogs know what art is? / ⚱️ Elwood Edwards died. / ⚾️ The science of baseball mud. / 🍄 The Mushroom Colour Atlas.
