VOL 4, NO 6

★

Comfortably dumb. / The problem is always people. Always. We are good at a lot of things, but somehow also bad at everything. We are stupid. We repeat our mistakes again and again. We never learn, mostly because we don’t especially want to. Learning is hard. Ignorance is bliss. I is tired.

Dumping a gogabazillion dollars into AI remains an obviously dumb idea. Adding quote-tweets to Mastodon is probably a dumb idea. Electing pretty much anyone to anything is never a good idea. See? Terrible things are everywhere and they are because people, generally, fucking suck. We are always, always, always the problem.

Not you, though. You’re great. Enjoy some links!

☆

”The Girl with a Pearl Earring bleeding from her eyes and ears” / AI Generated / 2025

☆

Confusions. / ☄️ Are we doomed yet?, asteroid impact probability. Related: So about that asteroid. / 👾 RetroFab, a collection of playable old-school handheld games. / Mike Tyson finally beaten in under 2 minutes. / Dragonsweeper. / Little Sisyphus. / ♟️ Blunder Chess. / “The Pinball Philosophy”. / ⚱️ Tom Robbins and David Edward Byrd died. / 🎨 Floor796. / Monospace, an ASCII art generator. / Essential Vermeer. / ✌️

✖

VOL 4, NO 5

★

Thievery corporation. / As has been well established here, I am pro-piracy. This is for all sorts of reasons, though mainly it’s an anti-capitalist stance. My general belief is that companies have ceded the right to control access to things by being profiteering assholes who care little about protecting the things they sell or paying the people who create them. (Exceptions, obviously, abound here. If you can pay a person who made a thing directly for the thing they made, do that. Small publishers/producers/distributors? Sure. But as you move up the chain, it gets more and more convoluted and pointless. Where you draw that line is really up to you.)

But also, you know, Facebook can fuck right off. (If you don’t want to click through, the TL;DR is Meta fucking torrented terabytes and terabytes of books to train their AI, which is about as grotesquely ironic a use of content piracy as I can imagine.)

As usual, I don’t really have a point to make here, but I’m watching the growing resentment against companies like Meta and Google and Amazon and Twitter — the people who not only kind of ruined the internet but also hollowed out real-world media/content/art/criticism/whatever in the process — with a perverse interest. I have regrets (as many of us should) for the small role I played championing these technologies way back when, and certainly times seem bleak in the digital (and, certainly more depressingly, actual) world, but I’m wishing on distant stars for a bit of wide-spread shit eating, and perhaps a move back toward a web that we can feel at least a little good about, and maybe even enjoy.

Also: The social web is the web. ❝Support for links is the basic requirement of the web. If you don’t support links not only aren’t you the web, you’re anti-web.❞. ✊

☆

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith / The Vanishing American / 1994

☆

Confusions. / 📰 Failure is not a binary state. / 📱 WikiTok, a TikTok-style interface for exploring random Wikipedia articles. / Paper Apps. / 🛹 On skateboarding and Prufrock. ❝Like a SoCal skater used to the everyday sunshine and convenience of their local park, Prufrock is a professional-level procrastinator. His actions are all in the imagination, putting off decisions to play out possibilities in his head instead. In indecision he finds a limbo where nothing gets done because nothing is done, there is always time ‘for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’❞ / 🍿 Warner Bros. has started dropping free movies onto YouTube. / 📺 Concrete TV. / An Attack On Titan reading list. / I’ll Save It Myself. / 🎧 Artisanal Japanese record needles. / “Crazy” by Gnarles Barkley, a dramatic reading. / ⚱️ Fay Vincent and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died. / 🔥 The Project Gutenberg eBook of Simple Sabotage Field Manual. / 👾 The Video Game History Foundation library and archive. / A new Donkey Kong thing. / ☠️ Kill Sticky Headers. / Kill book blurbs. / 🥚 How to boil an egg. / ✌️

✖

VOL 4, NO 4

★

Pod Loser. / Before, During and (Quite Possibly) After the Fall , a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

✖

VOL 4, NO 3

★

Reality Pee-Ve. / “I went and hung out with weirdos at a thing” has been my favourite kind of feature since “Big Red Son.” There is a rich history of cruise ship writing, most recently from Gary Shteyngart. Just last week I linked to a fantastic n+1 essay from a ventriloquists’ convention. And now Defector goes to CES (or, I suppose, Zombie CES as it’s not quite what it used to be):

❝Consider the problems that, taken altogether, add up to our shameful and unworkable political moment. It’s the abandonment of not just any sense of a common cause but a workable consensus reality; it’s the swamping of any collective effort or any nascent social consciousness in favor of individuals assiduously optimizing and competing and refining and selling themselves, not so much alongside the rest of humanity as in constant competition with all of it; it’s the rich buffing all human friction from every aspect of their days so that they can more cleanly and passively move through them, a circuit of Teslas circling silently underground forever; it’s everyone else, somewhere offscreen, leaving whatever those restless protagonists have ordered on the doorstep and getting tipped 10 percent for it; it’s an efflorescence of dead-eyed scams and ever taller fences.❞

About six years ago I went to a weed conference, which was an odd mix of money-dudes, marketing losers (this was the group I was in), hippies and obvious charlatans, and it is now the great regret of my life that at the time I was a copywriter for a weed company (i.e., a marketing loser) and not someone looking to spin off 7,000 words of depressing-but-amusing observations. So it goes or something.

☆

Fine realities / Rene Magritte / 1964

☆

Confusions. / 🎞️ More Defector: When did movies stop moving? ❝They seem to lack any sense of cognitive completion by the artist themselves, which translates to the screen. They read instead as sketches, as elevator pitches, as high concepts an executive got excited about without much concern for the follow through—Nosferatu in color! Hunter Schafer in the Alps! Nicolas Cage doing whatever the fuck! You could stick shots from these films into a View-Master and I imagine it would be an improvement.❞ / 💸 The rise and fall of Canadian Tire money. / 💻 Marginalia Search for non-commercial content (and, frankly, better search results than I’m getting from DDG and Google right now). / IndieBlog, random blog posts from the indieweb. / 🎨 Uncut.wtf, a catalogue of free type. / 📸 Who took the “Napalm Girl” photo? / I kinda want this Instax camera. / 🗺️ A Better World, change the past and fuck shit up. / 👾 Duck Hunt(er). / A cozy video game to explain cozy video games. / 📺 Watch Something Wonderful. / 50 years of SNL music.

✖

VOL 4, NO 2

★

Pod Loser. / Kinky Willy, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

✖

VOL 4, NO 1

★

Four the fecal, by the fecal. / I’m not interested in telling you how to live your life. You wanna keep scrolling Twitter, dunking on halfwits and sharing every thought rattling around in your head, fill your boots. But I’m (finally) out. (And this is not to slag on the thoughts rattling around in your head, the only thing I’m more tired of than other people’s opinions on everything is my own.) My tweets are closed, my Facebook shuttered (with the exception of Messages and WhatsApp because I haven’t figured out how to peel myself away from things being organized for my children (never mind the Meta Horizons account necessary for my son’s Quest headset, which I enjoy “fishing” on… I know, hypocrisy abounds, but I’m working on it)), my Instagram nuked, and Threads was boring af anyway (unless you have a really strong (and possibly unhealthy) opinion on The Last Jedi or were traumatized by Superman III). I enjoy Mastodon, but I really need to find more people to follow. Bluesky feels like Twitter and the screen-cap-dunk people are getting through my many filters, so I don’t actually read it very much. (Okay, maybe I’m telling those people how to live their lives — stop it, motherfuckers, stop stop stop, you’re just making everyone else miserable.) That’s probably enough parentheticals for now.

So what do we all do with this new time we have been gifted by ignoring rapid-fire news and even-rapid-firer takes and replies and quips and dopamine hits? I don’t know, get a hobby. Buy a radio. Go outside or take a nap or learn to bake. I don’t care. Be free and happy. Take some of your fucks and give them somewhere else. Like I said, I don’t want to tell you how to do you, but it’s going to be a long four years and we could all use a little insulation from, you know, all that shit. Call it self-care, if that’s your kink.

Related: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food? ❝History suggests that our collective approach to social media may be approaching a fork in the road. […] These laws are more like junk-food regulations than cigarette bans. They aim to make the product in question safer and give families more tools to manage their harms, but ultimately keep them available to all ages.❞ I’m starting to think it’s more like punching yourself in the face for fun, but milage clearly varies.

Welcome to Volume 4 (technically untitled, but "4" is what the heads call it). It’s earlier than I thought, and that’ll either go good or bad.

☆

The Social Model / Dr Alesha Sivartha / 1898

☆

Confusions. / 📰 Portrait of the artist as an Amazon reviewer. / A weekend at the ventriloquist convention. ❝Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky.❞ / I am an Apple News+ article. ❝You find a link and think you’ve done it—that you’ve successfully pierced my skin—but no. This website has a paywall too. I relish your devilish smirk falling. If this were a chess match, I’d say, “Check,” but this is so much more. This is lust.❞ / Paywall Reader, a “legal” way to bypass paywalls. / 📚 Standard Ebooks has added some new titles entering the public domain this year, including Brown On Resolution by CS Forester (I love boat shit and CSF is the king). / HyperEssays, a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. / 🗄️ The Public Domain Image Archive. / Nokia Design Archive. / Every Color Ever. / Old Maps Online. / 👾 Online Classic Games, including the OG Civilization. / Atari 2600 Pitfall. / The Visible Zorker, Zork but also inside Zork. / Enochian Chess, chess for 4 players. / Simulation Clicker, I don’t get it, but I watched my 12yo play it for nearly 3 hours. / 📺 MyRetroTVs. / Full episodes of Pop Up Video. / 🎧 Black Candy, a self-hosted music server. / ⚱️ Bob Uecker and David Lynch died (which you almost certainly already know, but I didn’t want it to pass without mention).

☆

Explorations. / 🍿 Sasquatch Sunset. When I watched this, I was alone and pretty high and spent a good chunk of the movie cackling at the absurdity of it. But it’s been a month and I can’t stop thinking about it, so I think it might actually be a work of genius. / 🎧 Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’. A found 1966 recording finally released. It blew my tits off. Here’s an article with some added context on Slugs’. / 📚 Whale Music. I read this about once per decade and love it more each time. Possibly my favourite ever, certainly in the conversation. (I also read The Plot Against America in December and of course it’s brilliant because Roth, but might be worth revisiting right now specifically.)

✖