📸 Freeze tag.

Just noticed I put the same song on back-to-back mixtapes and, sure it’s a banger, but my playlist game is getting sloppy.

After some brief and very unscientific playing around this morning… is Yahoo the best search engine now?

More like Toronto Poo Jays, amirite?

Now you’re just being ridiculous, New Yorker.

You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon, amirite?

I have been thinking almost exclusively about Sasquatch Sunset for 20 days now.

Gonna try more books, less news for 2025. TAKE THAT, NEWS

📻 Every new song I liked in 2024.

Today I learned that you can’t merge notes in Apple Notes, something I only discovered after creating 22 notes I would now very much like to be merged.

If we’re gonna eat the rich with this level of ironic detachment, will it go faster or slower?

“This is a public square” and “But they have to make money somehow” are inherently conflicting ideas.

It’s one of those good nights where, from my position in bed, I can tilt my head slightly and see that the only thing between me and Mars is a pane of glass.

So I guess we’re just gonna keep going with this thing where we have to pay monthly for every single piece of niche media, eh?

Remember when we thought the web was going to be democratizing? Oops.

Oh, NOW I get why Threads is mostly milquetoast engagement bait. They actively jerk off our edgebored takes.

No matter which social platform you settle on, never forget that each of us is only here to show everyone else how fucking clever we are.

The CBC News feeds seem to be firing again. Now I’ll need to search for something new to be mad about.

The mid is the message.

I know one Domino’s employee who deserves a raise for their problem-solving skills.

📻 The CBC Music app has a film scores channel.

Digital book pricing across borders is insane.

When I’m in my 80s, I’m going to talk about the culture wars like it was ‘Nam.

Just kill me.

Someone didn’t get the note from licensing.

When someonee dies, is there a race among Wikipedia editors to rewrite the entry in past tense? Or is that just one guy’s (volunteer) job? What’s the etiquette?

We need to talk about how bad reading websites is on phones.

Great moments in 2024 media.

We finally closed the loop.

📰 The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump // The New Yorker

DeSantis, despite the early hype from Fox News and the hopes of the Republican donor class, proved that negative charisma and terrible political judgment are not enough to run for President. He thought he was going to ride attacks on Mickey Mouse to the White House. Seriously?

📰 It’s All Bullshit // The Baffler

According to the Wall Street Journal, many workers who balance two jobs do not even hit a regular forty-hour workload for both jobs combined. One software engineer reported logging between three and ten hours of actual work per week when working one job, with the rest of his time spent on pointless meetings and pretending to be busy. My own experience supports this trend: toward the end of my five-year tenure as a software engineer for Microsoft, I was working fewer than three hours a day.

😳 Umbilical Cable for iPhone

📰 The Truth Is Out There // Atavist

A father’s disappearance, dark family secrets, and the hunt for bigfoot.

📰 Bordieu’s Theory Of Taste // Dynomight

I find Bourdieu personally appealing, and I think this book has important ideas. Still, here’s how I read that quote:

1. “My ideas are too complex to be contained in normal human language.”
2. “By being obscure, I can force everyone to take me more seriously.”

I don’t buy it. Mostly I feel the writing style just forced me to waste a huge amount of mental effort decoding everything. So, feeling vengeful, I decided to distill the basic idea of the book (as I understand it) into the ultimate un-Bourdieu style: A linear argument in seven parts, based on comics.

📰 Comparison Is the Way We Know the World // n+1

Comparison is the way we know the world. And yet we make rules about things that cannot be compared to each other. Take apples and oranges. Why wouldn’t you compare them? Both are fruit, both have sweetness, one is usually more sour than the other, one has an inedible part on the outside, the other an inedible part on the inside, both contain calories, nutrients and vitamins, albeit different ones, and you can make juice out of either, but you need different kinds of machines for each. These seem to me useful ways of getting to know apples and oranges.

🍿 Galerie A curated monthly movie club with special guest contributors.

📰 The Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust // NYT

“The roots of wrongness often reside in confusion, powerlessness and a need for social connection.” Building trust requires cultivating this social connection instead of torching it. But extending compassionate overtures to people who believe things that are odious and harmful is risky too.

📰 The Disturbing Impact of the Cyberattack at the British Library // New Yorker

The effect on the B.L. has been traumatic. Its electronic systems are still largely incapacitated. When I visited the library last Monday, the reading rooms were listless and loosely filled. “It’s like a sort of institutional stroke,” Inigo Thomas, a writer for the London Review of Books, told me.

📰 ‘Starting Soon, Nerds’: Levy Rozman Wants to Teach You Chess // NYT Magazine

There’s an easy explanation for why someone like Hikaru Nakamura, one of the few chess streamers and YouTubers whose reach rivals Rozman’s, has attracted such a vast audience: Nakamura, an American grandmaster, is one of the highest-ranked chess players in history. The influence of Rozman — the world’s 6,689th-ranked player, according to the International Chess Federation, known by its French acronym, FIDE — is tougher to account for, the product of an attention economy where packaging, social media savvy and on-camera charisma are at least as important as expertise.

📰 Studio Trickery // New Left Review

The rise of McCartney’s reputation at the expense of Lennon’s over the last few decades has something to do with the way popular music has become a less crucial part of youth culture. People still listen to music, it still changes and develops, but it is no longer the main vehicle for social comment or subcultural identity, far less important than social media; perhaps on the same level as clothing. Gone is the idea that pop music could ‘say’ something, that it could be a means of commenting on society, or an integral element of an oppositional counter-culture. McCartney’s solo work now seems unexpectedly prescient, anticipating modern listening habits.

⚱️ The lives they lived 2023 // NYT

📚 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.

🛒 McLuhan liked bulk.

🐦 The great tweet archive

📰 Goodbye to all that harassment

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

©️ Entering the public domain in 2024.

🧠 LEGO models of famous psychological experiments as imagined by AI.

🎧 ‘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.

🪐 NASA+ free streaming service.

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.

🕰️ 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.

👾 _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.

🛑 33 minutes of songs that stop on the word “stop.”

🎨 The original Bob Ross can be yours for $10 million.

📺 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.

💥 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.

🖼️ 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.

📰 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.

🪦 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.

📈 Presentations and pitch decks by the largest business failures and corporate frauds.

💬 My wife to my daughter just now:

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

🎧 Every sample from Paul’s Boutique.

👾 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.

🎸 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?

🖋️ 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.

🍆 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.

🐦 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.”

🤖 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.

♟️ ChatGPT plays chess against Stockfish and it gets weird.

♟️Vintage Canada.

📓 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

🧵 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.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the decisions that go into push notifications.

🤖 Jailbreaking ChatGPT by convincing (by threatening) it to pretend it isn’t ChatGPT.

I used to understand the internet, but this is gobbledygook to me.

📰 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.

🪗 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.

👨‍🚀 2001 directed by George Lucas.

📺 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.

💩 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.

🤖 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?

🐦 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.

📓 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

🖖 Ten Forward is the best thing to ever come out of Scarborough.

🎹 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.

🐦 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.

🎞️ 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.

🗞️ 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.

🤖 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.

🏬 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.

©️ Canada joins other countries in extending its copyright protection to a laughably stupid 70 years after the author’s death.

⌛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.

🚀 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.

📚 The Marshall Project has collected data on the books banned in state prisons.

🎄 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?

📸 Big dripper.

🍑 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.

📻 Electric cars may bring about the end of AM radio.

“Rather than frustrate customers with inferior reception and noise, the decision was made to leave it off vehicles that feature eDrive technology,” BMW said in a statement, referring to the system that powers its electric vehicles.

Tesla, Audi, Porsche and Volvo have also removed AM radio from their electric vehicles, as has Volkswagen from its electric S.U.V., ID.4, according to the carmakers and the National Association of Broadcasters. Ford said that the 2023 F-150 Lightning, its popular electric pickup truck, would also drop AM radio.

🎞️ Why does all the “eat the rich” satire look the same?

Even the phrase “eat the rich” feels trite. It neatly sums up a tote bag slogan era of anti-capitalism in culture, cutesy shorthand that’s now entirely representative of a watered down, inoffensive type of politics. You could argue that satire born out of this politics is predictable because its targets are predictable: we all know rich people suck and perhaps they don’t necessarily deserve nuance. But the beauty of good satire is in using a scalpel to eviscerate a subject, by having a distinct perspective and striking with precision.

🎧 The problem with Spotify Wrapped.

It’s a social trend that rises each year and cuts through the noise, fueled by pride or self-deprecating humor, depending who your top artists turned out to be. And it’s all built on user data, which Spotify packages in cool neon colors with cheeky commentary—a move that takes the edge off the creepiness of knowing Spotify is always listening. And in return for entertaining its users for the day, Spotify gets its annual chance to drive a social media trend and reap the benefits of free advertising as millions share their Wrapped publicly.

🎨 China’s Van Goghs: The Village That Paints Thousands Of Fakes A Year

⚾ A tremendous injustice has finally been corrected: Crime Dog is going to the Hall of Fame.

🔗 Misc Links

★ Futurepedia - The Largest AI Tools Directory | Home #links/collection #links/ai

★ Anna’s Archive #links/archive #links/collection #links/books

★ Feedrabbit - RSS and Atom web feed to email service #links/rss #links/email

★ more.graphics - Your Unique and Free Generator Tools in One Place #links/design #links/graphics

★ Generated Humans | Generated.photos #links/stock

★ “Tonight I’ve asked Stable Diffusion to generate 250 different pages from the 1987 Radio Shack catalog.” #links/ai

📰 Reads

★ How the Billboard Hot 100 Lost Interest in the Key Change | Tedium

★ Cormac McCarthy’s dream songs about genius siblings in love - Justin Taylor | Bookforum

★ An Oral History Of The Time Six Doctors Swallowed Lego Heads To See How Long They’d Take To Poo | Defector

★ Why 1992 Is the Year That Changed Gaming Forever | Den of Geek

★ Nicolas Cage and John Carpenter are cinema’s most studious eccentrics | Document

🪦 Obits

★ Art Brewer

★ Christine McVie

★ Gaylord Perry

🐦 A writer leaves Twitter, New Yorker version.

Participating in Twitter—with its world-spanning reach, its potential to radically democratize our discourse along with its virtue mobs and trolls—always required a cost-benefit analysis. That analysis began to change, at least for me, immediately after Musk took over. His reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account made remaining completely untenable.

🐦 A writer leaves Twitter, McSweeney’s version.

It is easier to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in my carpal tunnel finger constrict, when Twitter began for me, but I cannot lay my ruined finger upon the moment it ended, although it was probably when they reinstated @TruePatriotHangFauci4562847. And then verified him.

🧩 The new Wordle editor is ruining Wordle.

Folks (FOLKS), I do not want a punny Wordle. Wordle should not be cutesy, or themed, or even ironic. Wordle should stay hard and weird. No hints! Especially no thematic hints! People on Twitter should post their scores, and we should be able to scoff privately. Haha, what a loser; it took him four guesses! When the word is FEAST, you then must wonder: Did he intentionally take four guesses so as not to appear lame?

(On a personal note, I’m a mere 26 days from a perfect Wordle year and a lot of who I am is very much tied to getting it done.)

📕 “Gaslighting” is the word of the year. I watch a lot of old sitcoms, and while I know the term references a movie from 1944, I’m still a bit stunned when it’s used colloquially in things like MASH (twice!) and Cheers.

📺 Saïd Sayrafiezadeh finally watched Seinfeld.

It occurred to me, in my humorless state, that the extreme compression was working against my enjoyment, that the show would have been better with slower digestion, one episode per week as intended, followed the next day by recapping at the water cooler, and then summers off. Instead, I was alone and swallowing “Seinfeld” whole. It was also possible that I was trying, albeit unconsciously, to justify a decision I had made thirty years ago, and that each solitary laugh now threatened to cause a painful fissure in my world view. In other words, I was caught somewhere between comedy and regret.

🎨 Where we are with art and AI is probably quite a bit further than you thought.

Seriously, everyone whose job touches on writing, images, video, or music should realize that the pace of improvement here is very fast & also, unlike other areas of AI, like robotics, there are not any obvious barriers to improvement.

📺 The pilot for Starstruck.

🍷 Is wine fake? Maybe!

Obviously wine is not fake: There is certainly a real drink made from fermented grapes. The real question at issue is whether wine expertise is fake. And that ties this question in with the general debate on the nature of expertise. There are many people who think many kinds of expertise are fake, and many other people pushing back against them; maybe wine is just one more front in this grander war.

📸 Buggy.

👾 Jodorowsky’s Tron

🔗 This week’s links

🪐 Planetary Photo Journal Collection | Internet Archive #links/space

📇 ooh.directory #links/list #links/collection #links/blogs

🛠️ Kiwix lets you access free knowledge – even offline #links/wikipedia #links/tools

🐦 The Google Doc Of Twitter Memes Has Every One Since 2019 | Buzzfeed #links/twitter

📰 How a Lobbying Blitz Made Sports Betting Ubiquitous | The New York Times

📻 How the Billboard Hot 100 Lost Interest in the Key Change #links/music

🖋️ At the Joan Didion Estate Sale | The Paris Review

If an estate sale normally saps meaning from the fragments that someone has shored up, dispersing them and making them illegible in the context of a single life, the spectacle of the Didion estate sale does just the opposite, freighting these objects with an excess of meaning. There were plenty of things that might just as easily have turned up in a junky antiques store, or been rejected by one, but they belonged to Joan. Like “Lot 189: Miscellaneous Group of Eyewear.” This went on to sell for $10,000.

⏳ Why doesn’t physics help us to understand the flow of time? | Aeon Essays

It’s possible that our experience of the flow of time is like our experience of colour. A physicist would say that colour does not exist as an inherent property of the world. Light has a variety of wavelengths, but they have no inherent property of ‘colour’. The things in the world absorb and emit and scatter photons, granules of light, of various wavelengths. It is only when our eyes intersect a tiny part of that sea of radiation, and our brain gets to work on it, that ‘colour’ emerges. It is an internal experience, a naming process, an activity of our brain trying to puzzle things out.

🐦 Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast swathes of recent human history | MIT Technology Review

If Twitter was to ‘go in the morning’, let’s say, all of this—all of the firsthand evidence of atrocities or potential war crimes, and all of this potential evidence—would simply disappear

Also: A Guide to Archiving on the Internet | Snopes

📰 ‘Goncharov’: The Fake Scorcese Film You Haven’t Seen — Or Have You? | The New York Times

As of Monday evening “Goncharov” was the No. 1 trending topic on the platform, with Mr. Scorsese taking the second spot. Pokémon was in third.

Even Tumblr has gotten in on the act. “Goncharov” was ahead of its time “and it’s contribution to cinema is remarkable,” the platform tweeted on Sunday from its official account. “Rarely does a film tell as many diverse-yet-interconnected stories. Hard to imagine so few ppl have seen it.”

🦃 American Movie: Thanksgiving

📸 Wither.

📺 The SCTV Guide to Showbiz

Very sick of my sick children.

I’m taking you not inviting me into your Discord more personally than I took you not inviting me onto your podcast.

Twitter hasn’t been this fun since the Queen died.

The Globe & Mail cares a little too much about what’s going on in my bedroom.

🎆 Charlie Brown.

📺 The Scooby-Doo Project

📺 Downloading music in 2000

Never thought I’d have to mute the word “lettuce,” but here we are.

📷 You’ll float, too.

Serendipitous bot tweets.

While the Queen (the lady) jokes were mostly on point, this Queen (the band) slander is fucking bullshit.

📼 History of Punk - SNL

Live the sort of life that will have the internet memeing your death in real-time.

Some personal news: I’m now a Coke Zero guy.

📻 “120 Minutes” full archive youtube.com/playlist

📷 Invasion.

One More Try – an experimental skate video from Najeeb Tarazi on Vimeo.

📷 Fudge.

While Americans are all mad about HBO Max, can we talk about how absolutely horseshit it is that CBC Gem has ads? (And the extra horseshitty $5/month ask to get rid of them?)

What exactly is “that dawg” and why do I want it “in me?”

📷 Room for rent.

Someone build a popular service for naming and shaming companies that don’t send you an email letting you know they are about to renew (or just have renewed) the service you forgot you were paying for.

Still reeling from the news that there are multiple competitive Quiddich organizations.

💬

Oh, God—the lives people try to lead. Oh, God—what a world they try to lead them in.

-Mother Night

🔗 Rage Against the Machine - Live at Alpine Valley - 2022.07.09 Full Show - YouTube

New phone ended my Wordle streak at 169. 🫡

Building the TARCADE. 🕹