a journal of innumerable confusions
APRIL 1, 2024 – XXX
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Et two? / There is no rhyme or reason to the volume structure here other than I like counting things and it builds in breaks I can take basically whenever. Baseball was starting, thus ending Vol. 1 so I could do some fantasy drafting and watch a lot of games. But that’s all done, and after yesterday I may never watch another baseball game again anyway, so let’s get on with number two.
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Let them eat snake (and other confusions). / 🎸 Digging into the Rolling Stone 500. The nobleness of this project is matched only by its scientificicity. ❝Beyond accounting for new releases, there must be other factors influencing Rolling Stone’s choices. This project uses Rolling Stone album rankings – twenty years apart in time – to determine what influences ‘greatness’.❞ / 🗿 The future will be weird af. (More on CoreCore.) / 🐍 I hope you like the taste of python. / 🎨 There’s a new Keith Haring biography. / 🤑 Too late capitalism. ❝The odd thing about the undying attachment to the term “late capitalism,” of which Kornbluh’s book is but the latest manifestation, is that it refers to an epoch that ended, by all serious accounts, in the 1970s.❞ (The best line of the review comes late: ❝’The masses of people must implement transformative solutions like decarbonization, universal care, and vibrant cities that prioritize people over profit, liberate sexuality, and combat racist imperialism with democratic internationalism.’ OK. Does roasting Maggie Nelson bring us closer to this desideratum?❞) / 🥃 Why is the Angostura bitters label bigger than the bottle? / 🗄️ UbuWeb, a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. / 👁️ Ways Of Seeing, always worth revisiting. / 🎞️ Movie Posters Perfected. / 🧑🚀 NASA made a TTRPG and it looks kinda fun.
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Happy Rex Manning Day to all who celebrate. I hope you like blue cheese.
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Pod Loser. / Baseball, a mixtape.
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Wieners and losers (and other confusions). / 🤑 It always ends in ads, even for Discord. / 🤡 How Vice fell to pieces. (Spoiler: there are no surprises here. It was dumb people making bad decisions guided entirely by a Silicon Valley capitalist ethos.) ❝One executive described Dubuc’s hires as “a fucking clown show”; another called them “comical”; a third called them “cartoonish”; a fourth called them a “screwball cast of suits”; a fifth told me he’d learned valuable lessons from them about what never to do with a company.❞ / 🤩 An oral history of that Madonna appearance on Letterman. / 🎸 A new Prince track dropped. / 🌭 You had me at “Big Hot Dog.” ❝Now I know that a billion of anything is so many that it’s impossible to really comprehend, so let’s examine some other stats Big Hot Dog provides.❞ / 🐟 Phil A. O’Fish. / ⚱️ Joe Flaherty died. / 🎨 Trench art. / 🤖 The robots are archiving the work of the robots and I’m hopeful pretty soon we won’t need people at all.
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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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Pod Loser. / Alone Together, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
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There is a type of dystopian fiction where garish advertising is embedded in the landscape—a necessary part of the fabric of an ironic shitty future world where poor people risk some combination of dignity and life for money. In these fictions—Minority Report or Idiocracy or a Black Mirror—the ads are pervasive, obnoxious and occasionally legally required. It's satire! A cynical look at where we are headed. A warning to turn back before it's too late. Don't build the Torment Nexus, dummies!
Sure glad I don't live in a society capable of creating great things only to hollow them out in the name of slogans and jingles and clicks and money. And if I did, wouldn't it be nice to have someone to blame?
❝After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.❞
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Buy the book (and other confusions) / 📰 The Onion is saved! / 📚 The most depressing thing you'll read today: Nobody buys books. ❝The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).❞ / 🌿 Weed strain name generator. Fun fact: I used to get paid to name weed strains and I should really examine every choice I made that took me away from that. / 🎶 When do we stop finding new music? ❝Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences.❞ / They found the unfindable song. (Spoiler: it was porn.) / Beatbox with Henry Kissinger. / 📺 All of Freakazoid is now on the Internet Archive. / 👾 As the Crow Flies is a simple browser game that looks like my beloved Vectrex. / The entire universe in Minecraft.
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Quoth the penguin (and other confusions). / 🍿 Streaming media in prison is like streaming media outside of prison, it just has more layers of people gouging their fair share. ❝Each prisoner is assigned a tablet free of charge, but to watch films, we must buy a bundle of minutes. I can buy only 500 minutes of the Premium App Bundle for $10, which hosts three film apps. We must use all 500 minutes or forfeit them. New releases are available on the Premium Access Pass, which allows us to buy only 200 minutes for $8. The Premium Pass Bundle expires in 96 hours.❞ But also... / ...the comfortable problem of Mid TV. / Locally: The NFB is running out of money and soon we will have no nice Canadian things. / 📻 Normal music reviews don't make sense for Taylor Swift. ❝The Swiftverse is thousands of comments under Instagram posts, an additional three hundred and thirty-two million dollars for the NFL, a worldwide run on bracelet beads, and the Fed wondering why inflation persists.❞ / Fall asleep to the dulcet tones of the Northwoods Baseball Radio Network. / Some mixtapes. / 📰 Five Dials is done, but the entire archive is online. (Or skip to the Camus issue.) / ✍️ Poe's "The Pingu." ❝While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a clapping, as of flippers briskly slapping, slapping on my igloo floor.❞ / Wes Anderson's Montblanc ad. / 🖥️ The internet may be in ruin, but I’m always a sucker for interesting ideas wrapped in tortured metaphor. ❝Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.❞ / Copy the shrug emoji. / User Inyerface. / ⚱️ Alice Munro, Frank Stella, Steve Albini, Rex Murphy and Roger Corman died. / 💼 The story of 427 suitcases from A New York State Mental Hospital. / 👾 The Delta emulator is the new best app on my phone.
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Apologies for the posting gap. I had better things to do, none of which were particularly interesting. I've had a new mixtape roughed out for two weeks... maybe tomorrow.
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Robot rot (and other confusions). / ♟️ Chess on the internet is mostly like everything else on the internet: predictably awful. ❝Chess' problems aren't unique. But it is uniquely positioned to act as an accelerant for the internet's worst impulses: sexism, abuse, cheating, elitism, and toxic nerdery.❞ / Related: Everybody hates Hans. / Less related: Scrabble, Anonymous. ❝The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble. This is ultimately what the game is about: memorizing words with no concern for their meaning.❞ / 🍿 3,000 free movies on YouTube. / Roger Corman's Fantastic Four. / Filmgrab, collected stills from films. / 💻 Dead internet, zombie internet and vampire internet, oh my. / Related: Rotting internet. / Also related: The ruin of DeviantArt. / Google fixed. / The Communal Plot, a daily visualization we all build together. / 🛻 Have you seen a Cybertruck yet? ❝If there is anything to take away from this, it is that I once had an attribute that might have allowed me to make it extremely big in the contemporary automotive industry, which is "acting like a precocious doofus child while saying possibly-false car-related stuff in a way that favorably inclined observers found compelling." That can get you pretty far in the industry. I know this in a way that I didn't just a few days ago, because, finally, I have seen a Tesla Cybertruck with my own eyes.❞ / ⚾ Hero. / 📺 Harmony Korine on Letterman. / 📱 Point your phone at your Lego and Brickit will design stuff to build.
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Pod Loser. / Call Me, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
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I tamagotchu babe... / I recently cut my phone back to the bone, deleting any and every app that I found myself using to mindlessly fill time. All social media gone, Slack can stay, all news apps out, Kindle and Instapaper kept, games gone except chess and the New York Times Games app, and so on. I installed Dumbify. I had an honest — brutal, frankly — conversation with my notifications. And it's been nice. I am not telling you any of this because I want to promote some kind of opinion on doomscrolling and distractions and squeezing the juice out of every minute of your life. You do you. I am mentioning it only because I thought of my relationship with my phone a lot while reading about the terror of Tamagotchi.
❝It was the year 2010, and I had been given a Tamagotchi. I was surprised by this, because I was under the impression that Meredith really didn’t care for me. But oh, how wrong I was. Meredith fucking hated me. Her gift was not a cute piece of nerd nostalgia, but a brutal PsyOp designed to drive me to the brink of despair. And it worked.❞
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...and other confusions. / 👾 Utopia Must Fall is Missile Command meets Galaga meets Asteroids. / Pnogstrom. / 💻 Does Google know how Google works? Signs point to no. / But also: Dear G-Diary. / The Backrooms have been located. / What is Medium? / A decade of China's internet content no longer exists. / 🚶What was "normcore"? ❝Normcore was dad jeans, New Balances, Patagonia fleeces, tube socks in Birkenstocks, Jerry Seinfeld, a regular degular baseball cap, a romantic hybrid of real and imagined suburban Americana.❞ Also: the oral history. / 🖕 Spotify bricks their own device because fuck you. / Rolling Stone cancels lifetime subscriptions because fuck you. / 🎨 The blackmarket for Taco Bell art. / 🍿 Trailer for BRATS. (FTR, my crush on Ally Sheedy is entering its fifth decade.) / Starring the Computer. / Planet Of the Apes goes to the mall. / 🗄️ The Hydrant Directory.
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This is officially a wrap on Volume 2. Sorry it went out with a whimper and not a roar, but summer happens. Enjoy your vacay, kids!
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Food fight for thought (and other confusions). / 📰 Two decades of MTV News was just memory holed. (Archive) / 🎨 On the PhD in (and general hollowing of) "creativity." ❝The desire was not to elevate the already nonconformist or arty, but to convince the normies to conceptualize themselves as unconventional, creative, quirky – in the hopes that they could be encouraged to “think outside the box” of what a pesticide is supposed to be or what a weapon of war could accomplish.❞ / Banksy without Banksy. / 🍽️ The people who fight at dinner parties. ❝I am pleased to see the dinner party as an occasion to intensify dissent rather than merely react to it.❞ / 🎸 Queen Songs. / The Exotica Project (and other collections). / Dance Like David Byrne, a zine. / ⚱️ Françoise Hardy and Sika died. / 📻 Free sound effects from the BBC. / Also: 5 hours of the Shipping Forecast. / 👾 Moondrop Isle. / Level Devil. / 🍿 Search and play phrases from movies. / 🧮 Calculator words.
