Posts from February 2024

9AM — Zeldman succinctly sums up today’s social-media landscape: “If BlueSky is MacOS and Threads is Windows, Mastodon is Linux”

8AM

5PM — London’s Tate Modern currently has photographs from Joel Meyerowitz on display, who has done some superb street photography over his sixty-year career.

4PM — The six London Overground lines are getting new names and different colours. The new names “celebrate London’s wonderful and varied cultural heritage:”

• Lioness
• Windrush
• Weaver
• Liberty
• Mildmay
• Suffragette

Hordes of Tories must be fuming right now in their seven-bedroom detached Highgate homes about these new “woke” names.

8AM — Guardian writers shared their favourite break-up songs. Sacrilegious not to include “If You See Her, Say Hello” from Bob Dylans classic break-up album “Blood On The Tracks.”

6PM — The Super Bowl in Las Vegas: What Would Hunter S. Thompson Think?

The casino where Mr. Thompson found psychedelics almost irrelevant now begs for anti-depressants. It’s the kind of place where room rates start at $25, the pit boss’s suit is three sizes too big, and the air this week carried a scent of cigarettes, perfume and despair.

A man named Daniel, with his wife and two children tucked away in their room, sat vacantly at a slot machine late one night on the Circus Circus casino floor nursing a beer and staring blankly across the room. He was down a couple hundred bucks, hoping his luck would turn.

Nearby, a woman named Hazel, with fake Chinchilla boots and an obscene T-shirt that was far too small, lamented seeing a homeless girl win $500 and then proceed to tap away on the same machine until she was down to 56 cents. “If you got lots of money, you enjoy yourself in Vegas,” she said. “If you’re like me, with a couple hundred bucks, you’re here.”

Las Vegas is a depressing place.

1PM

Headnodic – Epicedium

12PM — A list of contemporary blog platforms, hosted and self-hosted, free and paid. I would also add two old-school options to the list: MovableType and Typepad.

4PM — Manuel Moreale rants about Arc’s new AI-powered search.

There are probably 700-billion-trillion pages out there but ARC has picked 6. Why those 6? No idea. Have those 6 paid to be there? No idea. Should I just trust that those 6 are reputable sources? Yup.

I wanted to quote more sections but almost the whole post is worth quoting. I suggest you read the whole piece yourself.

10AM — For J Dilla’s 50th birthday, Peanut Butter Wolf remembers the extraordinary producer:

The way he used technology to change hip hop makes it feel like the miracle of the pyramids. As a former hip hop beat maker myself, I can’t figure out what the fuck he did on some of that record, almost 10 years later, even though technology has now made it easier to do what was then not achievable in music production. And yet it’s not cerebral to the point of losing the funk or the soul of human feeling. His use of technology is only to accentuate the emotions of the music, not overpower them. It sounds simple until you hear the original samples that were used. Then you really appreciate Dilla’s craft at creating and in general, the art of sampling to make original music.

Time to listen to Donuts again today.

8AM — After a redesign, the Ostthüringer Zeitung, a local newspaper from the town where I grew up, offers a link to their RSS feed prominently on their website next to links to other socials. I’d like to see more of that from bigger publications.

10AM — After a year in private beta, Bluesky will be opening for the public this week. Anyone can sign up, invite codes are not required any longer. If you loved Twitter before Musk, you’ll love Bluesky. If Twitter did your head in, then you won’t love Bluesky. It’s the same concept, same design, same people, and same mundane content. The underlying, decentralised technology is different but I doubt anyone but us nerds actually care about that.

9AM

Earl Phillips, now retired, has been painting shop signs on Cleveland for over 60 years. He painted his signs by hand, no stencils involved, and still producing beautiful flawless typography.

8AM — Orlando airport has a Seinfeld-themed arrival path:

Flying into Orlando, your plane might use the SNFLD arrival path, taking you past NOOMN, FORYU, SNFLD, JRRYY and GTOUT.

GET OUT!

2PM — Life expectancy mapped by London tube stations. Unsurprisingly, the more affluent the area, the higher the life expectancy.

5PM — The Eames Archives. Add that to my bucket list of places I need to visit before I die.

4PM — I miss the internet: a zine:

From writer Joan Westenberg comes a digital zine reflecting on how the internet has evolved over the past 20 years. Packed with nostalgia for the early days of niche communities, amateur content and anonymity, it explores the current state of corporatization, algorithms and pressure to constantly produce.

This zine is for anyone feeling disillusioned by the internet’s lost potential and hoping to rediscover that early excitement of possibility. It asks the question - can we build a digital future that reflects the diversity, creativity and joy we glimpsed online in the past?

Nothing helps me rediscover the early internet’s excitement of possibilty more than a three-step process asking me to provide my email handle and full address to access a free PDF. Apparently a simple download link, you know the ones we had in 1998, isn’t enough. How am I supposed to take this seriously?

6PM — Mandy Brown’s unified theory of fucks:

But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back. Maybe not every one of them; maybe not every time. Some people’s bags have been empty for a long while, and they may feel the need to ration whatever they have; some people have been taught that to give a fuck is to lose something, not realizing that to withhold is what it means to lose. But I believe—I know from having given and received, from having lost and been renewed—that enough of them will come back that you can keep on giving, for a while at least, for as long as any of us has time to give.

That’s what work is, after all. Work—the action of change, the movement of energy from one being to another—is the means by which fucks are granted. Good work is the art of giving a fuck about the living. And all of us, every day, are faced with good work that needs doing, and good work that we can do.

I agree with the notion, the more fucks you give the more fucks you’ll receive. But in the context of work, the opposite is true. You get fucks back from your peers, sure; but from anyone above your pay grade, if you give a lot of fucks, they tend to take more fucks, until you run out of fucks to give. Unless of course, you like to talk about how many fucks you’re giving, which is a common replacement for giving actual fucks, but it works because it’s easier for the bosses to return the favour.

5PM — Iconfactory’s new Kickstarter Tapestry. An app that collates all of your feeds, from blogs and social media, into one feed, chronologically ordered, no algorithms involved. I want that; but as a desktop app, not on my phone.