Gold, fantasy, and adventurers - Transneptune
Kit digs into how a game mechanic could feel more medieval in terms of trust over treasure.
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Todd Alcott's Sci-Fi Tarot, Science-Fiction-themed Tarot Deck
From the creator of The Pulp Tarot and Horror Tarot comes Todd Alcott's Sci-Fi Tarot, a brand new tarot deck. Todd Alcott's Sci-Fi Tarot is a full deck of 78 retro-futuristic cards, inspired by sci-fi paperbacks, hardcovers and magazine illustrations of the 20th Century. It will aid you in divining insights into the mysteries of life and preparation for the future.
I Live My Life a Quarter Century at a Time
A fun story about the origins of the Dock
The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly
Tricking already poor artists into replacing themselves, basically.
The company started to bring on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model.
Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all this.
The most common feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the musician told me. “The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”
The industry has contributed to a massive wave of consolidation: different music-adjacent industries and ecosystems that previously operated in isolation all suddenly depend on royalties from the same platforms.
Never Forgive Them
It's bad out there for users.
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma.
How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident?
Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?
It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.
When every single website needs to make as much money as possible because their private equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners need to make more money every year without fail, the incentives of building the internet veer away from providing a service and toward putting you, the reader, in silent service of a corporation.
internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them
Those who can’t afford $300 (at least) phones or $600 laptops are left to use offensively bad technology, and we have, at a societal scale, simply accepted that this is how things go.
I am convinced that everybody is burdened by The Rot Economy, and that digital ecosystems allow the poison of growth to find new and more destructive ways to dilute a human being to a series of numbers that can be made to grow or contract in the pursuit of capital.
These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told they’re geniuses for doing so because money comes out.
The forces I criticize see no beauty in human beings. They do not see us as remarkable things that generate ideas both stupid and incredible, they do not see talent or creativity as something that is innately human, but a commodity to be condensed and monetized and replicated so that they ultimately own whatever value we have
Reclamation
I know I'll never have a proper audience so I need to avoid some of these growth temptations
Thoughts on Copilot
It's an older post and is focused on replacing work; it does touch on the licensing legal risk.
Minnesota Guaranteed Free School Meals for All Kids. Now Let’s Do It Nationwide.
The program has been a massive success, reducing families’ food insecurity and improving academic performance.
For Gen Alpha, learning to read is becoming a privilege
This all sounds kinda sus and I guess we're just spoiled
Remembering the ’70s activist group that tried to save us from the tech industry
Computer People for Peace were ahead of their time.
Not all blog posts are created equal
Makes me think I need to redo my categories a bit.
The Needs of Dementia Caregivers | Harvard Magazine
What it's like to look after a loved one with dementia
For Love of God, Make Your Own Website - Aftermath
One thing I haven't thought about is how I used to have a bookmarks folder I'd load every morning. I don't do that anymore, I get my links elsewhere (and I subscribe a lot to RSS) but that's interesting.
To me, having my own website, even one I run as a business with my friends, gives me a degree of freedom over my own work that I’ve never had before.
Once again, the only way forward is the Mac
Boom. Spot on.
Apple won’t stop you. It may scare you, cajole you, and hide the button that allows you to run that app in the basement in a disused lavatory behind a door with a sign on it that says “Beware of the Leopard,” but it will let you run it.
The Arecibo Message, Earth’s First Interstellar Transmission, Turns 50
A lot of details in this story I never knew.
How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells' Life
Love how much recognition she's gotten after a long career.
One of the Cepheids, a rather tall, sweet boy, had dressed up as a Sith lord, with a lightsaber made of parts he bought at an auto store. He made one for Wells too. “Which led to us actually starting to date,” Wilson says over tacos. “I always tell people we were brought together by the dark side of the Force.”
Wilson brings out a tray of tea and homemade shortbread—the Hobbiton vibe here is unreal.
At one point, they tell me they’re planning a big trip to Seattle for Worldcon, followed by a seven-day cruise in Alaska.
Murderbot, AI, and Techno-Capitalist Futures
Some great context around Murderbot and Wild Robot
Thinking about AI
A recent episode of The Talk Show showed me something about myself I don’t like.
The Great Grocery Squeeze
Food deserts are also probably Reagan's fault
In defense of practical gifts
Or: what I'm trying to say when I buy you socks
The Developers Who Came in From the Cold
I wonder if Apple could have managed the transition better... but without the cutoff nothing would have changed?
Star Trek as ‘going to a national park’: Lower Decks’ creator reflects on the end of the show
Sad it's gone but they really did love Trek
botsin.space postmortem
Too expensive to run alone, sounds like.
orry that this makes it very difficult to resist the inclination to centralize everything on a couple of big instances. And that inclination absolutely must be resisted. I would love to see a fediverse full of thousands of small instances of software platforms that are as easy to manage as a PHP web forum.
I worry that this makes it very difficult to resist the inclination to centralize everything on a couple of big instances. And that inclination absolutely must be resisted. I would love to see a fediverse full of thousands of small instances of software platforms that are as easy to manage as a PHP web forum.
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and a Smear Campaign After ‘It Ends With Us’
Ugh.
What killed the Christmas movie?
I'm surprised this is so negative on Spirited but otherwise I agree, I think there's a whole category of family movie that has disappeared.
Delighted Health Insurance Executives Gather In Outdoor Coliseum To Watch Patient Battle Cancer
Sometimes the parody just has to describe the real world.
In Search of the Automatic Platform for Personal Computers – Worms and Viruses
Some good points on what's easy for most users.
Opinion | What Do Democrats Need to Do? Act Like an Opposition Party.
Already rolling over because norms (and because they really do mostly represent the rich)
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?
We're in trouble.