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No one should have to say they’re redundant
I hate hate HATE that when huge companies make dumb, short-sighted decisions and then lay off people they don't give a shit about and think of as interchangeable parts, those same people are then forced to go on social media to talk about how their "role…
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Yeah, bubbles are fine.
🔗 the writer type: I deny that I'm in an echo chamber, and so do the voices.: The stark truth is that far from cocooning us, social media exposes us to a wide variety of previously unencountered people and opinions. These people are invariably weird, and…
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Fiction is ridiculous. And also great.
🔗 I Like Sally Rooney's Novels - The Biblioracle Recommends: When you get down to it, every novel is something of a con job where the author is trying to put one over on the reader. We know these people don’t exist, that everything is made up, an…
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The only way to stop platforms from exploiting personal data is to make it too expensive for them.
🔗 Social media and online video firms are conducting ‘vast surveillance’ on users, FTC finds | Technology | The Guardian: The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon,…
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I kind of think all software should cost money.
Whenever someone posts a new privacy-focused app or service they have discovered—web-search, chat, social media, etc.—my first question is "How much does it cost?" If the answer is that it is free, my next question is "How does it make money?" If I can't…
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When that thing you like turns into a business
I think we need a word for that moment when you realize that the individual creator you like has turned their thing into a hustle. It’s when the podcast you’ve been enjoying that was about a specific topic is spending more and more of their time talking…
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On likes and boosts
There was a long discussion thread on Micro.blog this past week about the platform’s lack of “social” features such as likes and boosts, and how the community aspect of Micro.blog would be better if it had these sorts of features. Everyone is, of…
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Alien: Romulus is a pretty good movie.
I went to see Alien: Romulus a few nights ago with friends and you know what? It was pretty good! Not great, and I had some a few complaints about it, but overall the movie kept me entertained for two hours. I should say that I went into it with very low…
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Never underestimate greed and ignorance.
I feel like a corollary to Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") is that one should never underestimate the amount of damage and suffering that can be caused by stupidity. We look at terrible things…
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The good old days weren’t all that good, if we’re being honest.
I was just reading yet another terrible review of Jonathan Haidt’s books about how mobile devices are destroying a whole generation. I am not going to link to it—not because the review is bad but rather because that book has already sucked up more than…
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My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
I finished reading My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones earlier this week. While I didn’t love it, I liked it enough that I drove to the bookstore the day after I finished it to pick up the sequel. The book connected with all of the horror…
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Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
I am about a hundred pages into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I have never read before. I have, of course, seen the old Universal movie with Boris Karloff as the Monster, and I think I saw the 1990s Kenneth…
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That so many people think Google is the only search engine basically proves they are a monopoly.
I was just reading some conversations on Mastodon about whether the antitrust ruling against Google will end up actually hurting them. As a matter of principle, I am all for these sorts of rulings. I hope that the DOJ has a bunch more cases in the…
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METALLICA!
The 14yo and I went to see Metallica in Boston on Friday night. It was his first concert, and my first time seeing Metallica live in nearly thirty years. While they are all clearly getting on in years (aren’t we all?), Metallica still puts on a great…
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Individual choices may not change the world, but they still matter.
🔗 Derf on Bluesky: As a former garbageman, I love stories like this. "Everything you're doing to cut down on waste is wrong." OK. So what SHOULD we do? "There's NOTHING you can do." Shut up. Derf is right. You should listen to Derf. It drives me kind of…
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Some David Lynch films, and also Abigail
Having watched Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, and Muholland Drive over the course of the last week, I felt like I needed a bit of a break before taking on Inland Empire. We signed up for a month’s worth of Peacock to watch some Olympics stuff (I could…
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Everything changes and it's really easy to get upset about that.
The annual music festival that happens in my town kicks off this evening. It has been running for 30ish years and we have been attending it for the last nine or ten years. It is relatively small as these big summer music festivals go and has always been…
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The 2013 Evil Dead remake is pretty bad.
I watched the 2013 remake (reboot? sequel? reimagining? I don't even know what we're calling these things anymore) of Evil Dead. I figured I should at least check out some of Fede Álvarez's stuff before completely dismissing the new Alien movie sight…
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We have no idea what other people are dealing with.
🔗 A Tale of Judgment and Grace: I thanked something I don’t quite believe in for saving me from myself and sparing that child from a scene of me haranguing her dad about civility. I made a promise to do my best to treat everyone as if they're dealing with…
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It’s okay not to get to all of the things.
At a random gathering I attended last night, someone mentioned Criterion’s 24/7 channel, which I was aware of but had completely forgotten about. I turned it on this morning and—as is the entire idea of the channel—a random movie was playing. The stream…