While I haven’t read it since it was released (back in 2013?), Brian K. Vaughan’s The Private Eye was particularly prescient. We’ve been heading towards its worldview for years and… have arrived, I’d say — even if every private detail about our lives hasn’t leaked, anonymity is impossible.
Beautiful night at the Arboretum on Saturday. They hosted a walking event under the full Harvest Moon, and just a week into our newfound discovery of this place, we’ve been twice. We’re anticpating several more visits as the temps cool and leaves change.
An astute equivalency of loneliness amidst other addictive vices, but with the thesis that it’s actually more dire, and to mitigate, an indulgence in a little old fashioned vice in the spirit of sociability is, maybe, just perfectly fine.
In Britain, pubs are closing at a rate of one per day […] Today’s owners blame taxes and costs, but young people increasingly choose online gaming, porn, drugs, Netflix, and OnlyFans over nightlife. […] the risks of alcohol to a 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by those of social isolation. When I go out to bars/clubs, I don’t see drunkenness … but togetherness.
Combo articles that spell out the major problem all generations are running into: the decline of critical thinking.
The Atlantic: I’m a High Schooler, AI is Demolishing My Education
The Economist: Is the Decline of Reading Making Politics Dumber?
I get it, books have lots of text, and reading is a process. But there are no dark pattern designs in books to optimize your time and drive attention engagement — and for good reason. It is a meditative experience, tapping our brainwaves and requiring us to think: understanding, interpreting, philosophizing, imagining, and yes, some books and study material encourage reflection and critical thinking.
We all know what happened here. The train has left the station and mass consumption patterns aren’t going to go backwards. I don’t have any suggestion for a fix. But I really feel for teachers and ex-critical thinkers everywhere.
In Monocle’s Briefing newsletter today, they highlighted the modernist/brutalist architecture of Japan’s Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium from 1964 and its risk of being torn down. At a glance, it shares a design philosophy with Death Stranding’s entrances for its Knot Cities. Love the overlap.
We may never get another season of Scavengers Reign, but the showrunner did get a chance to release Common Side Effects (Adult Swim/streaming on HBO Max), and it’s very good. Conspiracies, miraculous fungi, detectives, on the run, big political/economic philosophies – it’s all here in fine form.
No idea how Kottke found this essay, but great companion to my previous link:
And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.
Digital experiences continue to strive for the relentless pursuit of maximizing engaged user time, especially so with AI conversations:
Chatbot products […] are thus indeed a logical next step in the trajectory of Silicon Valley striving to create more addictive commercial software services for increasingly lonely consumers
So now we’re getting to the stage where drone warfare, once thought to be an electronic replacement to soldiers on the ground, is being eroded by the drone-frying Leonidas electromagnetic weapon. This also seems like a terrifying tool against any other avionics in the sky.
🕗 Updated my Slimmest Wallet Pursuit recommendations page. New entry for the year, probably my end-game wallet unless something, somehow, comes out that’s significantly better, or we stop using cards altogether in the future. Save you the click: it’s the Tom Bihn Minimalist Wallet #1.
Excellent piece by Heavy Table on the Midway Men’s Club at the Minnesota State Fair. My favorite stop (often multi-stop) when I go.
But while it may be as old-school as it gets, the place is anything but dusty. It hums with life. Fairgoers swarm every side of the nondescript building, lured by what’s rumored (loudly, and often) to be the cheapest beer at the fair — maybe the worst-kept secret in St. Paul. Inside, workers sling burgers and beer out of every side of the building, moving as fast as the flat-top and the taps will allow.
Friendly reminder how excellent the MX Master 3S mouse is from Logitech. Sure, they may be working on this new version (4), which rumors point to having haptics and software enhancements like the Action Ring, but if you have a 3S, nothing beats it — silent clicks are golden.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime-first-experience read: I Who Have Bever Known Men. Phenomenal novel by the late Jacqueline Hartman. It weaves a harrowing exploration of selfhood to the backdrop of a retracted, minimally expositioned nightmare. I suppose you could call it my poolside summer read.
This is a slightly ridiculous article about the increase in appetite for higher spice-level food in the US. Sure, as someone who really enjoyed well-spiced (and highly-spiced) food, it sounds like an absurd trend for the sake of burning your body’s receptors. But like anything, there’s a culinary art to well-spiced foods and spirits.
Most of these sky-high Scoville hot sauces don’t taste good, and signing a waiver to eat fried chicken drenched in Naga Viper peppers is different from the majority of folks' increasing interest in a variety of spices and “spicier” augmentation of food, or honestly, just more engagement with foods from across geographies that use “spicier” ingredients due to proximity and tradition. This all goes within reason — people are going to act like fools when foolish things are available to consume. But the fact that Fritos has 26 different Flamin' Hot products? Maybe that’s a sign that the spices they’re lacing into their chemist food actually does taste good, and perhaps there’s a national swing in taste because everyone isn’t pouring ketchup on everything anymore? Variety of choice is an interesting thing.
But maybe the science of all this makes the most sense, which the article does extrapolate:
Capsaicin, the compound that makes many spicy foods spicy, transmits pain signals to the brain, which the brain then counteracts by releasing endorphins—it’s like a runner’s high
There is something so alluring and exciting about a newsstand, particularly the kiosks abound around Lisbon, that I really wish media consumption, at least in the US, could tolerate more than just digital. Paper periodicals aren’t dead yet, but they aren’t proliferating.
Nice paper pad by Yamamoto — the Pen Addict takes it through its paces. While I don’t often write with Sharpies, it’s nice to stumble on paper that holds up well against those deep inks. Also seems suited for bullet journaling (vertical orientation), if you’re into that kind of thing.
Chris Person’s essay on Death Stranding 2 resonates.
The last four hours of Death Stranding 2 are some of the most absurd spectacle the man has ever been associated with. Kojima is constantly mugging at the camera through his characters, leaving silly, obvious references to his previous games as if to suggest that even he thinks it’s a bit absurd. Inhabiting the space often feels more like you are inhabiting Kojima’s instagram feed, like he’s gotten all the actors and directors that he personally enjoys together, put them in his weird little scanner, and he’s smashing them together like little action figures
You would have thought pristine wilderness in North American could weather pollutants better than developed areas, but even the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness has reported high mercury levels despite MN cutting emissions by two-thirds over the last two decades, imperiling freshwater fishing.
Passed by this stack of fallen trees, sliced up by the city, on my morning run. We’ve been getting some wild weather this summer.
A few pieces going around about “Google Zero” — essentially, the estimation that in the very near-future, we are going to see a complete re-tweaking of Google’s heretofore stalwart search enterprise into something akin to ChatGPT (which is already happening), which will catalyze an immense drop-off in search traffic to websites large and small.
I’d like to think Micro.blog’s Manton Reece’s positive perspective — that the Internet will survive this — is prescient, but I’m not so sure. I’m no longer as connected closely to the business of search, but I have to imagine a drop-off in inbound organic traffic is happening widely across the Internet. As are Internet users’ behaviors and expectations of interaction with platforms. Time is money, and everyone has a short attention. Give me the answer, point me to the thing, shortcut my ability to buy. The funnel is a truncated version of awareness-intent-buy.
But what Manton is right about is the need to “to build a relationship with readers”, or whoever interacts with your content, services, and commerce. Loyalty is as important a king as the content itself. I can’t predict how search engines and browsers are going to mutate in the next 2-3 years, but they’re going to, and reaching the depths of the Internet are going to become more difficult. But just as there’s been a swell of interest in analog/old school technology like record players, disc-based media, retro game consoles, and tabletop games, so too, I’d wager, there will be an interest in old fashioned digital discovery, or at the very least, a platform that brings together a federated open web in a dissimilar but modern counterpoint to search engines of yore. Perhaps think Usenet interactivity (through specialized browsers or apps), but in 2025.
Substack, Medium, Ghost, Microblog, Wordpress, etc. are already manifesting this kind of environment. But newsletter or blog-first websites can have one thing in common: a loyal audience, sometimes willing to pay (if available), and/or otherwise willing to return consistently to engage. Same goes for a retailer or boutique storefront, a doctor’s office, a home maintenance service, an airline, a restaurant, a destination. There is more awareness of brands, niches, and products than ever before, and advertising/content creation still works exceptionally well in the media environments across social and algorithmic platforms. So it is still quite possible to build classical awareness, but every touchpoint in the experience thereafter is critical in maintaining interest and earning loyalty to keep that connection strong, as there are so many derailments and distractions that can severe attention. Attaining and retaining loyalty is the important facet of a users’ ongoing engagement with an entity, no matter who or what you represent, insofar as you’ve been discovered.
Unfortunately, the discovery part is what the Google Zero moment is predicting will become the harshest reality for anyone trying to get a potential audience. While it’s still true that the value exchange is and always will be putting out great content and products and services (it’s arguably difficult for AI to yet do all three), an audience won’t magically find you. Playing the algorithm game is already more convoluted than playing the search engine game ever was (and I know — I was there from the beginning). What we have to hope for is improved curation, visibility through categorical aggregators, the human spirit of finding and elevating great work (using prominently used channels), and hoping that the future holds something to recalibrate the Internet’s search-ability in a way that yields back discovery and connection to the biggest and smallest of what we’ve created. It might very well be that some form of an AI browser will do just that, but I’d rather it be through something more... human.
Brutal, but absolutely on point mixed media work by Thomas Doyle (nice aggregation by Colossal). This kind of tech takeover has been done over the years, but in the medium of faux-antiquated sculptures, it hits differently.
(image via Colossal)
A genuinely hopeful take from Greg Storey on the malaise we all are (likely) feeling.
The late-70s malaise birthed MTV, punk, hip-hop, Silicon Valley, and the personal computer revolution. The Depression birthed New Deal reforms, the jazz golden age, and the technological leaps of wartime innovation. The 1890s gloom birthed the Progressive Era, Art Nouveau, and entirely new ways of thinking about society and power.
Hyland Lake Park Reserve.
A rewatch of Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) re-establishes — in my mind — its boundless inventiveness and vision. It also operates as an historic spiritual precursor to the Scavengers Reign series, which was unjustly cancelled by both HBO Max and Netflix.
Brian Eno:
I remember an early review of one of my ambient records saying something like “No song, no beat, no melody, no movement”—and they weren’t being complimentary. But I think they were accurate, because this is a music of texture and sonic sensuality more than it is any of those things they were alluding to. I’m sure when the first abstract paintings appeared, people said, “No figure, no structure,” etc.… The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way.