Now is a great time to mention dwitter[0], where people post "dweets", trying to draw and animate interesting visual effects with a limit of 140 characters.
While I think we've all settled on Cory Doctorow's concept, I really wish it wasn't called "enshittification". It's hard to take the phenomenon seriously when I sound like I'm just being edgy saying it aloud. There's something to keeping the term as a vulgar word, in that PR people working for companies actively engaging in it can't find a way to turn it around and own the definition, but "enshittification" could still use a little rebrand.
Tangentially, I'd like to shout out both Miguel's work both in explaining the Flask web development framework for Python as well as his work developing Flask-SocketIO, both of which I've used extensively.
What’s lovely about this post is that it follows the rule of bold claims producing interesting counters. Here’s my hat in the ring: I have had a really good time with the Elektron Model: Samples. It’s among the cheapest grooveboxes and comes with all the effects, parameter locks, and preloaded samples you need to do some great things.
Fortuitous timing. I just started writing daily on https://ds0.xyz whose backend I recently updated to employ tagging, but I haven't covered anything worth reading*.
How do people keep up with each other, private site-wise? Should I just add an RSS feed or something?
I recall termite colonies also have interesting an interesting behaviour that resembles an analogue for an organ that other animals are acquainted with: lungs.
Yeah, I was pretty intimidated just looking at it for the first time. Seeing my purchases in plain view like that tipped me over into using a competing mail server.
Sorry to go on a tangent, but that's John Lurie on the left in the second photo by Andy Warhol. I'm surprised to see he brushed shoulders with Basquiat and the rest.
Since my genre of choice is dance music, I use Soulseek, which I think has done a great job of carrying Napster's torch.
The trouble is that many of the tracks I'm into come from the personal collections of assorted DJs or diggers on Youtube, so obscure tracks are often in poor quality: I've had to resort to using Discogs to purchase the original vinyls and recording them through a sound card. I am not yet a pro at digitally cleaning up some of the minute crackling that occurs, and buying a brush to clean the records hasn't helped much...
A pleasant Icecast-using website is n10as (pronounced "antennas") radio[0]. I'm a longtime listener.
Personally, I like to use Icecast alongside Mixxx[1], an open-source DJ software that I highly recommend, to do live mixes of dance music over the web. Mixxx comes with configuration settings for broadcasting live audio within the program itself without the need for any extra client.
>unless it's being repeated without any attempt to consider broader implications.
That's just it, I think. The meme was taken in by a crowd that itself does not practice introspection. I don't think the New York Times is too far off when they mention its spread by "attention-starved gamers": disenfranchised young men attempting their own first run at exercising a naive political opinion over the internet.
Evan James has a good writeup on the sort of anxieties around society that sprung up the NPC meme [0]. There's a portion which I think has a kernel of truth, although it is definitely generous to the kind of people that immaturely lashed out and made very low-effort twitter accounts which wound up propagating the meme:
>The far right can be profoundly intuitive creatures, who feel more deeply than cursory glances suggest. The NPC meme is a response to something real, something that snarky liberals, and even leftists, increasingly fail to notice. In short, it is a tragicomic acknowledgment that things are not OK, that we are all NPCs (to one degree or another) because we are all in bondage.
I think the idea that people repeat samey platitudes they hear on TV or read online without much further thought is certainly a legitimate concern. The meme brought up a good point about mass consumer culture, but from there, it attained its own populism: a thousand voices telling a thousand other voices that they're following a script.
As someone who admittedly spends a lot of time on 4chan (an online addiction I have sustained for ten years), I was present to witness its snowballing on the imageboard. What I found interesting then was that the crux of the discussion around the meme focused on the idea that few people have an inner monologue [1].
"The real answer to solving technology addiction is the answer to sustainably solving most problems: innovation spurred by capitalism."
I find that when capitalism spurs innovations, those innovations work toward the sustenance of capitalism as a system, which I take some issue with. If some plucky startup solves tech addiction, it will be in a way that makes you a more effective worker or consumer.
[0] https://www.dwitter.net/