Best Printer 2023 Just Buy This Brother Laser Printer Everyone Has Its Fine - The Verge »

This is how you write a buyer’s guide in 2023.

And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again.

Four Thousand Weeks »

I’m currently reading the Oliver Burkeman book about time management and this is a lovely summary/tribute.

The Fail Whale Cascade »

I’m on Mastodon, but I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion.

I’ve enjoyed the freshness of Mastodon. I really liked starting with a blank slate on a smaller social network. But as things have gotten bigger there, I’m finding Mastodon is starting to exhaust me just like Twitter used to. I guess I just don’t have the energy to stay connected to the firehose of the unconnected thoughts of strangers.

The Honest Broker - Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival »

A great essay about how the vinyl resurgence appears to be cresting because of the greed of the music industry. Interesting fact I learned from this – only half of the people buying vinyl actually own a record player. I mean, I’ve bought a few records I’ve never actually put on my player because I streamed the album so much and wanted to support the artist. But even still, 50% is staggering.

Bring Back Personal Blogging - The Verge »

At the end of the day, we don’t know what is going to happen next with Twitter or any of these platforms. We don’t know what changes Web 3.0 is going to bring to the internet. We do know that we will all still be here, wanting to share our thoughts, talk about anything and everything, and commune with our people. Personal blogging is the simplest and fastest way to do all of that.

I don’t know if blogging is as easy as The Verge are making out in this article. They talk about owning your own platform so that you can be sure that your content won’t go away. But to do that, you really need to host your own blog, and that brings its own set of headaches (Ask me what my backup strategy is for this blog! Ask me if it’s something I worry about!) And toxic social media has made me extremely reluctant to share intimate details of my life on the internet. And the whole rise of AI has made me extremely wary of contributing anything to the corpus of things that will help train them.

But, all that being said, it’s a noble goal. Godspeed.

Polygon Announce a Making of Spycraft Documentary »

Oh wow! Spycraft was one of my favourite games of the 90s but it’s been pretty well forgotten by most people, despite the fact it did some really interesting things both narratively and gameplay-wise. And it had Charles Fuckin Napier!

So fair play to Polygon for going back and revisiting it now for a making-of documentary that sounds like it’s been in the works for a while. The documentary is coming in 2023 but you can watch the trailer now. And if you want to play the game, it’s available from Steam and GOG and it runs pretty well in Dosbox, even on a Mac.

Electronic Music Icon Korg Makes Music With Raspberry Pi »

TIL recent Korg synths have Raspberry Pis under the hood, which is probably another reason why RPis are so hard to come by these days.

A Year of New avenues »

I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’s tweets.

With the implosion of Twitter and the move towards Mastodon and the federated web, the internet of late 2022 is feeling more and more like the internet of 2002: ours.

An Oral History of Tim Currys Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism »

A wonderful deep-dive into a tiny, tiny moment that had a lasting impact. I also love that as well as interviewing game developers and critics, they also spoke to people like Katie Mack and Yanis Varoufakis.

The Inside Outtakes »

Bo Burnham has put up an hour-long video of the outtakes from Inside. But it’s more than just your usual outtakes – some of it is really cleverly done. Like showing all the takes of a song all at once, and turning off the unused takes as he messes up, so that at the end it’s like a Super Meatboy level replay and you’re just left with the take he used in the final film.

I wasn’t originally taken by Inside (although this might have been overly harsh because of, you know, everything) but I really appreciate the amount of work he put in.