Articles talking about how Facebook destroyed the personal, friendly, welcoming internet are fairly common now, but this one by Brian Philips is actually worth your time.
Before I started writing, I did a Google search for “Facebook” and “annus horribilis,” which showed that dozens if not hundreds of media outlets — The Guardian, the BBC, El Mundo, Die Welt, The Atlantic, the Silicon Valley Business Journal — used this phrase, Latin for “horrible year,” to describe Facebook’s 2018. But 2018 wasn’t an annus horribilis for Facebook. It was an annus horribilis for us, the people who actually faced the surveillance and dishonesty and abuse. It was an annus horribilis for us because of Facebook.
To get on my soap box a little bit here, if none of these stories – the Cambridge Analytica story, the whole Russia thing, this most recent one about giving media companies back-room access to personal private data – if none of these stories make you want to delete your Facebook account, then what will? Where is the line for you?
To go a little further: if you haven’t deleted your Facebook account by now, then you are complicit in all of this shit.
Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns.
This is just lovely. My favourite line is “Hope it all goes well with the photosynthesis”.
I have a friend who wears headphones on long solo runs because, he says, “I can’t spend that much time alone in my head.” I disagree. He can, and he should. Spending that much time inside one’s head, along with the voices and the bats hanging from the various dendrites and neurons, is one of the best things about running, or at least one of the most therapeutic. Your brain is like a duvet cover: Every once in a while, it needs to be aired out.
As someone who can’t do basic household chores like washing dishes or folding laundry without a pair of headphones, this cut me deep.
We visited the Titanic museum in Belfast last year and it was a great museum but honestly, this connected with me on a much deeper level. There’s a good reason the narrator keeps saying “just imagine”.
The best part of The Incredibles 2 wasn’t the story but the amazing world they built. This is a great, tiny peek into the design process behind creating that world.
This is some pretty cool news - the Rijiksmuseum in Amsterdam will be livestreaming their restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.
If you don’t know much about this painting then you can do a lot worst than checking out Peter Greenaway’s film Night Watching, which is a weirdly mesmerizing primer on the history behind the painting, told as if it was a Rembrandt painting itself.
My neck hurts. I am never not looking down. When I am not looking at my phone, I become slightly anxious. And then, when I do actually look at it, I become even more so. It reminds me of how I once felt about cigarettes. I experience the world with a meticulously crafted, tiny computer slab between me and it. I am an asshole. But so, maybe, are you?
Instead of the usual gushing over the new shiny, I wish more people wrote phone reviews like this.
The new Apple Watch OS has improved “exercise detection”. Except when I’m sitting on the couch, rocking the baby to sleep, it will buzz and say “It looks like you’re doing an elliptical workout, track it?”. At least the fall detection looks like it actually works.
I have a really low tolerance for nerdcore, but this is actually pretty good. And it speaks volumes that even MC Frontalot is sorta renouncing nerd culture. From “Internet Sucks”:
I don’t love you any more internet You used to be a safe home for my nerd hard and my intellect Now you got so much hate but you just gotta interject Now you got too many chefs up in your kitchenette
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