š” ā 2022-11-18
Hi. Itās nice to see you! Itās been a while, a couple years in fact since this last went out. This newsletter āpausedā for all the reasons so many internet things do (in addition to the reason so many internet things did in 2020 or thereabouts). I had wanted and planned to resurrect this regular, short list of things I like before the demise of Twitter became more apparent than it is nowā¦ but that demise has now encouraged me to speed up its return. And so here we are: a creek cutting anew through the hillside.
On the subject of Twitter ā about which I wont bend your ear for long, lest it get creased from the šæš“ ā I want to just remark briefly on Elon, and how incredible a spectacle his constant, high profile lack of even base managerial skill has been. Itās rare we get such direct insight into the actual acumen (or lack thereof) of high profile Captains of Industryā¢, or whatever we might call them. Watching Musk try-and-fail to tread twitter water over the last weeks feels at once horrible, and also like some cursed gift. Here we see a near a 24-hour/7-day document of a much lauded (???) man demonstrate total lack of expertise in everything from computer code to comms to not being a huge baby. I love it! I hate it. (I love it!)
Hard to say what the upshot here might be, of course. Elonstans will say that Twitter was always already bloated with skittle-haired leftist [epithet]s who need to be purged, and if losing them means the site tanks well so be it; knowing your boss/the ceo of some company is a total penis doesnāt make losing your job, method of audience or career development, or the way you chat with your pals any less unpleasant, inconvenient, crushing; the not terminally online have only heard about āstuff happening at twitter ā¦ ?ā if anything.
Perhaps if he does end up tanking the site to the point it is unusable, weāll be able to point to this saga as an object lesson surrounding the largely-worshiped yet largely-outmoded hyperactive, Silicon Valley management style that uses words like ārock starā, āninjaā, and yesā¦ āhardcoreā. Seeing who was at, and who is now exiting, Twitter is a portrait of the kind of person who makes an enterprise website. Which is to say: NOT one kind of person, and so ones managerial approach should probably reflect that.
If youāre curious about where else I am, besides Twitter - here are those places:
Fun City: http://funcity.ventures
Website : http://rugnetta.com
Twitch: http://twitch.tv/mikerugnetta
Patreon: http://patreon.com/mikerugnetta
Mastodon: https://octodon.social/@mikerugnetta
Anyway - on to the stuff I liked!
š
NEW OLD MEN - The John F. Canaday Repetition Project
NEW OLD MEN : The John F. Canaday Repetition Project : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
An album produced in 2022 from a bunch of home recordings people sent me during quarantine.Ā
My pal Ken made a beat mixtape of found sounds, stuff he asked people to record for him at home over the last couple years, the Prelinger Archive and some field recordings. This tape was written and recorded with minimal gear, a lot of it done on a phone, and with ancient pieces of kit like the Drumulator. Itās quirky, itās intimate, it rules.
Gall Tones - Carl Stone
As the story goes: Carl Stone had to go to the hospital during the first part of the pandemic, not for COVID but for his gallbladder. It being the height of pandemic, visitors were not allowed and many restrictions were placed on the items patients were allowed while admitted. Someone snuck Carl his laptop, however, and while bed ridden he was able to create this record: Gall Tones (get it?!)
If you donāt know Carlās work, its very characteristic: usually composed by looping small segments of audio, and/or jumping around to different snippets in a larger piece of source material (often preexisting music). I am generally a fan of Stoneās work, and I find Gall Tones to be amongst his more fun, energetic, and listenable records of late. Also, fun fact: all his songs are named after restaurants! (nb: he lives in Japan)
Feorm Falorx - Plaid
Iāve been listening to Plaid since their second record Not For Threes (1997) and I have enjoyed every single one of their releases. Feorm Falorx feels a little stripped down, and more elemental than their more recent releases (Polymer ā19, Digging Remedy ā16) but thatās traded for some altogether fun and dance-y vibes. The sound design here is what youād come to expect: acousticische, bouncy and bubbly, many-textured.
Profound Mortality - HERIOT
Typos in Your Obituary - The Fun Years
Scry - Cole Pulice
š
Bullshit as a practical strategy for self-deceptive narrators
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phil.12318?af=RThis paper argues that bullshit is a practical resource for self-deceiving individuals, or those who merely prefer to avoid self-examination, insofar as it is able to provide a mask for poor doxastic hygiene. While self-deception and bullshit are distinct phenomena, and bullshit does not cause self-deception, bullshit disrupts the capacity to interrogate the motivational biasses that fuel deception. The communicative misdirection engaged in by ordinary social bullshitters is applied reflexively by the self-deceiver to distort, evade, and obfuscate the self-deceiver's self-accounting. This discussion presupposes a broadly narrative approach to self-awareness and discusses how a motivated susceptibility to bullshit offers an explanation how our reports about ourselves can be frequently at odds with reality, and suggests that a complacency about rational validation of belief outside of self-certainty, i.e., the prevalence of bullshit, is even more of a threat than Frankfurt thought it to be.
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121570Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack peopleās attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoringāchoosing what to ignore and where to invest oneās limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from oneās digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educatorsā thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of todayās attention economy.
Distracting People from the Material Conditions of Our Society
Distracting People from the Material Conditions of Our Society
A New York Times Specialty
This weekend, the New York Times published a long, meandering story about how ābike theftā is plaguing Burlington, Vermont. The story ominously (and without evidence) suggests that what starts as bicycles perhaps stolen by āhomelessā people and āmeth usersā leads inevitably to āviolent crimeā and āmurder.ā The story functions as a warning to liberal readers in other cities about what happens when āprogressivesā and their āhippieā¦idealsā take control and do terrible things like reduce reliance on police.
The New York Times article is a meaningless series of anecdotes that sheds no light on the serious problems of our society.
Itās Not Just You: NYC Has a Serious Dungeon Master Shortage
It's Not Just You: NYC Has a Serious Dungeon Master Shortage - Hell Gate
As the pandemic ushered in well-publicized worker shortages, role-playing is experiencing its own labor crisis.
Playing the role of Dungeon Master can be a rewarding job but it is sometimes thankless, and always taxing. D&D can be overwhelming to any new player; this is especially true for a DM, who needs to know all the rules, adjudicate them, create or manage the story, plan logistics for their group, and cater the experience to what each player wants. The amount of effort involved makes it inaccessible for new players and difficult for experienced ones to sustain long-term.
All of which has conspired to make it harder to find people to actually run the spiking number of campaigns. "I think a lot of DMs just want to sit back and let other people run a game," one Dungeon Master on hiatus from running campaigns told me. "There's a DM shortage in the tabletop community like there's a top shortage in the LGBTQ community."
Richard Branson will stop āturning girls upside downā on Virgin planes
Richard Branson will stop āturning girls upside downā on Virgin planes | Richard Branson | The Guardian
The airline owner says he is still physically capable of āpicking up ladiesā but ātimes have moved onā
Bransonās last believed public inversion of a female model, wearing a bikini and Russian hat, was in 2012 to promote planned flights to Moscow. By 2014, he was already raising his own kilt in Edinburgh at the launch of an ill-fated domestic Virgin airline offshoot, Little Red.
He said: āYou just adapt with the times. And I might soon be getting to an age where I might pull a disc.ā
š¹
š¾
Iām about to get going on God of War: Ragnarok ā only had time to play a couple hours ā but so far itās doing everything I want after the last game: wild set piece boss fights, big scale cut scenes, and occasional mob-juggling. Iāve seen criticism that the combat get repetitive and the mini-boss fights feel like roadblocks to progress for no real reason whichā¦ I get. I feel this way about MOST AAA games tbh.
The thing Iām really looking forward to is the big Dwarf Fortress release on Dec 6. Very curious to hear how it plays (or does not play) on a Steamdeck, something my wife and I might buy each other half-of for Xmas.
š¤
Most recent Fun City came out Nov 4th, two weeks ago. Jenn and Shan did a cook-along stream last night that was a BLAST. You can and should watch the VOD here for some A++++ Spaghetti Nonsense. The next FC was scheduled to release today, but it has been postponed because I uhhhhh - well - had a (literal) baby.
š
Thatās all I got for now! Tell me what here you liked, what you didnāt like, what you wanna see more of, what you wanna see less of.
As for pacing, weāre gonna aim to do this every other week, but I have more to share weāll do it once a week.
So until then ā¦ š and hey: tell your pals about this newsletter if you like it. Thanks!
-Mike