📡 – 2024-05-07
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Friends! I hope you're well. I'm going to keep it brief up here, and get to The Stuff – some of which has been sitting in the To 📡 Pile for a month. Wait for a Friday, I thought, or just the clear the decks? Seemed best to get something out while I could, in this brief respite.
Scroll to the end of the long list of things that have been occupying my time, and where you can find them.
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We Columbia University students urge you to listen to our voices
Now, it is time to elevate student perspectives, the “us”, rather than the “them”. The traumatic environment and militarization of our campus are not the sole product of ill-intended protesters or reckless non-affiliates, as claimed by administrative emails; rather, they are the fault of the senior administration themselves. For months, this crisis has brewed as administrators neglected student and faculty voices. We must be clear: the administration has put our students’ safety at risk and has failed to ensure a conducive learning environment. As student leaders, it is time for our voice to be heard.
No one buys books
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.
Turns out, they agree!
The Man Who Killed Google Search
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change
https://aftermath.site/google-seo-kotaku-game-informer-dexerto-change
Note that these huge drops--from 65-90% across the board--aren't to the site's overall traffic, but their visibility in Google search results. Still, considering that most of the biggest sites on the internet are now almost entirely reliant on bringing in traffic through Google search results, this seems bad!
A second tweet lists even more declines. Gamerant is down 67.3%. Game Informer 62.9%. Kotaku, a site recently retooled so that even its front page is built around trending SEO topics, is down 64%.
The Life and Death of Hollywood
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/the-life-and-death-of-hollywood-daniel-bessner/
Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.
Rejecting the Binary
https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/judith-butler-afraid-gender-book-explained.html
So who is afraid of gender? Many, many institutional and governmental entities, not to mention activist groups both online and off, are now staging a mass moral panic about a “phantasmatic cluster” of anxieties related to gender and sexuality: queer and trans rights, feminism, abortion, contraception, reproductive technology, book banning. These issues, Butler demonstrates, can all be seen as parts of one very large and urgent problem: the global rise of authoritarianism. Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro—right-wing leaders and religious organizations from around the world are all busy stoking the same fearful rhetoric around the same handful of reliably incendiary issues. Any consumer of right-wing media is dosed many times per hour with “news” about their children being groomed by secret networks of left-wing pedophiles, or the imminent threat posed by imaginary gender pirates whose demand for basic bodily autonomy somehow imperils the sexual self-definition and even the continued existence of heteronormative cis people.
The Oral History of Repo Man
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/repo-man-oral-history-1984
Nesmith sent the script to Universal, and they rejected it. And he went out for a drink with a guy who wanted to be his manager. And this manager looks over at the bar, and there’s Bob Rehme, the head of Universal. And the guy goes, “Hey, Bob, Michael here has got a great script, and you guys turned it down.” The next day, Nesmith got a disgruntled call from an executive at Universal saying, “Oh, I guess we’re doing Repo Man.”
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SoundOriented’s 2X Pimpy Masterbox Collection
Why AI is Doomed to Fail the Musical Turing Test
Cybergrinding Through the Nü-metal Renaissance (with Sam Dunn and Holiday Kirk)
Multicylinder Engine Simulation - Engine Simulator Devlog 6
How Dropshipping Ruined Online Shopping
Church Andrews & Matt Davies - Yucca
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LOUD KLAXON NOISE
🌒HADES II is HERE !!🌘
— Supergiant Games (@SupergiantGames) May 6, 2024
Experience the bewitching sequel to our god-like rogue-like, now available in Early Access.
🌜Steam: https://t.co/MwAiwL8ZeW
🌜Epic Games Store: https://t.co/bKD6BvLhw6#HadesGame #Hades2 #DeathToChronos pic.twitter.com/jXhqctKj95
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I've been busy! Never Post continues to update biweekly, with the occasional mailbag episode where we respond to listener voicemails, etc on off weeks. The most recent episode takes a look at the transit vacuum that will arise when / if Uber and Lyft leave Minneapolis over fair payment laws; the second segment is about how the car has become a de facto vertical short-form video filming location. A new ep comes out this week and it's Very Special™.
A new episode of Fun City went out on yesterday! The team literally descends into the depths, getting closer to the answer to the mystery they've spent years uncovering. Tensions? You better believe they are high.
You can also catch me on
- Object Worship, talking about my field recorder
- The Alarmist, talking about the Dust Bowl
- The Eurowhat Podcast talking about Grocery Store Music
- Blocked Party talking about the retail location I would most like to do a guerilla DJ set in
- and finally, Never Post's hostility towards Spotify gets a shoutout from Alex Sujong Laughling in this great hour of radio from 1A. Highly recommended!
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That's what I have for you this go around – I hope you enjoyed! When / if the life-related curveballs cease, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled updates but ... we're probably post-as-post can here for the time being.
If there's anything you liked, loved, hated, want to see more of, see less of, see exactly the same amount of, or something you just wanna get off your chest ... I think you can jsut reply to this email? Would love to hear from you.
xo