January 27, 2025

📡 – 2025-01-27

Too cooked to be back; too back to be cooked

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🖋️

It took me a moment to realize, but I stopped writing these newsletters when Txitter began suppressing links. Though an email newsletter, the conversation around 📡 was headquartered on social media … maybe at first because no one really thought of Substack as a place to interact. And maybe then, later, because Buttondown didn’t have comments, or likes.

Anyway, it’s hard to continue releasing something in a vacuum – for me, at least; I like the making for itself, but in the releasing, I tend to need some feedback. So when I would share links to the newest post, 7 (literally) people might see it, and no conversation would follow. I could see some folks clicking links in the email back end, but remained generally unsure what was the most interesting and conversation-starting, vs simply the most grabby album art / headline / thumbnail / etc (my rubric for success is, yes, bizarre, and narrow).

Twitter, then, died.

Or, I mean, it has shambled on. I’ve left. And it occurred to me only this week: Bluesky does not suppress links, and Buttondown added comments. So maybe we can give this another go? Thus, here we are.

I am ashamed, really, when I think about it, of having tabled this project – which I like – for any reason related to Elon. But the heart wants what it wants.

I hope yours wants links.

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👂

A reminder, as it has been a while: music goes in order, roughly, from least to most “challenging”. The scale is not uniform, and the distribution is not consistent. All of these records below, for instance, are rather pretty. The first two are the most traditional, structurally. They get more adventurous, from there – though none of is frantic, nor noisy.

I have avoided, also, and I think I will continue to, describing what I have included. Click through! Give a quick listen, maybe you will be surprised.

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📚

Laura Dern’s letter to David Lynch: You wove L.A. into our dreams

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-01-22/laura-dern-last-letter-to-david-lynch-blue-velvet-wild-at-heart-inland-empire

Through you, I’ve learned what it means to be loved without judgment, just pure acceptance. You have forever transformed all of art, be it film or music or painting or cartoons or giving the weather report — all of it became a space for dreaming. All of it brought you equal joy and creative bliss and was led in the moment by deep instinct and creative consciousness. You made art every day because you had to. You meditated every day as a dedicated act of service. You lived in gratitude and grace. You never knew bitterness. In life, you always felt lucky.

Can a Steam profile be a real memorial for a lost life?, Alice Bell

Can a Steam profile be a real memorial for a lost life? | Eurogamer.net

How a Steam profile can help you grieve a loved one.

Many times over the last two years, I have looked at Ash's Steam profile and the games they played the most, and felt a desire to play them too. It's a desire I can't really explain, but to me, the record of what Ash was playing feels like not only an authentic record of who they were, but also a more present one. At the same time, I wonder if it's just me being terribly self-involved, inventing an extant connection in a collection of curated materials, rather than in something real.

That Shape Am I, Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood · That Shape Am I: Among the Mystics

Doubt is the dimension of the religious experience that brings it into reality, gives it that voluptuousness which...

James never disappears into the Latin ether, but speaks to us from the world of fresh groceries: words such as spark and pert and racy. If we trust him for his pragmatism, we love him for his verve. In James there is a sense of many doors opening on dimensions; he goes between them with his lively and solemn gift, his curiosity. And what I think of as his characteristic nouns: lustre and reality. The corrugated rays coming off the first, and the second almost seeming to have human eyes. Can you imagine sitting in the audience at one of the Gifford Lectures? A string of white agates around your neck, perhaps (like the ones that Luther, pig-of-the-world, claimed he would eat if only God would bring about the Day of Judgment tomorrow).

Experts warn about the 'crumbling infrastructure' of federal government data, Hansi Lo Wang

Funding uncertainty threatens U.S. economic data, federal statistics : NPR

Unstable federal funding puts at risk the government statistics used to track the U.S. economy and population, officials and data users warn. That's before any cuts by President Trump and Congress.

In recent months, budget shortfalls and the restrictions of short-term funding have led to the end of some datasets by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, known for its tracking of the gross domestic product, and to proposals by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to reduce the number of participants surveyed to produce the monthly jobs report. A "lack of multiyear funding" has also hurt efforts to modernize the software and other technology the BLS needs to put out its data properly, concluded a report by an expert panel tasked with examining multiple botched data releases last year.

Trapped in the Maw of a Stillborn God (Pt. 1), Edward Ongweso Jr

Trapped in the Maw of a Stillborn God (Pt. 1)

Vegas as a laboratory for surveillance and social control, the explosion of gambling as a sign of a degenerate culture seized by despair, AI delusions at CES, and the future.

Weaponized pleasure and hedonic engineering are not new concepts when it comes to consumer products, nor is the idea that something can be ubiquitous yet designed in a way that slowly kills its consumers as profitably as possible. In fact, the usual response to this is “regrettable substitution” where the toxic compound or hazardous product is banned, but replaced with something nearly identical. Despite this, people will debate whether the supposed benefits (taxes, recreation, etc.), especially when it comes to gambling. I think it clearly causes more harm than its worth, however! And not just for gambling—which, again, is intentionally designed to be as addictive as possible with finely tuned physical environments as well as digital technologies and has served as a laboratory for tools of surveillance + social control—but for the multitude of industries and spheres of life that have been touched by gambling and its tech innovations.

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📹

Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering

Elliott Smith - Clementine live + interview 1995 (Breakfast Time)

How To Synthesize Realistic Water

Kerri Chandler | Boiler Room: New York

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🕹️

Folks. Are you playing Caves of Qud? It may be the best thing that has ever happened to me. Highly, highly recommended. FFO Dwarf Fortress, Brogue, Stillfleet and other superfuture sci-fi, dying (but not necessarily difficulty).

Also on the radar: Citizen Sleeper 2 comes out Jan 31!

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😎

• Never Post just hit its one year anniversary! You can listen to our State of the Pod episode here, if you want to get some insight into how the Podcast Sausage is made. We talk about how many people listen, how much money we made, how much we spent, and how long we think we’ll be able to keep doing the show based on those numbers. New episode is out this week, on Weds!
• RIP Corp put out a new episode on female-focused co-working space The Wing two weeks ago. Ingrid takes an interesting approach with this one: what if we consider this business – founded by political staffer Audrey Gelman – as a celebrity itself? We end up with an interesting perspective on pinkwashing, capitalism-but-make-it-feminist, and – I think, at least – the idea of someone or something being too popular to fail, even after it does.
• Fun City’s most recent ep came out at the end of last month: the gang is working their way to the top of a city-wide conspiracy involving the police, healthcare, and a mysterious, shadowy group of magicians (because of course!) Next ep out early next month.
• We also recently put out some FC Bone Cone: the 5th ep of Filth Village, our patrons-only Mork Borg side game. In this episode, In The Hall of the Geist, some sell-swords are sent to best the powerful, spectral Bürgermeister of the game’s main setting: a small, decrepit village called Lastefarr. Click through for a 5m preview if you’re not a Patron!

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✌️

That’s what I got for you folks! I hope this return finds you as well as possible, state of things considered. And perhaps we’ll do it again some time. Say… two weeks-ish from now?

Until then, drop a line however you wish. I think you can just respond to this email. And Buttondown claims there are comments to be left on the web interface…

xo
-Mike

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