📡 – 2025-03-11
An "empathy game"
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I’ve also been on a real Beatriz Ferreyra kick after discovering her work last week. Ferreyra is a still-working electroacoustic composer from Argentina who worked @ GRM in Paris in the 60s alonside all the French guys you’d expect, if you happen to know about this particular group of French guys. But her work is very much her own, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. Here are a few of my favorites:
ALSO also, this mix is amazing
While I was on my Fulbright in Kyrgyzstan last year, I discovered a ton of amazing disco/funk music from Central Asia. Here's a small mix I made with some gems from Central Asia, interspersed with a smattering Turkish, Levantine and Chinese songs https://soundcloud.com/yaxshiyan/jaz-keldi-mix
— Yan Matusevich (@ymatusik.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T23:13:29.656Z
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The Atlanta Antifascist Guide to Wheatpasting
https://www.anarchistfederation.net/the-atlanta-antifascist-guide-to-wheatpasting/In today’s environment, social media is important, but fascist-friendly tech oligarchs have instituted many censorship choke points that keep antifascist messages from spreading. Even posting something as basic as “punch a Nazi!” might be enough to get you banned. As a result, many people are confused about what fascism actually is and how to resist it. Sometimes, seeing one simple wheatpasted message in day-to-day life creates a visceral connection and can have more impact than a thousand social media upvotes. Showing solidarity to the victims and targets of fascism and lifting their spirits is another crucial purpose of these physical messages.
Our friends regularly wheatpaste simple messages and stickers around Atlanta.
Columbo: A Marxist Fable
Columbo: A Marxist Fable – CARY EDWARDS PHD
I’m a Columbo fan. It’s a great way to while away a quiet afternoon watching the excellent, and sadly departed, Peter Falk trick another unsuspecting big shot into thinking he’s an idiot, when all the while he’s working the whole thing out. It’s structurally entertaining, shifting the drama to a battle of wits, by revealing…
from 2017
What occurred to me the other day was the realization that it wasn’t just the show’s structure that made it different – it was its politics. Here is a mainstream American show that espouses a Marxist viewpoint (bear with me).
Mr. Lonely
Mr. Lonely - Dissent Magazine
Some have suggested that young men are drawn to Andrew Tate because they suffer from a dearth of social contact. Yet men go to Tate not to alleviate loneliness but to intensify it.
Some have suggested that young men are drawn to Andrew Tate because they suffer from a dearth of social contact. Yet men go to Tate not to alleviate loneliness but to intensify it.
We're getting the social media crisis wrong
We're getting the social media crisis wrong
The bigger problem isn't disinformation. It's degraded democratic publics
My explanation of what is happening is this. We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one. Explaining it is going to require some words. Bear with me.
Building an Easier to Use FFmpeg With LLMs
Building an Easier to Use FFmpeg With LLMs | Drew Breunig
Using the llm CLI to execute FFmpeg incantations using natural language.
For the unfamiliar, FFmpeg is a command-line tool for converting video and audio files. It is ridiculously powerful and ridiculously complex. Most people I know use Google as the primary interface for FFmpeg: search for the job to be done, copy-and-paste the command. This pattern quickly migrated to ChatGPT and Claude, which proved excellent at FFmpeg incantations.
But it can get even easier…
Convenience is killing us
Convenience is killing us - by J. P. Hill - New Means
Let me be the first to say I like my little conveniences.
But the truth is we need comprehensively easier lives. We need systemic change, not just gimmicks that save us a few minutes in our hectic, difficult days. We need to change the structure of society so that life doesn’t exact such a toll, so that we can live with greater ease instead of craving fleeting moments of respite in a sea of stress and toil. What we certainly do not need is a fetishization of convenience when the price we pay for it is the gradual decay of a good life for us all.
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shopping should be harder
It takes 0.3sec to make what ??? What a fast cooking !!!
Alan Licht @ The Stone, New York City 20.10.2011
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The Story of Heterosexuality
Story of Heterosexuality by hatimb00
an art game.
What is heterosexuality? A preference? A biological trait? An orientation? A style of life? A philosophy? In my attempt to understand it, I have decided to make this game: Story of Heterosexuality. In so doing, I also wanted to feel what it is like to be a heterosexual and experience their struggles so as to become more empathetic with them, which makes this an "empathy game".
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I got COVID so I got laid up for a week and change and I’m JUST now able to talk without sounding like I’m standing one room over; put up a Fun Chatty over on the Fun City Patreon, that was our first since the present administration took office. To add to the chaos: it was a rare WHOLE CAST CHATTY. Rare vibes. Highly recommend.
There’s a Never Post release this week, in which I talk about Wikipedia vs Authoritarians and Georgia talks about how to have fun on the internet now that everything sucks. Latest episode is about the information environment on Tiktok before and after its 12 hour ban in the US, plus a rousing WHAT IS GOING ON HERE. Hans also just put up a Slow Post, our members only sleep-aid Side Show pod which people are calling “the only sleep aid podcast that actually works.” Or at least they would be saying that if they weren’t soooooo sweeeeepyyyyyyy.
I’m gonna be on Matt Silverman’s Influence next week (I think I can tell you that?!) in which I say things like “I love the internet, I just hate 90% of the stuff that’s on it” and “We have to abandon the idea of ‘building audience’ because it is poisonous.” I’m a fun hang! Normal, chill guy: that’s me!
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That’s what I got and I’m sticking to it. Say hey in the comments below (tell me which Beatriz Ferreyra track is your fave) or just respond to this email. Hope you’re good, all things considered.