The Whys
There are numerous reasons why I started to write here. In the literal sense, here because it’s not Substack. Substack is the easy option for email-centered writing due to its popularity, however it’s also deep in Venture Capital mode trying to get more, more, more users and is now a platform. Do you know you can do live videos in substack? Why? Who cares? I don’t want a publishing empire, I don’t want to create content, I just want an easy way to write some words and email them.
That, and the nazis1.
I honestly do not know anything about Buttondown’s founder’s politics, maybe for the best. All I do know is that Buttondown does one thing and it does it fine enough. I wish I could embed images in the free tier, though restrictions bring fewer distractions: just words.
Secondly, there is an opportunity open to me to take a free creative writing course that is normally very much not free. I have never done any creative writing so to get to the point where I can do any creative writing I need to rewire my old neurons to be able to do any kind of writing again. The road there is practice, and practice is paved with “write what you know.” Unfortunately for me I know a lot about really stupid stuff so I might have a lot of rewiring to do.
Lastly, I have a lot of tabs open in my browser at all times and while I save links to various online holes they tend to be forgotten the second they’re closed. One of the aspects of weblogs that I miss the most is the contextual threads that connect links and life together. It's a hopeless derivation from being terminally online. My ultimate desire is to have fewer tabs, fewer apps, and slower time. It all starts with a link dump. Here’s one.
I wrote this a couple weeks ago prior to us going on vacation and disconnecting. Since then, literally days ago, I see that it’s gotten worse: Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog.
Random Notes
I referenced the “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” last time but missed that the “I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again” guy replied to it: contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai.
Look, I’m tired of this slop as much as anyone else and I don’t want to write about it either. It is unavoidable. Whatever you agree or disagree with in the above post, the one chapter that rings true to me and is the reason I can’t avoid this crap: Chapter V. Just replace ‘or’ with ‘and.’
The Canadians Are Furious (nymag.com) (archive.ph link)
Canadian identity and patriotism is a very superficial and performative thing and leave it to New York Magazine to look at current Canadian grievances with the USA from a superficial and performative point of view: asking some patrons at a tacky gimmick bar on Queen West or at a Loblaws grocery store. The author then goes to a farmer’s market in Ottawa when the king was in town for the throne speech.
Rolling out the red carpet for one’s old colonial master may not seem like an obvious demonstration of national sovereignty, but it made sense in Canada
It doesn’t make sense. Nothing about Canadian identity makes sense, especially in the context of the crown. There is a very large contingent of Canadians that are highly traditionalist to British institutional history, yet somehow very conservative and white nationalist in a USA Republican sense. That’s not my Canada.
I have very different opinions on how Canada should act and shape its future than the mainstream and I’m pessimistic enough to see this performative nationalism as just that: a performance. These dark times are a generational opportunity to stand on guard and make something our own with the values we espouse; most will acquiesce to vassal status.
Related Links
Substack Did Not See That Coming (anamariecox.com)
Substack does not have a clear future as a newsletter business, I'm not the first to notice that. But it doesn’t have to fail outright to be a disaster. It just has to keep trying to become a life-sized map of the internet: maximum content, maximum churn. The center cannot hold—especially not for newsletters, a format that depends on intimacy and long-standing trust.
You Should Probably Leave Substack
https://leavesubstack.com/
The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work (404media.co)
Betting that this time, hinging the future of our industry on massive, monopolistic tech giants will work out is the most Lucy with the football thing I can imagine.
I’ve Seen How the Neo-Nazi Movement Is Escalating. You Should Worry. (theassemblync.com)
Language emanating from the White House “would not be out of place in a mass shooter manifesto,” Lewis said. “These things matter. The weight that is given by the media to an official press release that is openly white supremacist, all of that creates a permissive environment. All of that is the thing that eventually pushes another person to carry out an act of targeted violence.”
Meanwhile, the militant accelerationist threat is rapidly evolving, with a dizzying array of new groups popping up along a spectrum from nihilism to national socialism. It’s urgent that we understand the threats to date, simply to have a workable baseline to assess what might unfold tomorrow.
How incel language infected the mainstream internet — and brought its toxicity with it (theverge.com) (archive.ph link)
the dissemination of incel memes across platforms points to how fringe ideas can become mainstream, and that algorithms can perpetuate dangerous concepts in the name of engagement optimization. The lookism concepts from r/RateMe, including jawline angle, eye distance, and facial symmetry, are eugenics- based talking points that were already regarded as pseudoscientific by the nineteenth century. Now, with beauty influencers making content about those metrics, it feels as if we’ve reverted to social Darwinist ideas about skull measurement.
Using Maps to Pinpoint an Aurora (maps.com) (loosely related to vacation)
Using data from NASA, NOAA, and others, Kuril first mapped the average energy flux to estimate the strength of the aurora for a given time range. He then mapped average cloud cover to determine the conditions that might be typical for the season. Finally, a map of light pollution helps filter out locations too washed out with artificial lighting. By combining all these data, Kuril produced a metric to identify which areas offered the best chance to see the aurora. This aurora score, once mapped, provides a chart to the areas with a strong aurora, clear skies, and low influence from the cities below.
Listen to this
New Burial release today, Comafields / Imaginary Festival. The most surprising aspect of it is the realization that it’s been 20 years since South London Boroughs came out.