My neck hurts. I am never not looking down. When I am not looking at my phone, I become slightly anxious. And then, when I do actually look at it, I become even more so. It reminds me of how I once felt about cigarettes. I experience the world with a meticulously crafted, tiny computer slab between me and it. I am an asshole. But so, maybe, are you?
Instead of the usual gushing over the new shiny, I wish more people wrote phone reviews like this.
The new Apple Watch OS has improved “exercise detection”. Except when I’m sitting on the couch, rocking the baby to sleep, it will buzz and say “It looks like you’re doing an elliptical workout, track it?”. At least the fall detection looks like it actually works.
I have a really low tolerance for nerdcore, but this is actually pretty good. And it speaks volumes that even MC Frontalot is sorta renouncing nerd culture. From “Internet Sucks”:
I don’t love you any more internet You used to be a safe home for my nerd hard and my intellect Now you got so much hate but you just gotta interject Now you got too many chefs up in your kitchenette
Delighted for Cartoon Saloon. They’re quietly pumping out some of the loveliest animations I’ve seen in a long time – like Ghibli at their finest. If you don’t believe me, check out Puffin Rock on Netflix, which is a genuinely great children’s cartoon that’s full of charm and wit and visual inventiveness and it tells stories about friendship and intelligence that have none of the normal moralising one traditionally associates with children’s tv.
Laura Miller reviews Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, a book about rediscovering the power to actually read – I mean deep read – in the digital world of 2018.
There’s a lot of things that stood out to me in this review, but I’ll highlight this one because it’s so obvious and also so right
One of the reasons that digital readers skim is not because of some quality inherent in screens, as Wolf seems to think, but because so much of what we find online is not worth our full attention.
There are two times when it’s appropriate to use Clair de Lune: over amazing high-resolution videos of sunrise on the moon, and the ending of Ocean’s Eleven.
Anil Dash recently took the step of unfollowing everyone he was following on Twitter. This line in particular stood out to me:
… when something terrible happens in the news, I don’t see an endless, repetitive stream of dozens of people reacting to it in succession. It turns out, I don’t mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.
That’s entirely it. I’ve got a private list of maybe 20 people I follow because they’re the ones that are the least outraged about The Thing That People Are Outraged About Today, and it’s recently become my main view for Twitter because I’m too exhausted (emotionally, spiritually) for the main timeline.
Congrats to Simon Stålenhag, but I can’t help feeling like, culturally, we’ve scraped right through the bottom of the barrel and found more barrel to scrape.
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