johnke.meUnplatform is an interactive guidebook, online library, and recommendations database intended to help you escape social media and join the indie web.
A great set of resources to help people of all levels of technical expertise detach from the modern web. Or, as they put it “return to web 1.5”. I really like that as a phrase.
This isn’t wildly different from Kenji Lopez Alt’s advice, but I’ll use any excuse to add to my cacio e pepe tag.
Finished Perfect Organism: An Alien Isolation Companion by Andy Kelly. He says he wants it to be like a director’s commentary on a film, but for a video game. Definitely for obssessives though. He really gets into the minutiae.
Currently reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which is one of the books that inspired Orwell’s 1984 and holy cow does it show. Very similar books except We is so very, very Russian. So it’s a tougher read than I was expecting. Looking forward to something light after I’m finished.
My wife and I have started a rewatch of The Sopranos. (Confession time! I say ‘rewatch’ here but I’ve never actually watched beyond the pilot episode. So it’s a first-time watch for me.)
With the passing of David Lynch, I’m also rewatching (actual rewatch this time) of Twin Peaks. It still holds up.
Accidentally picked up a Balatro addiction. Oops! Now I finish off every evening with a quick round. Not sure if I’m actually getting any better at the game though! Feels weird to really enjoy playing something that doesn’t have an obvious and noticeable improvement path, but here we are.
I hate to be that guy but I’ve noticed a bit of brightness creeping into the evenings and it’s cheering me up. We’re gonna make it!
Also just before Christmas, I picked up a Bambu A1 printer and I’ve been really enjoying churning things out for that. My daughter had a Taskmaster Junior themed birthday party a couple of weeks ago and it’s been great being able to make unique little things to elevate the party, like Taskmaster Stamps for the tasks.
One of one. Oiche Mhaith, David Lynch.
A handy app for connecting to some self-hosted services (e.g. Sonarr, Radarr, Sabnzbd). It’s replaced a whole folder of bookmarks on my home screen.
Danny O’Brien on mystery of whether Elon Musk is Adrian Dittmann:
I feel like I’m spoilering about a week or so of social media entertainment for you here by not trying to lead you down the rat-hole of evidence in favor for Dittman-Elon, but this Spectator piece, apparently based on research conducted by crimew and frends, lays out the counter-argument — in that they kinda doxxed the real Dittmann. It’s not as the lawyers say, dispositive, but I think it holds water better than the pro-Dittmann!Elon arguments. (I’m using the fanfic bang notation here, where Dittmann!Elon is an official variant of the canonical Elon).
Every year, my wife and I do an escape room for my birthday (this year’s was Incognito’s “Prohibition”, which was ace!). Morty is like Yelp but for escape rooms and immersive experiences. Very handy for nerds like me!
In my house, we’ve started singing “everything is broken all of the time” instead of “little bit of everything all of the time” line from Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet”. We do it every time we encounter a problem with our tech (“Hey Siri what’s 5 times 3?” “I found some web results, I can send them to your phone” - great stuff, thanks Siri).
So Ed Zitron’s recent Web Summit talk about why all tech is so terrible now really resonated with me (tl;dr it’s because of greed). It’s great to see someone else so passionate and angry about it.
This morning as I was making a coffee, barely awake, something came floating out of the aether and lodged itself into my brain. I was awake less than five minutes and the universe had already bestowed on me my earworm for the day: the theme song from The Snorks
I haven’t thought about this show in probably 30 years or so? But I could remember every word of the theme song. As these shows go, it’s pretty niche. It’s not like it’s The Smurfs or something. But if I was to ask anyone of my vintage if they remembered The Snorks, I’d say most probably have some memory of it. We could get all nostalgic and be all “hey remember this?” “oh yeah, that was great! And remember this other thing? Good times.” It’s embedded deep and wide.
This got me thinking, what are my kids going to suddenly remember in 30 years? What theme songs are going to unexpectedly pop into their heads as they’re barefoot and bleary-eyed one morning? Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese is on hard rotation in my house, so probably that. Little Lunch maybe, but I don’t even know if that has a theme song.
This is just our house. But what are their friends going to remember? Now that we no longer have a monoculture and everything is so completely fragmented, what’s going to happen to communal nostalgia? In 30 years? Will it even be a thing? “Hey, remember Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese?” “Nah I never watched that” or “We didn’t have Netflix, we only had Prime”. What is going to happen without these common cultural touchstones?
A couple of things to bear in mind here.
The first is that there’s still a couple of franchises that still hint at a monoculture. Pokemon and Bluey are the big ones. It’s small but it’s still there. So maybe it’s not entirely dead yet.
The second and most important thing is: maybe this isn’t a bad thing? During the pandemic, I wrote about how nostalgia was helping me protect my peace as my anxiety was spiking pretty hard. I don’t think nostalgia is, by itself, a bad thing. But maybe, just maybe, there’s such a thing as too much nostalgia and that’s why my generation are, by and large, emotionally stunted adult babies? So perhaps we could achieve more with less of it?
At least the next generation won’t have to put up with jokes about leaving the immersion on.
This is a great tool for learning about the different sorting algorithms but also if you bump the delay enough, you get the kinds of beeps and boops that make for some wonderful nerd ASMR.