Seth Godin nerds out about typography for a bit. “Typography is a signal, not just a way to put letters on a page.… They say you can tell a lot about someone from their handwriting. For my professional life, my handwriting has always involved a keyboard.”
A brief history of the Apple Lisa computer, lavishly illustrated with historical images. Released in January, 1983, the Lisa was a commercial flop, but it pioneered the graphical user interface still in use in Windows and Macs today.
Eggflation is just more price-gouging. Cory Doctorow: One company controls the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food, and it’s making record profits—up 65% net year-over-year.
In its communications to investors, Cal-Maine’s eminently guillotineable CFO Max Bowman attributed the monopolist’s good fortune to “significantly higher selling prices” and “our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures.”
Dumb and shameful until it’s not
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says Web 3.0 is here. It’s not “the blockchain-backed cyberlibertarian free-for-all, where internet access is predicated on using crypto wallets to buy and sell digital assets” or the metaverse. It’s AI.
Now, you might say, “Ryan, A.I. is completely overhyped. Generative-A.I. art tools can’t even figure out how many fingers people have. There are all kinds of legal and ethical problems around this technology. It’s exploitative. It’s wildly insecure. We don’t even fully understand what it will do to our brains, yet. And there is a new dumb company every day hawking worthless A.I. fixes to problems no one actually needs to solve.” Well, fun fact: That was true of Web 2.0 too! In 2013, I used an app called Foursquare to check-in to a dive bar in Greenpoint every weekend via the geotargeting on my phone so I could get free tater tots. Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.
Also: " … the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue."
And Mutekimaru, a Japanese YouTuber, “created a system that lets his fish play Pokémon.”
Well, last week, the fish were playing the newest Pokémon release Pokémon Scarlet. The problem is the game is very buggy and during the playthrough it glitched out and the game crashed, but the fish continued controlling the Nintendo Switch’s buttons. The fish opened up the Nintendo Store, bought a game, and, for a brief moment, flashed their owner’s credit card number on the screen. Whoops!
The Reality of Being a Parent With a Controversial Past
Lily Burana wrote a bestselling memoir about her life as a stripper. Now she’s the mother of a four-year-old.
Our cultural fondness for outlaws is context-specific: Everyone loves a badass, but no one loves a bad parent.
…
we Parents with Pasts plead for the clemency of kindness, for assumptions of our inherent normalcy. After all, we wrestle our kids’ pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.
The Last Days of Hollywood’s Most Reviled Reporter (NYTimes). A profile of the late Nikki Finke, the most hated and feared reporter in Hollywood. She was an internet journalist in the tradition of Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.