October 2022

Stormy weather

Posted on October 17, 2022

Happening outside: a downpour the likes of which I haven’t seen in a while. Down by the river, I hear what sounds like foghorns.

It’s nice. We don’t really get weather here, and I miss it. If something isn’t falling from the sky—be it water or electricity—I’m bored. Thunderstorms are rare, and they seemed to be especially rare this summer. The Hudson Valley, for whatever reason, is not in the flight path of storms—they’ll sweep down across NYC, or up, across Massachusetts towards Boston.

There wasn’t a lot of rain this summer. Mostly it was cloudy.

Instagone

Posted on October 16, 2022

Every day, I wonder how long #Instagram is going to stay around. The experience just gets worse and worse.

At this point, my feed is a torrent of barely relevant ads and videos that have no value to me. The limitations are ridiculous: you can’t copy text, you can’t include links in posts, you can’t browse the site if you’re not logged in. The design isn’t ineptly bad so much as calculatedly, maliciously bad.

I remember, a decade ago and more, when these sites—now synonymous with an internet gone bad—were legitimately cool places to be. They had a reputation for oversharing and mundanity, but they felt like communities you wanted to be part of. The only thing I get from them now is stress, chaos, and the pervasive sense of being harassed by the people who run them. I still share my work on #Twitter and Instagram—unfortunately, they remain relevant enough to qualify as parts of my “digital presence” that I have to pay attention to—but I never browse them. I hate them too much to bother.

And I wonder if this will always be the natural conclusion of any mainstream-oriented social media site. Could something with much more limited features and minimal advertising survive? Do people really want to watch strangers’ home movies as much as some venture capitalist thinks they do?

Liquid Death

Posted on October 12, 2022

Walking into the local coffee shop this morning, I noticed the large cooler where they sell cold drinks had a shelf of cans with LIQUID DEATH emblazoned on them in large, death-metal blackletter. I assumed it was some alcoholic substance until I took a closer look and saw that it was actually mineral water.

I don’t know what to think. That level of attitude, applied to water? I try to avoid judging people by the brands they prefer, but there’s no way you’d buy such a thing without intending to make a statement of some sort. At least the people who made Death cigarettes could argue it was a warped sort of truth-in-advertising ploy. Trying to pitch overpriced mineral water as a punk-rock, counterculture lifestyle accoutrement is like selling a Marilyn Manson-branded wine rack; nobody who’s actually part of that scene would want to be seen with it.

So I have no idea if this appropriation of gothic morbidity is outsider cynicism, insider irony, or somebody who saw a niche and went for it. The company is apparently worth over half a billion dollars. Whatever the hell it is, it worked.