“Elections shouldn’t be about personalities, they should be about policies.”
I disagree. Personality is policy.
Chris Silverman page 3
X Blocks
I don’t pay much attention to #X these days, having abandoned it a while back, but things like basically gutting the “block” function make me wonder what the strategy is here, or if there is one. I don’t think this solves a real problem in a way that will make the service better for users.
That’s the problem. I can’t think of a single thing Elon Musk has done that actually improved #Twitter. Not one thing.
Lax moderation and a UX polluted with upsells and junk might get them more money short-term and make it more fun for right-wing trolls, but as far as practical-minded product decisions that took Twitter to the next level, everything Musk has done so far isn’t just off-putting, it’s weird. Bad products aren’t good long-term bets. Especially not a product that (1) already doesn’t make money, (2) has a deeply entrenched reputation for being bad, and (3) is facing an ever-broadening array of less-bad competitors.
There is no way he’s getting his $44 billion back with X in this shape.
Quad-bomb
If you’re watching Four Seasons on Netflix and you get to the part where they’re playing frisbee on the quad or whatever it’s supposed to be, that’s the shot I almost photobombed on the way to lunch today.
Cabel Sasser’s XOXO 2024 talk
I just love Cabel Sasser’s XOXO talk. I’m not going to summarize it—that would spoil the fun—but it’s got everything I like: art, mystery, and investigation, driven by a fascination with the strange. Highly recommend it.
ACF WTF
This business with Matt Mullenweg basically stealing Advanced Custom Fields and ransoming it back to WP Engine is beyond belief.
I wasn’t inclined to sympathize with WP Engine to begin with, but Automattic lost whatever moral high ground they had the moment this started.
Keep it simple
An attitude I’m seeing a lot of, in the wake of the Mullenweg/WP Engine drama, is “ditch #WordPress and replace it with [whatever static site generator is currently trendy].”
So many folks in the tech community don’t seem to grasp that a lot of us—including those of us with tech skills—don’t want to be worrying about things like build processes, deployments, or command-line wrangling with Ruby or Node. We want to log in, do our work, and hit “Publish”.
Mailmanarchist
The local mailman is a somewhat wild-looking guy: heavily tattooed, long beard, hair buzzed on the sides and long on the top, which he’s pulled into a ponytail. I’ve never talked to him, I just see him around town. He apparently keeps his lunch in the large, green mailbox-shaped cabinet outside my building (I thought these were used to store mail, but my landlord, who thinks it’s unsightly, was complaining once that the mail guy just stores personal items in it).
I’ve always wondered about this guy: clearly a nonconformist, but he’s working one of the most regimented, straight-laced jobs there is. What’s his deal? Does he play in a punk band on weekends? Working his way through art school? Recovering from something?
Stormy weather
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
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
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.