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Instagone

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    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

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      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.

      Isla Bonita

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        At 3:22 in “La Isla Bonita”, Madonna sings the McDonalds “I’m lovin’ it” riff, 17 years before McDonalds built an ad campaign around those notes.

        That is some seriously subliminal, long-game product placement.

        Ideal project

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          Ideal project: to be handed some really ugly UI, like RISC OS or Irix, and the brief is “you have complete freedom to fix this.”

          Mac icons

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            Did not realize until Dan Moren pointed it out that macOS includes a tiny (and somewhat buried) museum of Apple hardware.

            Remember these guys?

            Longtime Apple users might recall that macOS has had an icon museum for quite some time—if you cracked open your System file back in the 68K/PPC days, you’d find a trove of tiny 32×32 depictions of Apple’s other machines.

            A photograph of a lampshade G4 iMac.
            A realistic rendering of an old Apple xserve, a metal box with numerous drive bays and buttons.
            A realistic rendering of the first iPhone.
            A realistic rendering of the first Apple TV, a small silver box with a white Apple logo and the word 'tv' on it.
            A screenshot of classic Mac OS showing a window from ResEdit. The window shows a lot of small icons for different Mac models.
            A a lot of small icons for different Mac models, Apple printers, and system files. This is from ResEdit in classic Mac OS.