My long-time internet buddy Liz has just put out a really sick new album, full of tumbling abstractions of shredded post-indie pop collage and (the highlight for me) some extensive ambient sections full of waves of shifting colors and delicate arrangements. It's awesome, support her!!
The package of censorship and surveillance bills brought up in todays markup has been advanced
Continue to contact your representatives and demand this legislation be opposed. Tell your family and friends, explain how these bills are not what they appear, and ask them to join us in opposition!
posted about this a month ago bsky.app/profile/ella...
i've said this before but the "left behind" rhetoric appeals specifically to not very tech savvy normies and older (particularly gen x) people who felt like the social media era and new media in general passed them by and now feel like they have to jump aboard whatever new train to make up for it
tbh probably most of my favorites would put me in the "aging millennial" category lol
i experienced a ton of this meanness in the 2010's and it made me radically re-evaluate my life and my approach to everything because it was so traumatizing. i'd like to hope some people are getting better, but it depends on the space. i do know i have a lot of red flags i avoid like the plague now
i love how they became so pathologically afraid of firing people after Trump 1 because it made them look weak and disorganized that even the firing from the "you're fired" guy now is is in this weirdly soft and measured "participation trophy" type language.
while we're on the subject: there is no online echo chamber that is within an order of magnitude as politically, socially, and epistemic ally distorting as the average red state affluent suburb. there are masses that yearn for your ministry, reach out to them!
it feels like i wasted way too much time and energy doing that, thinking it would lead to somewhere or do something that it never did. and even when it never does, these platforms are always going to keep wanting you to engage with them as long as you're on them.
i've often said on here that 2016-2020 was formative for me in how much time i spent just scrolling social media and feeling bad and feeling powerless, and it seems like a lot of people are going through that now. and so i would recommend not doing that, because it actually helps no one
we live in a world more than ever where you can just surround yourself with people who agree with you and you never have to feel bad about anything ever, unless you want to. and if you want to, there's an infinite number of things you can - and people will - make you feel bad about.
my problem with the "we are all guilty/complicit" framing. it's not capable of reaching or shaming the people who are actually primarily responsible at this point. they are seemingly unmoored from ever having to feel bad about anything, or at least they think they are.
often think about how the people who are least responsible for the current state of affairs seem to feel the most bad, to the point of complete paralysis. and the people who are the most responsible are seemingly not capable of feeling bad about anything they do, ever. an unfortunate problem.
Saint Elizabeth tracks categorized by if the title is mentioned in the song or not:
1 cult of me: YES
2 terrible town: NO
3 just kids on the internet: NO
4 go fuck yourself: YES
5 intensive care: YES
6 blank cassette: YES
7 whyte dress: YES
8 bloodbath: NO
9 end of the trail: YES
10 the known: YES
sometimes you wake up with songs in your head for no particular reason
Send my upcoming GDC talk to your favorite small indie studio boss who is feeling guilty about exploiting their workers and tell them they can convert the studio to a co-op- schedule.gdconf.com/session/co-o...
Totally amazing new music
NEW
LIZ
RYERSON
Hey Im really bad at self-promoting but The Extended Universe is out in a month and a half and if you havent pre-ordered it yet and want to support my work this is a really good way to do it!
please no one ever show B3313 to Miyamoto, for many different reasons.
also without context i'm somehow guessing this is about Super Mario World, which has a truly grotesque level of secrets. which is the best thing about the game for me.
in contrast to Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, i think the grotesqueness of videogames are one of their greatest assets. agree to disagree, my friend!
What's scary about this story is the surveillance it hints at. This trans woman had changed her name, legally, but chose not to change her gender marker. She was apparently flagged in the DMV system as trans and her license was invalidated under a law that supposedly only concerned gender markers.
the effect of coming back into a conversation that is ever more insular, self-referential, intense and moving at warp speed is that it appears to the outsider like everyone's unhinged, even if the conversation makes perfect sense & is rational to the participants. feel like that cant be a good thing
had a death in the family and was almost completely off the internet for a few days & my observation is that there is too much happening too fast such that basic facts abt the world are difficult to ascertain unless you are mainlining info all the time & doing that seems to drive people insane
a single paragraph guide to taking pleasure in both the games you play and the material you put into the world. via @meredithgran.com
meredithgran.com/perfect-tide...
Candace Owens i can imagine just becoming like a more generic new agey conspiracy theory grifter person and Fuentes becoming like some kind of Bill Maher type except more antisemitic
not saying we'll see any less antisemitism, misogyny, etc from them. but we're going to see how hollow the far right media ecosystem really is when the current administration collapses and some of these people scramble to try and rebrand themselves.
would not be shocked if Fuentes and Candace Owens et al pivot to a more ideologically ambiguous generic "political commentator" role in the future because they are fundamentally grifters lacking a real core being and they know credulous libs will accept them into the fold basically no matter what
