Any internet community dedicated to a particular topic inevitably ends up rewarding those users who take the most extreme position possible in relation to that topic. You can see the incredible rise of artistic populism in the past two decades for a great example. Once upon a time, there was a communal sense that being too invested in children’s media as an adult was a mark of arrested development and something to be embarrassed about; the world’s nerds spent many years developing a persecution complex because of this belief. But it turns out that such social conditioning plays an important role. Once the internet became a mass phenomenon, the nerds all found each other and rebelled against any sense of obligation that they should ever engage with art on any level more sophisticated than “Is this badass???”
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Here is an acoustic version of The New Pornographers’ Firework in the Falling Snow with a guest appearance by Aimee Mann.
A Dialog Center poll indicated that nearly nine in ten Israelis characterized the terror attack as a consequence of a failure of the Netanyahu government. In the same poll, 56 percent of Israelis think Netanyahu should step down at the end of the war.
Parenting: Years of wishing your kid will sleep past 6 AM on weekends, and also being terrified they’ve somehow died when they do.
A man has been fined for pretending to be a ghost and other rowdy behaviour in a cemetery. […] A Hampshire police spokesman said that witnesses complained to police about Stallard’s rowdy behaviour and his pretending to be a ghost. “The witnesses reported the group engaging in rowdy behaviour and one of them throwing their arms in the air and saying ‘woooooo’,” he said.
Emily Benschoter was told she needed to cover up her pink hair after she already accepted a job offer. In order to keep the position, the 29-year-old decided to wear wigs instead.
“Perhaps you have forgotten. That’s one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he’ll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed. Ask an Iranian what the English did to him in 1953 and he’ll tell you. His child will tell you. His grandchild will tell you. And when he has one, his great-grandchild will tell you too. But ask an Englishman—” He flung up his hands in mock ignorance. “If he ever knew, he has forgotten. ‘Move on!’ you tell us. ‘Move on! Forget what we’ve done to you. Tomorrow’s another day!’ But it isn’t, Mr. Brue.” He still had Brue’s hand. “Tomorrow was created yesterday, you see. That is the point I was making to you. And by the day before yesterday, too. To ignore history is to ignore the wolf at the door.”
Thomas Walsh, formerly of Pugwash, has released his sole single A Good Day For Me. It’s co-written with Neil Hannon (of The Divine Comedy, and also Walsh’s partner in the cricket pop luminaries The Duckworth Lewis Method), and it’s another winner.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones is not impressed by the Tate’s rehanging:
In fact, the social history is larded on so much, with so many boxes to tick, that it all becomes too much to take in and you have no choice but to enjoy the art for its own sake. Is that big painting of a battle by Philip James de Loutherbourg nationalist, or anti-war, or what? I dunno, but the clouds lit up by cannonfire look great.
I don’t want to get too in the weeds on all of this, but I think rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism all eventually boil down to a bunch of weird nerds on message boards hoping they can find a way that sounds ethical to normies of using technology to rebuild feudalism with them on top.
You know, have as much fun as you want with generative AI, but any real professional use will still require human input and verified data sets, and, even then, it will largely be impacting managers rather than individual creators or laborers. So gloat all you want about never needing to hire a copywriter or an illustrator again, but I’m actually a lot more confident that their specific skillsets are harder, and possibly impossible, to replace than the glorified Slack mods that are paid six-figure salaries to manage them.