Modern cars are creepy.

This is an excellent and detailed overview and I’m better for having read it.

As someone who once owned Tintin au pays des Soviets (but also sold it more out of distaste of the art than the politics) and who is currently rereading a less-but-still-problematic classic Belgian bande dessinée, I really appreciated these reflections. I hadn’t realized that Tintin was about to enter the public domain, and that’s exciting! I’m more optimistic that Tintin can be reclaimed from its fascist, racist roots than Werd is.

Bookmarking as yet another example of Elon Musk’s free speech reputation being undeserved.

More suckiness in the world of academic publishing.

What a stupid thing this whole “banning TikTok” thing has proved to be.

I’m not terribly attentive to music or film quality, but the complaints about access to streaming media resonated with me.

I don’t like Big Tech, but I’ve become more wary of regulation in recent years because folks like Masnick have compellingly made this argument over and over: It’s the smaller, better companies and sites that suffer the most from it.

Horrific story; not sure why we’re so eager to punish the unhoused.

I’m bookmarking this so I can sit with it and return to it. It is powerful, searing, and condemning.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more angry about the gig economy than when reading this post.

I don’t see myself pivoting away from Reeder, but this looks interesting, and I want to see more of this kind of app out there.

Look, I don’t know all the finer points of this debate, but Mullenweg has repeatedly struck me as petty and juvenile, so it’s hard to imagine taking his side on any of the more substantive issues here.

Some more reflection by Doctorow on Bluesky and Mastodon.

This is the best possible response to a bad situation.

Some good observations here.

Well put: TCL plans to get more into original content, fueled by a dystopian strategy that seems largely built around minimizing costs and pushing ads.

This is a solid article. I think the opening is reflective and that there’s an effort to be open minded (more than I would be). It’s also amazing to me, though, how explicitly the goal here seems to be profiting from a surveillance-supported content mill.

Look, I’m a bit hesitant here, but Aardman’s take on Star Wars was great, so fingers crossed!!

Like anyone who’s read Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized (now free to read here, and you should go read it), I’ve thought a lot recently about its central conceit of an online message board where people stiffed by insurance radicalize each other into gruesome acts of violence. The story is hard to read: It’s vicious in its implied critique of U.S. healthcare companies, but the people being radicalized are also ugly in their response to those companies’ callousness.

Post election is a great time to realize the dangers that KOSA poses.

Some interesting reflections (and reasons to up one’s baseline existential terror) in here.

Listen, The Onion is great, but sometimes McSweeney’s is where it’s at.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read much on all of this, but I can’t imagine any coverage better than this article.

McSweeney’s content on academia is always darkly hilarious, and this is no exception.

Interesting stuff here. I think most complaints about OpenAI “censorship” are hogwash, but it’s still fascinating—and worrying—to see how much control the company exercises over its product.

Here’s hoping the Senate shows some spine. Gift link.

Some good points in here about how “shareholder value” can lead to bad decisions.

What a wild story. The unceremonious end of Redbox is a reminder of how much stuff we make and buy, and how, when companies fail to plan for end-of-life or go out of business, they often leave a bunch of devices that suddenly become e-waste behind.

Lots of interesting reflections here.

It’s uncomfortable for me to think about how close my “digital traces” research is to surveillance and YOLO data mining.

This is an important take, and I appreciate that the article concludes with a reminder that indie is the answer as we move forward with the social web.

This is a question that everyone should ask—and then be infuriated by the answer.

I wasn’t sure about a retheming of Mille Bornes for this game, but this post on design decisions was actually really reassuring.

Lots of interesting stuff in here, including the difficulty of content moderation, and yet another way that generative AI is screwing everything up.

McSweeny’s strikes again.