These guys are a Japanese band that goes all the way back to 1996. This is the first of their albums I have listened to—it just came out at the tail end of March—and I really like it. It's some pretty great and heavy death metal, but they also manage to stretch things out a bit and keep it interesting and diverse over the course of all the tracks on the album.
People spend way too much time and energy thinking about note-taking.
Just write stuff down.
🔗 The Miseducation of Kara Swisher | Edward Ongweso Jr.:
The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.
I can think of no better example of corrosive access journalism than Kara Swisher.
She will never write or speak critically of any of the crooks and billionaires with whom she hobknobs because she depends on them for her livelihood and—it would seem—her self-image.
More and more often of late, I am finding that the best course of action when I run across someone or something online that I disagree with is to roll my eyes and move on. Ten years ago, I would have responded with a comment on whatever platform I saw it in. Five years ago I would have written a post about it on my blog. A year or two ago, I would have maybe written something down in my notebook or typed it into Drafts and left it there.
Friday morning in Greenfield, MA
This album—released last week—came up randomly in my recommendations earlier this week, so I decided to give it a listen on a whim. I wasn't paying it too much mind at first, as the opening track is pretty straight-up death metal. That's fine, but the sub-genre tends not to do much for me other than as background music. The album has some pretty interesting dynamics, though, and by the time I got to the third track ("
🔗 A fake bridge collapse? Nope. – Kevin Drum: A sign of the times: Last night I saw a post on Twitter that displayed a video of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore collapsing. I did a quick check of a couple of news sites and saw nothing about it, so I assumed it was some kind of AI joke and moved on. Needless to say, I was wrong.
🔗 Boring Ideas | The Resonance Myth
Sure, our brains may crave patterns and stories, but pandering to these desires is a recipe for mediocrity. When everyone is trying to “resonate,” all we get is a cacophony of sameness. Everyone running at the same ideas. Everyone thinking the same way. Everyone trying so desperately to be relatable that nobody has the courage to be unusual.