🔗 Better to be Forgotten Than Disposable - by John Warner:

The point of putting books into the world isn’t to be forever immortalized. At least I don’t think that way. I’m not sure there is a larger point beyond simply engaging in the activity itself.

I wish I could explain this to the people who claim that AI is somehow a way to “democratize” the making of art by giving people who cannot write or compose or draw or sing or play an instrument access to tools of automation that eliminate the process of making the thing.

It’s the making that’s the art. Without the making, you don’t have anything meaningful.

I think this point cannot be overemphasized. I full endorse it.

Crying myself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship ever | The Atlantic:

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

My main takeaway from this piece is a reconfirmation of my several-decades-long stance than I cannot stand Gary Shteyngart’s writing style.

It’s just so cloying and desperately, pleadingly self-aware. It feels like a deliberately crafted stance.

It reads as fake and I don’t buy any of it. Dollars to donuts the dude had a fantastic time on the cruise, but writing about that would be off-brand.

A modern retelling of The Cask Of Amontillado set in a corporate environment… Montresor keeps assigning an overwhelming number of action items to Fortunado and repeatedly sending “Just wanted to check in on this” slacks until the tense silence that typically pervades the open-layout office is broken when Fortunado finally shouts “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, Montresor!” in exasperation at his laptop.

The few people in the office—many are defying the company’s return-to-office policy—glance over, wondering what has happened.

Fortunado mumbles “Sorry” and then goes back to updating his Jira board.

Between Andor and now this current—and final, I think?—season of Bad Batch, I feel like the subset of Star Wars fans who have been stanning the Empire over the years and getting t-shirts and tattoos of the imperial symbol really ought to be rethinking their choices.

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.