[A Pleasurable Headache] right where you left it
A short entry to start the year off. No fuss, no muss, just the links.
Links
The Web is Fucked
Incendiary URL aside, this is a no frills site that concentrates on talking about and promoting the web of old. Simply designed web personal web pages.
Fuck Web 3.0 basically.
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One Of The Most Ambitious Racing Games Of All Time Was Inaccessible To Western Players For 22 Years. A Dedicated Group Of Fans Fixed That
https://jalopnik.com/one-of-the-most-ambitious-racing-games-of-all-time-was-1848212428
Click bait style title aside, this is an excellent post on the efforts of a fans to localise cult racing game, Racing Lagoon.
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The Internet’s Unkillable App
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/internet-newsletters-dave-pell/620664/
Dave Pell on the persisting tech of the humble web based newsletter.
“Newsletters are always right where you left them. Sure, people complain about having too much email. But compared with everything else online, your inbox is the Walden Pond of the internet.”
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breaking the doom scroll
https://winnielim.org/journal/breaking-the-doom-scroll/
Winnie Lim on a more patient, mindful approach to consuming information and web use.
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From “Race Realism” To Anti-Vaxx, How The Spread Of Conspiracy Theories Has Helped The Far-Right Grow
https://itsgoingdown.org/social-media-spread-far-right/
The ever excellent It’s Going Down on the spread of far right theories and thought during the last two years. The vector for all of this, unsurprisingly, is social media.
Similarily, the recent IREHR report on Facebook and Covid denial is excellent and thorough in explaining how such radicilisation occurs and who is falling prey to it.
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Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen
An excerpt from Johann Hari’s latest book on the waning of focus and attention in the modern age.
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How Britain Falls Apart
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/01/will-britain-survive/621095/
Tom McTague takes a road trip through a Britain arguably more fractured than at any other point in it’s history.
“One of the problems in Britain is that the loss of faith in the country is now so pervasive that it is hard to know whether it can be rebuilt. The union is not only being questioned by Welsh, Irish, and Scottish nationalists, but also, now, by the once-unionist middle classes in England for whom Brexit has broken a bit of the faith they had in Britain. Some simply no longer believe it’s worth saving—that like Butlin’s, it is somehow shameful or anachronistic. They actively prefer the thought of being a less powerful but more settled European country: a greater Holland rather than a mini United States.”
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I’m off to listen to The Novice soundtrack again!
The movie leapt from nowhere after the last edition of this newsletter to become one of my favourites of the year.
See you in two.