Bird Mail: 013
The past two weeks were rather busy, so in lieu of a missive, here are a few things that caught my attention recently.
- Neauismea: Don’t ask me how to pronounce it because I have no idea. These illustrations, part of Inktober, remind me of the graphics of LodeRunner, a game I played as a child on floppy disks on the Macintosh 128k passed down from my great-grandfather. From the illustrator: “The tales of the Neauismetica unfold on a minuscule celestial object, where three Immortals dwell.” I am going to dig more into the lore of this little world and will report back at a later date.
- What’s the Difference? is a newsletter that teaches you…uh…what the difference is between things. I find a lot of them helpful and I feel like I learn something each time one lands in my inbox, so instead of forwarding them on to y’all every single week, I recommend you subscribe! This issue was one of my favorites, but this week’s on ‘fewer’ vs. ‘less’ is great too.
- Just in time for Halloween tell anyone in your life who loves good typesetting that they can go kern in hell.
- I can’t help but get sucked into the videos of 11foot8.com. Every time, I know what’s going to happen, but I get so much joy with each passing truck. Sadly, the bridge is being raised but not by much.
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I’ve been Facebook-less since 2012, but I have still watched with interest as it has grown into the soul-crushing hydra that it is. This Baffler article by Jacob Silverman is particularly damning. I pulled a few choice quotes, but it is worth reading in its entirety.
If it’s not clear already, then it must be said: Facebook is a right-wing company, hostage to conservative ideas about speech and economics, its fortunes tied to its allies in Republican politics, including the president, whose campaign spends millions on Facebook ads. Offering support to some of the worst figures in American political life, Facebook is as nihilistic as an oil company and just as willing to dump its pollution on all of us. That it has come to so thoroughly dominate our public sphere is a tragic indictment of American civic life and American techno-capitalism, which has confused the pitiless surveillance of today’s internet with utopian empowerment.
What Zuckerberg ignores is that his form of rigorous nonpartisanship, his refusal to take any stand at all, is itself a political act, especially when Donald Trump is president.
I would love to hear from you if you enjoyed any of these links, or if you have something you think I should add to my collection, feel free to reply to this email!
You friend,
Bruce