Category: Internet

BIG SKIES

WordPress is telling me I’ve published 1,000 posts.

A few hundred people a month read things I write here.

No likes, no comments, no “engagement.” Just me posting for the sake of posting. It’s a digital journal of sorts, I guess.

I’ve been publishing things on the internet since 1995 or so, which is about my earliest memories of the “commercial web.”

I had a Packard-Bell computer that I bought at Sears on credit, and it was about $3,000. Had Windows 3.1, and I think I had mIRC on there.

Met a lot of people via #pasxe.

We’d find out about shows like that back in the day. We’d make plans there to hang out and meet at diners. Then AOL Instant Messenger came along and fucked everything up.

I’m so frustrated by all the platforms these days. The tie-in. Streaming music services where you rent music. My Photos app has over 300GB of photos, and my new laptop has just a 512GB HD. I moved my photo library to my external HD, but now it won’t do the iCloud Photos thing.

This is why I go for walks. Today I walked about six miles, spread across three jaunts. “When in doubt, go for a walk” is my mantra for 2024.

BURN IT ALL DOWN

Music blogs in the mid-2000s were a power (I was there). A good review could help sell a ton of albums.

After that, we ditched our iPods and piled onto social media and streaming playlists.

It’s all burning down.

I’m surprised how anyone is upset at this. Unlike popular DJs that would make radio shows, the people making these playlists were somewhat “hidden.” Yeah, sure, we knew who some of them were, but it’s not like the big prominent names and faces that we see in the world of radio, you know?

So how then are we surprised that they just replaced everyone with computers anyways?

None of these companies want to actually pay money for editorial discernment. If they did they’d have a full staff of amazing writers, like how Bandcamp used to operate.

Email lists and vinyl records will outlast social media, and I’m adding DSPs to that list now, too.

(via, Bloomberg)

THE TRUTH WILL FIND YOU

Fight Club and The Matrix are two very important movies for me, mostly because I was in high school in the early 90s.

So yeah, I may watch these two movies a lot. I even have a Matrix tattoo.

Something struck me recently. Near the end of Fight Club, when Edward Norton is beginning to realize that he’s Tyler Durden.

“You work nights because you can’t sleep. Or you stay up and make soap.”

Now, the scene where Neo meets Trinity for the first time:

“I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.”

Neither of these main characters can sleep. They’re searching for something. Your next life, who knows?

And then each character expands because they start hanging around people.

Edward Norton was fighting with himself in the parking lot of Lou’s Tavern, when that guy walked up and said, “can I be next?”

Neo was searching, living alone, living on his computer. But his pals dropped buy for a miniDisc, right?

This then leads to Neo meeting more characters that wear all black and do stuff with computers.

This is an absolutely incomplete line of thinking between the two movies, the two characters. I’m not saying they’re connected, or in the same universe.

But the concept of not sleeping, or searching for meaning in some way outside yourself… I don’t know where this is going, so please stand by.

SO MANY PHOTOS

I’ve been thinking of getting a new laptop by the end of the year, sort of for tax reasons, but mostly because I’ve never been in love with my current MacBook Pro from 2020.

That said, I love having a 1TB harddrive. What I don’t love, though, is my Photo’s file over 350GB in size.

The baseline MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip comes with a 512GB HD.

So now I’m dragging my photo file thing over to my 2TB external HD.

I’ve got photos that are 20 years old in the Apple photos app.

From when I moved to NYC. Screen shots from my iPhone 4. Photos from when I biked across most of the US.

So many photos of my life, yet when I pass away this external HD will just get tossed in a dumpster and no one will remember any of it.

Happy New Year!

QUITTING SPOTIFY

Great post from Olivia Rafferty about quitting and deleting Spotify:

My final reason was this: I wanted to own my music again. I wanted to press ‘shuffle’ on my entire catalog and have it surprise me with my own taste. Spotify lets you ‘like’ albums, and save songs to playlists, but you’ll never get a full idea of what songs you have in your catalogue. And what if some artists pulled their work from the platform? I constantly reach for Joni Mitchell’s Turbulent Indigo and it’s not there. Owning your music means that you will never lose it at the whim of someone else’s business decision. And it will be a catalogue that exists in its entirety. All together, in one place.

She details how she’ll listen to music moving forward, too. Great read.

Read it here: …So I Finally Quit Spotify

THIS IS EVERYTHING

Ira Glass sums it all up in this recent interview with Vulture:

It’s just crazy to me that people are having a hard time earning money making something so many other people clearly want.

Well, part of the problem is that people aren’t paying for it, right?

Right. They’re accustomed to getting it for free.

That’s the hole in the business model.

Most people ain’t paying for shit.

There was a time when Limp Bizkit sold a million albums in one week. Now artists on labels with managers and lawyers are lucky to sell 50,000 in a month.

You used to have to pay money to go see a movie. Now you pay a few bucks a month for a few streaming services and never buy another DVD

Podcasts, websites, newsletters – free, free, free.

Yes, a small percentage of diehard fans support via Patreon, or Substack, or whatever, but for the most part there’s been more entertainment options that exist in the world.

Think about the 100 or 200 or 1000 things we read a day, and watch, and listen to. In a DAY. A MONTH.

I pay my ISP $56/month, and some streaming services. I don’t think I spend $100 a month on everything, and I can fill my eyes and ears with “content” every second of every day.

And we’re all paying that $100 every month, and more (much more), and a few people are making money from making the things that everyone loves.

Again, from the interview: people are having a hard time earning money making something so many other people clearly want.

What the fuck?

MAKE YOUR HOMEPAGE A HOUSEPAGE

On the left, the Salomon website. Three images, hardly even 350 pixels wide.

On the right, the Salomon Instagram page, a carosel of five, giant, screen filling images.

As I wrote in “DON’T MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA YOUR TROPHY CASE,”

We’re quick to posts our biggest moments on social media.

The “SOLD OUT” marquees. Massive crowds from stage. The plaques. Photos with our heroes and fans and friends.

We take photos of ourselves standing in Times Square with that big Spotify digital ad in the background.

We’ll share those slick DSP images on social media, showing off our placement on a cool playlist (like mine, below).

It’s the same even if you’re not in a band: we post all our most interesting photos, the imagery that shows off our unique, creative spirit, the videos that capture our spontaneous, magical energy.

We don’t put any of it on our website, then complain that nobody goes to our website.

Imagine making your website the MAIN place to see your latest photos, your behind the scenes, your deepest thoughts, your biggest BANG.

Instead we’re all giving our best stuff to social media platforms for free in hopes that a few people can even find a link to visit our store.

And who even reads this way? Back and forth, big sections of white space? Might as well put some pop up ads in there, too.

People LOVE the social media feed – photo, text, photo, text, photo, text.

It’s how ZILLIONS of people consume the internet these days.

And websites are still out here with tiny fucking images, text that zig zags all over the place, and letting social media platforms get all the attention by offering a better reading experience.

I AM AN AMATEUR

Oh, this is heavy:

“Being an artist within an economic system that favors private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, a price system, and competitive markets belittles my practice into a hobby. I am an amateur with no artist statement, thesis show, or MFA. The money I invest in creating art is a temporary loan to myself that I feel pressured to repay quickly by attempting to exhibit wherever the crowds are.”

From ‘A soft manifesto‘ over at The Creative Independent, via Naive Weekly.