Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
I can’t recommend BOOM enough.
If you do a lot of Zoom calls (I host 3 of them a week for Social Media Escape Club), look good, feel good, right??!
Instead of spending a bunch of money on a fancy camera, 4K converter, and everything else, get the best image from the device you’re using (in my case I use a Logitech Stream Cam).
I love being able to frame my video, and adjust exposure, vibrance, and all the other cool stuff.
If we can agree that we’re posting into the void on social media, why not just post on our own sites “into the void?”
I recently suggested a client add a blog to their website, and they sent me this:
“Literally within one week (of adding the blog) this led to an invitation to give a talk (you know the old-fashioned way, you introduce yourself to someone cool, they look you up, find your website and boom).”
If someone looks you up, and you’re on a social media platform and they don’t have an account, it’s very hard (or sometimes impossible) for them to see your work.
But every smart phone ships with a web browser. No one needs to have an account to view your website on the wide open internet.
When adding to your own website, you’re not posting into the void, you’re building an online archive.
Modern DJ software is bloated, and way too much for what I need, so I built this minimal DJ web app with Google’s Gemini + ChatGPT. It’s an HTML page that I load locally into Google Chrome with keyboard and midi controls.
I need this to make mixes of my HUNTERTHEN music, available to those who buy the full albums on Bandcamp. I make “soundscapes for your interplanetary commute,” which will either lull you to sleep or help you get your work done.
Next on my shopping list is something like this, the GRID3 PBF4 4-Button + Pot + Fader MIDI Controller. I really only need two sliders, but having four will be nice, and the extra buttons can be mapped to start / stop each track.
Great quote from ‘All we watch are millionaires,’ from Dense Discovery:
“Seeking out lesser-known voices isn’t just an act of cultural curation; it’s a philosophical stance, a refusal to let attention be the only metric that matters. Because the most interesting stuff usually happens on the margins.”
Link via Input Diet by Manuel Moreale
Manuel goes on to say, “I’m starting to believe that a phoneless life is, for me, the ultimate goal.”
Remember when people used to say they didn’t own a TV? Or a car?!? Someday not owning a phone is gonna feel the same way.
Electronic tickets are awful, and this just proves it even more.
One out-of-state fan shared her frustration: “We pulled up the tickets on Saturday through the Detroit Lions app, Ticketmaster, and even the wallet, but no barcode showed up. They told us to go to the box office after security, but there’s a long line.”
Listened to this on mydrive home today, and it was just fun hearing all the different zigs-and-zags on the subject of AI, particularly that a lot of writing that used to be on a subject (like “how do I write a good newsletter?”) can now tailored via AI to be specific about the platform you want to use, the style in which you want to write it, and all sorts of other hyper-specific points in a way that no single “how to” article could ever provide.
And that’s fascinating to me.
The streaming music platforms will soon follow the lead of the streaming video platforms and continue to raise their rates, which I’m sure will be helped along by the record labels that increase their licensing fees because they want as much of the action as the video streaming platforms.
The whole ecosystem will eat itself, and we’ll all go back to pirating music again (but the cool kids will keep buying vinyl and CDs and digital copies off of Bandcamp).
I’ve been seeing it mentioned in comment threads on some of the sites that have posted about Disney raising the rates again, notably MacRumors and I think something similar on The Verge. Monthly rates will continue to go up. Meanwhile, external hard drives and basic MP3 players are cheaper than ever on Amazon. It’s inevitable.
The beauty about keeping a blog is you have an archive about certain subject and quotes from certain people.
I’m hosting Sean Cannon today (Aug 21, 2025) on my Escape Pod Zoom call, a weekly gathering of the paid members of my Social Media Escape Club.
I searched his name on this blog, and found this post “Streaming Problems,” from January of 2020.
I clicked the source link, his Twitter feed, and then found this gem, regarding Spotify:
“So you have the biggest company in the space creating “fake” music to drive up margins, trying to create user habits that promote NOT interacting with artists or their songs, and trying to crowd music out of everyday users lives.”
Oh, how unaware we were at the time at how fake the music would get! He was talking about “fake bands” that made music for a fee, thus removing the royalty aspect. Fill the playlists with “freelance” bands, and profit!
But here we are five years later, and Spotify is littered with music created by AI.
“We are not worried about the meme situation,” said photographer Antonio Guilliem in a 2017 interview with Intelligencer.
Oooh, a wonderful resource of SLASH PAGES:
“Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like
/now,/about, or/uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.”
Thanks Mikey Seay.
