The 8BitDo FlipPad looks like a lot of fun, but I have no idea what games I would play with it.
The 8BitDo FlipPad looks like a lot of fun, but I have no idea what games I would play with it.
Watched: Project Hail Mary 🍿 last night. Though he shares my nickname, Rocky reminded me of my cat Jonah. Very enthusiastic, overfamiliar, and with a lack for respect for boundaries.
Emma Collins brings up the point that no one calls Wendell Berry a “country writer,” like we call musicians from rural areas “country musicians” and “country singers.” Perhaps, we should, like she does, start calling them “agrarian singers.” Her piece, Not the Times, The Eternities goes into the American love of nature. Since you can’t dig into America’s fascination with our natural beauty without mentioning the transcendentalists, she quotes Thoreau.
Thoreau spoke about chastity of the mind. “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities,” he thundered in his essay “Life Without Principle,” as he marveled that people allow “idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought.”
Time to touch grass?
Designer Jon Hicks’ obsession with music apps left him with a problem — he couldn’t find any that met all his needs. So, like many others in the age of LLMs, he built his own.
Hicks calls his app Jacket, and it’s easy to understand why when you see all the references to physical media. Giant artwork, extensive liner notes integration and perhaps most surprising and impressive, spines.
The spines harken back to Apple’s long-lost Coverflow view in iTunes.
Something about the combination of a good mechanical keyboard and typing in iA Writer just feels so right. It just clicks (NPI).
Reading the Claude watermark topic reminds me of how my son in college, who doesn’t use LLMs when writing his papers, has to check them with an LLM to make sure they don’t sound too much like AI. If they sound like AI, they’ll get flagged, even though the tools for detection are notorious for false positives.
Testing out lossless wireless listening with my Sony XM5s through the Queststyle QCC Pro2 and LDAC. Liking what I’m hearing.
This blog post by Tessa Brown teases apart the difference between social networking and social media.
I suppose what the story above suggests is that social media became the pretense for social networking. I’m reminded of this article I used to teach about the role menus played in restaurant interactions between servers and patrons. Basically the finding was that all of the conversations between servers and patrons were about the menu. “Is this good,” “Do you have this today,” “Can I tell you about our specials.” So the implication for literacy theory, the study of reading and writing, is that people use artifacts in conversation to structure what they talk about–the same way you and your friend from high school just Instagram DM memes back and forth to each other. People are awkward and need something to talk about. What I want to conclude is this pat thing: media is the excuse for us to talk to each other.
Social media clusters the conversation around a media artifact. Maybe a video or song. The metaphor of restaurant servers and patrons centering communication around the menu works well here.
This may be why I’m focused on the blogging service I use having solid integration with a social site. I tend to post a fair amount of media and welcome the social aspect of conversation around that media. Whether that actually happens is another matter, but it’s part of the goal, anyway.
The team behind Matter, my favorite read-it-later service, has a new app out. It that promises to help you manage time on your phone one day a week. The app is called Sabbath, drawing from the ancient and holy practice of taking one day a week to rest. Unfortunately, it’s iPhone only (the Matter crew are an Apple shop) and I spend more time on my iPad and Mac.