Nothing too important but if you're passing the time scrolling, you'll find some interesting stuff here.
Snippets 2023: 52 Snippets from 2023 | Snippet Finance
Lesser known but useful websites: 100+ lesser known but useful websites
Things Tom Whitwell learned in 2023: 52 things I learned in 2023.
Don't tweet. Unless you have something you particularly need to promote -- meaning you are selling something, including yourself -- don't tweet. No good will come of it.
I have a Twitter account but I don't tweet. If you ever see a tweet from me, I've probably been hacked. I do have folks I follow on twitter -- if you dig deep enough, you can get some useful info and some entertainment out of it. You just have to be very judicious about whom you follow and never read replies. That last part is very important. Never think of Twitter as a discussion board. It is for dissemination not collaboration. Every once in a while somebody will do an AMA. But beyond that never engage or expect constructive engagement.
Here are a few accounts I have found that are worth following.
David Burge (@iowahawkblog) / Twitter -- Consistently the most sharp and funny guy on the internet. Keen comments, old car identification, Iowa football, nostalgia, driving thru liquor store windows.
CarDealershipGuy (@GuyDealership) / Twitter -- Independent car dealer. Lots of good insight into the car dealership biz and the auto resale market (Carvana, etc.)
StripMallGuy (@realEstateTrent) / Twitter -- Some flip houses, this guy flips strip malls. Fascinating window into a rarely considered corner of suburban life.
BabelColour (@StuartHumphryes) / Twitter -- Finds old washed out autochromes (early color photographs, early 1900s) and cleans them up in Photoshop -- not colorized, the color is the original. End result is often photos taken more than a century ago that have the same vitality as something from your iPhone. It was never so clear that the people of the past were just like us.
Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) / Twitter -- Prolific poster of fascinating science and nature videos.
Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) / Twitter -- Savage nostalgia from the 70s, plus or minus a few years. Mostly, but not entirely, sports. Lots of bad language, but that was also true of the 70s.
Three Year Letterman (@3YearLetterman) / Twitter -- I have a twisted appreciation for a good troll and Three Year Letterman is the best, and it's not even close.
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) / Twitter --- I have a twisted appreciation for a good troll…er, OK Elon isn't really a troll, except occasionally. I like Elon, he doesn't spew corporate jargon or take fashionable poses. He can be snide or sarcastic or sentimental, but he seems genuine with a touch of eccentricity. Basically, he's just like most of us, which is a good quality for the richest man alive to have.
Michigan oriented links. All of these are downers. I'm going to have to do a balancing post about all the amazing stuff there is here. Si Quæris Peninsulam Amœnam Circumspice.
A documentary about Detroit’s faded Boblo Island. I vaguely remember a childhood trip or two to Boblo. It decayed and degraded like all of Detroit.
Evidently Michigan is where you do not want to own a home.
You would think now that pot is legal in Michigan the Hash Bash would no longer be needed. Nope. It's so important to people to pound their chests in righteous protest that they continue to do it after they win.
Speaking of which, the dominoes continue to fall in the race to legalizing psychedelics.
A whole slew of TV shows set, at least in part, in Michigan. It consists of Freaks and Geeks (top notch), a couple of mediocre comedy series, and a ton of forgettable (if you ever heard of them to begin with) shows that hoped to get some sort of atmosphere or identity with Michigan, and especially Detroit, references. Apart from F&G, a sad list.
Intrigue and danger under the Golden Arches: They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War
Twitter exchange: Best final episode of a tv series ever.. A lot of love for Newhart and MASH. Personally, I think the endings of Deadwood and Sopranos were the best dramatically, with Boardwalk Empire being the one that added the most to the series. A sentimental nod to Halt and Catch Fire. Broadly speaking, those shows with an intentional arc end better than the ones that ended because of cancellation (Deadwood as the exception).
An appreciation of my favorite author, the divine P.G. Wodehouse.
Speaking of books, a guide to how to write a (nonfiction) book in the current age.
Scott Alexander is back and it was quite a dramatic return. The NYT hit piece that caused his disappearance was finally published. I won't link it, but here is his rebuttal. I love reading Scott's essays, including the medical/psychiatric wonkery that he explains so well that even I can follow. If there was someone who was a follower of traditional media and tropes and began to search for sources of a deeper understanding of things, I would start them off by pointing them to Scott.
A couple of other interesting sources are David Perrell and Gwern Branwen. They do a great job of gathering a broad swath of interesting, if occasionally esoteric, writings from around the web, in addition to their own original content. The downside to going down this rabbit hole is that you might lose some of your ability to bond and communicate with your mainstream/clickbait reading friends.
Scott, like most thoughtful web writers, has gone to substack.com, a service designed to let the best long form writers not only write, but get paid. And do it with a certain confidence that they will not be de-platformed for their views. Most of the writers there have both free and paid options to get their content. I suspect, more and more, the free stuff will drift away, especially the key content, and we'll start having to pay for a steady stream of quality content. I also suspect that at some point substack will figure out a method for bundling content so folks aren't trying to manage dozens of subscriptions to their favorite writers.
They could call these bundles...wait for it…
Magazines.
For now there is good free content. It's interesting to note the different ways we are now trying to recreate the blog and forum experience of the turn of the century web through sites like substack or Medium or just through tweetstorms and facebook groups and subreddits. Could it be that the snapchat/tiktok generation is beginning to mature and looking for something more substantive?
Which is all just a long-winded way of saying I'm going to do a link dump on you rather than write something longer. Maybe you're grateful?
Maybe it's just me, but old photos in black & white or weak color leave me feeling that the past was two dimensional or incompletely drawn; as if the people in the pictures were simple constructs instead of actual human beings with full lives, this in turn leaves me feeling unrelated to the past instead of a product of it. This sensation is probably worthy of a full essay if I can ever sort my feelings about it out. In any event, check out Stuart's work.
K-Pop is Korean Pop Music. It is a huge thing in many Asian countries, both as music and as culture. It consists of either all male or all female groups, all members in their early twenties and all members looking like fashion models. None of them play instruments. If you remember the boy bands of the nineties, their personas are something like that, although the band members are more numerous, some over a dozen. The music is a pastiche of hip-hop, pop, dubstep. Dormin takes a deep dive into it.
The whole musical experience is corporation manufactured -- that is to say, as the article points out, there is no pretense of authenticity. The article also points to a dark side -- financial (and possibly sexual) exploitation of the young. Although financial exploitation is pretty standard in the music industry, not specific to k-pop. Sexual exploitation, or at least the appearance of sexual exploitation, is pretty common in the entertainment world, as we have seen -- again, not specific to k-pop. The kids are worked hard, physically hard, through years of tryouts and auditions and competitions to finally get in a group, but probably no harder than any athletes or dancers have to work to reach the top of their profession. The upshot is that the accusations of exploitation need to be considered in the context of the wider world. Still it's a fascinating look into one particularly successful corner of the music industry. I admit some of the videos are very striking. I can see why tweens and teens would go for it. I probably would too, just like I fell for the Monkees as a child.
California passes a law saying that freelance journalists may not write more than 35 stories per year, which many freelance journalists argue is not enough to survive on and would essentially destroy freelance journalism as a career option. The story seems to be that California wanted to ban Uber from classifying its drivers as freelancers, and the easiest way to do this was just to ban freelance work and carve out exceptions for any form of freelance work the state didn't want to ban, and whoever was in charge of exception-making randomly chose the number "35" for freelance journalism....Anyway, I think California journalists should feel lucky to be allowed 35 stories; most new housing in the state is limited to two.
"Amuse yourself at the gym today by seeing how many times in a row you can run 100 meters in 17 seconds. It's pretty easy to begin with! If you can do it 422 times in a row-without breaks-then congratulations, you can run a marathon as fast as Eliud Kipchoge did this morning."
Nothing to me has more excitement in it than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much on earth can beat it in travel for a sense of freedom - no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then 'Eat my dust.'Amen.
Places I have not been, that I would love to go to in my car include a trip north, starting in Cape Cod and taking in Quebec, and continuing until I run out of road, then turning west, seeing the rest of Canada, land of my fathers. I have seen only a small bit of it, but the rest of it beckons, the very names: Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife, Moose Jaw, down through Alaska - months of it, maybe a year, and why not?
Today, we also live in an age when our reputation is at the mercy of people we barely know, just as it was back in high school, for the simple reason that we lead much more public, interconnected lives. The prospect of sudden humiliation once again trails us, now in the form of unflattering photographs of ourselves or unwanted gossip, virally reproduced. The whole world has become a box of interacting strangers. Maybe, perversely, we should be grateful that high school prepares us for this life. The isolation, the shame, the aggression from those years-all of it readies us to cope.No cathartic howling, no black-and-white answers, which is what you have gotten from 99.83% of typical journalists. Nicely done.
[Later, at her high school reunion] We'd all grown more gracious; many of us had bloomed; and it was strangely moving to be among people who all shared this shameful, grim, and wild common bond. I found myself imagining how much nicer it'd have been to see all those faces if we hadn't spent our time together in that red brick, linoleum-tiled perdition. Then again, if we hadn't-if we'd been somewhere more benign-I probably wouldn't have cared.