Posts sobre citações

Nick Heer é um dos melhores autores que observam a tecnologia. Ele sempre tem opiniões muito bem embasadas que, mesmo quando eu não concordo completamente, me fazem ponderar e reconsiderar minhas certezas. No seu blog Pixel Envy, ele publicou recentemente o que eu acho que é o melhor obituário possível para o metaverso, e as loucuras que empresas como o Facebook, a Epic Games e Roblox fizeram (sem falar projetos como o Decentraland):

It turns out we are okay with having meetings and playing games online, but we actually like seeing live music in-person and travelling to real places. The problems each of these things may have — high costs, environmental impact, and so on — are notable and real, but are not ones with metaverse-based solutions.

The pandemic did not make the metaverse. There was sufficient interest in developing it well before then, and it is possible all of these companies would have announced all these products and services on the same timeline. But in a world without a pandemic, I cannot imagine anyone would have treated these metaverse announcements with anything like the seriousness they did. The pandemic officially ended in the U.S. just six months after the first release of ChatGPT, so it is impossible to disentangle the influence of either. But it is notable to me that the nosedive in mentions of “metaverse” on Meta’s investor calls occurred in Q3 2023 — the quarter immediately following the declared end of the pandemic.

Ele ainda termina com um toque quase esperançoso. Dá pra ver que Heer cresceu vendo a internet florescer. Esse tipo de otimismo é de quem viu protocolos e tecnologias sendo criadas na nossa frente no início da internet:

[…] Whatever that ends up being will probably be the result of people finding something useful and intriguing about doing something different. It will not be the product of big companies redirecting the money hose of platform fees onto themselves.

Recomendo muito o Pixel Envy. É uma ótima leitura toda a manhã.

Russel Davies escreveu um texto bem interessante sobre a “soberania dos dados” que parece ser a ruína de muitas empresas (undermanager). Alguns destaques da leitura.

Na introdução ele já elenca o paradoxo que é coletar dados para descobrir o motivo dos negócios não irem bem, e’quando os dados não respondem a pergunta você acaba coletando mais dados, o que te afastam ainda mais de procurar a resposta no lugar certo:

a. Data is a risk. Every bit of data has to be managed/looked after/cared for. That costs time and money. And most of it is useless.

b. Data is distracting. Most of it is just noise. You’re gathering it because you can, just in case, because it seems valuable. Then you spend ages trying to work out what to do with it. When you should be paying attention to just a couple of bits of it and actually doing something about it.

c. It becomes a job. Get enough data and you need data scientists. Then you’re stuck in a self-perpetuating structure that requires more data to feed the data scientists.

E, sobre a distância dos dados reais das pessoas que precisam deles:

The more it gets abstracted away to other teams and other softwares the more dangerous and misleading it gets.

Tem várias vezes na semana que eu me pego pensando que eu sou um incompetente no trabalho porque eu recebo dados do negócio fornecidos por outras pessoas que acham que teria alguma relevância pro meu trabalho, e eu não ver serventia nenhuma naquela informação. É muito frustrante receber informações que te dão ideia de um detalhe muito específico de uma parte da audiência e perder a visão do todo. Eu não desenvolvo pra um setor específico das pessoas que vão visitar um site. Eu desenvolvo pra todas as pessoas que possam visitar um site.

Topher Kearby, via swissmiss:

point out the good
when you see it.

in life,
in others,
in yourself.

because the world
needs to remember
what kindness and
love look like.

Do álbum Fantasy:

Can you see it all?
Can you breathe it all?

link

Do álbum Will Butler + The Sister Squares:

In the long grass, in the long grass
By the train tracks, by the train tracks
Waiting with nothing in my hands
Losing your voicе against the wind
Across my face the flow of timе
My shadow slowly fill the night
I found it fading in my mind
The final place I feel alive
Let me stay, let me stay, let me stay
Oh, let me stay here

Eu tô tentando zerar minha lista de leitura. Ela tem 209 links para ler, catalogar e arquivar. Pra me forçar a ler um pouco todo o dia, vou começar a postar aqui o que eu estou lendo, e talvez um comentário ou destaques.

Hoje, foi TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software, no The New Yorker.

Kyle Chayka:

Amid the accelerating automation of our computers—and the proliferation of assistants and companions and agents designed to execute tasks for us—I’ve been thinking more about the desktop that’s hidden in the background of the laptop I use every day. […]

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. Those files are stored as RTFs (short for rich-text format), one step up from the most basic TXT file.

I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. […] Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen. I could make lists on actual paper, of course, but I’ve also found that my brain has been so irredeemably warped by keyboards that I can only really get my thoughts down by typing […]

We users have learned that cloud-based apps and digital platforms are more likely to surveil us, mine our data, and manipulate our attention than to provide us the precise content and services we seek […]

Acho que esse relato de como Chayka usa o editor de texto (e como interage com um desktop) me ajudou a entender porque eu acho que nenhum outro dispositivo — celular, tablet, nada disso — consegue capturar: a ideia de que o computador é uma “bicicleta para a mente”. Usar programas que lidam com arquivos, que nos pedem para organizar e catalogar eles nos fazem pensar na nossa própria organização — eles nos deixam responsáveis pelo nosso próprio pensamento, pela forma como estruturamos ele e a forma que criamos sentido.

Um celular, ao contrário, quer moldar sua organização para a abordagem de um app específico. Olha como a gente adapta nossos pensamentos para as limitações do app de notas que usamos, por exemplo, ou como as limitações na hora de organizar a tela de início de um celular não nos permite criar sentido na forma que operamos o dispositivo, diferente de como organizamos (ou não organizamos) nossa área de trabalho no computador.

Uma pequena anotação de Fabián, no seu diário:

Walking won’t solve everything. But it won’t make anything worse.

That’s more than you can say for most things we do when we’re stressed, tired, or lost.

You walk to get out of your head. To breathe. To let your mind drift without crashing.

Do Lô no seu disco do tênis:

Quando você ouvir
Essa canção que eu fiz
Não esqueça de sonhar
Até amanhã, até amanhã, até amanhã…

Wikipédia, provavelmente:

Tell me, how have you guardians of facts been doing recently? (See also: Techno-Feudalist Infocide.)

Maybe twenty years ago, the alternative to my 100,000 crowd-sourced editors was a PhD expert, or Edward R. Murrow [citation needed]. But today, I’m not looking so bad, huh? Absolute best case, the LLM-generated legal advice you get is merely plagiarizing, probably from me. But more likely, it’s a mish-mash of Reddit posts filtered through an algorithm coded by a Belarusian teenager on the run from Interpol. (See also:Illya “CyberGhost” Cieraškovič, Controversies.)

Perfeito. Você pode doar para a Wikipédia.

Emily St. James, para a Vox:

[…] But the feeling [of needing a life change] The Leftovers had evoked in me persisted. I was satisfied, full up on the show’s particular blend of sorrow and joy. I was convinced that if I never see another TV show I felt as passionately about, well, that would be okay, because I’d had The Leftovers.

Pop culture functions as a kind of subconscious for what humans care about. That’s why I find it so fascinating to watch it fluctuate and change, to observe how it both is molded by our shifting social codes and actively molds them.

[…] everybody’s subconscious is a little bit different, and a meaning I ascribe to something may not be a meaning you would ascribe to it at all […] So I always think of that meaning as a little door in the back of the work. You watch the TV show or the movie, or listen to the album, or whatever, and you can talk about the work itself — the plot elements and images and directorial choices that go into making it.

But always, in the back, there’s a door to everything else, all of the cultural forces and psychological implications and deeper meanings you can find if you go digging. Open the door a little bit, and you might take a peek at those things. Throw it open wide, and you reveal just as much about yourself and what you value as you do the work itself.

What made The Leftovers special — and what most of my favorite TV shows have in common, come to think of it — is that it forced you to open that door and leave it that way permanently.

[…]

The Leftovers, then, is the first TV show I can think of that actively engages with a world where the uncertainty that is core to simply being alive has caused a lot of us to carve out our own completely separate experiences of reality […]

[…] much of existence is basically random, meaningless, and out of our control. What do you do when you’re confronted with that fact?

Well, you start trying to rationalize. You try to put a narrative on what happened. You find an explanation, whether scientific or religious or something else altogether, and you try to fill in the gap between your need for control and your complete and utter powerlessness

[…]

Everybody alive can relate to the feeling of wanting to be in charge of our lives, only to realize that the systems that surround us are waiting to idly flick a fingernail and send us ricocheting through the rapids of chance.

And yet as the show progressed deeper into its run, it became, for me, maybe the most optimistic show on television, because it stared into uncertainty, into darkness, and insisted that we would figure out how to make our own light if we found ourselves stranded.

The series doesn’t focus on bringing its plot to a conclusion; instead, it concentrates on guiding its characters toward wholeness, if not happiness. They might remain deeply sad, or frustrated, or angry, but they are allowed a moment of kindness or gratitude, a moment that pushes them to extend the same to others. If life is meaningless, if nothing has a purpose, then all we have is what we can give to each other. I can’t think of many messages more optimistic, or necessary, than that.

We have made it to the future, and it’s trying to kill us. But it’s also always the future, and life is always trying to kill us. The world is always ending, but it’s also always beginning.

Struggling against the meaningless nature of life is important, but so is remembering that meaning is what we make of it and that we can create meaning for each other. The Leftovers worked so well because it focused not on the flood, but on the Ark, on the people left aboard, watching the skies for a sign of something new. There’s all this water, all around us — but look at us, lucky us, we have a boat.

Spencer Chang, em sua newsletter:

I like newsletters that feel more like dispatches than editorialized posts. Inspired by Laurel and Robin, I’d like to share a little bit about where I am and where I’ve been lately.
[…]
The world manages to find a way to strike you with the most indescribable beauty when you need it most.

[…]
Websites are the future of video games.

They are the “end game” of video games. They are spaces where the end players (the website visitors) have the agency to freely interact with others, and not towards any predetermined object, but purely for themselves, discovering who they are in each new environment and finding new ways of relating to one another.

Somewhere in the push to make the internet the infrastructure of a global capitalist economy, we lost this perspective on what the internet is. If I asked people to define what websites are to them, they might talk about the capabilities they provide: “the world’s information at your fingertips,” “AI that does whatever you ask of it,” “a platform for selling products.” Or as design artifacts: they provide the basis of interactive, creative pieces of art, media, and writing.

But if we distill a website down to its base components, it is a space that allows people to talk to each other. In the era when the internet was new and before we had predetermined what it was “for,” everyday internet pioneers found ways to talk to one another by making websites for each other.

Jason Kottke, citando um diálogo nos momentos finais de Halt & Catch Fire:

Joe: How did we all get here today? The choices we made? The sheer force of our wills, something like that? Here’s another answer: the winds of fate, random coincidence, some unseen hand pushing us along. Destiny. How did we all get here today? We walked through this door. We don’t have to build a big white box or stadium or invent rock n’ roll. The moment we decide what the Web is, we’ve lost. The moment we try to tell people what to do with it, we’ve lost. All we have to do is build a door and let them inside.

When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we went through the Holland Tunnel and it was basic, concrete and steel, but it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat, wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge, it was the explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of the trip: the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending.

This is the first Web browser, the one CERN built to view and edit research. I wrote it up here for you to see how simple it is. It takes up one whiteboard — that’s basic concrete and steel — but we can take this and we can build a door and we can be the first ones to do it because right now, everyone else sees this…

Donna: …as an online research catalog…

Gordon: …running on NeXT…

Cameron: …on a network in Europe.

Joe: And with this handful of code, we can build the Holland Tunnel.

Essa é uma das melhores traduções da linda possibilidade do que é um navegador, e o que é, em si, navegar na internet.

Kottke:

But the open Web enthusiasts and advocates missed an opportunity to take what the Web was in the 90s and make that available to everyone. Instead of walled gardens like Facebook, Pinterest, and Medium (which echo the closed online services like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve that predated the Web), imagine a bunch of smaller services bound together with open protocols where individuals have both freedom and convenience. […] I hope I’m wrong, but with all of the entrenched incumbents and money pumping into online services, I’m afraid that time has truly passed. And it’s breaking my heart.

Brian Koberlein, em seu blog:

The quiet filter isn’t perfect. There are plenty of quiet sites that use Google Analytics just because it’s an easy way to see if anyone is reading. And some sites pass the test while still having a bombastic style. But the filter does reveal hidden treasures. Sites that are thoughtfully and personally written. There’s often intentionality to them that is refreshing to read. I find my own ideas are challenged more on these sites, and that’s a good thing.

The biggest downside of the quiet web is that it can be difficult to find. You can’t simply Google topics of interest. Instead, you have to dig a bit. Go down rabbit holes until you come across an interesting quiet page. It takes time and effort. It’s easier just to doomscroll on Twitter. But the effort is worthwhile. As you gather more of the quiet web into your readership, you will notice the negative effects of the traditional loud web more. And once you get used to the quiet web, you may never want to go back.

Manuel Moreale, em seu blog:

I still believe the first approach is doomed to fail. Because the issue with social media is not the tech, but the people. If you let enough people congregate in the same space some issues will inevitably arise. Grifters are gonna grift, scammers will try to scam, hustlers will hustle, influencers are gonna try to influence, and business people will try to monetise everything. It’s no surprise that Meta is slowly entering that space with Threads. And I don’t see Meta starting a blog platform next, letting everyone share and connect via RSS. So that alone tells me which approach is more appealing to the exact same entities we’re trying to get away from.

Having said that I’m hopeful. I do think people are slowly starting to realise that you can get immense human value from the web outside of traditional social media. You have to work for it but it’s absolutely worth it.

Brandon Dillon, 2weeks:

It’s an exciting time to be working in the space. After a long quiet period following the death of Flash, there are fewer and fewer technical barriers to making great games on the web.

The web can be a really vibrant space for games (as it once was). To make it vibrant, people need better tools. We should have a game development toolkit tailored to the web, and Tweaks can be that toolkit.

O melhor ensaio que eu leio em muito tempo, Maria Farrell e Robin Berjon analisam a web como um ambiente, e como eles realmente pode ser “salva”: como uma floresta, não é salvando uma ou outra árvore, ou espécie — mas tentando manter todo o ecossistema vivo e sustentável. Cuidando dos protocolos, dos serviços, dos sites e das pessoas.

Alguns recortes do texto de Madison Butler, para o Sidequest:

But while getting to 5 Dogwood Drive is the goal of the game, it isn’t the point of it. […] Financial instability keeps the characters forever caught in the liminal space that stretches between one stage of life and the next. The uncertainty makes each choice feel weighty yet meaningless at the same time. Ultimately their fates are shaped—some more bluntly than others—by capitalism’s hand, which lends the narrative a unique anxiety.

The liminal state, as defined by anthropologist Victor Turner, is the period of in-betweenness and transition from one stage to another; liminal personae do not abide by the rules and groups that determine social order elsewhere.

Kentucky Route Zero takes on liminality as defined by two different anthropologists. The first definition is by Victor Turner, who defined liminality as the period of time a person spends between two states or stages of life. The second is what anthropologist Paul Rabinow called purgatorial anxiety, a type of liminality characterized by a feeling that the future is on the line. One important aspect of Turner’s definition of liminality is that personal or social transformation awaits liminal personae on the other side; for better or worse, their lives will somehow change from one stage to the next.

Dr. Susan Merrill Squier argues the heightened stake in the future is the key difference between Turner’s liminality and Rabinow’s purgatorial anxiety. In Liminal Lives: Imagining The Human At The Frontiers Of Biomedicine, she writes, “The liminal is an arena of possibility, the purgatorial is an arena of responsibility.” Turner’s liminality is one of potential; in Kentucky Route Zero, the night takes characters to the most unexpected places. Rabinow’s liminality is one of reckoning; the morning comes and the characters have to make decisions that will determine their futures.

[…] The game asks a lot of both its characters and its audience; it asked me to consider questions big and small, many explicit and some implied. But mostly it asked me to observe, without affecting in any meaningful way, its narrative and outcome. I could change the tone of the scene by choosing a slightly more positive or negative response, but Conway was always going to end up at Hard Times Distillery and Shannon’s livelihood was always going to hang in the balance. The audience, like the skeletons who work for the distillery and the ghosts who roam the town and the characters who live in it, is trapped in a state of purgatorial anxiety. We can only guess what happens to Shannon, Ezra, and the others once the curtains have closed and the game has ended.

If music is a ritual of goodbyes, it is also a ritual of beginning. Kentucky Route Zero leaves so much open to interpretation, but in asking me to imagine a future, it gave me the space to imagine a better one, one where the pain and hardship are worth it—a future worth fighting for.

Devan Suber, para a Polygon:

The much-beloved AMC show made no secret of the fact that it was never really about the technology covered in a season; in the words of Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), the computer was always “the thing that gets us to the thing,” a vector for connection, expression, or some other deeper human need.

Uma encapsulação perfeita de uma das minhas séries favoritas. Halt and Catch Fire sempre capturou muito bem seus personagens como os desbravadores do início da computação pessoal: querendo criar tecnologia para conexão e expressão, e a empolgação deles de encontrar aquela nova fronteira – como se fosse a criação de um novo idioma, a descoberta de um novo continente. Já dá vontade de rever.

Ariane do Carmo, no Twitter:

“Nós não perdemos nada”, disseram as cabeças tristes, cansadas, baixas.

“Nós não perdemos nada, aqui apenas faltou luz por uns dias”

“Apenas não tive água”

“Apenas fiquei uns dias ilhada com meu bebê de dois anos”

“Apenas precisei sair e buscar abrigo em um local não alagado”

“Mas nós, nós não perdemos nada. Pois há outros que perderam bens, perderam casas, perderam histórias, perderam vidas. Então isso, isso não é nada. E eu nem sei porque estou tão triste.”

Dissemos nós, cercados por lama, sem perceber que nessa enchente perdemos tanto que até nossos padrões do que é sofrer foram reduzidos.

Via apoemaday:

I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, a night, a
full moon and –

but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

— Mary Oliver.

Do álbum Fantasy:

I heard of a legend
And that’s where I go
If my sister calls
Tell her I’m diving into the deeper end

To the edge of wonder
Where the wire stretches
‘Cause where I go
‘Cause where I go it’s trembling

Scott Tobias, The Dissolve:

“Dramatizing one man’s love affair with a computer is only slightly less absurd than imagining a portal into John Malkovich’s head, but at a certain point, the whimsy gives way to raw desire and hurt. It’s a deft kind of magic.”

“Call it narcissism, but everyone seeks a partner who understands and appreciates them, and it’s only human that Theodore would fall for an entity that reflects his best image of himself.”

“If there’s a measure of hope to Her, it’s in the thought that we’re capable of learning lessons and evolving—maybe not as fast as Samantha, with her seemingly infinite processing power, but enough to understand ourselves and other human beings better the next time around.”

“There’s comedy in asking a computer how it feels, but the answer feels important, because Samantha has become every bit as real to the audience as she is to Theodore. Her is a reminder of how much love is a melding of psyches, and how the memories it produces can judder and lose resolution once it’s over. Whether it can transcend the body is another question, but the film’s stunning final shot implies an answer.”

Algumas leituras dessa madrugada foram sobre o ato de escrever em um blog.

Whiona, wiwi blog:

I want to write more frequently about anything and everything, because it’s good for you, and I have so many thoughts constantly assailing this brain of mine

Tim Larew, Complex:

Sometimes it feels like we’ve traded drawn-out storytelling for fleeting moments where the audience bounces from one to the next
[…] The blog era represented freedom and opportunity.

There was no central hub, like a Spotify today, where all the playlists and means of discovering music are organized neatly within the platform. You had to search, to dig! Even when you grabbed a song directly from an artist’s social media, you almost always wanted to know more because context was the norm. So you’d go to your favorite blog, which is what everyone did the night “Acid Rain” surfaced out of nowhere, and you’d get the full story.

I, however, miss going to Blockbuster because it forced me to actively discover, to take in more elements of the art beyond just the film file. Did the cover catch my eye? How about the description on the back? Did it rope me in? Was the film I wanted not in stock, forcing me to search for something new?

Emily St. James, Episodes:

The comfort in Zodiac is the comfort of doomerism, the idea that we are completely fucked, and it’s better to just admit it. The only people who matter are the monsters in the shadows who’ve broken the world and the people sitting right in front of you, who might be able to help you shine what meager light you possess into those shadows.

[…]

The kind of light dehumanization that peppers the edges of Zodiac’s frames is something we all practice from time to time. When you are engaged in a really intense conversation in a restaurant, the server might become an abstraction to you. You’re aware they’re there, but you’re also really locked in on what you and your friend are chatting about. This filtering of the world is normal, even healthy. Our brains have to shut out some information to make sense of what’s important to us in that moment.

Yet watch Zodiac again with an eye toward how Fincher utilizes this technique. The longer the movie goes on, the more other people only seem to exist as disconnected blobs in the background somewhere. The second you start to really look at them, you might start to think they mean to do something horrible to you. So you learn not to see them, and the world becomes a collection of scary stories waiting to happen.

Max Read:

The killer thinks of himself as having an unmatched clarity about his life and the world, but the movie mostly regards him as self-deluded. He botches his hits, he forms attachments, he misunderstands his own importance. Rather than being freed by his careful planning and elaborately articulated life philosophy, he’s trapped by his own paranoias and resentments.

“The killer as sigma male” is obviously not the only way to read this movie; as suggested in the footnotes you could see it as an personal story about a fastidious craftsman learning his own limits, or also a movie about how annoying work is, especially as a contractor. (To quote the killer’s favorite band: “this position I’ve held/It pays my way and it corrodes my soul.”)

But I like the sigma male reading because it reminds us that throughout his career Fincher has been in dialogue with the concerns of 4chan and the rest of Loser Internet

To be clear, I don’t think that Fincher is endorsing these ideas, specifically–except for goth gf–just that he’s interested in exploring them and the kinds of characters who believe them.What’s particularly interesting for such an internet-y set of ideas is that Fincher doesn’t really make movies “about” the internet–even The Social Network was a lot more about ambition, sociopathy, and freak loners than it was about “the internet,” per se. Instead, he made a body of work around a set of broad social (and gender) anxieties that have been particularly shaped by digital culture.

More to the point, it reminds us that the killer and his sociopathic boorishness live in the same tech-wrecked world as the rest of us.

What we get instead of “action,” it turns out, is a lot of travel and logistical work, which suggests that the funniest way to read the movie is “autobiographically”: it is, after all, roughly two hours of an meticulous and obsessive freak planning and executing a tightly scheduled multi-city production.

David Pierce, The Verge:

In a POSSE world, everybody owns a domain name, and everybody has a blog.

Jill Krajewski, para a Vulture:

“I realized that he was looking at it as an ensemble film,” said Byrne of the late director. “You have a bunch of actors, you get to know each character one by one, and then you watch how they all interact with one another. I thought, I’m in my own world, but he saw what was going on there.”

Alissa Wilkinson, Vox:

I always have a book next to wherever I put my phone,” Escoto tells me. “So if I have the urge to check my phone for another useless doomscrolling session, I physically can see the book there. Nine times out of 10, I will choose the book, because I know what’s in store for me if I get on my phone.

Some studies have suggested that reading fiction can increase empathy. But a perhaps even more surprising finding comes from researchers who discovered a short-term decrease in the need for “cognitive closure” in the minds of readers of fiction. In brief, the researchers write, those with a high need for cognitive closure “need to reach a quick conclusion in decision-making and an aversion to ambiguity and confusion,” and thus, when confronted with confusing circumstances, tend to seize on fast explanations and hang on to them. That generally means they’re more susceptible to things like conspiracy theories and poor information, and they become less rational in their thinking. Reading fiction, though, studies have found, tends to retrain the brain to stay open, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to sort through information more carefully.

You’ll never become a reader by wishing you read more, listening exclusively to podcasts, or sitting next to a book while you scroll Instagram. (Even buying books doesn’t make you a reader, as I have, unfortunately, found out.)

David Roth, Defector:

The vague but ominous disruption promised by artificial intelligence fogs this process, justifying where it needs to justify and serving as a sort of jeering threat everywhere else; that this AI doesn’t yet really do anything well, and has the unfortunate habit of eating its own excrement until it goes insane, has not really damped this cohort’s enthusiasm for it. Which fits, because that appeal is more ideological and aspirational than practical. What all of these businesses—creative industries, social media platforms, online commerce—have in common is that they need people. They need people to make them, and they need other people to pay attention to them. The super-class that sits atop all this, gloating, does not like that very much.

Que honra ouvir Gal Costa nesse mundo.

E a coisa mais certa de todas as coisas
Não vale um caminho sob o sol
E o sol sobre a estrada, é o sol sobre a estrada, é o sol

Por isso uma força me leva a cantar
Por isso essa força estranha…
Por isso é que eu canto, não posso parar
Por isso essa voz tamanha

Do novo álbum do Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down:

I feel different today, different today
Different today, I do
I feel different today, different today
Different today ‘bout you

Eu sou apaixonado por essa performance de Nina Simone para uma música de Exuma. As letras são assombrosas:

Liberation of animals
Prevention of cruelty to animals men and beast
Flying and on flying flying things
Revolution of music poetry love and life
Sex change change change
Man is woman woman is man
Even your brain is not your brain
Your heart is a plastic thing which can be bought
There are no more diseases which can be caught

Man became the thing that he worships
Man today became his god
That was the day that man and woman truly became bored
Man became his good
Man became his evil
Man became his god
And man became his devil

Unconditional I (Lookout Kid), do álbum WE:

lookout kid
trust your body
you can dance
and you can shake
things will break
you make mistakes
you lose your friends again and again
‘cause nothing’s ever perfect
no one’s perfect
let me say it again…
no one’s perfect