https://textpattern.com/?v=4.8.8 https://www.jaredigital.com/ Premium linkage. Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:40:48 +0000 Jeffrey Zeldman: “The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise. Learn to be quiet on purpose.” https://zeldman.com/2026/04/15/the-courage-to-stop/ Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:03:52 +0000 A fantastic essay by Henry Desroches that deserves a complete reading, but that culminates as so: “Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will. The distillation of those principles on the web through manual code, hand-built social networks, and blogs, points luminously to one answer to the question of how the Internet can best serve humans: it’s personal websites.” (Also, massive appreesh for the home page banner: “Trans women are women. Trans rights are human rights. Fix your heart or die.” Forever and ever, amen.) https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/ Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:13:14 +0000 Joan Westenberg: “We have ‘growth hackers’ but no ‘stability hackers.’ We have ‘disruptors’ but no ‘preservers.’ The entire vocabulary of modern business is oriented toward the new, the unprecedented, the revolutionary. What we lack is language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.” https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/ Sun, 28 Dec 2025 22:17:10 +0000 I was looking up articles about Belly after seeing them play live, and ran across this gem from 2013. I never knew that Star was originally supposed to be the second Breeders album! Tanya Donnelly: “The genesis of that band was going to be that Kim [Deal] would have an album and then the next one would be my songs. And in fact all of the demos for Star say “The Breeders” on them. Like, on the reels and on the boxes. Because that was supposed to be the second Breeders album originally.” What??? I'm glad the universe or whatever intervened, because it gave us TWO seminal 90s albums: Star and Last Splash. https://spectrumculture.com/2013/11/13/holy-hell-tanya-donelly-talks-about-belly-20-years-later/ Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:26:20 +0000 “One of the defining bands of the shoegaze wave that washed over the indie-rock world in the 1990s, Lush mesmerized with their otherworldly vocals set against a swirling wall of sound. Assembled by former bassist Phil King from Super 8 footage he shot during the group’s time on the road, LUSH: A FAR FROM HOME MOVIE offers an appropriately ethereal behind-the-scenes record of the Britpop stars at their impossibly cool peak.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow3jEIV0s74 Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:22:02 +0000 A fun look back at origin of these influential platforms and the beginnings of collaborative filtering. https://cybercultural.com/p/lastfm-audioscrobbler-2002/ Fri, 14 Nov 2025 14:51:14 +0000 Another excellent essay from Frank Chimero with too many quotable passages, so this one will have to do: “[AI's] danger comes because it operates inside systems with no sense of “enough.” AI needs boundaries, and so do we. The question isn’t just “what can this machine do?” but “what should it serve?” and, most importantly, “when should we stop?” https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/ Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:03:49 +0000 A worthy read from Frank Chimero: “The primacy of meta-activities—optimizing for algorithms, visibility theater, consumer entrapment, externalization of costs, performative internal alignment, horse-trading amongst a set of DOA ideas—is poison. It is a road to nowhere worth going.” https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/selling-lemons/ Mon, 13 Oct 2025 04:41:51 +0000 Greg Storey: “Look, the word ‘vibe’ has no place at work or in it. If you want to vibe something then find a club at 2AM, slam a few Red Bulls, and knock yourself out. Because vibe anything—coding, analyzing, prioritizing, strategizing, designing, problem-solving—doesn't make anything more efficient, it just shifts the work elsewhere, and often on the people who are already buried as it is. Using AI as a vending machine will always produce the same result: workslop aka generic shit. In addition, using it this way—like what Microsoft is selling—leads to a reduction in cognitive functions.” https://brilliantcrank.com/vibing-is-not-the-way/ Fri, 03 Oct 2025 19:20:22 +0000 Ethan Marcotte: “[AI's] failure can’t be separated from the staggering social, cultural, and ecological costs associated with simply using these services: the environmental harms baked into these platforms; the violent disregard for copyright that brought them into being; the real-world deaths they’ve potentially caused; the workforce of underpaid and traumatized contractors that are quite literally building these platforms; and many, many more.” https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/against-stocking-frames/ Fri, 19 Sep 2025 20:44:48 +0000