Status:

Feeling pretty chipper today, which is perhaps not ideal for a session with my therapist but you gotta work with what you’ve got and we covered some good shit. Later I drilled some holes in the wall to put up some picture frames and didn’t fuck it up. So all in all not a bad day.

Reading:

• Japan’s tourism troubles are being fuelled by social media assholes — I have this theory, which tends to fall apart once I start interrogating it, that the dominant tools on the internet were not designed for normal people. A bunch of nerds and weirdos, introverts and outcasts, created a way to communicate that bypassed the rules of mainstream society so that they could talk about Star Trek or whatever with someone in a different time zone. It gave them a superpower and it was great. But what happens when you put extroverts and insiders on this great networked amplifier? We’re a decade or so into finding out.
• Bluesky is a record store — I’m kinda interested in the discourse around Bluesky, not because I particularly care about the platform (it’s fine, it won’t last once the money runs out, that’s OK) but because it’s a nice illustration of something I’m pondering and folk aren’t getting all angsty about other platforms. This positing of an online space as culturally similar to a record store is relevant to my thinking.
• The Red Hand Files: Harnessing your destiny

Watching:

• How Taylor Dearden portrays autism in The Pitt — She gets the expressions and mannerisms spot on. The number of times I thought, shit, I totally do that.
• Welcome to gooner world ‌(12:50) — Why everything on the algo-net feels like porn now.
• Nerdwriter on Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou ‌(8:25) — which I realised watching this I’d confused with Eyes Without a Face, presumably because of the eyeball thing, and because I’m a fool, but this means I haven’t actually seen it! Will rectify tout suite.
• Fixing the most dangerous dam in the world ‌(22:22) — Before I started watching Practical Engineering I assumed dams were simple things where you just block the river and leave it. I was so, so wrong.

Music:

• 1992 – The Love Album by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine — Mentioned it in passing yesterday and was curious to see if it stood the test of time. I think there’s something there, not a million miles from the state-of-the-nation wit of Half Man Half Biscuit, but I’m probably still too close to the memory of dancing to them at the indie disco. Need a second opinion.