second brain

a digital common place book | an s_m_i production | one of a few

[oneterabyteofkilobyteage]

original url http://www.geocities.com/climatechange777/

last modified 2008-12-10 21:43:56

[seldo]

[s-m-i]

#mood

[missamerican-pie]

[tetw]

10 Great Essays about Music

Is Old Music Killing New Music? by Ted Gioia - Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market. Even worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking.

The Dark Art of Mastering Music by Jordan Kisner - Shedding light on the elusive studio practice that’s all but necessary to make music sound great.

The Last Time New York Was Hardcore by Michael Stahl - In the ’90s, one high-octane underground music scene desperately held on to its rebellious roots of power chords, slam dancing and stage diving. What happened to hardcore?

Some Notes on Attunement by Zadie Smith - A voyage around Joni Mitchell

Is There Anything Left Of Hip Hop? by Jason England - Hip hop has reached its midlife crisis

The Problem With Saying Oontz Oontz by Spencer Kornhaber - The story of dance music in America is a story of boom and backlash. As Beyoncé and Drake turn to house-inspired sounds, will the cycle happen again?

Why Do We Even Listen to New Music? by Jeremy D. Larson - Our brains reward us for seeking out what we already know. So why should we reach to listen to something we don’t?

How Twitter Changed Music by Eric Harvey - Hashtag rap! Kanye rants! Terrifying stan pile-ons! For better and worse, Twitter has forever altered the music landscape.

What Will Happen When Machines Write Songs Just as Well as Your Favorite Musician? by Clive Thompson - Artificial intelligence tools will hurt some musicians and help others.

The Violin Doctor by Elly Fishman - He’s trusted to repair some of the world’s most fabled — and expensive — instruments. How does John Becker manage to unlock the sound of a Stradivarius?

[montereybayaquarium]

In case you need it today, here’s the link to our Moon Jelly Cam 💙

Moon Jelly | Live cam | Monterey Bay Aquarium

Be hypnotized by our gorgeous glowing moon jellies. 

[rosalarian]

I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

[rosalarian]

As Twitter empties out, I am once again a digital nomad, trying to rebuild a following on yet another site I don’t own (Bluesky, which is nice and you should follow me but also I am just so tired.) Every single time I move to a new site, maybe only 10% of old followers keep following me to the new place. Having done this several times, I barely have anything anymore.

YU+ME, at its peak in 2007, had 250,000 regular readers that came to my own personal website. Today, I have 450 followers on Bluesky. To say that I feel absolute existential despair is an understatement. I am making the best work of my life and nobody is seeing it.

[lastnightsreading]

Valeria Luiselli at Shakespeare and Company, 6/25/19

[lastnightsreading]

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan at Shakespeare and Co, 7/23/19

[lastnightsreading]

Tommy Orange at Shakespeare and Co, 5/29/19

[lastnightsreading]

Valeria Luiselli at Shakespeare and Company, 6/25/19

[lastnightsreading]

Sonia Sanchez at Maison de la Poésie, 11/10/19

[washingtonpost]

“Quite the minefield, this Internet.”

— Overheard at The Washington Post 

[washingtonpost]

“I am just cells, strung together by adrenaline. With like, sprinkles of caffeine.”

— Overheard at The Washington Post  

[s-m-i]

It is from this past that I come surrounded by sisters in blood and in spirit it is this past that I bequeath a history of work and struggle Each generation improves the world for the next. My grandparents willed me strength. My parents will me pride. I will to you rage. I give you a world incomplete a world where women still are property and chattel where color still shuts doors where sexual choice still threatens but I give you a legacy of doers of people who takes risks to chisel the crack wider. Take the strength that you may wage a long battle. Take the pride that you can never stand small. Take the rage that you can never settle for less “legacy, III” by Pat Parker

[bretzkysbs]

[s-m-i]

But that wasn’t even Webster’s most ambitious project. Certainly it’s not what he became known for. In 1807, he started writing a dictionary, which he called, boldly, An American Dictionary of the English Language. He wanted it to be comprehensive, authoritative. Think of that: a man sits down, aiming to capture his language whole.

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary « the jsomers.net blog

[annfriedman]

At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary. Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line—how each listed word differs from all the others. Some dictionaries keep themselves trim by just listing synonyms and not going on to make distinctions. You want the first kind, in which you are not just getting a list of words; you are being told the differences in their hues, as if you were looking at the stripes in an awning, each of a subtly different green.

John McPhee

This passage changed my writing process.

(via annfriedman)

[seldo]

Uber shows why your first job should be at a big company

I periodically give a very long tech talk, usually at dev bootcamps, called Stuff Everybody Knows. It’s about everything the web development industry has agreed is true for the last 20 years I’ve been in it. At the end, it includes some career advice, because I got questions about it a lot.

In that section, I say that the first job you take out of college or out of a bootcamp should be at a big company, not a startup. And here’s my explanation of why:

The first year of your life as a software developer is not really learning how to code, it’s learning how to exist in a company. You learn how meetings work, and how to navigate office politics, and you learn what an HR department is supposed to do. One of the reasons you see startups that were started by people who were in college at the time doing really weird shit is because they never had this experience. Why on earth were you sexually harassing each other and doing coke in the stairwell? Why did you not know that was a bad idea? It’s because they’d never worked anywhere else. It was just Lord of the Flies over there.

And if you’re looking for a proof of this, look no further than everyone’s current poster child for terrible corporate behavior, Uber. Fun fact: Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, has never worked at a company he didn’t run.

So if you’re wondering why it is Mr. Kalanick doesn’t seem to have any idea what the job of his HR department is and what constitutes appropriate workplace behavior, it’s because he made it up as he went along and got it horribly, horribly wrong. It is Lord of the Flies over there.

[s-m-i]

“Fun fact: Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, has never worked at a company he didn’t run.” Seen versions of this play out over and over and over…