Highlights

 

NFT Toxicity ☣️

07/25/2022 • #230

A bad NFT published on GameStop’s new service drew controversy over the weekend, but the real story might have been the trolls going out of their way to defend it.

Do I think GameStop has sullied its brand by deciding to run an NFT marketplace? No. I think they sullied their brand the day they purchased Funcoland and killed it off more than 20… Read More

I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Song 🎹

07/21/2022 • #229

How a song by an unknown singer, posted over the weekend, led me on a journey to learn more about who he was. Meet Joey Wilson, a Philly songwriter whose songs will haunt you.

Ever have an earworm stuck in your head that you know barely anything about? Welcome to my world over the past week. I kind of have to credit/blame the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott for this, admittedly. While digging through the archives of… Read More

07/19/2022

Benchmark-Gate 🍎 : 

A longtime Apple journalist’s takedown of the culture of performance benchmarking on YouTube might have been a little too sharp. Is there room for less drama?

#228

07/18/2022

What a Guarantee Means 🧦 : 

The outdoors brand Bass Pro finds itself the target of a class-action lawsuit because it apparently didn’t follow the rules of its own lifetime-guarantee socks.

#227

07/14/2022

What Did Medium Solve? ✍️ : 

Medium in many ways helped workshop the modern writer economy. The problem is, most of the solutions Ev Williams landed on found better homes in other places—and were the product of chaos on his own platform.

#226

07/12/2022

Inflated Grades 🏫 : 

Columbia University gets caught puffing up its numbers on a prestigious ranking—which raises the question about what the people running said list were doing.

#225

07/11/2022

ERNEST Goes to Nashville 🎸 : 

There’s a guy named Ernest Smith who has a current hit on the Hot 100, and I didn’t notice until now because his stage name is a mononym. Shout-out to ERNEST.

#224

07/07/2022

On “Manchild” 🤓 : 

A defense of learning to embrace whatever you’re into, even if it doesn’t match the norms of your age range. Nothing wrong with being a nerd.

#223

07/05/2022

Web3, in Console Form 🎮 : 

If you’re going to try to convince gamers your hilarious-looking Web3 console is worth checking out, you need more than a render and the promise of the blockchain.

#222

07/04/2022

MidRange’s New Digital Home 🏠 : 

My secondary newsletter finally has a place to live after a couple of months off the newsletter grid. Sure took long enough, didn’t it?

#221

06/30/2022

Repeating In The Name 📻 : 

The radio station replaying Rage Against the Machine’s signature song over and over is doing its best to devalue the work for purely corporate reasons, but the song is too good to be diluted.

#220

06/28/2022

Turning Heel 😈 : 

As proven by Kraken’s leadership manifesto and other recent leadership dramas, it’s now cool to be a total jerk even if it makes you insufferable. You’ll still get plaudits anyway. From somebody.

#219

06/27/2022

Tech’s Role In Stacking The Deck 🃏 : 

There are a lot of issues that Friday’s Supreme Court ruling on abortion exposed. One that shouldn’t be ignored? The role that big tech may have played in the decision.

#218

06/23/2022

Monocultural Studies 🧐 : 

A debate kicks up about whether the browser universe would benefit from a single dominant browser. We’re not in the Internet Explorer days anymore, but the choice still doesn’t makes sense.

#217

06/21/2022

The Bad Default 🌍 : 

A big reason why Internet Explorer limped into the history books comes down to Microsoft’s slow upgrade strategy at a time when the browser was dominant.

#216

06/20/2022

The Fingerprint You Leave ☝️ : 

As third-party cookies go the way of the dodo, digital fingerprinting is going to become an increasingly prominent tactic for tracking users. As a new website suggests, your taste in browser extensions alone can be enough to identify who you are.

#215

06/16/2022

Meet Your Heroes 🕹 : 

On the time I met Zophar, the guy from Zophar’s Domain, a quarter century after I first worked on his site.

#214

06/14/2022

Netflix’s Timing Problem ⏱ : 

In a world of Barry and Severance, the once-innovative model of dumping a whole season at once feels kind of old hat. And the best example of this might be Netflix’s crown jewel, Stranger Things.

#213

06/13/2022

The (Artificial) Truth Is Out There 🤖 : 

A Google employee sticks his neck out for the idea that bots may have souls. He’s probably wrong, but it’s still a big problem for Google.

#212

06/09/2022

Absurd Images From Thin Air 🖼 : 

Pondering the cultural value and obsessive nature of using Dall-E, the tool that generates images from whatever weird ideas you can conceive.

#211