Bendy

Apple doesn’t know what you want and neither do you. Apple makes you want.

Nobody, least of all oneself, knows what one wants (except in the moment; I want some peanuts) so we have to be told. And you certainly do have a choice, so long as it’s the right one.

Reading this article made me want to listen to Eyeliner’s Larp of Luxury again.

My setup is my laptop on an Ikea Björkåsen (featuring cupholder with nifty notch for the mug handle) and my arse on a Poäng. If that’s not minimal I don’t know what is.

I say, just think how much more valuable Yahoo! might’ve been if only they had thought more about brand management and not ended up with a “bullshit” logo. They truly blew their only chance to turn their fortunes around.

The irony wasn’t lost on me ;)

Paying for native macOS apps is like buying vinyl records. It’s an aesthetic choice, nothing more.

From an engineering perspective, racing cars are much closer to aircraft than they are to road cars; they just have their wings upside-down.

And I learn that Google is actually upset that its search results are suffering degradation by rampant, runaway SEO—they reap what they sow, and at everyone’s expense. Such brought to mind The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner as the web faces its own environmental collapse:

“You…treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”

Adblocking isn’t simply convenience it’s life-preserving.

I’ve not managed to read the article since its site’s choked. However I wonder if like some of the comments here it touches on something that has only become more stark with increasing automation and mass surveillance. That labor tends to consumption and vice versa.

These two otherwise orthonormal concepts collapse into each other in a manner perhaps related to the swings between pleasure and jouissance.

Even if you fight, you cannot win.

I discovered the cPickle module thanks to this show.

So long as it’s mightier than the sword.

“The NRA say that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. I think the gun helps. Just standing and shouting BANG! That’s not gonna kill too many people.” - Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill (1999)

Do you use these alternatives professionally? What kind of work have you undertaken?

Adobe CC has a lousy cancellation process for the same reason the US has had lousy foreign policy—it doesn’t need a good one. There is no alternative, and until there is they’re not going to give up the joy of causing pain to those disgusting evil customers who thought of leaving them if they’re not going to be compensated.

I agree with the article but I am nonetheless pessimistic. I do think remote work will stay, the relentless force of capital is now on its side, but I’m afraid that’s only because even in a remote work paradigm the “managers” will still discover new ways to control, abuse and enjoy their employees.

Looks like an extension of psychogeography.

This list is missing diagrams.net (draw.io).

This “puzzle” reminded me of Nick Land’s essay “Qabbala 101”, which remarks on patterns found in “primitive numerization” schemes such as this. http://files.eshkolot.ru/C1_Nick_Land.pdf