Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.

It’s happening dot gif

Bookmarking because I’m trying to collect as many recommendations for new music as I can. As I write this (21st December) they haven’t revealed their #1 slot, but if I was a betting man, I’d say it’s going to be Lankum’s False Lankum.

Update (24th December): I was right!

But without Sony’s complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav’s war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn’t been released yet. Thanks to Sony’s awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn’t even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

Moving country multiple times will change your relationship to physical media. I got rid of over 2,000 DVDs in 2012 because I couldn’t face the idea of packing and unpacking two dozen boxes of little shiny plastic discs one more time. But now in 2023, I’ve started buying physical media again because streaming is a fuckin dumpster-fire and even “buying” digital media is a minefield.

Maybe instead of spending money on blu-rays, I should invest that money in bigger hard drives for my NAS.

What a list! The Godfather isn’t even in the top 10 and everything above it is a banger.

The rule I like is ‘one hundred pages minus your age.’ Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap.

This post comes perilously close to one of those insufferable LinkedIn “if you’re not reading Marcus Aurelius from a beat-up paperback, are you really reading?” humblebrags, but I liked this rule in particular. The older I get, the more likely I am to DNF if a book isn’t holding me.

Government ministers had theatrical fits of the vapours at a piece of art depicting the police attending an historical eviction. They needn’t have worried. The image was clearly too subtle.

No artist would be so crude as to simply show the police force of the state standing guard at Bank Machines, protecting money against the people who own it.

And now, no one needs to.

I usually try to avoid anything too political over here, but this whole situation is just too bonkers to ignore, and Simon McGarr’s take is spot on.

Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer recorded a commentary for the special edition of Monkey Island 2 and now you can listen without having to play through the game. A great rambling conversation with three old friends about the process of making a classic game.

When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?

The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters

Pretty insane that Oppenheimer, of all films, would be the exception that proves the rule.