My world on the web
Yesterday, Taylor Swift pulled another surprise attack. This past summer, Swift released her quarantine album folklore with only a day of advance notice. Yesterday — the same day that folklore was nominated for a buttload of Grammys — Swift announced the impending release of Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a new live-concert movie that Swift made with her folklore collaborators Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Justin Vernon. That film is up on Disney+ today, and Swift also went ahead and made a whole live album out of it.
Given that folklore was already basically an acoustic album, it’s still striking to hear Swift and her collaborators stripping those songs down even further, giving them a different level of intimacy.
The conversations between Swift, Antonoff and Dessner were insightful and worth the watch.
An audio compilation of my bestselling books about creativity in the digital age, Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and Keep Going.
I know this track won’t hit home for a lot of people and that’s OK. I wrote it during Victorian Lock-down 1.0 at a time when I was feeling particularly lucky to be able to spend so much time with the kids while they’re still so young. To be able to look at my calendar and see NOTHING on it, forcing me to be completely in the moment because suddenly the future didn’t exist.
Surprisingly, that felt like a gift. I realised I’d been running an invisible race, a rabid dog chasing a phantom rabbit. But to what end? So to be given this chance to stop… well, I really didn’t want to forget it. So this song came out of that moment. It’s a post-it note to my future self: “don’t forget the good things you’ve learnt!”.
The video clip associated with the song is made up of multiple screens capturing the culture of video conferencing so prevelent during the crisis around COVID.
She has also produced a ‘live’ clip for The Sound which features Higgins walking around Melbourne before finally ending in with a performance at the hauntingly empty steps to Flinders Street Station.
Similar to Child Gambino’s This is America a few years ago, Higgins’ song encapsulates the current state of affairs, especially the hope at the end of the tunnel.
StackEdit’s Markdown syntax highlighting is unique. The refined text formatting of the editor helps you visualize the final rendering of your files.
TidalCycles (or ‘tidal’ for short) is free/open source software, that allows you to make patterns with code, whether live coding music at algoraves or composing in the studio.
via Chris Beckstrom
“How Will I Know” only fell into Houston’s hands because Janet Jackson said no. The song came from George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, a married couple from Seattle who sang backup on Deniece Williams’ 1984 chart-topper “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” and who recorded as the duo Boy Meets Girl.
She recreates the dance floor in her own image, tries to bring people together as a way of making herself feel less alone. She succeeded here by turning heartbreak into a weapon, loneliness into a rallying cry. It’s why Body Talk still works a decade later: Feeling alone is timeless.
Our year of 2020—somehow simultaneously overstuffed but also stretched thin, a year of Covid and protests against racism and a momentus election—will thus have a commensurately unwieldy digital historical record, densely packed with every need, opinion, and stress that our devices and sensors have captured and transmitted. That the September 11 Digital Archive collected 150,000 born-digital objects will strike future historians as confusingly slight, a desaturated daguerreotype compared to today’s hi-def canvas of data, teeming with vivid pixels. This year we will have generated billions of photographs, messages, and posts. Our movement through time and space has been etched as trillions of bytes about where we went and ate and shopped, or how much we hunkered down at home instead. But even if we hid from the virus, none of us will have been truly hidden. It’s all there in the data.
Matti, forgive me if this makes no sense to you, but perhaps there is a way to summon your wife and dear brother and release them from your despair so that they can attend to you — allow them to become your spiritual companions in that impossible realm, to look after you in their imagined presence, and guide you forward until things get better. For they do, in time, they do.
How has a seemingly straightforward image – an eye set within a triangle – become a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists? Matthew Wilson looks at the history of an ambiguous symbol.
In this article, we’ll explain why your website is a key part of your school library experience. Then we’ll discuss 5 essential features you should include when creating or updating your school library site. We’ve also got 8 examples of great school library websites and blogs to share with you.
The trick making your library’s website or blog as engaging and useful as possible is to include these 5 essentials:
- Clear site navigation
- Regularly updated content
- Consistent design
- Visible contact details
- Accessible design
She also provides a useful collection of examples.
Casey Cep writes that the novelist failed to truly acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation in his own life but did so with savage thoroughness in his fiction.
Victoria police say they can’t disclose any details about the program because of “methodological sensitivities,” much in the same way that stage psychics can’t disclose how they guess that the lady in the third row has lost a loved one due to “methodological sensitivities.”
Doctorow explains that all this tells the police is “how many crimes to charge the child with between now and their 21st birthday.”
Opal dealer Mike Poben nearly got rid of the 100-million-year-old fossils found in a bag of rough dirt — but his decision to keep them changed his life, and our view of Australia’s deep past.
Jan Boddez (jan.boddez.net)I recently moved another blog of mine back to “plain” WordPress, and in the process added microformats2 support to its Twenty Twenty child theme. Some remarks: I’ve yet to add a
u-photoclass to featured images, I used a bit of a trick to get post metadata to show below short-form posts rather than above, and I’ve also completely hidden the “regular” comment form—I’m more of a Webmention type of guy.All of the site’s source, minus default plugins and such, is hosted on GitHub, and that includes this child theme.
The ideas that animate iDPI have been outlined in a set of academic papers and articles in the popular press:
Building a More Honest Internet
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)Zuckerman and Rajendra-Nicolucci have an interesting looking research project here that aims to look at means of potentially providing more civic-minded social media.
I thought I’d take a short stab at beginning a conversation on this front as it’s an important topic that is near and dear to m…
Cal Newport on the 43 Folders blogger Merlin Mann; the late productivity expert Peter Drucker; the author David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” method; and why G.T.D. doesn’t address the anxiety and inefficiency associated with e-mail overload, a phenomenon that knowledge workers experience in the office.
In software development, for example, it’s widely accepted that programmers are most effective when they work on one feature at a time, focussing in a distraction-free sprint until done. It’s conceivable that other knowledge fields might enjoy similar productivity boosts from more intentional assignments of effort. What if you began each morning with a status meeting in which your team confronts its task board? A plan could then be made about which handful of things each person would tackle that day. Instead of individuals feeling besieged and resentful—about the additional tasks that similarly overwhelmed colleagues are flinging their way—they could execute a collaborative plan designed to benefit everyone.
I think the biggest challenge with this is as much about mindset as it is about process. It is interesting to consider this alongside discussions around distributed leadership.
I spent some time looking at Substack, but ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons. I am interested in this new writing space and model. But, it also does remind of the hype around Medium when it first started.
A new micropayments platform for newsletters won’t magically liberate public intellectuals from commercial pressures; it won’t solve the tensions between free speech and safety; and I highly doubt it will make having a career as a writer any easier. But it will create space for writing not tailored to the trending on Twitter section, encourage writers to develop a deeper relationship with their audience, and promote the sort of writing (both longform and short) that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of legacy media.
I really liked your association between Substack and Medium. What Monahan labels a ‘social media interregnum’. I really liked Chris Aldrich’s point about ‘yet-another-platform’.
I have been using Buttondown, but have reservations and am considering moving to Mailpoet, especially as all my posts are already on my site.
