A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).
READ
“Think of storytelling as peeling back layers to reveal what’s most meaningful:
Layer One: The Raw Experience. This is where we start—unfiltered truth, a messy, personal experience we feel compelled to share.
Layer Two: The Crafted Narrative. Here, we refine. We curate, find meaning, and decide what stays. We elevate the story beyond personal catharsis to something valuable for others.
Layer Three: The Universal Theme. The final layer is the essence—the emotion, lesson, or truth that resonates with anyone who hears it.”
How to Tell Stories That Move Mountains | Psychology Today
“The important thing to understand here is that the actual building is not an important part of the value calculation. We’re not really looking at the replacement cost, the unique design, the amenities, the location, etc. Those things influence the assumptions about the gross rent we can get or the cost of operating the building (higher cost means less net rent), but at the end of the day it isn’t the building that has value, it’s the income stream.”
Why Do Commercial Spaces Sit Vacant?
“Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts.
“The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,” Wright told TheWrap. “You can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them.” At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach.”
An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week
“The “problem” was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don’t fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are “high friction.” We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable.
So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.”
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
“Across the world, scientists listened to the ocean soundscape before, during and after lockdown, using 200 ocean hydrophones that were already in place around the global ocean. When New Zealand entered lockdown on 26 March 2020, boat traffic in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park – the country’s busiest coastal waterway – almost completely stopped. Underwater noise dropped to about one-third of normal levels within 12 hours – allowing the communication ranges of fish and dolphins to increase by up to 65%. For dolphins, that meant their calls could travel around 1 mile (1.5km) further than when hampered by shipping noise.”
Covid 2020: The year of the quiet ocean
“We all already see how AI’s can serve as workers. But how will AI’s will also become the new population of consumers? What do AIs need? They need to fulfill their tasks. This is why they actively resist getting turned off. Their urge to carry out their missions is easily as urgent as ours is to procreate. So instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AI so that they can do their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AI’s will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks. And they will spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.”
The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other
“1 Don’t make art for rich people;
2 Make art for everyone;
3 Don’t stand on the outside looking in, stand on the outside looking further out;
4 Don’t make punk rock;
5 Don’t make art bigger than yourself;
6 Don’t come the rebel;
7 The Lost Commandment;
8 Let your Lone Ranger ride;
9 Riot now, pay later;
10 Burn the Bridge;
11 Accept the contradictions.
As you will note, there are 11 commandments here and not the proclaimed 10. Please feel free to delete one of your choosing. I like choice.”
Bill Drummond’s 10 Commandments of Art | Bill Drummond | The Guardian
WATCH
EXPLORE
Chronicling America | The Library of Congress is an archive of scanned and digitized thousands of newspapers from across the United States, covering major events, small-town stories, ads, political cartoons, and daily life from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
This is tremendous: Slop Evader via Tega Brain, a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.
Open source app called NotchPrompter is an always-on-top floating text prompter for macOS (even with voice activation).
One persons (by illustrator Zara Picken) monster digital graphical archive of wonderful treats over at Modern Illustration.
A free online collection of Sound Therapy options (if you’re into that sort of thing).
If you ever need to Boing!