A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls in the past month (which I added to my Tumblr although for a few weeks it was terminated so not everything appeared there) for your eyes / ears / brain to spend time on (as no longer active on Twitter or on LinkedIn much).
READ
“Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’””
Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” – Ars Technica
“In the book, Klein and Taylor introduce us to the religious fundamentalists, Christian Zionists and Christian Nationalists in the US, readying themselves for the second coming. Describing a “bunkered state”, the authors connect climate-related disasters, a rabid anti-immigrant standing army in the form of ICE and a politics built on false promises and misinformation to depict a febrile, riven society that doesn’t know what to believe. But the truly terrifying bit is the bridging section, on tech billionaires. The super-rich have apocalypse fantasies of their own, built not on faith or ideology but on a calm and rational evaluation of how best to maintain their position; they would genuinely rather reign in hell than share in heaven. And they have all the money to make sure they get there.”
Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’ | Society books | The Guardian
“A watermark is a visible mark embedded in a physical or digital medium to verify authenticity or assert ownership. A spymark is a hidden signal that makes your work traceable without your knowledge or consent.”
Spymarks, not Watermarks – brand
WATCH
EXPLORE
Bastardica allows you to combine two fonts and create a whole new (mainly) awful looking one to download and use.
Small Town Zine Club is an online / browser-based app for creating zines and sharing them with the wider world for free.
Build gradient backgrounds and export for free (even short videos) with this very detailed online creator.
OpenShot is a free, open-source, non-linear video editor for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Animaps creates a little video between points on the globe for creative use.
Recordly is a feature-rich open-source screen recorder for all platforms.
LISTEN
The latest episode of the fireside.rs podcast where we feature and celebrate plus learn from those who craft spaces for humans to actively belong and be creatively productive—for full show notes check out #9 Align + Podcast With Janine Sudbury | October 2026.
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