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#76 May 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Creativity Matters Issue 3 2025 - front page - justadandak.com
Read and download this months issue here / subscribe here.

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

“If we deliberately change the way that we breathe, for example, using exhales that are twice the length of the inhale, we consciously send different signals to the medulla oblongata (the brain’s control center), just as we might change the input channel on a television remote. This part of our brain responds with instructions to the endocrine system to produce a neurotransmitter that slows down our heart rate, regulates blood pressure, and returns our body to homeostasis.”
The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System

“Under an interpretation of one of the category 1 duties, the foundation said, if it chose not to verify Wikipedia users and editors, it would have to allow anonymous users to block other posters from fixing or removing any content, under the act’s measures to tackle online trolls. As a consequence, thousands of volunteer editors on the site would need to undergo identity verification, which breaches the foundation’s commitment to collecting minimal data about readers and contributors. Punishments for breaching the act include fines of either £18m or 10% of a company’s global turnover and, in extreme cases, access to a service being blocked in the UK.”
Wikipedia challenging UK law it says exposes it to ‘manipulation and vandalism’ | Wikipedia | The Guardian

“Lately, it feels like some of you aren’t the techno-optimists I took you to be. You’ve been heard uttering slurs like “I’m worried about my job stability” and “I just don’t think it’s positive for humankind,” neither of which sounds remotely optimistic or techno. I’ve even heard shocking reports of teams failing to incorporate plagiarism into their processes, because—I can’t believe I have to repeat this—“it’s not helpful.” Team, hear me when I say that this is harassment, and it must end. Put yourself in your coworker’s shoes—say, a coworker with really nice, designer footwear, who has invested their personal fortune into the Giant Plagiarism Machine™, along with other intellectual-property-theft futures. Imagine how that coworker (could be anyone!) might feel working alongside such Negative Nancies.”
A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

“Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market. When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research—the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness—the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.”
Via US Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – Part 3: Generative AI Training pre-publication version – A report of the register of copyrights May 2025 (pdf)

“Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted as much during more than ten hours of testimony, over three days last week, in the opening phase of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.”
Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over | The New Yorker

WATCH

EXPLORE

Check out and play this no stress Tetris game / in-browser.

Open Alternative is a growing list of open-source alternatives to everyday SaaS products.

Check out this lovely little online Gradient Wallpaper / Colour Blend Generator via quismi.

Spawning AI is trying to provide ‘opt-out’ services for creators regarding Generative AI platforms.

PairPods is an an app to easily share Bluetooth audio on macOS between two devices at a time for free.

Check out The Brilliance Summit if you’re in the UK at the end of June this year (founded by the wife of a pal).

Apply now for It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch – championing the next generation of creatives, deadline is 22 June at 23:59.

Live TV Wall displays international news channels in two grid layout options which you can go full screen with for backdrop creations.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

16 Years Of LinkedIn | Divesting From A Broken Platform

Rolodex™_67236_Rotary_Business_Card_File with LinkedIn logo added - justadandak.com
By Poolcode – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link + my mod.

It’s taken me months to individually contact the majority my 3,100+ connections in my LinkedIn network via the direct messaging option.

After a personal opening paragraph saying hello and looking at what they are currently up to, I mention their work and / or how long it’s been and / or reminder of where we met plus ask of how I can support their endeavours. I then continue with the following reason for the message:

“Am reaching out to let you know I don’t know how long I’ll be actively using LinkedIn going forward, so if you’re not already please subscribe to my site / blog to ensure you get all the important updates from me: https://justadandak.com/blog/ -> there’s a box on the right hand side to pop your preferred email into or there’s the RSS feed to snag and add to your reader. It’s never more than a handful of posts a month plus you can unsubscribe at anytime, your data is never shared on ;-)”

I then standardise mentions of a few things of what I’m up to and after that share details for those more inclined to go deeper: how after 30 years online I’ve seen in the past decade the erosion of ethics and trust on social media platforms regarding engagement, then how specifically the LinkedIn algorithms hide anything useful even though I have tried to ‘train’ it (plus in turn how my stuff doesn’t get through to those I’m connected to), and finally I ask about their site / blog / newsletter / YouTube channel in which I can subscribe to / grab the RSS from plus hope we get to speak / meet again soon.

Out of the folks contacted I’d say 10%, maybe 15% responded. A third of those shared support / understanding with the issues of the platform (whether it be direct experience of lack of utility / reach / use). Got about 100 new subscribers to my blog via email (no way of telling who snagged the RSS feed) and had three direct speaker coaching clients which was a nice unintended outcome.


I joined LinkedIn during 2009.

I had 15 years online under my belt by that time and that year marked 3 years into MediaSnackers, where we were championing the astonishing creativity and collaborative force social media offers through training courses / talks delivered across several continents and for / to an impressive group of clients.

I still truly believe in the magnificent power of connecting humans / ideas through online mediums plus the incredible ways it enables others to have voice. However, as exemplified by Facebook and Twitter, the corrosive strategy to hollow out of any kind of human-first approach and replace that with everything run by algorithms / data-sucking-bots illustrates the aim of commodifying attention to the degradation of it’s own usefulness (see ‘enshittification’)

For what its worth, LinkedIn has an opportunity to differentiate with the following:

  • remove the alorithmic or at least allow an opt-out version of the main feed, serving content only from 1st connections (they could even go further and introduce private groups where you can curate humans into topic areas which only you can see)
  • remove or label or have an opt-out to any AI text / image in someones feed (although being owned by Microsoft can imagine it’s a sales funnel play for Co-pilot LLM plus all of the content on the platform has already been sucked up into the database)
  • allow a block feature on certain words or phrases to again cut through the trend-aligned posts and content

Until then and for the time being, I’ll log in every now and again to see if anyone has left me a message or tagged me in something of interest. For the reasons shared above, LinkedIn has now been relegated to an amazingly useful modern-day-Rolodex for when I travel and need to find folks in a particular place (within my network) until such time they remove that feature also.

Published

#74 March 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Merlin as a harpist at the court of Arthur, Suite Vulgate du Merlin, BnF, fr. 749 f. 319 (c.1285)
Merlin as a harpist at the court of Arthur, Suite Vulgate du Merlin, BnF, fr. 749 f. 319 (c.1285) via Uni of Cambridge

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Amazon has previously mismanaged Alexa voice recordings. In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay $25 million in civil penalties over the revelation that it stored recordings of children’s interactions with Alexa forever. Adults also didn’t feel properly informed of Amazon’s inclination toward keeping Alexa recordings unless prompted not to until 2019—five years after the first Echo came out. If that’s not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts. Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.”
Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 – Ars Technica

“When the company first announced it was considering a sale, we highlighted many of the potential issues, including selling that data to companies with poor security practices or direct links to law enforcement. With this bankruptcy, the concerns we expressed last year remain the same. It is unclear what will happen with your genetic data if 23andMe finds a buyer, and that uncertainty is a clear indication that you should consider deleting your data.”
How to Delete Your 23andMe Data | Electronic Frontier Foundation

“To prevent the threatened setbacks to US innovation and risks to national security, OpenAI urged Trump to enact a federal law that preempts state laws attempting to regulate AI threats to things like consumer privacy or election integrity, like deepfakes or facial recognition. That federal law, OpenAI suggested, should set up a “voluntary partnership between the federal government and the private sector,” where AI companies trade industry knowledge and model access for federal “relief” and “liability protections” from state laws. Additionally, OpenAI wants protections from international laws that it claims risk slowing down America’s AI development.”
OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use – Ars Technica

“Perhaps the closest we’ve seen to a justification has come from “Crypto Czar” David Sacks, who reiterated that the US would not sell any of the bitcoin and wrote on Twitter that “It will be kept as a store of value. The Reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called ‘digital gold’”. But this argument doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, even setting aside the already questionable nature of bitcoin’s usefulness as a “store of value”. If an asset will indeed never be sold, how would the US draw upon its stored value in order to, say, backstop the dollar or pay outstanding debts? What’s the point of a store of value if that value can never be accessed?”
Crypto reserves: no public good, no principles

“The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid. The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”. The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.”
US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms | US news | The Guardian

“Professor Mark Bateman, from the University of Sheffield’s School of Geography and Planning, used a dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence, to discover the burial age of individual grains of sand from eight samples throughout the site. His work showed that the archaeological site extended back from 12,000 years ago right through to around 150,000 years ago. These results were then corroborated by Electron Spin Resonance dating. “It is incredibly interesting to take a grain of ancient sand and be the first to know when it was deposited. It is even more so when the age of the sand changes what we know of how, and where, our ancient ancestors lived.””
Scientists find earliest evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150,000 years ago | News | The University of Sheffield

“A more effective model charges for the full engagement, encompassing four key phases:
Discovery – Understanding the client’s needs, challenges, and objectives. This phase involves research, conversations, and assessing the right approach.
Defining Scope – Establishing the framework for delivery, including the intended outcomes, process, and deliverables. This ensures clarity for both parties.
Delivery – The actual execution, whether that’s a keynote speech, coaching session, advisory engagement, or facilitation. By this stage, the foundation has been laid for maximum impact.
Debriefing & Follow-Up – Evaluating outcomes, providing reflections, and offering ongoing insights to support long-term success.”
The Folly of Hourly Charging — David McQueen | Executive Leadership Coach

WATCH

EXPLORE

Searchable collection of retro 88×31 buttons from the GeoCities era.

Love this free Revenge font, a typeface made from some graf on the Bow Arts Cente in London.

This will keep you busy for a while, the largest collection of Free stuff on the Internet via FreeMediaHeckYeah.

Have a giggle, get confused, be moved / triggered / wowed by these 100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century (fwiw).

3D Earthquake Map is a real-time interactive global earthquake map showing the depth of the shakes as well as where.

Attend the Design for Exponential Impact at Camp Earnest, California, Jun 23-27 2025 (tickets available now and range from $1,282.33USD).

Seen a few of these pop up which basically run the subtitles through an AI and then summarises the YouTube video back to you (currently free).

goeuropean.org is a community-driven directory bringing you recommendations and insights from across Europe (if you’re looking to use move your purchase power away from certain places).

The Creativity Pioneers Fund is a global unrestricted grant of 5,000 euros for non-profit organizations around the world, that are addressing social and environmental issues through creativity and culture, established in 2021 by the Moleskine Foundation (apply before April 7th 2025).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

2024 Annual Review | Reviving To Valuing

Varied lessons in principled living.

2024 broke my heart…

…broke my spirit…

…broke me open…

…what a gift!

VALUES

three rules animation - justadandak.com

It was a year of living my personal and professional standards.

This meant orienting away from people and a path which had already eroded much of my time, had taken me away from cherished communities, emptied my energy / bank account / sense of belonging and left me adrift.

These decisions were massively challenging although were right to make, and made easier by those who ask for mundane, those who say things then do the opposite, those who prefer to stay small and who have yet to develop the courage to take responsibility for situations they have created!

It truly was not a good year for others bringing positiveness to my life, however, it was one in which I discovered my own worth… then I added tax!

TED(x) TALK

My TEDx talk is on ted.com—BOOM⁠—what a smile-inducing-discovery and had me adding ‘as featured on ted.com’ to all references on my site!

The talk is flirting with the one-million-views mark so currently working out what to do to recognise this. Sign up in the sidebar to get that notification as will announce it on my blog.

The accompanying Speaking With Purpose book continues to sell in its tens… many purchasers have gotten in touch afterwards saying nice things and / or asking follow-up questions.

I’m currently story-boarding a ten-part videos series on my three pillar approach and it being applied in different ways, so again stay tuned to that in the first half of the new year via this blog.

FEATURES

jinx arcane gif

Was quadruply-thrilled to be invited to participate / featured in the following podcasts:

The Subtle Art of Public Speaking | Stage, Page & Screen Podcast
Digby Scott, Dig Deeper Podcast | Translation, Narration, Curation and Host Leadership
Is Creativity Just A Catchphrase? | Finding Creativity Podcast
Deconstructing My TEDx Talk | A Critique Via The GhostRanch Podcast

BLOGGED

blogging - napoleon dynamite gif

Posts this year:

  1. 500,000 TEDxNelson Talk Views | Celebrating With A Giveaway
  2. #60 January 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  3. For Those Who Want To Tell Better Stories #12 | Video Store Chat, Blind Drawing Tutorial & Web Story
  4. The Passing Of A Friend | RIP John Weekes
  5. #61 February 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  6. Need To Yawn | Watch This
  7. #62 March 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  8. The Subtle Art of Public Speaking | Stage, Page & Screen Podcast
  9. Open Call To Play | Back On The Creative Market
  10. #63 April 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  11. #64 May 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  12. For Those Who Want To Tell Better Stories #13 | Thumping & Plucking The Bass, Informational For Buying A Car, and Drumming Blind
  13. #65 June 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  14. MUNDANE | Made Up of Nothing, Devoid of Anything New or Exciting
  15. #66 July 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  16. PEO Course Review | Figuring Out Next Moves
  17. 2024 North America Tour & Return To Aotearoa / New Zealand | Fancy A Dance?
  18. 750,000 Views | Celebrating As We Go
  19. Three Rules | What Love, Trust & Sorry Needs
  20. NEW SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT | Purposeful Storytelling Impact Course
  21. #67 August 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  22. Dear Madam | Beyond The Savage Creative Storm
  23. Mundane Series Launch | Positive Products To Amplify Imaginative Minds / Hearts / Souls – PURCHASE NOW!
  24. 30 Years Online… So Far | 1994-2024
  25. Rilke’s Briefcase, Writing Implements & Inkpot | A Past Auction Find
  26. #68 September 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  27. Digby Scott, Dig Deeper Podcast | Translation, Narration, Curation and Host Leadership
  28. Remember(ing) Me | Lone Strolling In Art Galleries Again
  29. HATCH 20 | Impact Summit 2024
  30. #69 October 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  31. Standing Out In The Global Media Industry | Connecting Two Small But Perfectly Formed Nations
  32. Deconstructing My TEDx Talk | A Critique Via The GhostRanch Podcast
  33. The Sacred Vastness Of Being | Forrest Landry At HATCH 20
  34. #70 November 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
  35. Is Creativity Just A Catchphrase? | Finding Creativity Podcast
  36. #71 December 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

To ensure you don’t miss a thing subscribe and can get an email every time I post a blog:

RETURN(S)

gandalf-returns-gif

…back to Cymru Wales for two extended periods.

…back to the hunger building to be creative (with others).

…back in England for a quarter-of-the-year-side-quest.

…back to North America for some dancing plus HATCH.

…back in Aotearoa New Zealand rediscovering whanau.

…back to freelancing and meeting folks to explore collabs.

…back for new future possibilities with blank pieces of paper (see 2025 below)!

ONLINE COURSE REDO DECISION

Decided not to develop this out further after asking and gaining feedback from the community.

After chalking up a healthy five-figure return which sustained me through the lean-years of post-Covid-times, will now be folding the lessons and insights into the following:

NEW SERVICE

planes trains and automobiles gif - john candy with a casio

Launched publicly after a successful pilot with a multi-national (who promptly ordered a second cohort plus now in talks for future ones in 2025), the Purposeful Storytelling Impact Course is a tailored leadership learning experience, aimed at greatly improving storytelling techniques and oratory skills, as well as enhancing the capability to deliver exceptional showcase presentations across diverse fields.

Here are some quotes from those who have participated:

If you care about having your leaders internally gain crucial oratory / communication skills then this is something to check out and then get in touch to explore booking.

SPEAKER COACHING

coach hines gif

Always a joy to sit and collaborate with others on their voice and story, plus how they will share that with the world.

As I continue to hone my speaker coaching skills I’m finding a lot more fluidity in approaches I’m taking, informed by the accrued years of practice, an intuition stemming from the thousands of individuals I can now say I’ve interacted with. And even so, I continue to learn constantly and constantly reevaluate the limits of my own understanding in this discipline.

Along with the 1-2-1’s (which now includes an Olympian in my alumni of clients), I continue to offer speaker coaching through my established half/full day ‘purposeful storytelling’ masterclass sessions (foundation and advanced options available), again, get in touch for more info.

CREATIVE PRODUCING

john travolta confused gif - pulp fiction

Apart from some pro-bono and friend-consulting in this space have done very little this year. Although triple-keen to explore briefs from those looking to gather humans in one room for ‘delicious learning experiences’⁠—check out my pedigree and lets talk.

STORIES

Have an outline of a historical fiction story and another sci-fi trilogy I’d like to work on in the first half of 2025. Have decided against the other book idea at the moment (detailed in last years update and which aligns to a launch of a new business venture which I’m still researching and curating ideas around).

SOCIAL MEDIA

Reddit source.

Since I stopped tweetmailing the platform continues to descend further into the pile of fiery turds described.

I did sign up for Mastodon and Bluesky although not interested in diverting my time from other things to cultivate a following on there or diluting my curative / creative efforts.

Tumblr has become my go-back-to curation platform and have enjoyed the interesting things it thinks I should be interested in, but again, spend no time on there shaping the feeds and not using it beyond feeding my monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.

As where I get my information and stimulation from, am going back to the more ‘traditional’ blogs and online communities like Reddit plus personal newsletters (especially ones with RSS feeds I can pull into my reader).

For that reason LinkedIn holds less and less interest as it continue to go the way of all algorithmic platforms (I’d honestly pay the premium option if it trusted us to be adults and I could just get the updates of those in my network).

So for now the focus will be blogging and creating here (again, sign-up in the sidebar please).

2025

the simpsons - i will not fight the future gif

I’m hungry to find the edges of things, to build, rebuild, to collaborate, to Shake The Dust, plus orient towards those who are principle-led and celebrate / nurture creative actioneers.

For this reason I’m taking the opportunity to return to Aotearoa New Zealand (for at least six months) and in terms of future travels, unless something radical and wonderful occurs, will be staying put for a while as really need to ‘land’ somewhere to counter the adrift-ness being felt deeply.

So what about you? Where do you find yourself at the beginning of the new calendar year? How can I serve / add value in your adventures in 2025? And if nothing else, please feel me sending you light:

Previous years reviews: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009
Published

#67 August 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

(via Tube map redesigned by University of Essex lecturer goes viral – BBC News)

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Creativity is made, not generated. Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us. We’re here for the humans. We’re not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.”
Creativity is made, not generated — Procreate®

“Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. Humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way our networks are built predisposes us to use power unwisely. For most of our networks have been built and maintained by spreading fictions, fantasies and mass delusions – ranging from enchanted broomsticks to financial systems. Our problem, then, is a network problem. Specifically, it is an information problem. For information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are.”
‘Never summon a power you can’t control’: Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

“In an email reported by the New York Times, Condé Nast’s CEO, Roger Lynch, said that the deal will make up for some of the revenue that technology companies have snagged publishers in recent years. He wrote: “Generative AI is rapidly changing ways audiences are discovering information. It’s crucial that we meet audiences where they are an embrace new technologies while also ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property.” Other media companies have taken the opposite tack. The New York Times and the Intercept have sued OpenAI for using their articles. The litigation is ongoing.”
OpenAI signs multi-year content partnership with Condé Nast | Technology | The Guardian

“Like designing any immersive experience, a public place captures the imagination of its visitor. It offers a promise. How a place looks (Form) and its practical purpose (Function), should be informed by its “guest promise” (Fulfillment).”
Margaret Kerrison | ex-Imagineer on placemaking | bloolop

“A recently published report by digital collaboration management company Vyopta found a correlation between employee retention and camera enablement during virtual meetings. Workers who left their organization within a year of the study’s sample period (Q1 2022 and Q1 2023) turned their cameras on in just 18.4 percent of small group meetings, while employees who stayed at their organization were on camera in 32.5 percent of such meetings. The report — which involved 450,000 employees and data from 40 million meetings worldwide — shows that companies need to make a concerted effort to establish an effective virtual meeting culture…”
Camera-Off Time in Virtual Meetings Could Be a Bad Sign for Employee Retention, Study Finds | Inc.com

“In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes. The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat. The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.”
A new model of empathy: The rat – The Washington Post

“Last week, Google backtracked on its long-standing promise to block third-party cookies in Chrome. This is bad for your privacy and good for Google’s business. Third-party cookies are a pervasive tracking technology that allow companies to snoop on your online activity for surveillance and ad-targeting purposes. The consumer harm caused by these cookies has been well-documented for years, prompting Safari and Firefox to block them since 2020. Google knows this—that’s why they pledged to phase out third-party cookies in 2020. By abandoning this plan, Google leaves billions of Chrome users vulnerable to online surveillance.”
Google Breaks Promise to Block Third-Party Cookies | Electronic Frontier Foundation

WATCH

EXPLORE

Automatisch is an Open Source Zapier Alternative.

The Unanswered Oddities playlist is a superb use of AI.

A minimalist town builder with trams to play in your browser.

These wonderful Werner Herzog Inspirationals are posters for our time.

RSS still rules so here are a bunch of tools which will aid defining your own media menu.

Create vector dotted maps with custom options and download them as SVG or PNG files.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#60 January 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

(via The 1944 CIA guide to sabotaging meetings — Authentic Comms Strategic Consultancy)

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“I can get through this.” / 2. “I’m not going to let myself be a victim.” / 3. “Life is hard.” / 4. “This, too, shall pass.” / 5. “What can I learn from this?” / 6. “I need some time.” / 7. “I still have things to be grateful for.” / 8. “It is what it is.” / 9. “I’m letting this go.”

Harvard psychologist: If you use any of these 9 phrases every day, ‘you’re more emotionally resilient than most’

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy.“

(via Street Level Surveillance)

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.

Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.”

‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

“The act of entering an airport starts with the removal of personal sovereignty. If you linger at a curb, you will be ticketed. If your bag is overweight, you are screwed. Inside, you are scanned, told explicitly what you can and cannot take with you, and people must submit or be punished. Often surly people are yelling at you about your laptops, shoes, and belts. It is now also taken for granted that if you wish to consume anything at an airport, it will cost 2-3X what it does in the wild.”

The Oppressive Culture of Air Travel

“One significant anniversary in 2023 passed almost without mention. In May 1923, the Welsh women’s peace petition was initiated – a plea from the women of Wales to the women of the US, urging the US to take its place in the newly formed League of Nations and encouraging its full participation in the permanent court of international justice, which had come into being in 1922. The text refers to American-Welsh cooperation in the 19th century, and welcomes the steps taken after the first world war to control the arms trade and tackle what we now call human trafficking and the movement of illegal drugs.”

Remember the tenacity of 400,000 Welsh women a century ago. Then use your power to shape events today | Rowan Williams | The Guardian

WATCH

EXPLORE

Watch YouTube without the ads via YewTu.be.

This list of 50 types of Science Fiction is interesting.

Nearly 300 (unicode) arrows. Which are your fav(s)…?

4131 free icons for your games & other creative projects via game-icons.net.

This open source app: GitHub – MrKai77/Loop: MacOS window management made elegant.

At templatemaker.nl, you can create and download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free!

Play around with this Text to Speech & AI Voice Generator – ElevenLabs to see how far this technology has come.

A specific problem which I’ve been having with my Mac solved with this open source app: Blue Snooze: Sleeping Mac = Bluetooth off.

At Techcopes, you can access a variety of font generator tools to customize and enhance your text in different styles for different social media platforms.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

Tweetmailing No More | X’iting The Shitfire

After over 16 years, 36,600+ tweets, many connections / friends made, conversations / communities explored, good stuff curated and shared… I’m out!

For some time Twitter has been a bit of a turd.

A turd rolled in glitter.

Then Elon Musk was forced to buy it and decided to set it on fire.

So now it’s sparkly shit, in flames, stinking up the place…


I remember a time when it was an active community of humans adding value to each other (as when you tweeted people would see it, respond, share on etc).

It’s not anymore.

I remember when tweet-ups were a thing (literally tweeting out where you were going to be in a city or place or event and folks would join you from the virtual community to make themselves real).

It’s not anymore.

I remember when geo-location was available as a search criteria (as a way to connect into physical communities of practice and tracking some fun stuff).

It’s not anymore.

I remember when ‘Follow Fridays’ was a thing (celebrating people in your network for their efforts online and exposing them to your network for more follows).

It’s not anymore.

I remember when RSS feeds where available on profiles and even searches / hashtags (which allowed an opportunity to mash-up that data as research and insights or even as a way to curate clusters of people into fun groups).

It’s not anymore.

I remember when the platform had trust in its user base by showing just the tweets from people you were following (by the way if you want that, start a private list as sponsored tweets don’t appear in there when viewed and tweets are sorted by latest).

It’s not anymore.

I remember when Twitter was fun and allowed third party services like IFTTT to again curate and play with what’s being shared in interesting ways (I used to tweet quotes from Rilke and have them automatically curate to a Tumblr blog called ‘Missing Rilke‘).

It’s not anymore.


…the reason I stayed this long was due to the legacy echo of community and connection.

Alas, the algorithms, sponsors and shareholder return is all that matters now, along with a silly man in charge making sillier decisions (take your time).

My engagement (folks I talk to and who respond to my tweets) has flat lined to nearly zero these past few years. And just like with all my relationships, I need some parity of energy and effort to continue investing from my side.

Twitter will probably become one of the worst financial investment failures in modern history and all because one person thought he could do better than others for himself not the community as a whole (success in one arena does not equal mastery in another).

So I’m going back to things I can control. The stuff I used to advocate for when delivering new media training back in the day with my second company MediaSnackers. This blog (please do subscribe in the sidebra / footer or grab the RSS feed) will become the center point of future activities and my community (yes I’ve sniffed out Mastodon, Discord, BlueSky etc but I have no energy to build a new community elsewhere and dilute my offerings / energy further, plus I’m going to be busy for a while with my new job).

So thank you Twitter.

Thank you for connecting us to each other.

For allowing us to express ourselves.

To be heard in a loud world.

To be part of something, expansive.

It worked. For a while. Now it doesn’t:

My first ever tweet, see ‘I’ve Been Tweetmailing For 15 Years | How The Twittersphere Has Changed
Related posts: Flawed Social Media Engagement Tactics | A Simple Fix, Twitter Basics | Plus The Things They Never Tell You, Ulearn12 | The Rise Of The Tweetmailers, Tweriod | When Your Audience Is Online For Engagement, plus all monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.

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Flawed Social Media Engagement Tactics | A Simple Fix

A snippet from a recent Creative Welly episode which sums up my thinking on why our online feeds are so ineptly corrupt these days plus a simple strategy to solve the problem.

And I meant a psychology degree in addiction.

“Trust people to be human and adults about this. Let them follow who they want to follow and just serve them that stuff, nothing else. And you’ll be surprised then the uptake of activity because you’ve trusted them.”

Clipped from Creative Welly Episode #49 | Julia Capon & Jake Nash

See also:

My idealist spirit still hopes for a time when the web works for its users and not the advertisers.

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Vapid LinkedIn Strategies | When Things Aren’t Really Free

Bored with these obvious and insipid tactics.

“Here’s something for “free” but you have to leave a comment and I might or might not send it to you based on if you’re in a position to do something for me in the future and because I already gave something to you you’re more likely to do something for me now even though I originally said it was “free”.”

Posted originally on Linkedin here.

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