Related Recs

Rec

🦪

the life and death of online platforms

piece that explores our collective relationship with algorithmically driven platforms and theorizing why non-algorithmically driven platforms haven't caught on yet (PI.FYI mentioned ‼️). some of the references and moments in the writing style makes this article feel hollow and generic, but the overall conceit is engaging. also this article (and the general public alike) keep saying tumblr is dead but tumblr is very alive for me personally.
"Just kidding. There is no pure place: we crave the end because it seems cleaner on the other side. We all live,and have always lived, in the muck—even and especially after death. Download the niche app, participate in the empty-ish forum. Labor to make the experience you want. Labor to animate a human internet."

@veggiedumpling

Mar 6, 2024

18

Rec

🕯

BEING WHIMSICAL IN EARNEST TO STAY LOOSE WITH IT

I have some subscriptions expiring soon that I can’t financially justify anymore so I’m on that article grind and for I suppose sadomasochistic reason many of these articles have been about ai and I simply can’t get behind these overeducated assholes proposing it has any humane, beneficial qualities at all. (It is quite literally inhuman.) the main argument always seems to be efficiency or offloading the emotional labor of navigating your own life and an argument that essentially boils down to ‘fuck the elderly and disabled leave them alone isolated in their homes or institutions with their screens and an algorithm fed on bigoted rhetoric that hates them’. You have to keep the whimsy to remember the time ai saves you is worth nothing if it keeps you from your friends and family and passions and general élan vital. (Also that nothing is worth the environmental racism, air pollution, and quickening towards the water wars necessitated by data processing centers.) in the scope of universal relativity, the laws of physics, space and time, string theory probably, it is a miracle that any of our consciousnesses have been realized as a tangible collection of cells cloaked in flesh moving around on the single life sustaining planet we know of among one another, each individual their own fantastical miracle at the crosshairs of time and space. That you are ever anywhere with another person has cosmic implications. Whimsy and recognizing the secular miracle of existing is what makes it all mean anything. They want us to forget our miracle of being and sign our time and eyesight over to the ai that further resigns you to the hustle culture normalizing three jobs to afford food and shelter. Mortality makes your life mean something but death in itself is meaningless. It is cruel and random. It’s the life that matters, not the moment it ceases.Take that hammer for your brothers and sisters, remember however gooey you feel inside is the same solubility everyone always feels shifting inside, and it is that persistent threat of dissolution and navigating the slick tumbleweed in each of us that makes us human, that keeps the poets employed. The confusion of being alive is paramount to the human condition, and the clinical precision of ai obfuscates the beauty of being alive with other people. If you prick us we bleed! Heaven is each other, etc. Reject binary codes and techno-fascist yes-men. I’ll show you my ooz and you might see yourself in the leaking I can’t contain. Maybe we can ooze together in a Francis Bacon, Queer (2024) sort of way.

@broodyscanner7

5d ago

1

6

Rec

🗣

THE CULTURE WAR, ALGORITHM FODDER, GENERALIZATIONS

everything is politics. from vaccines to lgbt matters, politicians have leveraged the things conservative americans don’t understand to stoke fear and confusion.
this isn’t anything new. what is new is the algorithms that reenforce those fears. comment sections we’re told to treat like real conversation just flooded with faceless accounts saying their most vile inside thoughts. it’s easy to want to interact and easier to just read it all and be mad. but every second spent engaging is another brain scrambling distraction.
these sensationalized posts and comments do nothing for education, understanding, or empathy. even on the left, slacktivism actively hurts the cause. theres an idea that someone who holds ignorant beliefs is *bad* in all politicized fields. but let’s be real, just because uncle jeff is pissed about tuck underwear it doesn’t mean he’s a climate change denier. generalizing people is exactly what politicians want from us.
social issues are important and politics aren’t going away from that any time soon. but social media is a slippery slope and i personally refuse to engage. when it bleeds into my real life (”parents just WANT their kids to be trans”) i try to engage in conversations that get to the root of the issue. where’s this info coming from, why do you believe that? these are the kind of questions strangers won’t ask them on the internet.
misinformation is a sickness that we’re all plagued with. to find some truth and understanding we cannot be having these discussions on platforms like facebook or instagram or twitter. if we do, we’re just giving these tech ceos and politicians what they need: engagement and fear

@roogby

Jun 3, 2025

1

Top Recs from @_loegan

Rec

💖

"that's us / wild combination" – arthur russell

about a year ago a friend of mine was going around asking people what they felt to be the "most romantic" song, and this was my gut response. There's just something so sweet about the scene at play here... nothing dramatic is happening, it's just a moment of stillness (thru movement?) in a relationship – maybe it's even just a friendship – that defines the baseline of what romance at its best should feel like. I find Arthur's good at that

@_loegan

Jan 5, 2024

13

Rec

🎄

8 hours of vintage department store christmas music tapes

"Ambient music should accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." – Brian Eno
Christmas falls on a Monday this year, which means many of us have had to put in a full work week. At approximately 5pm today, we'll suddenly need to turn on our holiday brain – RELAX! we'll scream at ourselves. What better to induce a Xanax-like state of absent-minded – yet still holiday-related – bliss than corporate muzak? Whatever holiday-related ambience you're trying to cultivate or salvage, this may just be the absolutely perfect soundtrack ~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQKlEkKXBzQ

@_loegan

Dec 22, 2023

9

Rec

🧵

ELI enis' exploration of the gen z-driven shoegaze boom

"So how did we get here? How did shoegaze, a genre short on hooks, memorable riffs, and magnetic personalities, that’s carried on as a niche strain of indie music since the initial wave of ‘gazers receded from the limelight in the mid-’90s, suddenly become a defining sound for Gen-Z rock fans?"
Important and fascinating cover of a very real phenomenon. Part of what I found most fascinating is the compositional aspects of this new wave, which sees The Kids employing recording techniques more typically associated with pop songwriting – toplining to a "band" track created by a separate producer.
https://www.stereogum.com/2245469/tiktok-has-made-shoegaze-bigger-than-ever/columns/sounding-board

@_loegan

Dec 19, 2023

6