Escape the algorithm
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The modern entertainment business is largely (and increasingly) populated by people who possess social, cultural and financial capital and who enjoy a certain degree of privilege. Ozzy was the opposite of that kind of person.
Excellent obituary of the late Ozzy Osbourne here, by a writer who takes a class-based angle. Even after a (massive) life, what remains is just the stories people tell.
What NPCs need isn’t more lore. It’s shape.
This is a tool I’m going to use to create NPCs who survive contact with play. It fits on an index card. It works for merchants, villains, allies, and authority figures. And it’s resilient under improvisation.
— Read on neillwhyborne.substack.com/p/the-7-sentence-npc
Info on writing durable, memorable basic characters.
Our claim is that in a world of full automation, inequality will skyrocket (in favor of capital holders)….
The relative wealth differences in a thousand years—or a million—will be downstream of who owns the first dyson swarms and space ships. And space colonization isn’t bottlenecked by people’s preference for human nannies and waiters.
— Read on x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2006505366423745004
Vienna is the height of world sophistication at the beginning of the century:
Certain cities, during certain periods, exert disproportionate influence on world culture: Paris in the 1920s; New York in the 1970s…Vienna around the turn of the century might just outdo them all.
But despite this power, citizens had the sense of “dancing on the edge of a volcano”:
The Viennese were fuelled by cocaine, champagne, sex and dancing; stupefied by morphine, pastries, cakes and cigars. Culturally, there was an emphasis on ephemerality, on taking hits of hedonism while being cynically aware of the meaninglessness of it all.
It’s familiar:
It’s not hard to spot parallels with our own time: an era of elite overproduction, in which young, highly educated people have their paths to success and achievement blocked off by older generations.
More here. Has it always been this way? History rhymes?
Since 2000, the story of TVs falling in price is largely the story of liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs going from a niche, expensive technology to a mass-produced and inexpensive one.
— Read on www.construction-physics.com/p/how-did-tvs-get-so-cheap
Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through.
— Read on sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-rare-people-who-are-solid
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
More here. I maintain that enshittification extends beyond online services to all instances when a company ceases to deliver a beneficial good in order to maximize profits.
If your grocery store has shifted from selling low-margin, high-quality food to overindexing on candy and junk food, your grocery store is enshittified.
..,despite our problems, life is as good as it has ever been. Especially if you play the game of “imagine you’re randomly born anywhere in the world.” At almost every point in the past that would mean an above-average chance you would be birthed into poverty, hardship, pain, want, and violence, and your adult life (assuming you made it to that) would be a struggle to stay alive and satiated.
Where did the time go?
they filled it in with drugs, fights, absurd made-up dramas, mostly about who liked who, and watching whatever slop the three channels provided, regardless of quality.
On technology:
I especially struggle taking seriously the “modernity sucks” people who lay the blame on technology and seem to idolize the pre-industrial past. Modern technology is wonderful, and our current problems are not because of the machines, but in how we use them.
More here. I also remember a lot more fights and drama. But I remember long talks about books and ideas, too – something that seems to have moved online and become more poisonous.
In the 1970s, the big question was why was Chicago so fiscally well run….Why did New York go bankrupt when Chicago didn’t?…in New York, the political machine died, and the result was…they gave money to everybody. Whereas in Chicago, people were either for or against the Daley machine. That machine had an incentive not to get into a lot of fiscal trouble, because if it did, it would be punished politically.
Excellent throughout.
— Read on http://www.statecraft.pub/p/should-the-feds-bail-out-chicago
Though Taylor Kitsch ultimately wound up landing the role, former Lost alum Josh Holloway has revealed that he was originally cast as Gambit in X-Men Origins
I’m rewatching Lost, and it’s abundantly clear that Josh Holloway as Gambit could have anchored an entire franchise. Whoever decided to eliminate him missed big time. More here.
For its part, eternalism is, in principle, hospitable to the idea of time travel. If the entire universe exists unconditionally, all spacetime with its varying regions simply be. We could travel to different times because all times exist. Traveling to different spatial locations is made possible by the existence of all spatial locations and the path between them. Four-dimensionally, there is a timelike path between different spacetime locations.
— Read on iep.utm.edu/eternalism/
Costco negotiates as a strong buyer with tremendous leverage, giving Americans the opportunity to live comfortably for low cost. What could this look like for medicine and health care?
We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name… So we are all reincarnations – though short-lived ones. When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere
— Read on kupajo.com/everything-is-undergoing-constant-reassembly-evolution/
For decades, marketing leaders guided buyers through a neat sequence from awareness to purchase. Today, that linear funnel model is breaking down. Buyers now chart their own course — jumping between channels, self-educating via digital content and often engaging sales late, if at all.
As buyers became harder to corral into a predictable path, marketers tried to compensate. In response, companies are frantically multiplying touchpoints….
This explosion of activity reflects an omnichannel reality: the customer’s path to purchase is no longer a straight line but a complex web of on-demand interactions across digital and physical channels. But the surge in activity hasn’t solved the problem. In many cases, it highlights how poorly the funnel aligns with today’s buyer behavior.
— Read on martech.org/why-todays-buyer-journey-no-longer-fits-the-funnel/
whenever i hear a young person confidently assert that humanity is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do participating in real life, it’s actually quite reasonable to conclude that we’re hanging on by a thread
— Read on stephstiner.substack.com/p/a-gen-z-guide-to-fixing-your-doom
You could put higher consumption taxes on items the wealthy purchase to a disproportionate degree. Paintings and yachts, and so on. Tom Holden argues: “In a world in which capital is essentially the only input to production, taxing capital reduces the growth rate of the economy. Whereas at present capital taxes have only level effects. So if anything, capital taxes will become less desirable as the labour share falls.”
— Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/01/taxation-in-a-strong-ai-world.html
those of us who do venture deeply into his work quickly discover something far more imposing. [Clark Ashton] Smith’s imagination is vast, luxuriant, and final, as though one had strayed into a world already immeasurably old, already in decline, and wholly indifferent to human ambition or consolation.
— Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-ensorcellment-of-january.html
After a string of disturbing mental health incidents involving AI chatbots, a group of state attorneys general have sent a letter to the AI industry’s top companies, with a warning to fix “delusional outputs” or risk being in breach of state law.
— Read on techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/state-attorneys-general-warn-microsoft-openai-google-and-other-ai-giants-to-fix-delusional-outputs/
One of the goals of politicians is to get you to focus on taxing income. The psyop has worked for decades now and hopefully people are waking up to this sham.
Basement Whatever 