“Stopsigncam is a Twitch channel that’s been streaming a Salem intersection where, its title estimates, 98.73% of Vehicles don’t stop.”
[via]
The Young Political Spaces of the Internet
“The only thing that can effectively catch a young, alienated kid who is at risk for far-right politics is left-wing counter-messaging and opposing political solutions. Because his grievances are legitimate, and if he has no way to express them, you’re sending him even further to the right.”
Joshua Citarella on The New Yorker
The side-effects that tends to get us
“The only appropriate response is the most profound ambivalence. That’s what we owe new technologies: we have to teach ourselves to be absolutely ambivalent about them, and mainly we have to teach ourselves to imagine their inadvertent side-effects. Because the inadvertent side-effects are the side-effects that tends to get us”
(William Gibson, 1997)
Preserving Worlds
“Preserving Worlds is a documentary travelogue through aging but beloved virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are delicate things, and they can vanish with hardly a trace. Under Capitalism, preservation is often the last priority. “
The Sigil Engine
The Soothing, Digital Rooms of YouTube
“Helle Breth Klausen, a doctoral student at Aarhus University in Denmark who researches digital media, including A.S.M.R., classifies ambience videos as a kind of “self-medicating media.”
[via]
Reality Shifters
I recently discovered the existence of “reality shifting”. In brief, thousands of people – mostly teenagers – claim to be able to jump to (and live in) alternative realities, in some kind of lucid dream, after having carefully scripted it all. There are different suggested methods for shifting, which sometimes are simple and sometimes very complex. The most popular alternative reality (DR – desired reality) is Hogwarts, the Harry Potter school of magic, where some people claim to have spent weeks. TikTok and YouTube are full of these videos and I literally can’t stop watching them.
Dear imaginary audience
Sea shanties are trending on TikTok
More amazing collaborative content to enjoy:
“TikTok’s unique ability to plumb the depths of obscure genres and hoist them to the forefront of popular culture has landed another viral sensation: the sea shanty.”
[via]
DALL·E. An AI that creates images from text
Ok, this looks super fun: “we’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language“.