Yeah, of course I’ll watch the last season of Stranger Things, but I still think they should have done a time-jump (like “10 years later” or some such) between the third and fourth seasons. I mostly enjoyed season four, but it was really difficult to ignore the fact that all of the cast were clearly at least a decade older than the kids they were playing.

I suppose the problem with doing a time jump like that is that it would have forced them out of the 1980s setting that has been such a huge part of the show’s look and feel, as well as of its appeal. I can understand why they might be reluctant to move on from that.

While out for my run this morning, I was listening to a recent episode of Aaron Ross Powell’s podcast in which he talks with Mike Masnick. The conversation was all about decentralizing the internet, mostly focused Bluesky (Masnick sits on Bluesky’s board of directors).

I am not interested in an ideological fight over Bluesky v. Mastodon. I have a Bluesky account and it seems fine, although I personally prefer the community on Mastodon. I have some underlying questions about the company’s long-term business prospects, but at a tech protocol level, they mostly seem fine. I also have no beef with Masnick; I think he writes really good stuff at Techdirt and I agree with most everything he has to say about what has gone wrong with the internet and how we might start undoing that and making it better.

🔗 Why We Quit Spotify:

So what finally pushed us over the edge? Well, a lot of things. For me, chief among them was music journalist Liz Pelly’s incredibly damning—and incredibly well-reported—recent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. It details all the ways Spotify has devalued music through the years, helping to turn the most powerful art form we’ve got into another frictionless commodity controlled by tech oligarchs. Like how Spotify created an entire program—ominously dubbed Perfect Fit Content—in which they pushed more and more faceless muzak onto their popular in-house playlists because it was licensed by the company under cheaper terms, taking money and placements away from genuine artists. Or how its hyper-personalized algorithmic playlists forced listeners to burrow deeper and deeper into their own musical comfort zones, dulling the opportunity for personal exploration. Or how their Discovery Mode introduced a shadowy pay-for-play scheme that all but required many independent artists and labels to lower their own royalty rates in order to surface songs on the platform. Every chapter—practically every page—of Mood Music offers revelations on how Spotify purposely undercut music makers in order to bolster their bottom line. I don’t know how any ardent music fan could read this book and not be moved to cancel their subscription.

🔗 The compact disc isn’t going quietly - Chicago Reader:

CDs have DIY appeal too. Chicago postpunk band Blush Scars just self-released their new album, Summoned, and front man Sean McCormick made runs of 50 CDs and 50 cassettes at home. “I did all the CDs within one day, and now I’m on day three or four with these tapes,” he says. Burning CDs didn’t just give McCormick an inexpensive way to release his band’s music on physical media; it also reminded him of when he used to burn his own mixes on CD. “I think there’s kind of a nostalgia factor towards it,” he says.