I just ran across a bunch of dumbasses on Bluesky—I am not going to link to the thread because it is too stupid—arguing about whether it is important to teach the reading of books in high school, or to teach them in college, or what the teaching of reading books is even good for, and all I can think of is how broken our entire “outcomes-based” education system is.

The “outcome” of being able to read, view, and listen to long-form creative works like novels, films, and albums is that you get comfortable digesting complex narratives that have text and subtext and ambiguity.

I want to like this album, but I think I kind of don’t.

It’s frustrating—there are a lot of great ideas here, and clearly a lot of talent, but it just doesn’t hold together for me. This album feels all over the map.

I guess some people like this sort maximalist approach, but it feels too busy and overwrought to me. I should also note that prog metal never really appeals much to me, and there is quite a bit of that here; that’s part of what contributes to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink aspect of this album.

🔗 The Great Dumbening:

But their blatant stupidity is why they’re so popular. It’s the uncomfortable truth underpinning pretty much everything that’s happened in pop culture — including politics — since the 2010s social media revolution. The online platforms that created our new world, run on likes and shares and comments and views, reshaped the marketplace of ideas into an attention economy. One that, like a real economy, is full of very popular garbage. And, also like a real economy, is now so vast and important that it’s virtually impossible to change it. If you want access to it, you better get comfortable making lowest-common-denominator bullshit in front of a camera. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to feel good about doing that if you’re an idiot.

I found this typewrite in a secondhand shop over the weekend:

It is an Underwood Champion, probably from 1950 based on the serial number.

As with any machine like this, it needs a thorough cleaning of the innards. Everything works except for the 6 key, which is very stiff. I’ll have a better idea of what’s going on there once I get the thing opened up.

In the meantime, it seems like a really solid typewriter. It feels like it is bolted to my desk as I type on it, even though it is not super-heavy. I’ve got it set up as my desk typewriter for this week to get a better sense of how it is working, and will probably get around to some basic disassembly and a good

I was just flipping through unread stuff in NetNewsWire and noticed that the date of the entry I was reading was all the way back in April.

Why the hell do I need to be reading posts that are that old?

So I clicked the “Mark all as read” button and cleared >2700 post out of the queue. It’s pretty great! I recommend it.