I think we need a word for that moment when you realize that the individual creator you like has turned their thing into a hustle.

It’s when the podcast you’ve been enjoying that was about a specific topic is spending more and more of their time talking about their live events and the three other shows that they’re starting up. Or when the nonfiction author who had a good book starts a podcast and a Substack and then a subscription series. Or when the cooking YouTuber starts pushing their cookbook and their nutrition plan.

There was a long discussion thread on Micro.blog this past week about the platform’s lack of “social” features such as likes and boosts, and how the community aspect of Micro.blog would be better if it had these sorts of features.

Everyone is, of course, free to like what they like and think what they think but for me, the absence of likes and similar stats-gathering functionality is a feature, not a bug.

I went to see Alien: Romulus a few nights ago with friends and you know what? It was pretty good! Not great , and I had some a few complaints about it, but overall the movie kept me entertained for two hours.

I should say that I went into it with very low expectations. I cannot say that I have really liked any movie in this franchise since Alien 3 and even that took me a while (and watching the Assembly Cut) to come around to. I can appreciate what they were trying do with Alien Resurrection even if I do not like it; as for Prometheus and Covenant , I thought they were both awful and I wish they had never been made.

I feel like a corollary to Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) is that one should never underestimate the amount of damage and suffering that can be caused by stupidity.

We look at terrible things happening and we think “There’s no way this can’t be deliberate” and then we go looking for some master plan behind it. When we don’t find one, our brains want invent one to fill in the gaps.

I was just reading yet another terrible review of Jonathan Haidt’s books about how mobile devices are destroying a whole generation. I am not going to link to it—not because the review is bad but rather because that book has already sucked up more than its fair share of oxygen.

While I am fairly sure that everyone having Internet devices in their pockets is not great, I am also pretty sure that it is not as universally awful as people like Haidt make it out to be. Of course, “It depends” is not the sort of argument that sells books or gets one prime placement on high-profile op-ed pages.