What are the websites that make reading 10,000+ words a delight?
Hit me up with your best examples of online longform reading experiences! I don't mean NYT-style Snowfall things, I'm more interested in books/blog posts.
Bonus points if they do interesting things with footnotes, links, and all that!
@Edent The short answer is that it varies a lot! I often feel FOMO in Punchdrunk-style immersive theatre too, and it can be frustrating not to get picked for one-on-ones. The hope in those free-form events is that you’ll come across enough interesting stuff to keep you happy despite the FOMO.
When it comes to more organised stuff like the Star Wars hotel, visitors can be tracked and guided to specific interactions with actors and events, basically guaranteeing a level of engagement.
The problem with writing a book about why immersive experiences are so big right now is that I look like an idiot when curators/directors/writers/artists say "oh then you must know about X" and I have to admit ignorance because the field is so unimaginably broad.
(Of course I could just lie and pretend I know but the entire point of this exercise is to explore and hopefully shrink the bounds of the vast sea of things I don't know, and share them with you.)
A curator was aghast I didn't know who Refik Anadol was and seemed ready to dismiss me on the spot. I turned her around with the ridiculous amount of reading I've done on the history of panoramas, but it turned out I had seen his glorified screensaver at MOMA but didn't know his name.
DELIGHTED to say that my latest tech history column is live on Every and they've made this one free-to-read.
Because it covers one of the most overlooked founders of the golden age of computing: Lore Harp McGovern, founder of Vector Graphic who pioneered small/medium business computing.
I read an article, like, YESTERDAY about how "companies should just pay maintainers" is not a sufficient solution for the xz-burnt-out-maintainer-vulnerable-to-abuse problem that took a light anticapitalist lens, and now I cannot find it for the life of me. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
Aside: I really need to get my bookmarking game back on track now that Maciej fell off the deep end and Pocket is being vastly underresourced by Mozilla, but that is a different problem for a different day.
RIP to a real one. Practically everything he wrote was decades ahead of its time, not to mention superbly entertaining and deeply humanist. https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/
Just ended up in the Apple Store this afternoon and saw a midnight black 15" Macbook Air.
Oh, the shiny!
I lost my saving throw, so of course I had to buy one ... for @feorag . (I'm not ready to replace my M1Pro MBP, dammit, but F needs a new laptop and end-of-accounting-year is looming.)
@cstross Studio Display isn’t a big improvement IMO. I haven’t compared the specs but I went the same path - it looks nice, decently bright, nice set of ports, but nothing to write home about
Goddammit people need to stop misusing “dopamine” already. “Addictive” or “habit-forming” are perfectly respectable words that, even better, are not the name of a neurotransmitter that too many people think is a happiness chemical.
I keep thinking about this @simoncarless post on how the vast catalog of Steam games – so many of which are still playable and polished – means that new games are competing with all games.
It used to be that constant hardware and OS changes meant older games were harder to play, and perhaps not worth playing. Now that things are more stable and it's easy to distribute bug fixes and updates online, that's all changed.
@cstross Yep, I have always hated overwriting. That said, one of the best things I've written is when I finished a column and realised the final sentence should be the start of the actual column!
@rysiek no! you must be wrong - don’t you realise these would be terrible things because they would interfere with Apple’s glorious plans, which only want the very best for all?!