Another thing I like about Micro.blog: by following a limited number of posters, I see all new posts in pretty short order. Which means I can put away my screen and get back to non-screen living in pretty short order. (If I do want more MB, I can always tap “Discover.”)
Cosmos
“Floozy Tree,” more like. I love her.
This painting hung in my mom and dad’s house for 60 years or more. Now it’s my sister’s. Artist unknown. I love it. đ¶
Joe’s Bakery, East Austin. Get the Migas con Todo.
Through their ever-flowing stream of messages, each offering a simulation of connection, social platforms promise to alleviate the sense of loneliness they provoke. Turning social interactions into symbolic transactions, they reconstruct society on a foundation of anomie. Bots fit seamlessly into such a society, upping the monetization potential substantially.
When Facebookâs News Feed introduced us to what Zuckerberg termed âfrictionless sharing,â we learned, or should have learned, that friction is the essence of sharing. Freed of any investment of effort, time, or care, sharing loses all meaning. It becomes mere transmission. The frictionless friendship offered by chatbots, by removing the need to adapt oneâs self to another self, to make room in oneâs life for a different being, will be similarly empty.
Good guys and bad guys in New Zealand. Catton’s deft writing of her good guys’ interior lives reveals how noble aims often come bundled with not-so-noble motives. But her bad guy is simply bad. Nothing mixed about him. Too bad – for both the character and the novel.đ
What’s the over/under on how long it will take Trump to take credit for an American pope?
Just saw the first lightning bug of 2025. Hooray!