You’ll find that these professions have a vested interest in maintaining network effects, and as such will view Mast/Blue as threats to their networking infrastructure. They don’t want to dilute the importance of the platform their patronage systems rely on (let alone destroy it) - in fact its centrality is why they leverage it to advance their careers. Artists I can see understanding platform agnosticism to some extent, but for the other two groups, it’s simply not in their DNA. The gatekeeping is a feature for them.

‘The medium is the message’ as a Canadian theorist once said.

The domain is leased to SEO lizards https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/

Removed by mod

It takes an odd set of political priorities to misunderstand what’s going on in Last Battlefield. The writers clearly lay out why they’re both to blame.

Her reaction was understandable and entirely predictable. The episode does an elegant job illustrating that sometimes the new life form’s nature is beyond the capcity of our species’ wiring to cope with.

Lots of banned artist and album names that will return zero results, unless you do something like search for a song or two that’s on the album you want and finding the data that way.

The only objectionable hurdles are the insurmountable ones

Last Christmas I gave a family member a flash drive containing ~10 high quality movie encodes, basically a shortlist of the year’s personal highlights I think they’d enjoy too. I don’t know if they’ve used it, but I’m going to make a habit of it until I hear otherwise. A drive for a handful movies is cheap enough to not worry about if it’s never seen again. Give them a large capacity drive however, or access to a Plex server, and paralysis of choice occurs.

Data and metadata about you are a kind of digital noose that hangs loose about your neck, until a third party* pulls it tight to hang you.

You’re right to feel bitter. You’re the victim of an abusive software stack. But it’s important that you come away with an understanding of why R_ddit was able to identify you individually, and why the ways in which we interface with the web really do matter, despite normie’s typical self-justifying complaints.

*Anyone, identifiable or not, without warning, for any reason, at any time

There are contexts where such a statement is fine. Even in a context where it could be construed as rude and prejudiced, it still doesn’t matter, because it’s such a milquetoast insult. A shitty throwaway putdown on the level of ‘okay, boomer’ or ‘male, pale and stale’.

Overmoderation on the public web is as much of an issue as its lack.

Yep, the he/him she/her labels on social media profiles are a pretty reliable timesaver.

Let us share products, offers and rewards you might like to help stores personalize your shopping.

This sentence is a masterpiece of omission.

Oh, the bigots! OH MY GOOOOOOOD THE BIGOOOOOTS, Heaven curse the bigots! They’re invading our spaces, corrupting our children’s minds! A Senate Select Committee on Bigotry is now a national imperative. The bar for non-bigotry must be raised CONTINUALLY higher: society cannot afford anything less! And the purge must be comprehensive. Our communities MUST be kept linguistically pure. Associations must be kept PRISTINE AT ALL TIMES. Suspect the poster above you? Suspect your brother or sister? Report and unfollow and block at every opportunity! Trust-n-safety them out of existence! Interpretation is vacillation!

There is no volume level below 100 when condemning the awful terrible ungood bigot!

Every 60s show seems to be scored as though the camera could pan out any time and reveal whatever setting you thought you were in was in fact a black-tie ballroom party with a big band ensemble.

ST got the future of healthcare right: when the toolset is so advanced you can wave a thingy over a body part and perform diagnoses and repair on the spot, the profession becomes 99 per cent bedside manner.

Smear campaign

A smear campaign, also referred to as a smear tactic or simply a smear, is an effort to damage or call into question someone’s reputation, by propounding negative propaganda.[1] It makes use of discrediting tactics. It can be applied to individuals or groups. Common targets are public officials, politicians, political candidates, activists, and ex-spouses. The term also applies in other contexts, such as the workplace.[2] The term smear campaign became popular around 1936.[3] [Wikipedia[

Look everyone, it’s the season 37 opener of I’m not going to use the great tool because people I don’t like are also using the great tool!

TNG s05e20

Every one of us has a thousand different kinds of little people inside of us, and some of them want to get out and be wild, and some want to be sad or happy or inventive, or even just go dancing! That’s why we all have so many different urges at different times. And all those different little people inside of us: we must never be afraid to take them with us wherever we go. Who knows when we may need one of them to pop up and rescue us from ourselves! Variety, my dear Alex. The great secret is not the variety of life, it’s the variety of us.

Australia tried this in the early noughties I believe - running a non-public URL blacklist. After some parliamentary accountability and commmitees got it cracked open, they found that about 10% of the sites met the definition for inclusion, with the remainder being a grab-bag of things various politicians and bureaucrats didn’t like.

Yep she’s a superb actor.