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1) I find it interesting that in the era of the reboot, even websites and magazines now fall into that trend. ( Read more... )

2) At the same time, entertainment of all kinds has now infiltrated areas of society, business and governance in a way that has made it less distinct than before. If that gets people to pay attention to issues usually outside of their habits, then I see that as a good thing. But the way that everything has now become a form of entertainment, and seriousness or expertise of any kind is downplayed, seems a lot less of a plus.

3) Pillowfort has announced it will pursue non-profit status and as such is looking for people to step forward and become officers as well as various kinds of volunteers.

"I started Pillowfort ten years ago because I, like many others, was growing frustrated with how shareholder interference and corporate greed was degrading social media platforms. The need for a site like Pillowfort, that puts its users first, doesn’t take venture capital funding, and doesn’t subject its users to corporate censorship for the sake of ad revenue, has only grown since the site was launched nearly 10 years ago."

4) Speaking of Pillowfort, osteophage posted How Pillowfort Built a Comment Culture Worth Emulating which I find interesting to compare to how DW functions.

5) England vs Norway. ( Read more... )

1) I got a bit of a break in between the time the workmen finished in our apartment and my partner came back from visiting his family. There were things to be done but I needed him here to do them. ( Read more... )

2) I had an especially poor night of sleep, getting maybe 3 hours yesterday. I ended up reading from 4 AM onwards until 6 when the grocery opened. It was my first grocery shop for two weeks so it was mostly fresh foods I had to restock.

One real plus is that I suspect the store had over-ordered watermelon for the 4th of July. I had to double take when I walked past the boxes and saw that they were marked at 99 cents. Not per pound, per watermelon! I hadn't planned to buy any since I had cherries I wanted to stock up on. But they were mostly bright red, so I just got one bag of dark ones. And two watermelons -- the ripest looking ones of the dozen or so left.

3) I also wanted my partner back to watch stuff on Prime before we cancel it. We saw the finale of Good Omens. ( Read more... )

4) Spain vs. Belgium. ( Read more... )

1) Signal boosting Squidgeworld's call for feedback about how to handle guest comments on the site. "Commission spammers (at least this most recent one) have been copy & pasting entire stories into ChatGPT, and then having ChatGPT formulate a question about that fic. So while a guest comment may have sounded heart-felt, if the comment ended with a, "Why do you think..." or "What inspired you to..." question, then they didn't read your story and come up with a question; AI did. And the person literally copy & pasted a ChatGPT generated question into a comment - that's how we knew.

The easiest way to deal with these type of people is to disable guest comments completely."

2) Platforms sought no age proof for any of 50 test accounts declaring age 16, researchers said. "Some dummy accounts received advertisements for youth banking products, an indication the platform registered the person's age range, Hammond said. One account which signed up to Elon Musk's X claiming to be 16 was served pornographic content, he added. None of the platforms let users sign up if they declared they were under 16. But just one, Australia-based live-streaming platform Kick, refused to let users create an account without proof of age."

3) The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. "From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice."

What I found most fascinating was this study's results: ( Read more... )

4) And it's not just text that video is displacing: End of an Era: Longtime Podcast Hosts Go Quiet as Video Dominates "Over the past year, various indicators of this transition have been piling up. Marc Maron ended his program after 16 years. Al Franken, an audio evangelist going back to the days of Air America in 2004, released his final episode last week, too. And many of the remaining audio-centric stars are attempting video in some fashion. (Witness Ira Glass, who is now recording promotional clips for This American Life.)"

5) France versus Morocco. ( Read more... )