live nation is actively killing publications that cover new artists while also promoting festivals that almost exclusively cater to nostalgia and legacy acts. these problems are not unrelated.

Leor Galil@imleor.bsky.social · 11h ago

“Music publications BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine have been gutted by parent company Veeps... Nearly all the staff at each publication appear to have been laid off yesterday. Veeps, which is now owned by Live Nation, acquired the publications in 2024 or 2025”

I've been rewatching X-Files and it's such a delicate balance that makes it work so well, something magic between those writers and those actors and even the conventions of 90s television all adding up to something bigger

Ooooh, we are all rooting for @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca ! retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31/f...

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

iStock A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges…

retractionwatch.com

Our coming dystopia is going to be hilarious

kay taylor rea@kaytaylorrea.bsky.social · 10h ago

lmao

AI: making life better one hobby at a time. - RevRay ebird.org/news/threat-...

From Truth to Fake: The Threat of AI to Media Archives - eBird

As AI becomes commonplace, what you see in a photograph may no longer represent reality. Learn about how this impacts eBird and what you can do to help.

ebird.org

AI companies scraping websites at scale is a real problem. But a proposed NY law could make it harder for libraries, journalists & researchers to preserve the web and investigate the powerful. That's why we've joined @eff.org & others in a letter to Gov. Hochul. blog.archive.org/2026/08/04/i...

"No one's sure why" because we have perfectly good computers sitting around that can't upgrade to Windows 11 and all the new hardware costs too much that's why

internet freds 🦇☠️💾✨️@esquiring.bsky.social · 19h ago

it is, at long last, the Year of Linux on the Desktop. www.techspot.com/news/113326-...

I've never used ChatGPT. If I'm absolutely honest, although I've heard of Claude, I'm not 100% sure what it is. I've never knowingly used an #AI tool. To me, this post reads like 'If pre-sliced cheese was suddenly banned, would you even know how to slice cheese manually?'

Ayo@darrylayo.bsky.social · yesterday

Guys like this don’t realize that they are the freak

Generative AI is catnip to the men who miss female sycophants katemanne.substack.com/p/a-culture-...

A Culture Hooked on Generative AI is a Culture that Misses Female Sycophants

And we have missed a central reason why AI is a feminist issue

katemanne.substack.com

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

25 years ago, when I wanted to know the etymology of a French word, I had to order a hard copy of an etymological dictionary in French from France.

Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 21h ago

It's gotten so much easier to start learning so many more languages, you used to be limited to the 3-5 major languages that a local bookstore or educational institution had decided it was worth making available, and now you can just like, look things up in hundreds of them

bleh. I wanted to watch a recorded conference presentation but it was made using an AI voice. I just can't. ew. no 🤮 Give me your all your filler words, your mispronunciations, awkward backtracking, and tangents. I loathe the highly polished AI outputs. This human wants to listen to humans.

The most terrifying enshittification I've discovered has been learning that Microsoft Word documents no longer auto-save if you are not saving them to one of their own proprietary cloud services. I'm slapping control-S like it's 1999.

This thread (which Robin pursues down a couple different, useful forks) is a great overview of the mess that is eBook licenses for libraries, especially 24-month expiring licenses for books in series! (Context: cost per circ = cost per each time it's checked out.)

Robin Bradford@tuphlos.bsky.social · 2d ago

Book 1 is $59.99 went out 4 times. Cost per circ $14.99 Book 2 is $59.99 went out 4 times. Cost per circ $14.99 I'm not buying book 3. If the cost per circ was $5 or $3, I wouldn't mind. But that is WAY too high, especially for a thing that expires after 2 yrs.

They think they're being clever eugenicists by saying that people with "underlying health issues" don't matter, but >75% of U.S. adults have a chronic condition (including 60% of age 18–34). So what they're really saying is "nobody matters, it's okay if everybody dies from inadequate regulation."

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 2d ago

Breaking News: Two deaths in Michigan have been linked to cyclospora. Both people who had the parasite also had underlying health issues.

I love how Europop songs are always like "I am literally incapable of not dancing. Dance has kidnapped my children, and if I stop dancing for even a moment, they will be executed. This all began when I had a very sexual affair with the god of dance. Peace and love worldwide!"

Oh no. Exactly what everyone who knows literally *anything* about it said would happen did in fact happen. Wow. So now all the other know nothings in other governments around the world who are planning on giving away everyone's privacy will stop and think for a single second, right? Right??

Ben Schwarz@benschwarz.bsky.social · 3d ago

Australia’s eSafety commissioner buried a report (released Friday afternoon) that shows the under 16 social media ban didn’t tangibly reduce teen social media use, and also resulted in parents tuning out of kids usage. We traded our privacy for no reason. theconversation.com/more-than-80...

this boils down to "the pandemic didn't actually happen but they still closed the applebees" which frankly i think is a trauma response by a lot of people that buy it - lot easier to be in denial that things were that bad instead of reckoning with 1.3m dead people [in this country]

Gabriel Bosslet@gbosslet.bsky.social · 3d ago

RFK Jr said these words today on national television "There were ICUs that were empty all over the country including in New York at the height (of the pandemic)" hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha You are a fucking idiot hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha <sobs silently>

we talked about this more at the time but initially a lot of the ppl who died were in big blue cities and were not white. this is not incidental to the revisionist and eugenicist nonsense we hear now.

Sky Marchini@sky.skymarchini.net · 3d ago

this boils down to "the pandemic didn't actually happen but they still closed the applebees" which frankly i think is a trauma response by a lot of people that buy it - lot easier to be in denial that things were that bad instead of reckoning with 1.3m dead people [in this country]

It’s hard to explain but tv was better when you couldn’t watch the show you wanted whenever you wanted to watch it and most of the shows were worse and the TVs were worse and the entire experience was worse, that’s when it was better

I worked for New York’s largest medical center at the start of the pandemic. There were morgue trucks on the streets. They set up emergency medical tents in Central Park. Healthcare worker colleagues died. It is horrific that RFK Jr is on national TV lying that ICUs were empty.

It's absolutely insane we've somehow let the Covid recriminations debate become like "why didn't we reopen in person schools before there was a vaccine" and not "why did none of the trump guys go to jail for stealing PPE from New York hospitals in March 2020"

I love it when people upload a design they intended for, say, a card, but then the platform takes it upon itself to slap it on other kinds of products too [ #foundmedia #zazzle #meme #weirdcore #wtf ]

I think it also revealed just how quickly a bunch of otherwise very hard problems can be to solve with global collective action. The fuckin Ganga was running clear water for the only time in my lifetime because for 2 weeks nobody threw garbage in it. The canals in Venice had fish.

Dave Andress@davidandress.bsky.social · 4d ago

Covid lockdowns demonstrated, in a deeply imperfect way, the possibility of large-scale social solidarity for a higher cause. That is a prime reason why so many powerful people want us to run screaming away from them into the comforting arms of selfish individualist competition.

simply love a sentence that improves exponentially word by word

matt demon@ayshaufarah.bsky.social · 4d ago

We were in the sex panel and there was a tornado so we had to move across the hall to the improv panel.

I keep thinking about this gorgeous essay about how LLMs- so often trained by inheritors of colonial English- has now rendered the kind of language that is natural to us (“fancy” vocabulary, passive voice, reduced relative clauses) artificial and suspect. marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-...

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.

marcusolang.substack.com

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 5d ago

A Nigerian born author, Jerry Falade, had his $2.4M book deal pulled because he was accused of using AI. There is unavoidable optics of a Black man writing a brilliant novel that people assume must have been written by AI. However the broader issue is we can’t trust any writing isn’t AI generated.

Much of everything you see online in 2026 is engineered clickbait designed to sap your attention and rile your emotions until you live in a world of despair and confrontation. Most of the comments aren’t even real. Turn off the timeline and go pet your cat.

Airplane (1980) #FilmSky #MovieSky #Movies