Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category Internet

  • Boredom

    Kaleb Horton was an American writer who died in September last year. He had an extraordinarily unique writer's voice, reviewing music, describing culture, and observing life in the 2020s. This paragraph, and particularly the last sentence, is one that keeps rattling in my head:

    You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.

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  • What I'm reading: public benches and Phobos

    'The Disappearance of the Public Bench', Gabrielle Bruney, Places Journal

    To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.

    'Occasional paper: Inconstant moon', Doug Muir, Crooked Timber

    Now we have to take a step back and talk a little bit about the physics of moons.

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  • What I'm Reading: Jerry Springer Machine

    'What happens when the short-form video bubble pops?' Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day

    The takeaway for me from the Geese debacle is not that a bunch of huge fucking losers are getting money from record labels or whatever to astroturf fan campaigns for indie bands. It’s that the current state of short-form video is so unbelievably rancid that it has become inhospitable to anyone with an actual fanbase. There is a delicious irony here. That social platforms could be made irrelevant by their own pivot to video. Congrats, Silicon Valley, you built an infinite Jerry Springer machine and no one wants to use it anymore because it makes them look like Jerry Springer.

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  • Email

    LIKE MANY CONTEMPORARY INTERNET users I subscribe to the newsletters of people whose writing I enjoy. These drop into the inbox of my email with a satisfying regularity. In a sense each of these fulfils the same niche as blog entries once did, with a bit more formality, each being a self-contained piece of writing by a single author generally on a theme or interest basis. Each invites me to subscribe, like, support. Are they novel?

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  • Computers

    IT OCCURRED TO ME some months ago, in a thread of toots I think is worth reproducing here and now, later, as a blog entry, as I waited the usual three or four minutes for Word to open my document, that the basic tasks most people use PCs for (browsing file systems, opening documents and working on them, email) have barely improved or changed since the early 2000s. And have not sped up or become in any way more productive.

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  • Bird World

    WE MUST ASSUME BASED on his silence that Graeme Bird is dead, in an institution, or in any case is beyond authorship. This was a man whose incredibly prolific commenting and blog posting in the Australian internet and beyond, through the 2000s and early 2010s, makes his present absence from the internet inexplicable except by force.

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  • Posting

    WHEN YOU’RE BLOGGING IN the era of posting (thank you, reader Matthew of Bellevue Hill) you subject yourself to a few annoying constraints, like not having an easy phone app you can tap your malformed thoughts into, like having an effectively infinite word limit instead of a crisp punchy microblog format, like the knowledge for better or worse that your blog is being archived for posterity. Most of all though when you consider the fundamental shift that happened somewhere around 2014, between writing in the different formats, you realise that microblogging, tweeting, or whatever you choose to call posting, involved a fundamental shift away from obligation.

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