Wil Wheaton, writing on his blog, presents his point-of-view regarding the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes.

To give some sense of what is at stake: There are actors who star in massively successful, profitable, critically acclaimed shows that are all on streaming services. You see them all the time. They are famous, A-list celebrities. Nearly all of those actors don’t earn enough to qualify for health insurance, because the studios forced them to accept a buyout for all their residuals (a decade of reuse, at the least) that is less than I earned for one week on TNG. And I was the lowest paid cast member in 1988. They want to do this while studio profits and CEO compensation are at historic highs. Nearly 9 in 10 SAG-AFTRA members does not earn the $26,470 required to qualify for health insurance. Meanwhile, studio executives are pocketing tens of millions of dollars of bonuses and compensation. Each. (CNN: “When Iger rejoined Disney as CEO in November 2022, he agreed to an annual base salary of $1 million with a potential annual bonus of $2 million. The agreement also includes stock awards from Disney totaling $25 million [and] Netflix’s co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters made $50 million and $28 million, respectively, in 2022, according to a company filing.”)

Those billionaire CEOs complain that what we are asking for is unrealistic and unsustainable. They say we — we — are destroying the industry that was so profitable and successful for a century before they arrived.

I realize they want to remodel their third vacation home so they don’t embarrass any of the guests they take there on their yacht. My heart just aches for them as they struggle to keep up with a changing business model. Here’s the thing: if the current business model of the industry only functions when labor allows itself to be exploited so that executives make thousands of times their salaries, that business model should be destroyed.

I expect this strike will go on for a good long while.

Om Malik, writing at his site, has what I think is the definitive take on Twitter, the rebranding, and Elon Musk.

When you pay billions to buy something, you can do anything with it, including self-mutilation and brand destruction. It doesn’t mean you entirely understand it or can bend it to your will without breaking it. I fear that we are at a point of complete value destruction of Twitter, the company Elon Musk bought over a year ago for a whopping $44 billion. The company has dropped its “blue bird” logo and name in favor of X, a stillborn brand for over two decades. Whether something better emerges from the ashes of the bluebird remains to be seen — I am not holding my breath or cheering for a Phoenix rising from its ashes. 

It’s amazing. Read the whole thing.

Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu, reporting for The New York Times, has one of the craziest stories regarding Twitter, so far.

The tech billionaire, who bought Twitter last year, renamed the social platform X.com on its website and started replacing the bird logo with a stylized version of the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet. Inside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed to words with X in them, including “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to photos seen by The New York Times.

Today I learned why Tesla models are named S, 3, X, and Y, in that order. He’s a child, isn’t he?

Linda Yaccarino, ostensibly the CEO of Twitter… err… X, made a series of Tweets explaining the rebranding. It is close to sounding unhinged.

It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life or in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.

X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.

For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential. X will do that and more. We’ve already started to see X take shape over the past 8 months through our rapid feature launches, but we’re just getting started.

There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well … everything. @elonmusk and I are looking forward to working with our teams and every single one of our partners to bring X to the world.

It literally makes no sense. I’m not even going to discuss the fact that Meta, Microsoft, and probably dozens of others have a claim to the X mark in social media, online, and other places. X.com will likely trigger porn blocks everywhere online. What a stupid, stupid move.

M.G. Siegler, writing at 500ish, calls the whole thing Bizzaro Twitter.

All of this sucks. I loved Twitter. But the bird is dead. In its place is some weird, spiraling viral network where the content pushed to you has no unifying principle beyond maybe just having the opposite ideological bent of the content that proliferated before it. This is basically Bizzaro Twitter. It’s so fucking weird. It’s like a literal version of the scene in The Dark Knight where The Joker lights the massive pile of money on fire and walks away. Except that amount of money clearly wasn’t $45 billion. This is.

Unreal.

Restricted free agent G Ayo Dosunmu has agreed on a three-year, $21 million deal to stay with the Chicago Bulls, agent Mike Lindeman of @excelbasketball tells ESPN. pic.twitter.com/whY8tifPLA

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) July 21, 2023

Good deal.

Nicholas Bate –

Just as an over-stuffed washing machine doesn’t do its job, an over-full day causes its owner to become stressed, fatigued and to lose focus on the true priorities.

The true priorities? Do less and achieve more.

Nicholas Bate –

1. Stories will transform your presentation from a list of bullets to something which engages heart and soul.

2. Stories embed values and principles deep in a child’s brain. There is far more to Goldilocks and those three bears than porridge.

3. Stories help your customers understand what life will be like once they commit to you.

4. Stories of the right kind (empowering, resourceful and pragmatic) motivate us to do our very best. Homer knew exactly what he was doing.

5. Stories use language not just words; it requires an engaged brain to use a story. And the latter is an increasingly rare commodity on a Zoom/Teams call.

6. To write a story, be it a scenario for a product or one for your children requires you to give 100% attention to the task in hand.

7. Stories require beginnings and middles and ends.

8. A great story is never forgotten.

9. Stories need sensory rich descriptions.  That requires us to look up and notice life.

10. One well-written story is worth a 1000 e-mails.

11. To be a great story-teller is to be a magician.

Casey Newton, writing on his Substack Platformer, does a quick rundown of Threads after a couple of weeks and why he still thinks it will supplant Twitter as the micro-blogging service of choice.

The demand is there, the product is good, and its chief rival is circling the drain. (Other rivals don’t seem to be faring much better; Bluesky, which had been my favorite Twitter alternative in recent weeks, has been mired in internecine conflict over the past week related to the use of racial slurs in user names. Even worse, from a growth standpoint, is that the app remains invite-only.)

Interesting observations. Nobody knows if Threads will be successful in the long run. I do think it has the better chance of being the “Twitter killer” it’s been touted since it launched. As soon as it adds a web version and adds a tab that shows only the people you follow, I think engagement will jump up.

Dave Pell –

Even with the widening and ever-damaging economic divide, Americans haven’t seemed to be willing to get behind workers. But things could get personal as major strikes, the actors and writers strike already happening, and the UPS strike that looks likely, are gonna take away the shit you love most: Your stuff and your shows.

AI is one of the issues being disputed in Hollywood. According to SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, studios “proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation.”

There’s no way the “background performers scanned and used forever” crowd is winning that battle. I really hope the UPS strike happens too. That will hurt a whole lot of people and companies.

Nicholas Bate –

1. Always have a plan;

2. But understand that the reason for a plan is it allows more flexibility in a world of surprises.

3. Always know your true priorities, work and home. NOT (necessarily) what is most urgent nor most easy.

4. Ensure work is aligned to those priorities.

5. To execute 4, get comfortable with a polite ‘no’.

6. Your brain is your greatest asset: look after it. Many current working practices reduce the brain to ‘auto-cue’.

7. Your brain is part of your mind/body holistic system. Look after your body. Much office life neglects the body’s hunter-gatherer needs.

Routine | The Most Advanced Calendar for Productive People

Unify your calendars, centralize your work, plan your days and focus on what matters now!

This looks interesting. I’m on the wait list. Feels very Apple to me.

Laura Wagner, writing for The Washington Post, has an eye-opening look at the Northwestern allegation, the aftermath, and the student newspaper that broke it all wide open.

The Daily Northwestern operates independently from the university. It is published by a nonprofit organization called the Students Publishing Company, which is overseen by a board of directors composed of alumni, faculty, staff and student volunteers.

“Our philosophy is the newsroom is independent, and the board is just there to support,” Chairman John Byrne, a lawyer and former editor in chief, told The Post in a phone call Tuesday.

The firewall between the university and the newspaper is doing its job; the student journalists told The Post that Northwestern did not try to interfere with their reporting on these stories. And they emphasized that the story about Northwestern’s football program is ongoing.

An incredible piece of journalism.

Jeremy Werner, writing for the Illini Inquirer, weighs in on the damage happening at Northwestern and the subsequent firing of head coach Pat Fitzgerald. All of it is stunning.

Often we want to paint people as black or white, good or evil. Most times, we as people are more complicated than that. Fitzgerald did a lot of good for Northwestern but now leaves embattled. Once seemingly forever golden, Fitzgerald now leaves a very gray legacy at his alma mater.

I could give a shit about Fitzgerald and Northwestern athletics, but what happened happened and he ought to be held accountable.

Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, writes a piece where he pleads for the Baseball Gods to find a better landing place for phenom Shohei Ohtani than where he’s been the last few years, the Angels.

…Ohtani is set to become a free agent the likes of which we’ve never seen. Any team that signs him will essentially get two superstars, the best hitter in the game and one of the best pitchers, for much of the prime of his career. Every big spender will be all-in for him: The Dodgers (probably the current favorite), the Yankees, the Giants, the Mariners (who almost got him when he first came to the majors six years ago), and, of course, Steve Cohen’s Mets, whose owner worked all those years in the coal mines of hedge-fund land precisely to be able to pay a player like Ohtani whatever he wants.

It’s too bad the Cardinals won’t even sniff what his asking price is going to be.

Warner Brothers has dropped a new trailer for the Blue Beetle. I’m definitely getting Iron Man mixed with Spider-Man with a dash of Shazam’s family stuff thrown in. I dig it.

Blue Beetle hits theaters everywhere on August 18.

Additionally, Warner Brothers also dropped the first trailer for Wonka. I’m less enthused about this attempt at reimagining Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but what the hell…

Wonka is out on December 15.

Watch the brand-new trailer for Ahsoka. August 23 can’t get here fast enough.

Shawn Blanc –

In order to accomplish your goals you need: (1) a clear goal; (2) a winning action plan; and (3) consistency.

Take away or invert any of those things, and you’ve eliminated the possibility of succeeding at your desired outcome. Here’s what they look like when inverted: (1) unclear direction; (2) random acts of productivity / busywork; (3) distracted / trying something new but moving on quickly.

Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby star as Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film about the French dictator. Here’s the first trailer.

It has promise. Nice ending line. Phoenix does well when he plays dark, brooding characters.

What a great two-minute video showcasing Rosario Dawson’s journey to becoming Ahsoka.

I have a feeling I’m going to love this series.

Bernie Miklasz, writing for Scoops with Danny Mac, explains in no uncertain terms who has the power to fix the St. Louis Cardinals.

DeWitt controls all of this. He can change all of this. He received immense and justifiable praise for all that he’s done since his ownership group purchased the Cardinals before the 1996 season. It’s been a hugely successful era, but the greatness is gradually fading. The reality is underlined by his team’s 5-17 record in the last 22 postseason games — a bleak October-ball decline that includes a 1-9 mark in the last 10 playoff games.

Reality doesn’t mess around.

Martin Pengelly, writing for The Guardian, reports on the latest “news” regarding a couple of billionaires with nothing better to do.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has suggested he and Mark Zuckerberg should have “a literal dick-measuring contest” in the latest broadside aimed at his rival billionaire.

Seriously, grown men do not talk like this.