Jim Abrahams, a film director and writer behind hit slapstick comedies like Airplane!, Hot Shots!, the Naked Gun series, and more, died Tuesday, his son Joseph confirmed to Variety. He was 80.

Niklas Göke –

There is no magic thought that’ll solve your life forever, but there is always the right word at the right time.

“Calm.”

“Go.”

“Stop.”

“Breathe.”

“Think.”

“Speak.”

“Accept.”

“Sleep.”

Usually, the right word is a simple one. Perhaps one of the first 100 you’ve ever learned. We panic about complex issues, but panic itself is also straightforward. When in doubt, fear, or anxiety, go back to your first-grade vocab book. Chances are, you’ve known the answer all along—you just have to spell it out.

imagine being such a huge dork that an entire thriving web site and community exists simply because you suck

— Ygrene ([@ygrene.bsky.social](http://ygrene.bsky.social)) November 26, 2024 at 12:39 PM

Seth Werkheiser –

A client who has worked with some big names wanted to build their email list, and I gave them this idea:

Think of the amazing people you worked with throughout the years, and think of all those stories you shared, and the memories you’ve made. They’ve got to have dozens of those stories to write, right?

So write that post, with that one person in mind. Then email that person a link to the piece.

This gets you around sending a boring email to “all your contacts” saying, “hey, I have a newsletter now, you should subscribe.”

Write a post that will resonate with the person you’re emailing. Yes, even if it’s just that one person. Email the person the link. Maybe they subscribe, or at least reply and you two catch up, and who knows where that leads?

It’s not always about striking it rich and getting 100 new sign ups. Sometimes the right message to the right person at the right time is all you need.

[handing mixtape to doctor] please, my beats, they're very sick

— Ygrene ([@ygrene.bsky.social](http://ygrene.bsky.social)) November 24, 2024 at 10:24 AM

Dave Pell –

The notion that you need to know about world events right when they happen is a marketing creation of media brands. And yet, those news stories mingle in the same lock screen with the personal reminders and calls from your mom. The stuff that has something to do with you is now almost impossible to distinguish from the stuff that doesn’t. Trust me, that news alert can wait until later. Like most things on the internet, it can wait until never. You’re not Batman. You’re not going to do anything about the news alerts, so they can wait. As a general rule, you don’t need to be immediately notified of any breaking news that’s happening more than about eighteen feet from where you are right now. At most, your alerts should only cover your locality. Even Bruce Wayne only covers Gotham.

Kelsey McKinney, writing at Defector, provides an insightful breakdown of our current political landscape.

The second Trump Administration will surely be just as annoying and slapdash and dangerous as the first, and I cannot sit here with my LED light mask on and make fun of cabinet appointments again. I cannot watch 18 effectively identical ghouls shuffle through the press secretary job again. I cannot read the same articles about Ivanka’s involvement, and who is attending the White House Correspondents Dinner, and critique bad newspaper headlines. I cannot do this shit the same way again. And I will not do it while the same Democrats hold the same positions of power they did the last time this happened and refuse to do anything different.

I am tired of hearing that the other side is worse. They are; I already know this; that is not enough. I am tired of watching the people who are supposed to represent us roll over in front of Republicans every time they have the majority and then hesitate or capitulate when the Republicans refuse to do the same. I want the fucking moon to fall. I want something to change. I want the future to be different than the past, and I want that to start now.

Instead of licking our wounds, I want an outcry. I want us to believe not only that a better future exists, but that we deserve it and should fight for it, and then I want to do that. I want us to take this massive heaping misery of a country and transform it into something better for everyone.

It is important to remember that the Republicans in power do not hate the Democrats in power. They hate us—the electorate, the people. The policies they are passing are made to hurt us. And if the Democrats we have elected to fight on our behalf won’t do it, they should be relentlessly reminded of what it means to be an elected official, of who exactly they work for and what their job is. And if that means that their positions of power are less enjoyable and more difficult to do, good. They failed to win what they billed as the election that would determine democracy’s fate; they failed, very obviously, to take it nearly as seriously as they encouraged us to do. Every day that they continue to do that, they continue to fail us. It is our job to remind them of that.

Volvo posted a 3 min and 46 second ad on Instagram, shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema, the cinematographer of Interstellar and Oppenheimer. It goes against every single rule you can think about as a social media spot. Length. Format. Over-produced.

It is one of the best advertisements I have ever seen.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Volvo Cars (@volvocars)

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 conference 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. Sometimes we realise we are having problems as one or more is missing.
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.

Will Leitch, writing for Intelligencer, thinks all this noise about athletes doing the “Trump dance” after touchdowns or goals is much ado about nothing.

But in the same way that I do not believe that every person who voted for Trump explicitly wants the return of fascism and chickenpox, I’m pretty sure doing the Trump Dance isn’t the same thing as donning a MAGA hat or screaming for mass deportations. Pulisic — who, it should be said, has shown Trump-friendly tendencies before — said he decided to do the dance because, “I saw everyone doing it yesterday in the NFL, I saw Jon Jones do it. We’re just having a bit of fun, so I thought it was a pretty fun dance.” This is how information spreads among young people (which athletes are, remember), and particularly the so-called “low-information” voters who delivered Trump back into office. They saw a dance, they thought it was funny, they repeated the dance. When you strip the context away — which you shouldn’t do, but is exactly what they’ve done — it is a funny dance. That’s why we all made fun of it in the first place.

I sincerely don’t care. I’m not a fan of athletes or coaches wearing political paraphernalia during a professional sports match, but otherwise do what you want.

Last week, bible scholar, author, vlogger (and owner of one of the finest t-shirt collections in town) Dan McClellan posted a video asking the question Did God choose an adulterous man to rule his nation? Apparently some viewers took issue with Dan’s message, so he immediately posted a followup video, On the intersection of some of my research & politics making abundantly clear what he meant.

I find Dan to be intelligent, calm, and reasonable. His videos are always interesting.

HT: Metafilter

It started with Swifties leaving Twitter/X in droves and heading to Bluesky. They were the first to be noticed, but they were the tip of the iceberg.

Bluesky gained its first wave of high-profile users last spring, and switched from being invitation-only to open to the public in February. In the past week 700,000 to a million people have flocked to the platform after the election.

As of this writing, it’s the number one free app on the iPhone’s U.S. App Store.

The past week has seen diverse luminaries from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Dionne Warwick join or reappear on the site. The Guardian announced it was quitting Twitter/X, and it only seems like a matter of time before the news organizations and journalists start posting on Bluesky.

Personally, I’ve locked down my Twitter/X account and threw away the key. Before I did that, I had already used a service called Tweet Deleter to remove all my old posts and likes from the site. It wasn’t free, but I only needed to run it once. I have a single post on Twitter/X and that’s what’s staying. I’ve removed the app from my phone.

As for Bluesky, I have an account, but I’m still mulling over the benefits of attempting to create what I had on Twitter/X. My only post is the same one I have on Twitter/X.

So far, Bluesky delivers exactly what you want, when you want it. While I have not spent hours doing so, Bluesky allows you to curate your own feed, fostering an authentic social media experience.

Am I advocating for Bluesky? Sure, if you want to try and recreate the “old Twitter feeling,” but it’s still social media and social media is really good at making you feel bad. Still, Wired has a great article about getting started with the hot new social network.

However, my thinking echoes Ian Bogost’s piece in The Atlantic. He writes –

A network of any kind—social, communication, epidemiological—is only as effective as the scope of its connections. Two decades ago, when social networks were new, it was easier to develop a rich, broad network because nobody had one yet. MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn helped people build databases of the connections they already had—friends, family, schoolmates, work colleagues. Twitter was among the first social networks that encouraged people to connect with anybody whosoever—to build a following of strangers. That, as much as its distinctive, short-text format, made Twitter what it was. Among other things, it became a distinctive venue to follow live global events, and to share and engage with journalism. It also was a place for brands to interact with their customers, and for businesses to provide customer service.

Bluesky has not yet found its distinctive identity or purpose. But to me, one user among many who started using the service in earnest this week, it feels more like the early days of social networking than anything else in recent memory. The posts I have seen, and made, are dumb and awkward instead of being savvy and too online. For now, Bluesky invokes the feeling of carefree earnestness that once—really and truly—blanketed the internet as a whole. Gen Xers and Oldlennials who had already finished college when Facebook started will remember the strange and delightful experience of rediscovering lost friends on that service—people you hadn’t seen or heard from in years. Now that strange delight itself can be rediscovered: I’ve felt something like it as I watched my Bluesky migration plug-in locate and auto-follow thousands of users whom I hadn’t seen on X or Twitter for years.

But the internet’s media ecosystem is more fragmentary this decade than it was during the last. Uncertainty about social media’s future produces existential questions about the major platforms: Will TikTok be banned? Will X become state media? Will the Bluesky bubble grow beyond this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we can’t help but try to keep them going, for however long we can.

My whole operating philosophy now is to just stack good days. If I had a good day, that’s a win. Then I get up the next morning and try to do it all over again.

I had a good day today. Onward we go.

— Drew Magary (@drewmagary.bsky.social) 2024-11-19T23:58:54.481Z

Jeremy Warner, writing at Illini Inquirer, reflects on the tenure of Josh Whitman as Illinois AD and the culmination of this week’s triple rankings.

This week, all three of the most prominent programs in the Illinois athletic department are ranked: women’s basketball at No. 22, football at No. 24 and men’s basketball at No. 25. That’s the first time all three programs have been ranked at the same time since January 2000 — before Bill Self even arrived at Illinois to take over the men’s basketball program from Lon Kruger. Yeah, it’s been a while.

Illinois Athletics made one of the best decisions by hiring Josh Whitman as Athletic Director. What an incredible run so far, with higher expectations on the horizon.

Dave Winer: A quick podcast about the new 365-day-a-year campaign we need on the social web to keep our democracy alive.

I’ve been saying this for twenty years – the Dems shut down their campaign presence on the social web on Election Day, and they come back when they need our money (to give to the huge media companies for ads) and vote, and that’s it. We play no role in governing.

Meanwhile the other party, starting when Trump discovered Twitter, was on the air 24-by-7-by-365 every freaking year whether or not there’s a presidential election. Their voters are led, ours are left to drift around in the wind, asked to resist with no answer to the question How? We have no leadership.

Now we may be able to get the Harris campaign back on the air on the social web. We found the team that did it. Like the rest of us they lost their way on Election Day which was only two weeks ago, believe it or not.

Nicholas Bate –

There are many reasons for writing regularly.

But one is that the more you write the more you will discover your style and with that comes expertise and with that comes fun and enjoyment.

Go write.