Ivaylo Durmonsky has a very well-written article exploring social media's deeper aspects.

Yes, quitting social media or doing a social media detox will calm your senses and increase your well-being. Plus, you keep your personal data for a little longer. But there is something else. Something I don’t see others acknowledging.

The main benefit of taking a break from social media is that you stop living in a fictional world and finally start dealing with your own reality.

This is something I’m beginning to think seriously about. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Instagram (mostly Reels), and my wife has noticed. I’m not feeling particularly good about a lot of things in my life personally and the world generally, and I’m wondering if I’m subconsciously wanting to escape into my digital world.

Durmonsky points this out in his piece:

People will do anything than consider their dreadful reality.

The greatest source of suffering for the modern man is the most banal: Boredom.

We can’t survive even a minute without doing something.

That’s why social media websites are so popular and so hard to quit.

When was the last time you were bored? For me, I always turn to the old chestnut of “only boring people are bored,” but maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe I’m turning to social media to avoid reality. That seems unhealthy.

Drew Magary on the tired act of Aaron Rodgers:

If you still wanna call Aaron Rodgers the greatest quarterback of all time, whether it’s because of his incomparable style of play or because you just don’t wanna say it’s Tom Brady like everyone else would, go right ahead. I’ve idolized terrible men in sports, and I’d be fine with the character clause for the Baseball Hall of Fame crumpled into a ball and then smacked 475 feet into a flowing river. But SOME measure of public accountability would be nice here. I’d like the man booed.

I honestly don’t care. Contrary to popular opinion, I do not have a favorite NFL team or player.

I wish he was vaccinated, and I hope he doesn’t get seriously ill and die, but if at least if it keeps him from making stupid State Farm commercials I’d be happy.

Will Leitch on Trump:

I’ve enjoyed the last 10 months of not having Trump barge his way into every conversation I’ve had about anything, whether it was sports, movies, music, food, whatever. Trump’s signature skill is turning every conversation into a conversation about him: He may be as good at that as anyone has ever been at anything. But his ability to do so has dwindled considerably since he left office and was kicked off social media platforms (you may remember this happening, it was because of that whole “inciting an insurrection” business), and it has not, personally, been unpleasant. Having Trump less a part of public life is like having a long, emotionally abusive relationship end: It’s as if we had forgotten that life wasn’t always like this, and didn’t have to be moving forward.

My wife and I were talking about this very thing. I had not “seriously” thought about this orange clown in months. And then he shows up at the World Series, does the racist chop cheer, and people are talking about his stupid smirk and his wife (who obviously isn’t getting paid enough).

I know the answer is not to give him any oxygen. This is about all I’m going to give.

Go away. Nobody likes you.

I’d say pretty stupid.

I mean, it’s a science-fictional idea that may or may not happen in my lifetime. In the short term, it’s just a shiny object that Zuck wants to use to fool people into thinking his company is not a terrible one on practically every level.

Matt Birchler thinks otherwise:

I don’t think a world where we spend all of our time in a digital world is good, nor do I think Facebook (damnit, Meta) is the best company to sheppard this concept forward, but I do think that we’re further down this road than many people think we are.

We aren’t. All the things he talks about AR, smart watches, etc. are still firmly in the real world. Wake me up when we have Ready Player One-style worlds.

Zed Snyder, writing for Smile Politely, has a nice write-up for Dan Wild’s new collection.

Stories For Imaginary Friends guides you into the dark, but it also brings you out the other side realizing that you didn’t just read a collection of stories. You’re asked—quite literally begged—not to give up on yourself, or on the things in your life that maybe you stopped working on because it was too hard to see any light.

Dan is a treasure and I’m pleased I can call him my friend. His stories are incredible. You should buy the book.

Tim Curry explains why Halloween is great in “The Halloween Song” from the 1986 film adaptation of The Worst Witch.

This is always the best thing about Halloween.

A ton of reporters contributed to this Washington Post feature today about how the insurrection of January 6 played out. It starts off with these damning first five paragraphs.

Live television news coverage showed the horror accelerating minute by minute after 1:10 p.m., when Trump had called on his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol. The pro-Trump rioters toppled security barricades. They bludgeoned police. They scaled granite walls. And then they smashed windows and doors to breach the hallowed building that has stood for more than two centuries as the seat of American democracy.

The Capitol was under siege — and the president, glued to the television, did nothing. For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack. Even as the violence at the Capitol intensified, even after Vice President Mike Pence, his family and hundreds of Congress members and their staffers hid to protect themselves, even after the first two people died and scores of others were assaulted, Trump declined for more than three hours to tell the renegades rioting in his name to stand down and go home.

During the 187 minutes that Trump stood by, harrowing scenes of violence played out in and around the Capitol. Twenty-five minutes into Trump’s silence, a news photographer was dragged down a flight of stairs and thrown over a wall. Fifty-two minutes in, a police officer was kicked in the chest and surrounded by a mob. Within the first hour, two rioters died as a result of cardiac events. Sixty-four minutes in, a rioter paraded a Confederate battle flag through the Capitol. Seventy-three minutes in, another police officer was sprayed in the face with chemicals. Seventy-eight minutes in, yet another police officer was assaulted with a flagpole. Eighty-three minutes in, rioters broke into and began looting the House speaker’s office. Ninety-three minutes in, another news photographer was surrounded, pushed down and robbed of a camera. Ninety-four minutes in, a rioter was shot and killed. One hundred two minutes in, rioters stormed the Senate chamber, stealing papers and posing for photographs around the dais. One hundred sixteen minutes in, a fourth police officer was crushed in a doorway and beaten with his own baton.

All in the first two hours.

Trump watched the attack play out on television and resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief — a president reduced to mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol. And throughout, he repeated the lie that the election was stolen.

The whole thing is harrowing to read.

I’ve been waiting forever for The Athletic to do a feature on the Fighting Illini Men’s Basketball team since I saw the first of their “The Program” series. Brendan Quinn’s article is insightful, smart, and ends with these two paragraphs:

Underwood has established himself as one of the better coaches in the conference, and both this team and program are now built in his image. When asked recently about Illinois’ ability to get under opponent’s skin, Underwood replied, “Maybe it’s taken on a little bit of my personality. I hope so.” He added: “You have to play with a little fire in your belly. Maybe it means we’ve arrived. If people want to talk about us that way, and not like us that way, maybe it’s because we’ve stepped on toes.”

That’s indeed how the Illini play. It’s taken them all the way back to the upper-echelon of college basketball. Fact is, though, they’re still pissed about how last season ended, meaning a team that already plays with a massive chip on its shoulder is now carrying around a boulder. That edge, along with Curbelo, Cockburn and all those well-aged veterans, is enough to pen a special year in Champaign and fill Underwood’s glass to the top.

Yup. I like them to be a little chippy… not get technicals chippy, but chippy nonetheless.

So, I was today years old when I learned that the big international hit “Beggin’” by Måneskin is actually a cover of a Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons song of the same name.

I was surprised how close Damiano David’s voice is to Frankie Valli on the song.

Also, I Wanna Be Your Slave might have you questioning your sexuality.

This is only the beginning...

Thank you to those who have experienced @dunemovie so far, and those who are going in the days and weeks ahead. We're excited to continue the journey! pic.twitter.com/mZj68Hnm0A

— Legendary (@Legendary) October 26, 2021

I really didn’t think it wasn’t going to happen, but you never know.

Bernie Miklasz with the inside story.

I can’t say that Oliver Marmol was born to manage the Cardinals. But this is true: he was raised to manage the Cardinals. The inevitable became official on Tuesday morning, when chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. and president of baseball operations John Mozeliak presided over a video news conference to introduce their choice as manager. As soon as the job became open I listed Marmol as the frontrunner, and this was his job all along. There was little if any suspense to the job search.

Marmol was raised as a Cardinal.

And now will lead the Cardinals.

Okay, young man. Let’s see what you got.

Here it is. Facebook is bad. You already knew this, but whatever.

Over the weekend, we learned even more about what Facebook has known about its platform all along. Seventeen news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and released dozens of stories based on thousands of pages of leaked internal documents from Facebook.

The cross-outlet project is called The Facebook Papers and Protocol has made a great guide for sorting through all of it. I’m also rather partial to The Atlantic’s reporting by Adrienne LaFrance. Also, Tom McCay at Gizmodo has a good breakdown.

The leaks have confirmed a lot of things that many reporters and researchers have been claiming for years. Facebook knowingly promotes right-wing content and conspiracy theories over non-politicized content. They played a central role in organizing the January 6 insurrection. The only nice thing to come out of this is that apparently, there aren’t any young people on the site anymore.

I probably need to leave too.

In case you were wondering whatever happened to that one guy who used to occupy the Oval Office, he tried to start a blog. It failed. Now, he’s back at it trying to launch a “social media” site called Truth Social. Looks like it’s gone belly-up before it even got off the ground.

Trolls flocked to the site the second it was announced and within hours Truth Social went down. To combat the trolling, the site suspended new accounts and disabled all the accounts that had been created.

Andy Baio said, it’s also just a modified Mastodon instance and they’re violating the license terms.

That was a complete and utter failure. Not unlike his presidency.

Evander Kane, a forward with the San Jose Sharks, is out for 21 games after turning in a fake Covid vaccination card to his team and the National Hockey League. Officials were not fooled; Kane is apparently apologetic.

“I would like to apologize to my teammates, the San Jose Sharks organization, and all Sharks fans for violating the NHL COVID protocols,” said Kane in a statement released by the NHLPA. “I made a mistake, one I sincerely regret and take responsibility for. During my suspension, I will continue to participate in counseling to help me make better decisions in the future. When my suspension is over, I plan to return to the ice with great effort, determination, and love for the game of hockey.”

None of this is something Kane said. He is only sorry he got caught.

He should be suspended for the season without pay, but that’s just me and I don’t care about hockey or the NHL.

Key art, if you don’t know, are the images that identify shows in streaming menus. I am old enough to remember TV listings in the newspaper and TV Guides. I still surf channels on the guide with my digital cable, but I also scroll through the onscreen menus of streaming services. That’s where the key art is at.

Like the best movie posters and book covers, these images are bold and simple promotional graphics, but as Rex Sorgatz explains in Why is this interesting?, key art is more than just a simple image or, at least, it should be.

Good key art is so evocative, so iconic, that it becomes the image that springs to mind whenever you think about a show:

One neglected characteristic ties all these images together: They are all horizontal.

It sounds trivial, but going wide helped differentiate TV key art as its own medium, distinct from book covers and movie posters. And because these images appear on streaming platforms, they are unencumbered by other marketing copy, like taglines, cast and credits, and multifarious blurbs.

There is a simple purity to key art.

I have never thought about key art as much as Rex Sorgatz. He keeps his favorite key art here.

In the New Yorker, Paul McCartney wrote down the story behind all the lonely people.

The song itself was consciously written to evoke the subject of loneliness, with the hope that we could get listeners to empathize. Those opening lines—“Eleanor Rigby / Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been / Lives in a dream.” It’s a little strange to be picking up rice after a wedding. Does that mean she was a cleaner, someone not invited to the wedding, and only viewing the celebrations from afar? Why would she be doing that? I wanted to make it more poignant than her just cleaning up afterward, so it became more about someone who was lonely. Someone not likely to have her own wedding, but only the dream of one.

Allen Ginsberg told me it was a great poem, so I’m going to go with Allen.

Alex Heath, writing for The Verge, has the scoop.

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

As soon as this happens, I’m sure there will be story after story equating Facebook changing its name to whatever with Philip Morris Companies, Inc. changing its name to Altria Group Inc.

The fact that both offer highly addicting and dangerous products is not missed.

Nicholas Bate with some advice to add a bit more productivity to your life… by subtraction

Just when you are being seduced into adding more to your life, subtract something. Just when you feel driven to do more stuff,  choose what is actually important and do less.  Just when reptile brain says work harder, work mindfully.  When everybody is speeding up, stop, think and  slow down. You’ll be more productive.

The Cardinals have agreed to part ways with Manager Mike Shildt.

— St. Louis Cardinals (@Cardinals) October 14, 2021

Shildt has been in the organization for the better part of a decade I think. What could those “philosophical differences” be at this juncture? We’ll probably never know.

I sure hope they turn to Jose Oquendo.

Josh Ginter pitches the wonderfulness of Cleartones.

Cleartones are awesome. They’re simple notification tones and ringtones made with simple instruments. To me, these are the ringtones Apple would make if they, you know, made better ringtones.

I remember seeing Cleartones years ago, but never jumped on board. For whatever reason, Josh’s post convinced me to give them a shot and I’m quite enjoying them.