The Dice — 002

It's been a crazy great week. On Monday Ryan Rumsey and I hosted our first Jump Ship workshop, Restart and it smashed. If you’ve ever thought about working for yourself, Restart guides you through a series of exercises to give you an informed perspective on what the future could look like. We're doing it again in June and July. I also recorded two podcasts, one for a new Same Team Partners program with Brett Harned and a prototype for a new show that I can’t talk about just yet. And I finished testing a new product that I’m excited to get into production. Busy week.

It’s Memorial Day Weekend here in the States. Reach out and say hello to a veteran and don’t forget to say "thank you" for their service. A short thank you goes a long way.

Alright, lets roll.

I thought VICE was gone so I was happy to find that’s not the case with Let it Kill You, a new series on skateboarding an art. Luxury, this one is all you, bruh. And speaking of things I thought were dead—ICQ will shut down next month. Uh-oh! 

Consider this must-read Internet, AIGA’s profile on Jamie Levy who published “interactive floppy disks, point-and-click magazines full of sound collages, rants, gig reviews, and games” in the 1990s. Now there’s an archive I would pay to browse and read through.

Somewhat related: On Reading Issues of Wired from 1993 to 1995. As soon as I finished reading the article I started bidding on a few issues from the first year. I managed to snag a mint copy of issue 1.4 featuring William Gibson’s Disneyland With the Death Penalty.

Anthony Baker (I’d link to his blog, but he keeps making excuses why he hasn’t set one up. And I’m calling him out publically because he’s an interesting person who has a lot of interesting perspectives and memories that would make an excellent blog.) was thoughtful to send over a link to Minimal Website Inspiration , a lovely, seemingly endless collection. Related: Anders Noren, one of my favorite theme designers, released one of his best yet, Pulitzer. Shame that Anders’ work is currently WordPress only. I would love to see him port his themes to Ghost.

One thousand four hundred and sixty-eight people responded to Tim Bray’s poll, Your reaction to the AI buzz, on Mastodon. To my surprise, 96% responded, “Mostly annoyed.” Then again, with all the recent AI-related news, from Apple crushing arts and humanities into the machine to Google and Bing’s extremely flawed AI makeovers, it sure feels mostly annoying. In times like these I wish Douglas Adams was still around.

To add to the AI tire fire, here’s an interview with Adobe’s CEO on the future with AI. As you might guess the guy seemingly has no awareness, no clue—more like zero fucks given—on how Adobe tools will put artists and creatives out of work. Hey, who am I kidding? They already are.

While we’re on the subject of super expensive cloud-based software subscriptions that put profits above art—Affinity, makers of extremely great alternatives to Adobe, just released another free update to their platform. Get out of the cloud.

We Need To Rewild The Internet is your must-read long-form essay for today. Authors Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon. Even without all the AI crap going on, the Internet was already starting to feel over-processed and boring. Maria and Robin bring an interesting idea from the world of ecology and I’m all for it.

More support for and active participation in the Open Web is key to this strategy as are fun and welcome initiatives like Ye Olde Blogroll 

In closing, thank you for reading and have a good rest of your weekend. Please consider sharing this with your friends, family, and enemies (who are sometimes one in the same which makes sharing easier). And if you come across something worth sharing with the rest of the class, let me know.

This issue was created while listening to Only God Was Above Us by Vampire Weeekend. Here's a live performance of one of my favorite tracks, Mary Boone.