Meanwhile #166
Yes I’m still banging on about Barbie and Threads.
— Myspace launched TWENTY YEARS AGO. You kids won’t remember this, but it was huge. And yet its existence is almost entirely anecdotal.1 All we have are mentions in old blog posts, articles, jokes, a weirdly dated mention in the first Iron Man. An entire social network – at the time, the social network – can now only be inferred from the impression left by its impact. Actually, there is a way to peer back into the really-not-that-distant past: if you can remember your old username, visit Internet Archive and try myspace dot com / username – chances are, your younger self will still be on there, frozen in a CSS hellscape of your own coding.
— Talking of space (smooth segue there), I’m tempted to update my First Man poster with the tagline “his job is just … moon”.
— I do love a good media diet post. Khoi raises a good point about Wes Anderson in his latest roundup: “There’s not another director working today who inspires such widespread devotion and yet, among his devotees, so little consensus on what makes his films work, or which of his movies are the triumphs and which are the misfires”. I know a lot of people simply adore Fantastic Mr. Fox for example, for me it’s just … I mean it’s okay I guess.
— This year’s Thought Bubble (11-12 November, Harrogate) has an incredible lineup of comic artists and writers and suchlike. Seriously contemplating that reduced ticket price for cosplayers.2
— Now that there’s a following tab (launched fifteen minutes after I moaned about its absence in last week’s post), I’m rather enjoying Threads, especially its inherent ephemerality. No bookmarks, no drafts, limited search options. Just enjoy the sound of the posts as they whoosh by. I’m sure more features will appear soon (any minute now …), but hopefully we don’t find ourselves in a communities/stories/spaces quagmire of feature creep.
— I need to visit Amsterdam’s Electric Ladyland, the world's only museum devoted to the wonders of fluorescence – “an acid trip which also instructs you about the science of phosphorescence”.
— Daily Show writer Dan Amira is on strike, so of course he decided to pass the time finding the restaurant with the highest number of brothers.
The original version of it, anyway. The website myspace.com is still a thing, but it’s now a broken down entertainment news aggregator in a state of undeath. Why has nobody bought it for pennies and turned it into something? Anything?
All costume suggestions welcome, otherwise I’ll be going for my fallback of Tired Dad In Aliens T-Shirt. Must allow for glasses, beard, long hair, rugged handsomeness.