Boredom is everything, man. I think our loss of boredom in contemporary society is one of the greatest, weirdest, ambient losses. It is one of these things that’s hard to quantify the value of. And we’ve lost it so completely and totally that we very rarely have moments to even re-experience it, unless you do so intentionally. And so for me, yeah the boredom of these walks is, I would say, 50% of the value of it. It’s forcing yourself into a place where you’re not teleporting mentally.
Posts in: Links
Austin Kleon’s latest (subscriber-only) newsletter issue is about the creative seasons. Two things:
- It contains a pdf version of a zine he wrote on the subject. I know some people around micro.blog have recently been talking about zines and other ideas for analog delivery of writing. This is an interesting way of doing that: digitally delivering a pdf of something meant to be printed and folded.
- I am definitely a person who goes through creative seasons. In the past, late-winter and early-spring are when I’ve started more creative projects. This latest round has been a bit of an anomaly since it started in early winter - but I think that was driven in large part by my attempt to resist Big Tech and seeking out other ways of communicating.
A Russian farm has given its dairy cows virtual reality headsets in a bid to reduce their anxiety. All comparisons to Zuckerberg’s metaverse aspirations should be avoided in order to keep the herd calm.
“Amazon Prime is an economy distorting lie” by Matt Stoller. Really good explanation of how Prime actually raises prices across the internet - and why it’s a key part of the DC Attorney General’s antitrust case against Amazon.
Great article on the current legal fight over recognizing the legal personhood of Happy, an elephant in the Bronx Zoo. Also includes some really interesting history.
