The Attention Economy Notes
(via This Is Colossal)
Music, comics, art, and other stuff, all in one gigantic pile. The web of yesterday, tomorrow!
(via This Is Colossal)
So let’s see. It’s been a few days since I decided to stop going to social media (specifically, Twitter and Mastodon) and things are feeling pretty okay. I’m still getting plenty of chatter, but it’s with groups of friends instead of the entire Internet. All of the bad news still manages to make its way to me but I’m not, like, immersing myself in it, and when I have conversations about stuff it’s with actual people and not a gigantic abyss of torment.
It’s helpful that right now Song Fight!’s chat is being fairly active due to the not-quite-live stuff taking place, and it’s nice having real conversations with these people I’ve known for so long. In some ways I feel like the pandemic is the best thing to happen to Song Fight!; the in-person live events were starting to feel like we were all just going through the motions, for the most part.
Here’s the things that happened earlier today. First, the quiz show:
and here’s the Song Fight! stream:
And if you want to just watch my set on its own in cleanest quality, that’s over yonder.
Two major things happening Song Fight!-wise:
Yesterday I decided to take a break from social media. This was for a number of reasons, but they all boil down to my increasing frustration with how interactions occur in rapid-fire quick-sharing spaces, and this has been growing for quite some time.
The microblog format significantly changes the way people interact. Every post is short and taken out of context (while everyone expects everyone else to have the full context already), which makes it impossible to have a as meaningful conversation especially when a short notion spreads far and wide. I feel that it is a big part of what’s dividing everyone in a never-ending search for clout that devolves into a shouting match.
Every year, Song Fight! does a live show where a bunch of folks come from all around the world to perform for a couple of nights. Of course, because of current events this year’s show had to get canceled.
But this was the 20th year, so we couldn’t let such an important milestone go. So instead we’re doing it online.
I didn’t perform on night 1 but I was interviewed by Glenn Case, which was a lot of fun.
On night 2, I produced the stream and video (and did a bunch of simple bumper animations, which was fun!) and also one of my music videos got played. And it was cool to see responses to it from people who hadn’t seen it before!
Anyway, I have recorded a live set along with most of the other members of Sockpuppet, and hopefully that’ll get broadcast this week on night 3. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
I remember around 15 years ago being impressed with the fact that the total amount of hard drives in my home had crossed the 1TB threshold.
Nowadays I have around 25TB worth of spare hard drives just sitting in a box. And quite a lot of capacity actually in use, too. Jeeze.