Today’s inspiration:
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Category: ideas
Twitter Hackers Caught
There’s a scene at the beginning of “Ocean’s Eleven,” where Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan are trying to talk Ruben Tishkoff into joining them in their planned casino robbery caper. Ruben is hesitant at first, but is happy to join in once Danny and Rusty explain that they’re planning to rob the casinos of Ruben’s nemesis, Terry Benedict, who had recently bought Ruben’s hotels from under him and was planning to demolish them “to make way for some gaudy monstrosity.”
Baltimore Magazine recently published an article by senior editor, Ron Cassie, with some bold proposals to, as the title says, fix Baltimore. The article recounts some of the historical reasons for why Baltimore has come to be in the position that it’s in. It’s not what most people would think, especially outsiders, who most likely think the issue is crime, because they’ve watched The Wire; they’ve maybe even binged it during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. It’s true that Baltimore, as it is now, is a product of the decisions made about its governance.
AOL was not the Internet. In the early days, the late 80’s and early 90’s, they sold it to you as such, but it wasn’t. You could get access to Usenet, and eventually to the larger Internet, but that’s another story. Still, using the online service could be a fun experience and perhaps no part of the service outside of the iconic “You’ve Got Mail” sound was more popular than IM. Before there were Twitter followers and Facebook “friends,” if you were on AOL, you had your buddy list. Unless you used IRC or ICQ, bulletin boards, or some type of instant chat via a Unix system, chances are, you used AOL. If you weren’t a techie, you almost certainly used AOL.
I get it. The media is selling us an election as much as they’re covering one. It’s not as much that they’re putting time and energy into covering something in the public interest as they’re engaged in a race and a fight themselves for eyeballs and advertisers. That’s the news game and between the uncertainty of print and online, I get the push to make the most money, the quality of the information being disseminated — not always the most important consideration. It’s feed for the growing fetishization of politics in America.
National Book Lovers Day. Going to answer some questions I saw on Twitter earlier.
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