This link roundup does not include any discussion of the US elections, and I do not have plans to write about it in the immediate future.  My thought about it is: pace yourself!  We’re on a slow motion train wreck, don’t burn yourself out on the first week.

This month, I reviewed I Want to be a Wall–that’s the silly graphic novel I referred to earlier.

Cohost September 2024 Financial Debate Retrospective: Making Sense of The End | osteophage – The ad-free social media platform Cohost recently financially collapsed.  Why?  Coyote explains why many of the popular theories are incorrect.  Cohost was able to generate healthy revenue for its size, but its dev team had unrealistic expectations, trying to support four full time tech salaries.  Also the devs were trying to make a competitor to Patreon, but this is a doomed venture because it requires a great deal of regulatory compliance overhead that the devs weren’t even aware of.

Yeah, that just sounds like ordinary tech startup incompetence.  There’s nothing fundamentally impossible about what they were trying to do!  Other ad-free social networks exist.

The Visualizer’s Fallacy | Christian Scholz – After writing my post about Wittgenstein, I found someone who wrote a dissertation on Wittgenstein and aphantasia.  He observes that aphantasics can in fact think without visualizing, and they even perform well on shape rotation tests.  So does that mean visualization is unnecessary for mental rotation?

Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure | synecdochic – After I wrote about targeted advertising, someone pointed me to this long essay from 2008.  I think it’s a good rundown of why things are the way they are.  But I think time has not exactly borne out the author’s prediction that the advertising model will collapse.  Sure, individual social media sites have collapsed, but all the top websites continue to be powered by advertising revenue, two economic recessions later.  The author also predicted that creators would revolt against the advertising, but on the contrary, many creators have embraced it.

A Game About Doing Nothing | Transparency Boo (video, 2:37 hours) – A deep dive into Aquanaut’s Holiday, a 1995 game where the player does fairly little.  They discuss the ideal of a game about doing nothing, and how the game does and does not fulfill this ideal.  They trace its influences backwards, forwards, and sideways.  It’s interesting to contrast with its sequels, which were superficially similar, but included scanning checklists, twisting it into a much more goal-oriented game.  I’m not sure the game sounds appealing, but I think a lot about methods of escape from the goal-oriented mindset that games so often rely upon.