First off, hello to the new subscribers here from Culture Vulture! It’s so nice to see you. For the rest of you, I wrote a piece for Luce’s great pop culture newsletter on my lifetime hatred-affair with high heels: Emma Thompson told me she’s never wearing heels again. Me neither.
Second, yes I was hit by a tornado last night, but I’m fine. I lost a tree and my BBQ cover, but my house is in one piece. Do not recommend.
In the aftermath of the inauguration, it’s become even clearer that the owners of our online social infrastructure are all from the bad place.
I don’t plan on talking about The Horrors here. But it’s becoming even more vital that we create our own healthy, happy, vibrant spaces online.
To date, that’s been more or less impossible when it comes to social media. Even before all of the trust and safety teams were dismantled, short of going private or deploying an aggressive block&report strategy, being on twitter or tiktok or insta meant being at the whims of whatever blackbox algorithm drove the most engagement. And those platforms learned pretty quickly that what drives engagement is hatred, conflict and fear.
Like many people, I signed up for Bluesky when twitter was first acquired. I thought it was a cute, nostalgic replacement but I didn’t think it was IT. I said to a lot of people at the time, whatever comes next will not be a twitter clone, it will be something else. Now I’m not so sure.
Bluesky has had another huge spike in user growth since the inauguration and the brief US tiktok “ban” and is now closing in on 30m users. But it’s not the scale of it I find interesting, it’s the curation.
Old twitter let you create “lists”, so you could check in on groups of accounts you wanted to see. But Bluesky lets you make your own entire feeds, and customise your whole social media experience. Mute certain words, block certain accounts, sure. But also what if you don’t want to see posts with links to amazon, and you don’t want NSFW content, and you want to see every time someone mentions your favourite blorbo. All of that is possible with a feed, and more.
I’ve been spending the week hanging out with the guys building graze.social. It’s a low/no code feed builder for Bluesky, and it’s changed my whole experience with being on the site. Want to just see fancams? Here’s a feed I made. Want to only see photos and videos of people’s lego builds? Here’s another. Trying to find your fandom peeps? Here’s a feed that catches all fandom discussion across the board. You can make feeds public or private, opt in or opt out. You can even use them for community building:
Similarly, Rudy Fraser and the team at BlackSky continue to do amazing work with feeds by and for Black users.
I don’t know if Bluesky’s growth trajectory will last, but the ability to curate your own social media is something I’ve longed for for years. I’m excited to see where it goes. (If you want to have a play, start here.)
By the time The X-Files (baby’s first fandom) wrapped up its final season, I’d drifted away. So I missed that there were two immersive audio dramas that followed (voiced by Anderson and Duchovny). They were removed by audible but they’ve been put up on youtube.
If you’ve been enjoying s2 of Silo, you’ll get a kick out of all the videos Adam has been posting about his visits to the set, meeting all the incredible craftspeople working on the costumes, props, and world building. But I particularly loved this little vid in which Adam weathers a duckie pez dispenser so that it looks like it belongs in the silo.
Funnest in-person game of the summer (thanks Tim!) is Hitster. You hear snippets of songs (through a spotify-connected app) and have to place them in the right slot on your timeline by year.
When my brain is racing I like to listen something soothing to fall asleep and my fave pod for this has just started season 2. Drifting Off with Joe Pera combines lovely gentle funny storytelling and music and is the perfect wind-down. (idk how best to link to pods, but its on every platform)
