Alex Cranz

hey are you reading what I'm writing over at AVC? Netflix busted itself thinking data and audience insight alone could build a media empire. That only works if you're Youtube or Tiktok and people just provide nonstop content for free. www.avclub.com/netflix-brok...

11 year old called today to talk CoD and I reminded him he might hear or feel the urge to use slurs or curses because of the anonymity and that is wrong because there are people on the other end of the line. Then we workshopped insults, so sorry if you get emoted on and told to go back to Minecraft.

Again I say, the scam economy is consuming the political will to fight authoritarianism.

I mean sure he's investing a billion dollars, but that will only cover like 1/6 of the annual note they owe the bankers and anyways this merger never should have been allowed to exist.

can’t stop 3d printing server racks

like here’s another one! couldn’t even be bothered to make a website for the shell company they were laundering the bribe through.

we used to be a real nation. reagan and his team worked so hard to hide his dementia! now we just let trump direct dementia-addled outbursts at reporters. no one even bothers with coverups. when will coverups come back!

There is a whole documentary out right now that goes into great detail on why exactly you should never ever take these claims at face value.

conversation so canadian its gonna get it with tariffs

Today my godson said "Auntie X you are so stylish." Then looked at his mom and said "Mom, do better." and I know this is just his months long assault on his mom's self-esteem and has absolutely nothing to do with me. But also the kids think I'm cool.

If you never left X fine. If you left X because of fascism, Nazis, or Musk and you're going back? You just have inconsistent values and I got beef with you. Like please do not pretend you ever took a moral stance on this and accept your roasting for having a spine like a dried twig.

If you haven't read Careless People you really should! It's about Zuck's burgeoning understanding of Facebook's role in world politics and just how dangerous that understanding was.

new form of skeet shooting coming soon to rural america

East of Eden is great because it both acknowledges how deeply stupid all these men getting dick dragged by Cathy, and acknowledges what Steinbeck often struggled with, which is that the internal lives of women are complex and even absolute queen bitches have reasons. Cathy won't be tied down!

companies like Apple and Google are facing a problem in consumer technology because people want simplicity and freedom and privacy and their business models cannot allow for a lot of that. there’s a reason self hosting is growing in popularity.

finally the photos developed from when i was shooting with a 60 year old medium format camera. i am happy i did not pay for prints

Really weird watching Leslie Stahl, possibly the most storied news correspondent working today in the United States, get treated the same way the staff of GMG was treated in the G/O era. Like, she covered Watergate. She had to host Face the Nation in the 80s! She's in her 80s covering war zones.

My favorite genre of person is offline millenials. these people remember AOL chatrooms with fondness but also exclusively get memes from their kids or instagram reels. they do not know about harambe. they have no idea what tub girl is. they do not belt out "we are charlie kirk". they walk among us.

I know John Gruber just dropped a whole thing about why X is a nice place to post on, but Kelly tweet is the kind of stuff that keeps me away from it, and increasingly most short-form social media. It's just way too damn easy to push harmful and destructive propaganda on these platforms.

the president of the united states is throwing a walleyed fit over the Nobel Peace Prize and honestly he should be impeached just for how cringe and embarrassing this is.

remember faces of death? it used to be really, really difficult to see video footage of people dying and it was even a taboo outside of specific news and academic settings. 25 years later people are upload videos of deaths to force accountability and the federal government broadcasts executions.

the more media consolidates the more of this we’ll see.

nothing questions my faith in humanity like the reactions online to the final episode of Lanterns. a lot of people have almost no media literacy and truly cannot fathom ever empathizing with women. Yoikes

I am sad about the role private equity has had in Shout's transformation. But yes I also just got their 4K release of Peking Opera Blues.

okay but anticipating this would be a huge hit would be like expecting the Steve Buscemi Kool-aid movie would do numbers. like good lord who on earth was trying to say that?

The way tech has infested Hollywood is so funny. Just a yawning black hole of humanities education trying to dictate entertainment. flashy logos to entice investors. absolutely no grasp of what entertainment is beyond numbers.

Texas GOP out here threatening me with a good time.

In college there were guys you knew could NOT take you home because they usually sought out the drunkest girls to hook up with so if they were taking you home you were tanked. we called these dudes sluts and laughed and laughed and now at least one of them is a priest and it is all still rape.

People haven't heard the living in texas song and are acting like they're out of touch with popular music when the reality is that the monoculture has almost disappeared and that song is at the top of the billboard because of social media and spotify plays happening in places you don't go.

Laine, as always, is right on the money. companies flocked to SV because the military industrial complex had already gathered all the engineers, technology, and money there. A bunch of dudes in garages didn't build the infrastructure that made SV such a brilliant lab for developing new technology.

after annihilating a few lakes so I could set up all the scripts I now have Bookorbit ingesting all my libro.fm and libby books and syncing across my Kobo, xteink readers and iPhone. and it shouldn’t be so hard to just read books without Amazon or someone else controlling the whole stack.

the NYT’s Best TV shows list is like that one super pretentious friend who reads about TV and rarely actually watches it. just 50% mediocre awards bait. millennial ass grey of lists. we have more television than we’ve ever had and it was reduced to this???

My mom, who has dementia, was watching a PBS documentary yesterday about NYC during early COVID and asked if I'd lived there during that time and when I recounted my experiences in a rush we both learned that apparently COVID was super traumatic in NYC! And not nearly enough other places...

Texas politics is weird because I’m constantly getting fundraising texts like DON’T YOU HATE TRANS PEOPLE AND MUSLIMS AND ”ILLEGAL“ IMMIGRANTS. Like woah boy that’s the plan? Just hope everyone is super bigoted and weird?

Thank fucking God. It was inhuman before climate change and now its demonstratively monstrous.

diesel prices so high my tiktok is all memes about trucks tasting ag diesel for the first time. lot of dipsticks gonna be coming back red soon.

So happy Cornyn and others noticed what a horrible shitheel Bo French is but fun fact—his racist tweet about students at the UT game? not even the worst thing he’s said THIS YEAR. Terrific primer from February about why Texas might be stuck with him. www.texasmonthly.com/news-politic...

spent a whole afternoon installing a Toto bidet toilet seat and NO REGRETS except not holding the nut when detaching the water hose which required a visit to the hardware store to buy a new fill valve. Why are bidets not standard? I thought we lived in a society!!!!

the way to stop out of control AI is to regulate the humans creating the out of control AI. oh your ai broke containment and caused millions in damage? that’s not an act of God, that’s you not building adequate safeguards.

as evidenced by the entire tech world’s mindset it’s never been more critical to have humanities education

The people who take old peoples' calls and have to help them? I don't think any of them get paid enough.

…i like unsettling baby link from the new zelda game.

Lioness is like 40% Zoe Saldaña doing Taylor Sheridan-written rants about how dumb most Americans are. it's super condescending but also like 95% right. and it feels like the most accurate portrayal of the rural Texan mindset I've seen on TV.

80 percent of recipients are single mothers. this is just further punishment of women for not being married and deigning to have lives outside of marriage and the policy is reductive and abhorrent and deeply deeply sexist.

This is the thing! AI is a tool! It's a powerful and useful one! It's just the people deploying it are doing so in the most reckless, greedy and destructive way possible and being shocked everyone isn't hailing the technology as the next iPhone.